“Good luck,” I say. “On your speech.”
She doesn’t say anything back or smile at me. Just squeezes my arm again, nods, and walks away.
And after she’s already up on stage and well into her speech, I do the same. Nod and walk away.
As I’m walking out the door, I pass Daddy. He says my name, grabs my hand as I pass, and squeezes it gently twice. I squeeze back once before we both let go.
In the car, I pull out the list as tears cascade down my nose and onto my dark blue dress.
I cross off numbers 1, 3, and 5.
Chapter Forty-One
It hits me as I sit in my driver’s seat, keys cold in my lap, that I have nowhere to go.
Until.
Until that ugly neon Post-it note looks back at me. The soft pencil scratches on it have faded a little, the paper is damp in places, but it’s still intact, if a little wrinkled. I text Victory two words: he fumbled
And she texts back about two minutes later. You remember how to get here?
yes, I type.
Victory answers her door in a big T-shirt and a pair of men’s dress socks.
“Smells good in here,” I tell her as I walk inside, my long dress dragging on the ground. Her house is like a tiny piece of comfort made tangible. The walls are a dark, blood-red burgundy, and it’s so unconventional that I find myself staring at them for longer than I should. This is my second time being here and I’m still a little enamored with it.
Palm-size figurines decorate the house’s bookshelves and mantels—mischievous Black boys posed for a run, pretty little doe-eyed Black girls with innocence heavy on their shoulders and in their rounded hips, fat-cheeked Madeas with smiling faces and wooden spoons in hand. On the walls, there is art. Each wall holds an ode to a New Orleans that doesn’t exist anymore, when jazz was played in the streets for no reason at all, when women’s skirts were as loose and flowy as their morals, and a storm hadn’t caused a statewide devastation.
The entire house is an ode to her Blackness, and maybe mine, too.
“My mom did up the roux for tomorrow,” Victory says, snapping me out of my haze.
I laugh because my mamma probably cooked her roux today too for tomorrow’s Olympic-size pot of gumbo. I like that Victory doesn’t feel the need to explain this to me.
This is a thing we have in common. Our Blackness, it seems, is connected after all.
We go into the den. There’s a flatscreen, and Victory unpauses her movie. She’s watching Eloise at Christmastime, which is one of Tristan’s favorite Christmas movies, though he’ll deny it forever and ever.
“Are your parents home?”
“They’re asleep.”
“Okay.”
“So what’s up?” she says. “It’s kinda late. What’d he do? And what are you wearing?”
I shrug, but then I remember the healing. That everything grows back, and poison can be sucked out. I imagine taking a rough tackle, pretend the pain is the same. I always get up from those, too. “Sometimes,” I tell Vic, “I feel like my Blackness is in competition with yours, and I’ve never felt like that with anyone else.”
She laughs. “I feel like that all the time, but that’s internalized racism for you. That’s classism at work, too. And it sucks, right?”
“Oh my God, so much,” I whisper.
“Yeah.”
“I never felt like that before I found out about my dad.”
“About your dad?”
“My bio-dad is white.”
“Oh. Yeah,” she says again. “I know I probably don’t think hard enough about the fact that light-skinned Black girls have it just as hard as us dark-skinned girls do. I mean, you’re strong. You know? You’re not a Black girl that needs help. And, listen, what I said before—in the bathroom—you’re Black. Okay? You know that, right? Don’t you ever let another person tell you you’re not. If I’ve learned anything from my parents, it’s that all it takes is the smallest percentage and the will to stare the rest of America right in the face. You’re Black.”
She’s quiet, then: “You know, the assholes I come into contact with are usually very overt in their hatred of me, or in their fetishization of me. But I imagine being like you, pretty and light-skinned. Coming into contact with some racist piece of shit and not knowing they hate who you are inherently. Because they’ll never say it. Because they’ve accepted the tiny part of you that isn’t Black. It’s like … who can you even trust, you know?”
