I couldn’t let you have that. I had to get you to Berkeley, right? We shot the ending with you and Torrance in Berkeley cheer uniforms, playfully squabbling over who would be captain. We filmed at the UCLA campus as a stand-in, and I was proud to be back at my own alma mater. A homecoming for me, and I’d gotten you there. Roll credits.
They cut the scene.
“It really kind of had no place in the movie,” the director, Peyton Reed, said in one of the many oral histories of the film. “It really didn’t feel like it said anything, or did anything, so we just decided to cut it.”
You never made it to Berkeley. Instead they ran a blooper reel, mixed with the cast lip-syncing to the song “Mickey.” I get it: it’s epic, and it’s something people remember.
You know what else people remember? You as a villain.
I once saw a poll of greatest movie villains and there you were. Why? Because you asked for accountability in the most civil tone I could manage? When people do their impersonation of you—to me!—it’s an aggressive, slang-talking girl threatening violence. I want to ask them, “Uh, show me where I did that? Show me where that was my act.” It’s interesting how my tone is received and regurgitated. And how you, calmly fighting for credit for your work—fictionally!—were internalized by so much of the audience as scary.
That same unwarranted fear translates into the adultification of Black girls and the criminalization of Black childhood. In New York City elementary and middle schools, Black girls are eleven times more likely to be suspended than their white peers. And a recent Georgetown study of adult attitudes toward Black girls across the nation found a tremendous adultification bias against Black girls as young as five, with respondents saying those girls need less nurturing, protection, and support than white girls. A follow-up study sought the comments of older Black girls like you, and they reported harsher treatment and higher standards at school. One of the young respondents said, “I feel like you cannot make mistakes as a Black girl.”
I would not let you come anywhere close to a mistake, but the reality is that you can do all the things that white folks tell you that you need to do in order for them to respect you and give you basic-ass human rights . . . and it still won’t fucking matter. You’re a villain. You are Sandra Bland, calmly asserting her rights to State Trooper Brian Encinia, who pulled her over on a July afternoon in 2015 in Prairie View, Texas. Sandra Bland knew her rights. She told him her rights. When Black women assert themselves, that somehow threatens people. This happens in retail situations, corporate offices, and school hallways. A Black woman can be minding her own business, and how she responds to provocation or even a random question will be used against her. When Encinia asked if Ms. Bland was irritated, she calmly said she was. When she wouldn’t put out her cigarette, which is not illegal, he decided her tone was combative, and ordered her out of the car. When she refused, he pulled out his Taser and screamed, “I will light you up.” In the video, he sounds absolutely unhinged. Minutes later, Encinia hog-tied Ms. Bland on the side of the road. Days later—Isis, she was held for three days because of a minor traffic stop—she was found hanging in a jail cell.
It doesn’t matter what you say, it matters how you make people feel. And you can’t control that. Knowing how you and I would be received, I should have just put the words in your mouth unapologetically.
So, I am here to apologize to you. When I said today that you didn’t go far enough, that was on me. I failed you and myself. I was the fourth lead, but my face was on the poster. You were the girl with no last name, but the star of every meme. You were only in about a third of the movie, and now I would know to fight for equal time to tell your story. Your iconic moments with the Clovers are what people remember, though I know it’s partly that we are bits of Black resistance dropped in the middle of the milk.
Your story, the real one, is that you are amazing with your rage. With your disappointment, your heartbreak, and all your complicated feelings. Never in spite of them or because you hid them.
I wish I had just given you the space to be a Black girl who is exceptional without making any kind of compromise. Because that’s who I want to be now. That’s what I am chasing, so much later in life than you: to be exceptional by my own standards. Unapologetically me.
I can’t make this up to you. You and the movie exist as you were created more than twenty years ago. This apology is a promise to simply do better as I raise two girls now. You would love them. When Kaavia James was on the edge of one year old, someone gave her a baby-sized cheerleader uniform that looked like yours. When she put it on and was into it . . . it was a moment. Because not every outfit gets to live, Isis. Kaav will take something right off if she doesn’t like it.
