Heads of the Colored People

by Nafissa Thompson-Spires

  On the bright side, if the suicide attempt failed and she had to have her stomach pumped, she would lose at least ten pounds, and that would be better than last year’s colonic, the pictures of which had elicited an awkward silence from her online friends. Weight loss would make for a great status update.

  Razor wounds were better, she decided, because even though there would be blood, she’d pass out before she saw much of it, and if she didn’t die, she could take pictures of the scars. Actually, scarring might be much better than attempted or completed suicide because there’d be questions to answer, like “What happened? Who did that to you? Are you okay? Do you need help with anything? You didn’t do that to yourself, did you?” She committed to becoming a cutter for an hour or so, like Ellie on Degrassi, and to make a few marks up one arm and then post a picture. She eyed her marmalade cat, Sherman, sitting on the window’s lily-print cushion. The cuts would have to be deep enough so they wouldn’t look like mere scratches but not so deep as to draw too much blood.

  The first tiny cut hurt way more than it looked like it did when Ellie tried it, and Jilly was hungry. She put the knife back in its pouch, again, licked at her wrist—though there was no blood, only a superficial abrasion—rifled through the pantry, and finding nothing to snack on, sat back on the couch.

  She had read somewhere, a book in Psychology 101 or something, that people who told everyone they were going to do it were just asking for permission, but she didn’t need or want permission.

  • • •

  The thing about Jilly—and this is something she’d feared about her life from adolescence onward—was that there was no backstory. Nothing exciting or terrible had ever happened to her, and if there was any oppression for her to overcome, it only grazed her but never lingered. She had been followed in posh boutiques many times by Asian and white women and twice by black women, but those were the only examples of racism she could remember experiencing. She knew that she should feel discontentment, connected to a large chain of disenfranchisement or systemic persecution—it’s not that black death and the news of the world didn’t touch her spirit—but she was somewhat ashamed to say, in therapy or publicly, that the bulk of her discontentment came from having very little about which to be discontented. Her mother was pushy but stable, her father claimed her, her friends were attentive if tired. It was she who broke up with her boyfriend, not the other way around, and they were still Facebook friends. She got a dozen “Are you okay?” direct messages after she changed her status from “in a relationship” to “single.” And she had a full network of supportive people, however superficial most of their interactions were. The support she lacked felt more fundamental, and she didn’t know where to seek it.

  The picture Jilly had posted the day before had gotten only four likes and two comments: “HOTT,” from an acne-prone creep she’d known in high school; and “your welcome” when she replied to his post. Perhaps that was what set her off, not disregard for the difference between “you’re” and “your,” but the shallow comments. She thought the picture, which she’d taken in her bathroom mirror from her camera phone, warranted a better response, at very least because of the interesting angle from which she took it. The sideways shot showed her, fingers making a peace sign, lips making a fish face, in a cream-colored skirt that stopped at the upper thigh and offset her smooth brown skin, and a purple bandeau top that might or might not have been half of a bikini.

  She put her laptop down and pulled her knees toward herself when an idea came to her. It was Thursday, after all. She posted “TBT” and a link to a YouTube video of “Dead and Gone,” to feel out the traffic, then waited for the notifications to start, for the thumbs to erect small monuments.

  Within twenty minutes, a red square announced fourteen likes, no comments. She didn’t know how to read this. Were they saying they wanted her dead and gone or that they liked TI, or Justin Timberlake?

  She waited ten minutes and tried a second video, then another, posting from her laptop. These things worked best in a quick succession that made them seem stream of consciousness. “Another one: ‘Give Up the Ghost’ by Immature, feat. Crazy Bone.”

  “Oh and can’t forget Bone Thugs: ‘Crossroads.’ ”

  Jilly could boast of few superlatives that might be included in her obituary. In eighth grade, she was voted Most Photogenic by her peers and earned a quarter-page feature in the school yearbook. But she could never regain that former glory. By high school, she was one of four Prettiest Girls, and two of them were thicker than she was, and she wasn’t even the only black girl to win the honor. An undergrad boyfriend said she was the best kisser he’d ever had, but he cheated on her. A stranger at the mall said her feet were “the most adorable feet I’ve ever seen.” She wasn’t sure if the compliments of a creeper even counted. What did she have to show for her life, other than the near perfections of her appearance?

