by Brit Bennett
“I know,” she said. Her skin looked silvery in the moonlight. He rolled toward her, touching her hip. She was so slender, he forgot sometimes, the longer he was away.
“She might come back on her own,” he said. “Homesick. Maybe she gets older, figures none of this is worth it.”
He reached over, touching Desiree’s soft curls. He was so hungry and so full of her, he could hardly stand it. But she rolled away from him.
“It’s too late,” she said. “Even if she comes back. She’s already gone.”
* * *
—
IN LOS ANGELES, no one had ever heard of Mallard.
All freshman year, Jude delighted in telling people that her hometown was impossible to find on a map, even though few believed her at first, especially not Reese Carter, who insisted that every town had to be on a map somewhere. He was more skeptical than the Californians who easily believed that some Louisiana town might be too inconsequential to warrant a cartographer’s attention. But Reese was a southerner also. He grew up in El Dorado, Arkansas, a place that sounded even more fantastical than her hometown yet still existed on maps. So one April evening, she dragged him to the library and flipped through a giant atlas. They’d just stepped in from the rain, Reese’s wet hair looping across his forehead in loose curls. She wanted to push his drooping hair back, but instead, she pointed at a map of Louisiana, below where the Atchafalaya River and the Red River met.
“See,” she said. “No Mallard.”
“Goddamn,” he said. “You’re right.”
He leaned over her shoulder, squinting. They’d met at a track-and-field party her roommate, Erika, had dragged her to last Halloween. Erika was a stout sprinter from Brooklyn who complained about Los Angeles endlessly, the smoggy air, the traffic, the lack of trains. Her grievances only made Jude realize how grateful she felt. Gratitude only emphasized the depth of your lack, so she tried to hide it. On move-in day, Erika had glanced at Jude’s two suitcases and asked, “Where’s the rest of your stuff?” Her own desk was cluttered with records, photographs of friends taped to the walls, her closet stuffed with shimmery blouses. Jude, quietly unpacking everything she owned, said that her other things were still in storage. She knew that she liked Erika when she never brought it up again.
On Halloween, Erika draped herself in a sparkly purple dress and tiara, Jude reaching for a lazy pair of cat ears. In the bathroom, she sat on the toilet lid while Erika hunched in front of her, powdering electric blue on her eyelids.
“You know, you could look real pretty if you tried a little,” she said.
But the bright blue only made her look darker, so Jude dabbed at her eyes during the whole ride over. Later, Reese would tell her that the blue eyeshadow was the first thing he noticed about her. In the cramped apartment, she’d stumbled after Erika, squeezing past witches and ghosts and mummies. When Erika fished in the ice-filled bathtub for beers, Jude ducked into a doorway, overwhelmed by it all. She’d never been invited to a stranger’s party before, and she was so nervous, she didn’t even notice, at first, a cowboy sitting on the couch. He was golden brown and handsome, his jaw covered in stubble. He wore a rawhide vest over a blue plaid shirt and faded jeans, a red bandanna tied around his neck. She felt him watching her, and not knowing what else to do, said, “Hi, I’m Jude.”
She tugged at the fringe of her skirt, already embarrassed. But the cowboy smiled.
“Hi Jude,” he said. “I’m Reese. Have a beer.”
She liked how he said it, more of a command than an offer. But she shook her head.
“I don’t drink beer,” she said. “I mean, I don’t like the taste. And it makes me feel slow. I’m a runner.”
She was rambling now, but he tilted his head a little.
“Where you from?” he said.
“Louisiana.”
“Whereabouts?”
“A little town. You haven’t heard of it.”
“How you know what I’ve heard of?”
“Trust me,” she said. “I know.”
He laughed, then tilted his beer toward her. “You sure you don’t want a sip?”