I do know.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “We, like, really have to stick together.”
I flick her knee, watch the way her lashes press softly against her cheek when she blinks. “You’re pretty.”
“What?” She laughs.
“You said you imagine being like me, ‘pretty and light-skinned.’ But you are pretty. My mamma’s as dark as you. Darker, probably. And she’s the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen. Her skin is smooth and she walks into a room or out of a room and eyes follow her. She breaks necks. But I think she had to learn that, you know? She had to learn that her beauty was hers, especially after being told so many times, right to her face, that she wasn’t pretty at all. That her skin was a problem.”
Victory is visibly crying now.
I smile at her and think about how many tears people in my life have cried this week alone. “Can I hug you?”
And she nods and then we are scrambling over couches toward each other. And we are holding on and we are fighting without moving, without speaking. We are promising our allegiance to each other and we make a nonverbal pact then and there to love ourselves and to love each other in the way that only we can.
When we pull apart, we’re both crying a little and we don’t pretend we’re not, using our thumbs to wipe each other’s tears away.
Vic laughs. “Did we just coat our friendship in cocoa butter?”
I high-five her. It’s a seal on our magic. “Basically.”
I like the way we’ve just opened up this dialogue between the strongest pieces of who we are, when I never imagined we would.
It’s two mornings later when I pack up a few things from my room at Merrick’s. It’s a small gym bag, plus one of the four pillows Merrick bought for my bed. I walk out into the living room and find him on the floor in front of a wooden box. It’s got a vinyl on top.
“What’s that called again?” I ask.
He shakes his head. Laughs. “I can’t,” he says. “It’s called an eight-track player.”
“Oh. Yeah. I knew,” I say, and then amend, “I forgot.”
As I walk toward the door with my things, Merrick calls, “Baby, you going somewhere I should know about?”
I clear my throat, turn, thumbs in my jeans pockets. “I’m gonna take this stuff to Mamma’s.”
He opens his mouth once, then closes it before giving it another go. “Okay. You moving home, then?”
I shake my head. Walk back toward him and set my stuff down. “It’s not about Kai. I just want to take this stuff over there. I like these pillows you bought. And Pépé bought me a sweater like the one he has, and I wanna have it in my closet over there. Just a few things. You know, so I can maybe go between houses sometimes.”
I let that dangle and Merrick picks it up. “I know I should say that’s good. As the adult here and as your dad, I should say it’s good you’re making headway with your mom. The human in me, though—that part is wondering how badly I’ve messed up, knowing a large part of what happened with Kai is my fault.”
“You didn’t. You didn’t mess up,” I say.
“I used poor judgment there. I still don’t know if I should have kept you both apart, should have intervened more.”
“You didn’t mess up,” I say again. “Not too much.”
Merrick laughs and pulls me to him. I sit in the circle of his arms as he talks against my temple. “I love you. Okay, kid? I love you. I want nothing but good things for you. I want you to love my family and your mom’s family. I want yo
u to understand your heart and your mind and both parts of your culture. You make me want to put my shit in order.”
I pull back and look him in the eyes, and I ask him for what I need. “No more girls, Merrick. Please, please,” I whisper. “I’m not saying never, just, in and out the way they have been, like a merry-go-round. It’s hard … for me.”
He nods, but the look in his eyes is basically just Oh my God, I’m that clueless. “I can work with that. I can work on that. Tasia, I’m learning here. I’m slow on the uptake. And I’m not saying the speed at which I’m learning or applying myself is acceptable. What I am saying is this—if I fuck up, feel free to let me know. ‘Merrick, you’re fucking up.’”
I parrot him. “Merrick, you’re fucking up.”
He laughs and I’m back against his chest. He sniffs. “Don’t tell your mom I let you swear, yeah? We’re French: it’s who we are.”
“Dad?”
He is corpse-stiff when he grunts.
“I’m going to call you Dad from now on,” I say.
