by Rachel Gold
“Do you want to come to the cookout?” I asked.
“Let me take Pickles home and ask my parents if it’s okay.”
She set the last chair into place in a big oblong that took up the middle of the street. Getting Pickles’ leash from where she’d looped it around another chair, she waved and walked off down the block.
I wondered how we’d look together: a white girl walking a mostly black dog and a black girl walking a white dog. Did that look like a commercial for world peace or fabric softener?
* * *
I wanted Aisha to come to the block party cookout so much! If she didn’t, how weird would it be to show up at her house with a stack of comic books?
I’d invited my best friend Jon to the cookout, even though he would diss everything about it, so I had to stay. If Aisha didn’t return, maybe tomorrow I could walk over to her house. Or I could hang a sign on my treehouse that said, “Come over! Read comics!” Would she see that from her yard?
After carrying out cutlery and napkins and condiments, I went inside to change. If Mom didn’t drive around the signs, like that jerk guy had, she’d have to park in the alley, by the big, heated shed that held Milo’s woodworking equipment. I didn’t see Mom’s current favorite purse on the hooks by the garage door, or thrown on the dining room table, which was more likely. I stopped in the kitchen to drink half a glass of water and poured the other half into Wolvie’s bowl to cool it down.
A quick check out the back window showed no car. Maybe I’d get lucky and Mom would be stuck at work. She did a lot of evening shifts because she assistant-managed a Maurice’s, a chain women’s clothing store that also sold shoes and accessories, but not any that I’d wear. Mom didn’t like me bringing Wolvie to neighborhood events, but it wasn’t fair to leave Wolvie in the house with so many people right out front.
My grandpop, who we all called Pops, stood in the back yard, cleaning the surface of a grille that was already cleaner than any other grille in our town. Like always, he wore khakis and a blue short-sleeved button-down shirt. In winter he switched to long sleeved. Milo bought his shirts a dozen at a time. He wore them buttoned all the way up, an uncannily hip old guy, but I think he was being hip on accident.
Hearing rustling from the basement, I yelled down to Milo, “Need help?”
“Nope,” she called back. “Go wash up.”
I headed for my room. My brother Brock must’ve come and gone because our bathroom stank of his acrid body spray. I could smell it from the top of the stairs, even though my bedroom comes before the bathroom. Brock’s room is in the basement, but he shares this bathroom with me because Mom, Milo and Pops kicked him out of the other two bathrooms. He left his socks, underwear and shirts in every corner and they reeked like thousand-year-old cabbage.
Pops and Milo have lived here for way longer than I’ve been alive, like since the eighties, when my mom was a teenager. She used to have my room, or I had hers, however that worked. Now she slept in the first floor den that Milo converted into a bedroom when we moved in. Milo and Pops slept in the big bedroom on the second floor and I had the little one, which was still plenty big for me.
After a quick shower, I changed into my blue Wolverine T-shirt, the one with Laura on it rather than Logan, and less-torn jeans. I switched the dog treats from the pocket of the other jeans to these. When I got back to the street with Wolvie on her leash, Pops had the grille rolled out and fired up. The smell of pork fat and spices rested heavy in the warm summer air. I gave Wolvie a treat since she wasn’t allowed to eat bratwurst—though she’d steal part of one off the ground later and then have gas that made everything Brock smell like air freshener.
Milo sat in a folding chair with people all around her since she was the official/unofficial royalty of our neighborhood. Adults had taken up most of the chairs, but I saw a blanket on our front lawn with Jon and Brock on it. Jon had biked over from the fancy housing development on the other side of the river. This used to be a small town when Milo and Pops first moved here, but then people noticed it was a pleasant twenty-five minute drive from Saint Paul, so new houses kept getting built for the corporate folks who wanted big yards. And the small, old houses in my neighborhood got built onto or torn down and replaced with big, new ones, like the one across the alley, where Aisha lived.
