A More Deserving Blackness (2 page)

             
It isn’t until I fumble my way to health class that I see him again, the guy from the hall.  I’m sitting in a seat at the back, staring down at the textbook the teacher had placed on the scratched table in front of each blue plastic chair, so it’s his scuffed work boots I notice first.  Black leather, broken laces that were frayed at the ends, the hem of his jeans threadbare and faded.  He walks slowly past me, turning at the last moment to claim the seat across the aisle, one boot beneath the desk and the other spilling out into the aisle.  I glance over at him and immediately recognize him; the dark hair, the darker eyes, the face completely devoid of expression.  He doesn’t talk to anyone and if it isn’t my imagination, the other students seem to give him a wide radius as well.  In fact, as I raise my head, I notice he’s getting more sidelong looks than me, which is practically impossible.  Though that will almost certainly change as soon as –

             
“Class, I want to introduce our new student, Bree McCaffrey,” my professor, Mr. Apligian, announces in a booming voice. He’s wearing the unfortunate combination of a cream sweater vest over a short-sleeved white dress shirt, the knitted fibers stretched over his portly belly.  He has grayish-brown hair shorn close to his head and dark plastic framed eyeglasses that he adjusts on his nose as he scans the classroom, looking for me.

             
I cringe as the room erupts in the squeals of chair legs, students pushing back in their seats, shifting their attention to me at the back of the room. 

             
“Bree’s going to be with us for the rest of the year,” he adds lamely, and then, mercifully, my introduction is over.  The squeals signal a shift of attention back to the front of the room as Mr. Apligian rattles off a few more formalities while passing out the syllabus.  I settle back into the uncomfortable plastic chair, dropping my hands to my lap, searching with my thumb against my opposite wrist.  I find it easily, tender under the pad of my thumb.  Only once I feel the slow, sour seep of relief do I realize he’s still looking at me.  The guy from the hall.

             
He stares at me unapologetically and I find myself staring back, wondering who he is.  Wondering why he doesn’t seem to have any friends in a school this size.  Wondering what had been so devastating that he’d stood there like that earlier, like the world was crumbling to ash all around him.

             
The girl in the desk in front of him doesn’t hand him his copy of the syllabus as it travels to the back of the room, she drops it onto his desk like it’s burning her hand, and he finally breaks his gaze at the interruption.  When he catches her eye she jerks back around like she’s spooked.

             
He never looks at me again, and when the bell blasts overhead, he slides smoothly from his seat without a backward glance. 

             
He hadn’t spoken a single word to anyone.

              My last class is pre-calc and by the time I reach a seat at the back of the class I’m exhausted and raw.  After so much time holed away from everything, this much constant noise and activity is draining.

             
I stiffen and jerk away when a shoulder comes plowing into me out of nowhere, solid and heavy.

             
He’s laughing when he turns around to face me, tanned face and sandy brown hair in that popular style that is way too long and meant to look wind-swept.

             
“Sorry.  That was -” he jabs a finger at a chuckling boy behind him – “dickhead’s fault back there.  I’m Dylan, by the way.”

             
His eyes are practically twinkling at me and I know he expects me to have some kind of girly reaction here but all I can feel is that throbbing in my arm where he’d run into me.

             
“What’s your name?”

             
I stare at him.  Really?

             
His smile goes crooked in a way that can only be calculated as his eyes turn theatrically mischievous.  “Should I guess?”

             
Yes, asshole.  I’m The Little Mermaid, and if you’re just charming enough, pretty soon you’ll get to kiss me while a discordant seagull sings us a love ballad.

             
“I really am sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

             
He thinks I’m mad at him or something, playing some game.  I scan the classroom.  Where is the effing teacher?

             
The bell rings loud enough to make me jump, but Prince Oblivious doesn’t notice.

             
“Come on Beautiful, just your name?”

             
“Mr. Tanner,” an authoritative male voice calls out as he closes the door behind him, and I sigh.  Finally.

             
Dylan gives me a wink before making his way to the front of the class.  I watch curiously as my teacher – I hadn’t paid enough attention to my syllabus to care what his name was – whispers succinctly across his desk, his eyes flicking more than once back to me.  I can imagine what he’s saying.

             
New girl.  Had a rough time.  Doesn’t talk. 

             
When Dylan returns to the seat next to mine he actually looks a little sheepish.  But that doesn’t stop him from grinning at me on his way out after class ends, slipping a pumpkin-orange canvas backpack over his shoulder with one overly muscled arm.

             
“See you tomorrow, Beautiful.”

              Trish picks me up after school during what she calls her lunch break at two-thirty in the afternoon, and I force my face into all the right expressions.  She fires a string of animated questions at me on the short drive back to her house, feeding me the answers she hopes for in her enthusiastic nodding.  I barely even have to listen in order to respond in all the right ways.  One of the perks of not talking is that people don’t really expect a whole lot of variety in your responses.  Trish talks at me until the very moment I nod my goodbye at her and slip from the car.