He nods and nods and nods. We sit there for a few more minutes and he rocks us back and forth and he just nods.
Chapter Forty-Two
“So tell me about your weekend, Tasia.” Today Dr. Lloyd is wearing an exact replica of the R sweater from Harry Potter. I’m torn between asking her where she got it and pretending that I don’t understand its reference.
“What part of it?”
“The part that’s heaviest is usually not the place many people start, but that’s up to you.”
I nod, itch my chin where I’m having the world’s shittiest breakout. “I broke up with Kai.”
“That’s heavy.”
“It was a heavy couple of weeks, to be honest.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
I love when she asks the clichés. “I hate it. I hate everything about it.”
“Was it mutual?”
“It was my decision.” This chair I’m in is getting less and less comfortable. My back hurts. At my feet is a stack of books, the top one is called The Pollination Process of Bees. Why does she have a book about bee sex?
She nods. Writes a thing down. “How does he feel about it?”
I shrug. “I haven’t talked to him. Haven’t seen him. He hasn’t been around at my dad’s or at my grandparents’ place. Which is weird, because he fricking lives there.”
She nods. Writes down another thing. I don’t like all this nodding she’s doing. All the shrugging it’s inducing in me.
“But, like, okay.” I readjust in the chair. “I think I expected us to be a little … seamless? Like, incandescent, almost.” Jesus, it’s getting hard to breathe, and an uncomfortable sense of urgency hits me.
“Breathe,” Dr. Lloyd says. “Take your time. There is no rush. Everything you’re doing right now, all that you’re saying—it’s okay. It’s coming out just as it should. You have no place to be but here.”
Her words are like an IV of Valium.
“Tell me about this expectation. You have issues with that.”
“With expectation?”
She nods.
“That’s fair.” I look down at my hands, twist my fingers around one another, and when that starts to hurt and feel repetitive, I switch to twisting my thumb ring.
“I didn’t know Kai and I were going to have to work at being together because every part of that relationship was easy. The way we fell into it from being annoyed at each other to being entirely consumed with each other.”
“Easy in comparison to all the others.”
“You lost me.”
She puts her pen down, pushes her sleeves up. “You’ve been playing Tetris with all your relationships. With your mom, with your dad, with Merrick, with your best friend, with your new friends, and your grandparents. Even with your sport.”
I … nod? I nod. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I have been.”
“So it makes sense that this one relationship would feel easy, because all the others suddenly got so hard. Do you want to tell me about the reason for your breakup?”
No. “He lied to me.”
“And that was a deal-breaker for you?”
I shrug and mumble but they’re not words.
“What about? What did he lie about?”
That’s not a part I’m okay to talk about. Not with her. “My problem is that he lied at all, when I’ve only ever been honest with him. I’ve been the most honest with him out of everyone in my life, and he didn’t treat me the same. I hate being the last to know.”
“Like you were the last to know about your biological father.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you plan to talk to him?” She steeples her fingers over her flat stomach.
“Yes. But I think that talk isn’t going to bring us back to where we were. I think Kai was meant to be a lesson. I’m real grateful for that, but I think it’s okay to learn a lesson, accept it, and then move on.”
She nods.
I nod.
She says, “That’s fair.”
The bell rings.
Chapter Forty-Three
I don’t speak to Kai. I see him here and there in the classes we share and I see him walking the halls sometimes when I know neither of us can help it.
I see him walking with Dahlia, I see him walking with Cole, I see him most often walking with Sam, who always says hello to me as he passes.
And I know Kai sees me, too.
He passes me now in the hall, Cole at his side, and doesn’t even glance at me. He doesn’t look at me at all. Victory laces our fingers and squeezes tight. So tight. Too tight. It’s perfect and grounding.
What a metaphor. He sees me.
During practice, I get rocked. Three times. Each and every time, I line up against the receiver that seems to have the most to prove. I’m so tired of it, but still I keep pushing. By the end of it, they jam me at the line so hard, I hit the ground in a plank, like someone jumper-cabled my ass to a Chevy.
