All of my school friends live on one exact same block. All five of them. They live in old, enormous homes overlooking the river. They all have garden-lawns and clean new minivans you aren’t allowed to eat in. Sometimes I wish I lived here more than anywhere, even Hawaii.
I get dropped off with one of them on a Saturday afternoon and sometimes we get permission to go into a basement I wasn’t originally invited to, and we play Ghost in the Dark, or we form a bike gang, even though it doesn’t feel like much of a gang because their moms all make us wear knee pads and helmets, things I don’t even own, and we have to promise not to leave the block or cross the street. There’s no bass booming by, just cicada hums and mowers, no gold- skinned grandpa pushing a silver cart full of fruit bars back and forth in the heat, wiping his brow on a rag he hangs from the handle that must be hot on his old hands. Instead there are blond moms, in-shape as teenagers, jogging by with strollers and Walkmans, saying hello to my friends and knowing all of their names. There are no black or brown kids living in this neighborhood or visiting except for me, and especially when I am my summer shade, I’m always worried that some little freckle-faced boy will call me out for being here.
Monica and Ally are my two very best school friends. They live three houses apart. At Ally’s, every time, I have to be alone for a whole hour while her mom forces her off alone to practice her clarinet. I watch a movie and listen to her miss notes and start over from far away. Her mom says I can’t play outside because it will make Ally jealous and distract her. While I’m sitting in their living room trying to pretend I like Snow White, not even being offered a decent snack, I feel sick for my house, where we only own good movies like The Princess Bride and Mr. Mom and where, if I ever played an instrument, my mom would definitely let me put off practice until my friend left, or probably never tell me to practice at all.
Monica plays the flute, but you would never know it from a playdate. At her house we are mostly left alone. We make a lot of poster-board plans to save the rainforest and its animals. She’s obsessed with Jane Goodall and tells me about the movie Gorillas in the Mist too much.
One great thing about being Monica’s friend is that she isn’t the kind of white girl who makes you feel hideous. It’s not like hanging out with my other best friend Sarah, who looks like she should be taking over a whole section of a Sears catalog, laughing in a red tankini on one page and skipping in a purple wool jacket and matching beret on the next. Monica has soft curly hair that doesn’t stay together when it rains, almost as bad as mine except hers is blond. She has round cheeks that don’t match her twiggy body. And her skin is the kind my mom has, whiter than teeth and unable to tan even one shade.
I love Monica, and I even like her little kind-of-whiny little sister, Lisa, and her dad is okay, even though he pours a bowl of cereal and milk and purposefully lets it get soggy before he eats it, so sometimes when I think about him I gag a little. But I like how he says my name in a playful way, like if he knew me a little better he would like to tickle me, and how he laughs when his daughters say something sassy instead of getting mad. But I am not a fan of Monica’s mom.
Once, when she made us sandwiches, she stared at my plate as I was finishing and said, “So . . . do you not like crust?” I shook my head. “Well, you could have just told me that, and I would have cut it off.” She has this really huge phony smile on all the time, but now she wasn’t even wearing it. She took my plate. I knew I was supposed to say something like “sorry” and “thank you,” but I couldn’t crack my lips.
She tried to flash a little smile when she caught me watching her fill the sink, but it barely even lit up before it went out again. She plays like she’s nice and I guess a lot of people are fooled, but I have a special vision that can see through adults like her. She’s always on a sharp edge, like her feet are being cut into and she can barely stand. Which I don’t even get because she has a pretty cute husband and a giant house. She gets to be a mom; she doesn’t have to work besides cleaning up and making us sandwiches.
I sat on a bar stool at their counter, waiting for Monica to finish her apple slices, and it hit me that her mom was probably only mad that out of all the wispy little white kids at our school her daughter had to pick the one brown girl for a best friend. She was mad that I was in their house, dirtying their sparkling toilet when I had to go, eating up their precious white groceries, wasting the crusts of two whole bread slices.
I went home and couldn’t stop imagining her tripping and skinning her face, choking on the uncut crust of a bologna sandwich, finding out she has cancer. I didn’t quite want her to die because I love Monica so much, but I wanted her to come close and realize how horrible she is. That God doesn’t like her.
But I didn’t tell my mom. I knew what she’d say. “She probably wasn’t really upset at you . . .” I know what she thinks, that I’m too sensitive, that I hate people too much.
It took almost a year for me to not feel like my organs were turning into lit coals whenever I was playing at Monica’s house and her mom came into the room to tell us something. She’s still as edgy as always, but she hasn’t been mean again. There is a tiny chance that it wasn’t about me, that maybe she had her period that day. So now I can just feel a smoldering instead of full flames.
We aren’t allowed to watch TV at Monica’s house, only a G-rated movie at a sleepover, so sometimes we get so bored we make up dances to Paula Abdul songs.