I’d been taller than Jon when we first met and he’d started to catch up. Plus he’d discovered fashion. I didn’t like either of those trends. He had on dark blue skinny jeans and a short-sleeved button-up, black with pink flamingos, ironic and stylish. Jon’s jeans looked like they wouldn’t be caught dead in the same store as mine. He’d been growing out his very black hair, now past his ears, and it made him even more handsome-pretty.
Brock wore his usual sleeveless T-shirt and baggy jeans. He’d been allergic to sleeves since last spring when some girl at school talked up his arm muscles. They were bigger than Jon’s arms, but Brock had a ways to go to catch up to Pops in muscles, size and height. Brock got the freckles in the family and with the acne and sad attempts at shaving, most days it looked like his brush of red hair had launched a partially successful missile attack on his face.
I dropped onto my butt on the blanket and bent my knees up so I could rest my arms on them. Wolvie sighed because she knew she so wasn’t getting at a brat anytime soon and flopped on her side against my hip.
“Kaz, just in time,” Jon said. “Pick a hero.”
Jon had more interests than having superheroes fight each other, but this was the one that crossed over to Brocks’ interests, or at least his old interests. Now that Brock was starting tenth grade and had approximately seven hairs on his face, he was trying to give up that kid stuff.
Jon had another version of this game in which you described the heroes going on dates, but no way Brock would play that.
“I’ll be Wolverine,” I said. Because it was a very Wolverine day, in the best ways.
“X-23, Laura Kinney?” he asked.
“No, Logan.”
“You can’t be Logan,” Brock said. “You’re a girl. You’re Laura.”
My brother the traitor. He hadn’t cared when we were little if I was guys as often as I was girls. The whole idea of tenth grade had corrupted him.
“It’s a game,” I insisted, loudly. “I can be whoever I want. I can be a guy.”
“You’re Laura!” Brock came back louder.
“Why can’t Kaz be whoever she wants?” asked a newly familiar voice from behind and above my left shoulder.
I hopped up and pressed my arms to my sides because I already wanted to hug Aisha and that would be so weird when we’d only met today. Jon and Brock also got up, Brock with a more WTF stance: legs wide, arms crossed.
“Aisha moved in across the alley,” I told them. “This is Jon and my brother Brock.”
Everybody said “hey,” with varying levels of enthusiasm. Brock picked up his pop bottle and didn’t quite turn back to face her.
To me, Aisha said, “Laura does have more cutting force per claw, so bear that in mind.”
“What? How?” Jon asked. He ran a hand through his hair and it sifted down ending up looking as great as when it had started. My hair was only an inch longer than Jon’s, light brown instead of black, about as straight, but it never did that—only got frizzy if I touched it, sometimes even when I didn’t.
Aisha rocked back and shrugged in a no-big-deal, this-is-obvious way. She’d put a light jacket over her delicate shirt, a patchwork of orange fabrics, different colors and patterns. It fit close to her shoulders and made them look tiny.
She said, “Two claws instead of three means the total force of the strike is split fifty-fifty, rather than into thirds, so even if her striking power is less than Logan’s, he’d have to hit significantly harder to match her. Plus a lot of their strikes aren’t based in muscle force, they’re based in momentum, so she basically owns.”
“Cool, okay then I am Laura,” I said and sat back down on the blanket because Wolvie had
been gazing up at me like: For real? Are you going to keep standing and make me get up for nothing?
Aisha sat on the other side of Wolvie and ruffled the thick fur by her ears. Wolvie huffed and rested her head on Aisha’s thigh.
Brock sprawled out on a whole third of the blanket, and Jon took the remaining edge. He said, “You’re still never going to win because Quentin will just mind control you.” These days, he aways picked Quentin, who was queer and a super powerful telepath.
“Not with Jean Grey on her team,” Aisha said.
“You’re not Storm?” Jon asked.
“Why would I be Storm?” Aisha pitched the question with full curiosity.
“’Cause she’s African American,” Brock told her, sounding both like he was talking to a little kid and like African American was not a great thing.
“Oh, you’re going with the obvious reason,” Aisha said. “Yeah, we’re both black, but as someone wise once said, ‘It’s a game. I can be whoever I want.’ I’m Jean Grey. Who are you?”
