By Any Means Necessary

by Candice Montgomery

  There’s a stray piece of lint on her shoulder—really, I swear there is—and I reach up to pick it away and then smooth out the fabric.

  “I’m not exactly batting a thousand over here myself, so maybe I could stand to take some notes from you. I’m almost certain my boyfriend broke up with me. I’ve been in love with him since I was in, like, seventh or eighth grade. I’m gay, by the way. Did you know I’m gay? Never did get the chance to come out to you the way I did with Uncle Miles and Titi n’em. I miss him to distraction, that boy. Turns out that post-breakup, can’t-eat, can’t-sleep stuff is real.”

  I’ve tried so hard not to think about him, but he’s there at every turn. I can find him in everything. When he was mine, that was a good thing. Felt like what Moms would have called a blessing.

  Knowing Gabriel, seeing the ways he’s still London but has become Gabe, my Gabe, feels like watching a year go by at light speed. I like to think he and I loved like the seasons changed for us, and there is some truth to it.

  Spring is when we decided that growing among the garden just wasn’t for us and so we went off, a couple of middle-schoolers, and did our own thing. When summer arrived, we chose to cut out our hearts and freeze them for next year because we knew it’d mean limited hours together. When winter arrived, we never looked twice, jumped in the pools with all our clothes on and, eyes holding each other’s, held our breath even after we’d come up for air. When autumn came for us, we redefined what it meant to watch leaves lose their colors, both of us changing, voices deepening and jaw lines sharpening little by little.

  I like thinking that we loved like the seasons changed for nothing, because we were everything that couldn’t exist during the little showers of rain that didn’t get along with the sparks lit between us—and yet, still we did.

  We loved like the seasons changed for us, but love can be so damn backward sometimes. It was never meant to hold any true singular definition. I’ve kind of realized, too, that once you’ve had a taste, you’re sort of screwed, but it’s okay.

  Love is love is love is love, and I’m holding tighter than I should to the fact that we’ll figure it out.

  I exhale, growling because I’m so damn frustrated. “I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. Or why I’m doing it. I just want to prove I’m worthwhile to someone and even though Uncle Miles isn’t around to see it or reap any of the benefits, I don’t know how to let go of the fact that I owe him. That doing right by him would somehow make me right.”

  The drapes are only partially open, so I get up and open them wide. She has a great view. Or, the room has a great view. Moms isn’t getting the opportunity to see it.

  I walk back over to her, crouch down on my haunches, and whisper, “Would you hate me if I let it all go?”

  I kiss her papery cheek before I go.

  31.

  You know, I read online somewhere that there’s so much discourse about the “beauty,” or the lack thereof, of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers that many critics don’t even believe he painted it himself. That is, I think, how I want to feel.

  I want to paint some ugly shit for me. The metaphor sucks, but the sentiment is still definitely a thing.

  Man, he must have been so happy, painting those sunflowers. Sometimes all I want is a whole field of that feeling. A whole field of sunflowers.

  The morning of the protest, that’s the thing I’m thinking of when it happens. I feel like I’ll always remember where I was—in the room I share with Desh. What I was doing—packing everything I thought I might need into my backpack. Ready to move mountains and face the consequences. What I was thinking about the day I lost everything—sunflowers. Sunflowers sunflowers protest sunflowers.

  I’m eighteen years old and I’ve come to realize that all the conversations that I’ve been in surrounding gentrification are hollow because there aren’t many of us who understand what effective, considerate, quality services should look like in neighborhoods that house underrepresented populations.

  That was a lot. I know.

  There are no figurative neurological pathways that spell out exactly how we enhance those neighborhoods without displacing the people who make it worth everything.

  That’s the issue. So many times, I and many others have called the cupcake shops, Whole Foods, and juiceries the problem. Have targeted and boycotted them as if they are the issue, when really the root of it all is just that it’s impossible for those of us in the neighborhood to afford them. And so, therein, I hope, should lie the solution.