  She did actually feel depressed now, thinking about it, dying and all. No one would associate her with Sylvia Plath. She wouldn’t look like the Lady of Shalott with her new weave framing her face as she lay on her back in a boat, or even Anne of Green Gables as the Lady of Shalott or even Megan Follows as Anne of Green Gables as the Lady of Shalott, because her natural hair wasn’t even red, and anyway, she’d read that when black women died it wasn’t glamorous, and people didn’t make metonymic literary connections about them, even to lynching—as they did for black men; black women’s bodies just died, out of frame, and that made her sadder.

  The laptop pinged. Another notification.

  “Love this song! You’re on a roll today, girl.”

  • • •

  If Jilly were to run a content analysis of the style and type of posts that got the most responses, it would emerge that faux Ebonics always ranked high, especially up until the past year or so: “Peep this foos.” A picture of herself wearing red oversize Sally Jessy Raphael glasses and making a fish face was one of her all-time highs, with 384 likes and 73 comments; maybe yesterday’s reenactment photo, in the white skirt and purple bandeau, was just played out. Current events worked, if they were interesting, deep stories she’d seen on Yahoo News about medicines that actually made you sicker or soy milk filled with estrogenic compounds and neurotoxic proteins. Posts about television were even better: “Kerry Washington is SO gorgeous. I want that outfit . . . and that one. Go, Shonda!” Instant fifty-six likes. Cat videos outperformed babies, which followed closely behind, but delicate posts about family and #blessings could be tricky, because people didn’t want to see how happy you were too often, even if you were making it all up.

  • • •

  Jilly returned to the kitchen and scanned the refrigerator. Several of her friends were on antidepressants and had attempted suicide before, and they got a lot of positive responses for their candor. Jilly had asked her third therapist for antidepressants twice, but she said, “No, Jilly, I’m still not that kind of doctor. And you aren’t depressed, just narcissistic, and there are, so far, no medications for that.”

  In third grade, after reading The Secret Garden, Jilly had asked her mom—and subsequently two doctors—for a back brace to treat her scoliosis, like Colin. They had all laughed and said, “What an imagination,” in those adult voices.

  Her second therapist said, “You’re not a hypochondriac; you just have too much time on your hands. Try volunteering somewhere.”

  The old people in the nursing home looked uninterested when Jilly tried out her tap-dancing and Shirley Temple imitations. A man with long ear-and-nostril hairs fell asleep midact, and his snoring was so obnoxious that Jilly paused the show to try to rouse him.

  Jilly thought going to and posting vaguely about therapy at least left something up to the imagination of her followers. She mentioned her experiences there frequently in her “Think About It” Tuesday posts, with captions like, “Who says black people don’t go to therapy?” and #therapy. If she mentioned it often enough, without saying why she went, people could fil
l in a sexier disease than narcissism, which you couldn’t exactly tell anyone you had, because it made you look bad, and she didn’t even have the malignant kind or the official personality disorder; even her narcissism was pastel pink, kawaii cute.

  Jilly was really hungry now, and dying of starvation wasn’t a quick suicide option. She had a cabinet full of groceries, some even gourmet, but a meal of microwave ramen seemed more fitting for the occasion than, say, chicken tenders and broccoli. She chose one of the Thai-flavored packages from the cupboard.

  She had forgotten to put water in her ramen a year ago and heated the dry noodles and powder sauce to a smoky black mess that left her kitchen smelling like burned fish for a week but which made for an excellent photo. 227 likes.

  During senior year, she’d known a girl named Fatima who had bulimia, and though Fatima didn’t otherwise eat dairy, she often binged on big servings of nacho cheese. Jilly didn’t envy any sickness that made you throw up or poop uncontrollably or look so gaunt that you weren’t even pretty anymore, but it did seem that everyone else had a label, that their illnesses got more attention, that there was something chic about them.

