Bitch Is the New Black (14 page)

“Fine. Call me when you get home,” said whoever was assigned to me that night. A text an hour later was always good enough—“Goin 2 bed. Holler.”

It was in the middle of another lie—telling Gina that I was waiting for the bus to go home and definitely not walking there—when I got cut short by a burning sensation in my right bicep.

“Aaaaaah!”

“Dude, what the fuck?” she asked from the other side of the phone.

“This asshole with dreadlocks just grabbed my bag. I can't believe this shit!”

“Dude, what?”

“He snatched. My effin'. Bag. From off. My effin'. Shoulder.” I was starting to get winded.

“And where are you?”

“Running after his ass.”

“What?”

“Don't play yourself, asshole! Don't. Play. Yourself!”

It was the 911 operator who convinced me to stop running. Something about her not being able to do anything for me over the phone if he decided to graduate from misdemeanant to felon. The police officer that showed up to my rescue grudgingly agreed to drive me home only after I admitted to having been robbed just three weeks earlier. He called it in as I slid into the backseat, feeling like a badass. “Copy that.”

For obvious reasons, I was all too happy to get a real reporting job without hooker hours about six months thereafter. For equally obscure ones, I kept on walking, this time from our offices in the great state of Virginia through the popped polo collars of
Georgetown and the striped button-downs of Dupont, on to the furry hoodies of U Street, then on through the designer jeans of Little Ethiopia and finally into the bat cave. I firmly believed lightning doesn't strike thrice, or maybe I just couldn't let the terrorists win. Either way, the four-mile trek soon became something like an addiction. I say “like” because admitting you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery, and that was the one direction I wasn't headed.

It was a headache that scared me straight.

The weather in Washington is something akin to a “domesticated” lion let loose in the wild after years of drinking from a toilet—unpredictable. On this particular morning, it was freezing outside, so I wore a huge black puffy coat to work. But by the time I left that evening to start my hour-long walk home, the temperature had shot up to hot as balls. Unfazed by this, I strapped my twenty-pound laptop to my back and said my goodbyes. About twenty minutes in I sensed something might be wrong when I felt something warm and wet run down my thighs. I bent over for a second to peek between my legs to see if I'd had an “accident.” Nope, just sweat. Lots and lots of sweat. Realizing then that I probably had a Rorschach inkblot of perspiration shaping up nicely on my ass and back, I decided leaving my coat on would be best. It would also be a fitting penance for not taking the metro, or the bus, or a cab, or a rickshaw.

Once I finally got home, I threw that fucking coat off like it was on fire, flinging it across the living room with one hand and freeing myself from my now-gazillion-pound laptop with the other. I've never been thirstier in my life. I downed three highballs of Brita in as many seconds and then headed for the door again. Thirsty
and
starving. My mouth watered for a personal pan pizza from Duccini's, about twelve blocks down the street. I could've had a larger pizza delivered, I could've taken the 90 bus
straight down, I could've grown my own organic tomatoes on the windowsill and made a pizza using those and rat meat, but I didn't, okay—I walked.

By the time I got inside, the temperature in my head had to be at least 187 degrees Fahrenheit. There was a new girl taking the orders up front, which pissed me off because the African guy with the Mets cap always gave me a free Fanta. Two ten-year-olds in Catholic school uniforms played with dolls under the counter, and the brunette behind me got her order taken before mine. Pissed, I walked up to lean on the counter more than I should've been, my eyelids way heavier than they should've been. I had an epiphany about the word
throbbing
being an example of onomatopoeia, and everyone in there suddenly became stupid, fat, and ugly.

“Excuse me? Hello? Are you gonna take my order? Jesus.” I couldn't friggin' believe how rude the new girl was being.

“I'm sorry; I didn't know you were ready.” If she was shocked by my volume, she didn't let on.

“Obviously! An eight-inch pepperoni.”

“No problem, ma'am. Let me just—”

“I mean, can I pay now? Jesus!” Why the hell was this chick so slow on the uptake? I looked around for some sympathy and came up with nothing but dirty looks.

“Right. Sure. That'll be five dollars.”

Reaching into my coat pocket (yes, I put that coat back on) for my wallet actually felt like digging for clams. I took a tiny step back to steady myself, and then everything turned gray. The woman with the dark hair yelled, “No no no no,” and I woke up on the fake linoleum.

Fainting is your body's inconvenient way of telling you to take a time-out. I had never fainted before and never want to faint again, despite having previously thought the act romantic
and Elizabethan. The new girl was on the phone with 911 (me again), and the African guy was on his way with a cold Fanta. I told them I was fine, no really. Just a little hot and tired. I thanked the brunette for catching me and shooed her hand away when I got up off the floor. They charged me for the pizza. I ate it on a stool in the corner, holding each piece up to my mouth with one shaky hand and a grape Fanta to my head with the other. Pleading the fifth, I won't say how I got home.

