by Ibi Zoboi
I sound bitter, but I’m not. Resigned is probably closer to how I feel.
Grandma Rose still doesn’t budge. “It isn’t that I’m not happy to see you, Annabelle. It’s just that I would’ve expected to get a call first. We haven’t talked since early May.”
I shift from foot to foot. I told my mom to call Grandma before we left. It was a nine-hour drive from Georgia to Maryland, so it wasn’t like she didn’t have an opportunity.
“I want it to be a surprise,” Mom had said, flipping through my playlist as I drove.
“Not all surprises are good,” I said.
She ignored me.
Now, here we were having an awkward family reunion. No one asked for this.
Mom sighs. She still hasn’t answered Grandma’s accusation. “I texted you.”
Grandma Rose harrumphs. “A text isn’t a conversation, Annabelle.” She looks from my mom to where I stand at the edge of the porch. “What does Devon think of this? This is her last summer at home before she goes to college. Doesn’t she want to spend it with her friends?”
“She’s fine with it,” Mom says, shooting me a nervous look over her shoulder. I could blow up her spot so easily if I wanted, but it just seems needlessly cruel. The past few months I’ve been trying not to think about what’ll happen to her after I leave for college and she’s all by herself. The least I can do is give her this small bit of backup.
I smile at my grandma, as though that can make Mom’s lies reality. I’d begged to stay in Georgia, had even treated my mom to a week of silence to prove how serious I was. But then my dad looked at me and said, “Your mother can’t drive the car by herself. Someone has to get her to Maryland. Maybe this will change your mind about being a nurse.” And I knew the conversation was over. My declaration that I wanted to study sociology instead of nursing had been a well-trodden battleground over the winter and spring, and I had no desire to revisit it. Either way, I could tell by the set of his jaw he’d already removed himself from the situation, and there was no way anything was going to change his mind.
It didn’t matter. Once I got to college I’d be free. In a little less than two months I would start college in New York, and once I was there I could do whatever I wanted.
It was the dream.
But first, I had to survive the summer in the backwoods of Maryland. Cecil County wasn’t exactly open-minded and welcoming to Black folks. And even though I was used to seeing Confederate flags dotting the landscape, they seemed more ominous this far north. I didn’t want to be here any more than Grandma Rose wanted us to be here, so I stood there silently as my mother tap-danced around the truth.
My parents were getting a divorce. It was just that neither of them wanted to say it out loud. But anyone could see the train hurtling down the track toward its inevitable crash.
I watch wearily as Mom spins her web of lies in the early-morning heat. She crosses her arms and sighs heavily, like Grandma is the one being unreasonable. “Look, you won’t even notice us here. I’m going to finish a project for work and Devon is going to start getting ready for college. If it’s too much of an inconvenience, we can get a hotel, come back and spend some time with you later this week.”
My mom quit her job right after her hospital stay. And we don’t have money for a hotel. But I say nothing. My phone buzzes, and I dig it out of my back pocket, surprised I have a signal in the middle of God’s country. It’s a picture of Amy and some of our other friends by the side of her pool.
miss you, the text reads.
Ugh. Now I miss her, too.
Barely ten a.m. and already sweat trickles down the small of my back as I stand on the porch daydreaming about being back home, away from this awkwardness. Not that it would be any cooler in Georgia. But right now I could be swimming with my best friend Amy in her pool. Amy in her bright-red bikini that made me feel some kind of way.
That gets me to thinking about her and the way she’d kissed me after one too many beers the night of graduation.
“I hope you don’t think I’m a lesbian or anything, but you’re my best friend, Devon. I just love you so much,” she’d said. And because I’m a great friend I’d taken her home immediately.
But that didn’t mean I hadn’t thought about that kiss, and Amy, ever since.
“I suppose you two had better come on in,” Grandma Rose finally says, jolting me from my memory and back to the here and now. She stands back from the door. “I’m letting all the cool air out. I hope you aren’t expecting breakfast, because I don’t have anything to eat. If you’d have called me, I would’ve gone to the store.”
