by Ibi Zoboi
Sobechi comes back so that Mummy, through the driver’s-side window, can fix his tie. “But, Mummy, I am going to carry things and sweat. Why do I need to fix my tie?”
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” she replies.
When she finishes, Sobechi straightens his back and walks over stiffly, waving when he gets close enough. The man Sobechi assumes to be the father glances over and stops in his tracks, nearly dropping the shelves he’s carrying. “Oh, hey!” he grunts with a smile. “You must be our neighbor!”
Sobechi sticks his hand out. “Sobechi Onyekachi. Pleased to meet you.”
“Alphonse, or just Al.” The father wobbles, manages to sneak a sweaty hand out for a quick, limp handshake. “I told Eve we weren’t gonna be the only Black family on the block!”
“May I help?”
The father glances at the shelves and laughs. “This might be a little heavy. Uh, my niece might need some help with her band equipment.” He pivots slightly. “Hey, Dez! Come meet our neighbors!”
By now, Mum is out of the car, and Daddy is with her, wearing a suit jacket and jeans but with the top button of his dress shirt undone. While they’re making introductions and Alphonse wobbles under the weight of his shelves, Sobechi cranes his neck and sees a shape moving by the U-Haul.
Out of the shadows of the U-Haul’s belly comes a girl who looks more or less his age, maybe a little older, black, hair combed down so that it covers one eye. She’s dressed in all black with a chain from her belt to her front pocket jingling while she drags a big, square-shaped thing backward, occasionally glancing over her shoulder.
“Al, what is it?”
She disappears for a little, and Sobechi is left to wonder what on earth is the relationship between Dez and Alphonse that allows Dez to address him by his first name (and not even his full name, at that!) and not catch a fiery slap across the face. In a minute she’s back, and she stares directly at Sobechi, sizes him up. “You sure you can help me lift that? It’s heavy, and you’re a little . . . skinny.”
Was she going to lift it herself? Sobechi wonders, almost in shock. “I can help!” he says at last. He can’t help but sound offended. Skinny!
“’Kay. I’ll climb back in, push a little bit, then you can get the other side. Ready?”
She hops back into the U-Haul, and immediately, they’re at work. Her voice is husky, deeper than any girl’s voice he’s ever heard before, with a little bit of a rasp, like it’s being dragged over something. Maybe she needs water. Sobechi will make sure to offer her some when they’ve finished.
“What is this thing?” Sobechi asks, his long, narrow back already aflame from the effort of carrying it inside and down two flights of stairs.
“It’s my amp. Well, one of them.”
Sobechi gulps. “One of them?”
Dez squints at him after they set the thing down in a large room that’s already a jungle of cables and what looks like pieces of a drum set and a whole bunch of other sticks and cords and instruments he’s never seen before. Then she laughs with her whole body, and her voice changes, becomes thicker yet more musical. The raggedness has vanished. “Heavy, wasn’t it.”
She sticks her hand out. “Desirée. Or Dez, for short.”
This close and in the light, he sees how beautiful she is. She wears no makeup; the skin of her face is a smooth, unblemished brown. Her hazel eyes shine. Her body, with its muscles and confidence, seems to own the air around it. It seems almost wrong to call her a girl.
“Sobechi,” he manages to say, holding her hand, dry yet firm when it grips his.
“Nice to meet you.” She jerks her head toward the stairs. “Now, let’s get the rest of it. It’s not all that heavy.” She laughs. It’s too warm outside for the full black outfit she wears. Her long-sleeve T-shirt, worn gray at the elbows and with faded lettering on the front, must have been baggy on her once upon a time, but now it hugs an athletic body as tall as his but . . . fuller.
By the end, after all the moving and the overlong greetings among the adults and Sobechi brushing his teeth and showering and after his nightly prayer with Mum and Daddy, when he’s lying in bed, he does not even notice how he can barely move his arms anymore or how much his back is paining him. The only thing he sees, staring straight through the ceiling, is Desirée’s face. He smiles, then realizes with shock the reason she feels so different.
She’s the first Black girl he has ever known who wasn’t somehow related to him. Suddenly, thoughts climb over themselves in his head, a confusion of hopes and fears and wondering more tangled than the wires in the room with all that music equipment. His body is warm with a different kind of fire now.
