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by Lisa Allen-Agostini

  “Sorry,” I grumbled. “Hello, Mom. How are you?”

  “Fine. Still trying to catch up on work. You know those people, always putting paperwork on my desk in a complete state and I have to do everything….”

  I zoned out. When she called my name for the third time I came back to myself with a snap. “Yes, Mummy?”

  “Let me talk to your aunt. You clearly have nothing useful to say.”

  My face burned. Without a word more I handed the phone over to Jillian. My aunt watched me with a frown. I couldn’t tell if she was pissed at me or her sister. Probably me.

  A little voice in my head chimed in with Dr. Khan’s reminder to say nice things about myself. Okay, okay. Maybe Jillian was annoyed at her sister, not at me.

  “Cynthia! How are you?!”

  Jillian was always nice on the phone with my mom. They were sisters, after all. They had been close once, really close, before Jillian left Trinidad.

  “Oh, things are going well….” She told Mom about her new contract, leaving out the LGBTQ connection. My family was full of things better left unsaid.

  “Oh, she’s doing great.” She threw me a look. “Cynthia, I don’t want you to panic, but she had a little setback.

  “Small. But yes, a breakdown.

  “Four days.

  “No, she didn’t go to the hospital.

  “But—

  “Yes, she saw a doctor.

  “Cynthia, lis—

  “Cynthia! Listen to me. She’s okay. No, you don’t need to come. She’s doing much better now. It was last week and the doctor has seen her. She’s doing fine now,” she repeated.

  At that point I drifted back to my room. I had heard all I wanted to hear. Obviously my mother was going to try to convince Aunty Jillian to send me back to Trinidad. I hoped Jillian would stand up to her.

  Minutes or hours could have gone by as I thought of how I’d have to leave Edmonton and everyone and everything in it. I was lying on my back, staring up at the plain white ceiling, when my aunt came in.

  “Well, that was hard,” she announced. I didn’t reply. “Hey, sport.” She held my chin and turned my head to look at her.

  “Am I going back?” It was all I wanted to know.

  She looked surprised. “No! I told her you were fine, didn’t you hear me?”

  I snorted. “As if she listens to anybody.”

  “She listens to me. I’m her big sister, you know! I told her you were in good hands. Am I right or am I right?”

  Reluctantly I smiled. “You’re right.”

  “Scooch over,” she said, lying on the bed next to me and taking my icy hand.

  “Cold hands, warm heart,” she intoned, a relic from her childhood that I, too, knew from my own. In a lot of ways, things hadn’t changed in the Caribbean since she was a girl. “Baby, you’re going to stay here until you’re ready to go home. Don’t worry about your mom, okay? I’ll handle her.”

  Little tears started slipping from the corners of my eyes. “I never want to go back home.”

  “You will, one day. But right now you can just stay here until you feel ready. Don’t worry. You’ll be my little girl until then. And this can be your home.”

  I buried my head in her shoulder and cried.

  After a while my sobbing stopped. I wiped my face with the back of my hand and just lay there smelling her spicy, warm perfume. I sniffed. “What’s that you’re wearing?”

  “Patchouli. It’s an herbal perfume. Very hippie-dippy,” she said, winking and grinning.

  “Are you a hippie?”

  The grin stretched farther. “Nah, just a good environmentalist. Nobody does animal testing for patchouli,” she explained. “Like any good lesbian I have to believe in a cause.”

  The way she said it was funny but I could tell she was partly serious.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, I was joking,” she said, resting her cheek on my head. “It’s a thing people say about gay people. That we identify with causes—animal rights, the environment, homeless people, immigrant rights, the poor.” She thought about it for a second. “I guess, because we know what it’s like to be in the minority and the underclass. We know what it’s like to have no voice so we try to speak for others who don’t either.”

  I digested that for a while. “What’s it like?”

  “Patchouli?” she asked, pretending to be serious. “Okay, okay,” she giggled as I pinched her arm. “What do you want to know?”

  “Well…what’s it like being…you know. Gay.”