There she was, her little belly sticking out, looking deadpan no matter what new person screamed in delight at the sight of us. She is not the girl who gives the defensive smile, or who worries about the feelings of grown-ups who can take care of themselves. As Black girls, you and Kaav have not been given the space to be unimpressed and unbothered. I need to create it for her. As a teenager, Zaya is her own person and my job is to support her. To do my best to provide the nurturing and support she and countless Black thirteen-year-olds like her do not receive outside the home. But Kaav is reliant on me creating that space while she’s a toddler. Since she was born I have made a point of not just dressing her in name-brand clothes or having her hair done perfectly every time I document her. I want her to have the freedom to exist as her authentic self.
You taught me that, Isis. I’ll be forever grateful.
I love you.
16
Escape from King’s Landing
We ran up the hill. The lights of the hotel gleamed above us in the dark. Get there, I thought. It’s safe there. My best friend Larry was behind me, still gripping the beer bottle he had broken to use against the neo-Nazis chasing us. He was the only one of my friends not crying. Thomas, Malika, and Chelsea, just ahead of me, kept looking back to see if those monsters were still behind us.
“Keep going,” Larry told us. He didn’t need to. We just wanted to make it out of King’s Landing alive.
The trip to Dubrovnik had started out so promising. We landed in Croatia that afternoon and went straight from the plane to work. This was June 2019, and I was selling L.A.’s Finest to international buyers. My costar Jessica Alba and I had offered to attend an industry convention in Dubrovnik as a pit stop during our European press tour. We had a strong pilot to show off, a drama about two cops in the Bad Boys universe of Jerry Bruckheimer. Jessica and I killed it, and by the end of the day, we were so successful we gave each other a high-five, like the end of the montage when the plucky entrepreneurs sit back and count their money.
We each had our little teams—a glam squad and publicist in tow—and each had different plans for our one night in Dubrovnik. Jess and her group wanted to do more of a high-end tour of the city. If she was doing the Goop version, I joked to my team, “we’re doing the Poop version.” My team’s friendship runs years deep. There was my best friend and hairdresser, Larry, my makeup artist Malika, my stylist Thomas, and my publicist, Chelsea. Whenever we travel together we are all about a good time. And that meant going to King’s Landing.
We were all superfans of Game of Thrones, which shot the show’s King’s Landing castle and village scenes in Dubrovnik’s Old City. Our hotel looked out on the giant medieval fortress, a maze of cobblestone side streets and red-roofed buildings surrounded by a mile-long wall. Picture Medieval Times meets Disneyland, right on the edge of the Adriatic Sea.
All five of us gazed down at King’s Landing during our dinner at the hotel restaurant. We were out on the terrace, and the air had cooled to the high seventies, the waters of the Adriatic darkening to a deep blue as the sunset made the sky orange and purple.
“This place,” I said. I was still done up from the conference, serving glamour but now dressed down in pants and sneakers. I kept shaking my head back, loving the
sideswept chop of a bob that Larry had given me just a few days before.
“It’s gorgeous,” said Larry, seated next to me. He moved in his chair, wearing a mesh shirt only he could pull off, absently picking up the rhythm of the music around us. I have known Larry since my Bring It On days, when I met him as a dancer performing at a car show with my costars, the singing group Blaque. Even after he transitioned to hair, it’s still been a habit of his to adjust to the beat around him and make it his own.
Sitting across from us was Thomas, serving Cape Cod twink, and Malika, still dressed in her go-to work look of black shorts and a black sleeveless top. The fifth member of our little band was Chelsea, my publicist, who’d been with us for years but still seemed like the kid sister. Her hair was long and hanging down her face with a slight curl, a newer Bohemian version of Edie Brickell, or maybe a biracial cousin of Haim.