Lisa pops her head into Monica’s room. “Can I do a dance with you guys?” she asks.
Monica rolls her eyes but sighs. “Fine.”
Lisa squeals and runs off to change.
They invited me over after school to stay all the way until after dinner. Maybe we’ll perform our routine in the living room for her parents and my mom when she comes to get me. Maybe not, because we’re all the same kind of shy.
“Here, you can wear this one,” Monica hands me a shiny pink leotard she wore in her jazz recital last year. We are the same age and height, but since I’m thicker her leotards cut into my crotch and creep into my butt crack and pinch under the arms. But I pretend like it feels fine because there’s no alternative except for my own plain shirt and overalls, which would look even dumber in a dance show than my gross thighs squeezing out of these leg holes like popped sausages.
Her dad is still at work and her mom is down in the kitchen so we practice in her parents’ room. It’s as wide open as a backyard, with ceilings no adult could ever reach, not even an NBA player.
Monica and I don’t wait for Lisa to get started. Even though we’re best friends, we’re not too great at sitting in silence together. She pushes play on “Cold Hearted Snake” and we stand still, just feeling our shyness like puppet strings pulled too tight. When the song ends, after she has to move to rewind it, she quietly suggests we begin by pointing our feet in towards each other and raising our hands above our heads. I think we should get on the floor next, maybe do a roll. When we jump up, Monica says, we should clap to the beat as we walk in a circle.
“You didn’t wait for me!” Lisa whines, and immediately starts crying in the bedroom doorway, folding down to her boney knees.
“Be quiet and get up!” Sometimes Monica is meaner than I think I would be if I ever got to have a baby sister.
Lisa gets up and stops whining but only until she takes me in, wearing her favorite color leotard.
“Heeey, I want to wear the pink one!” she pouts.
“No, it doesn’t fit you, Lisa!”
They go back and forth as I stand eyeing the doorway, ready to change back into my clothes. I don’t want them to get so loud their mom comes upstairs, asking why I’m hogging this leotard, making her baby cry. And it’s starting to leave red lines in me, anyway.
“I’m not dancing unless I get to wear the pink one,” Lisa threatens, sitting cross-legged on the floor between us.
Monica sighs deep. “Lisa. Seriously. She’s the guest, so she gets to wear it . . .” I’m about to tell them that I don’t really care, but then Monica adds, “And anyway pink looks the best on her skin.”
I look away. I don’t know why, but it’s embarrassing having my skin mentioned out loud. Monica has never said a word about me being half black; none of my white friends have. Not in a bad way or a good way or any way at all. So it’s just weird. And I’ve never heard of brown skin looking better in pink. But she said it like it was a known fact. I’m pretty sure that it isn’t a real compliment, though; it’s just her way of winning the argument.
Monica is pulling Lisa up by both elbows, and Lisa is half-heartedly whining, “Stop,” but letting herself be pulled and staying on her feet. She crosses her arms and says, “I want the pink . . . and plus . . . we’re black too . . .” She mumbles, but I swear I hear her right.
I’ve never seen someone whip around faster and sharper than Monica does now to growl, “Shut up, Lisa!” She shakes her head so slowly, burning her eyes into her sister’s. Lisa bites her lips and runs out of the room.
I breathe in so hard and then I can’t let it out. I can’t swallow. I start to see spots.
Monica looks everywhere except at me, she walks away and pretends like she’s skimming through cassette tapes for a long time, then finally changes the song to “Opposites Attract” and goes right into showing me her ideas.
Sometimes I imagine that deep inside of me a little bold black girl lives, maybe the spirit of somebody who birthed someone who birthed someone on and on until me. She says all of the things that make me shake to think about saying to people. She says, “Hold up!” a lot and even worse, when she’s really offended she puts up her finger and rolls her eyes and says, “Hold the fuck up! What the hell did you just say to me?” Maybe she’s creeping closer and closer to the surface of my skin and someday she will be in charge, and this weak-me will retreat deep into my liver.
We make up a dance. Mostly Monica makes up moves and I copy whatever she does as if I’m into it. I don’t speak. When we’re called down to eat, we change back into our clothes in buzzing silence. Monica’s cheeks had flushed when she shouted at Lisa to shut up, and they still aren’t fading back to pale. Maybe she’s just hot from dancing. I don’t know which way to feel. If she could just act normal, I think maybe I wouldn’t feel like fainting.
I try not to make eye contact with her or anyone through dinner. I try to eat at least some of everything so I won’t get called-out for being wasteful again, even though it has no taste and my stomach is flip-flopping.
When my mom comes, Monica says softly, “Let’s go put our leotards back on,” but I say that my stomach kind of hurts a little, sorry. Monica’s mom says, “Oh, I hope it wasn’t the food!” and I tell her it wasn’t without turning around from the front door, where I’m standing with shoes on and water in my eyes. “Monica, you two will do your dance next time she comes,” her mom says. Monica doesn’t say anything. I wonder if she knows I’m never coming back.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” my mom asks, as soon as I close my car door.
