One of the Good Ones

by Maika Moulite

  “Hey,” she whispered, closing in on our gap.

  When we were slumming through calculus, we’d started playing this game. Find the Asymptote. But we were the lines on a graph sharply approaching a curve, getting eternally closer and closer but never touching. I moved in some more, admiring her long eyelashes and the curve of her forehead, her freckled nose, her chin, her lips.

  Those lips.

  I didn’t mind losing this time.

  As I brushed her lips lightly with mine, her fingers combed through the fine curls at the nape of my neck, which had a looser texture than the zigzags of the rest of my hair. I deepened our kiss, letting my hands land—

  The bellows of laughter, of exhaustion, of indignation in the hallway were too loud for me to ignore now. I looked around anxiously to ensure that we were still tucked away out of the line of sight of anyone who might be peeking through the glass window of the door. Ximena noticed my quick glance, and the corners of her lips drooped slightly. Besides Happi, Ximena was the most forthright, confident, swaggy person I knew. Heads turned and followed her when she walked down the hallway, because her aura of IDGA-single-F-itude was magnetic. The boys wanted her enviable sneaker collection and impeccable undercut. The girls wanted her expressive, large brown eyes and delicate bone structure. And the way Ximena carried herself let everyone know she knew it too.

  I didn’t like when I did this. Made her doubt herself.

  I was my truest Keziah Leah Smith self with Ximena. We had never exchanged dramatic I love yous in our time together, but I had yet to come up with another word or phrase that encompassed everything I felt for her. Nor had I come up with a word for the unbearable sensation that spread through the hollows of my gut when I imagined the looks of horror and disappointment on my mom’s and dad’s faces if I told them I was in love with my best friend. And that she was my girlfriend. I knew intellectually that it wasn’t my job to make my pastor parents love me—all parts of me. I also knew it wasn’t my job to worry about what the congregants of the church they led would think. But I wasn’t ready to hear what they would say to me. If they would try to pray with me. If they would declare callously and with conviction that, like God, they loved the “sinner” but hated my “sin.” In their eyes, I would no longer be one of the holy ones, one of the good ones. I wasn’t ready for that.

  Once a week on my YouTube channel, I talked about how the world was overdue for acceptance. Inclusion. Tolerance was no longer enough, because it didn’t require real commitment on our parts to embrace what made us each unique. Instead, it showed that we were fine with each other’s differences so long as they weren’t displayed for everyone to see, tucked away and never truly celebrated outside of the safe confines of the group in which you belonged.

  I knew that being your authentic self, no matter where you were or who you were with, wasn’t just an act of rebellion. It was an act of self-love. It took courage to step out and live your life out loud not just for everyone to see, but for you, damn the consequences.

  I was ashamed to admit that I wasn’t there yet.

  Ximena broke away from me silently.

  I opened my mouth to say...well, I wasn’t sure what I could say that she hadn’t heard from me before.

  You’re the kind of girl you fight wars for.

  You’re the kind of girl you fight wars with.

  Ximena reached into the front pouch of her backpack and pulled out a beat-up old paperback. The top corner of the book was missing, as if someone had taken a bite out of the faded cover. “My abuelita said that this should help with your AP Human Geo paper. It’s the copy of The Negro Motorist Green Book that she used way back when.”

  I carefully took the book from Ximena and turned it around slowly in my hands. “Wow,” I breathed. “It’s like holding a snapshot in time between my fingers. Holding one of these never gets old.”

  “You’re such a nerd.” A tiny smile returned to Ximena’s face. “All that research you’ve done is impressive.”

  “I can’t wait to show it to you.” My face and heart grew warm. “You won’t believe the stuff I found online through the New York Public Library’s database, and the couple seconds I got to skim my dad’s heirloom copy, which he won’t let me take out of the house. I told him that if that book could survive the deadliest war in history, it should be able to survive me taking a peek at it once in a while, but he acted like I said I was going to burn it. Thank your grandma for me again.”

  “She told me to tell you that she’s just paying forward the kindness someone gave to her when she first arrived in the US,” she answered. “Then she told me to leave her alone so she could focus on her novela.”

  Ximena had to get her fierceness from somewhere.

  “Oh, grandmas,” I said. I bit my lip. “So... I got a weird message this morning.”

  Ximena straightened in her seat.

  “Weird how? From who?”

  I showed her the email, watched her face contort in confusion. Worry.

  “Who is this?”

  I shrugged. “They sent something once before, but I didn’t think anything of it. I know psychos come out the woodwork when you’re a public figure, but it kinda freaked me out.”

  “Did you tell your parents?”

  I looked at her like come on now.

  “Fair enough, but can you like do anything about this? Go to the police?”

  “They would laugh me out of the station. It’s fine,” I said firmly. “I just wanted to share because I was a little shaken up, but now I am fine.”

  Ximena opened her mouth—

  “How’s the video game going?” I asked abruptly. She was going to study Game Design at NYU. We’d opened our college decision emails together in March and then celebrated when we each got into our dream schools. Wiped tears of relief from each other’s eyes when we saw that all our hard work had paid off.