We were on our second bottle of wine and the chef realized we were an up-for-anything crew. He kept bringing us things that weren’t on the menu, pairing the dishes with wines from the cellar. Still, our eyes kept returning to the lights of King’s Landing below us.
“I want to be there,” I said in a Disney princess voice, speaking for all of us. “Take me down there.” We asked our new friend the chef how far of a walk it would be, and he said five minutes.
“We could get a nightcap there,” said Thomas.
“What if there’s fans?” Chelsea asked me.
“Oh,” I said, joking. “Well. It’s a risk we’ll have to take for King’s Landing.”
“We’re going,” said Larry.
In no time we were settled up, photos taken with the staff, and halfway down the hill, just us. Even before we got into the Old City, everywhere we looked was an Instagram moment: “That’s a picture . . . that’s a picture.” We were already a group primed for impromptu photo shoots, so this was like a social media theme park. Still, we were quiet, because we were aware that as much as this was a place for tourists, more than one thousand people still called the Old City home. You might even say we were reverent in this place, because we were so devoted to this show. Our last view of these streets we walked upon had been seeing them incinerated under the fire of Daenerys and her dragon.
We were just inside the huge door letting you in to King’s Landing when a tour bus pulled up to belch out a long line of white teens. They were probably high school seniors or university freshmen, coming right toward us. We paid them no mind, going on about our Lannisters at Leisure photo shoot. Then I heard a voice from the group.
“Oh my God, there’s so many of them.” I couldn’t place the accent, whether it was English or Australian, but it was in the international language of disdain. We turned to look behind us, to see whatever it was they were talking about. Sparrows? White Walkers? Wildlings?
They were talking about us.
As they barreled their way in to King’s Landing, one guy was pushed out of line to be closer to us. He recoiled, and curled his lip into a sneer.
“What, is Obama in town?”
The teens began laughing, each trying to be louder than the other until it was a forced jeering directed at us. My team and I froze, more out of confusion than fear. They started filing into a club right inside the gate. The Arya Stark in us rose, and we did a delayed stutter-step move of “Oh, no the fuck you won’t,” toward them. Horrible music bled from the club, a relentless doochie-doochie-doochie beat.
“We’re going in there,” I said. “Fuck that.” Malika rolled her eyes, and I sighed. “You’re right. Go in and pay our money? To do what?”
“Let’s go see the rest of King’s Landing,” said Chelsea.
We were just a little bit into King’s Landing when we ran into Jessica and her team leaving dinner.
“Oh my God,” she said. “That place was wonderful. Best time. Best service.” They were heading to bed at the hotel. In Jessica’s group, she had an Asian makeup artist, a Mexican hairstylist, and two white people. They were an undeniably ethnic bunch, and this felt like a vote for our crew. If they had a good time in King’s Landing . . .
Those were just some kids, we decided. “Outside agitators,” I joked.
Now we just had to find a good local place for our nightcap. We kept looking, but nothing said King’s Landing—every place we passed was just the generic Euro tourist bar. And we nixed any place playing that doochie-doochie dirge of electronic music. Which did not leave much—it seemed King’s Landing was one big house party.
I asked Larry to stand by a beautiful arch in a wall covered in the patina left by centuries of rain. I wanted to get a picture of him looking so regal in a fairy tale setting. I squatted to get the angle just right. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Thomas move to stand between me and two men who’d stopped to look at us. I turned to watch us being watched.
Thomas did something, some subtle bit of body language that caused them to shrug and move on. He turned back to us, and for a second his face still had the hardness he’d shown these men. Thomas Christos Kikis’s parents are Greek immigrants who came to Tampa and got into the restaurant business. Growing up he spent a lot of time in Greece, a neighbor of Croatia. Whatever had transpired between them was in an unspoken cultural language that Thomas still had use of.
“What happened there?” I asked Thomas.
