I feel sick.
“Did you know him?” Terrell asks.
I shake my head.
“He was in my music class,” Devon says.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
We sit in more silence, waiting for the third face. I feel anxious all of a sudden. I’m not sure why. These people wanted to ruin my life—our lives. They didn’t care about us, whether we lived or died.
So why do I feel so bad?
“Another guy,” Terrell says as the third graphic goes up.
I freeze.
I feel Devon glance at me, but say nothing.
The edges of my vision start to crumble. I don’t know how I’m meant to feel about this, or react, so I don’t think; I just sit here and let it happen.
My face is wet and I hate myself for crying. He doesn’t deserve it.
“I need some fresh air,” I say, placing my mug on the ground before getting up and leaving Terrell’s room.
I feel more tears gather as I rush down the stairs and head outside.
The morning chill wraps around me, and I feel faint.
I can’t believe it.
I bring my wrist up, wiping my eyes again, as more tears spill.
I can’t believe Jamie’s dead.
“Chiamaka?” a voice says from behind. I turn back, quickly wiping my eyes.
“Yes?” I say as I turn to face Richards.
He looks sorry for me.
He shouldn’t. There’s nothing to be sorry for. Just a girl here crying over her awful dead ex–best friend.
“Wanna get out of here?” he asks.
I raise an eyebrow. Yes, please. “Where are you thinking of going?”
“Someplace quieter than here.”
I nod. Sounds like the sort of place I need.
* * *
We get to the beach nearby a while later. We decided to walk, since neither of us is exactly fit to drive right now.
I got changed into a nicer-looking shirt of Terrell’s, one without any graphics of weird superheroes, and Devon stayed in his PJs from last night. Terrell stayed behind, said he’d make some breakfast.
When we get to the beach, I take in how quiet it is. Like truly quiet. Like the whole world has disappeared.
The waves crash against the sand, and Devon takes a seat on the ground.
I’ve lived in this town most of my life, but never been here. I don’t think I even knew of its existence.
“How did you find out about this place?” I ask him, taking a seat next to him now.
“Used to come here a lot when I was younger, when things at home and at school got too much,” he says.
I nod.
I can see why. It’s really peaceful here. I sit up, crossing my legs. I’m about to tell him how nice it is here, but he’s speaking again.
“I tried to kill myself here, years ago,” he says.
I look at him. That’s … surprising.
“Oh,” I say. Because that’s all I can think to say in response to that.
“I think I thought it would be nice … to just die—drown, in my favorite place. Now I find other ways to drown and cope,” he says.
“What stopped you?” I ask.
He doesn’t respond at first.
“Someone followed me here … pulled me out, didn’t let me do it,” he says quietly.
“Sounds like a good person.”
“He is,” Devon says.
We sit in silence, just watching the waves.
“You’re not a bad person, you know … for grieving him.”
I’m guessing he’s talking about Jamie.
“I’m not grieving him,” I say.
Devon nods.
“Well, even if you wanted to be sad about it … you’re not a bad person. Just human,” he says.
“Okay,” I reply, wanting to end the conversation about Jamie there.
It’s hard to detach the Jamie I liked, my best friend since I was fourteen, from the real Jamie. The one who was a racist coward, who never really liked me, who always had this plan in mind to screw with my life like this.
But I’m going to have to let go of the fake Jamie somehow. I refuse to grieve over someone who probably would have celebrated my death if the roles were reversed.
It’s unexpected, but I feel a weight on my hand as Devon slips his fingers through mine and squeezes. I give him a weird look, but he doesn’t notice.
And I don’t take my hand away.
I’ve felt alone a lot in this world, filled with people and faces that don’t look like me. My parents always working. My friends all backstabbing actors. My relationships never real.
But right now, with Devon, I don’t feel alone at all.
Not one bit.
47
DEVON
Friday
Later, when I’m alone, I look at my tweet again.
The support has doubled since I last saw it. People are talking about the protest and my tweet that sparked it. So many people are supporting us and the truth.
I hope things work out, and the truth remains in the open, unburied. I hope we get to be okay after all this.
I go to my messages and see my inbox filled once again. A message from a verified account catches my eye and so I click on the message.
It’s from a Black journalist.
@CindyIsHere47: I saw your tweet and I’d love to speak with you. Let me know if that is something you’re interested in.—Cindy
I don’t want to trust anyone from any institution that can be paid off easily by Niveus. But then I click on her profile, eyes widening when I see the company she works for.
They are big. Known for their unapologetic articles and fearless takes. All detailing the lives of people like us, wronged by the systems.
I’ll show Chiamaka the message. Show her who it’s from, see what she thinks.
But for now, I close out of Twitter.
I’m back in my room now, in my house.
I close my eyes, pretending it’s already the future, and I’m somewhere else, living a completely different life.
Dreaming is dangerous. But I allow myself to this time.