Maybe it was his accent, southern like hers. Maybe his handsomeness. Maybe because, in a room full of people, he’d chosen to talk to her. She took a step toward him, then another and another, until she was standing inside his legs. Then a loud group of boys jostled into the room with a keg, and Reese reached out, pulling her into safety. His hand cupped the back of her knee, and for weeks after, when she thought about that party, she only remembered his fingers lingering at the edge of her skirt.
Now, in the damp library, she flipped through the atlas, past Louisiana to the United States to the world.
“When I was little,” she said, “like four or five, I thought this was just a map of our side of the world. Like there was another side of the world on some different map. My daddy told me that was stupid.”
He’d brought her to a public library, and when he spun the globe, she knew that he was right. But she watched Reese trace along the map, a part of her still hoping that her father was mistaken, somehow, that there was still more of the world waiting to be found.
Five
On the road from El Dorado, Therese Anne Carter became Reese.
He cut his hair in Plano, hacking off inches in a truck stop bathroom with a stolen hunting knife. Outside of Abilene, he bought a blue madras shirt and a leather belt with a silver stallion buckle; the shirt he still wore, the buckle he’d pawned in El Paso when he ran out of money but mentioned wistfully, still feeling its weight hanging at his waist. In Socorro, he began wrapping his chest in a white bandage, and by Las Cruces, he’d learned to walk again, legs wide, shoulders square. He told himself that it was safer to hitchhike this way, but the truth was that he’d always been Reese. By Tucson, it was Therese who felt like a costume. How real was a person if you could shed her in a thousand miles?
In Los Angeles, he found a cleaning job at a gym near UCLA, where he met body builders who told him where to get the good stuff. At Muscle Beach, he lingered on the edge of the crowd as men bulging out of tank tops preened under the afternoon sun. Ask for Thad, someone said, and there he was, a giant of a man, hairless except for his scraggly beard. When Reese finally mustered the nerve, Thad brushed him aside with a big paw.
“Boy, come back with fifty dollars,” he said. “Then we got somethin to talk about.”
All month he scrimped and saved until he raised the money and found Thad at a bar off the boardwalk. Thad steered him into the men’s room and pulled out a vial.
“You ever shot up before?” he asked.
Reese shook his head, staring wide-eyed at the needle. Thad laughed.
“Christ, kid, how old are you?”
“Old enough,” Reese said.
“This shit ain’t nothin to play with,” Thad said. “Make you feel different. Make your baby makers slow. But I guess you ain’t worried about none of that yet.”
“No sir,” Reese said, and Thad showed him what to do. Since then, he’d bought plenty of steroids off plenty of Thads, each time the transaction feeling as grimy as when he’d first stood in that dirty bar bathroom. He met meatheads in dark alleys, felt vials pressed into his palm during handshakes, received nondescript paper bags in his gym locker. Now, seven years later, Therese Anne Carter was only a name on a birth certificate in the offices of Union County Public Records. No one could tell that he’d ever been her, and sometimes, he could hardly believe it either.
He said this matter-of-factly, under the glowing red light of the darkroom, not looking at Jude as he lowered the blank photo into the developer. Weeks after the Halloween party, they’d started meeting here. She hadn’t expected to ever see him again, and might not have, if, on the ride home, Erika hadn’t mentioned that she’d seen that cute cowboy before, working at the gym nearby. Jude began to run there even thoug
h she hated running indoors—no sky, no air, just running in place, staring at her own reflection. She hated every part of it except for when Reese eased up beside her, wiping down a stationary bike. He leaned against the handlebars and said, “Where’s your ears?”
She glanced into the mirror, confused, until she realized he was referring to her dull costume. She laughed, surprised he even remembered her from that party. But of course he did. Who on this campus—who in all of Los Angeles—was as dark as her?
“Must have forgot them,” she said.
“Too bad,” he said. “I liked them.”
