by Rachel Cohn
My cookie trance breaks when I am mauled in an embrace by the last person here from whom I would have expected—or wanted—comfort. “It’s like it doesn’t feel real or something, you know?” Bex, Laura’s high school best friend, says to me. Her talents reside on the field hockey field, grunting and running and hitting, so I imagine she can be forgiven her lack of articulation skills. Bex is the person who named me “8 Mile,” thinking I didn’t know. She didn’t even go to the same school as me. Yet the name traveled.
I’ll never figure out how a girl like her managed to be invited to five proms this year alone; nor do I understand why at the moment of mutual acknowledgment of our shared person’s suicide, this is the thought that occurs to me in relation to Bex. But it’s true—she’s not even that pretty, yet somehow her shiny white smile on pink dimple cheeks always wins out, despite her plain brown hair and eyes, her curveless, boylike, field hockey body. Bex is a girl who would never understand what it’s like to have an 8 Mile butt, because she doesn’t even have a butt.
I step out of her arms. I don’t want that stick touching me, even if she did love Laura. She’s the reason I lost the last few years of Laura—Bex, and he who trails behind her, Jason, Laura’s ex-boyfriend. At least he will not try to touch me. Handsome soccer-star boys who just finished their first Ivy League year won’t bother trying to comfort a girl like me, heavyweight to his featherweight class.
“Hey,” he says to us. He’s so blond and handsome, it would almost be intoxicating, if not for his predictable, casual acceptance of it, as if those looks and that privilege were the natural right of any white boy from Woodley Park whose parents are both telegenic political media commentators.
What’s there to say back? Hey? Bummer about that suicide and all, right, dude?
Laura took us by surprise when she broke up with Jason after New Year’s. Now I get it. Laura wanted Jason to understand his freedom to move on. After.
Has Jason ever noticed how much Laura and I look alike? Shave me down a dozen sizes, straighten and dye my hair back to its natural color, take off the goth makeup and give me a fresh-faced cover-girl glow, and I could be Laura. I could be the one to console him. I could envelop him.
But it’s Bex who jumps into Jason’s arms, pressing her face against his lean chest. What it would be like to be her, open to touch, expecting that anyone would want it from her? She holds on to Jason tightly. In their embrace, I see that soon, their grief could potentially turn to something deeper. Laura wouldn’t mind. I do.
I am not without my own knight in shining armor. Jamal has found me again. Not only is he my best friend, he’s my psychic; I don’t realize I am parched until I see him standing before me, bearing a tall glass of water. “Thought you could use this,” he says. He hands me the water and I gulp it right down. He asks Bex, “Weren’t you the girl who tutored my sister Niecy in math this year? Seems like I’ve almost met you about a dozen times.” Niecy goes to the same school that Bex and Laura just graduated from. Jamal’s a mama’s boy; he had no problem going to the charter high school where his mother is the principal, but Niecy, she wanted her own path, the one with the fancy girls.
Bex loosens herself from Jason’s arms and turns to Jamal, appraises him. What’s not to admire about the black suit and baby-blue silk tie (for Laura), his caramel eyes and smooth cocoa skin, or the Afro hair he’s disciplined into ten braids running the length of his scalp, knotted at the nape of his neck? Jamal must meet Bex’s standards. She smiles, momentarily distracted from her grief. “Don’t tell me. You’re the brother who blasted all the D.C. go-go music from the speakers in his attic room so we had to go to the library to get any studying done in peace? I mean, I like old Chuck Brown and Rare Essence just as much as anybody who grew up here, but Niecy was trying to raise her PSAT score, and you weren’t helping.”
“You’re Rebecca, right? Seven-up!” Jamal responds. Bex couldn’t know Jamal’s way of acknowledging a person he likes is to speak to them in snippets of songs, preferably by Parliament, his favorite funk band from back in the day.
“Everybody calls me Bex. Ho!” she sings back. I would not have expected a girl like her to speak in Parliament.
Jamal doesn’t date white girls. Why should he, he says, when he lives in Chocolate City, surrounded on every block by the finest-looking flavors of nonvanilla?