             
“I’ll see you for dinner!” she calls out the window to me as she backs down the drive, and with a wave she’s gone.

             
I let myself into the house.  It still smells of her morning coffee, which is a pleasant enough aroma.  It’s neat and simple, everything in its place, but I don’t have the energy to find any better resting place for my still mostly empty backpack than the floor where I drop it just inside the door.  I toe off my plain grey sneakers, leaving them where they lie as well, a tiny eye of disorder in the middle of this pristine space.  Not that Trish is pretentious or uptight or anything, she just doesn’t have a lot of time for hobbies or trinkets or mess or teenage sisters dropped into her life like a sordid mistake from the darkest cloud in a stormy sky.

             
Though, to be fair, I wasn’t dropped.  I’d asked her, pleaded with her in any way I could, to come live here.  It was just too hard back home.  And she’d agreed without hesitation, even though we both knew the whole thing chipped just a little more off my parents’ already broken hearts.

             
I have several hours still before she’ll be home from the newsroom.  Plenty of time to toss my belongings through the door of the blue guest room– my room now – and slam it shut, locking them away from sight.  I’m getting good at that.

             
Trish comes home at eight, spilling through the door with a spray of apologies and immediately disappearing into her bedroom, changing into her customary sweatpants and t-shirt before reemerging to set some water on to boil for pasta.  Tugging the sleeve of my sweatshirt over my wrist I watch her silently from my spot at the table where a nearly full mug of mint tea had long since gone cold in front of me.  There’s a magazine on the table and I pull it toward me and flip it open, taking an icy sip of ghastly over-strong tea – I’d forgotten about the teabag and had left it in - because it seems like something normal to do.

             
Unlike sitting alone at the kitchen table in silence for the past few hours.

             
Trish looks similar to me in color only.  Our hair is the same shade, somewhere wandering lost and confused between brown and auburn.  Our skin is the same freckled pale, our eyes the same brown edging toward gold.  But that is where the similarities end.  Where I am short but curvy Trish towers over mere mortal girls, usually topping off the goddess look with simple closed-toed spiky heels and sleek, dark pencil skirts.  Her hair is curly where mine is stubbornly straight and years back she’d cut it short just below her chin.

             
Her springy curls bounce as she shakes the uncooked pasta into the pan, and I’m washed with a sudden and heavy wave of guilt.  Working the hours she does, letting me stay here after my parents had lost all hope of ever getting me back, the least I could do is cook her dinner so she wouldn’t have to do it once she got home.  For the first time all day I wish I could speak, if only to say I’m sorry.  But the effort of finding a pen and paper to write those two words feels exhausting, so I let the wave blast over me until it’s just a mild tugging at the bottom of my stomach.

             
I blink and see Trish leaning back against the slate countertop and staring at me.  She’s waiting for something, obviously, and I raise my brows, sending her what I hope is a carefree-looking smile.  I feel like a blind person trying to draw a tree.

             
“How was your first day?” she asks, and by her tone I can tell this isn’t the first time she’d said it.  I shrug.  No need to be overly enthusiastic.  Even before . . . I was never as chipper as the force that is my older sister.

             
“Did you . . . talk to anyone?”

             
I stare at her.

             
“Okay,” she sighs.  Then, with that inextinguishable optimism, “Did you meet any friends?”

             
That I can’t even justify with a shrug and her lips twist into something like a guilty smile.  “Right.  Teenagers.”  She walks over to me, leaning her hands down over the top of the chair adjacent to mine.  “They’ll come around, Bree.  Just give ‘em time, all right?”

             
Time.  Of course.  The magic eraser.  Just give it time, Bree.  You’ll feel better, Bree.  You just need some time, Bree.  Time heals all wounds.

             
After long enough, people just stopped saying it.

             
But I nod anyway, because that’s what she wants, and it will make her feel better, give her something to tell my parents when she sends off that biweekly email she’d promised them she would.  Just one more way I was the sliver in the eyeball of her fast-paced, successful life.  And the heartbreak of my parents’.

             
She reaches to squeeze my shoulder and I mentally brace myself for the stabbing impact.

             
“Hungry?”

             
Not even remotely, but I nod anyway.

Chapter 2

T
he next day, Trish takes me to school on her way to work, a major sacrifice for a
news
reporter accustomed to her feet already aching in those professional superwoman heels long before the sun even comes up.  I follow her out onto the driveway, stifling a yawn.  She doesn’t need to know how little I really sleep, though more than once when the suffocation of insomnia or a nightmare had forced me out of my room I’d found her still seated cross-legged on the floor with her computer open on the coffee table in front of her, her face washed of makeup so the bluish glow of the screen illuminated her freckles. 