  I never brought up what might happen to us when she was at NYU and I was at UC Berkeley, double majoring in African American Studies and History. She didn’t either.

  Ximena looked at me. “Really well,” she finally said as she closed her programs and shut down the computer.

  I knew that, in New York, Ximena would find someone who wasn’t locked in a closet. She’d leave me behind like the three-hour time difference and the thousands of miles that would be between us.

  “Will I see you tomorrow for the protest?” Ximena asked.

  Man. The protest. I was going without a doubt, but I hadn’t told my parents yet. I knew they’d put up a fuss, and I’d been holding off on letting them know. As soon as Ximena and I got word that POCs Uniting for Justice was organizing an event, we’d known that we had to be there. We’d tried to convince our other best friend, Derek Williams, to go too, but he said something along the lines of Hell naw! I’m not about to become another statistic out in these streets. He sounded like my parents.

  “Yeah, I’ll be there,” I said.

  “So, uh, I’ve got coding.”

  I nodded as she gathered her things.

  She left without another word.

  “I’m sorry. I think I’m in love with you,” I whispered, trying it out on my tongue a little too late. One of these days I’d be able to say it to her proudly. Maybe I’d pull a page out of the retro Tom Cruise handbook and hop on a desk and shout it for all of our classmates and teachers at Edison to hear. But as the bell rang and I sat alone staring blankly at the black computer screen, I admitted something else to myself.

  Today was not that day.

  After placing the Green Book Ximena had gifted me in my bag, I realized that the assignment due in my first period history class was not there. I groaned and ran out of the lab, dodging students who were also stampeding through the hall, to get to my car. I sighed in relief when I saw several sheets of paper at the foot of the passenger seat and rolled my eyes at
Happi, because she had to have felt them under her shoes, then grabbed my work and rushed back inside.

  “Wait, wait! I’m here!”

  Clutching the stack of notes in my hand, I scurried to the classroom door as the bell’s final warning died away.

  Mr. Bamhauer let me in with a smile but pointed dramatically at the front of the room. “You know the rules, Madame President.”

  I contained my huff and stood before my desk in the first row. Mr. Bamhauer was a man made up of power move upon power move. If you peeled each of them away one by one, you would eventually find that they were there to cloak a tiny little gnome of fragility.

  Bing Mathis jerked his head lightly at me from his seat beside mine, and I followed his gaze to Mr. Bamhauer’s desk, where the assignment had already been collected. I dropped my papers on top and mouthed thanks. Bing had been late to class last week because his school bus had broken down and he’d had to wait for another one to pick him up. After he’d finally gotten to class and explained this, Mr. Bamhauer had nodded and said, “You know the rules, Mr. Mathis.”

  “Now that everyone is here...” Mr. Bamhauer began, and the din of the room silenced immediately. “We can continue where we left off in our unit on the Civil Rights Movement.”

  I pressed record on my phone so that I could go back and review anything I missed the first time. Mr. Bamhauer encouraged this so that we wouldn’t ask him to repeat himself. He paced between rows of desks with his arms folded.

  “As you know, you can’t look at a calendar and point to an exact date as the start of the Civil Rights Movement. But let’s say it began around 1946, when many Black soldiers returned home from World War II, through 1968, with the signing of the Fair Housing Act and the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., yes? During this period, African Americans advocated for equal rights under the law, something they had been doing since the abolishment of slavery in 1865.”

  He paused. I shuffled on my feet. Where was he going with this?

  “But even as some African Americans fought for these rights, there were others who recalled a simpler time. In fact, there were some who didn’t want to be free once slavery ended. There is a fascinating oral history in the Library of Congress of a woman born into slavery in Alabama who reminisced about her master’s kindness.”

  I gasped and felt every single gaze land on me.

  Mr. Bamhauer sniffed. “Would you like to say something, Madame President?”

  “Um. Yes!”

  “By all means, please do,” he huffed.

  “While this one woman might have felt that way, I don’t think it’s an accurate connection to make about formerly enslaved people in this context. I would argue that being given freedom without any tools with which to build a life after bondage might explain why someone would wish to go back to what they’d known. For a person to long for slavery after being considered property as a human being, whipped mercilessly, and ripped away from their family? That shows trauma. What exactly would you say are the redeeming qualities of the systemic degradation of the human spirit and bodies that was the enslavement of African descendants?”

  “There’s no need for the pretentious language, Madame President,” he said. “But I’ll bite. Perhaps ‘redeeming qualities’ isn’t the phrase to be used here, but there is something to be said about the fact that slaves weren’t working around the clock and even had Christmas off. And the woman I mentioned appreciated having everything she needed for survival, especially food—poultry, fruits, veggies, milk...”

  My eyes widened. He ignored me.

  “Furthermore, there’s no denying the negative impact the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment had on the Southern states. In fact, their economies were completely upended.”

  It took everything inside of me (and then some) to not yell at the apex of my lungs that Mr. Bamhauer was wrong, wrong, wrong. That this history he was teaching so flippantly was more than black words written on white pages, underlined with the gray graphite of pencil. That the green money of these Southern states hid something bigger: red blood shed on brown soil, watered by the tears of Black families being broken apart, generation after generation.