I can no longer deny the Oxy, deny the sway gripping my body, throwing me off balance, hurtling me either toward passing out on the floor, or to a good long nap. Jamal sees it, catches me before I fall. His palm presses against the heavy folds of my arm, warming me.
“Go home and sleep it off.” He leans over to whisper in my ear, and my body tingles all over again in anticipation of our private exchange, free of Bex’s ears. “This is so not cool today, Miles.”
Who’s he to judge?
I expect Jamal to take my hand and walk me home to the carriage house, which he would do if we’d whiled away an afternoon down by the canal, sharing a joint. Instead, his hand that’s holding me up gently pushes me away, to regain my own balance. His attention turns to Bex, nonnegotiable, nonreturnable.
Teenagers. So fickle.
I am still high, but crashing down.
Back in the Day
THE GAME JAMAL AND I PLAYED THE LAST FEW SUMMERS was this: The Great Cake Con.
Last day of school. Jamal’s finished signing everyone’s yearbooks, and I’ve finished patiently standing behind him while no one asks me to sign theirs.
We pick a fancy pastry shop in a yuppie neighborhood like Dupont Circle or Foggy Bottom. We sprint there after the final bell rings in our summer freedom. We admire the concoctions in the glass cases, the tortes and pies, the buttercream and mocha fillings, the mousse cakes and rum cakes and shortcakes and Black Forest cakes, oh my.
Our mouths appropriately salivating, Jamal asks to speak with the store manager. He explains that we’re getting married next week. Eloping, actually. Maryland’s just a hop-skip-and-jump away, right? We don’t need Vegas. The Chesapeake’ll do us fine. We’re . . . pause as Jamal smiles bashfully down at my generous stomach as I arch my back to jut the belly out further . . . in the family way, and we don’t want to wait to make this about-to-be family legal. We’re gonna tell our folks when we get back from the justice of the peace. Sure, we’re young, but we’re crazy in love. Figure, we’ll lay out a spread of cake so grand, the folks’ll be too buzzed on the cake to get angry over our little accident who’s surely gonna bring joy to their old ages. But . . . sir or ma’am, could you help us out here? ’Cuz we need to sample the cakes, but we don’t have the cash to try each one. We’re going to break the bank on the final product, once we’ve picked the perfect cake. It’s gonna be a big moment. The cake has to be just right. Naw, we don’t have a fancy wedding planner to arrange cake samplings—what, you kidding?
The act, of course, is preposterous. A dapper, fine-looking brother choosing a faux goth, pale sister, the extra with too much extra, to romance-mate? Only on a play date. Yet, as play-for-cake, the act works. With anybody else, we’d be kicked out of the establishment after the first bashful smile. But Jamal, he can pull it off. No one can turn down that honest face and sugar smile. He’s never not sincere—even when he’s acting. His heart’s all the way in it.
Jamal’s parents have groomed him his whole life to follow in their footsteps—university at his father’s alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, the all-black elite men’s school (his mother went to the women’s college, Spelman, across the way), then back to D.C. and a career in law and D.C. politics. I think they’ve pegged Jamal into the wrong plan. Jamal should be lighting up the stage and screen, far from home. But I like his parents’ design schematic better. It means he’ll eventually have to return to D.C., to me. I’m not going anywhere.
We have our cake and eat it, too.
After the posh bakery charade, we go to the local supermarket chain, Giant Food, to celebrate the con. Jamal spins me for a slow dance in the f
reezer aisle before dipping me down low, pressing into my back with one hand as he opens the freezer door with his other hand.
I’m uncomfortable with anyone touching my rolls of flesh, so as a rule, I don’t dance. But I will with Jamal. Especially for more cake.
“M’lady,” Jamal sings into my ear.
“Good sir,” I announce back into his. “Another year, another jive act. Mayhap thee should be congratu-funking-lated.”