             
Day two. 

             
Her silver Honda is glistening with dew and I run the tip of my first finger over it as I round to the passenger side.  The metal is cold and feels good.

             
I drop into the seat, closing the door behind me and she backs cleanly down the drive.  The car hums as it rolls to a stop while Trish shifts into drive, and I look out the window as we head away.

             
On the other side of the road is a simple brown house; square, indistinct white wooden porch at its front devoid of any chairs or pots or other symptoms of humanity.  The yard is well-maintained but with only a few sporadic bushes at the edge of the drive along a short fence of slightly dirtied white color.  No other flowers or gardens.  Taken care of, but at the same time, kind of . . . forgotten.

             
What catches my eye is the bright red paint scrawled across the entire front of the garage door, little crimson drips having dried like blood seeping from a fresh wound.  As I stare at it I hear Trish mutter something about it being terrible as we roll past.

             
I crane in my seat a little, staring at that one grisly red word. 

             
Murderer.

              My second day is very much like my first, and in many ways, very different.  Of course I speak to no one.  I’m a little less lost.  I even manage to avoid the scene in the bathroom, though I find myself absently rubbing at the inside of my wrist on more than one occasion. 

             
I don’t see the guy from the hall yesterday until his boots appear next to my desk in health class again, heavy footfalls announcing his arrival.  He makes his way to the back of the class and slips into the same seat across the aisle from me without ever being acknowledged by another living soul, and for a second I wonder exactly how crazy I really am.  What is the difference really between hearing phantom screams in your mind and seeing a talking, breathing ghost walk through the halls of your high school?

             
I jump when the chair on the other side of me screeches, sliding across the dirtied linoleum floor as a tall, lanky, smiling boy drops into it, complete with dimples and spiky black hair.

             
“Hi,” he says brightly.  “I’m Erik.”

             
I stare blandly at him, no idea what to do.  Does he expect me to answer him?

             
“No, it’s okay,” he assures me with a vague shaking of his hand in the air between us above the table, like a dj at a beat box.  “I know you don’t – don’t talk.  You’re Bree, right?”

             
I manage to nod.

             
“I’m Erik.”  An awkward pause.  “I already said that.”

             
I don’t smile, even though he’s being nice and he’s talking to me and there’s no reason not to act like a normal girl to this decently cute boy next to me except that I’m not normal and I’ll never be normal.

             
He seems unruffled by my reluctance, and grins a quarterback kind of grin at me, though I have no idea if he even plays football, know nothing about him at all other than his name.  Twice.

             
“All right if I sit here?” 

             
I shrug and he takes that for a yes, unfolding his long legs and making himself comfortable in the seat. 

             
When the bell rings I glance over to my right, and the ghost is sitting perfectly immobile, leaning on his elbows and staring at his desk with impossibly dark eyes.

             
More than once I see heads come together, whispers a shrill static between them as they glance back at the quiet fixture to my right, not even bothering to hide the looks.  A few are mocking, some angry, but all with widened eyes, like elementary kids at a zoo, when the gorilla beats on the glass with his massive fists and scares the shit out of them.  A little too close, a little too real.  And I find myself studying him, searching for what it is in his calm, expressionless demeanor that scares the shit out of all of them.

             
In pre-calc, my Disney Prince – Dylan is his name - is ludicrously nice to me, holding open the door and leaping out of his seat to get my pencil when I drop it.  He grins at me with perfect white teeth and calls me “Beautiful,” but at least he doesn’t try to get me to talk to him again.

             
Over the next few days, it doesn’t take long for both of them to fall into habit.  Dylan, being overly nice to me, heavy on the endearments in a sweet but obnoxious sort of way.  Even sharing a bag of skittles with me one day that I politely eat some of before dumping the rest into the bottom of my bag.  And Erik, casually choosing the seat next to me in health every day.  He never has any trouble finding something to talk about, despite my failure to respond.  It’s nice, in a way.  He has an easy smile, dimples that don’t quit.  Erik acts a buffer to the rest of the class, and I don’t see them staring as much.  Word of me had spread around the school quickly, and I’m fairly certain there isn’t anyone who doesn’t know of the new girl who refuses to speak.

             
One day it’s, “Where are you from?”

             
I just shrug.  Erik doesn’t really expect an answer, and I know that even if I was Oprah fucking Winfrey, getting paid millions to sit around and talk all day, I still wouldn’t tell him that.

             
“You know, there are other colors besides grey,” he teases me another time, as he slides into the seat next to me.  “No, seriously.  I’ll introduce you sometime.”

             
The next day it’s, “So, Bree, huh?  Are you Irish?”

             
And on and on, innocent questions that I never answer but that keep the air full of vibrant words flitting on weightless wings between us.