Frances forbade me from walking for a month and made an appointment with my primary care physician, who one EKG and some blood work later said that I had been tired and hot.

For a while I was good—taking the metro to
and
from work, staying hydrated, carrying my pepper spray with the safety off, and ordering my pizza in. Really, I was just too embarrassed to show my face around town, seeing as how it had played me so tough. I'd been held up by teenagers, made bruised and bagless by someone else, and then collapsed in front of strangers and to-go boxes. Perhaps I should lay off the walking for a while, I thought, if only to trick Washington into believing I was gone. Then maybe whatever hoodoo had been placed on my hobby might get lifted—hopefully in time for the cherry blossoms.

I had to ease back onto the street, hopping off the train a few stations before I was supposed to or catching the bus a few blocks away. Duccini's was the last stop on my comeback tour.

It'd been a while, so I had a speech prepared. It began, “So, it turns out I'm not deranged, just a little dehydra…” Fortunately, I didn't need it. The African guy spotted me mumbling to myself outside and was shouting by the time I got my foot in the door. “Hey! My friend. I was worried about you.”

I've got a bag of Adaoha's stuff going stale on the bottom shelf
of my bookcase. Next to that is a bundle of unopened mail with her name on it. They've been there for a while now, since before and way after her funeral. I refuse to open either, much less make direct eye contact. I threw out bravery for such things with my Amy Grant tape and sadistic sleepover games.

Adaoha has become either Bloody Mary or the Tooth Fairy, depending on whether I miss or hate her. Some days she makes me afraid of my own reflection, and I have to sneak past the bathroom mirror to get in the shower, embarrassed and dirty. Afterward, with the room all misty, I squeegee only the skinniest slice of mirror with my right hand, wiping the shower sweat away with one swift karate move. Despite the badass technique, I'm still too scared to look for too long. Even the thirty seconds it takes to wash my face freak me out. Something could easily materialize behind my back while I'm bent over the sink with my eyes trapped shut by soap. Once I've straightened out, I still don't look.

 

“Helena? Hey. Do you need a ride?” The voice on the other line was feathery soft, almost ephemeral, reminding me of a grade-school teacher's after a problem child has saturated his or her pants. More than an inside voice, this was a voice inside my head.

I happened to be taking a mental health day that afternoon. Too scared of what I might do with access to the Internet at work—continue refreshing certain people's Facebook pages and writing biting one-liner away messages—I'd decided to spend the day more sanely. As I furrowed into the farthest reaches of the bat cave better known as the bedroom of my basement apartment, the last thing I wanted to do was talk to anyone about anything unless it was a certain person named Dex begging for my forgetfulness. The calls kept coming.

None of them were him. Each time the phone rang, I'd wait a few rings before pulling it from my pillowcase. Three-oh-one. Somebody from Maryland. Ignore. That became impossible as the calls kept coming. Four in an hour. Fine, fine, I stopped feeling sorry for myself long enough to answer. It was a friend of Adaoha's and a club friend of mine at best; thus far our telecommunication only involved the very occasional text. I must have forgotten something major—another Dirty Thirty birthday celebration, perhaps. Smooth. See what this dude was making me do? I was fucking up on my friends! I was missing out on a chance to scream, “Woo-hoo, you're old, bitch!” at a woman I didn't know but felt sorry for in a crowd of twenty-somethings too busy belting out Beyoncé lyrics to care that they were next. An excuse was worked out in my head by the time I reached into the pillow.

“Oh, uh, hey lady,” I croaked, attempting to come off equal parts drunk, germ-infested, and sleepy. “What's going on? Am I supposed to be getting dressed?”

“What?” She sounded lost, possibly doubting my ability to go from zero to sexy in minutes.

“Seriously, I can put some clothes on in…” An outfit was worked out in my head by the time my feet hit the floor.

“No. Helena, you don't know?”

“What?” It was my turn to be skeptical.

“Adaoha died last night.” And rip goes the Band-Aid.

Ignoring the invention of the perm, black chicks are not susceptible to magic. We don't go up in clouds of smoke. We don't disappear down suspect rabbit holes. We don't walk into coat closets, never to be heard from again. Plans have to be made, hair has to be pressed, and bags of stuff have to be packed.

Black chicks don't do this. They aren't supposed to just up and leave, because they have expert knowledge about just how much that shit sucks. They know how much no one wants to be the asshole getting left. The one standing at the edge of responsibility, too tired to lie down and too reasonable to leap. The one on the receiving end of all those tears and snot and spit and shit and piss and blood and cum and whatever other carnal fluid nature makes a living getting rid of.