“We’re fine, Mom. Besides, Devon can go to the store. It’ll give her something to do,” Mom says, kissing Grandma Rose on the cheek as she walks by. As for me, Grandma Rose just gives me a long look before patting me awkwardly on the shoulder.
“Sorry about your summer, kiddo,” she says, just low enough so that my mom can’t hear.
I guess Mom’s tap-dancing isn’t so effective after all. Even Grandma Rose knows the truth.
When I was younger, we used to come to Grandma’s house every time Dad deployed, spending the summers here in Parrish Point, small-town, middle-of-nowhere Maryland. It’s about an hour from Baltimore, but we rarely visited the city because Grandma Rose always complained that the one-way streets were too difficult to navigate.
I know now that one-way streets is code for too many Black folks, but as a kid I never knew that. The time I spent in Parrish Point was magical. I loved climbing trees, chasing fireflies, and drinking not-too-sweet tea in the evenings while Grandma and Mom gossiped about distant family members and complained about the mosquitoes. Sometimes we would even ride bikes the three miles into town to get burgers and shakes at the town’s lone drive-through, Chuck’s Creamery. I have a lot of memories of this small town, so being in Parrish Point feels like returning to visit an old friend.
An old, racist friend.
I’m hyperaware of my dark skin as I push my cart through the grocery store, people giving me hard looks if I spend too much time in one aisle or another. Most likely none of them remember Rose Davidson’s Black granddaughter. I hear their whispers and comments, but it’s easy to ignore them. Shopping while Black. Well, half Black. But it’s not like it matters to anyone white.
All they see is the high melanin content of my skin.
Of course, I guess it’s partially my fault. I’m damn near a stereotype. My hair is down, a frizzy halo of curls around my face, and I’m wearing short shorts and my Black Lives Matter shirt that Dad threatened to burn when I brought it home. “We aren’t thugs in this family. We respect the police,” he’d said. Like BLM was about respecting authority, not demanding the right to live. But he’s always been more comfortable being the “Good” Black person, as though it’s possible to be better than racism.
It had taken hiding the shirt at Amy’s house to keep it in one piece, and the last thing I was about to do was to let Parrish Point make me feel bad about it.
I swing the cart around to the cereal aisle, staring at my options for a bit too long. I’ve just about narrowed it down to two different high-sugar cereals when a white woman comes around the corner, pushing her baby in a cart.
“Oh, I just love your hair,” she says, her eyes going wide at my curls.
“Oh, thanks,” I say. I stare really hard at the cereal, hoping she’ll take the hint and leave me alone.
She doesn’t.
“It’s just so amazing. How do you get it like that?” The woman touches her own straight brown hair, as though she’s imagining how she’d look with an Afro.
I blink. “This is pretty much what it does.”
“It looks so soft . . . ,” she says, and for a moment I’m afraid she’s going to reach out and pet me like I’m a labradoodle.
“Please, for the love of God, tell me you are not about to try and touch her hair.”
Behind the woman stands a girl who looks close to my age. She’s what my m
om would call “pleasingly plump” in order to avoid saying fat, like it’s a crime to carry around extra pounds. The girl’s hair is the same brown as the woman with the baby, but cropped closely in an aggressive pixie cut. She wears a shirt with a unicorn that says “Trample the Patriarchy,” and a pair of board shorts with work boots that are completely inappropriate for the heat. Her lip is pierced and she wears an expression somewhere between rage and embarrassment.
She is, quite plainly, the hottest white girl I have ever seen.
“Sarah! Of course I wasn’t,” the white lady says with a laugh, hands nervously adjusting her baby’s bib. She looks embarrassed, so I know that’s exactly what she was going to do.
“I’ll grab the cereal if you want to go get some bacon? You know Mom will lose it if I bring home the vegetarian stuff again,” the girl says, and the woman with the baby shoots me a wan smile before beating a hasty retreat.
“Sorry about that,” the girl says once the woman’s gone. Her voice carries the hint of an urban area, her words slightly more clipped than the slow vowels of rural Maryland. “That’s my sister, trying to prove she isn’t just another racist white person. If you would’ve talked to her long enough, she would’ve told you how she voted for Obama.”
