Kai nodded sympathetically. “Wow, that’s like the realest shit you’ve ever told me. This is like some best friend shit,” she whispered.
“Jesus Christ, you’re a fucking corn dog.”
“Hell yeah. Hot, brown, salty, and popular among the lazy and degenerate.”
“You know I just poured my fucking soul out to you, right?”
“Yeah, I know. Felt good, right?”
“Not really. Don’t you have anything better to do than to solve my problems?”
“Yes. But I’m doing it anyway, so first, I need you to make more tea. Second, give me the booze so I can flush it. Third, I don’t really know. Zed and Apollo will explain the rest. Just know that there are more satellites. Lots more. Let’s smoke.”
“Okay,” Sol replied, shuffling through the cabinet for a pot to boil some water. Finding one, she filled it and placed it on the stove. Kai trailed her as she traipsed over to the liquor cabinet. Did she really have to throw all that liquor away?
“Yes,” Kai’s stern face answered. Sighing, Sol forked over three bottles of tequila and a bottle of whiskey. Kai beamed with satisfaction, retrieving Sol’s wine glass from the kitchen counter then heading to the bathroom.
Sol remained in the living room, plopping onto the couch and surveying the destruction she’d wrought over the last month. The carpet was stained red from cheap merlot. The fan hung limply from the ceiling, spinning like a skipped record. Her grandmother’s couch smelled of blunt ashes and corn syrup.
This house—Sol’s house—didn’t deserve this. Training her eyes on the ceiling, she tried to ask her grandmother for forgiveness, her body unwinding as her few sips of wine churned in her empty stomach.
Her spirit was uneasy. Something didn’t feel right. She paused, focusing on the sound of liquids draining into her toilet bowl, thick yet smooth. Each splash hit her like a pinprick, irking her, nudging her toward the truth.
She didn’t want her grandmother to forgive her. What she wanted was for her grandmother to look away. She wanted another drink.
Mr. Pang’s hands left the steering wheel for the fourth time in two minutes. Apollo had never seen him this frustrated.
“I told you we should have taken MARTA, Dad,” Zed taunted.
“But the GPS said traffic was light, and why drive somewhere, park, take a train, then walk, when I can skip one step?” Mr. Pang argued.
“You’re only skipping one step, Dad, and you’re not even skipping it. You’re replacing it with rush hour traffic.”
“Well it’s still not my fault. Who schedules an orientation at 11 a.m. on a Monday?”
Apollo nodded, agreeing with them both but not intervening. He’d never seen Zed’s family speak above an excited whisper. It was refreshing to see that they too weren’t above yelling. Plus, he hated MARTA in the morning: legions of aspiring rappers, stressed young moms, condescending yuppies, shook white suburbanites, indignant homeless people, and tired working folks, all packed into blocky seats with poorly placed handrails and a color scheme straight out of an art class for preteen moms. Apollo wasn’t too good to ride MARTA, but he knew it too well to be anything other than ambivalent.
His eyes floated to a nearby car that they’d been parallel with for almost half a mile. A suited black woman sat in the driver’s seat of a Subaru Outback, her windows rolled down, an Erykah Badu song leaking out. She was sweating profusely. Traffic was exercise.
“If you think this is bad, wait until we try to look for parking,” Zed goaded.
“Zadie, why do you insist on being so pessimistic?”
“Zed, Dad. I’m not being pessimistic, I just wish you would listen to me. I drive into the city all the time. You drive around the city all the time. I know a few things.”
“Hmm,” Mr. Pang replied, polite but dismissive.
Apollo abandoned their conversation. There was too much traffic ahead for it to continue to be entertaining.
Two miles and one half hour later, they were on the outskirts of Georgia Tech, searching for Mr. Pang’s mythical parking spot. Although it took ten minutes of circling the block, the legend turned out to be true. Parking in front of the Waffle House on Fifth Street, they hopped out and hustled into the heart of Georgia Tech’s campus. Mr. Pang hated being late.
