It takes six weeks for my collarbone to heal enough for me to function without the sling, and two weeks beyond that for Mom to let me even think of going near “that game” again, which is when Steph and I can finally stop playing in secret from our rooms and let her and Dad watch a match. Steph moved her desk, monitors, CPU, and all her hot-pink VR equipment into my room just for the day so we can duel side by side. Dad helped her rotate my bunk bed so he and Mom can both sit on the couch and watch the match on the computer screen. I tried to show them how to use my VR headset so they can get their own and experience the game from the stands like true SLAYers, but Mom couldn’t wear it for more than ten minutes without getting dizzy, and I don’t think they make a headset in the world big enough to fit Dad’s head.
Maybe one day we’ll get to see Mom and Dad in the stands smiling down at us. I imagine Mom wearing something from the seventies—with a giant Afro and gold hoop earrings and roller skates, and Dad wearing something space-age, like Major Lazer. Steph and I stand staring at each other in the middle of Fairbanks Arena with the spotlight beaming down on us, Mom and Dad watching behind us in the real world. That feeling that I thought I’d feel after opening that letter from Spelman? That blessed assurance that I’m doing exactly what I was always meant to do? That relief I was so sure I’d get? I get it now, with my whole family right here in my room, watching this duel, both halves of my world converging. Hyacinth is dressed in a ridiculously over-the-top leopard-print catsuit, complete with tail and hot-pink claws, because why not? Claire designed it just for her. Now Steph talks to Claire more than she talks to her own sister. I smile, knowing I was right. They get along just fine.
“So, what happens now?” asks my mom, her muffled voice competing with the roar of the audience in my headset. Steph answers, since she’s keeping one of her headphones slightly off her ear to hear them better.
“Round three is about to start,” she says. “We’ll tap our last two cards, and then I’ll lay Kiera out.”
“Don’t forget who designed these cards,” I say, wiggling my fingers at my hips like I’m in a scene from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
“Some of mine are in there too now,” she says.
“Exactly two,” I say to Mom. “But who knows? Maybe she’ll get lucky today.”
Steph convinced Claire to let her add the Yaaas card, which cracks me up because I don’t even know what it does. Steph said she wants me to be surprised, but knowing her, it’ll be extra AF. Cicada’s voice echoes somewhere above us.
“Duelers, ready! Round three starts in three . . . two . . . one . . . Go!”
I, Emerald, tap my next two cards, and Hyacinth lunges for hers. Mine flip over and I prepare to battle as Cicada announces giddily, “Ooh, we’ve got Queen Hyacinth with Reclaimed Time and Yaaas, and Queen Emerald with Fufu and Canceled! This is gonna be a fierce one, kings and queens!”
“What in the world is the Yaaas card?!” I squeal as Hyacinth sprints at me with her super speed from the Reclaimed Time card. I hold up my hands, she bounces off my force field from the Canceled card, and we both go flying.
“Whoa!” we scream in unison, each of us watching our characters peel themselves off the floor and prepare for the next confrontation. Her pink eyes are flashing from across the ring, and she extends her hot-pink claws to intimidate me. I like battling Steph. She likes to play tricks just to mess with me, but they don’t work.
“Just battle, Queen,” I say to her. Mom chimes in again with another question.
“What is ‘Reclaimed Time’? What is that?”
Steph jumps in before I can.
“That’s Auntie Maxine coming through, Mamma!” she cries as she lunges at me again. I plant my feet firmly on the carpet and produce another force field, knocking her back a few feet.
“You know,” says Mom, “if you knew those vocab words like you know these cards, you’d spend less time agonizing over homework.”
“Not true,” whines Steph, sucking her teeth. “That’s different.”
I direct the conversation back to this game.
“You gonna show me what this Yaaas card is all about?” I ask. She’s holding it back, waiting for the perfect moment, maybe? I’m a little nervous. Is a whole team of Missy Elliott background dancers going to pop out the ground like Michael Jackson’s zombies? What does yaaas even mean, except an enthusiastic “yes”? What would a “yes” card even look like?