He must see her again.
Even though it’s Saturday, Mummy has Sobechi up early. First the sound—SOBEEEECHI!—and only after Mummy’s voice has echoed several times through the house does he smell the jollof rice she’s making.
When he makes it down to the kitchen, containers are already filled almost to bursting. Mum has brought out one of her fine ceramic bowls, a large one with flower patterns and a top that sits snugly on it.
“For the neighbors?” Sobechi asks his mother, leaning over her shoulder.
She busies herself with readying the containers. “Bring the big one over to greet our new neighbors. And tell them if they would like to come over tonight, they are welcome.”
“Yes, Mummy,” he says, slipping his hands under the big dish and making sure to cradle it properly in his arms.
“And speak correctly. I don’t want to hear later that you were speaking all jagga-jagga.”
He nods and assumes a straight face all the way to Desirée and Alphonse’s front door.
Lifting one knee up and tempting fate, he manages to poke a finger at the doorbell. It swings open and Desirée stands in the doorway, coarse but straight hair in her face, clothes loose on her frame. So she is one of these teenagers who get to sleep in on Saturdays. Sobechi has heard of these people.
“Good morning,” Sobechi says, smiling cheerily like in those Colgate commercials. “Is Mr. . . .” He panics. He didn’t get Al’s last name. “Um . . .” He does not dare use the man’s first name.
She slaps her forehead. “Oh, duh. You mean my uncle. No, he’s out. Running some errands or whatever, I dunno. Here. Let me get that.”
Before he can properly protest, she’s taken the dish from him and turns to head back inside. “Wow, this smells good. Oh, hey, come on in. The place is messy, and I, like, just woke up, but it’s not like I was getting ready to go anywhere.”
Nothing she says makes sense to Sobechi. Why did she not let him carry the plate inside like a gentleman? How is it nine thirty in the morning and she is still in her pink pajama pants? Does she greet all strangers like this?
Inside, the place is cool and almost odorless, with cardboard boxes everywhere, and only some of the furniture is unpacked. Desirée places the dish on the kitchen countertop. “Oh, by the way, thanks for helping last night. It would’ve taken so much longer if it was just me and Al. Eve checked out after they brought the couch in. Al’s friend.” She opens the top of the dish and sniffs. “Hey, I got a friend coming over. Maybe you know her? Goes to school around here? Dominique Reyes?”
Sobechi’s mind darts in a dozen different directions. Does he know someone who knows Desirée? Who could that person possibly be? Dominique Reyes? He shrugs.
“Anyway, we’re gonna jam for a little bit if you wanna meet her.”
“Yes,” Sobechi manages.
She smiles at him, and it’s perfect. “Cool,” she says, then fetches some spoons from a drawer. She hands him one, then, with the other, starts digging into the jollof rice.
Sobechi’s eyes widen in horror.
She sees his face out of the corner of her eye, then chuckles shyly, hand to mouth to catch stray grains of rice. Why does her sloppiness make Sobechi want to spend even more time with her?
“I’m a mess today,” she mumble
s, still smiling. “But this is really good.” She stares at Sobechi for a beat, then goes, “Come on. You gotta help me with this. It’s a lot.”
Slowly, carefully, he digs his spoon in and takes out a good hunk of rice. Using his free hand as a safety net, he guides the spoon to his mouth. Desirée peers at him, like he’s some sort of alien. He makes it without spilling a single grain, and it’s the most triumphant bite of jollof he can remember ever having.
“You were literally gonna take all day,” says Desirée in disbelief. Then she’s laughing, and Sobechi’s heart flips again so that he almost chokes on the rice.
When he finishes coughing, he starts laughing too, then suddenly, he falls into her rhythm and they begin talking and Sobechi finds that some small gate has opened in him, a single lock expertly picked.
The doorbell rings.
Even as something taps a fast rhythm on the door, Desirée is out of her seat and racing across the living room. She flings the door open and wraps her arms around the waist of whoever’s on the other side. “Dom!” she bellows, pulling the other girl close. When Dom straightens, the drumsticks she holds twirl over fingers whose tips poke out through ratty gloves.