  It’s just not that simple, though. It’s really not. Otherwise, I think someone a lot smarter than me would have fixed it already.

  But I’d like to think I’m on to something. I’d like to think I can step in one day and hold out my hand and offer the hood some real answers. Some real financial solutions that’ll include a boost to our quality of life.

  I don’t want my kids to grow up and one day drown in Poverty PTSD the way I am. I’m sure as hell clawing my way up and out, but it’s work. It’s energy I could have been putting into my education. Into bettering my own personal world.

  Do you see where I’m going with you? Start from the beginning of this chapter.

  Read it again.

  Good?

  Yeah.

  Now you’re thinking. It’s systemic oppression.

  That’s where the seed of problems that infect these neighborhoods comes from. And I want to fix it.

  There’s a Welsh word, hiraeth, that translates loosely to “homesickness.” Thing is, the word is so much bigger than that. It’s a longing, a visceral break in the heart that stems from losing a piece of the place you can’t ever go back to.

  Hiraeth. I like this word.

  It’s exactly how I feel about the apiary. Which is why, even though it’s been seized, even though a crater opened up in my chest the moment it happened, we’re still going to throw down. We have a point to make and goddammit, I’m not going to forego that chance.

  The auction is being held in the early hours of the weekend.

  Emery all but stitches herself to my back. “You’re driving,” she says, tossing her keys at me. She’s through the student parking lot and sliding into her passenger seat a second and a half later.

  “Emery,” I say. And I stop there, because what else can you say? When did this stranger become my friend? When did “I don’t know you” turn into “I love you”? The change must have crept in while none of us were watching. It’s been like that with all my friends here.

  The family Aunt Lisa was talking about.

  I start the car.

  Buckle up.

  Signal.

  Pull into traffic.

  I feel okay.

  32.

  I feel okay until we are seated. The drive back to this particular part of Los Angeles, the affluent, never-seen-an-upheaval part of the city, is louder than I expect. It’s louder in different ways than Baldwin Hills.

  I hate that this loud feels fresher. Organic.

  In the hood, your loud is ephemeral. It always feels like you’re bleeding out instead of winning whatever battle is surrounding you.

  The auction is located in the “conservatory” section of a local park. This part is quiet. It’s all children’s giggles and moms in yoga pants helping their stroller-strapped baby take a sip off a large bottle of kombucha.

  Look, nothing against kombucha. I fucks with it.

  But the point is, it’s foreign. Also, stop giving your babies this organic crap and let their tiny bodies figure it out the way they’re meant to, like, damn.

  Here, I feel like I should be running. We should not have come. I readjust for the fiftieth time in my gray foldout chair, Em’s hand in mine, making eye contact with each of the people in this far-too-crowded space. I wonder who will put a numeric price on the part of my soul that’s up for sale today.

  Is it irrational for me to fucking loathe the people of color sitting in this room with numbered paddles in their hands, ready to
buy up some property that probably was built on the backs of less-affluent people just like them? It feels like a betrayal. Only, like, two-thirds of the room is white.

  The rest, I don’t even know how to process that.

  A third—maybe the fourth?—scan around the room reveals Rick the Dick, sitting as close to the exit as one can get, as though he’s got reason to run and wants to be prepared.

  I inhale and exhale repeatedly to slow down the nausea that’s resting at the bottom of my throat. Ever smelled the inside of an old book that’s spent too much time not being read? Its pages shut long enough that it becomes something altogether different?

  Some people enjoy that smell, get all kinds of dreamy eyed and nostalgic about it. I don’t.

  Funny, then, that the inside of this building smells exactly like that.

  The old dude at the podium starts shouting out specifics on properties like his life depends on the heavy boom of his “SOLD!” declaration, spit flying from his mouth, nailing the front row with a little DNA. They fucking deserve it.