“She’s going to turn into Beyoncé,” chuckles Dad.
I roll my eyes and smile at how funny he thinks he is. I can almost feel Mom rolling her eyes behind me.
“Wanna see?” asks Steph as I hear her lower herself to the carpet. Hyacinth begins prowling around the ring.
“Wow, look at that, Charles!” cries Mom. I don’t think she’ll ever get over the novelty of watching Emerald and Hyacinth mimic on-screen what Steph and I are doing in real life. I’m still holding up my force-field hands, ready to whip out my Fufu card if the Yaaas card happens to be something it’ll counter. Hyacinth raises her catlike hindquarters, making her tail wiggle like she’s about to pounce.
“Really?” I ask. Again, extra.
“YAAAAAAS!” yells Steph.
A black cube the size of a vehicle zooms toward me, and I lower the force fields and dodge to my left. I feel my foot catch Steph—the real Steph—in the ankle, and Mom gasps.
“Careful,” she calls as I regain my balance. “Space yourselves out a bit.”
Steph calls out again, “YAAAS!” and I watch a second black block fly past me so I can get a good look at it. It’s not a block. It’s the word “YAAAS” in capitalized Arial letters, twice my height and three times my width, flying past me like a freight train.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asks, circling the ring again.
“Gorgeous,” I say flatly. I clap my hands together and when I separate them again, a small ball of dough hovers between them.
“What the hell is that?” demands Steph.
“Whoa, whoa,” thunders Dad as I reel back and haul it straight at her. “Watch your language in this house. We aren’t your li’l online friends.”
“Sorry,” she says, diving out of the way. I hear her land in a heap on the floor next to me and I laugh and stretch my arms out as wide as they’ll go until the dough grows to the size of a house, hovering twenty feet over Hyacinth’s head.
“What is that?!” she shrieks. “Is that the Fufu card? What even is fufu?”
I bring my hands down hard and flatten Hyacinth with the dough. My points on the Megaboard jump from 1800 to 2300, and the whole arena goes wild with cheers and whoops and hollers.
“It’s a staple food in so many African countries! How have you never heard of it?”
I raise my fists in the air to lift the dough ball off poor Hyacinth, who’s lying on the floor, trying to get up.
“Come on, come on,” hisses Steph. “Get up, you useless—”
I slam the ball down a second time and say, “It’s popular in Ghana and Nigeria.”
And a third time.
“It’s made of cassava and green plantain flour.”
The round three drums rumble through the arena, and I hear Steph take off her headset, so I lift my goggles up to my forehead, grin smugly at her, and finish with, “Often served with peanut soup.”
And then I take off both gloves and toss them on the floor.
“Did you just win, Kiera?” asks Mom.
“Yes I did! Boom!” I holler before sticking out my tongue and dropping into a flawless nay-nay.
“Yeah, yeah,” groans Steph. “All right, all right, student hasn’t surpassed the developer yet. I’ll get there.”
She smiles and throws her arms around me as I hear Cicada’s voice from my headset announcing, “Queen Emerald wins! Queen Emerald wins!”
But I listen closely to the arena’s cheering. Half are chanting, “Long live Emerald,” and the other half, mixed in, are chanting for my sister.
“Long l
ive Hyacinth!”
“Long live the queens!”
“Long live the queens!”
“Long live the queens!”
I hold my sister tighter, even after she pulls her arms down to indicate she’s done hugging me.
“Thanks, Steph,” I say.
“For going easy on you? Don’t get used to it.”
“For talking some sense into me about Malcolm. For having my back. For SLAYing with me. For everything.”
I feel her nod, and the audience fades and I hear the chat menu sound in my ears. Cicada’s voice comes through loud and clear.
“Well done, queens! Excellent duel! What do you think of the Yaaas card, Kiera?”
“She thinks it’s ridiculous,” says Steph, pushing away from me and unplugging the USB on my CPU so Cicada’s voice resounds through the room instead.
“But it’s a fun one,” I add. “And it’s definitely something we say. Hey, Claire, you’re on speaker now. My parents are here.”
