Hell of a Book

by Jason Mott

  “Well?” I say.

  “Just thought it was time we met,” The Kid says. “That’s all.”

  “Well, that sounds ominous,” I reply with a smile.

  “Nah,” The Kid says, flashing a smile full of marble-white teeth. Contrasted against the darkness of his skin, it just might be the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen. “It’s not like that,” The Kid says. I begin to hear a drawl in his words. Something southern Black. He’s offered up more than a few “y’alls” and “my neck of the woods” in his short-lived life. He sounds like old Cadillacs and boiled peanuts, sweet tea and home. It’s as beautiful as his skin and his smile. “I’ve wanted to talk to you for a while now,” The Kid says.

  I smile my best “Always good to meet a fan” smile and I say, “Do you want me to sign a copy of your book?”

  The Kid grins. “Nah,” he says. “Not a fan. Just wanted to meet you.”

  “Alright,” I say. I’ve met a few fans like this since starting this book tour. I’m learning to roll with it. “Well, it’s great to meet you too.”

  As interesting as this kid is to look at, there’s something unsettling about him too. As I watch him eat, I’m filled with the urge to get away from him. I want to go back to my room. I want to go back to my room, and curl up in my bed, and fall asleep and not see him in my dreams.

  I realize that I can’t just sit here with this kid anymore. My mind won’t stand for it. I keep staring at his skin and I keep telling myself not to do it. I want to stare at him as much as I want to never look at him again. Something about him fills me with an immediate sense of love and hate. I want to hug him and push him away at the same time. And I know that all of this stems from the impossible color of his skin.

  I wonder what growing up with skin like that must have been like. Going to school looking like that? Must have been hell. Pure fucking hell.

  “Well,” I say, “it’s been good meeting you and I hope you enjoyed meeting me. I would love to say something about fate and the power of chance meetings, the allure of strangers, serendipity . . . all those sorts of things.”

  “It’s cool,” The Kid says. “You ain’t gotta stay. I just wanted you to see me. That’s all.”

  “Well, consider yourself seen,” I say. I aim a pair of finger guns at him and “Pew-pew!”

  I offer one last smile at The Kid in honor of his gentle yet eloquent phrasing. “I just wanted you to see me.” That’s a beautiful thing to say to someone. I mean, don’t we all want to be seen?

  Before I leave, I lean in close and say, in my sincerest voice, “I see you.”

  Then I head back to my hotel room.

  * * *

  —

  I stretch out on the bed and try to get some rest before the next leg of the book tour. The last thing I see in the darkness before sleep takes me is the darkness of The Kid. I see his skin. It’s darker than the darkness of sleep. And then he grins and his pearly whites shine like snow on dogwoods.

  Then The Kid fades away. His smile lingers, but then it’s gone too.

  As sleep finally gets its fishhooks into me, I offer up a heartfelt “Poor kid” for the pitch-black boy I met today. Living a life looking like that in a world that works the way this one does? . . . I wouldn’t hang that noose around anybody’s neck.

  The boy was ten now. Five years older than he was when his parents made him believe that he could turn invisible. And in those five years, he had learned that none of it was true. And nowhere else was the truth of his parents’ lie more evident than on the morning school bus ride.

  More than anything else in this world, he hated that ride. It was where they had named him “Soot.”

  Soot. Four little letters that hung around his neck like a lodestone. So every day as he watched the school bus come rumbling along the dirt road toward him, he shuffled his feet and chanted a mantra over and over again: “Don’t let them see you. Don’t let them see you.” Even though he knew all the talk of The Unseen wasn’t true, he was still child enough to want to believe that it was true.

  So each morning, he tried to be Unseen.

  He climbed onto the bus quietly—without laughter or hello—and he kept his eyes aimed at the floor as he made his way to his seat. Then he slid in against the window, and placed his bookbag in his lap, and pulled his hoodie over his head, and faced the window, and breathed slow and even, like a gazelle hiding among lions.