  One of her friends—not online, but her real friend—Carl from the eleventh-grade art club, at Eisenhower High School, had even died. He hadn’t asked anyone for permission or left a note. His mother and friends, even Jilly, had wept openly at his funeral.

  Jilly shivered, thinking about Carl in the closed casket, and his mom’s eyes, glassy yet hollow. She took out a porcelain bowl, which she’d ordered from Etsy, printed with kawaii lollipops.

  She’d heard people, including Carl’s sister, say that suicide was the ultimate act of selfishness, that it left everyone else behind to clean up the mess. Jilly wasn’t sure how she felt about that. It was Carl’s body and therefore his choice. And no matter how you died, it left a mess for someone else to clean up. If Carl had died in a car accident or from cancer, his family would have still asked why, and they would have still been responsible for the funeral arrangements.

  Jilly chose a porcelain soup spoon and floral-printed chopsticks and placed them next to the bowl. Who would make the arrangements for her? Her mother didn’t even know her favorite flowers, and she would probably want Jilly buried in an Ann Taylor dress suit with a bedazzled collar. The auburn sew-in weave was cute, but Jilly wasn’t sure she wanted to be memorialized in it forever. Who would run her online tribute page or make sure the right people came to the service? And what good was a funeral if she couldn’t, like Tom and Huck, witness the mourners and see how much they had all loved her?

  She chastised herself for her stupidity and chuckled. She was not going to kill herself, certainly not today. Maybe she would try volunteering again, try reading to the elderly. She could wear a costume and visit sick children or attractive young men in the hospital; she could start brainstorming the outfits and completing the necessary applications as soon as she finished her dinner. The pictures she would post. Nothing was more fulfilling, it occurred to her, than giving back to others and letting people know about it.

  She poured water from the filter pitcher into the bowl, over the dehydrated noodles and powder, and put the whole deal into the microwave and pressed start before she remembered her phone.

  Later, those who mentioned her asked whether anyone had noticed anything different about her. Were there any warning signs? And why did she set the whole house and the poor ginger cat on fire? Why did she use the phone instead of a more traditional way? But in the moment, Jilly saw only the bright crimson of the explosion. It came in four red pops, like notifications, friend requests.

  WHISPER TO A SCREAM

  The comments poured in steadily, and though she never responded to them right away, sometimes taking up to a week so as not to look too eager, Raina always read them almost as quickly as her viewers posted. She ignored anyone who posted comments with the N-word, monkey references, and black-fetish cracks, their vitriol one of the main reasons for her mother’s opposition to Raina’s “hobby.” But the eighteenth comment, “Can u where ur Dorsey uniform in the next 1?” made her close her laptop for a moment before she could bring herself to reopen it. No avatar accompanied the screen name, Sir_Pix_Alot, but she knew it must be Kevin or one of the other guys in her class again. No matter how many times she blocked them, they always reappeared with new names and the same line of trolling. “We know it’s you, Raina.” “How come you never talk like that to us at school?”

  She closed the laptop again and carried it from her bedroom into the bright kitchen, where her mother had left two notes on the oversize refrigerator: “At the salon. Heat the leftovers around 6:30,” and “Finish your algebra 2 before you get on Youtube.” Raina crumpled both notes into the trash can and reset the magnets—one advertising her father’s car dealerships and one for the family dentist—that had held the notes to the fridge. The scrunched paper made a satisfying sound that her viewers would enjoy. Her mother had hidden or thrown out the tasty bread again. “Fiber will help you with some of that belly,” Carmen had said the week before, on her way out to some event, focusing her eyes on Raina’s midsection for longer than necessary.