  How could they trust someone like this to teach the future leaders (and followers) of America? This revisionist history was unacceptable. But I couldn’t say any more. Not now, anyway. Mr. Bamhauer had strict rules against students interrupting his lectures for any reason that didn’t involve preventing imminent death. He’d chuck me into the hall before the words left my mouth. So, I bit my tongue, and I didn’t even whimper when I tasted blood. He soon moved on to the court cases I’d reviewed this morning, and he let me sit down when he got to the subject of nonviolent protest. As though everything was fine.

  As soon as class was over, I marched right to Mr. Bamhauer’s desk and demanded an explanation. “Sir, were you suggesting earlier that slavery was just a wrinkle on the history of this country? Do you think it wasn’t that big of a deal?”

  “Why, of course slavery was bad,” he said with a smug little smirk, his thick mustache twitching. “It was abolished, after all.”

  “But that’s not what you suggested today,” I pressed. “Are you going to make that clear next class?”

  Mr. Bamhauer stood and started to pack up his things. He had a planning period next, and everyone knew he used it to take a smoke break. He looked at me, boredom in his eyes.

  “May I offer you some advice, Miss Smith? You should consider taking a step back from all of this...activism. I know colleges say they won’t penalize you for the protesting and the advocacy, but people are watching. And this moment that’s happening right now with your generation? It won’t last.”

  He liked to play devil’s advocate (not that the devil needed one) for the good old days and didn’t enjoy being questioned for it.

  He folded his arms. “Don’t you have another class to get to?”

  I spun on my heel and stormed out of that room in a thunderous cloud of rage and disbelief. I had to think. My next class was AP English Lit, and we were meeting in the library, which was perfect. Ms. Crown was giving us time to work on our study outlines independently and to have small group discussions about Brave New World. I suspected she was just as over the semester as we were and was confident we wouldn’t embarrass her when our AP test scores came back, so she left us to our own devices. An idea was already percolating in my mind, and I needed to work through what had just happened.

  I ran up a flight of stairs, frantically making my way to the media center. I was doing a great job of avoiding my dawdling classmates, sidestepping students lost in conversation, until I turned a corner and smacked right into a hard chest.

  “Derek! Sorry, I’m on a mission...” I said to my best friend, who looked deep in his own thoughts. He barely grunted. I followed his distracted gaze and saw Happi, wearing oversize headphones and muttering lines to herself. She sauntered past us without even a glance our way, and I rolled my eyes. I didn’t have time for this.

  “Oh, hey, Kez,” Derek said belatedly.

  I waved him away. “Gotta go!”

  I walked to the library and got to work splicing together the audio I’d recorded of Mr. Bamhauer, complete with faculty picture, and then recorded a video of my reaction to the lecture. In less than a half hour, I reviewed the footage, logged into my YouTube account...and hit Upload.

  4

  SHAQUERIA

  TUESDAY, APRIL 10—

  1 WEEK BEFORE THE ARREST

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  I didn’t know why I agreed to meet with her. Yeah, she was perfectly put together, dressed up all fancy in a beige maxi dress that I didn’t know how she kept clean, and her high heels looked more expensive than all my possessions combined. But a social worker was a social worker, whether they were decked to the nines or were wearing an ill-fitting suit that cost $19.99 on clearance at Ross. I h
ad moved to LA to escape...this. The pitying looks from new social workers fresh out of their practicums. The boredom from the grayed ones who were jaded and had seen it all. Twice. They tried to help—some more than others—but all the effort in the world couldn’t give me a family that stuck. That cared. That wouldn’t hurt me.

  “What do you think of the chicken?”

  So she liked to wine and dine before getting into the nitty gritty. Cool.

  “It’s fine.” It was free, so it was better than fine, but she didn’t need to know that. I was still trying to find a job that would keep me available for auditions and pay enough to afford this heinously expensive city.

  She popped a cut square of syrupy waffle into her mouth and smiled. Waited. I put my fork down.

  “Ms. Howard, Roscoe’s is great and all, but what are we doing here?”

  She wiped her mouth. I glanced at the napkin. Not a whisper of her matte lipstick had transferred to the paper.

  “Oh, just Sienna is fine.”

  Her sister, my former drama teacher back home in Jackson, Mississippi, was the same way. She insisted we call her Ms. Priscilla and not by her last name. I’d mostly kept to myself at school, and she had respected that while pushing me to give my all in my performances. Her class was the first place that I’d ever felt like I had space to truly breathe. Stretch muscles I didn’t know my body had.

  “Well. Ms. Sienna—I’m sorry, it’s the Southern girl in me,” I said apologetically, my excuse for this insistence on keeping a distance between us. “I’m so glad Ms. Priscilla is doing well and that her baby came into the world okay.”

  “Me too,” Sienna said. “I will say, though, that she was very sad to learn you were gone when she returned from maternity leave.”

  I nodded slowly. There we go.

  “I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but I turned eighteen, and in the state of Mississippi—and California, for that matter—I have the right to exit the system. So I did.”