“Williams Street!” Mr. Pang exclaimed as they crossed over I-85, their pace undisturbed.
“What’s so important about Williams Street?” Apollo asked. “Thinking about opening another restaurant?”
“No! That’s the home of Adult Swim!” Mr. Pang answered with a tone of obviousness.
Apollo grinned and continued following Zed, who was leading. Mr. Pang was so cool. Well, maybe, Apollo reconsidered. He probably just watches Family Guy, Apollo decided, declining to verify. He liked his categories to remain stable.
“Where are we headed, Zadie?” Mr. Pang asked.
“Zed! Zed!” she yelled. A group of startled students gawked from the front yard of a Greek dormitory. Apollo found their matching T-shirts to be uniquely embarrassing. They looked like a successful dodgeball team: triumphant, but united in uncoolness.
Mr. Pang sighed, speaking slowly. “Where are we going, Zed?” The “d” in her name was noticeably blunt, offensively percussive.
“The Ferst Art Center,” she said, cloyingly pleasant.
“Where is that?”
“About ten minutes away.”
“Christ.”
“Dad, it’s just walking. You’ll survive.”
Mr. Pang sighed and continued forward. The campus designers clearly didn’t believe in grids. After banking left down Techwood and winding down Fourth Street, passing students and filled parking spaces and manicured greenery, they found other conspicuously lost first-year families and filed behind them, proceeding to the Ferst building.
Entering the building, Apollo felt overwhelmed as they were herded into a swank auditorium with cozy red seats. From the door to his chair, he had received a pencil, a mug, a ream of glossy brochures, a T-shirt, a pin, and at least four high fives, none of them solicited. Why was college so welcoming?
The room filled quickly as families continued to arrive, their voices incrementally escalating to cut through the loud, ambient chatter. Apollo struggled to hear Zed, who was whispering to him about potential majors. It took him a full minute to realize she was actually shouting.
“How can they call it the College of Computing when they only have two majors?” she asked.
Apollo shrugged, suddenly distracted by movement on the stage. Two young white women in gray pantsuits mounted it calmly, one sitting down in a chair near the edge of the stage and the other walking to the center. The arms of one of the women shot up then slowly descended, adjusting the volume. A few resilient pockets of noise held out, but they were quickly snuffed by an explosion of shhs that came from all across the room. Her pantsuit was fitted and spectacularly crisp, each line and edge starched into a spike.
“Quiet, a white woman is speaking,” Zed whispered into his ear, making Apollo vomit out a shrill laugh. He was shunned so quickly and decisively that his laugh didn’t even stretch past one syllable. Stalling out, his mouth remained agape, his eyes down. Maybe welcoming isn’t the right word, he thought.
The woman spoke of bland topics like advisors and roommate assignments and the campus bookstore, but her voice was enthralling. Every other sentence was a compliment. Zed and Apollo’s class was the biggest, the most competitive, the most diverse, the most international, the most global. Superlatives bounced around the room like a JezzBall, transforming even mundane statements into reasons to applaud. The excitement caused the volume to slowly begin to return to its earlier high, but the woman seemed to be in control, her arms gradually ascending as compliments continued to gush from her perfect, gleaming teeth.
Things really livened once the speech became
individualized. “We had a 13 percent acceptance rate this year, but you made it! We had the highest average SAT scores on record, but you made it. We scheduled this orientation at 11 a.m. on a Monday, but you made it.” Suddenly, the room detonated, cheers and claps and whistles erupting from nearly every person in attendance. Only the custodian, a small Latino standing near the door with a broom, seemed unfazed. Apollo scoffed when he realized he was also standing; he didn’t even remember rising. He looked at Zed, who was also coming down from the collective high. Of all the parents in the audience, only Mr. Pang seemed unaffected; still seated, his legs were indifferently crossed, his brow flat.