“Nothing.”
“Did you guys get in a fight or something?”
“No!”
I don’t know what it was. I keep replaying it.
There’s no way that Lisa actually thinks that they’re black, girls who wouldn’t be able to play unprotected in the sun for ten minutes without losing all of their skin. She obviously said it because she just really wanted that pink leotard. That part doesn’t bother me.
But the part I don’t know how to feel about is the shut up. Why did Monica yell it, and give her that long, wild look, just as if she had called me a name, fat or dumb or something. Just like she would have stared her down if Lisa had blurted out something embarrassing Monica had done, like pooped her pants. Shut up, she said, shut up, like I yell at my brother when he’s teased me for an entire road trip and I can’t stand to hear one more word of his stupid voice. Only Monica was even louder, meaner.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” my mom says again, as we pull into our driveway.
Maybe I should tell her. Maybe she could explain it to me, what Monica meant, because she understands the ways and words of white girls like I never can, no matter how much I hang out with them, even if I sometimes start to think that our ways and words are similar or even the same. Maybe I’ve thought that sometimes.
But she might also get red-face-mad at my best friend. And she could decode what she said so that I can’t go back to being unsure about it, and she would talk to Monica’s mom, and tell me I can’t hang out with her anymore. Maybe I’d like that, but maybe I would think that it was unfair. And I would still see her every day at school and everyone, all the white kids around us, would want to know what broke us up. If I told them they would think I’m such a baby for being mad over nothing.
But my mom keeps pressing for it. She turns off the engine and angles herself towards me in the darkness, in the shadow of the garage we never pull into because it’s full of things that aren’t cars, where it’s really cold and I’m not wearing a jacket. “Tell me what’s wrong before we go inside.”
“Nothing’s wrong . . . I was just thinking . . .” I make up a really fake laugh she probably isn’t buying. “Um, Lisa . . . tried to say that they were black . . . and . . . um, yeah.” I stop short just before tattling on Monica. I swallow the rest of the story into my stomach acid.
She furrows her brow, like she’s maybe about to be upset but first she wants more. After it’s clear I’m done sharing, she relaxes her face and says, “Weeelllll, she is. You know that, right? Remember, you met their grandma?”
I hold my head. If the past few hours were all a fever-dream I woke up from right now, everything would make perfect sense again. I’m trying so hard, but I can’t picture any grandma right now, especially a black one, and definitely not a black grandma belonging to them. “Mom! Who are you talking about?!”
She sighs and tries to take me backwards a couple years when she says Monica’s mom asked if it was okay for me to go along to visit their dad’s mom in the tiny town just north of us, and my mom picked me up from there, and she saw her for herself. “She’s light-skinned, but definitely black.”
I think I can see her now, on the chipped-blue steps of a porch. And Lisa on her lap. I remember, but barely. I think that Monica and I mostly played far away from the house, and I had no idea who she was or why we were there and I didn’t care. I must have been six. I remember her waving at me, or I think I do. She was sandy-black, lighter than me, with white hair and only her wide nose to give her away. Or maybe I’m making her all up.
“Are you sure?”
“Very,” my mom laughs. “Monica’s dad is definitely half-black. I’ve heard him discuss it before with Dad.”
I picture him. He’s just a white man with a tan.
I grip my seatbelt. If I busted through the window, I think this shock could make me levitate out of the car, and I would keep rising.
My mom can’t read my thoughts like she sometimes can. She laughs at me for the way my mouth is hanging open. “She’s never mentioned that to you, that you’re both mixed?” She climbs out of the car.
My knees are all shaky, and my hands, as I try to unbuckle.
Shut up, Monica growled, and looked down at her sister like she was barely holding back her hands. I don’t know if I’ve ever been that kind of psycho-mad at somebody. I’m not even that mad right now, realizing that my best friend is part black but hates it so much she doesn’t even want me to know. Maybe that’s why she chose me, because we’re kind of the same, even if she wanted me to think we weren’t, or maybe I chose her. I can’t remember.
My mom taps my window. When I open the door slowly she asks, “Are you okay?”
Probably, everything was just nothing, and the next time we play it will be all normal.
“It’s just my stomach feels a little nauseous . . . because Mr. Peterson eats his cereal soggy.”
“He had cereal at dinner?”
“NO . . . it’s just another time I was there. He did it at breakfast. So sometimes . . . I still think about it.”
She laughs, “You really do hold onto things forever. Remind me never to get on your bad side,” climbing the porch steps ahead of me, opening the back door of our warm messy house, where we all hate crust, and everyone is either black and can’t hide it if they wanted to, or really wishes to be.
