Tyler Johnson Was Here

by Jay Coles

  We end up talking about nothing, about bullshit, until G-mo tells us he’s got something to say.

  “Yeah? What’s up?” I go.

  He takes a breath. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole college thing lately.”

  “Uh-huh?” me and Ivy say.

  “I think I’m going to apply to UCLA. It’s too late for the fall. So maybe for the spring.”

  “That’s what’s up, bro,” Ivy says, fist-bumping him.

  “You’re a goddamn brilliant bastard,” I tell him. “You’re going to get in.”

  “You know, I’m looking into some local community colleges,” Ivy says. “I really want to get into engineering.”

  I can’t help but smile right now.

  “That’s so cool, yo,” G-mo says, leaning back into the sand and dirt surrounding the court.

  “Yeah, maybe I’ll get my dream job with NASA or something. Who knows?” Ivy continues, gesturing with her hands to show the potentially endless possibilities. G-mo gives her dap.

  There’s a short pause. “I applied to Howard,” I tell them, and they all look at me with surprise.

  “So you’re not applying to MIT anymore?” G-mo asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Having second thoughts?” Faith asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I realized I was only interested in going to MIT because all my life in school I was taught that MIT and other really prestigious, mostly white schools meant success. It meant acceptance. It meant that you were finally somebody in the world. When Dodson didn’t even believe in me and said I had no chance of getting into MIT, I wanted to do any-and everything to prove him wrong.” I stop to take a breath and look up at the pale, milky-blue sky. “I’ve spent too much time wondering what people think of me and spent so long trying to look good enough for Dodson, for white people, for Mama, for everyone except myself. And I think…” I look down at my feet. “I think it’s my time to finally be who I am, who I want to be.”

  There’s a moment of silence, except for the birds chirping in the trees in the distance.

  “Man,” G-mo says interrupting the quiet. “I feel you.”

  My eyes meet his and he nods at me.

  We play one more game, changing up the teams, and then Faith drives us to get dinner at Tyler’s favorite chicken and ribs joint, and I try not to hurt, even though I probably always will.

  • 31 •

  The hateful-hot sun beams down like it’s a UFO that’s claiming me as its newest abductee. And I shield my face as best I can with my hand, but it doesn’t seem to work. In the car, Faith chooses just the right station, landing on Tupac’s “How Do U Want It.” And my mind clears steadily.

  And suddenly, all I can think about, all that is running through my mind, is firsts. My first time hearing the sound of a gun, my first time feeling loss, my first time meeting my best friends, my first time without a brother, my first time seeing bigotry, my first time being told I was not good enough, my first time being told that I was—and am—good enough, my first kiss, my first boner, my first love. And in my thoughts, I go over all the other firsts I’ll get to experience with Faith.

  We go over to her place for some alone time, and she puts on some music. When she sits down, she kisses me nice and quick on the lips. Her lips are soft—so soft, like touching cotton candy or like falling face-first on a mound of powdery snow. It’s pretty fucking magical.

  I kiss her mouth, her eyelids, her eyebrows, her forehead, her neck, her ears, and even her breasts through the fabric of her cheetah-print shirt. We roll down the couch and flip over. I’m on top, then she is on top, and then we flip again, and we are both on our sides, and this couch is so small and is ruining things for me. She darts up, squeezing my hand. “Wanna go to my bedroom? There’s a lot more space in there.”

  “Yeah,” I say without hesitation, following her.

  We fall into the bed, and she pushes the covers to the side.

  “You’re the greatest,” she says between kisses. “I like you so much.”

  “And I really, really, really like you back,” I say to her, sucking on her bottom lip.

  “Let’s take our clothes off,” she suggests.

  And I have a two-second crisis with myself. I’ve never done this before. And I wonder if she knows.

  “Sure, we can,” I say, my mouth still so close to hers.

  This is going to be awkward. I don’t know what to do, and she’s about to find out. Do I take my own clothes off? Or hers? I think she realizes now that I’m a fucking amateur. And so we end up doing a little bit of both—taking each other’s clothes off, and our own.