  And sometimes it worked. Sometimes he was invisible. Or, at least, that was how it felt. But it was a tentative invisibility, full of tense nerves and anxiety. It was time spent listening to the conversations of the other kids, listening for his name, listening for the four-letter word that he had become: “Soot.” It was a terrible type of hiding, not the safe and happy place his father and mother had described when they’d told him about The Unseen. But it was the best he had and so he took what he could from it.

  And on the days it didn’t work, when he hid as best he could but it didn’t work, it always failed in the same way, all because of the same person.

  When the bus pulled up in front of Tyrone Greene’s house, Soot trembled. He pressed himself even more tightly against his window seat and held his breath as the eighth-grader climbed aboard the bus and stomped down the aisle to the back where the other eighth-graders sat.

  Tyrone Greene was the biggest eighth-grader on the planet. His father owned a farm and kept Tyrone out in the field all through the summer and, because of it, he had the muscles and angles of a grown man even though he had barely broken the seal on being thirteen. He was the kind of kid who knew his body gave him power over others. He was the kind of kid who wasn’t afraid to use that power. He was the kind of kid who had nicknamed the boy “Soot.”

  For the next twenty minutes, Soot didn’t move. He stared out of the window, watching the old trailers, and magnolias, and sprawling fields pass him by. He counted the moments, hoping all the time that the school would suddenly appear and he could exhale and race off of the bus before catching Tyrone’s attention.

  “Hey!” a baritone voice called out from the back of the bus. Soot flinched. “Hey, Soot?” Tyrone called. “Soot? Hey, nigga, you hear me! Answer me!”

  Soot’s jaw tightened like grapevines and he closed his eyes as hard as he could. His entire body tightened. He whispered to himself: “You’re unseen and safe. You’re unseen and safe. You’re—”

  His mantra was broken by the thud of Tyrone’s heavy bulk flopping into the seat beside him. “Soot?” Tyrone growled. “Don’t ignore me, blerd nigga. That shit pisses me off.”

  “What?” Soot finally replied. He kept his face to the window because he knew that the tears were not far away and, if he had a choice, he would keep them to himself.

  “Hey, man,” Tyrone said, his voice soft all of a sudden. “Hey, turn around, my nigga. I’m trying to talk to you, you know?”

  Soot pulled off his hood and turned to face Tyrone. He was as broad as any man, with a sharp nose, and light-brown skin, and a slightly crooked smile. “Why you be trying to ignore me, Soot? You know you my nigga.” Tyrone’s smile widened, like always. “We cool, ain’t we?” He held up a large, callused hand offering a shake.

  Soot watched the hand hang in the air for a moment. This too was a part of the way this dance with Tyrone always went. It was a terrible ceremony that resurrected itself over and over again, day upon day, through the years like the hope we all have of being truly loved.

  “You ain’t gonna shake my hand?” Tyrone asked. The hardness had returned to his voice. “Don’t leave me hanging, Soot.”

  Because he had no other choice, Soot shook Tyrone’s hand.

  “There we go,” Tyrone cheered. “That’s my nigga.”

  The other kids on the bus watched and listened. They too, willing or unwilling, were a part of the ceremony. Up front, they turned and leaned over the backs of their seats,
watching. Some of them grinned. Others did not grin, but neither did they look away. Soot wondered about those kids the most. He wondered how they could watch and say nothing. But he also knew that he would do the same.

  The eighth-graders in the back all migrated up to the center of the bus, all of them sitting and leaning in a semicircle around Soot and Tyrone, pulled by the persistent gravity of cruelty.

  “So how you doing, Soot? You good, man? Family good? All that?”

  “Yeah,” Soot replied. He said the word as hard as he could, trying to force the one syllable to make him sound bigger than he was.

  “Yeah? That’s real good to hear. Your daddy still skinny as fuck, I bet.” Tyrone glanced around at the other kids, then turned back to Soot. “Hey . . . can I ask you a question, man?”