My helmet flies off as I go down.
The ball pops out of my hand and Coach’s whistle blows, shrill. “Quirk! Where the hell’s your head at, girl!”
I shake it off as one of my receivers, Nathan, helps me stand. “Sorry, Teez.”
“No sweat, nice hit,” I grunt. Which is funny, because I’m covered in it. My shoulder is screaming, and when I flex my back, I feel it pop. Hurts good. I need that wake-up.
After Coach reams me out for a solid three minutes, he calls us into huddle, tells us to be at the weight room by seven a.m. tomorrow, and dismisses us, telling us to carb up and get to bed early tonight. You’d think we were playing in the Super Bowl and not just a high school state championship game.
Cole walks by me as he wipes a short towel across his forehead.
“You did work on those running backs today, Cole.” I don’t know why I say it. I do, on some level, but I think usually I’m good for a little more finesse than that.
He nods. “You need to talk to me.”
The amount of laughter that I beat into submission is ridiculous.
“Uh, yeah. For just, like, a second, though.”
At the bleachers, he sits, towel on the back of his neck, sports bottle in his hand. His hair seems redder, if that’s possible, and I can definitely understand what Kai sees in him, looks-wise. The sharp edge of his jaw, the hollows of his cheeks, the Anglican nose. All of it culminates into a not-unsatisfying package.
“So talk,” he says.
He’s not going to beat around the bush and—what do you know?—apparently, neither am I. “Are you guys back together?”
“Are you serious, Tasia?”
This is the first time he’s ever used my first name. Usually it’s just “Quirk!” coming at me in the form of a reprimand or a heads-up on the field.
“Yeah, I guess.” I start to take my braids down. They’re shitty because Merrick has been trying to learn to do them. “I just want to know. And, like, I guess I technically could h
ave asked him, but … I don’t know. I think you know what it’s like to want him and not have him.”
Cole flinches.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m honestly not trying to be a bitch, if you can even imagine that.”
“You’re not a being a bitch. I get it. I get you and I get this question and it’s like, Jesus Christ, the only thing I don’t get is Kai.”
Yep, because honestly, he isn’t alone.
“I don’t think that’s meant to happen. I don’t think we’re supposed to understand him entirely,” I say.
“That doesn’t seem fair.” No, it doesn’t. Cole pats the metal next to him and I sit.
He turns me around so my back is to him and he helps me to take my braids out.
“We’re not together.”
I probably knew that, if I was thinking logically. I know Kai, at least on that level.
“Know what’s funny?”
“What?” I shiver when his fingers ghost over the middle part on my scalp.
“He’s asking a lot of questions. Like, about himself.”
“How’s that funny?”
“Mm, just in that he’s asking them about himself. About you. He’s asking like I’m supposed to be an authority on him or you, or you guys together.”
The self-concerned part of me is thrilled Kai’s been thinking about me. About us. Even if in a roundabout way. But the other part of me hurts for him, hurts with him. I’ve wished more than once that there could be a way to make this chaos mean something.
“What kind of questions?”
“Like, ‘Do you think you know me?’ and ‘How permanent did Tasia and I seem?’ and ‘Does my life look perfect to you?’”
Kai’s life has never looked perfect to me. But to someone who maybe doesn’t know him, I think it probably does. Probably my life seems that way to a lot of people, too.
Cole pretty much confirms that with his responses. “Know what I said to him? I said, ‘Kai. I don’t know you anymore. I knew you once and then I didn’t anymore because you didn’t let me.’ He didn’t like that. But I told him it wasn’t an attack. It was just … facts, you know? And I told him that I thought you guys were pretty freaking permanent. That that’s why I hated you, I think. Like, you could have been anybody, but it was just the fact that you came along and suddenly Kai wasn’t everyone’s anymore. He was just Tasia’s.”
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