She got rid of us. I would do the same to her, except I have this bag of Adaoha that I'm actively ignoring right now. It's my new thing. Some days I pretend to forget it's there.

Those same nights, I think she might come for me in the middle and sneak something special under my pillow or maybe snatch me away to the place that only she knew about. Maybe she'll show me the secrets she kept there. Because this whole time, she had to have known something we didn't about what
ever was on the other side of that fall that was so much fucking better than staying on solid ground with us.

I say “us” like we were a gang. Maybe we were, and jumping was the only way out.

 

The girl was offering me a ride to Adaoha's parents' house in Maryland. We—the friends who knew her best—were gathering there to console and have council. What happened? Nobody knew, the girl said. She'd been found. Found. She'd done this to herself. Nobody mentioned the word that rhymes with civic pride. We don't even smoke cigarettes.

The girl's voice was still in my head, saying she figured I was ignoring her calls because I already knew. Because I didn't want to talk. I didn't. If I said another word, the feeling might come back to my tongue.

“No, that's okay,” I said. “Adrienne will take me.”

Fuck. Now I have to tell Adrienne. I call, and she doesn't pick up. I text something urgent. She calls back—was coming out of class. Law school. She is laughing with someone. I don't want to say it, don't want to change her. I almost hang up. Whoever's walking next to her is laughing like a maniac. There is the opposite of a pregnant pause. I contemplate hanging up again.

“Yeah, what's up,” she said.

“Adaoha died last night,” I say.

“What?”

In times of crisis,
what
gets the most use out of any of the five W's. Like
fuck
, it's ambidextrous, able to play both sides by way of inflection.
What
(emphasis on the “tuh”) demands an answer.
Whaaaa
(with an endless “ah,” almost like pi) is genuine shock and awe.
What
(with a breathless “whuh”) is deflated, defeated.
We practiced each one over the next week, as if rehearsing for something thrown together at the last minute. Everything was hectic, and nothing was patient.

We'd become walking automated voice systems. No matter how hard you raged against the machine, “What” was the only response, when the obvious prompt should have been “Why”? We didn't bother to ask until six feet of packed dirt buried any hope of an answer. I probably didn't want to hear it anyway—I probably would have told Adaoha,
Keep it moving
,
please get it together
,
do something with yourself,
or something like that. Maybe I'd cursed her, killed her. On a church pew, guilty tears threatened my face, twisting it into something so grotesque I was terrified it might freeze that way forever if someone happened by and slapped me on the back.

Funerals fucking suck. The name itself brings to mind stiff organs, whorish makeup, and venereal disease (for me anyway). To remedy that in civilized circles, the ceremony is renamed a “homecoming,” which itself brings to mind broken beer bottles, communal anger, and matching uniforms. The tailgate was in the bat cave. I went into overdraft buying a dozen white roses to make corsages out of and was blessed with a mindless two hours, wrapping green floral tape around freshly cut stems.

There is a false sense of accomplishment in numbers and costume. The corsages were for us—her sorority sisters. Standing in my kitchen, each of us pinned one above the heart of another, making sure it wasn't crooked. The actual ceremony was an ominous afterthought. It was all about the preparation, preparation, preparation. Which of course all went to shit as soon as we saw Adaoha in a coffin. A fucking coffin. Another word in desperate need of a euphemism.

The flowers had to be white. White like the dresses we wore when we became sisters. When Adrienne, LaKia, and I saved
Adaoha from a life sentence of nerd alerts. Despite the pats on the back we gave ourselves, she still turned out better than us. See, we all had the same bag. Note here that I am not speaking in the metaphorical sense, that each one of us tiny human beings has some tiny “bag” of fear and loathing festering on the bottom “shelf” of our “bookcases.” No, I mean that Adaoha, Adrienne, LaKia, and I each have the same exact bag. We got them as presents on the night we were made Deltas. After a nationally sanctioned and predetermined period of learning about sisterhood, scholarship, and service—and also screaming, sit-ups, and sleep deprivation—we put on those white dresses, said a few magical words, and poof, we were related.

Adrienne I'd known since hating her freshman year. We lived in the same dorm, but not the same planet. It was me, her, this tall guy who played the saxophone like a virgin, and a girl who wore ankle-length jean skirts and Keds topped with tube socks. Those were the blacks on our floor. From a scientific point of view, I took an educated guess that all black people on campus were either geeks or militant (Adrienne wore loose-laced Timbs). I decided to hang out with white people and got hanged for it. Supposedly a mental memo went out to all the Black Student Organization members. I'd been Oreo listed.