             
He starts beckoning me over at lunch as well.  The first time, after I’d just gotten through the line with that same sympathetic grandma look from the lunch lady who was barely older than Trish.  Having just paid the overpriced three dollars for the bottle of V8 that I hold in one hand, I’m struggling to pin my bag against my body with my elbow as I zip it closed.

             
“Here, let me help you with that,” Erik says with those dimples flashing, smoothly removing the bag from my hands and zipping it for me, setting it back on my shoulder once he’d finished.  I put on a smile for him, because he’s being nice in a sea full of distrustful stares, and anything else would be just plain bitchy.

             
Regardless of how his touch makes me want to shove him away from me with both hands.

             
He adjusts his own bag on his shoulder, an army-green messenger type bag, grabbing his brown plastic tray from atop the milk cooler behind him where he must’ve stashed it to come to my aid.  There’s a purple Gatorade bottle wobbling precariously in one corner and a white Styrofoam plate piled high with nacho chips, a gelatinous meat-like substance, and hot, radiation-hazard-yellow cheese.

             
“That’s all you’re eating again?”

             
I blink up at him.

             
“Sorry, I’ve . . . noticed you a few times.  You don’t really eat much.” 

             
I spin the cold bottle around in my hands.

             
“And you always sit alone.”

             
When I look back up at him he laughs, scratching the side of his nose self-consciously.  “I’m . .  . really not as creepy as I sound.  I just meant to ask if you wanted to sit with us and it’s coming out all
One Hour Photo
.”

             
The Robin Williams movie?

             
He’s waiting for an answer, and though the “us” part concerns me a bit, I put Trish’s overjoyed face in my mind and gesture that he should lead the way. 

             
He does.  My stomach sinks when it’s to a long, rectangular table overstuffed with chairs, everyone talking and joking with each other loudly.  He elbows into the mix of them and pulls two more chairs to the end, offering me the corner, furthest away from everyone else.  I sit and give him a small grateful smile, and he returns it before offering a short introduction.

             
“Everyone, this is Bree, of Apligian’s health class.”

             
A collected hushing spreads in a wide circle over the crowd of them.

             
“Be nice to her,” Erik continues loudly, “she already thinks I’m creepy.”

             
“He is creepy,” a thin girl with straight black hair jokes, and he throws a chip at her.

             
The conversation picks up again, and though a few of them glance at me once or twice, mostly they ignore me.  And I have a place to sit.  Almost normal.

             
I discover, listening as I pretend to belong, pretend everyone so close together and so loud doesn’t bother me, that Erik was recently dumped by his on-again-off-again girlfriend.  And that he is, in fact, part of the football team, but not the quarterback, though I can’t seem to stop thinking about him that way.  And because he smiles or winks at me every now and again, without pushing me into a more active role in their camaraderie, I also discover that he is genuinely nice, which, in my limited experience, is rather rare.

             
The day after, Erik just waves me over, saving that end seat for me again, and I take it.  He offers me some of his fries, which is nice, but I shake my head, my stomach rebelling at the sight.  Food would taste horrible.

             
It becomes a routine, seeing him twice a day, something I can live with, as long as he doesn’t expect me to ever speak to him.  As long as he doesn’t touch me.  He’s pleasant enough, in a Quarterback Cutie Ken doll kind of way, and utterly harmless.

              It’s on my way into the building my second week of school that I find myself following a huge group of guys, a flock of overly inflated testosterone encased in red and white varsity jackets.  I’m not paying any attention to them, they’re just another object filling up the meaningless space around me, until all of the sudden they stop walking all together, with the same unspoken synchronicity of a murder of crows.

             
My nose smashes into a red leather-clad back, right under the bolded, arcing felt letters of a name.  Carter.

             
“Whoops.”  He spins, catching me at my elbows but immediately releasing as I flinch back.  “Hey.  Sorry.  You okay?”

             
He’s smiling down at me with a young-looking round face that doesn’t fit his massive shape and I’m nodding back at him, at his warm brown eyes, when I suddenly jump at a loud, jarring clang.

             
Around his bulk I see the reason they’d all stopped – that guy from health.  The ghost.  He’s standing, facing an almost empty open locker I assume is his and he whips his dark head back, his face hard and furious.  He’s standing in a perfectly motionless rage, fists clenched and shaking at his sides, and I realize that had been his face I’d heard a second ago, clanging into the metal lockers. 

             
Carter glances away from me, behind him as a few of his buddies step back, and he smiles oddly at me before he spins and slaps his huge palm against the face of the lockers just shy of the guy’s ear.  The metallic clap makes my eyes blink automatically, and I’m standing there, stunned, as Carter leans over the guy.

             
“Watch yourself,” he says in a low voice.  “Not everyone is scared of you.”

             
The guy is just glaring straight ahead, jaw tight, and then I barely even see him move but the locker door slams shut and then bounces back open, wobbling on its hinge, and Carter howls, curling his body around his left hand.