by Ibi Zoboi
We swim, we eat, and a few folks drink, but I don’t. Sarah is never far from me, and when someone asks her in a low voice, “Is that your girlfriend?” I’m delighted to see her turn several shades of red.
Once everyone is sufficiently tired and full, we hang out around the fire pit. Like at most parties, the chatter breaks into several conversations, and the words drift by me without really making any impact.
“Your parents have a really nice house,” I murmur. Sarah and I are sitting close, shoulders touching, and her hand is almost on my leg but not quite. It gives me all kinds of thoughts, which should be silly since I just met her, but also feels completely natural.
“Yeah, the murder machine pays well.” At my raised eyebrows she clarifies, “My dad does contracting work for the army.” She says this almost apologetically.
“Oh, no worries. My dad is in the army. So murder is also his business. Where are your parents, anyway?” I ask.
“Upstate New York. We have a cabin up there and my parents and my sister, who you met at the store, spend most of the summer there. Which is why I stay here in Parrish Point,” she says with a mischievous grin. “The scenery is much better.”
The compliment sends my brain into panic mode. Suddenly I’m thinking about my mom, wondering if she took her medicine and if she’s fighting with Grandma Rose and what kind of mess could be waiting for me when I get home. “I should get going. My mom doesn’t like me staying out too late. And I have important library business to attend to in the morning.” I give her a half smile in apology for both bailing and the weak joke.
“I’ll walk you out,” Sarah says.
I wave goodbye to everyone as Sarah and I pick our way through the cool grass. “Thanks for having me over. It was a lot of fun.”
“I’m glad you came,” she says. Both of us fall silent, the reality that our time together is about to end dampening my good mood. Then we’re stepping into a shadow and she’s grabbing my hand and turning me around.
We don’t say the word crazy in my house. Not anymore. After Mom had her incident last winter, it was erased from our family’s lexicon, like we can rewrite reality by changing how we talk about things.
But it doesn’t work, because the first thing I think when Sarah Smart kisses me, touching her soft lips to mine, is This is crazy.
Followed closely by Dad would lose it if he found out. Then He won’t know. He isn’t here. And There’s no way this lasts beyond the summer. Is this what I want? A summer fling?
Or could this be more?
I don’t have an answer. But I also don’t much care. Because when a pretty girl kisses you full out, it’s time to stop thinking and start doing.
So I ignore all of the panicked thoughts whirring through my brain and kiss Sarah back.
My days take on a pleasant pattern.
I get up and eat breakfast with Mom, who has retreated into her books. I worry that she’s trying to replace reality with dashing dukes and swooning ladies, but it’s the first time she’s seemed happy in a long time, so I make a point to check out new books for her and just make sure she’s keeping up with her prescriptions. A couple times she drives down to Baltimore to “have a tune-up,” as she calls it, an appointment with a local psychiatrist. I always ask her how those appointments go, but she usually just gives me a smile and picks up her book.
Afterward I drive Grandma to the library to open it up. At some point in the morning, Sarah comes by, usually with coffee, so that Grandma starts to look forward to her visits as much as I do.
Sometimes Grandma Rose gives me a sly look, but I don’t think she knows what’s going on. I’m pretty sure there aren’t any lesbians in Parrish Point.
And if there are, I can guarantee they aren’t hanging out with my grandma.
At lunchtime, after most of the shelving from the library’s night drop has been done, Sarah and I sneak away to be together. Sometimes we go swimming at her house. One day we drive down to Baltimore and walk around Inner Harbor, holding hands and grinning. We go to the aquarium and steal kisses in the shadows between the exhibits, giggling whenever we’re nearly caught.
Sarah is the happiest person I’ve ever known, and smart as hell. Her humor matches mine, and we spend entire afternoons watching terrible TV and cracking each other up. Being around her makes me feel like someone’s turned a light on inside of me, like I was a vacant house and a family has finally moved in. Even though I know this is only happening because my mom seems too distracted to notice and my father is five hundred miles away living his own life. If any of that were to change, it would break this fragile thing I’m building with Sarah.
And I’m not sure any of that even matters. At the end of the summer she’ll go back to Towson and I’ll go to NYU. Sometimes, when I’m lying on the couch in Grandma Rose’s living room, thinking about that makes me feel a bit panicky. The inevitable end to my time with Sarah.
But when I’m kissing her, everything else fades into the background.
And of course, by the middle of July we’re doing more than just kissing, our hands and mouths finding the places that make each other sigh in delight. I learn the landscape of her body, and she navigates mine just as well. Sometimes we’re awkward, breaking into nervous giggles when things feel too serious, too heavy. But then we find our rhythm and fall back into sync.
I don’t have words for the way she makes me feel when we’re messing around up in her room. Happy just doesn’t seem adequate; alive is much closer to the truth.
After my time spent with Sarah, I go back to my grandma’s house and dodge my mother’s questions and my grandmother’s knowing looks. Because I want my afternoons and evenings to be mine alone, and if I put a name to what Sarah and I have, if I call her my girlfriend, then I’ll have to have an entirely different conversation. One that I’m just not ready to have.