I shrug, because I want to play it cool and but I’m also trying to check the girl out without looking like I’m checking her out. I fail miserably.
“It’s no big deal, I’m used to Parrish Point,” I say, like I’m so cool not even awkward white nonsense can bother me. “It is what it is.”
“You aren’t from around here,” the girl says, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye as she peruses the array of cereals. At first I think maybe she’s checking me out as well, but when I look in her direction and our eyes meet, I convince myself that I’m just making it up, that it’s all in my head.
“No, I live in Savannah. Well, outside of Savannah. My mom and I are up here visiting my grandmother. You might know her—she’s the librarian here. Rose Davidson?”
“Oh yeah, I totally do. I’m always at the library. Well, I was before I went away to school. Rose is . . . Rose. I’m Sarah, by the way. Sarah Smart.”
I smile at her avoidance of classifying my grandmother as anything other than what she is and grab a box of super-sugary cereal, the kind I can count on my mom not to eat. And then I grab a box of something that looks boring and healthy as well. “I’m Devon. And I guess if you’re always at the library, then I’ll see you there? Since it’s the only thing to do in this town.”
She smiles at me, and I’m surprised to see that her front tooth is slightly chipped. Somehow it makes her even more appealing.
“Definitely,” she says.
I walk away to do the rest of my grocery shopping, feeling buoyed by the possibilities.
My first crush was a white girl named Leslie Salinger in fifth grade. She had a blond ponytail and smelled like strawberry bubble gum. She was obsessed with being a good kisser, because her older sister had told her that the only thing boys cared about were boobs and being a good kisser. Leslie used to practice on me, because, as she said “you have puffy lips and are a better kisser than anyone else. Plus, you always smell a little like chocolate.”
The chocolate smell was cocoa butter, helping a sister out.
Our kissing lessons went on for a couple weeks, until a teacher found us practicing one day during recess and that was the end of that. Another girl had ratted us out, and I like to think it was because she was jealous. Either way, Leslie’s parents decided to send her and her sister to Catholic school and my dad threatened to send me to boarding school if anything like that ever happened again.
“That’s disgusting—you don’t kiss girls, you understand? We don’t have gays in our family,” he said. Mom eventually got him calmed down, but I never forgot the way his eyes bulged as he yelled “GAYS.”
After that, I never kissed another girl until my friend Amy’s drunken advances.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t think about it, though.
I’m daydreaming about kissing Sarah when she walks into the library a week after our first meeting in the grocery store.
I stop the shelving I’m doing for a few seconds and stare stupidly, because I’m only partially sure I didn’t conjure her out of my imagination.
When I’d agreed to help my grandma out at the library, I’d done it half because my mom was working my nerves and half because I was hoping I’d see Sarah again, but now, here I am looking right at her and I’m not sure exactly how to feel besides ecstatic.
“Hey,” she says. She’s walking straight toward me, and suddenly I don’t know what to do with my hands and my heart is beating too hard and I’m also trying to remind myself that there is a possibility that she is not thinking about me the way I’m thinking about her. I don’t want to be a creeper and my brain is like, “SMILE, SMILE!” So I do. But not too wide.
“Hey,” I say. I slide a book onto the shelf. Cool. I’m the chillest ever.
“That’s nonfiction, Devon. It goes on the other side of the library,” my grandma calls from the front desk. I don’t even know how she can see where I put the book this far back into the building.
My face heats as all of the blood in my body rushes into it. “I knew that,” I mutter. Because I did, until Sarah fried my brain circuits.
Sarah grins. “The Dewey decimal system makes zero sense,” she says sympathetically.
“Right? I mean, why make things needlessly complicated? Letters or numbers, pick one,” I say.
Sarah laughs, and not in that fake way people do when they’re trying to be polite, but like she actually thinks I’m funny. “So, are you working here now?”
I shake my head. “Just helping out. It’s better than HGTV.”