“Apocalypse,” he declared.
“Shoulda picked Franklin Richards,” Aisha told him with a dramatic sigh and a single shake of her head. “Well, that was a short fight. I’m going to get a burger.”
“Try the brats, they’re better,” I said, unable to stop grinning.
“Who the hell is Franklin Richards?” Jon sputtered.
“No way,” Brock insisted. “If I empower Quentin, you two are fucked.”
Aisha tipped her face down and looked up at Brock out of the tops of her eyes, like she was staring over glasses even though she wasn’t wearing any. She raised her eyebrows and kept them up.
“Let me break this down for you. I shield Kaz’s mind and she goes in as a distraction. Sure you can defeat her in a minute, but it’ll take you a minute. And any damage you do, she can heal from. Meanwhile, I use the Phoenix Force to reach back in time and push around a few minor details in the universe, step on a butterfly, whatever. Now Apocalypse is born as a normal human and Quentin is much less of a jerk. Fight’s over before it even started. Should not have messed with the Phoenix.”
“No, what? No!” Jon sputtered.
“Why are you being like this?” Brock asked me.
“I thought the point of the game was to win,” I replied. But I could see the point of the game, today at least, was for them to win. They didn’t think they could lose to me and Aisha. And somehow this was worse than losing to me alone.
“Show me to the brats?” Aisha asked and I pointed to Pops’ grille. She got up and offered me her hand. I let her pull me up because of how her fingers tightened around mine.
As we walked over, Wolvie heeling next to me, I said, “That’s only the third time I’ve won against Jon. You’re amazing.”
“Phoenix is pretty much always the answer,” she said, grinning. “Are you usually Wolverine?”
“In the fights, yeah. But by myself, Beast. He’s super smart but he’s also funny, goofy, especially in the earlier stuff. Are you always Jean?”
“Yep. You know, people underestimate Beast,” Aisha said. “Maybe ’cause he doesn’t look like they think a genius should.”
I introduced Aisha to Pops and we got two brats, lightly charred on one side, perfection. We heaped them with relish, mustard and ketchup. Aisha bit into hers and widened her eyes.
“Oh this is good. It’s like a hotdog that got bitten by a radioactive spice truck.”
“You were going to let me feed you something bad?”
She shrugged and smirked, all cute. I just dug into my brat, radiating inside because she trusted me enough to take my recommendation.
Jon and Brock pounced on us before we even got back to the blanket, coming around either side of the cooler as we got drinks.
“If you didn’t have the Phoenix, we’d totally win,” Jon said to Aisha.
“Yeah, you’re not shit without that,” Brock added. “So we win. We just wait for a time when you don’t have it.”
“You know Jean can call the Phoenix, right?” Aisha said. “I mean, that’s literally how she got it in the first place. She used her powers to draw it to her and save her own life. So, no. You still lose.”
Brock faced me, his cheeks ruddy with anger. “Have fun cleaning up by yourself. Your new pal’s not going to win a lot of friends around here with that attitude.” He stomped off toward the house and Jon headed back to the blanket.
“I’m sorry, my brother’s a pretty bad loser,” I told Aisha.
“Yeah.” From her tone, she didn’t buy that. “Or the obvious reason.”
She’d turned away from me, as if she could see through my house to hers. In this one day, she’d had to deal with the mean neighbor calling her a bitch, Brock and Jon being hyper-aggressive and me clueless about all that.
It took almost a year for me to see how much of the time when Aisha held her ground with a white person, even with as small and smart and funny as she was, they’d come back at her hard. I didn’t understand how in my town, and not only mine, blackness acted as a lightning rod for white people’s anger.
Took me a lot longer to figure out what to do about it.
Chapter Two
August 2016
Flash forward one year of as many hours and minutes as possible with Aisha. School mornings, I’d run over to her house so we could walk to the bus together. Summer mornings we walked the dogs. Aisha lit up telling stories. I made up questions so she’d keep talking. Her bright, melodic voice had a depth that made me feel I could wrap myself up in her words.