“Dom, this is . . . um—”
“Sobechi,” he says, sticking his hand out.
“What up, what up?” Dom says, eyeing him up and down. Tight curls frame a face the color of sand. Then she’s got eyes only for Desirée. She chews her gum with her mouth open and is always tapping the sticks on a different part of herself. Now, her thigh. Now, her collar. “So, Desert Eagle, we jamming or what?”
Desirée looks over at Sobechi, and it’s like the two of them, she and Dominique, fit perfectly beside each other. Desirée with her bony elbows and wild hair and Dom with a plaid shirt tied around her wide waist and a bandanna taming her curly hair. Desirée able to stand completely still and Dom constantly moving some part of her body.
“You down?” Desirée asks.
Mummy never said what time Sobechi needed to be home, so, loosened by the risk he took with the rice, he shrugs and grins. “Yes.”
“Shit yeah,” Dom cheers, swaying.
“Dominique!” Desirée can barely keep the frown on her face. “Our guest!”
Dom twirls a drumstick in her fingers. Her grin nearly splits her face. “Oh, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet, my guy.”
Dominique sits at the drum kit in the basement, moves her snares a little bit, then moves them back, checks the cymbals, and occasionally steps on her kick-drum pedal. Desirée plays with her guitar. A cord connects it to one of her amps, and a bevy of pedals lies at her bare feet. She strums idly. Her fingers dance over the neck of the thing, and she’s not even looking at it, but the notes climb over each other in the air. Single trills and arpeggios, then, every so often, a CHUG-CHUG that nearly knocks him out of his folding chair. The guitar growls. That’s the only way Sobechi can explain it. Something like a tiger or a dragon from the fantasy novels he sneaks into his room without his mum seeing.
Desirée and Dominique whisper to each other. Sobechi catches words like “periphery” and “system” and “August burns red.” The girls giggle. Desirée shakes her head, darts a look at Sobechi, then confers with Dominique once more. They seem to come to an agreement.
“Okay,” Desirée says, once again facing Sobechi. “We’re a little rusty, and the song sounds a little weird without backup vocals, but here goes.”
The guitar growls: chug-chug-chug-chug BRUNUNUBUNUBUNUNUU. Dominique bangs on the drums and each kick joins forces with each stroke from Desirée, the barrage so powerful Sobechi falls out of his seat. He covers his ears. They might actually start bleeding.
Then there’s only drums, then a softer melody, and a voice. Desirée’s singing. Sort of.
When he can separate the sounds, he hears “Life in a bubble jungle”—gibberish—“but I was in there for you”—what is she saying?—“life in a bubble jungle.” Then . . .
BRUNUNUBUNUBUNUNUU. “Seeing you, believing”—gibberish—“THE POWER STRUGGLE, believing and healing, appeasing, THE POWER STRUGGLE.”
It makes absolutely no sense. The newness of it all makes Sobechi dizzy, so dizzy he almost vomits, but after what seems like forever, they’re done. It’s over.
Dominique cackles behind her cymbals and snares. “Oh my God, I’m crying.”
“Sobechi, you okay?”
She’s back to normal. Sobechi looks up, and Desirée’s face is right in front of his. She’s kneeling, her guitar-that-sounds-like-a-dragon-and-a-bear on a strap around her neck. Her hand is on his shoulder.
“Hey,” she whispers. “You good?”
“I . . .”
She smirks. “That was a lot. We were a little loud.”
“What was that?” Sobechi manages to murmur.
“Hah! That was System of a Down.”
“Best band ever!” Dominique shouts from behind the drums.
“But . . . those sounds. I’ve never . . .”
Desirée’s eyes go wide. “Wait, you’ve never heard metal before?”
“What is metal?”
Desirée chuckles. “Metal, my friend, is the most freeing sound in the world.” Her gaze softens. “But we kinda threw you in the deep end.” She squeezes his shoulder. “Let’s show you something a little softer.” She’s up again. “Let’s do Dead Sara.”
Dominique pouts. “But that’s not really metal.”
Desirée makes a stern face, and Dominique relents.