He wore a slate gray T-shirt, a silver dumbbell emblazoned across his chest. Sometimes, during a shift, he grew bored, hoisting himself onto the bars to do a few pull-ups. He’d applied for the job because he could use the gym for free and the manager didn’t care that he had arrived from out of town with no identification. But his real dream was to be a professional photographer. He offered to show her his work sometime, so they started meeting on Saturdays in the campus darkroom. Now, as he watched the photo, she watched him, trying to picture Therese. But she couldn’t. She only saw Reese, scruffy face, shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, that loop of hair always falling onto his forehead. So handsome that when he glanced up, she couldn’t look into his eyes.
“What do you think of all this?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never heard anything like it.”
But that wasn’t exactly true. She’d always known that it was possible to be two different people in one lifetime, or maybe it was only possible for some. Maybe others were just stuck with who they were. She’d tried to lighten her skin once, during her first summer in Mallard. She was still young enough then to believe that such a thing was possible, yet old enough to understand that it would require a degree of alchemy that she didn’t quite understand. Magic. She wasn’t foolish enough to hope that someday she might be light, but a deep brown maybe, anything better than this endless black.
You couldn’t force a magic like this but she tried her best to conjure it. She’d seen a Nadinola ad in Jet—a caramel woman, dark by Mallard’s standards but light by her own, smiling, red-lipped, as a brown man whispered into her ear. Life is more fun when your complexion is clear, bright, Nadinola-light! She ripped the ad out of the magazine and folded it into a tiny rectangle, carrying it with her for weeks, opening it so many times that white creases cut across the woman’s lips. A jar of cream. That was all she needed. She’d slather it on her skin, and by fall, she would return to school, lighter and new.
But she didn’t have the two dollars for the cream and she couldn’t ask her mother, who would only scold her. Don’t let those kids get to you, she would say, but it was more than her classmates. Jude wanted to change and she didn’t see why it should be so hard or why she should have to explain it to anyone. Strangely, she felt that her grandmother might understand, so she handed her the worn ad. Maman stared at it a moment, then passed it back to her.
“There are better ways,” she said.
All week, her grandmother created potions. She poured baths with lemon and milk and instructed Jude to soak. She pasted honey masks on her face, then slowly peeled them off. She juiced oranges, mixed them with spices, and applied the mixture to Jude’s face before she went to bed. Nothing worked. She never lightened. And at the end of the week, her mother asked why her face looked so greasy, so Jude rose from the dinner table, washed Maman’s cream off her face, and that was that.
“I always wanted to be different,” she told Reese. “I mean, I grew up in this town where everybody’s light and I thought—well, none of it worked.”
“Good,” he said. “You got beautiful skin.”
He glanced at her, but she looked away, staring down at the photo paper as an abandoned building shimmered into view. She hated to be called beautiful. It was the type of thing people only said because they felt they ought to. She thought about Lonnie Goudeau kissing her under the moss trees or inside the stables or behind the Delafosse barn at night. In the dark, you could never be too black. In the dark, everyone was the same color.
* * *
—
BY SPRINGTIME, she spent every weekend with Reese, so inseparable that you began to ask for one if you saw the other. Sometimes she met him downtown, wandering beside him while he shot pictures, his camera bag slung across her shoulder. He taught her the names of different lenses, showed how to hold the reflector to bounce the light. He’d been given his first camera by a man at his church—a local photographer—who’d let him borrow it once to take pictures at the picnic. The man had been so shocked by Reese’s raw talent, he gave him an old camera to play around with. Reese spent all of high school with a camera in front of his face, shooting football games and school plays and marching band practice for the yearbook. He snapped dead possums in the middle of the road, sunlight streaking through the clouds, toothless rodeo stars gripping bucking horses. He loved taking pictures of anything but himself. The camera never saw him the way he did.
Now he spent his weekends shooting abandoned buildings shuttered behind wood boards, graffitied bus stops, paint chipping off stripped car husks. Only dead, decaying things. Beauty bored him. Sometimes he snapped pictures of her, always candids, Jude lingering in the background, staring off into space. She didn’t realize until she was developing them. She always felt vulnerable seeing herself through his lens. He gave her one photo of herself standing on a boardwalk, and she didn’t know what to do with it so she sent it home. On the telephone, her grandmother marveled.