As the cheering receded and butts collapsed back into seats, the second woman, whose pantsuit was much looser, rose and elaborated on the topics the first woman had packaged with filler. Her voice was pleasant, but she offered no compliments. Apollo could feel the room drift into hostility. Did this woman not know who she was talking to? They were the class of 2023—disruptors, innovators, pioneers, dreamers. Cell phones gradually migrated to eager hands, crushing candy, snapping selfies. The woman droned on for a solid twenty minutes, losing the audience with each word. But toward the end of her speech, she mentioned football, and the odds were immediately in her favor. One man dropped his phone, the resulting thunk echoing throughout the suddenly quiet room.
The speech ended without further mention of football, but the opportunity was not lost. As soon as the second woman turned to head to her seat, the first woman quickly returned, flanked by cheerleaders with gun-like devices. “I heard you guys like football!” Apollo heard her shout as Mr. Pang spirited them out of the auditorium. A towel whizzed over his head into the arms of a small Asian toddler as they rushed down the aisle. Apollo was shocked at how many evil glares the girl received. Nothing in this world is free, he heard his mom say from somewhere deep in his skull.
The art center’s main hall offered no respite from the grand welcome. Representatives of various student organizations lined the walls, a sea of tables and enthusiasm. Apollo braced himself, wading out into the center of the hall, hoping equidistance would make him invisible. Zed trailed behind him, her sandals dragging on the floor. Apollo welcomed her. Together, they would escape this madness.
They couldn’t, Apollo quickly realized. Their early departure from the welcome speeches had marred them. They were the only ones in the hall. Recruitment was their destiny. Within seconds, Zed was lured in by the free sweatpants offered by Blue Cross, Blue Screen, a Christian programming club. Apollo quietly absconded, but then found himself at the table for the 1500 Club. The club, represented by three austere white guys, was mysterious. Their table was covered in a black cloth, but the surface was bare; they didn’t even have flyers. The eyes of each rep were hidden behind a pair of hideous transition lenses, the frames of their glasses embarrassingly pedestrian, clearly bought either on sale or in absentia, likely by their mothers.
“What are you guys about?” Apollo asked.
“We all have SAT scores of 1550 or higher,” one of them answered.
“Why?”
“Why were our scores high, or why do we unite because of our scores?” another answered. Apollo knew that a different one had spoken, but he couldn’t bring himself to look at them directly. They were boring, existentially.
“Why are you a group?” he asked, eyeing other tables over his shoulder.
“Smart people just belong together,” the first one told him.
“Guess I won’t be joining you then,” Apollo said, shirking off. Kai would have appreciated that burn, he thought, eager to tell Zed.
“Did you get 1550 or higher?” someone shouted from behind Apollo.
“I got into college,” he replied under his breath.
He eventually found himself in front of the table for the African American Student Union. The organization was represented by two black girls, both clad in jeans and black T-shirts emblazoned with AASA, stylized in green, red, and black letters.
“Are you guys Pan-Africanists?” Apollo asked, worried.
“No, we just haven’t updated this T-shirt in like twenty years. We’ve been off that multicultural Kumbaya shit for a minute, though,” one of the girls informed him in a casual drawl. “I’m Cherise,” she added, offering a handshake. Apollo accepted. Her grip was firm. She reminded him of Sol.
“I’m Apollo,” he replied.
“Apollo, please do not let this hooligan ruin your impression of our organization,” the other girl interjected in a nasally tone. “The rest of us have home training.”
Apollo laughed, unsure how to respond. “So, what do you do?” he inquired.
“We’re just black in public,” Cherise answered, making Apollo snicker and the other girl frown. “Seriously,” she continued, “we exist just because we can. Some of us do other stuff with Black Lives Matter and other larger organizations, but AASU is like Al Sharpton. We’re around because we’ve been around, not because we need to be around, you feel me?”
Apollo nodded, trying not to laugh in the face of the other girl, whose cheeks were turning an ornery red.
“This is not recruitment, Cherise!” the girl exclaimed. “If you think we’re so backwards, why do you come to the meetings? Why do you pay the dues? Why are you here over the summer, recruiting?”
