by Natasha Díaz
Her presence throws me off, and I feel my throat go dry. I look back over at Darnell, who waits in the wings. He pounds his chest lightly with his fist in solidarity. The room is huge, but the bright lights they positioned directly in front of the microphone stand are blinding, so I look into them until they burn my eyes and I can’t see anything but the words in my head.
FAKE NEWS
The headline reads:
Maggots that crawl underfoot never expose the truth.
Evenly browned by solar-powered convectors,
a camouflage of soil rather than homicide.
But it is true.
There’s a murdered man
who lies in an unmarked grave,
dissolving into his surroundings.
Nourishment for the orange trees
that feed young boys.
A cycle which later supports the media’s claims of cannibalism in Africa.
Two-hundred-degree mists of body odor hang low,
not unlike the bum on the subway wearing old jeans and throwback Adidas.
And when the heat wave does not subside,
the trickle of juice falling down his chin
as he runs on top of his father and uncles
makes it all seem worthwhile for a time.
A young girl who runs on the cement
that covers layers of skin
and drinks her Tropicana (which is said to be pulled right off a tree)
on the corner of Rosa Drive,
tapping the beat to a song she can’t remember with her toe…
the definition of carefree,
which is sometimes a synonym for careless.
Unaware she is capitalizing on the anguish
from the coup d’état and the heat wave.
But her house is brick.
Her walls are covered in imitation da Vinci in fake-gold frames,
and her water flows through stainless steel;
each flush does not send a quiver down her back.
And
It’s only when the door locks behind her
that she grasps what was lying in the balance.
The applause rushes toward me, a tornado of recognition.
See, your words mean something, the little voice inside me says, convincing me of my worth and my right to exist as I am.
My phone buzzes: the alarm I set to make sure I intro Darnell in time. But the crowd hasn’t stopped clapping, and their support sends a jolt of courage through my veins. Jesus stands in the center of the cheering crowd.
“Woo woo woo!” he shouts.
With each moment that passes, the attention nourishes me with a power so addicting I can’t rip myself away. LaShawn waves her arm wildly and points at the iPad, but I don’t move.
Darnell doesn’t know about the live stream. Read another one; get your words out there. You’ve stayed silent long enough, the voice inside me urges. He won’t know the difference. He’d be proud of me for being so open with my work, she says, and I agree.
I look over at Darnell where he stands ready for his introduction, but I face forward again, open my notebook, and begin to read a second poem.
* * *
—
When my creative output has reached its maximum, I introduce Darnell. He smiles at me as he walks onto the stage, oblivious to my deception.
Jordan is waiting for me behind the curtain. I must have impressed her.
She takes me by the collar and slams me against the wall.
“What is wrong with you? How could you do that to Darnell? He’s the only one who believed in you in the first place.”
How can she still be mad at me? For once I’m doing what she wants, declaring my public support for our community, and it’s still not enough.
“Jordan, you told me to say something. You said I had to do the work and use my voice.”
She rolls her eyes so far back in her head she looks possessed.
“Sometimes the best way for you to do that is to shut up and make space for someone else—uplift those around you whose voices are silenced.”
“What are you talking about? Darnell’s famous already! He can barely make it a few feet in Harlem without someone stopping him for a selfie.”
“In Harlem, Nevaeh. He usually doesn’t get access to this sort of audience, and you took that away from him. These are your people. You can perform for them whenever you want. This was a space for us to try to be heard.”
“IT ISN’T MY FAULT I WAS BORN LIKE THIS!” I shriek.
“Yeah? Me either, and yet I’m the one who always has to defend my right to be alive.”
Jesus comes around the corner.
“Yo, chill! Y’all are making so much noise,” he says, looking from Jordan to me. “That was great, baby!” he adds.
“All right, break it up.”
Rabbi Sarah pulls us apart.
“Who are you? Get your hands off her!” Jesus yells, pulling me from the other side.
“I’m her—”
“My teacher! My homeroom teacher!” I shout to protect my lies. He can’t find out who I really am, not today.
The screech of metal chairs shifting in the next room fills the air as the audience peers over in our direction. Darnell looks at me from the stage, hurt by the disruption of his performance.
“I have to go. I’ll call you later,” I tell Jesus, and run out the back door.
“Need a ride?” Rabbi Sarah asks between huffs as she chases me onto the street.
It’s six-thirty. I need to get going if I’m going to catch Stevie’s audition.
“I have to get back to Riverdale,” I say with a shake of my head.
Rabbi Sarah ushers me into a Subaru filled with potato-chip bags and soda cans and begins driving west toward the highway. After a while she breaks the silence.
“No offense, but Jordan has a point.”
“What?”
