by Natasha Díaz
I open my palm to find a crumpled piece of paper that reads Just in case. Sarah 718-666–6666.
Suddenly, Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” starts to play and Stevie pops out from behind a parked car.
He’s wearing a black tracksuit and begins to do a spot-on performance of the choreography from the video. The portable speaker he brought with him is pretty powerful, and neighbors start to come outside to see what the commotion is about. Stevie locks eyes with Jordan immediately, despite how utterly mortified she looks.
Janae sits on the railing of the stoop with her iPhone on its tripod, capturing the performance and blocking Jordan from running back inside the house in embarrassment. At the chorus, Stevie rips the tracksuit off to reveal a leotard exactly like the one Queen B wears in the music video, and the growing crowd goes wild.
By the last verse, there are at least forty people out here whooping every time he lands a move or adds a bit of flamboyance to his hip rolls. He pulls a bouquet out of nowhere and points to Jordan with such power that the crowd immediately parts like the Red Sea. With a cleared path, he brings it home with a forward flip, but not before flinging the flowers in Jordan’s direction.
We all watch the flowers fly through the air and tumble toward her in slow motion, but just as they begin to descend, a gust of wind smashes them down directly into her face. She falls backward, but Zeke holds his hand out to catch her like a leaf in the wind. It sounds like everyone in the whole neighborhood cheers.
Janae walks over to Stevie, who hands her a wad of folded bills.
“Half up front, half when I get the edited cut? Deadline for the audition is end of next week.”
Janae grabs the money and winks. “I’ll have it to you by Wednesday,” she says.
“How could you?” Jordan hisses, swiping at Janae’s phone like a feral cat.
“You ready to pay me back for that college trip?” Janae retorts, simultaneously evading her sister’s reach and shutting her down.
Stevie, who is covered in sweat and still catching his breath, walks toward Jordan.
“I’ll get you more if the petals got messed up—”
Jordan shoots Stevie a steel-cutter glare that stops him in his tracks. If she could have any sort of superpower, I am one hundred percent positive she would choose to shoot fire from her eyes so she could burn a hole in his chest, rip his heart out, throw it to the ground, and stomp on it.
“Don’t ever come near me again.” Jordan’s body shakes as she walks back into the house.
Stevie drops to the curb, where I plop myself down next to him and throw my arm around his shoulder.
“I’ve been where you are. She comes off harsh. Just give it time. Why didn’t you tell me you were doing this?” I ask, salty that Janae was more in the loop with my best friend than I am.
“I tried, B, but you’ve been preoccupied,” he says with a sadness so deep I feel it radiate into my heart.
“Do you wanna come in?” I ask in an attempt to make up for my negligence.
“You don’t wanna go in there.” Janae nods to the doorway, where Jordan is crying into Zeke’s neck. She hands me my coat. “You’re both coming with me.”
Chapter 22
“I could have called us a car,” Stevie whines through chattering teeth.
“Who told you to come out here without a proper jacket?” Janae asks. “You’re in the city now. That means you walk or take public transportation. No more of this bougie car-app mess.”
She stops in front of a building with windows that have been painted white and sport AVAILABLE FOR RENT signs.
“Where are we?” Stevie asks.
“You’ll see,” Janae says as she searches through her bag.
People walk past us and into the space, hurrying to avoid the chilly evening. Janae’s forehead scrunches so lines appear between her full, perfectly arched brows.
“What in the hell?” She pulls out a marble-cover notebook with my name on it.
“Hey!”
I grab the notebook and look more closely at the purse—it’s mine.
“Damn, relax. I must have grabbed the wrong bag trying to get us out of there before all hell broke loose.” She takes the bag off her shoulder and hands it to me with a look of annoyance as she flips the long ombre twists on her head from one shoulder to the other. “You’re welcome.”
Inside, a bunch of desks and tables have been pushed to the perimeter of the room, leaving rows of mismatched chairs in the center. The seats are filled with young people chatting and drinking water from small plastic cups.
Darnell, the youth pastor from church, stands by the snack table, greeting everyone.
“It’s good to see you, Nevaeh.” He takes my hand in his and then looks past me. “Janae,” he says with a grin before he continues the welcome train.
We settle into one of the back rows so Janae can set up her tripod to film whatever this is—must be another gig she’s picked up to add to her portfolio.
“Welcome!” Darnell bows to his audience. “Is there anything anyone wants to say before we get started?”
Someone stands to speak. “The courts by Marcus Garvey Park need to be repaved, and the hoops need to be replaced. My pops is holding a town hall next Friday to ask district officials to allocate necessary funds for the repairs. The white developers comin’ in and buyin’ up all the buildings are saying the basketball courts should be demolished—they say it’s attracting drug dealers and gangs that prevent buyers—but really we’re just chillin’ there, cuz we can’t play on it in the state it’s in.”
The lights are dim, but all I need to hear is his voice and my heart slams against my chest like a Ping-Pong ball. It’s Jesus.