  A lump swelled in the boy’s throat. He tried to choke it down—the shame, the fear, the tears that were on their way—but it got stuck and he nearly vomited. He cleared his throat and turned his face to the window again, wishing for something to come along and take him away from all of this.

  He wished that he could disappear again, become completely unseen like he had done that day. For years now, his mother and father had made him close his eyes and say, over and over again, “I am unseen and safe. I am unseen and safe.” But it never worked. Sometimes his father would sigh heavily when the boy failed to become invisible again. Soot’s mother was more patient, if not sadder, when her son failed to find the magic. “It’s okay,” she told him. “You’ll get it.”

  “Is this for real?” Soot asked. “Darryl at school said people can’t turn invisible. He said you’re tricking me.”

  “Don’t worry about what Darryl at school said,” his mother warned. “Just because nobody else can do it doesn’t mean you can’t make it happen.”

  “Have you ever done it? Or Dad?”

  “No,” his mother said, her voice suddenly a soft apology. “But you will,” she said. “The only thing that matters is that you learn to do it.”

  “Why?” Soot asked.

  “Because you have to” was the only answer she ever gave him.

  “Hey,” Tyrone said, pulling Soot out of his hope that some sort of salvation would come for him. “I said can I ask you a question? You not ignoring me again, are you, nigga?”

  “Nah,” Soot said. He took a deep breath and wiped the first tear from the corner of his eye. He couldn’t stop what was coming. Now he just hoped to bear it out with as little crying as possible. “I’m not ignoring you. What you want to ask me?”

  “Cool. Hey, you know you my nigga, right?” Tyrone began.

  “Yeah,” Soot said. “I know.”

  “So I gotta ask you, dude . . . you know you black, right?”

  Soot hesitated. Again he wished to be invisible. Again, shamefully and persistently, he continued to not be invisible but to only be his impossibly dark-skinned self. Of course he knew he was black. Not dark-skinned, but black. Black as shut eyes. Black as starless nights. Black as stovepipe soot.

  He wore hoodies and long pants all year round in the hopes that the kids would see less of his dark skin and find fewer reasons to pick on him. But none of it helped. He was the boy named Soot, and no one would ever let him forget it. Nothing he ever did would change that.

  “Answer me, Soot,” Tyrone prodded. “You know you black, right?”

  Tyrone had the perfect skin. High yellow. Light as butter. The holiest of blessings. Light skin got you girls. Light skin made teachers like you. Light skin made you a star in Hollywood. Light skin was everything. And almost all skin was lighter than his, so what did that say about what the future held for him?

  “Yeah,” Soot said, “I know.” He smiled, as though a smile could deflect the pain.

  “Yeah. But you ain’t just black, nigga. You extra black. Like, I bet you sweat coffee.” The first snicker rippled through the kids on the bus. “I mean, why you steal all the darkness? Why you so stingy?” More laughter. A few rows away, a girl yelped out a high-pitched laugh. “Nigga, your mama must have been blind and she wanted you to look like what she saw. Nigga, I bet when you get out of the car your daddy’s oil light come on.” The snickers turned to giggles turned to belly laughs. The entire bus was in on the fun now.

  “Why you gotta be so black?” Tyrone asked. “I mean, not just why, but how? How you come out so black? Is it the sun? Is that what it is? I mean, damn, nigga, you extra black. You black with a side of black. You my nigga and all, but damn . . . You got all the black!”

  Every time Tyrone said the word “black,” Soot flinched and the tide of laughter around him swelled a little higher. Soot swallowed again and tried to find somewhere to turn his eyes away from Tyrone but there was nowhere else that he could look. Tyrone was the mirror that reflected the blackness Soot wanted to be and could never be. Tyrone was blackness that didn’t have to be black. His hair was soft and had a curl to it that didn’t need chemicals, and his nose was straight and thin, and his lips were equally thin, and yet he could be black when he wanted and he could be something else when that mood suited him too.

