By Any Means Necessary

by Candice Montgomery

  Clarke and Auburn are splitting my bed, while Kennedy and Emery share Desh’s, which is funny because these standard dorm-issue beds are barely large enough for one adult-size body, let alone two. Desh’s sleeping situation is probably the winner—he’s starfished on the floor right there in the middle, which is pretty much also how he lives his life.

  Emery rearranges Kennedy into a position where the three of us can lay horizontally on Desh’s bed. It’s not comfortable, but it is comforting.

  It’s the safest I’ve felt in a long time. It’s hard not to wonder how a person could feel so many different emotions all arm-wrestling one another for the top spot.

  Comforted, safe, lonely, alone.

  It’s probably why so much of my struggle with the apiary has been what it is, this constant pull back and forth between who I am and who I could be, what I want, what I need, and what I think others want or need from me.

  I’ve been fighting with myself for a very long time, and Uncle Miles is the one person who helped me win that fight. He didn’t try to stop me—just gave me the tools to succeed. I think he understood, better than I ever will, that sometimes the fight is necessary. It always gets you to the other side and at the end of it, you’ll always have picked up something new, regardless of the fight’s outcome: a couple new bruises or some bragging rights.

  Both of which can be valuable in the hands of a Black boy.

  And so now—now, when people want to take the apiary from me, it’s like they’re trying to take Miles from me. And if they succeed there, then what am I? Who am I? Who do I become when he’s really and truly gone?

  Taking my bees means taking my uncle away, and taking him away means losing the piece of myself he helped me to be.

  Still … did I go too far tonight? Am I fighting a battle that doesn’t need to be fought? Is winning this one going to be good for me?

  Maybe I’ll win. Maybe I’ll get to keep my farm and my bees. And then what? Where will I be, now that the Add/Drop deadline has come and slipped right by me while I was busy being absent and in love?

  I cannot keep things together all the way from San Francisco. I really can’t.

  It starts in my hands. My right hand, first. The tremors. It forces me to grab the shaking hand with my steady one, but it’s no use because then the left is shaking and I feel it starting to take up all the room in my chest that isn’t being inhabited by the way my heartbeats have multiplied and rippled out like a riot with a message to tell.

  That’s what’s happening. My body is telling the story of my last forty-eight hours.

  My body is reliving it all.

  “Cut me out of this place.”

  “Torrey?” Emery says. I don’t realize I’ve said it out loud. Am still saying it out loud. Not until I feel Em wrap her arms around me from behind. She grips me so tight that it starts to feel like I just might unthaw. But then the tremors wreck me all over again, and I curl up into the fetal position. I try and try and try, alone and far from home, stuck in one place and chained to another, to convince myself I’m not in over my head.

  I am.

  “Breathe, Torrey.”

  I am. I am.

  “Torrey. You have to breathe.”

  I am!

  I’m so desperate for anyone to fix it. I just want to sleep all this life away.

  God, do I lack the common sense to let go of a thing that’s practically killing me with a smile on its face? I’m out of my mind.

  Face pressed into the mattress, I swallow a scream. What else is left? What else is there?

  She shakes me a little and then bites, “Torrey” right into my ear, and I feel it like a crack, feel it just as roughly as I feel each of the bruises I earned tonight.

  “Breathe,” she says again.

  I whisper, “I am.”

  All along I’ve thought, no matter what it takes, I’m going to make sure no one so much as sneezes the pollen off a single bee on that farm. It’s like I needed to fight for them the way nobody but Miles ever fought for me. But through all that, I think maybe I missed the fact that I am losing pieces of myself in order to protect pieces of myself.

  How much of that is worth it?

  I feel like, no matter what I decide, I am never going to be whole. I am, right now, shaking so hard that pieces of me are falling off, moment by moment.

  There is no real fixing or repairing. Only choosing. There is only choosing.

  29.

