“I’m sorry,” I say. “I messed up.”
No one speaks as we pack up. Derek comes running across the grass and puts an arm around Natasha’s slumped shoulders. He speaks to her in a low voice for a minute, then Natasha looks up, smiling.
“Hey everyone, D to the rescue! He’s the producer for his team and he says they were going to shoot here tomorrow, but we can use their time instead. It’ll be a lot easier to work during mime class.” Her eyes slide over me. “I take full responsibility for today’s issues. We’ll make it up tomorrow. And I thank all of you for the support. We’re going to make a great film, I promise. Huddle up!” Everyone runs over to her and gets into a huddle. I kind of hover on the outside until it breaks up. I try to say something to Natasha as everyone is leaving and not looking at me, but she follows their lead and walks right past me as though I’m invisible. And right about now, I am wishing I was.
Chapter Thirty-Four
The next day it really hits me that three weeks really is no time at all. I’m behind on my Street Style mini reports and forget about the choreography … I still haven’t done my Black to the Future assignment, and even though I’ve graduated to coil pots, I’ve only managed one and it looks like it was made by my baby cousin Taden.
The swim test is hanging over my head like a perpetual storm cloud. It’s become a mission for Dr. Triphammer, and I can tell he talked to my friends about it too. Every once in a while we’ll be hanging in the room, and Charles will look up from his book and say something like, “When states were ordered to desegregate public pools, many chose to close them down instead.” And somehow, when I was quizzing Natasha for the Blackity Bowl, we got to: “Legend has it that this person, the first Black woman nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress, dipped her toe into a hotel pool to protest segregation in the 1950s. So the hotel drained the pool.” I looked at her hard when she answered, “Dorothy Dandridge,” but she wasn’t laughing.
“Do you always win?” I ask one day. We’re sitting on the stone benches near the main building. The sprinklers are on, and every once in a while a light spray of cool water hits my toes.
“Huh?” she asks, looking down at her notes. “Oh wait—that’s not a Bowl question, that’s a me question.”
“Yeah, you,” I say. “You’ve never gotten one of these wrong. You’re the queen of everything around here, and everyone knows it. And they still like you! Do you ever slip up?”
“I mean …” She looks up. “This is kind of … deep. If you want to stop quizzing me, that’s fine.” She smiles. “What’s going on with your plan? You haven’t given me an assignment or anything. I’m worried that—”
“I don’t have a plan,” I say abruptly. I can’t even play it off anymore. “I had an idea and I had no idea how to execute and I’m in this place where everyone else seems to know how to do stuff and for once I think I’ve gotten myself into something that I can’t get myself out of.”
“Oh no!” she says. “Come on, don’t give up, we can fix this!” She picks up her notebook and pen, but then she sighs and puts it back down. “That’s not what I meant.”
“You mean I should give up, and we can’t fix this?” I say. “Yeah, thanks for confirming.” She really does think I’m a loser.
“No, I mean …” She takes a deep breath. “You can’t tell anybody this, okay?” I nod. “I went back to Nurse Denene after we interviewed her.”
I wait. Is Natasha sick?
She takes a deep breath. “I’m scared.”
Huh? “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I’m scared. And I’m not supposed to be, ever. I’ve been so focused on achieving for so long, I feel like I have to keep going, no matter what. I know Michelle thinks she’s hyping me up, but every time she says all that stuff about how great I am, I feel sick.”
But … you, you are always so calm and confident,” I say. “All the time!”
What I’m saying is, it takes a lot to make it look easy. Like it’s literally making me sick. My head starts pounding …”
“And your stomach clenches up,” I finish. I look at her and nod. “Been there.”
“Nurse Denene says that the road from Black girl magic to strong Black woman can be harder than it seems. I don’t want to disappoint my parents, I like having people think I’ve got it all together, but … it’s hard to play that role twenty-four seven.”