I think we deserve a happy ending.
EPILOGUE
The Fire Next Time
Sixteen years later
A letter from the Underground Society
Dear Mrs. Johnson,
It has come to our attention that you are planning on enrolling your son, Rhys Johnson, at Pollards Private Academy. We are writing to warn and advise you against sending Rhys to this school, as Pollards Private Academy systematically targets its Black students, practicing a form of social eugenics. Attached to this letter is evidence dating back to 1965, when the first case of social eugenics took place at the now-closed institution Niveus Private Academy, tragically costing the first Black victim there her life, as detailed in the documents. Since 1965, the school caused undue trauma to all enrolled Black students, including, but not limited to, emotional and physical harassment and severe mental trauma as well as attempts to sabotage academic records, college applications, and employment possibilities.
To guarantee your son’s protection from having a similar experience at Pollards, we would love to invite him to join the Ruby Bridges Academy. This is a school set up by the Underground Society—a society founded to tackle the systemic inequality in schools across the country.
Niveus was not the only institution practicing social eugenics, and we are still working to find those connected to Niveus while also providing an alternative solution for students we identify as targets of any of these institutions. Our aim is to reform all the systems, starting with education.
We hope you consider our offer.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Chiamaka Adebayo and Professor Devon Richards
Co-Founders of the Underground Society
DEVON
I watch him sleep soundlessly, chest rising and falling, rising again. Beard overgrown, scruffy, head clean-shaven�
�always. The room is dark, despite it being early in the afternoon, and I have somewhere to be, but I get sucked into his beauty and find myself trapped.
I let my eyes fall to his bare back, where my favorite tattoo of his is, the one with numbers. I run my fingers over the date written on his back, then I lean in and kiss it.
“If you’re gonna touch me, at least touch me somewhere it counts,” his sleepy voice mutters.
“You’d love that so much, wouldn’t you, T?”
His dimples pop out and he laughs.
“Why are you up so early?” he moans.
“Firstly, it’s twelve thirty, and secondly, I have a doctor’s appointment at one.”
“You just want an excuse to see her,” he says, turning to face me now, squinting. “God, I’ll never get tired of looking at your face,” he muses out loud.
My heart is beating fast but steadily.
“I’ll never get tired of looking at me too,” I reply, leaning in, giving him a quick kiss.
“That so?’ he says, wrapping his arms around my shoulders, trapping me.
“Mm-hmm…” I kiss him again.
When I’m with him, I feel like I’m falling in love all over again. I’ll never get tired of him. It’s one of the only things I’m sure of.
I know that if I don’t move away, I’ll end up skipping the whole day, and so I stand before he can pull me back down again.
“Ma made you breakfast,” I tell him, pulling my jacket on now.
He grins. “I love her more than anything in the world.”
“Marry her instead, then,” I tell him, walking out of our bedroom. I run down the stairs into the foyer, then I turn to the kitchen. Gray coils are springing out of Ma’s bun and there’s a smile on her face as she sits on a stool doing sudoku puzzles—Ma has an addiction to those—while whatever’s in the pot bubbles in front of her.
There was a time when it felt like this wasn’t enough. A time where I resented her so much for hiding what she did about my pa, I didn’t pick up her calls, I didn’t check in on her. It’s hard to forgive when you’re hurting so much. But I hurt no more. Now I know she was all the family I needed. And if I can wake up every day to Terrell’s face and Ma doing her puzzles, I think that would be everything to me.
“Gonna go to the doctor’s, Ma,” I tell her, hugging her from behind, before kissing her forehead.
“Is Terrell awake yet?”
I nod. “I told him you made breakfast.”
“Have a nice trip,” she says.
I leave, rushing out the front door, down the steps of our home, and straight into my car.
It doesn’t take me long to get to the hospital, where I walk past the receptionist—much to her obvious dislike—up the stairs and straight to her office, with her name on a plate outside the chestnut-colored door.
I knock and she yells, “Come in,” and so I open the doors to find her behind her desk, sifting through papers. She throws me a quick glance and I smile, moving toward her and hugging her from behind.
“Richards, unless your heart is failing, you need to wait in line.”
I roll my eyes. “No time, I have a music class to teach. Just wanted to swing by and say hello.”
She raises an eyebrow. “Did you get me coffee?”
I sit down on the chair opposite her desk. “I’m not your intern.”
She squints behind her glasses, hair packed up in a bun, coat dazzling and tailored.
“Couldn’t tell, you definitely dress like one,” she mutters to herself, a small smile playing on her lips.
Most days I drop by. When she’s not busy, we go out to lunch. Today’s clearly not one of those days. She goes back to staring down at her papers like a mindless zombie, occasionally signing things in black ink. Her phone chimes and she briefly looks at it, then looks away.
“How’s Mia?” I ask with a smile.