Now in two weeks, we’d start ninth grade and I’d been worrying that she’d find someone else she wanted to spend her time with. I had massive questions about how people dated, about my body and what to do with it. But I knew one thing: I wanted Aisha to be my girlfriend.
Being from L.A., she’d been out about liking girls since she was eleven. She’d even had a girlfriend for part of seventh grade. She insisted everyone from California wasn’t automatically cool and that homophobia was still a huge problem in the black community, but looking at her family, I’d never have known. Aisha had spent a month this summer in California with her lesbian aunts—her mom’s sister and her partner—and I’d missed her so much and envied her. I wished for more queer and trans people in my family. Or, like, any.
I decided that the perfect day to ask Aisha to be my girlfriend would be the anniversary of the day we’d met. That morning, I texted her to see when she wanted to walk the dogs. We walked them in the morning all summer because it was cooler for Wolvie and then they weren’t jumpy all day.
She texted back: Can we walk the dogs to downtown? I need coconut water and candy?
Coconut water?
Dad.
Her dad had hooked us on coconut water with much more success than his smoothies. More than half the time his smoothies came out like murky swamp water. Aisha kept telling him to stop putting kale in them, but he wouldn’t listen.
Aisha didn’t wake up as early as I did, especially in the summer when she didn’t have to, so by the time she was up, dressed and eating breakfast, it was nine. Wolvie and I went across the alley and hung out in the back yard, texting Aisha to let Pickles out.
Pickles chased Wolvie around their backyard tree. When they’d run each other out a bit, I put them on their leashes and went inside to see if Aisha was done with breakfast.
Aisha’s mom sat at the kitchen table reading The Plays of Georgia Douglas Jackson, looking like a taller, heavier version of Aisha without the grin. She had a thoughtful face and her hair was in two French braids close to the sides her head, tucked in at the back. That gave her a level of seriousness that couldn’t be cracked, even by her faded blue T-shirt saying: “Books, because reality is overrated.”
“Are you excited for ninth grade to start?” she asked.
Her question reminded me that I had to ask Aisha out soon, like today, and I got sweaty despite the air conditioning.
“I like that we’re the o
ldest students,” I told her. “But you know I’m still going to study, like, two-thirds of how much Aisha does.”
She chuckled. “Who knows, this year it might be three-quarters.”
Aisha ran down the stairs and stopped at the bottom to put on the blue sneakers that went with most of her sundresses. She took Pickles’ leash and went out the front door, me and Wolvie following.
The whole walk there, I tried to figure out the best way to ask. I got her talking about whether sorcery or telepathy was stronger in the Marvel comic book universe, hoping that would give me cover to figure it out. “Do you want to go out?” seemed too blunt. “We’re really good friends, maybe we should date,” sounded more tentative than I felt. I’d about settled on, “Do you want to be my girlfriend?” when I got pulled in to her argument. As with most of our comic book debates, it ended at, “It depends on whether large-scale telepathy can disrupt sorcerous artifacts; we need more research!”
We reached the CVS before I was ready. Anyway, it would be better if we had drinks and chocolate—better yet if we went to the ice cream place after CVS and I could ask her there. I stayed outside with the dogs while Aisha went in to get our candy and coconut water. I watched people go in: a guy older than Pops, bent forward in the shoulders; a girl about my age but way taller; Mrs. Branch from the local library who sometimes ordered graphic novels for us. I said hi to her.
And I watched people come out: two kids, maybe ten, jostling each other and admiring their handfuls of candy bars; a woman with dirty blond hair, wearing cool cargo pants who walked off down the street.
A police car pulled up. Last year I’d have smiled or waved at them. Now I got a thick dread in the center of my chest.
Six weeks ago, in early July, a Saint Paul cop had fatally shot a black man driving home with his girlfriend. Aisha had sent me the link to the news story the day after it happened. I’d scanned the headline fast, registering the words “black man” and “police shooting” and then—a dizzy, sick vortex inside me—“Falcon Heights.” I’d been there. That was near the Minnesota State Fairgrounds. It was less than thirty miles from where we lived, where Aisha lived.