  “I don’t know what it’s like being anything else, so that’s a really hard question for me to answer. It’s just normal for me. What’s it like being straight?”

  I shrugged. “I dunno. Normal, I guess.”

  “See what I mean? But I do feel sometimes—not so much anymore, but I used to feel like I wished I were like you and like Cynthia. I do want babies and a ‘normal’ life. So it’s kind of weird not having those things, but I couldn’t really imagine myself any other way.”

  “Did you ever have a boyfriend?”

  “Yup. Did you forget I told you Nathan and I dated? Way before I knew I was gay. We stayed friends, though. And Josh is my godchild, as you know. I wish I saw more of him. Sweet kid. Josh, I mean, not Nate. Nate’s a pain in the—”

  We laughed at the same time. I was glad she shared my opinion of Nathan. He was arrogant and self-centered and I didn’t like him one bit.

  “Was he always like that?”

  “A jerk?”

  I nodded.

  “Uh-huh. He grew up very privileged and I suppose he never had to think about other people. He likes ‘exotics’ because they give him a glimpse into the other side but—” She shook her head. “Why am I having this conversation with a fourteen-year-old?”

  “ ’Cause I asked?”

  We laughed again.

  “Are you an ‘exotic’?” I asked.

  “Yup. So are you, to people like him. You’ll meet lots of people here who think that you’re some kind of collector’s item just because you have a Caribbean accent and dark skin.”

  I already had. I thought about the young policeman who tried to talk to me at the bus stop, and others I had met at the library and the gym. “White people are always surprised that I speak English and wear normal clothes and stuff,” I said. Then I thought about Julie’s version of “normal,” the clothes she called “Desi high fashion,” and reconsidered my language. “Western clothes, I mean.”

  “Right. Not everybody’s like that but some people are. Nathan married a Jamaican, that’s Josh’s mom, and I think Nate was always surprised that she was brighter and better educated than he was.”

  I chuckled.

  “But Josh seems like a good kid,” she repeated. She looked slyly at me. “What do you think about him?”

  I blushed and bit my bottom lip. If the earth had opened up right at that moment it would have been awesome.

  “Ooh! Looks like somebody has a crush!”

  “Aunty!”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll stop teasing. I have to give you fair warning, though: I’m inviting them over to the barbecue.”

  “Not the barbecue!” I said in dismay. Maybe it wasn’t too late for them to change their minds. Alas, they were following the doctor’s advice and taking life back to its ordinary level. I didn’t have to participate, my aunt told me, but I’d be expected to come out of my room and say hello at least once. Hesitantly, I agreed. “But don’t tease me about the boy, okay? It makes me feel bad.”

  “Agreed,” she said. No teasing, but I had to get ready to talk to the most gorgeous boy I had ever seen, in my temporary home. This time, I hoped I could do it without having a complete collapse.

  I called Akilah as soon as Jillian closed the door
.

  “Ki-ki!” I wailed.

  “What? Are you okay?” She had obviously prepared herself for the worst. It had been ages since I had talked to her. She looked scared, her eyes open wide and her mouth trembling. “I was so worried!”

  After apologizing for ghosting her, I calmed her down and told her about the awful past week, the sleeping pills that knocked me out, Dr. Khan and his advice to exercise and his threat—um, I mean promise—that I would seriously start talk therapy soon.

  “Why are you hating on therapy so much?” Akilah asked.

  I was scared of what the therapist would say when I told her or him about my deepest secrets. When normal people hear that you want to kill yourself, they treat you like you’re crazy. But when you’re crushed under that monster and you can’t breathe for the pain, nothing makes more sense than wanting to die and make the pain stop. Talking about it was almost as scary as feeling the feeling itself. “I just don’t want to. Julie’s already made the appointment,” I wailed. I was being dramatic, but it was a front for real fear.

