Skye Falling

by Mia Mckenzie

  12

  I do everything I can to not think about Viva’s party and the things Tasha said. It goes okay at first. I spend the rest of Saturday in my room, eating fries and watching television on the wide-screen concealed inside the antique armoire. Did you know there is a whole-ass TV show where celebrities tell ghost stories? I’m not making that up! On Sunday morning, I work on my taxes, organizing my paperwork to send to my CPA, pausing every now and again when Vicky texts me links to hilarious baby and/or cat videos. At eleven, I go to the hairdresser to get my locs tended to. When I get back to the B and B, I work on my taxes again. Then, just when it seems like I’m fine, like I’m not even pressed about Tasha and her bullshit anymore, I find myself on her Facebook page. I’m staring at her profile picture. It smiles at me like we’re still friends. I start scrolling.

  I see the usual social media stuff—a photo of Tasha and some woman on a hike; a post asking for realtor recommendations; an art show she’s RSVP’d to as “going”—all representations of a good, fun life. There are no pictures of bad hair days or crippling depression or uncertainty about a life misspent. Ain’t no emojis for that type of shit.

  A few scrolls down the page, there’s a photo, posted yesterday, of Tasha and Viva at fifteen years old, with the hashtag #stillhomies. Tasha has the same hairstyle Salt sported on the beach in the “Shoop” video and Viva is wearing overalls with one of the straps undone, like Will Smith in ninety out of one hundred episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Their arms are around each other’s shoulders, their faces frozen in the too-cool-to-smile, duck-lipped expression of teenagers trying to seem badass. The photo has sixty likes, including one from Viva. I know this photo. Viva has one just like it framed on a corner table in her suite at the B and B. Only that photo also has me in it. Sure enough, peering closer at the Facebook post, I see, resting on Tasha’s other shoulder, a dark-skinned hand that is definitely mine. The rest of me is cropped out. I feel something rising in my chest, part anger, part sadness, at the thought that Tasha chose a photo with me in it to make me feel bad, to make me feel cut out of our past, like an amputated gangrenous limb. But then I think that’s probably my own narcissism, like why would she even think I’d visit her Facebook page? It’s possible, maybe even probable, that all of the photos she has of herself and Viva at that age include me. I was always there. We were always there together.

  I think back on that year, on us as we were then, always leaned into one another, shoulder to shoulder, always touching, always connected. Now, she’s pretending I was never there.

  But whatevs. Who cares? Forget Tasha. Etc. Why am I even on this stupid app right now? I move my thumb to close it, but right before I do, I see another post, also made on the day of Viva’s party, and a little farther down the page, that reads: Don’t trust a bitch who rewrites the past to make herself the victim.

  Hold. The. Fuck. Up.

  I check the time stamp: 1:07 p.m. Which means she posted this soon after I left the party.

  Without allowing myself a second to think about it, I click in the comment box under the post. There are a few ways I can go with this:

  The diplomatic route: Hi. Hello. Good morning. I was wondering if this post is about me? If so, I’d just like you to know that I find it grossly inaccurate. Good day.

  The reverse psychology route: Totally agree! Bitches who make themselves the victim, when they were, in fact, the villain all along, are the worst!

  The all-caps clapback route: NEVER TRUST A BITCH WHO DOESN’T REALIZE SHE’S THE BITCH WHO CAN’T BE TRUSTED. ALSO: WHO ARE YOU CALLING BITCH, BITCH???

  All good, mature options, obviously, but I choose the last. I’m halfway through my all-caps reply when a text alert pops up on my phone. It’s from Vicky.

  Chu doin?

  I stare at it for a second, trying to decide whether to reply now or wait until I finish this perfectly reasonable, totally well-thought-out Facebook comment. Having a shitty day, I write back, then I put down the phone and go back to the comment.

  Another text pops up. Steven Universe marathon is on. Wanna come over? I have snacks.

  I stare at the message for a long moment, then at my all-caps clapback, my cursor hovering over the send button. I delete the message. I close Facebook and text Vicky back. What kind of snacks?