“‘Weatherman’?”
Desirée nods. “‘Weatherman.’”
Her guitar goes again, no chugs, just riffs, riffs, riffs, then drums, soft at first, snares, rising, then—Sobechi braces himself—badumdum.
“Come on!” Then it hits, but it’s kinder this time, more intelligible.
The drums are slower, and he can hear her singing.
“Addicted to the love of ourselves
I’m the weatherman
And tell no one else
I’m the weatherman
SO GO FOR THE KILL”
Her voice warbles and strikes, and it’s got that rasp he recognizes. He can actually see that type of sound coming from an actual human being.
As she sings, she flicks her hair back, but her mouth is always pressed to the microphone in front of her. Sweat soaks her shirt, brings a sheen to her face, so that she’s glowing in the fluorescent light. Occasionally, still strumming, she looks back at Dom, who smiles broadly. Then things go quiet.
Then it’s just Desirée.
“I sing for the melody and I sing for a reason
. . . for all that un-American
SO GO FOR THE KIIIIIILL”
Then she’s back to head-banging, dancing around in place, contained in a booth surrounding that microphone. But wild and crazy, her hair going every which way, like the music has possessed her. It has replaced her blood and her bones. She has become those sounds, that music.
By the time they finish, she’s spent and looks like she just climbed out of a swimming pool, but she looks so happy. Sobechi has never seen anyone so ecstatic.
Something flutters in his chest, and he wants to freeze that moment, to stare at that smiling face and to make sure the sounds that make Desirée grin like that never, ever stop.
“He likes that one,” Dominique chirps, pointing a drumstick at him.
Desirée’s laugh is even more music coming from her throat. “We’re gonna make a metalhead out of you.”
He has no idea what that means, but it doesn’t matter. His body is alive. More alive than it’s ever been. His sternum thrums from more than the echo of the growling and roaring of the amplifiers. His fingers tingle. Blood rushes to his face.
He feels like he has been struck by lightning. Thunder still rings in his ears. His insides are on fire. And he wants to do this again.
Desirée throws him right into it. Playing her favorite bands, breaking down the different genres. Explaining the difference between death metal
and math metal. Turning her nose up at most nu-metal, but there are a few bands she likes. When she plays certain bands, even though they may not have the technical brilliance he recognizes in others, Desirée gets a faraway look in her eyes, and Sobechi can tell she’s transported to a different place, a different time, then she’ll tell him about how, when she and Al would move around a lot, Korn was always playing on her iPod. Jonathan Davis’s screams held so much of what she felt.
They sit in her music room now, a week after she screamed about power struggles and a weatherman, with “Tempest” from the Deftones’s Koi No Yokan album playing softly in the background.
“I know I was ragging on nu-metal, but Linkin Park was literally all I listened to after I went to live with Al.” She smiles at the ceiling, then at Sobechi. “I used to practice Chester Bennington’s screams in the shower. Aunt Eve was always banging on the walls. ‘Cut that shit out!’ ‘Dez, if that’s you howling in there . . .’”
Sobechi wants to ask what happened to her parents. He realizes with a shock he can’t find the words.
“When I found out Chester had died, Sobe, I cried for the whole rest of the week.” Even now, remembering it, she grows quiet, and tears well in her eyes.
It’s more emotion than he has ever seen in his life, so much of it coming from one person.
“But System, that’s my love right there. Toxicity’s easily one of my favorite albums of all time.” She gets up from the carpet they’re both lying on and slips her acoustic guitar’s strap over her shoulder. She has that inspired shine in her eyes again. Sobechi presses pause on his iPod and disconnects it, and Chino’s crooning cuts off midlyric.
Almost immediately, Desirée starts playing. He recognizes the first notes as the beginning of the title track off that System of a Down album. Over and over, Desirée plays it, extending the intro, then goes in a drumless breakdown of the chorus, singing it rather than shouting it like Serj. “Somewhere, between the scared silence and sleep, disorder, disorder, disoooooorrrrder,” then humming.
“More wood for their fires, loud neighbours”
Before he knows what’s happening, Sobechi is on his feet and singing the words, first a murmur, then something deep and rumbling coming from his chest.