“We need y’all to come out and support us if we’re going to save it. They’re pushing us out and raising the rent, but this is our hood, and we need to show them that we’re not backing down.”
I slide down in my seat a little, ashamed that my appearance automatically associates me with anyone responsible for the gentrification of this neighborhood I have begun to love.
“Thank you, brother. We’ll be there,” Darnell says as he looks around for any other updates, but no one else raises their hand. “All right, let’s open the floor. Zadie, you wanna start us off?”
Everyone settles into their seat as a singer/songwriter who looks like Zoë Kravitz and sounds like Eartha Kitt leads the group in a rousing rendition of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the Black national anthem. I’m embarrassed that I don’t know the verses, so I do my best to mouth along with the words.
A young man walks up to the stage next and hands out blindfolds to the audience. Once our eyes have been covered, he begins to do impersonations of different celebrity voices, which we yell out from the audience once we have identified them. Overall, he is pretty impressive. His Barack Obama would give Jordan Peele a run for his money, but his Chris Rock could use a little work.
After his set, a woman rushes into our row. In her haste, she steps on my foot.
“Sorry!” Jordan whispers with sincerity, until our eyes meet and she turns ice cold.
“Sit down!” someone hisses from the row behind us, so she keeps scooting in to the farthest seat from me, on the other side of the room.
After each performance, the group gives constructive feedback and encouragement. Even the young kid who stumbles over his freestyle gets a standing ovation halfway through. “You got this!” “Chin up, young blood!” they shout, encouraging him to start over and find his footing.
Finally, Darnell heads up to the mic. His blazer is open now and reveals a T-shirt that reads
SOJOURNER &
HARRIET &
IDA &
ROSA &
SHIRLEY &
CORETTA &
ANGELA &
ASSATA
Slowly, everyone in the room starts to hush, drawn to his smile and intense eyes. Just as he’s got the room’s attention and the last whispers are down to a murmur, he begins:
“I like them buttered and brown,
Heat-kissed without so much as a hint of smoke.
Dark, thick, and sticky,
Spilling over crevices that fold into each other.
Perfection materialized in layers too complex to accurately describe,
The taste that taught me desire.
Pancakes.
Step one: Assemble ingredients.
Reach up and take the last five dollars from the big jar that lives on top of the fridge,
Twelve quarters, nineteen dimes, and ten pennies, to be exact.
Buy Bisquick from the new supermarket that swallowed the twenty-four-hour bodega
where my mama used my birthday as lottery numbers and the cat was an employee with benefits and OT,
Where the tabs reached back to our grandfathers’ graves
And were expected to be paid with nothing more than a flash of gracious teeth
and the change in your pocket.
Smelling like aunties and macerated sunflower-seed shells and livery cabs and off-duty nurses.
Step two: Whisk the ingredients together, but make sure to leave lumps in the batter,
Misshapen in their truth, because flawless doesn’t actually matter—
This too is just a means to an end.
Whisk until your arm is tense,
Firm and flexed,
Sweaty and shaking,
Like your cousin who does pull-ups on the streetlight at 181st
Next to a fold-up table he chills at to play dominoes and shoot the shit.
Then fold it together,
Raw and beige and familiar,
Smelling like the look of surprise they give me when my words come out in the same vernacular.
Each turn of the whisk a newly aerated batter,
Until it is ready for
Step three: Pour a cupful onto the cast-iron skillet my mama smacked me with the back of her hand for cleaning with soap, undoing generations of seasoning.
Watch the bubbles burst on my stove top the same as yours,
Because science doesn’t discriminate.
Step four: Flip it once and cook until done.
Golden and brown.
Same since the day we arrived.
Slick and crisped by heat and time.
The way your grandmother made them,
Way back in the day when a fridge was just a metal box with an ice cube
And nobody had nothin’
Except for hope.
Except for joy.
Except for this round, imperfect, golden-brown pancake.
Can you taste it?
Smelling like and hunger pains and Christmas mornings
And comfort that for a moment,
Our life is,
is delicious.
His command over the room slowly dissipates, freeing us all from our stupor, and we erupt into a chorus of snapping fingers that transforms the space into a life-size rainmaker.
I feel something I’ve never felt before. A longing. One that draws me up before I even realize what’s happening.
“Nevaeh?”
Darnell’s voice echoes from the microphone and returns me to my immediate surroundings, where I find that I am the lone person standing in the crowd.
“Come on up,” Darnell says with a smile that blinds me, even in this poor lighting.
“B?” Stevie whispers with concern, but I keep moving. If I stop for even one second to think—
What are you doing? the little voice inside me asks.
I don’t know, I respond, grabbing my notebook from my bag.
My stomach is in knots as I walk toward the mic, emboldened by the community and support that surround me and terrified that for the first time in my life I want to step out of the shadows and shine.