  In seconds, our skin is touching, bare bodies showing, chests heaving, and heat waving in between us. We’re pressed so close together I damn near need a condom.

  Then we are all hands and moans, and everything feels electrically charged, raging at full speed. She doesn’t care where her hands go, and neither do I.

  She reaches into a box underneath her bed and comes up with a condom. “Just to be on the safe side,” she says, “put this on.”

  I bite open the package and slip it on after reading the back of it for directions.

  “Are you sure?” I ask her.

  She smiles and nods. “Yeah.”

  Everything picks up to full speed.

  Our bodies touch and collide.

  And we are one.

  Feeling each other through and through.

  I kiss her on the neck, and she lets out a moan that sends me kissing her. I look at her face and her expression is just fucking… everything, her eyes closed and her teeth making imprints on her bottom lip. And suddenly, I can almost feel all the layers that I have grown over my own purity stripping away. I feel them peel faster, the faster things move, the further things go.

  • 32 •

  Two more weeks slide past, and we’re suddenly only days away from the trial. They’re going to have me and other people testify. I just hope that the jury listens and does the right thing.

  Mama, still smelling like hard work and cigarette smoke, cleans out Tyler’s room. The pain on her face causes me an intolerable amount of agony, and it takes a herculean effort to blink away the tears when she asks for my help. We take down his posters and put them in a box. We clean out his dresser drawers and nightstand, pulling out old sports magazines, a couple of condoms, a jar of Vaseline, and an application to community college that’s half filled out, and this gets Mama to start crying. We strip the bed down and put the comforter, sheets, and pillowcases in a laundry basket for washing, eventually for slipping into the attic with other lost things.

  “It still doesn’t feel real,” Mama says. “It feels like at any moment, he’ll be coming home.”

  I blink, piling up all of his sports collection cards from a little stool in the corner of the room. I reach underneath the stool, and hidden there is a piece of paper held up by tape. It takes a few seconds, but I carefully peel back all the tape to see what it is.

  “I try to make myself think that he’ll be stumbling through the door asking me to make him a meal any day.”

  “Yeah,” I say, “I feel that sometimes, too.” I notice that I can talk about him, finally, without instantly losing my breath, or bursting into tears or flames.

  “That’s right,” she says, folding up pairs of his socks and tossing them in the same laundry basket. “It helps me to think about it that way. I just wish…” Her voice trails off for a moment, and when I turn around, I see she has her hands placed against the wall. “I wish people knew who he really was. A boy with a big heart.”

  I unfold the paper and read it to myself. It’s a letter. It’s addressed to Dad, written in cursive, and in it Tyler tells about how much he’s going to try to be the opposite of him when he grows up, about how much he hates Dad for what he did, about being afraid of Dad, and I have to stop reading, because it pains me to hold on to such a thing.

  And I feel something in my chest. And it wants me to act on it
.

  I rip the letter to pieces and toss them in the trash bin, trying my best to forget that the letter ever happened, ’cause it makes me feel kind of shitty for not listening.

  Tyler wrote Dad, and I wasn’t alone.

  Mama keeps on keeping on with picking apart his room, until it’s nothingness, until it’s bare, until all that is left is a mattress and a bed frame and a box in the corner filled with all the tangible things we’ll remember about him.

  Tyler was like our dad in many ways. He was hardheaded. He was stubborn. He was selfish. He was all of these most of the time. Tyler was a good kid, with dreams and goals for the future. Tyler was not a monster. And man, goddamn, it’s so fucking sad to me how none of this mattered seconds before he was shot.

  Tyler once looked up to Dad. Tyler looked up to me, and it’s finally hitting me that I was too stupid to notice. And now, more than ever, I’m looking forward to the trial, where I’ll let the world know just how good of a kid and brother he was.