And so I become two versions of Devon: the old one, who tucks her feelings away under polite smiles, and the new Devon, who knows exactly what she wants and isn’t afraid to say so. Because while we skirt every topic imaginable at Grandma Rose’s house, Sarah and I talk about everything.
Except for what will happen when summer ends.
“Have you ever been with anyone else like this?” she asks one afternoon as we float in her pool, limbs tangled around one another, breaths short from too many kisses.
I shrug. “Not since fifth grade,” I say.
“You had sex in fifth grade?” she says in amazement.
“No! I had sex last year, with a guy I dated for a while. But it wasn’t great. I think I did it mostly because I felt sorry for him. Fifth grade was the only time I kissed a girl. Well, that and my best friend earlier this summer. But that didn’t really count.” I fall silent as something occurs to me. “Wait, what are you talking about, sex?”
Sarah gives me a sidelong look. “You do know that’s what we’re doing, right? You and me?”
I pause, trying to put the things we’ve done together into the concept of what I consider sex. “We’re not having sex. We’re just messing around,” I say.
As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I know it was the wrong thing to say. Sarah frowns, her hurt carved into her features, and disentangles herself. She swims back a few feet so that I am left without her body heat. I’m suddenly chilled, and I wrap my arms around myself as my feet find the bottom of the pool.
“We’re having sex, Devon. The stuff we do, that’s sex. You need to get rid of your heteronormative standards that sex is only penis in vagina.” She isn’t yelling, but her words come out in a rush and her face is suddenly red.
I hold up my hands in surrender. “Okay, okay! I’m sorry. This is new to me and . . . I don’t know. I don’t want to mess it up. But I also have no idea what I’m doing. I’m not going to always use the right words, but that doesn’t mean I can’t learn.”
Her anger fades away and she sighs. “I know. I’m sorry. I just—sometimes I get so mad, at how everything revolves around what
other people consider to be the truth, you know? Like the experiences of someone like me don’t matter.”
I give her a bit of side-eye. “I’m Black, Sarah. I think I know what that’s like.”
Sarah opens and closes her mouth a couple times. “Oh God, now I know how my sister must feel.”
And then we’re laughing at the ridiculousness of it all and talking about how terrible the world is.
As I drive home a couple hours later, I smile, realizing that we’ve just had our first fight. And we made it through okay. We are officially a couple. Maybe with a better understanding of each other.
I don’t think either of us wants to ruin this.
But neither of us can stop the summer from ending.
Two weeks before I’m scheduled to go to New York to move into my dorm room, my dad calls to say his deployment schedule has been moved up.
“I’m not going to be taking you to New York,” he says over the phone. He called Grandma Rose’s landline instead of my cell phone, which is weird. Like he wants to make sure she knows he called. “I have some extra training they want me to go to, so I’ll be out in Washington State. Your mom will buy you what you need, and I’ll see you over Thanksgiving and Christmas break. I’m not shipping out until February.”
He hangs up and doesn’t talk to my mom.
“Predictable,” Grandma Rose huffs when I tell her why he called. But honestly, I’m relieved. I can’t imagine him in a place like New York, let alone on a college campus. He’s still annoyed that I want to be a sociologist and not a nurse.
But for once, I just don’t care. Much.
Mom and I sit down a couple days later in the kitchen and decide what I’ll need for my dorm room, and Mom gives me a credit card with my name on it.
“Does Dad know you’re giving me a credit card?” I ask.
“No, because this is on my account. I got a job in Baltimore. That’s where I’ve been, going on interviews.”
“Oh,” I say. “I thought you were just going to the doctor.”
“I was, but I was also looking for a job. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to worry about things.” Mom takes a deep breath and lets it out. “Your father and I are getting divorced. There’s no more sidestepping the conversation, I suppose.” Mom looks down at her hands, and I notice for the first time that her rings are missing. “He was supposed to be here when I told you, but like with everything else, he seems to have his own agenda.”
I nod. There’s a part of me that’s devastated, and I suppose I’ll cry later, but mostly I’m just relieved that it’s finally done. That we’re finally talking about it. “Why, though? I mean, I know Dad seems to be volunteering for more deployments and he’s gone a lot, but I thought you were happy until you got sick.”
Mom smiles sadly and drinks her coffee to give herself extra time to consider the question. “I guess I was just tired of always being second to everything else. It wasn’t like that in the beginning. But lately . . .” She trails off. “I deserve to be happy,” she says.
“I know, Mom.”
“You deserve to be happy, too,” she says with a knowing smile. “What are you and Sarah going to do after the end of the summer?”
“What are you talking about?” I sputter, but Mom just raises her eyebrows.
“Aren’t you dating? Because it looks like you’re dating.”
“I don’t know.” I pause and look at her. “Maybe?”
Mom shakes her head sadly. “You should talk to her, because at some point there won’t be time to say all the things you feel. And feelings have a way of coming out one way or another. It’s better to control how those feelings manifest.” Mom stands and kisses me on my forehead. “Your grandma used to always tell me that just because something is over doesn’t mean it wasn’t successful. All things end at some point.”