She widens her eyes. “Are you a fan of those tiny-house shows?”
My heart sinks. Dammit, and here I thought she was perfect. “Actually, I hate them. I spend most of my time watching them and waiting for them to say something ridiculous like, ‘Oh, I thought there’d be more space in here.’”
She claps her hands over her mouth, her brown eyes somehow even wider with excitement. “YES!” she says, loud enough that Grandma, who is the loudest loud talker that ever uttered a syllable, is shushing her from the front desk.
Sarah ducks her head and says in a quieter voice, “My favorite part is when they’re always like, ‘Where are we going to put the baby and the dog,’ and I’m like, ‘Not in that tiny-ass house.’”
I snort, and cover my mouth to keep from laughing too loudly.
“Hey,” Sarah says, sobering suddenly. “I actually had a reason for stopping by.”
“Need something to read?” I ask.
She grins lopsidedly. “No, I was wondering if you wanted to hang out later tonight. Some of my friends in town are having a barbecue, and I thought it would be cool if you came along. Since you don’t know anyone and all. I figured the Dollar General has just about lost its charm by now.”
“What are you talking about, I haven’t even been to the Dollar General yet,” I say with a smile. “But yeah, that would be cool.” I don’t mention that my other option is listening to Grandma Rose and my mom bicker over every single tiny thing until Mom retreats to the guest room and buries her face in a romance novel. Sarah’s party sounds way better.
“Great!” Sarah says, looking a little relieved.
I dig my phone out of my pocket and we trade numbers. It’s all I can do to keep my hands from shaking.
“Should I bring anything?” I ask,
She gives me a Cheshire cat smile. “Just a swimsuit and a smile.” I can’t quite tell if she’s just being friendly or if she’s actually into me.
But it doesn’t really matter. I am smitten.
It turns out the barbecue is at Sarah’s house, which isn’t all that far geographically from my grandma’s house and yet a complete world away from what I’m used to. Maryland is all rolling hills and deciduous forest,
while in Georgia we’d lived in a giant house on a postage-stamp lot. One look at the traffic speeding by on the rural highway out front and I decide driving is the better option. Nothing good is going to come of a lone Black girl walking along the highway in the middle of nowhere. Mom surfaces from her laptop just long enough to point out where her car keys are when I ask to borrow the car.
Escaping Grandma Rose’s house is like running away to Neverland.
But once I’m to Sarah’s place, I lose my nerve. After parking my mom’s car, I get out and spend a few long minutes trying to build up the courage to go inside. Sarah’s house is nearly three times the size of my grandma’s, and from what I can tell she doesn’t just have a pool, she has an entire swimming complex. Bass can be heard from the end of the driveway, as well as girlish screams and splashing.
“What am I doing?” I mutter. I’m so far out of my league that I’m not even playing the same sport. Sarah is too pretty, this house is too fancy, and I don’t belong here. I should just go back to my grandma’s house. I could watch HGTV with Mom while she talks about how she wants one of those bright-orange accent walls, which is my dad’s least favorite color.
“Hey, you aren’t planning on flaking on me, are you?”
I spin around and Sarah is standing behind me.
“Okay, that’s creepy.”
She laughs. “You said you’d be here around four, and I wanted to make sure you didn’t get lost. Sometimes people try to take the private road instead, and if you did that, you would’ve ended up in a field of cows.”
“Well then, thank you for saving me from the cows.”
She bows gallantly. “My pleasure. Come on, everyone is dying to meet you.”
She takes me by the hand and pulls me up to the house, and my nervousness fades into the background. As we walk around the house to the pool area, she keeps ahold of my hand, glancing at me very quickly. “Is this okay?” she asks. My heart trips a merry rhythm.
“Yes,” I say, and her answering grin is everything.
The party is a blur of activity. I meet her friends, some from Parrish Point, others up from Baltimore for the day. Sarah is heading into her sophomore year of college, and most of the people there go to Towson University, which is also where Sarah goes. I am relieved to see that I’m not the only Black person there. She knows so many people, and they’re all super friendly, but I can’t remember most of their names.