The last time I was this nervous was the fourth-grade Black History Month luncheon, when my teacher, a white lady named Cleo who claimed she was “Black on the inside,” forced me and the other Black girl in our class (who was actually Indian) to recite Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech for fifty white parents.
“Hi,” I say to the crowd, but the sound of my own voice makes me grimace and I can feel Jordan’s eyes burning into me. I look and see that my notebook is upside down.
“I’m Heaven,” I hear myself say into the microphone.
Just breathe, the little voice inside me says.
So I turn my notebook around, open it, and exhale.
What I know, I know from my mother’s lips:
That fairy tales end with abandoned ships.
That songs have no time or true melody,
And paintings fade with princesses left out at sea.
The day I was born, I crawled out of her legs,
A mutant or human, two sides to my head.
She sewed up her womb and limped to a mirror.
My weight was my proof, and yet, I was clear.
“You have to be strong, I can’t wait for your color.
Your people will find you,” said my dying mother.
She rocked me to sleep and placed me in a cave,
Asked a bird to watch over and give me a name.
It’s no way to live, such a state of unknown,
To be nothing more than a cloud or shadow.
A ghost with a heart, I walk to the beat.
Food I take from a web or the cracks in the street.
There are no people of mine whose eyes search in dismay.
They look through me to others, ready to claim.
Quiet only has meaning if you’ve known solitude.
“You have to be strong.” Her whisper hangs off the moon.
Low tides bear rock teeth, a grin harsh and jagged,
So I hop on their surface for proof I bleed red.
“The sting—may it last.” I beg to the wind
That the curse will be lifted, forgiven of sin.
To wake is to breathe is to dream of my skin
And a hope that today, I will be colored in.
It isn’t oxygen streaming out of my lungs anymore; it is fire. My insides turn to ashes and are reborn, exactly the way Anita said the magic would feel: lightning and thunder and sunlight all at once. The room must be able to tell, because they send snaps of rain down onto me in support.
“Who are you and what have you done to my best friend?” Stevie runs up and hugs me, excited and in shock. “That was awesome, B! How did you—”
“Lightskin! You got bars!”
Jesus interrupts the moment and my body tenses, but this time, it’s not because of the butterflies. The anxiety creeps up my esophagus as I am reminded of the call to arms Jordan issued to me not so long ago.
Just because you didn’t choose to pass doesn’t mean you don’t have a choice.
“Don’t!” I shout, surprising myself and causing the crowd to turn in our direction. “Just, don’t call me that, okay?”
Everyone around us is still. I feel Jordan listening, even if I have no clue where she is. Jesus tilts his head to the side and holds his chin with his pointer finger and thumb, ruminating on my outburst.
“Whatever you say, Nevaeh,” he responds with a shrug. “Wanna grab something to eat?”
He takes a step in my direction, and I get dizzy from the smell of him.
“Yes!”
The excitement in my face is hard to mask, but it melts when I turn and see Stevie biting his lip, rejected now for the second ti
me this evening.
“Stevie…”
“I’m out,” he says, and pivots on his heel.
I tell myself that if the situation were flipped, Stevie would do the same thing. If Jordan ran into his arms, he would ditch me for a date with her. Still, I get that feeling in my gut that I’ve made a mistake that needs to be fixed at once, but when I turn around to explain, Stevie and his footsteps are gone.
Darnell is surrounded by a crowd of people who ask him for feedback or a photo. He winks in our direction as we leave.
“How do you know Darnell?” Jesus asks me when we step out into the cold.
“Why, you jealous?” I tease, bolder than I have ever been with each moment that passes.
He tickles my rib cage and spins me around, and just like that, his arms pull me close and we are completely intertwined from our lips down to our toes, blanketed by the streetlights and the soft music coming through windows overhead.
A loud grunt greets us from behind, and we break apart to find an older woman making her way down the street with no interest in taking the five extra steps necessary to bypass us. Her face, which seems to wear a permanent scowl, is familiar; she’s one of the Gray Lady Gang from my grandfather’s church.
“Good evening,” I say, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, but she pushes past us, shaking her head. If she had a giant red letter A in her pocket, she’d most definitely pin it to my forehead.
Jesus and I head to Wendy’s, and my stomach growls as we enter. Between my outburst at dinner and Stevie’s romantic flash mob gone awry, I didn’t get to finish my lasagna.
“What?” I ask Jesus, who watches me intently as I line up the sauces to dip my nuggets in one by one. (Honey mustard, barbeque, ranch, and creamy sriracha—basically everything but sweet and sour, which deserves to be retired to the island of nasty condiments. Amen.)
“You eat funny,” Jesus observes with a laugh that makes my insides rumble and my face turn pink.
“No I don’t!”
He pulls a sauce out of the order and places it at the end, halfway through a dip cycle, messing up my rhythm.
“All right, fine!” I concede as I move the ranch back to its rightful spot in line.
He leans over to take a bite of the nugget in my hand, and his smooth teeth brush against my fingertip.