“Finally,” she said. “One good picture of you.”
In all of her school pictures, she’d either looked too black or overexposed, invisible except for the whites of her eyes and teeth. The camera, Reese told her once, worked like the human eye. Meaning, it was not created to notice her.
“There you go again,” Erika said sleepily, each time Jude slipped out early Saturday morning. “Off to see that fine man of yours.”
“He’s not my man,” Jude said, again and again. Which was technically true. He’d never asked her on a date, escorted her into a restaurant, pulled out her chair. He didn’t kiss her or hold her hand. But didn’t he shield her with his jacket when they were caught in a rainstorm, leaving himself dripping wet? Didn’t he attend all of her home track meets, cheering during her heat and, after, pulling her into a hug outside the girls’ locker room? Didn’t she talk to him about her mother and father, Early, even Stella? On the Manhattan Beach pier, she leaned against the turquoise rail while Reese aimed at three fishermen. Biting his lip, the way he always did when he was concentrating.
“What do you think she’s like?” he asked.
She fiddled with the strap of his camera bag. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I used to wonder. Now I don’t think I wanna know. I mean, what kind of person just leaves her family behind?”
She realized, all too late, that this was, of course, exactly what Reese had done. He’d shed his family right along with his entire past and now he never talked about them at all. She knew not to ask, even as he wanted to know more about her life. Once, he asked about her first kiss and she told him that a boy named Lonnie had grabbed her outside a barn. She was sixteen then, sneaking out for a late-night run; he was tipsy from a stolen bottle of cherry wine that he’d passed, back and forth, amongst friends all night on the riverbank. She would always wonder if that empty bottle was the only reason he’d kissed her, why he’d even wandered over to her, climbing unsteadily over the fence, as she finished her lap behind the Delafosse barn. She stopped hard, her knee stinging.
“W-what you doin out here?” he’d asked.
Stupidly, she glanced over her shoulder and he laughed. “You,” he said. “Ain’t nobody here but us.” He’d never spoken to her before outside of school. She’d seen him, of course, goofing around with his friends in a back booth at Lou’s or hangi
ng out the side of his father’s truck. He always ignored her, as if he knew that his teasing was out of place beyond the school halls, or maybe because he realized that ignoring her was even crueler, that she preferred his taunting to the absence of his attention. But she only felt irritated that he’d decided to speak to her now, when she was panting and dirty, her skin misted with sweat.
He told her that he was on his way home, cutting through the Delafosse farm. He tended Miss Delafosse’s horses after school. Did she want to see them? They were old as dirt but still pretty. The horses were locked in the stable for the night but he could use his key to get in. She didn’t know why she followed him. Maybe because the whole night was unfolding so strangely—Lonnie catching her, Lonnie speaking to her decently—that she had to see where it would end. In the stables, she followed Lonnie blindly, overwhelmed by the smell of manure. Then he stopped, and through the streaming moonlight, she saw two horses, brown and gray, taller than she’d imagined, their powerful bodies sleek with muscles. Lonnie touched the gray one’s neck and she slowly touched him too, stroking his soft hair.
“Pretty, huh?” Lonnie said.
“Yes,” she said. “Pretty.”
“You should see ’em run. R-reminds me of you. You don’t run like no person I ever seen. Got a hitch in your gait like a pony.”
She laughed. “How you know that?”
“I notice,” he said. “I notice everything.”
Then the brown horse stamped his hoof, spooking the gray horse, and Lonnie pulled her out of the stable before Miss Delafosse’s light flickered on. They skittered behind the barn, laughing at the nearness of getting caught, then Lonnie leaned in and kissed her. Around them, the night hung heavy and damp like soaked cotton. She tasted the sugar off his lips.
* * *
—