It isn’t bedtime, but I close myself into my room, fold up into the rocking heat of my waterbed, float, and cry quietly, and when the waves stop I make some more. I’m sadder than I’ve been in a long time, so sad that I don’t even exactly know why, but I can’t think straight enough to try to figure it out right now. I think it’s just a million things all clashing and tangling and cutting into each other. I guess it’s kind of wanting to stab Monica to death, and loving her, and it’s the secret shame I’ve felt before that I don’t want anyone to ever know about, and it’s Kwanzaa, and dances I don’t know how to do, and my dad’s African clothes in the back of his closet, and his family in Chicago so close and so foreign to me, and it’s white kids at my school trying to rap Fresh Prince songs, not knowing how to talk to the kids in my neighborhood, and the boys who broke my brother’s basketball hoop.
But at least I’m home. I love to come home. Even when I’m in-hate with everyone in the world, I feel this calm whenever we round the last corner and I can see its broad brick shoulder poking out of the block ahead of us. I might get annoyed with someone here, but there is always my own room with fifty-three stuffed animals that I can cry into, and my cat and my dog, my hamsters and my cockatiel, always singing and digging and making me know I’m not alone. And anyway, no one ever says anything very mean, I never have to worry about what hateful thoughts are floating around under someone’s wispy blond hair, because in here no one is blond, and I know them better than I know about math or horses or anything.
At our house too many lights are always on. My mom isn’t into homemaking like some moms I know, actually she’s pretty against it, which is just perfect. You can sit anywhere; if you spill, no one cares. The TV is almost always on, or the record player in the living room, and even when it’s my dad blasting old people like Carole King or The Temptations on Saturday afternoons as he does the dishes, the constant noise makes you feel like you’re surrounded by a whole village who loves you instead of just a mom and a dad and one brother. There’s usually pretty good food, sometimes even pop. There are only five or six meals my mom makes for dinner on rotation, but that’s great when you don’t like any other things. It’s an old house with no central air, so in the summers the upstairs is unbearable, but that means we get to close ourselves into the kitchen and TV room that has an air conditioner in the window and a cabinet filled with all our favorite movies on tape, and our mom never really tells us that we have to turn it off and go outside: we only do when we wanna. In the winter the radiators hiss and pop, which jump-scares you just like a haunted house, and for the spots where the warmth doesn’t quite reach, we have a trunk filled with quilts and comforters, a fireplace my dad sets up for us as we sit on the couch drinking the Nestle powder our mom stirs into milk and heats on the stove.
A lot of times I fantasize about never having to leave my house again. Like, what if I woke up and a flood had washed us to the river, then the ocean. Other houses would be out there, too, like the house of my mixed best friend Nikki, and sometimes we would dive off of our front porches and snorkel around together with seals and dolphins. But mostly we would just wave to each other from our windows and stay with our own families.
Once a week a big ship would come by to drop off food and everything we need. My parents wouldn’t have to worry about work and there would be no school, so maybe my mom would have another baby, or even two, a sister for me and a little brother for Nate. All we would do is just play Clue and watch The Simpsons and bake cookies when we felt like it. I’d finally get good enough at Mario Kart to beat Nate. There would be no such thing as bedtime, and some nights I’d invite my family through the window in my bedroom. I’d make the roof comfortable with sleeping bags and I’d have a bowl of chips and root beer floats, and we’d lie side by side on the slant and watch the stars. It would be so dark out there, we’d see all the ones we don’t know about now. Sometimes, my brother says, aliens land their ships in the ocean, so we’d watch for them together, and if we saw any we’d wave but never tell. Some nights we’d meet in my parents’ bed to listen to my dad read The Hobbit to us again, using the deep and tiny voices of all the characters. Sometimes islands, or whole countries, would move past the kitchen windows as we helped my mom make eggs and pancakes. But no voice inside us would ever say to step on land again.
And if I were hanging out on my porch dipping my toes in the water, holding on to the black iron railing to make sure I didn’t get pulled away from home, and we happened to float past certain people’s houses—miserable, stuck- up, stuffy houses that used to be on the good side of town overlooking the river but were now just floating aimlessly like everyone’s—I’d close my eyes. Because they’re nothing to see. I would lie on my stomach, my head on my warm, brown arms, to let my back get even browner, better, deeper.
Bahiyyih El-Shabbaz’s fiction and creative nonfiction has been published in Phoebe Journal, Toska Magazine, the Bronx-Bi-Annual, Hair Trigger, the South Loop Review, the Other Stories, and Hypertext. She has been a recipient of a Columbia Scholastic Press Association Award, a finalist for The Chicago Literary Guild’s Nonfiction Award, and the winner of Phoebe Journal’s Creative Nonfiction Award, judged by Cheryl Strayed. She attended Columbia College Chicago’s Fiction Writing Program. She is represented by Sobel Weber Agency and is currently working on a collection of short fiction and a YA novel.