“I think you spend a lot of time complaining about what’s out of your control instead of considering and appreciating what you’ve got,” she says.
Fury burns just under my skin, sweeping over my whole body.
“Do you think I chose to live as the brand ambassador for the Ambiguous Verging on Barely Perceptible Half-Black Club?” I shout. “It takes me fifteen minutes to fill out official forms because I never know which box to check under ‘race,’ so I eventually settle for ‘other.’ She wants me to just ‘be white’? I don’t know how to do that either. I don’t know how to be me.”
“I’m not saying everything is easy for you. I’m just saying you’ve got a family. You’ve got cultures, two of them! A surplus! You’ve got a history. If I had any of that…” She shakes her head in longing.
“I can’t believe you’re taking her side.”
“I’m not taking anyone’s side, but, Nevaeh, you have to learn to be wrong.”
I take a deep breath and hold it to calm my nerves.
“Ya know, Rabbi, you’ve got a lot to say about my life considering you never talk about your own. But that’s not what this is about. It’s because I was born Jewish, isn’t it? You think you get extra points for helping the confused biracial girl find herself or something? You think that changes the truth?”
She slams on the brakes and skids to the curb. A cab honks as it swerves and barely misses her side-view mirror.
“You want to know about my life?” she growls, paralyzing me with fear.
SARAH EDWARD HAS A STORY BUT IT’S HERS TO TELL, ALL RIGHT?
I. The Beginning
Two things have remained the same:
Each day, when she woke up, she hid under the covers and stayed
In the world projected from the backs of her e
yes into her brain,
Where her feet felt like a trampoline
And the treetops looked like ice cream,
And also,
She has always had two first names.
She stayed when the light from the hall spread across makeshift walls.
When the screams from punches softened
And the sound of rusty water streamed from the shower,
That’s when he opened her door, that slippery sour.
A dad-faced demon, a gin-soaked creep.
She stayed and she stayed,
Because when the door closed behind him, it remained closed for hours.
II. The First Half of the Middle
There isn’t much to say
Except
Winter in New York City
Is hard.
Especially if you are living on the street.
Especially,
Alone.
III. The Second Half of the Middle
Why is it that men can torment us,
But also get to be the superheroes who save our lives?
His smile was the first she had seen in a while.
As was the warm food.
But he didn’t push.
Her life was a fight
(He could tell).
So he would just visit
Before day turned to night.
When her guard wall shattered onto the pavement through crooked tooth cackles,
When her shoulders relaxed from rock tight.
There wasn’t much, but he did what he could.
He gave her a book that read from right to left, not left to right.
IV. The End of the Middle
Trust began to exist like an equator, measured in the tufts of his sparse white hair.
From existence sprouted possibility,
A word that always seemed fake or cruel or just out of reach.
And then she was a woman.
But when she found him again he was so old he was barely a whisper,
Which she trapped in her ears to keep
As he gave her what he had:
His smile,
A prayer,
And another first name,
Ariel.
V. Now
In Hebrew
Ariel means “God’s lion.”
And lions do more than rule.
They roar.
When she finishes her story, I get out of the car. There are no words left to say, and the acrid taste of shame on my tongue makes me worry I might get sick if I try to speak. Rabbi Sarah drives away as soon as I shut the door behind me. On the sidewalk, I breathe in and out, gulping up the remnants of hate and fear and sorrow she left behind. I try my best to hold on to them for her, to give her momentary peace before they break free and follow her, unrelenting and self-serving, the way hate and fear and sorrow always are.
* * *
—
By the time I get a car that’s willing to go to the Bronx, it is peak rush hour traffic, which is further delayed by a car accident. It’s not until 8:15 that I run into the fortress that is Fort Hilten. Determined not to let my disastrous evening ruin Stevie’s, I decide to play it like I made it in time, because people are only now beginning to stream out of the building and into the night. I must have just missed the end.
I make my way through the exiting crowd and those milling around in groups until I find Stevie holding a giant gold disc attached to a ribbon in one hand and a bouquet in the other.
He did it. He won.
“CONGRATS!” I jump on him and scream and cheer and make a scene, but he remains still in my arms. “Let’s celebrate! Are you hungry? My treat.”
I grab his hand to drag him away, but it falls limply back to his side. Some jocks from our school, probably basketball or soccer players, pat Stevie on the back.
“Yo, you killed it, bro! There’s a free crib in one of these Hilten herbs spots. They’ve got booze and we’ve got a blunt.”
Stevie moves toward them, brushing past me without a second thought.
“Stevie?”
I run after him. Stevie stops, blank and motionless. I take him by the shoulders and stare directly into his empty eyes.
“I know your mom would have been proud of you. She is proud of you.”