  She sat at her kitchen table. Her mom was cutting up vegetables in the background; I heard the rapid whack of a blade on a chopping board and could imagine the kitchen redolent with pungent chadon beni, the dark green leafy weed we use for seasoning food in Trinidad. A wave of homesickness hit me. There were so many things I wanted to say but didn’t want Aunty Patsy hearing. And top of the list was the gorgeous kid, Josh. Gesticulating to Akilah that she should leave the kitchen had no effect. I typed in the message bar, GO TO YR ROOM!!! WE HAVE TO TALK!!!!

  journal session 4

  I think about color a lot. Even more now that I live in Edmonton, since the color of my skin marks me as different from most of the city’s population. When I was walking down the street, I would be one of a handful of black faces in a sea of white; there’s more salt than pepper here, if you know what I mean.

  Home home, brown skin is the norm. Most of the people who live in my country have either African or Indian ancestors. Walk through downtown San Fernando, my hometown, and you’ll see a spectrum of complexions ranging from palest ochre to darkest ebony. It’s beautiful to me. As a child I took it for granted; my world was full of brown people, people who looked like me. They lived next door, loaned me books at the library, drove the buses I rode, read the news on TV, and ran my government. I hardly ever saw white people in real life. On TV sitcoms, yeah, all the time. But not doing ordinary stuff like taking out the garbage. Here, white people were my neighbors, my librarians, my bus drivers, the news anchors, the city council, even the garbage men.

  Being black in a black country doesn’t mean race isn’t important, though. I grew up accustomed to people referring to me by the color of my skin: I was a dark-skinned girl. Not just me, either; so-and-so was a red-skinned lady; so-and-so was a brown-skinned fellah. I had a neighbor everyone called Blacks because his skin was so dark. Nobody said it out loud but skin color mattered. The lighter your skin, the more desirable you were for a job, for anything really. A light-skinned mixed-race girlfriend with long, wavy hair was the gold standard if you were a boy, no matter your race. Girls freaked out over light-skinned boys—“red man”—as though they were some kind of prize. Even Ki-ki said her grandmother wanted her to marry someone who would “add some milk to the coffee” and give her light-skinned grandchildren one day.

  As a bony, dark-skinned girl with short, kinky hair, I felt I was nobody’s first pick. Matchstick. Charcoal. Bun-bun. Those were some of the nicknames the other kids called me. My personal fave was Corbeau, after the pitch-black vultures that lived on garbage and dead dogs in the dump. In my primary-school graduation class photo I was a dark, unsmiling smudge with huge eyes, hiding in the back row behind the lighter, smiling faces.

  When I told Akilah the Cute Boy was light-skinned, she screamed. “You? I can’t believe you have a crush on a red man!” I rolled my eyes at that. I didn’t like him because he was light. He was super cute. Like super. Cute. And taller than me (how rare was that?!). Besides, I had never had a crush on anybody at all, red man or not. When I told her Josh’s skin color, describing it as caramel brown, she laughed at me. “He making you not only thirsty, but hungry, too! Caramel?” I knew she was only teasing but I seriously thought about what she said. Why not say caramel? I’m the color of dark cocoa. She was the color of milk chocolate. It wasn’t my fault all the good colors for brown happened to be named after food. Besides, I’ve read stories where white people were called “olive” or “peaches and cream.” Those are food, too, right?

  Josh was smart and cute and so cool. He was a catch; there could be teenage girls all over Brooklyn swooning for him. Though Ki-ki always told me I was pretty, I never believed her. If a dark, skinny girl with picky hair was pretty, why weren’t there more people like me at home home in the advertisements on TV? Pale Indian faces adorned billboards for skin lightening cream, Bollywood movies, and rum. Light-skinned mixed-race people sold pretty much everything else, from car batteries to rum. (Everybody sold rum.) I have to admit they put a lot of dark-skinned soca singers on billboards. I liked Fay-Ann best of all. She had short hair, even shorter than mine!