I take a deep breath. “Back home, it was easy for me to do stuff. I’m a debate star, I’m on the honor roll, teachers love me, I’m funny, I’m a great dancer”—I sneak a sideways glance—“people think I’m cute.”
“They do?” she asks. “What people?” Then she laughs.
“I just thought I’d throw that in,” I say. “But then there was this debate championship at the end of the year … and I didn’t feel ready. Usually, I know I have it on lock, but … this time I wasn’t sure. See, usually Luke helps me prep and stuff, but this time … he didn’t. He was getting his portfolio ready for Rowell.”
“Oh yeah! That’s so cool. So, how did it go?”
“It didn’t. I withdrew. I pretended that I wanted to give other people a chance to win, but I didn’t want to risk losing.”
“That’s deep,” she says.
“I don’t know if I can do anything without my brother there to help me,” I say, almost in a whisper. “And that’s really scary.”
She laughs. “Okay, this is depressing. We’re quite a team.”
I smile, mostly about the part about us being a team, because that’s almost the same as being a couple. Maybe I didn’t ruin things by confessing that I’m basically my own kryptonite.
We sit in silence for a while. A couple of geese stroll nearby. One of them looks straight at me and honks like, “Make a move, fool!” There’s a little gap between me and Natasha; if I do a fake stretch, I can probably close it but …
“Well, this is good timing,” she says, standing up. “We’re having this conversation, and now we need to head to the last Superhero Secrets session.”
I am the king of missed opportunities. I stand too. “Yeah, too bad we won’t get any real tips there.” I think back to that conversation with Reggie. “But maybe we can help ourselves? Shiny Suit Man is just going to look at his phone anyway. We can pretend to be doing the workbook but actually talk some real talk. I mean you, me, Charles, and Michelle.” I not trying to have a heart to heart with the whole camp.
She nods slowly. “And maybe get some work done?” she says. “I’m scared of failing, but I’m not trying to. I still want to win on Camp Showcase night.”
“Blackity Bowl or the film?”
She gives me a look. “Both, of course!”
Dr. Triphammer is walking toward us, yelling about who left the sprinkler on, so we get going fast.
“Are you going to talk to your brother?” Natasha asks as we run.
“Maybe,” I say. “He’ll probably get all choked up and feel guilty for leaving me hanging for most of the summer, but I’ll tell him it’s okay and maybe he’ll make it up to me by dumping a bucket of horse poop from the stables on his intern’s head.” A boy can dream.
She laughs again, and says, “You’re cute.”
Yep. A boy can dream.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The next day, I spend most of my free time working with Michelle’s cast on three routines that I’ve made up for The Two Amys. At first, I just worked in the room when Charles wasn’t there, but it turns out that my friends really take this “creative community building” stuff seriously. Natasha had some clips of people like the Nicholas Brothers and Gregory Hines, and we watch them one evening during rec time. Without saying anything, I pretend we were on a date until she says, “And please don’t get all weird on me like we’re on some kind of date.” And Charles is good at being a kind of crash test dummy—despite my best efforts, he hasn’t gotten past his jerky specialty move, so I test out my teaching on him. If he can come close to the move I want, then I know I
that the Two Amys performers will get it. I’ve just finished teaching him the big “Africa for Africans, At Home and Abroad” number when there’s a knock on the door. I open it, it’s my assistant Fred.
“Hey, Fred, what’s up,” I say as Charles does something almost like what I showed up.
“We have a meeting with Natasha,” he says. “Actually, it was supposed to start ten minutes ago. She’s wondering where you are.”
Oops. I leave with Fred and run over to the multipurpose room that Natasha had booked for our meeting. She’s standing in the doorway with her arms folded.
Even though we had that whole conversation, Natasha is still … Natasha as far as I can tell. I wouldn’t be surprised if she tried to win the Street Style competition too at this point. She keeps scheduling these extra “conferences” with her film crew and when I joked that “ain’t nobody got time for that,” she didn’t even crack a smile. It’s not even like she wants to have a one-on-one; she keeps pulling Ready Freddy and me aside to talk sound like I don’t know what I’m doing. Which I don’t, but still. It’s humiliating.