I stand tall out of his dip and glance into the freezer case. I choose the kind of generic sheet cake Laura and I always liked best for our birthdays—chocolate with white frosting, and a plastic clown face jutted into the middle. Jamal and I will bring the sheet cake home to Laura, to eat inside the tree house. We’ll dig into it with forks, not bothering to cut slices. We’ll eat around the edges, the heaviest frosting parts, until only the carcass of the cake remains, with the maniacal clown in the middle.
Maybe we’ll all share a joint after.
The annual cake con heralds summer. Laura will leave on holiday with Jim soon enough. Jamal will attend some precollege summer enrichment program his parents have chosen for him. I will pass the summer smoking and reading books and missing them even when they’re right there with me.
They dessert me before deserting me.
This year there is no last day of school. No game. No cake. There is no Laura to come home to.
French Gray Goodness
I SHOULD PROBABLY LIVE IN FRANCE WHERE MY understanding is that it’s socially acceptable to wear all black and chain smoke. I will have to starve myself for a few months before I go. I don’t think they like fat people or Americans there. But I can lose the weight and pass myself off as Canadian. I will get along fine in France, mais oui, and eh? I will smoke instead of eat the beautiful pastries, and I will drink lots of coffee. Eventually I will have so many toxins filling my body I won’t be able to feel anything at all. That’s okay in France.
In the shaded nook of garden behind Jim’s house, I have my own private France. Here I can sit on a carved wooden bench under the giant oak tree with the full green branches, protected by the tree house situated over my head. I can smoke to my heart’s content, fill my lungs with tar, course my body with nicotine. I can pretend I am sitting outside the Louvre or Versailles or any of those famous France places that have lush, expansive gardens, and where people are allowed to smoke in public establishments without the antismoking Gestapo charging in to ruin their peaceful time. Here in my own private garden, I can be a world away from D.C., waiting to meet up with Laura, to share secret smokes up in the tree house, to talk about first periods, boy crushes, the tyrannical social hierarchy system of the middle school playground.
The garden behind the big house on Jim’s property is no rival to the famous gardens at Dumbarton Oaks, the historic property nearby that anchors Georgetown’s royal marriage of architecture to landscape. The garden here is haphazard rather than serene, interesting instead of stunning. In the long, wide yard between the main house and the carriage house there are marble fountain sculptures, roses and magnolia in June bloom, honeysuckle randomly sprouting around the hedges, a mosaic-lined swimming pool at the far back side near the carriage house and under the tall, tall trees separating the garden from the street, but there’s no method to the madness. It’s as if no real thought or plan went into the lush beauty—stuff was just put there, and nature, and D.C., did the rest.
I like it back here. It’s probably better than France. No one will bother me or talk to me in a foreign language and I don’t have to pretend to care about ice hockey.
The garden’s vibrant colors—daisy yellows, violet blues, fuchsia pinks—today appear to me to have melded into one murky color: gray. Everything looks the same. It used to be I could sit back here and almost taste the deep greens of the swamp climate trees and grass. This morning the garden has no taste, no color. I don’t even savor the cigarette I am smoking. I breathe in tar, exhale smoke, taste only gray.
The humidity reminds me: I am not in France. The summer air is heavy and lazy, like me. Strands of curls lock onto the wet on my face. I took out the cornrows this morning, one week after the funeral. I washed my hair but the long, frizzy mane will take hours to dry in this wet D.C. air. I figure I’ve got at least half a pack of cigarettes to go before my hair dries and Jamal stops by to walk me to work. I light another smoke and return to my book—Sisterhood of Spies: The Women of the OSS, about American female secret agents during World War II. When we were little, WWII spygirls was one of Laura’s and my favorite games up in the tree house.
“Mind if I join you?”
I am so lost in my gray smoke clouds and gray pages that I did not notice Jim approaching my cigarette perch. I put down my book and see that he, too, looks gray, and not just because of the gray chinos and gray polo shirt he wears, or the gray hair and eyebrows that once shined rusty blond, long before Laura changed the color spectrum of his life.
He asks a simple question, yet it strikes me as funny. Since I started high school, it’s like there’s been this implicit understanding between Jim and me not to engage one another in conversation. I don’t know how that happened. It just did. And now, completely casual, as if my teen years haven’t gone by with almost no spoken words between us: Mind if I join you?