Mom walks out of the room. I’m not entirely sure she’s talking about me and Sarah, but the advice is good all the same.
I spend the next couple of days agonizing over how to bring up what happens next between me and Sarah. I don’t know that it makes sense to have a long-distance relationship, but I also don’t want to just ghost on her when it’s time to leave.
Finally, as we sit in front of Chuck’s Creamery eating greasy cheeseburgers and salty fries, I bring it up. “Hey, I leave for NYU in a couple of days,” I say.
Sarah puts down her burger. “Yeah, I figured it was coming up soon. I’m actually supposed to go down to Towson tomorrow to start moving into my apartment with my roommates. I guess I’ve just kind of been putting this off.”
I take a deep breath. “I don’t know how you feel about leaving things as they are, but I don’t want to lose you as a friend. But I also know that the odds of a long-distance relationship surviving aren’t good.”
Sarah nods, even though her expression is sad. And maybe a little relieved? “Yeah. I don’t know, I kind of just don’t want to talk about it. Can’t we just let things continue on until they don’t work for us anymore?”
“Is that how it usually works?” I ask.
Sarah shrugs. “I have no idea. Let’s just live in the moment. We can keep making out and figure things out as we go.”
And old white lady carrying a couple of vanilla cones walks by, and she looks at us with an expression of horror and utter disgust.
“Not you, no one wants to make out with you,” Sarah calls after her.
The old woman quickens her step as we burst out laughing.
“You’re going to love New York,” Sarah says with a grin that seems a little bit forced. “Hey, do you know the story of how Central Park was built? It’s wild.” She’s changing the subject, and I let her. Maybe we will keep seeing each other, especially since Mom will be working in Baltimore. There’s always Thanksgiving and Christmas, and New York isn’t that far away.
But maybe I’ll start school and fall in love with a hot New York girl the first week. In that moment, I realize that anything is possible.
And I decide to do just like Sarah asks and live in the moment.
Hackathon Summers
Coe Booth
NOW
The banners on the wall in the giant well-lit reception room read “Welcome, Incoming Computer Science Students,” along with the New York University logo on either end. Garry smiles, staring up at the big white letters, and it’s like he finally feels like he’s where he’s supposed to be.
This reception is a lot nicer than he expected. He’s imagined a room with folding chairs and a Spotify Top 40 playlist trying too hard to loosen everyone up. But all the computer science students would be standing around awkwardly, not sure how to interact with anyone.
Exactly what he’s doing right now.
There’s a buffet with hot and cold food, and even servers walking around with hors d’oeuvres and sparkling apple cider in champagne glasses. Garry silently thanks his father for dragging him to Men’s Wearhouse a couple of weeks ago so he could have “dress slacks and a button-up shirt for college like every young man should.”
Early in the morning, he and his dad drove down to Manhattan and moved him into the freshman dorm. Garry felt different being back in New York City. This time he wasn’t here for only thirty-six hours. He was here for four years.
Now, at the reception, all he can think about is how much he wants to see her again. Scanning the room over and over, he’s starting to fear she’s not here. But she has to be. That was their plan.
“Garry, my man!” He turns around to see Marc, from their team. Marc is all height and dreads and smile. They bro-hug.
“NYU let you in?” Garry asks him.
Marc laughs. And they talk about everything, how they both applied early admission, and how much they couldn’t wait to get back here but for real, not just for one weekend every summer.
Finally Garry asks the only thing that’s on his mind. “You see Inaaya?”
“Nah. You trying to pick up where y’all left off last year?�
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Garry shakes his head. “I told you, man. It wasn’t like that.”
“Okay. All right. You sticking with that?” Marc looks at Garry like he’s being ridiculous, and maybe he is. “I was there, remember?”
“Just let me know if you see her,” Garry says. He can’t deal with Marc and his questions. Not when he can hardly make sense of things himself.
He met Marc at his first hackathon the summer after freshman year, held right here at NYU, and they ended up being teammates every year. And even though they found out they didn’t live that far from one another—Garry in Rochester, Marc a little outside Buffalo—they never saw each other during the school year. Just in the summer, for the hackathons.
Now they walk around the reception for new computer science students, drinking cider and eating mini egg rolls, sharing dorm information and class schedules, but Garry can’t help scanning the room. Maybe she’s late. Maybe that’s why he can’t find her.
One thing he doesn’t do is consider the other possibility, that she chose a different college. He can’t think of that because, if he does, he knows he’ll never see her again.
THE FIRST HACKATHON
The first time Garry saw her was three summers ago. It was the first time his dad let him come to the city by himself and stay for a whole weekend “with absolutely no supervision,” even though Garry told him a million times there were going to be adults there. He had left home early in the morning, before his father woke up for work, and gotten to the Greyhound station on his own. The bus took over seven hours to get to the city, stopping in every small town in Upstate New York nobody’s ever heard of. But to Garry, the whole thing was an adventure, proof he could do things on his own, even get to New York City.
That Friday evening, after he found the right building and checked in at the registration table, he watched as all the kids arrived. He was looking. Not looking for her, specifically. But someone else Black, someone whose presence there would tell him he was in the right place, that he wasn’t going to be the only one.