  * * *

  —

  When I get to Vicky’s, Faye answers the door in bare feet. Her toes are painted red. She’s rocking a green camo sweatshirt with the collar cut off, revealing her delicate clavicles, and a long, flowy skirt. Her dark skin is agleam with some kind of oil, her hair is pinned up on top of her head in a pile of woolly magnificence, and she’s wearing her glasses. I want to kiss her. Like, there’s a pain in my chest that’s partly everything that’s happened over the last couple of days and partly an overwhelming desire to kiss her. And also possibly suck her toes if she was into it. “Hello, Skye,” she says. “Vicky’s not ready yet.”

  “Ready? For what? I thought we’re supposed to be watching cartoons.”

  “I think she has a new plan,” Faye says. “Would you…like to come inside and wait or…”

  Would I like to come inside and wait? As opposed to hanging out on the porch like a Jehovah’s Witness?

  “I could go wait in the middle of the street and try not to get hit by a garbage truck, if that works best for you.”

  She stares at me for a moment, probably trying to figure out whether she’s for or against me getting hit by a garbage truck. Then she takes a step away from the door and says, “Come on in.”

  I walk past her into the house.

  Inside, it’s very West Philly row house chic, part old-school, part remodel. The walls that separate the rooms in most row houses in this neighborhood have been taken down here, so, standing at the front door, I can see the whole first floor straight back through the kitchen. The walls that remain are painted an unconventional but very sharp gray with bright white trim. The decorative wood mantelpiece and ornate front window trim are classic West Philly accents, though, as is the thick, polished wood banister leading to the second floor. The place is decorated in what seems exactly Faye’s style: flowy, cream-colored linen throws next to pillows with edgy camo shams; a comfy-looking, overstuffed sofa beside a very mod, bare wood Parsons chair, positioned beneath a leopard-print tapestry; and the Blackest of Black art on the walls, including a painting over the sofa of little girls in cornrows jumping double Dutch. The house is basically what you’d get if a Maya Angelou poem fucked a ’90s Supreme streetwear catalog and I’m not one bit surprised.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” Faye asks me, heading for the kitchen. “We have coffee, juice, water—bubbly or flat—and Vicky has a lot of root beer.”

  “I’m good,” I say. I’m actually thirsty as fuck, though.

  She continues toward the kitchen. I follow, because I’m not really sure what else to do.

  The kitchen is cute: updated but not over the top. There’s a large pot of water heating up on the stove and a colander full of wet collard leaves in the sink. A counter island in the middle of the room is covered with stacks of manila folders.

  “Excuse the mess,” Faye says. “Midterm papers.”

  “You’re a teacher?”

  She nods. “Honors English at CAPA.”

  CAPA: the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts. I went to school there myself. For some reason, I don’t mention it.

  Faye takes a seat and starts marking up one of the papers with red pen.

  Now I wish I’d said yes to that drink, so I’d have something to do other than awkwardly hover. I could tell her I’ve changed my mind, that I’d love a bubbly water, but she already seems to be engrossed in the midterm papers. So I just stand there, shifting my weight from one foot to the other, until she looks up and says, “Feel free to sit.”

&n
bsp; “I’m good.” WHUUUUUUT.

  “Okay,” she says, and goes back to marking papers.

  I shift my weight again and think seriously about killing myself.

  “Hey, Skye.” It’s Vicky. Thank God.

  “What’s up?” I ask her. “I thought we were watching Cosmic Steven or whatever his name is.”

  “There’s a festival at Clark Park,” she says. “There’s live music and a lot of records and stuff on sale. Can we go?”

  “Okay,” I say. I mean, I was low-key looking forward to putting my head under the covers and escaping into cartoons for the rest of the day, but sure. “You ready?”

  She shakes her head. “My jeans are still in the dryer.”

  “You’re already wearing jeans.”

  “Yeah,” she says, “but I haven’t worn purple jeans at all this week.”