“Bonjour, Mr. and Mrs. Johnson!” she cries. “It’s nice to finally meet both of you!”
Steph and I look back at our parents. Dad is still sitting, but Mom is pushing herself off the sofa and grinning.
“Bonjour, Claire! It’s good to hear your voice. We’ve heard so much about you! Heard you’re in school.”
“Yes, going to university. Math is difficult right now.”
“Kiera can help you with that,” chimes in Steph, grinning at me smugly, “as soon as our plane lands.”
It hits me in slow waves.
“What plane?” I ask. Mom and Dad are both standing now. Mom’s hands are clasped and her eyebrows are both raised high. This time they’re saying, you heard her. My eyes get huge.
“Claire?”
Her giggling starts softly, like she’s trying to contain it, but it grows and grows, and Steph joins in, and eventually so do Mom and Dad.
“Are you all serious?” I scream. I’m really going to fly to Paris? I’m really going to meet Claire in person? I scream and jump up and down, and Steph jumps with me, throwing her arms around me.
“Oh my God!” I cry, “Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
I don’t even know where to begin. My hands are shaking. My heart is racing.
“When do we leave?” I ask. “Mom, who’s paying for this?”
Mom and Dad look at each other with a grin, and Dad says, “I think we’d better let Claire explain this one.”
“Story time!” squeals Claire’s voice through the speakers. I wish she used her webcam so I could see her face right now. My heart is thundering. I can’t believe I’m really going to get to see her!
“Can you all hear me? Kiera, can you hear me?”
“I can hear you, Claire,” I say. “Just hurry up before I die of anticipation.”
“I got a message in my inbox,” says Claire with a smile in her voice, “a few weeks after your picture went viral and the local Paris news began reporting the story. My inbox blew up, but one message caught my eye. It was called ‘CEO of IDC wants partnership.’ ”
I look at Steph, and her smile indicates she knows what in the world Claire is talking about, so I fold my arms and listen.
“IDC stands for Île de Cerveau. That’s ‘Brain Island’ in English. It’s a virtual reality technology start-up that’s scheduled for an IPO at the end of this year. The CEO’s name is Maurice Belrose, also known in SLAY as Spade. Yes, that Spade.”
My eyes grow huge. Spade? The same Spade who gave me the mantra I’ve been putting on my cover photos and screensavers and even my phone background for the last couple of months? The You are a queen, and this is your game guy?
I can barely speak. It comes out as a croak. “Yeah, I know him.”
“He and I have been talking. I met him in person in a café, and I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d talk me out of meeting strange men in person that I met online.”
She’s absolutely right. And nuts.
“He said that he’s seen the news, and he thinks we could partner forces and pair SLAY with Brain Island’s devices and existing games. Lawsuits may be a very real reality for us as long as we’re making games just for our people, but under the umbrella of a Black-owned company with other games available to all, we could fly protected. We could lead a whole team of developers to make updates, we could have time to translate the in-game text into more languages than just English, adapt the game so it’s compatible with accessibility-friendly devices, and take SLAY from great to awesome. And he wants to fly you and Steph out here so you can meet him this weekend!”
Steph squeals and practically tackles me where I stand, and I have to shift my weight to keep from falling over. My chest is pounding, and my eyes are brimming with tears as I hold my sister. Mom comes and joins the hug, and Dad completes it.
“I’m going to pack literally everything I own,” says Steph, her voice muffled under the layers of bodies in this hug. We all laugh until my sides begin to hurt, and Claire, who I’ve forgotten can’t see a thing that’s going on, asks meekly, “What do you say, Kiera? You in?”
“That’s a yaaas from us!” yells Steph. I roll my eyes and play-slap her shoulder.
“That’s a definitely and a half,” I say.
“Better get packing, then!” says Claire. “I’ll be there to pick you up from the airport on Saturday morning.”
My heart skips. Claire’s going to be there? She’s going to be the first face I see in Paris? I don’t even know what she looks like. Oh God, she has no idea what I look like. I mean, not for real. Just a picture from Twitter. A bad one. I really do need to start packing, strategically.