  He’s going and going, voice growing hoarser by the minute. And then my lot is up. Our lot, where my bees used to be, where I occasionally slept when Moms got too bad and then later when Theo did. Where I came out to Uncle Miles and he smiled because Black men aren’t supposed to have words for that.

  It’s where I, like bees, learned to trust.

  I am a glass house right now.

  Emery presses her face into my shoulder and cups my cheek on the other side. “It’s okay, Torr. It’s okay. Just breathe.”

  The bidding starts just as a guy slides into the empty chair next to me.

  Although he’s heavy and armed with a deep-brown cane, he’s also tall and moves like his bones have never known any kind of worry. He wears a vest, horn-rimmed glasses, and some kind of weight in his eyes that belongs to who only knows.

  He pats my knee with a rough mallet of a hand. “It’s gon’ be alright, son.”

  The bass rumble of his voice is soothing. Comforting. Kind of like aloe on a burn. Or Vicks on the bottoms of your feet when you’re sick. Thank you, Aunt Lisa.

  “What’s your name, now, son. Tell me what your name is,” he says.

  I push past the tears that have settled on the rims of my eyes. “Torrey. It’s Torrey.”

  He nods. “Good name. And your girl here. The one tryin’ just so hard to save you. Who’s she?”

  “She,” Em says, a smile in her voice, “is called Emery.”

  “Ahh,” the man says. “An excellent name.”

  “Can we ask your name, sir?” Emery whispers just as the auctioneer screams “to the woman in the large hat!”

  “Well, you’ve gone and done just that, now, haven’t you? My name’s Miles Myrie.”

  I’m caught up in orbit and every piece of shrapnel that’s been trapped inside me reaches out to the magnet that’s in his words.

  His name is Miles.

  “Ain’t that something?” he says on a laugh. “Miles Myrie. Mama was with them Jehovah’s Witnesses when she decided to try and make my name into a big thing the wind would write down every time someone said it.”

  I glance up at him, meet his eyes, and shake my head.

  Nothing. There’s nothing there. I feel like I’m missing some kind of denouement. His name is Miles. Isn’t that supposed to be the moment he stands up and buys my property for me and fixes whatever horrible fistfight has been happening in my chest for the past few hours?

  But there’s nothing in his eyes that says he knows me top to bottom. That says he loves me through nothing, anything, everything. Uncle Miles is not in there.

  I look away.

  “You know,” he says. “I don’t ever come here trying to buy nothing. Don’t make no sense to me the way these people making money, entertainment, and hobbies off breaking people down.”

  “So, why are you here?” Em asks. I think she knows I’m incapable of anything resembling speech right now.

  Mr. Myrie laughs.

  I cannot refer to him as Miles right now. I won’t.

  His laugh isn’t big like you’d expect. It’s silent. You can tell it wants to get out, just wants to escape, just a little, so badly. But he holds it in. It is his and his alone.

  “I come here—to things like this—to know what I’m up against,” he says, solemn.

  “Do you have a business up there on the hill? Own some property?”

  Mr. Myrie nods. “Several. Most of the apartment buildings I occupy make it impossible for these people to ruin things completely. Out here talking about rent increases and tax increases and things that don’t do nobody but white men no good.”

  “We’ve got a counter from number eight again. Going once!” the auctioneer says, and I can’t breathe. Someone’s made a final bid.

  Mr. Myrie continues. “I tell my tenants one thing.”

  “Going twice!”

  Who is it? Who has my heart in their hands right now?

  “Nothing beats a failure but a try. Hang tight to that one, now, I tell you. Oohwee. Two Black kids like y’all? Yeah. Hang real tight to the try.”

  “SOOOOOLD TO NUMBER EIGHT. CONGRATULATIONS, SIR.”

  I do it. I change a glance up and search the room for paddle number eight.

  It’s Mathew. There’s no kind of gravity on Earth or anywhere else that can hold my soul in place right now. Couldn’t it have been anyone but him? Anyone but this man, this product of a system meant to break me.