  “You have to wear purple jeans every week? Like, as a rule?”

  She nods. “Yeah.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Prince,” she says. “Duh.”

  “She’s very into Prince this month,” Faye says, glancing up from her work. “Next month, who knows?”

  “No,” Vicky says, super seriously. “It’ll be Prince forever.”

  “You said that about Etta James last month,” Faye says. “And you haven’t even listened to that record I bought you.”

  Without another word, Vicky leaves the kitchen. About half a minute later, Etta James’s “If I Can’t Have You” starts to play. Faye looks at me, and I know we’re both remembering that day at the record store when she rejected me. Cool cool cool.

  “See!” Vicky calls from the next room. “I’m listening to it right now!”

  Etta sings, I-I-I-I-I-I don’t want nobody, if I can’t have you…

  I shift my weight from one foot to the other and die a thousand deaths inside.

  Faye clears her throat. “Are you sure you don’t want something to dri—”

  “Bubbly water sounds great.”

  I watch her open a cupboard and take out a glass. When she opens the refrigerator to get the seltzer, I notice a photo on the door, of Faye and Cynthia as kids. It’s the Cynthia I remember best: young, bright-eyed, smiling. Next to her, there’s Faye, a few years older, not smiling, her dark eyes intense even then. Cynthia’s arm is around Faye’s shoulders, and their heads are touching. I think about what Faye said, about how they didn’t like each other, and I wonder when that started.

  Just before she closes the fridge, I notice a second photo, of Faye and another woman holding hands on a beach, with a younger Vicky skipping along behind them.

  Faye pours the seltzer and holds the glass out to me, but as I reach over to take it, my arm swipes a stack of folders and some of them tumble to the floor.

  “Shit. Sorry.” I bend down and pick up the folders and see a book there on the floor, too, with a bunch of Post-it notes sticking out of it. I pick it up.

  “Are you teaching The Color Purple?” I ask her, putting the folders back on the counter but not the book.

  She nods. “To my twelfth-graders.”

  I turn the book over in my hands. It’s the cover with the sunflower. Its corners and spine are worn. “I used to carry this book with me everywhere. I think I lost it in Nicaragua a couple of years ago.”

  I open it, to one of the Post-it-marked pages, and see notes written in the margins in neat handwriting. One note says: This is how it feels to be shamed. I close the book.

  “Most books I got assigned in high school were by Black men or white people,” I tell her. “I didn’t even really know Black women writers existed. I mean, I did, but I didn’t. And definitely not queer ones. I can’t even imagine reading this in high school.”

  “At the high school I went to in Georgia,” Faye says, “all the good books were banned. I didn’t read this until sophomore year of college.”

  I discovered The Color Purple the summer after graduation, when I was eighteen. I remember almost running the three blocks to Tasha’s house, sitting on her bed, reading passages out loud to each other for hours. It was the first time I saw my Black queer girl self in a book and it changed my life. I consider telling Faye all of this. But then I remember, again, how she barely says a word to me when I pick up Vicky, and how she gave me a hard time at the spelling bee, and how she just now almost made me stand out on the porch, and I suddenly feel super self-conscious and unliked, and instead of saying, “I love The Color Purple, it changed my life,” I say, “That sucks for you.”

  That.

  Sucks.

  For.

  You.

  Faye holds out her hand for the book. I give it to her and she hands me the glass of bubbly water. I take a sip, as awkward silence opens up like a hellmouth around us.

  I-I-I-I-I-I can’t talk to nobody…

  “So, you went to high school in Georgia, huh?” I ask loudly, trying to drown out the song.

  She nods. “Jenkins. Which you’ve probably never heard of. But only for two years.”

  “How’d you end up there?”