  Over her snack of baked corn chips with hummus and dried cranberries, Raina replayed the video. “Hi, everyone,” her video self whispered from the kitchen table, as her manicured hands stroked alternately a feather and a children’s anthology. “Today, I thought I’d”—she ran her fingernails over the cover of the book—“start with some scratching sounds and then tell you a story.” She had carefully edited out the two-second frame in which she cleared her throat, fearing it too jarring a sound, despite the six or so requests she’d gotten for “more rasp.” She had briefly considered deleting the three-second accidental shot during which she adjusted her breasts into her top, but she kept it for her mother’s sake, and for Dom’s, deliberating only as long as it took to hit Finalize. She liked leaving Carmen little surprises here and there, sometimes to keep her on her toes, sometimes to force her hand. Last week it was a pendant necklace that grazed her cleavage. The week before, she decided on the hint of a lacy bra under a V-neck shirt.

  She guesstimated that Carmen was responsible for seven of the three-hundred-plus views the video gained in its first hour after publication, because just as her mother could check Raina’s browser history—which Raina always cleared, along with her cache—Raina could check stats on her viewers, a detail that Carmen did not seem to understand. Her mother must have watched the video from the salon and was probably preparing her lecture. Dom hadn’t seen it yet or he would have called, though at four thirty it was still a little early.

  A year ago, when Raina had started making ASMR videos, she assumed that keeping her head out the frame would preserve her anonymity at some level, prevent the sorts of dramas that had resulted from the makeup and hair videos she started in eighth grade. With only her voice and torso as markers, she believed her classmates would not be able to identify her, but someone always did. It wasn’t as though she could start over with a new online identity every time they caught up with her; her viewers wouldn’t know how to find her, and if she gave them clues, Kevin or the other guys would find them, too. Why should she lose her growing number of subscribers or the stats on her videos because of a few jerks with too much time on their hands?

  “Because it isn’t right, the whole thing,” her mother had said barely a week earlier. “You don’t want people to see you as one of those nasty girls, do you.” Carmen had phrased it as more of a statement than a question.

  “What’s nasty about helping people sleep or soothing them?” Raina had said, regretting it almost immediately. That was the point of trying to create an autonomous sensory meridian response, a tingling of the head and body in full relaxation that some people experienced from sounds and other stimuli. Raina was sure some viewers were using it for grosser purposes—some of the comments made that clear—but she saw her videos, and ASMR, as therapeutic. She imagined her voice like warm wate
r pouring over the crown of her listener’s head. A girl with PTSD had written to her last week, saying, “Your stories, your voice, these are the only things that have helped me sleep.”

  “See, Mom,” Raina said, showing Carmen this email.

  Her mother adjusted her freshly straightened hair—it was always freshly straightened, because Carmen didn’t allow it to become unfresh, kinky, even wilted. “We both know that’s not what most of the people are using the videos for. It would be different if you weren’t whispering and trying to make your voice like that”—Carmen emphasized the last word—“or if your whole head were in the video.”

  Raina tuned out the rest of the lecture, which involved one iteration or another of the same: Why don’t you reconsider plus-size modeling if you want to be in videos and make money? You could try my agency again. Or at least go back to doing hair-and-makeup tutorials so people can see how pretty your face is, instead of them just watching your chest jiggle while you talk. You said yourself you don’t feel safe with those perverts and racist folks on there.

  “Safe” was the word that Raina actually heard each time the lecture ended. It bothered her that her mother felt more concern over anonymous perverts or racists typing lewd comments from remote places than she felt for the bully down the block, the one at school. Raina did not feel safe, not with Kevin still tracking her online, not when he lingered near the school lockers. She had never felt completely safe at Dorsey, not since fifth grade, when Kylie S. had said that first through fourth grade, sleepovers, and years of after-school ice-skating lessons didn’t matter anymore. She could no longer hang out with the only black girl, because her dad said it was “kind of like the fox and the hound and how they had to go their own ways eventually.” Even with her handful of friends, Raina felt exposed at Dorsey, hypervisible, the girl with the big chest, the hefty girl, the black girl, the hefty black girl with the big chest. Kevin didn’t help matters, always singling her out.