  I should have known things weren’t one hundred percent copacetic when, the week after my brief love affair with vandalism and nervous breakdowns, I have still heard nothing from Oily Rick or his company. We were told as I was leaving the station that night that no charges were being held against me.

  There was no bone in my body that didn’t want to question that.

  Lisa, on the other hand, looked at me, pointed at the police officer and said, “That is what you call a gift horse, stupid. Let’s go.”

  So, suffice it to say, I didn’t ask any questions.

  But that’s usually where things trip me up. When I don’t ask the questions I know I should. It happens to me in Coco’s class, it happens to me when I’m buying discount bread from the grocery store, and so yeah, in this, when I should have questioned the whys of it, and then didn’t … well. That’s probably why Oily Rick is here. At my dorm, again, following me into the commons.

  I hate having conversations here. It’s official.

  “You’re welcome,” he says, smile on his face. It occurs to me then and there that sharks—as in, the species of fish—do not smile.

  “Whatever,” I say. Then, under my breath, “Greasy head-ass motherf—”

  “I didn’t catch that.”

  “I said, ‘Whatever’. Stop following me, please. Stalking is highly frowned upon.”

  “So’s vandalism.”

  “Is it?” Jackass.

  “Look, son.”

  “I’m not your son.”

  “My company … we’re not pressing charges. Why? Because I’m a charitable guy.”

  Or because Ryan Q pulled up hella dirt on him and his back channel–ass businesses. But I digress.

  “I am, however, here to tell you that you’ve essentially just screwed yourself. Not a huge chance you’re going to get to keep your farm with that little demolition project you orchestrated. Now your petition amounts to nothing more than scratch paper and some illegible names of people who don’t matter much now.”

  Breathless. That’s what this does to me, it seeps in and commandeers my breath.

  He smiles again. I hate him. I hate it. I hate everything about this. “See you at auction, son.” He chucks my chin with a finger, turns, and walks away.

  Two mornings later, I find myself at a local coffee and wine bar called Hostel.

  Hostel is one of the places I’ve basically fallen head over heels with here in San Francisco. Not unlike a certain Afro-Latino boy made up entirely of hair and stardust.

  Hostel is relatively new, but it’s designed to basically look like a squat bunker with black walls and exposed brick. But there’s stuff to like about this try-hard imperfection. Like the way the bathroom door’s handle sometimes locks on you, and you have to give it a real good hip check before it agrees to let you out.

  Or the way the Wi-Fi goes out every time the fog decides to move with a little gusto, requiring a reset within ten minutes’ time, or else the on-duty supervisor will be stuck on the phone with Time Warner Cable.

  Emery walks in.

  I’m shoving a paperback into my back pocket and walking toward her when she nods in the other direction, and heads to the corner of the commune dedicated to Collective business.

  An idea starts to take shape. One that, if executed properly—and within the next two weeks—could save the apiary.

  Since the Collective is a group of activists based in LA city proper, it’s a big deal that they’re here, in the Bay. They’re not so much run by any one person as they are a tentativ
e group of lost boys. Think Occupy, but Black and based on the opposite coast.

  They’re big on the usual things—pushing back against anti-Islamic rhetoric, BLM, the influx of ICE raids that’ve been taking place of late as well as funding causes like the Latino Victory Project and Planned Parenthood. But they also do the small things. They are single-handedly responsible for funding the lunch program at six out of the nine local elementary and middle schools in the LA area. They’re feeding kids whose parents can’t afford the lunch program. Some of these kids—it’s the only meal they get in a single day, and if that ain’t good work, don’t tell me what is.

  I walk toward their group, huddled in a circle. The stress is palpable. Hands on chins, brows lowered—something’s happened.

  Em looks up at me. Nods as she speaks to the group. “No. You know that’s not how we operate. Our project is proactive and visionary—not reactive. We don’t fight fires just because they’re blazing and we happen to have a couple of red cups of water in hand. Leave that to others who have the power to do so. Our fight is with the embers it leaves behind and the sparks that ignited it in the first place.”