  What else could a person want?

  “I mean, really, though,” Tyrone continued, “what makes you so dark, nigga? Why you so black?”

  Soot shook his head and laughed a nervous laugh. “You crazy.”

  “I’m not joking. Why you so black?”

  “Man . . .”

  “Why you so black?”

  “Just . . . stop. Okay?”

  “Nah. Not until you answer me. Why you so goddamn black?”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Why you so black?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Make me. Why you so black?”

  “Please . . .”

  “Why you so black?”

  “Please, Tyrone.”

  “Why you so black?”

  “Stop!”

  “Why you so black?”

  Soot’s cheeks were wet with tears. Laughter echoed around the narrow metal frame of the bus until the whole thing shook like the floor of a Baptist church at revival. The laugher continued until Soot sobbed in the corner and the bus driver finally yelled something back at all of them about getting back in their seats.

  Tyrone stood. “What you crying for, nigga? Damn. You know I’m just fucking with you.” Then he disappeared into the back of the bus, followed by the other eighth-graders, all of them grinning like angels.

  Later that night, as the rest of the house lay sleeping, Soot sat up in his bedroom doing his best not to cry and failing at it. The sound of his intermittent sobs woke his father, who came and sat on the end of Soot’s bed and said, simply, “Don’t listen to what people say. Fuck them. You’re beautiful, son.”

  “Why do I have to look like this?” Soot asked. His broken sobs became a steady stream.

  “One day, you’re going to have to learn to love who you are,” his father said, but Soot could not hear him over the sound of his grief. And so, Soot’s father climbed into bed with his son, and held him, and shushed him as the boy wept while, outside, stars shined and the ebony night wrapped the singing earth.

  I’m sorry. I haven’t introduced myself. I’m an author. My name is ———. Maybe you’ve heard of me and maybe you haven’t, but you’ve probably heard of my book. It seems to be selling pretty well. It’s called Hell of a Book. And, according to the reviews, it’s a hell of a book.

  It’s in brick & mortar stores. It’s online. It’s been Kindled and Kobo’d, iPadded and Audible’d. It’s been optioned so that it can be movie’d—Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Donald Glover are both said to be interested. We’re even in talks to have it comic book’d. My publisher is happy. My editor is happy. The company I pay my student loans to is happy. My agent and publicist is . . . well . . . she’s involved, and I think that’s as close to happy as publi
cists get.

  But I’m not here to talk about my book. Not just yet. Everything has to begin somewhere first.

  I grew up in a small house in a small North Carolina town you’ve never heard of because it’s never produced anything of value or done anything other than stand as a stagnant tide pool as the course of time rushed past.

  I had parents whose names you don’t know but I’m sure you can imagine. Picture my father, tall and lean. He worked at a sawmill all his life. Picture my mother, short and round. She worked as a mother all her life. Somewhere in the middle of that common equation, I grew into a skinny kid who read a lot of books. I was dead center of the bell curve in school. I was a prodigy of mediocrity.

  I was fourteen when I decided I wanted to be a writer. Back then it was simpler. I started by writing alternate endings to my favorite books and myths. In my version of the Odyssey, Athena never shows up and Odysseus takes on the suitors in a battle royale. He loses an arm in the fight but is henceforth known as Odysseus the Severed which, obviously, is a much better name.

  Even when I started writing, it wasn’t anything impressive. My characters were flat. I couldn’t write a decent scene to save my life. Every sentence ended in an adverb. The crowning achievement of my early attempts at creative description is summarized in the time when I once described a tree as “a tall, wooden growth with limbs like a tree.”

  But I liked telling stories. And that was really the only requirement to be a writer back then, back when I was still trying to be a writer. The irony is that, once I actually became a writer, my life wasn’t really about writing anymore. Funny, that.