  At dinnertime, Mama has everyone over for a big feast before the school year ends, using money she’s gotten from donations after Tyler’s death. She sets up an extra seat for Tyler and everything. She even scrapes up enough money to buy streamers and balloons, so it really looks like a legit celebration, like a toast for the survivors of the hood or something, and as much as I feel sick, I go with it.

  She makes fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and corn on the cob. There’s something special about all of this—sitting here with her, Faith, G-mo, Ivy. I’m mended for a while.

  At night, after everyone leaves, I toss and turn in bed. That’s the new normal for me. I can’t sleep, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a doctor diagnosed me with insomnia for a lifetime. Some nights, I can’t sleep because I transport myself in the memories of Tyler. Sometimes, it’s like I hear him dribbling a basketball outside my window, shouting about how he’s going to play for the Warriors alongside Steph Curry, dribbling like he’s a mallet and the earth is a bass drum.

  Tyler is gone, but the memories are not. And I’m okay with staying wide awake just to relive them.

  • 33 •

  School has finally let out, which means we’ve got seventy-something days to enjoy ourselves before college, and we’re just days from graduation. Auntie Nicola used to say that with graduation comes the real world, a handful of babies, and a string of life crises.

  And this means I have weeks, no, maybe days to hear back about an admissions decision from Howard.

  Ivy calls and tells me that she was accepted into all four colleges she applied to, and it’s just a matter of her committing to one. She doesn’t want to stray too far from Candace, her new girlfriend, who’s already enrolled in a local beauty school.

  And even G-mo tells me that he put in his application to UCLA and is pending late admission. It turns out the girl he’s talking to has some sort of connection with the head honcho over there, like an aunt or uncle or cousin or something, and his chances of getting in have, like, doubled.

  Faith is going to transfer to an art school in New York with a full-ride scholarship, which she earned by submitting one of her completely original and beautiful magazine collages. I promise her that I’ll come to visit. I’m going to find a way to make this happen. Maybe after the trial, I’ll be able to think a bit straighter.

  All this to say: My two best friends, and my girlfriend, have committed to their futures, made promises to their dreams, and I still feel stuck with no plan A, just a plan B titled Hood Life Forever weighing down on my shoulders.

  My birthday is coming up soon, and I make it a thing to let everyone know that I will not celebrate it. I can’t. It’s not a happy day like it used to be. It’s more of a day of mourning—a day where we’ll just gather to grieve and cry over a marble cake. Knowing that this will be a year of many firsts without the other half of the equation has me numb with grief.

  I’ve got over five hundred followers on Tumblr now and a shit-ton of reblogs, and according to G-mo, who suddenly claims to be an expert on Tumblr, this is big—like, really big. More people are listening. And every day, the like count on Facebook climbs higher and higher. We’re at nine thousand right now.

  I’m trying to sort out which photo to upload to all the pages next. I try to keep them synchronized and updated. Yesterday, I discovered some pictures of the protest, so I just reposted them. My goal has been to post something to remember him daily.

  I can’t decide if I want to post this photo of Tyler and me when we were four, the two of us sitting on Mama’s and Dad’s laps in some strip mall, the Easter bunny making the peace sign behind us—the two of us looking absolutely terrified by the giant rabbit. Tyler would wrestle me to the ground if he ever knew I was thinking about posting this. Wherever he is, I know he’s looking down on me, cussing me out under his breath. But probably with a smile, too.

  It still takes effort to get up out of bed.

  Some days, when I do, I just stare at the blackness I see in the mirror hanging on my closet door. I tell myself that I love this skin, that I’ve always loved my blackness, that if the world doesn’t love me, I will love myself for the both of us. After reminding myself that I matter, that I always mattered, that Tyler mattered and still does, I make a promise to myself. I promise that I’ll never be silent about things that matter, that I’ll keep on saying his name for the rest of my days.

  Blasting “I Got 5 On It” by Luniz on my phone and eating an Oatmeal Creme Pie, I walk outside to check the mail. Today’s a nice day, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to be miserably rainy at all, which goes against everything my weather app promised.