  Before I walk away, I glance down and see flyers on each of their laps for what they intend to be the first annual Foster Care and Adoption Awareness Rally.

  “The whole point of this,” Emery continues loud enough for her circle and even me to hear, “is to help Black youth see how they can get in on the ground level. How they can be more active in things like the Collective.”

  A kid with too much hair on top of his head rises. The tips are bleached so there’s, like, a 70 percent chance he’s going to say something dumb. He’s familiar. I’ve seen him around LA, on the west side, I think.

  “We just lost two of our sponsors due to these assholes coming in and shutting down our event site. What are we supposed to do about that now? We don’t have a venue, Emery!”

  She sits down, and I silently beg her not to give up. Don’t concede. I so selfishly want her to fight for this thing she loves and believes in. We’re alike in a lot of ways and one of them, I know, is that we were given too much passion to hold inside our bodies. And now, the object of my passion is all fight and very few moments of love.

  I’ve known Em for the duration of my stay here at SFSU, but I wouldn’t say I know her well enough to bet on her next move. But it just doesn’t seem like her MO to just give up once one obstacle is set gently in her path.

  She seems like the type to maybe concede on a temporary basis once the fiftieth obstacle is dropped like an anvil. But nothing short of that.

  I clear my throat. “Use us. Or, me. Or, damn. I mean, like—”

  “Spit it out, bruh,” Frosted Tips says.

  I give him a look but Emery slaps him across the back of the head before I can say anything.

  “Thanks,” I say to her. “I meant that you guys can use the apiary for your rally. My farm,” I clarify for Vanilla Ice over there. “It’s private property, so at least there’s that.”

  “I like the idea of that,” Emery says. “Doing it in the city would be so baller and having an actual space to do it on-slash-around would be perfect.”

  “We don’t have that kind of money. I know what it takes to rent a space that size.” This, from a guy with red lipstick and a badass, anatomically correct heart tattooed on his neck.

  He’s probably right about their money situation though. We’ve rented out the apiary to about a handful of private parties in the past, garden parties, wine tastings, baby showers where we’ve had more than a few stings because some idiot father-to-be couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Point is, we’re not cheap because it takes money to keep us going.

  “Yeah,” I say, readjusting my stance. “But I’m willing to forego the cost. I need this just as much as you guys do. This is important, and it’s not about money. And the city councilman’s office is like four blocks east of the farm.”

  She exhales. “Do you know what you’re asking for? Because we’re all on board, but there are risks involved.”

  “I think so, but I’m sure you’ll correct me if I get it twisted. I need protest. The Collective needs action. We combine the two and meet them at the top. At the councilman’s office. I need to show them there’s genuine support and pushback as a result of shutting us down. And they need to know we know our rights. Black lives don’t matter to them, and I understand that they especially won’t while we’re there, raising hell.”

  “You’ve done your homework.”

  “I know my way around Google, yeah.”

  She nods. “This isn’t the kind of thing that just comes together overnight. You know that, right? It takes weeks of planning and coordinating. Sometimes months.”

  I nod, even though I’d hoped to have it pulled together at sort of an expedited rate.

  “Has to be two weeks. My farm is yours if we can make this happen by then.” It has to. “And, in the event y’all end up needing to hold another rally, I’m pretty sure I know a rec center that’d be willing to jump in. I can make that happen.”

  I think. I’m not entirely certain, but I’ll promise anything to damn near anyone right now. Plus, I’ve worked with the rec center long enough to know they’ve thrown their support behind lesser causes for people a lot less deserving than the Collective’s members.

  She exhales, then mumbles, “Freakin’ tired.”

  I know, right. You, too? Yeah. This life shit’s for the birds, ain’t it?