“Because allegiance isn’t delusion,” Apollo jumped in, happy to find a kindred spirit.
“Because things can change,” Cherise corrected him. “Including me.”
The girl seemed satisfied, but Apollo felt betrayed. “But what if they can’t?”
“Even if they can’t, there’s levels to this shit. Not everyone can be out in the streets or on the highway or in the classroom, but everyone has to keep in contact. Because the moment we think our one battlefield is the entire war, we lose.”
“But aren’t some battles more important than others?”
Cherise’s face shifted in multiple directions, her mind processing his question. “Nigga, I’m not your spiritual advisor,” she said after a spell. “Figure that shit out on your own. Just don’t be reckless out here, sabotaging other people’s battles on some Blue Lives Matter or class first shit.” Then she left.
Apollo stood with the other girl, who remained silent. She offered him a pen and pointed toward a mostly empty spreadsheet that was lying on the table. Apollo wondered how she would have recruited him as he leaned over, considering whether he really wanted to join AASU. Cherise seemed cool, but her politics unsettled him. She had all the same dispositions as him but didn’t seem to come to the same conclusions. He glared at the list, indignant. Only one name was scrawled in: Zed Pang.
Apollo didn’t sign. He didn’t need an organization, especially one that didn’t prioritize countering government surveillance and secrecy. Even Solara’s thick head understood what was at stake. He’d have to convince Zed to renege, he decided as he reached the end of the hall. They were too woke for such middling affiliations.
There were no more tables to investigate, so Apollo turned and watched the growing activity in the hall, which was becoming densely packed as families streamed out of the auditorium. Zed waved at him from a few yards away, pointing at a table to signal that she was still browsing. Apollo smiled back, mouthing “Take your time” and sitting cross-legged on the wooden floor. He never refused solace.
Ten minutes later, she was finished and plopped down next to him, her spoils crumpled beside her. Apollo kissed her aggressively, eager for a taste of the familiar. Zed laughed in response, pulling away and taunting him before finally allowing him to score another peck.
“Make any enemies?” he asked.
“Maybe. There’s some group called the Encrypts. Great name, but all they do is study cryptocurrencies. I told them they’re wasting their time.”
“And a great name. What’s with white guys and cryptocurrencies?”
�
��Beats me.”
“I saw you signed up for the African American Student Union.”
“Yeah, they seemed pretty cool.”
“Meh. Seemed like they lacked focus to me. ‘Let’s get together ’cause we’re black’ is so backwards. There’s much better reasons to be getting together.”
“You’re too smart to really believe that’s why they exist, but just in case you do, I’m definitely dragging you to their meetings.”
“Whatever.”
Mr. Pang suddenly appeared, his face brimming with amusement. Zed and Apollo looked up at him in unison, remaining seated.
“All you two did was walk down a hallway and talk to people. How can you be so tired?”
“Talking is exhausting when no one is listening,” Apollo complained.
“I thought everyone was pretty attentive, actually,” Zed replied.
Apollo shrugged, grabbing his assorted loot and standing up.
“The meter has two more hours left,” Mr. Pang informed them. “I refilled it while you were gone. You two can meet your interim advisors or we can walk around the city, maybe go to the Varsity! It’s up to you.”
“So that’s what that auditorium thing was about? We can just email our advisors. We’re not really dressed for meetings.”
Mr. Pang’s brow slowly lifted. Apollo could feel his gaze linger over his exposed arms, which housed two pound signs inked into his triceps. Suddenly embarrassed, Apollo refracted the glance onto the other new students filling the hall. Almost all of the guys were wearing polos and khakis, and almost all of the girls were clad in floral sundresses. Apollo was the only one rocking a sleeveless tank top, he realized with regret. He hated it when he felt the need to surveil himself. Zed fit in much better, her burgundy sundress compromised only by her knee-length white socks.
In the Heat of the Light Page 8