  One whiff of the air and I can tell somebody’s having a cookout somewhere nearby. I don’t know exactly where it’s coming from, but it smells good as hell. I can even hear the faint bass of music in the distance over my own.

  I pull three envelopes from the mailbox. One of them is addressed to me. It’s from Howard. A gasp slips out of me, and I damn near do the Dougie in the middle of the street. I’m not going to open it right now. I’m going to go inside first and show Mama.

  I’m cat daddying all the way up the driveway.

  “Mama!” I shout, bursting through the door.

  The thump of my heart gets even louder when I set foot in the living room, where she’s cleaning up—vacuum going, bleach water sitting in a bucket, gospel music blaring and everything.

  “Look, look, look!” I shout to her, waving the envelope in her face.

  Her eyes get wide. She takes off her yellow cleaning gloves and hugs me. “Open it, open it,” she says, damn near jumping up and down for me.

  I don’t even care about being all neat. I rip the shit out of the envelope and pull out a letter. At the top it says: CONGRATULATIONS! ADMITTED! And I don’t even catch myself crying until Mama’s wiping my tears for me.

  She reads the letter out loud, then says, “I’m so proud of you.” She steps back and just smiles at me, like she’s finally scraped up a little happiness.

  I hug her again and everything feels perfect.

  Wednesday comes, and I’m in the passenger seat in the car with Mama, and we’re spending all of today together at her request. She’s driving us to some burger place she found by her job. I stare out the window at the rapidly passing scenery, jamming to an oldie, “Doo Wop (That Thing)” by Lauryn Hill, on the radio. I guess all of this is to ease our nerves about the grand jury trial happening in a matter of days. Just days now. Man, it’s so close. I try not to think about the trial, because I know that in the end, it doesn’t matter what the jury decides. Tyler’s life still mattered, even if they can’t see it for themselves.

  When we pull up to a little burger shack with an orange sign in front of the door that says IN-N-OUT BURGER, Mama cuts the engine, and the music cuts off right at the chorus, leaving an awkward silence.

  Inside the burger joint, the air smells like onions, and it’s fairly empty, so all the staff members are looking at us. Mama orders a p
lain cheeseburger, and I get the double-double.

  We both eat slowly once we choose a table. I can tell she wants to talk by how she watches me take every bite. That’s a thing about her I’ve picked up over the years.

  “How’s your food?” I ask.

  “Pretty good,” she says, dipping fries in ketchup.

  “Yeah.” I nod, going in for my fries now.

  There’s a beat before she clears her throat. She pushes a piece of hair away from her face and pins it back into her short ponytail. “I’ve been thinking about scattering Tyler’s ashes,” she says, looking down at her food. “Nicola said it’s a good thing, too.”

  What. The. Hell?

  Faintly, very faintly, I let out a breath. I don’t know whether to be mad or not, but I’m mad and sad and hurt all at once. All I say back is “Why?”

  It looks like she wants to scream or cry or both. “I just thought maybe it would be good for us.”

  “Us?” I question.

  “You and me. Tyler, too,” she responds. “I don’t think it’s right for me to be holding on to him forever, baby.” She wipes her mouth with a napkin. “I’ve been thinking about some good places to do it at. Like maybe a river or ocean or something. Somewhere that it feels right.”

  I just nod and finish up my food, trying to process everything. I think about it on the way back home, think about it all night. When I go to sleep, I end up dreaming about it, too.

  • 34 •

  Marvin. Marvin!” Mama’s standing over me, trying to wake me up. My eyelids are low, but I blink them to focus. “It’s time to get up, baby. We got somewhere to be.” It’s Saturday and Mama’s talking about how she found the perfect place to scatter Tyler’s ashes.

  I get out of bed, go pee, brush my teeth, and then change into some clean clothes—nothing too fancy. Something comfortable. It’s going to be pretty hot today, so I choose some shorts and a shirt.