“Nothing,” he said, but looked back to watch them continue to walk. We did, too, entering a large square, one of the two we’d seen from above in the hotel. I thought about how the five of us had all had to live in two worlds at some point. To translate our lives for safety. Thomas grew up gay in America and in Greece. There was me going from Black Omaha to white Pleasanton. Larry living under the constant threat of violence growing up gay and Black on the west side of Chicago, then working in extremely wealthy spaces in L.A. Chelsea was biracial but spent most of her life in white spaces. And Malika, who was raised in Ohio but did the reverse Great Migration of going to college in Alabama, where she was reminded of the Confederacy at every turn.
And here we were in this ancient city, yet another world for us. The only thing missing was the dragons.
“Wait,” said Malika. “Is that—”
We gasped. The stairs. The stairs where Cersei Lannister, the ultimate brotherfucker, begins her walk of shame through the alleyways of King’s Landing to the Red Keep. We took turns as Cersei, grabbing tissue to ball up and hurl as rocks to play the villagers taunting her with “Shame! Shame!”
We followed Cersei’s footsteps right into getting lost in the quiet medieval village. It was getting late, and we still hadn’t found a place for a final drink of the night. Around us was a maze of elevated alleyways. I looked up one corridor to see what appeared to be rainbow lights around the door of a bar. When I was a little girl, my mother always told me that if I was ever lost in a big city, “Look for the rainbow flag.” She believed in the goodness of the LGBTQ+ community, and knew there would be protection and direction there. I have always found this to be true.
“Did we just find the gay bar at King’s Landing?” I asked.
“Probably the gay bar of Dubrovnik,” muttered Thomas. We walked up the narrow alleyway, toward the rainbow lights like we’d found Oz. The cobblestone corridor was lined with doors and alcoves, and we finally started to see the locals. People popped their heads out to scowl at us, almost like this was part of the Game of Thrones experience, latecomers to the mob growling at Cersei. They really did seem angry. Again, we were dead quiet, so it was simply the sight of us that brought this reaction. Still, we thought maybe this was part of the thrill. We were on a ride.
There were tall tables outside the bar, and more people looking up from their drinks to stare at us. The alleyway felt more closed in now. We could hear that signature house music from inside. I shrugged. “Let’s see what they got,” I said.
We stepped into darkness. I wondered how anyone could even order or find a seat. As our eyes began to adjust, the place didn’t look like any gay bar we’d ever se
en. We craned our heads, peered in the dark to find an open area, and saw that a good portion of the crowd had turned to stare at us.
“I’m going to the bar,” said Larry, paying the people no mind—not even hinting that he’d seen them. “Beers?”
From where we stood at the entrance, I watched him at the bar, slightly bebopping to the house music, trying to catch the vibe of the place. The bartender ignored him at first, then she finally ambled over, looking like the angry bus driver on South Park. As he ordered, the man next to him heard his voice and turned to look. Larry didn’t see the man move inches over, almost crowding the guy next to him so as not to be near Larry. Like dominoes, the people seated at the bar looked at Larry with daggers in their eyes.
“I’ve gotta go to the bathroom,” Malika said, slipping out from behind me.
“We’ll stay here until you and Larry get back,” I said. “If we see a place to sit we’ll get you.”
That left Chelsea, Thomas, and me. I was thinking of the scene in 48 Hrs. where Eddie Murphy takes Nick Nolte to the redneck bar to show him racism. “This is not a gay bar, is it?” I said. Thomas shook his head. He understood this crowd better than me, and his face was taking on that steeliness I’d seen when the two men were staring at us.
I saw some people get up to leave their table, so I stepped forward to grab it. But when they turned and saw us, they changed their mind and sat down again, facing us like there was going to be a show.
I was about to go over to Larry, tell him we should just go, when Malika came flying at us.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. She looked so stricken I thought she’d been hurt.
“Come here and look at this,” she said, grabbing my hand to drag us into the hallway leading to the kitchen and bathrooms.
“Malika. What happened?” I said.
You Got Anything Stronger? Page 16