Code-Name Cynthia is nekkid with her lover inside the French Embassy, waiting for her opportunity to steal secrets of occupied France from the embassy safe. But whatever. “Sure,” I say to Jim. He does own the garden, after all. What am I going to say? Go away, my book’s at a really good part?
“Got a cigarette you can spare?” I eye him suspiciously and he adds, “I think under the circumstances I can be forgiven for picking up smoking again. And don’t look so concerned. You will not be the enabler of my downfall. I started back up last week but ran out while I was sleepless last night. I haven’t yet had a chance to replenish the supply. Only a few days back on smoking and already, the morning nicotine cravings have set in. Goodness, the price of cigarettes went up in the years since I last smoked!”
Goodness. What a queer word, I think. Not gay, but wrong—a word that’s meaningless now, a bygone word from a bygone era, from Code-Name Cynthia’s time, as bygone as the word “bygone.”
I open the Marlboro box and shake it, extending a cigarette up for Jim to take. He sits down next to me on the bench and lights up. I thought I remembered him as a Virginia Slims man. Lapsed smokers are rarely brand loyal. But I see Jim has resurrected his old Tiffany silver lighter with his initials engraved on it, a gift from a partner from long ago, when same-sex lovers had to stay in the closet but chain-smoking on crowded airplanes and in movie theaters was totally fine, even encouraged. Secondhand smoke was clearly less dangerous than two men sharing the gift of a public kiss, in goodness’s bygone time.
We smoke together, silent. I’m sure he’s here to bring up the issue I know is forthcoming: my departure from this property. Mel promised me as much before she left for England. Miles, if recent events have taught you anything, it should be that now is the time for you to take charge of your life. Stop smoking, already, and stop treating your body like a dumping ground for junk food. And you’re almost eighteen. You’re grown up, almost an adult, and with Laura gone, surely you realize we can’t stay here at Jim’s forever. My heart is broken. Maybe now’s the time for me to seriously consider a permanent move to England with Paul? You’ve got the summer to start thinking about what you want to do after you finish school. We have to move on and out eventually, I guess. Right, honey?
When Jim finally speaks, about half a cig down, it’s to ask this: “Aren’t you hot wearing all that black in this heat? It must be ninety degrees with 90 percent humidity out here.” This kind of question is why I avoid conversation with him. He is judging me, and I suspect his verdict on me is always the same: white trash. Sweaty and pudgy, doesn’t know how to dress properly.
“I’m fine,” I say. These words have become like a mantra spewing from my
mouth. Storm update from Accu-Miles Weather Center: The Category 5 hurricane downgraded to a tropical storm some time between the funeral service and Mel’s departure. Low clouds still hover over me when I sleep —if I sleep, misting my eyes and sending chills through my body alone in bed at night, but the full-scale rage has yet to come ashore. But it’s still early in the season.
I have Laura’s leftover bag of goodies to tide me over in the meantime. Half a hydro eases me into slumber, but the half is not so gram-deep I can’t wake up in the morning. Smooth.
I’m only a full-on Perc or Oxy junkie for special occasions, like quality time with Laura, or after suicides and during funerals. I can walk away any time. That doesn’t mean I don’t deserve a little generic half-treat at night when I can’t sleep.
I want to distract Jim from my impending eviction, so my question for him is this: “Aren’t you going away this summer?”
Rich people don’t languish through D.C. summers. They go to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, the Outer Banks of North Carolina, little Georgia sea islands, or to France for real.
Jim takes a drag, exhales. “Don’t have the heart for travel right now.”
In our resumed silence, the real question hangs in the thick air between us: How are we going to make it through this summer, without her?
In my childhood, summer was Laura. Summer was overnight camp with shared bunk beds, day trips down the Chesapeake, zoo visits, roller-coaster rides, miniature golf, and ice-cream cones. In the summer, I had Laura all to myself. We were our own unit, separated from her school friends—and my lack of them.