Law. No one had this dream for me. No one held out a hand saying, Here, take this. So I told my secrets to Sylvia with the hope that I’d get something in return. I whispered how I fell in love slowly. First with the way Jerome called my name, August, so much breath around the sound that it was hard not to feel the summer light pouring out through his voice.
I was thirteen the first time we went further than the kisses we stole in the dark of my vestibule. Only Sylvia knew. Give this back to me, I wanted to say to her. I want your promised future filling up the empty space ahead of me.
10
But Gigi was the first to fly. A woman in white patent leather go-go boots came and got her from school one day so she could audition for a performing arts school in Manhattan.
Everybody, Gigi said. Meet my mom.
Hey, we said, struck silent by a woman so young and beautiful she could have been on the cover of Ebony or a centerfold in Jet magazine.
Hey yourselves, Gigi’s mother said.
At the audition, Gigi told us she had to say the same lines over and over—Hey Big Daddy, ain’t you heard. . the boogie-woogie rumble of a Dream Deferred?
Gigi said her lines again and again for us, her voice deeper, strange, our Gigi but different, standing in front of us inside someone else’s skin.
They said I had something. A white lady there said, You could be someone.
Then, suddenly, as though Sylvia’s father looked closely at us and saw every single thing he hated, we were no longer Sylvia’s friends but ghetto girls. When we arrived late in the afternoon, he stood at the door. No company today, he said to us. Sylvia needs to get ready for her new school.
Go home, he said. Study. Become somebody better than you are.
We could have blamed his stinging words on his stilted English. We could have said Fuck you, man—become who he thought we already were. But we were silent.
None of us asked, what new school. Or why. He was tall and thick, his hatred for us a deep wrinkle between his eyebrows.
We turned away from Sylvia’s door, said good-bye to each other at the corner, each of us sinking into an embarrassed silence, ashamed of our skin, our hair, the way we said our own names. We saw what he saw when we looked at each other. So we looked away and headed home.
In class, Sylvia’s empty seat reminded us of her father, his arms folded across his chest, his glare a reminder of a power that was becoming more and more familiar to us. A power we neither had nor understood.
When we saw Sylvia again a week later, she was wearing a St. Thomas Aquinas uniform, her older sister’s arm tight around her shoulder. She glanced at us, mouthed, Park later. I squeezed Gigi’s hand and nodded.
That evening, Sylvia pulled a joint from her coat pocket, let it slowly disappear into her mouth then pulled it out again, To seal it, she said. None of us asked where she’d gotten the joint or the Winston matchbook. We circled around her and watched her take the smoke deep into her lungs, hold it, then exhale. We followed her lead, the smoke hot and hard against the back of my throat. We had seen teenagers doing this, crowded together tight as fists, their eyes closed against the smoke. We coughed our way through, laughing at our own ignorance until the laughter and the smoke seemed to release everything impossible in the world.
It was winter again and Angela had lost herself in dance, Gigi in lead role after lead role at the performing arts high school she now attended.
I spent my days watching people move, both outside our building and inside, too. Jennie was replaced by Carla, who stayed only a month before the police came and took her away. Carla was replaced by Trinity, a small, girlish man who spoke French to the men who followed behind him up the stairs in the evening.
At mosque the sisters asked, What about their mother? their eyes taking in my father’s thin mustache, his thick close-cut head of hair, his broad shoulders. The manicured nails on his eight remaining fingers promised them damage, imperfection, and, they hoped, need.
Their mother is gone, my father answered.
Their mother’s gone, Sister Loretta echoed.
What’s in the urn, Daddy?
You know what’s in that damn urn, August!
At night, I spoke to my mother, apologized for the lies my father told, promised her there’d come a day when he’d be less afraid. He’d take us back to Tennessee then, back to SweetGrove. I told her to be patient, that with Allah, all things were possible.
11
We turned thirteen and it seemed wherever we were, there were hands and tongues. There were sloe-eyes and licked lips wherever our new breasts and lengthening thighs moved.
Angela and Gigi and I showed up at Sylvia’s house one Saturday morning when the family was gone. Sylvia, able to sneak us inside, stood ironing her Catholic school uniform as we talked. It happened, Angela said. I’m bleeding.
Finally, we said.
We thought you’d never join us on this side, we said.
We were teenagers now, our bodies different but all of us still the same height, all of us still blending into each other.
We found places to be together, sharing a joint on the stairs of the closed library, stepping over prayer rugs to sit on my bed, cutting two pizza slices into four at Royal Pizzeria because if we bought something, we could sit for hours. Park swings, handball courts, the spot of sun on the corner where a windowless factory set dozens of pale, tired women free every day at 5:00 P.M.
Angela said, My mother said don’t tell a soul.
But we didn’t have to open our mouths. Summer came again and men and boys were everywhere, feathery hands on our backsides in crowds, eyes falling too long at our chests, whispers into our ears as we passed strangers. Promises — of things they could do to us, with us, for us.
When Sylvia threatened to run away, her father said we could stay over. He asked to call our parents, make sure they knew where we were. We no longer looked at him — gave him our numbers without lifting our eyes. Angela said, My mother already knows, quickly before anyone could dial a number, speak to someone. It’s fine, Angela said, looking anywhere else.
After speaking to my father, he said, He’s a good man. He has his God. A man needs his God. He eyed Angela, the torn sweater, the hole in the toe of her dingy socks. Angela tucked one foot behind the other, bent into herself. Then, saying nothing, he left.
We stayed up late, watching television sitcoms, eating Popsicles and bags of candy. Sylvia and I wore baby-doll pajamas that felt obscene and made us giddy. We slow-danced with each other. Angela showed us how to French-kiss and we spent hours practicing. We practiced until our bodies felt as though they were exploding.
We whispered, I love you and meant it.
We said, This is scary and laughed.
When Jerome asked where I’d learned what I learned I said, Don’t worry about it because he was eighteen and I was nearly fourteen and nothing mattered but hearing I love you and believing he meant it.