“She’s good, very pregnant, but good…,” she replies, still not looking up at me. “I actually wanted to tell you something,” she adds, still shuffling through papers. “I found out that this Black student, Rhys Johnson, is applying to Pollards. I got members of the society to speak with his family, get them to reconsider, but they want the best for him, and the best in that town is Pollards.”
“So what, we just let them enroll him?” I ask.
Chiamaka nods. “We’ll keep an eye on them; have people watching out for him. Plant someone on the inside. Anything to make sure we never let another Black kid get hurt by places like Niveus again.”
CHIAMAKA
It’s late when I leave my office to check up on my final patient.
I nod at a nurse wheeling in a pregnant woman, smiling as the bleach-like, sanitary smell of the hospital fills my nostrils.
My shoes squeak against the floor, and curls from my bun loosen, falling and blocking my sight a little. But I can still see the room number in the distance.
I think about the boy, Rhys. How much unwarranted suffering he could face at that school. Like we did. Like our ancestors did.
I think about how many Black spirits have been killed by white supremacy and lies. How many of us were experiments. Worthless bodies in some game.
I think about Henrietta Lacks, whose body they used, mistreated, and tossed away, but who changed medicine forever. Who never got her revenge for the way they stole her cells, as if they were entitled to her body. Because she was Black and a woman, and in that combination, she, to them, meant nothing.
To me, she and all the other spirits broken by this world and its systems are the reason I get up and do this every day.
I walk into the room.
There he is, my final patient. Face hollow and sickly. Green and blue veins all over his arms and neck. Lying back, eyes peering up at me.
He’s dying.
I close the door behind me and I smile.
We lock eyes and I move forward, approaching his bed, glancing at his heart rate through the monitor.
I can hear the sound of the beeping from the machine as the lines zig and zag slowly.
I drum my fingers on the machine, turning to face him now. He moves his mouth to speak, but no words come out.
And they don’t have to.
The shock in his eyes is evident.
“Hello, Headmaster Ward,” I say.
♠ THE END ♠
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Dear Reader,
I wrote Ace of Spades at a very dark time in my life. I had just started university, which for many reasons was difficult: I had no friends; I really hated myself; and I was slowly climbing out of the sunken place and realizing just how bad things were for people who looked like me. I was reading more books, talking to more people, and having the realization that the circumstances I grew up in were no accident, but a system that was created to work against me.
I grew up in South London, in a place we call ends, which in American terms would translate to the hood. My town is known for its diversity and massive Black population. My high school was at least 90 percent Black, and it wasn’t until I got to my university in Scotland that I realized how much my community in London meant to me.
Since starting university, for the first time in my life, I could go days without seeing another person of color. I would walk around the campus and feel people watching me, like they all knew something about me, and it put me on edge. For the first time, I was getting weird questions like, “Is that your real hair? Can I touch it?!” and having everyone in the lecture hall glance at me during the lectures on slavery and the colonization of Africa.
I genuinely felt like something insidious was happening, and while technically no one was really out to get me in the way Aces from my book is out to get my characters, there was something sinister happening. Something beyond my control, that had everything to do with the violent systems in place that I noticed every time I went to class or even walked around campus.
Systems that made it rare that people from my background were able to come
to university and thrive without any issues.
In my first year, I had also just started watching Gossip Girl for the first time and became deeply obsessed with it, bingeing all of the seasons in a matter of weeks. After watching the show, I remember wishing there were more Black people. I was so in love with Blair Waldorf and her characterization, and I just thought it was such a shame that there were hardly any prominent shows like Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars where these hilarious, mean female leads were played by Black actresses.
From then on, the idea for Ace of Spades started to form, and before I knew it, I was in my second semester of university and I had a first draft.
This novel deals with a lot of important topics and themes, such as classism, racism, and homophobia. It is also allegorical in many ways—which I hope you pick up on as you read. But one thing I was adamant on was keeping the setting as neutral as possible. With stories, it is so hard to ground readers without specifying a city or neighborhood, and so while there are mentions of places that are vaguely familiar, the story is meant to have no concrete ties to any one place.
I want people to read this book and not see the issues discussed as something that only affects some, but see that anti-Blackness is in fact a global issue: one that can’t be diminished or pinned on one country or group.
I started Ace of Spades as an eighteen-year-old freshman—lonely, depressed, and with a lot of questions about the world and myself—and through writing this book, I felt as though I was able to guide not only my characters on their journeys, but also myself. Writing this book was like a form of self-therapy, and I hope that it is the same for Black people that pick this book up.
The universe has a weird way of working, and it feels almost like fate that Ace of Spades will be published at the end of my senior year. It’s like I have grown and developed alongside these characters, and I’m excited you get to meet them!
I hope that in reading this story, you see that despite the darkness we are plagued with, which often feels inescapable, that not only are happy endings possible for Black people, but that we deserve them.
With love,
Ace of Spades Page 32