“Did you forget again?” she asks as soon as I sit down.
Yes. “No,” I say. “I was just …”
“It’s not like we don’t need to go over how to handle the equipment or anything, not like we haven’t had accidents already,” she says. “And by we, I mean you.”
“I had one mishap, Natasha, and you’re acting like I can’t turn on a microphone,” I say. Fred chuckles.
“You didn’t, when we shot Triple M, remember?”
Fred laughs louder this time, then he looks at me and clears his throat.
Natasha sighs and goes on. “You’re going to have to ask him when we can schedule a reshoot, by the way. It’s not gonna be me up in his face.”
Triple M had been giving me the stink eye the whole time and I know why. Everyone who wants to do a solo dance was supposed to show it to him already. I want a showstopper, but I’m … stuck. Everything I come up with, I give to Michelle for The Two Amys or to the class for the group routine. That’s actually coming together nicely; she’s so good at telling me about the story she’s trying to tell, I can really see it.
“Fred, can you give us a minute?” I ask. He moves like six inches away. I keep looking at him; finally he walks over to a tree. Then he comes back.
“We’ve got some great ambient noise happening right now—the birds, the swimming races in the background,” he says. “I’m going to record some before lunch, if that’s okay. I’ll have it ready for our meeting.”
“We’re not meeting,” I say.
“We’re definitely meeting,” says Natasha. “And thanks, Fred. Way to step up.” He salutes, but she rolls her eyes and he puts his hand down fast. This time I laugh, and Fred finally leaves.
“Really not a good look for me,” I grumble. “Can you chill a little on the whole way-to-step-up-Fred attitude?”
“Can you do some stepping up?” she asks, folding her arms. Immediately I go into some steps—I’ve finally learned the routine everyone was doing on the first night. She does not look amused or impressed. “And less clowning. I thought you wanted to help me win this thing.”
We’ve been filming kids in all the classes; usually I let Fred do the recording while I “supervise” (which is really just me scheming on ways to hang out with Luke). I mean, I’m also trying to give Fred a chance to live his dream, so the way I see it, I’m doing a double good thing. That’s what I keep telling myself.
“Natasha, you know you’re going to win. You win every year. This project is great already, you can relax a little. You don’t have to be all about the trophy for once. I thought you said—” I stop when she glares at me.
“No, I can’t relax!” she says, and I raise my eyebrows. “I told you, I’m a legacy. People think I just get the film award because of my mom. It’s up to me to prove them wrong.”
“Nobody thinks that.”
“Yeah, right,” she says. “I know they’re wrong, but still. I want them to know it too.”
“Isn’t the important thing that you know it?” I ask. “That you’re being the best you you can be?”
She gives me some side eye for a minute, then we both laugh.
“Nice,” she says. “Guess you’ve been hitting up that workbook.”
“I’ve been perusing it as Charles would say.” I shrug. “It stays terrible.”
“Okay, what about you?” she asks. “You said you wanted to help me with this, and I’m sorry, but you haven’t done that much.
Busted. “Okay, I do love movies—especially watching them. I told you how my brother and I were going to do that summer film festival at home …”
“Yeah, like a million times,” she says drily.
“I’ve just been distracted. And overwhelmed. And I don’t even know if film is a thing for me,” I trail off. “Not like choreography. I love that for real. But I’m messing that up too.”
“I’m not trying to say I told you so,” she says. The bell for lunch rings, and kids start running toward the dining hall. “But I totally told you so!”
“Okay, okay,” I say. “You were right. And so was I—remember I said I was a secretly a failure? I think that means I win!” She doesn’t laugh. “The truth is,” I continue, “I’m really behind on my dance for Street Style, and they’re depending on me … and Triple M is about to annihilate me …”
“It’s fine,” she says. “Let’s just be honest with each other, okay? I thought we were friends—and no shade—but it’s pretty obvious that Fred has been doing most of the work.”