  My hair was another thing. It was never long to begin with, and the tightness of its curl made it seem even shorter. Every time she combed it, Cynthia wished out loud that I would straighten it like she did hers, and save her the ordeal of putting her hands through the thick coils. Every couple of months she herself went to the beauty salon and paid a lot of money for her hairdresser to put a chemical paste into her hair to take the kink out of it. The cream smelled like old pee and burned her scalp, leaving painful sores that scabbed over the next day, but when she walked out of the salon she had straight hair that swished past her shoulders, for a while, at least. When I turned twelve she asked me if I wanted to do the same to mine. I said no. She couldn’t understand why. The first week of the third term of school, right after Easter, I took a pair of paper scissors from my pencil case and cut my hair off. I don’t know why. I ketch a vaps, like we say home home. School had been agony that day; maybe that was it. At lunchtime I could barely stop myself from running into traffic if only I could make a dash past the security guards at the gate. At home, finally alone and away from all the noise of my school, I looked into the mirror and saw my picky hair. It was all I could see. Not my clear skin or my big black eyes or my full lips or my high cheekbones. I saw only the hair my mother hated. It filled me with frustration. I didn’t pause before I started to snip. Mom was blue with rage when she saw me standing in my bedroom with that little heap of black plaits at my feet. She marched me straight to the barbershop to get my hair evened out, because of course it was an awful cut, patchy and rough. I got a long lecture about making the best of my looks, and that included what little hair I had left. A woman’s hair was her glory, she said again and again. When it grew out enough, she said, I would get a weave. I sat in that barbershop chair, hearing the buzz of electric clippers and feeling the sting of the alcohol the barber sprayed on the back of my neck when he was done, thinking I would never want to stick someone else’s hair into my own. Why should I? There was nothing wrong with my own hair, was there? And if there was something wrong with my hair, was there also something wrong with me?

  The morning of the barbecue was crisp and clear. Julie was up early, mixing meat, mushrooms, and onions into a slurry that, she assured me, would turn into the most delicious hamburgers I’d ever tasted. Jillian was out buying charcoal and paper cups and I was assigned to rake the lawn, clean the bathrooms, and put out fresh towels. I also had to change the sheets on the pullout sofa bed, in case anyone stayed over afterward.

  It was about ten in the morning when I finished my chores and gave a thought to the fact that I had absolutely nothing to wear. Yeah, I had T-shirts, jeans, shirts. But nothing in my wardrobe was an outfit I considered worthy of the occasion. It had to be something really special.

  �
�Uh, Julie?” I said weakly.

  “Sugar? What’s up?” She was, by this time, vacuuming the living room. She switched off the vacuum cleaner and looked at me expectantly.

  “I have…I have nothing to wear.”

  Jillian chose that moment to walk in. She screeched. I wasn’t sure whether she was horrified that she was related to me, or thrilled that I was finally showing interest in something except the color and texture of the ceiling paint.

  “That’s wonderful!” Julie yelled.

  Jillian dropped her bags by the kitchen door and hurried out to the living room. “Oh, baby!” I was engulfed in a spicy patchouli hug. “Let’s go immediately. We can pick up some things at the mall in a hurry.” She turned to Julie. “You have—”

  Julie waved us off with a huge grin. “Go before the child changes her mind.”

  Jillian and I got into the car and sped to the mall in record time. I didn’t have a chance to stress out before she practically dragged me into a store called Sweet Harts, which had half-naked mannequins all over showing legs and boobs and bellies and butts to an alarming degree. I never would have expected her to choose this store, and not these clothes, given the way she dressed herself. Then I remembered seeing pictures of her the way she used to look in her teens, before she left Trinidad. She was pretty and girlish and prone to frills. A lot of pink eyeshadow too.

  “Uh, Aunty,” I called out.

  She didn’t hear me. She had a tube top in one hand and a miniskirt in the other and was sizing me up with a glance that made me feel a little afraid.

  “Aunty! I don’t think this is my speed,” I said more firmly.

  Her face fell. I was wearing a plain black T-shirt, black joggers, and Birkenstocks. While I wasn’t ready to meet the most gorgeous boy in the world looking like that, I sure wasn’t going to see him with my so-called boobs and tiny butt hanging out.