Steph darts out of the room to commence the process, and I begin to follow her, when I hear my mom’s voice behind me.
“Baby?” she asks. I turn to see her standing there, glancing at my dad and then smiling at me with those pursed lips and outstretched arms. It feels so good to be able to hug people again now that I don’t have to wear that sling anymore. I wrap my arms around my mom and let her hold me without fear of pain.
“Thanks for letting me go. To Paris. I can’t tell you what this means to me.”
I don’t know what else to say. Meeting Claire, meeting Maurice, it’s everything I could’ve ever dreamed of for my role as developer of this game. Now we get to take SLAY to the next level, and I get to be at the helm.
“Of course, baby. We love you. So much. I didn’t want to pressure you right away to tell us—we wanted to give you time to recover from . . . all this. But why did you keep all this to yourself ? Why didn’t you tell me you made all this?”
It stings. The words sound accusatory, but I can tell by the tone of my mother’s voice that she’s hurt.
“I thought,” I begin, choosing my words carefully, “I . . . didn’t think you’d understand.”
“What wouldn’t we understand?” comes my dad’s voice from the sofa.
I sigh, realizing I have to get to the heart of what the problem has been this whole time.
“Mom, remember when you told Steph to swap her red Rihanna glasses for something less ‘tacky’?”
I feel her nod, and she kisses the top of my head.
“And how you don’t want us saying ‘ain’t’?” I continue. “And how up until recently you’ve used the word ‘ghetto’?”
“Now, wait a minute, some things are just . . . scrappy, Kiera. Just . . .”
“Ghetto,” says Dad, pushing himself to his feet and stepping forward. “Scrappy. Tacky. Ghetto. They all mean the same thing, Lorette.”
Dad doesn’t call Mom by her first name unless we’re talking about something serious.
Mom loosens her hold on me and I look up at Dad.
“I love you both,” I say, “but there are things about being Black that you don’t embrace. Things about my Blackness that you don’t embrace. I slip into Ebonics, or AAVE, or whatever, when I’m around people I’m comfortable with. People who I know will accept me. This pressure to
conform to a standard that’s not mine, I . . .”
I don’t even know how to continue that. I what? I . . . what?
“I think I get it.” Dad smiles down at me through his huge glasses. “This game—SLAY—it’s not just a game to you. It’s not just a hobby. It’s not just something to add to your résumé. It’s you. Steph brings home heaps of opinions on Dr. King and ‘AAVE,’ but for you, we’ve missed it. We’ve missed out on yours. We haven’t asked. We haven’t given you space to tell us, or fostered the kind of environment that would encourage you to. And we—I,” he says, resting a hand over his chest and glancing at Mom, “am sorry.”
Mom’s face has softened, and she looks at me and nods, her eyes full of tears, one streaming down her cheek.
“Your father’s absolutely right,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to show my girls what it means to be a strong Black woman, and I thought I knew what that meant. I had very specific opinions on what that meant. I . . . I just don’t know if I know anymore. I don’t know what you believe about your role in this world as you blossom into a young woman, Kiera, but I’m so proud of you for exploring it. So. Proud. And I’m going to put you on that plane knowing my baby is going to lead millions to do the same.”
She pulls me close, into another hug, and I smell that coconut oil wafting from her hair as she says, “You be whoever you are. Be whoever you are as a strong, beautiful, Black woman, and I’ll be right here. Always. I love you. We love you.”
I’m a blubbering mess right now, pressing both my sleeves into my eyes, and my parents hold me right there in the middle of my room until I finally stop. I don’t know what to say to them. Thank you doesn’t seem to cover it. Not even close. So I just nod at each of them in turn, and follow Steph so we can start packing.
17. THE LONG GAME
* * *
Just a few months ago, I was sure Malcolm and I would graduate, move to Atlanta, have three gorgeous melanated babies, and live out the rest of our days together among people who look like us. But here I am on a ten-hour flight halfway around the world to Paris with my little sister, courtesy of a Black French CEO and his wife, Sylvie, who called us this morning to make sure we made our flight on time.
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