  I pull her aside to a far corner of the room and lower my voice. “I know this probably only adds to what stress you already have going, but I just really want you to know I’m not going to take advantage of what you can do or can offer. I’m willing to help you and the Collective out, too. Beyond just this. If you help me hang onto it, my space is yours for whatever you need. Rallies, fundraisers, events, parties, meetings. Hell, I’ve seen that kid with the Y2K Justin Timberlake hair sleeping in his car from time to time. There’s a bed in the apiary’s back shed that’s his for whenever he wants it, so long as you can give me your word he’s not gonna try and pawn my espresso machine or anything.”

  This time she does laugh. “Yeah, Justice has a space to sleep, it’s just. He was adopted last year.”

  “Kinda late in the game for a Black kid, isn’t it?”

  “Late in the game for anyone to be adopted, yeah. But. He’s not comfortable with them yet. Doesn’t believe they want him for real. Which. They might not, but they signed the adoption papers, so there’s gotta be some genuine desire there. Anyway, he tells them he’s staying at a friend’s place and then takes off and sleeps in his car instead.”

  “If they signed the papers and made it official, what’s even in it for them?”

  “I don’t know. Street cred? Respectability?”

  “They’re a white family?” I ask. It’s the only way I can see around something like that.

  “No,” she says. “Asian. They’re, like, second-gen Korean.”

  I nod. “Lot of politics in that.” The history of Black and Asian interpersonal relationships is … messy.

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “So,” I say.

  “So,” she says.

  “Will you help me put this thing together with some quickness, a little finesse?”

  She hangs onto her answer for a second, and I know she’s making me wait because that’s just my Emery—exacting. And utterly incomparable.

  I groan, “Put me out of my misery, Em.”

  “Whatever. Yes, I’ll help get this thing off the ground in a hurry.”

  “Yes!” I hug her and it’s probably a mistake. Confirmed! When she suddenly decks me right in the chest. “Christ, Em. These are new,” I say holding my chest. “My plastic surgeon is going to be furious.”

  “You’re such a dweeb.”

  I smile. Feels pretty cool. “Thanks, shorty.”

  She folds her arms across her chest and mulls for a moment, lips sliding from one side of her mouth t
o the other.

  “What?” I say.

  “My mind’s already dancing around how we can get this ball rolling.”

  “Deadass. I’ve been thinking maybe we need an online presence to really reach people.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Online presence like what? A webpage? A GoFundMe? A newsletter? All of the above?”

  “That one.”

  “Mm. I got you. Whatever you need, okay? You’re a pain in my ass, Torr, but I got you.”

  She and I set up a Twitter page and the GFM pretty much on the spot, because technically winning this fight over the apiary has to end in us paying those back taxes, even if we do stop the auction.

  As soon as she splits, she’s already texting me with possible options for a hashtag we can use online to get some chatter going.

  #SavetheBeesLA

  #Action4Apiary

  #MilesToGoApiary

  That feeling … did you catch it, too? It was quick, so I’ll tell you—it’s akin to that of a wildfire.

  30.

  Whenever I’m having a particularly hard time, I end up in the same place. If not physically, then mentally.

  Today Moms has a flower in her hair. It finally hits me that she is aging. Death is a different sort of thing when your loved one has been on a ventilator for as long as Moms has. I’m so used to having her be at death’s whim because of some large piece of machinery. I’m not so used to her being subject to time. The way the rest of us are.

  Still, I sit in her room now, and I don’t try to huddle in the farthest corner. I don’t try to avoid looking at her or hearing her heart monitor and BP machines beeping like a metronome.

  “What’s good, Moms?” I say, so quiet I’m not even sure I managed to verbalize the words out loud. “You look nice today. Got a little flower in your hair and everything. Looks like your nurse might have even done a little blush or something.”

  I pull my faraway chair closer to her bed.

  “I like that they’re taking care of you in here. I sometimes wonder if I should have more input on your care. Theo refuses to let me take over as your proxy. He’s such an asshole, Mom. Eventually I will, though. But for now, it’s looking like you’re doing okay.”