  “When I was fourteen, and my sister was eleven,” she says, “our mother died. Our father was mentally ill—they just called it ‘crazy’ back then—and he was always disappearing, for weeks or months or years at a time. We didn’t know where he was by then. Our grandparents were already gone. We were bounced around from foster home to foster home for a year, until the state located two relatives who could each take one of us in. Cynthia went to live with our father’s cousin in Newark and I went to Georgia to live with a great-aunt I’d never met. I lived with her for a year. Then she died and I got passed around between her relatives, who were barely related to me, for another year after that.”

  See, this is why I don’t ask questions. A perfectly innocent so, you went to high school in Georgia, huh? and here we are, smack in the middle of a Gloria Naylor novel. Don’t get me wrong: It’s not that I don’t have compassion for orphaned children. I have tons. I swear! I’m just not any good at showing it. But we’re at a pause in the conversation where I’m supposed to say something. And that something isn’t supposed to be wow. I try to imagine what a normal person, who was good at human-people stuff, would say, and I come up with the following: “That must have been hard.”

  Faye looks at me, nods. “Yes, it was.”

  NAILED IT!

  Etta is still singing, about hugging and squeezing and kissing, her voice getting real low and sexy and suggestive.

  “Then you came back?” I ask Faye. “To Philly?”

  “Yes.” She gets up from the table and goes to the counter, where she starts de-stemming collards. “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You’re from here, too, right? Larchwood, around Fifty-seventh?”

  I frown. “I’m starting to feel like Miss Newsome has an unhealthy amount of information about me.”

  “Vicky told me,” she says.

  “Ah.”

  “You still have family over there?”

  “My mother and brother.”

  “What about your father?” she asks.

  I shrug, which is my default answer to what about your father?

  “Grandparents?”

  “Nope.”

  The song is somehow still going. I sit there wishing it would end. Then it finally does and the room fills with heavy, awkward silence again. It creeps into my brain, it gets under my skin. My face feels hot. My armpits are sweaty. My ass itches!

  “I went to CAPA!” I blurt out, all of a sudden and way too loud.

  “Oh,” Faye says, a little startled, almost as if she wasn’t expecting me to start shouting. “Why didn’t you say so before?”

  “I forgot.”

  “You forgot where you went to high school?”

  “Jus
t for a few minutes. Then I remembered.”

  She’s squinting at me, with her head tilted slightly to one side, like she’s confused. Or like she doesn’t know what to make of me. I can’t imagine why. She goes back to de-stemming her collards. After a moment, she asks, “What was your major? At CAPA?”

  “Writing.”

  She looks up at me, interested. “What kind of writing did you do?”

  “Poetry. I wanted to be a poet.”

  She smiles at me. It’s a real smile, the first one she’s ever given me. A sudden spark of fire, it lights up her face, the room, my entire miserable being, and for a second, I don’t feel like a Jehovah’s Witness standing on the porch anymore.

  “I need a new phone,” Vicky says, finally returning to the kitchen.

  “Why?” Faye asks.

  “My camera’s acting janky.”

  “Janky how?”

  “Videos are all dark and, like, fuzzy.”

  “So, you don’t need a new phone,” Faye says. “You just need your camera fixed.”

  Vicky rolls her eyes. “Fine. When can it get fixed, then?”

  “I’ll make an appointment at the geek bar, or whatever it’s called.”

  “When?”

  “When I have time. Maybe next week.”

  “But what if I need to video something important?” the kid asks.

  “Such as what?”

  “I don’t know. Just…something.”

  Faye peers at her. “Vicky, we already discussed this,” she says, pointing a collard stem at the kid. “You’re not recording the cops.”

  “But why?”

  “You know why. Because you’re too young.”

  “No, I’m not!”

  “You are,” Faye insists. “The adults on the block will look after the reverend. I don’t want you interacting with the police. In any way.”

  “That’s not fair! I’m not a little kid!”

  “I didn’t say you’re a little kid. I said you’re too young to—”

  Vicky slams her fist hard on the counter. It’s the first time I’ve seen her get angry and it’s startling, like the unanticipated eruption of a tiny volcano. Her brow is tight; her fists are clenched. There’s a vein throbbing at her right temple as she yells, “This is bullshit!”