Stevie smacks my hands with the flowers.
“Don’t you dare talk about her,” he growls. “You are a liar. You didn’t leave in time to see me dance.” He holds his phone up. The video of my live stream plays.
“Stevie—” I say, but he walks away.
He heads in the same direction as the jocks, or maybe home, just anywhere away from me.
Chapter 31
Stevie hasn’t spoken to me in weeks. Not even a glance.
No one has. Rabbi Sarah stopped scheduling our meetings, and Jordan gives me nothing but death glares. Janae smiles or nods whenever her sister can’t see her, but otherwise, I’m on my own.
Last week, I walked into the library and found Stevie working. Instinctively, my body moved toward his table, but he looked up from his book and stared right through me. Now invisible to the one person who has never let me feel small, I have begun to tiptoe around the school, digging my nails into my sore and bloodied palms to convince myself that I haven’t really disappeared.
Today, I decide to do something about it, so I sneak out of history class and post up in front his last class. I position myself to stuff my last hope for forgiveness into his hand when he walks out. In my letter, I beg Stevie to give me a chance to explain and apologize in person. I tell him I’m proud of him and that I miss him. I tell him I’ll be in our spot outside for lunch tomorrow, waiting and hoping he’ll be there too.
Then I run home and count the hours until midnight, when I officially turn sixteen.
* * *
—
Jesus shows up at my doorstep in the morning with roses and takes me to get doughnuts at the new spot, Fill-er-Up, that opened on 125th and 5th Avenue. They only make three flavors a day, and you get to choose your filling, fruit or cream, as you see fit. It’s the type of artisanal place that would normally have a two-hour wait, but one of Jesus’s boys, Brian, works the early shift before his classes at City College and he lets us in before they open.
Jesus changes into the official uniform and hairnet in the staff room in the back to give me the full experience. Brian supervises as he makes me six doughnuts: two chocolate with matcha cream filling, two banana with chocolate ganache filling, and two almond with blackberry filling. After the pastries are made, Jesus sneaks us into the staff room so we can drink each other up like water after a drought.
Did you know,
when Jesus licks chocolate off your fingers,
you can feel it in your toes?
Brian eventually knocked on the door and told us we needed to bounce because he had to open the shop, so Jesus changed back into his clothes quickly before we snuck out the side door and slipped past the Columbia students whining about how long the line was out front.
“Have a great birthday day,” Jesus tells me.
His fingers, sticky with sugar and my ChapStick, run up and down my lower back under my shirt and give me the chills, distracting me from the anxiety that Stevie won’t show today.
“He’ll be there, baby. No te preocupes.” Jesus opens the door for me as a car pulls up, and I wonder if my psychic abilities have been transferred to him. “Call me later, boo.”
“You live here?” my driver asks me when I get into the car. I wiggle my toes, unsure if the tingling will ever go away or if this a permanent side effect of having Jesus as my boyfriend.
“Hmm?…Oh, yeah,” I respond.
“How ca
n that be? You’re too pretty to live in Harlem,” he says, in a playful tone that makes me clutch my keys and put one between each knuckle, the way Janae showed me when some guys followed us home after this month’s open mic.
I put my headphones on to drown him and the whole world out on the ride to school. First period is almost over when I arrive, so I decide to skip the rest of my classes until lunch as a birthday present to myself.
Today is one of those perfect days you always hope your birthday will fall on. Everyone sits outside at lunch, and even our spot, as far away from the main campus as it is, is overcrowded. I weave through the clusters of people lounging in the sun, searching for Stevie, and finally spot him lying on the grass, propped up on his elbows with his face to the sun.
He showed up.
I move faster, ready to make amends and enjoy my birthday with my best friend. But Abe cuts me off and plops himself down right where I was about to sit. Stevie looks up, his hand blocking the sun, but it’s Abe who speaks.
“Hey, Nevaeh! Wanna join? I grabbed extra fries because the Steve machine is always hungry,” he says, his rank breath hitting me in the face like a military tank.
“Stevie, can I talk to you…over here?” I ask, pointing to a patch of grass just a few feet away.
“Whatever you have to say, you can say in front of Abe,” Stevie responds, popping a fry into his mouth.
His words slash me like a million simultaneous paper cuts, all small, superficial wounds but surprisingly painful.
My pride is hurt, but so is his, so I suck it up and plead with everything I have.
“Stevie, I’m sorry I missed your performance. I tried to be there. I really did. But some stuff went down, and there was traffic. You can’t hate me forever. You’re my best friend. I need you.”
A vein I have never seen before protrudes from his forehead, pulsating and red, warning me to move with caution and care. He stands and moves toward me, propelled by fury.