  I turn in Emery’s arms, say—probably too loud—“Get me out of here, please, please. I have to get out of here.”

  And the world falls away as she all but lifts me and starts walking out of what can only be called hell on Earth, and when she realizes I’m hyperventilating, she presses my hand to her chest, right over her heartbeat.

  Hang tight to the try.

  33.

  Ever walk past a random group of girls—could be at a school or a basketball game or a mall or a track meet or wherever—and just know which has things figured the hell out?

  All four of my CAKE girls have this life thing on lock. I mean, I think I knew that, but it becomes abundantly clear when I get the text from Auburn that she, Clarke and Kennedy (along with Desh) have just reached the apiary after their six-hour drive from school.

  It occurs to me again when, as Emery and I are walking up the street to the apiary, the others walk straight toward us sure—like the roads belong to them. Like they know they were born with a fight waiting for them and they’ve already strong-armed anyone or anything standing in their way.

  I’ve been a longtime fan of Black women as the people who, as Malcolm X said, are the most disrespected people in the world—and yet they still run circles around us all.

  Malcolm X had a lot of things right.

  And they’re all here, waiting for us when we finally arrive, members of the Collective, neighbors of the community, local business owners, Aunt Lisa, and—yes, even Mrs. Xu and Mr. Jones. They’ve brought ice packs, like, a dozen large aluminum trays of hot food from Daddy Mojo’s, and cases on cases of bottled water.

  You say “this is a protest,” and the hood automatically thinks it’s block-party barbecue.

  Still, considering where I found myself when I came to get signatures of support, this feels like a really solid show of support.

  Emery gets on her soapbox (yes, we actually gave her a literal soapbox to scream at people from; apparently, we are the people who just like to watch the world burn) and give everyone instructions.

  “We don’t want to stray too far from the apiary. The point of having this be home base is that it was technically private property and owned by Torrey. That’s changed now, and we’re here to let them know how we feel about it.

  “So, while you can make your way up and down the block, let’s try not to swing too far beyond that. And I know some of y’all headass dweebs from TC might think that doesn’t apply to you—it does. Let’s be mindful of where we are, and wh
at we look like, how our melanin doesn’t exactly serve us here. If there is a police presence, do not resist, do not fight back, comply and stay silent. We have half a dozen pro bono lawyers on reserve to deal with whatever may come. That applies to all protesting. Not just TC. Be safe. Be smart.” She’s silent for a moment, breathing hard. Then, on a yell, “Whose city?”

  And we, as a crowd, a community, unbroken, yell, “Our city!”

  It feels solid. Feels good.

  It feels better when I turn to find him right beside me.

  “What are you doing here?” I say.

  The first thing I notice is the dark circles. They look like mine. His are cuter, though. Then I notice his outfit. He always did dress like the Afro-Latino version of Jamal Lyon. Beanie. Loose, incredibly chest-exposed thin tee. Cardigan thicker than Beyoncé.

  He looks good. Comfortable. At home in his skin. But also, he looks tired. He looks like heartbreak.

  He moves slowly, like he’s not in control of his own feet, pushing straight into my arms. Or maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the one that brings our bodies flush against each other.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  Damn damn damn. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.

  I am. I’m crying. “Thank you, thank you, thank you for being here. With me.”

  “I didn’t know,” he says, a rush of words. “I did some research on bees. On their stats. On this farm, in particular.”

  “Why? Why would you do that?”

  He pulls back, looks at me, and shakes his head. “Don’t you know by now, príncipe? It’s important to you. So it’s important to me. Because you are important to me. All of you, exactly as you are. And listen. I found an apiary that’s just thirty minutes outside of San Francisco.”

  I don’t know where he’s going with this. “Mm-hmm.”

  “The Addie Rose Apiary. They are willing to buy everything. Every hive and colony and most of your supply and stock. They’ll even take care of transport.”