“Ouch,” I say.
“Not because you’re a failure, Emmet. In fact, a lot of your problem is because you’ve been a good friend. Both Michelle and Charles have talked about how much you’re helping them. And … well, even if you haven’t been a big help on this film, you’ve listened to me, and I appreciate that. So, what about you? What’s up with your solo?”
“It’s great, just putting on the finishing touches,” I say quickly. I may not be a complete failure yet, but I still need to win something. And I might have a shot with Natasha if I show up and show out big time at the Camp Showcase. “It’s gonna be fire.” I smile. You’ll feel good about losing to me.”
She smiles back and starts to walk away, then turns back to look at me. “Good luck. But make no mistake, I want to win,” she says. “And since, as you say, I’m amazing, I should!” She pauses. “I’m gonna go meet with Fred, make him the official sound guy. I’ll talk to you later.”
I wave goodbye, glad that she didn’t get all twisted up about what I said. Natasha’s cool. And she’s smart—I should probably talk to her more about my film festival, she might have some good ideas. I know I’m not doing a great job of showing her my best self, but there’s still time. Then I see Derek catch up to her. He puts his arm on her shoulder, and instead of shrugging him off, she leans in. Guess she’s not that smart after all.
Chapter Thirty-Six
In Black to the Future, Charisse and Gordon ask a kid named Chris to come up and read something.
“‘We don’t have to be what you want us to be,’” Chris reads slowly, and then sits down and high-fives all the people around him like he did some real work.
“That’s a quote attributed to Bill Russell,” says Charisse. “A man who many consider to be one of the greatest professional basketball players of all time.”
Someone coughs out, “LeBron,” and this girl Eloisa yells, “Jorrrrdannnnn!”
“Bill Russell led the Celtics to eleven championships and was an outspoken social activist,” says Charisse, looking unbothered. “LeBron James follows a similar path in many ways. Anyway, Russell often refused to ‘play the game’ to get ahead in the business of pro ball, which may be why many of you don’t know his name.”
“Our topic today is Great Expectations and Blaxploitation” says Gordon. “And yes, I came up with that myself.” He smiles. “Pretty good, right?
”
Charisse rolls her eyes. “We want to talk about how we may sometimes feel that we have to be a certain way in order to succeed as Black people, whether or not we feel like we can just “be.”
I raise my hand. “I thought Blaxploitation films were all about stereotypes of Black people. Why would we talk about that?”
“Sometimes those films had political messages,” chimes in Natasha.
“And they’re part of our culture,” adds another kid.
“My mom says we don’t need to be showing out in front of white people,” says a boy. “We’re already trying to fight negative images of our community.”
“Um, hello? Who created those images in the first place? And why are we even worrying about what white people think?” asks Michelle. “We already know that it’s not going to be good, when it comes to us. We need to just do our own things, like Marcus Garvey said.”
I know all about Marcus Garvey now! Yardies unite!
“But we have to ‘do our own thing’ in a white world,” says Troy. “So we gotta be realistic.”
And we’re off. We’ve gotten so comfortable that Gordon and Charisse mostly sit back and let us talk, but I can tell they’re really listening. After a while, Charisse asks us about our favorite YouTubers.
“Oh wait, don’t try and take away my videos,” says a kid. “You’re ruining all the fun!”
Everybody laughs, but I’m seriously a little nervous that they’ll tell me that some of my faves are problematic. Everything’s so complicated when you know more about how complicated everything is.
Luke speaks up. “What I don’t get is why people like that guy Brett in the Hood can act all hard core and call himself a thug and have six million subscribers, but an actual Black person doing the same thing can’t get anything except maybe wrongly arrested.” He gets many snaps after that comment.
It Doesn't Take a Genius Page 20