I had no clue how bad it was until one drunken night in the elevator to the sixth floor. Hamish, who was Irish or British and smelled like chlorine and foot fungus, was seeing me home after too much “punch” from a house with Epsilon or Chi on the facade. Adrienne, her good friend LaKia, and a bunch of fellow conscious card-carrying black girls were coming from something with “African” or “Malcolm” on the flyer. Buried in Hamish's pasty neck, my arms wrapped around his concave swimmer's waist, I never heard what they were whispering about. But when we got out, I saw the looks—disgust, shame, envy maybe.

After that, Adrienne was just a fancy Bed, Bath and Beyond shower basket in the bathroom, overstuffed with Victoria's Secret lotions. We never spoke, but I had a speech prepared in case of an eminent showdown. It began thusly: “First of all, I'm from Compton. I have a cousin on death row. I went to public school for a friggin' entire year. You don't know my life!” And my ghetto résumé went on from there.

As fate would have it, though, my oratorical skills would go untested, because one shitty work-study job grilling hot dogs for outside “jams” later, the two of us were inseparable. Adrienne made me go to $3 pajama parties at the Pan African house, saving/drowning me in a mosh pit of black bodies pulsating to the xylophone stylings of “Money, Cash, Hoes.”

One semester later and I was deemed sufficiently black enough for even the most discerning of palettes. I rebelled by letting Spencer Schulz, a blond Floridian of German descent, lick my fingers in private and hold my hand on College Walk. Hey, I enjoyed white people
and
delicious Korean BBQ. But the Benetton ads of my teens had been canceled. Welcome to the real world as experienced through four years of voluntary social segregation. Having seen
School Daze
on VHS, DVD, and BET, I figured joining up with somebody might help simplify things.

So, Delta. Adaoha thought all we had to do was sign our names on a sheet numbered one through five, and then allakhazam, we'd be in. “Umm, no, honey,” was the thought bubble that hovered above every already-Delta. “Do your research.” That meant going to all their parties, study breaks, and women's forums on the state of black relationships as depicted in
Love and Basketball
. Adrienne and I, having done the aforementioned research, knew all the tricks—have at least one intelligent thing to say per run-in with a sister, covet the color red but never think of wearing it, and always stay till the end.

Adaoha, we thought, didn't have a chance, seeing as how she was a total weirdo, one of those black folks on campus who do hang out with other black folks, but not the normal kind, so they might as well be hanging out with white people. That was me before Adrienne saved/drowned me with black lip liner and Lil' Kim. Adaoha should've gone first, maybe.

Somehow she made it in—something to do with a 3.6 GPA. So, it would be the five of us—me, my new best friend Adrienne, her friend LaKia, Adaoha, and her freak of a friend from the women's college across the street, Darienne. We all lived together temporarily while studying for the DAT—the Delta Aptitude Test, which every candidate for membership had to pass. Grudgingly, the five of us spent Spring Break '00 in my double in McBain Hall (Stella was gone on vacay). We figured the bigger the room, the less likely it'd be that anyone would have to breathe the same direct air as Darienne.

This is going to sound extremely elementary, but Darienne picked her boogers and then ate them, according to Adrienne, who knew her from nursery school or something. She could have been reformed, having completed the twelve-step program for chronic nose diggers better known as puberty, but we didn't give a shit about any of that. Adrienne said, we laughed, and Darienne was marked.

It didn't help that she still lacked the basic life skills of any human being not raised by benevolent wolves. Deodorant was exotic to her, as were hot combs and the plastic drugstore kind. Then, of course, there was the conspicuous snot mustache we couldn't rightly make fun of because she was scheduled for functional endoscopic sinus surgery somewhere in the distant future. Since medically diagnosed conditions are by definition unmockable—openly—we instead implied our resentment, hoping she'd infer her way to social betterment. Sometimes I felt
sorry for her, but most times I just wished she'd wipe her fucking nose. Being her ace boon coon, Adaoha either didn't care, was too good to notice, or pretended not to, so it was up to Adrienne and me.

One 3:00 a.m., the five of us were delirious with facts about Delta's maternity ward in Africa when, predictably, the talk turned to our own vaginas. I thought this would be an A and B conversation with the only two nonvirgins (me and LaKia) hosting a smutty talk show for a captive audience of one (Adrienne). As usual Adaoha had her nose in a book, and Darienne…well, come on. But to our double surprise, Darienne had something to say about double happiness “up against the wall.” “Oh, yeah, that's the best,” she said, interrupting us with a nasally nonchalance we'd never heard before and would never believe.