Instead of living in shabby, patched-together old Seattle with its missile-strike scars, we lived in a big corporate town. We were important and had plenty of money. We spent our time speeding around in fast cars or making flashy scientific discoveries in laboratories or catching gangs of spies, embezzlers, and saboteurs. Since this was a Mask, I could live the adventures as any of my brothers or sisters or as either of our parents. That meant I could "experience" being a boy or an adult. But since it wasn't like a real Dreamask experience, I had no sensation guidance beyond research and my imagination. I watched other people, tried to make myself feel what it might be like to drive a car or fire a gun or be an older brother who worked in the South Pacific as a deep-sea miner or an older sister who was an architect in Antarctica or a father who was CEO of a major corporation or a mother who was a molecular biologist. The father was a big, godlike man who was rich and smart and ... not there most of the time. I had the hardest time being him. Research didn't help much. He was more of a shell than the others. What should a father be like inside, in his thoughts and feelings? I wasn't sure. Not like Madison, for sure. Like the fathers of my occasional friends? 1 saw my friends' fathers now and then, but I didn't know them. Like the minister, maybe—stern and sure of himself and usually surrounded by a lot of deferential men and smiling women, some of whom were rumored to sleep with him even though they had husbands and he had a wife. But how did he feel? What did he believe? What did he want? What scared him?
I read a lot. I watched people and 1 eavesdropped. I got a lot of the ideas from kids whose parents let them have non-religious Masks and books—bad books, we called them. In short, I tried to do what my biological mother hated, but couldn't help doing. I tried to feel what other people felt and know them—really know them.
It was all nonsense, of course. Harmless nonsense. But when I was caught at it, it was suddenly all but criminal.
There was a theft in my Christian American History class. Someone stole a small personal phone that the teacher had left on her desk. We were all searched and our belongings collected and thoroughly examined. Someone examined my notebook too thoroughly, in spite of my self-destruct codes, and found my scenario.
I had to attend special religion classes for delinquents and get counseling. I had to confess my sins before our local church. 1 had to memorize a dozen or so more chapters of the Bible. While I was working off my punishment, I began to hear whispers that I was, indeed, adopted, and that I was the daughter not of rich, important, beautiful people but of the worst heathen devils—murderers, thieves, and perverters of God's word. The kids started it. There were plenty of kids around who were known to be adopted, so it was commonplace to ridicule them and make up lies about how evil their real parents were. And if you weren't adopted, and someone got mad at you, they might call you a heathen bastard whether you were or not.
So first the kids started in on me, then the adults, some of whom knew that I was adopted, began to talk. "Well, after all, think about what kind of woman her real mother must be. That's got to leave a mark on her." Or, "You wait. That girl is no good. My grandmother used to say the fruit doesn't fall far from the tree!" Or, "Well, what can you expect? 'Vere' means truth, doesn't it? And the truth is, there's bad blood in her if there ever was bad blood!"
I remember turning around in church to confront the nasty old woman who had stage-whispered this last bit of stupidity to her equally ancient friend. The two were sitting directly behind Kayce, Madison, and me during Sunday evening service. I looked at her, and she just stared back at me as though I were an animal who had somehow invaded the church.
"'God is love,'" I quoted to her in as sweet a voice as I could manage. And then, '"Love is the fulfilling of the law.'" I tried to make sure that my words carried as well as her ugly stage whisper had carried. Bad blood, for heaven's sake. Kayce had told me people said things like that because they were ignorant, but that I had to respect even the ignorant because they were older.
On that particular night, Kayce nudged me with a sharp elbow the moment I spoke, and I saw the ignorant old woman's mouth turn down in a grimace of dislike and disapproval.
I had just turned 13 when that happened. I remember after church, Kayce and I had a huge fight because she said I was rude to an older person, and I said I didn't care. 1 said I wanted to know whether 1 realty was adopted and if so, who were my real parents.
Kayce said she and Madison were the only parents I had to worry about, and I was an ungrateful little heathen not to appreciate what I had.
That was that.
When I was 15, an enemy at school told me my real mother was not only a heathen but a whore and a murderer. I hit her before 1 even thought about it—and I discovered that I didn't know my own strength. I broke her jaw. She was screaming and crying and bleeding, and I was horrified—scared to death. I got kicked out of school, and very nearly collared as a juvenile felon. Only Madison and our minister working together managed to keep my neck out of a collar. This was the beginning of the worst part of my adolescence. I was grateful to Madison. I hadn't thought he would fight for me. i hadn't thought he would fight for anything. He had become even more of a shadow as I had grown. He repaired aging computers for poor working people. He had seemed closer to his tools than he did to me, except when he was feeling me up.
Then, on Saturday, after my troubles had been papered over, while Kayce was attending some women's-group thing at Church, Madison explained to me how grateful I should be to him. He had saved me from a collar. He read me an article about collars—how they hurt, how they can "pacify" even the most violent criminal and still leave him able to do useful work, how the holder of a collar control unit is "a virtual puppet master" as far as the convict is concerned. And although the pain that the collar can deliver is intense, it leaves no mark and does no permanent harm no matter how often it must be used.
Madison gave me some other articles to read. As I took them, he reached out with both sweaty little hands and felt my breasts.
"It wouldn't hurt you to show some gratitude," he said to me when I pulled away. "I saved you from something really brutal. I don't know. You're so ungrateful. Maybe I won't be able to save you next time." He paused. "You know, your mama wanted to let you go on and be collared. She thinks you hurt that girl on purpose." Another pause. "You need to be nice to me, Asha. I'm all you've got."
He kept after me. There were times when I thought I should just sleep with him and be done with it. But I was back in school by then and I could stay away from home most of the time. He was such a godawful whiny man. My only good luck was that he was small, and after a while, I realized he was a little bit afraid of me. That was a shock. I had grown up timid and afraid of almost everyone—resentful, but afraid. I had to be provoked suddenly and severely to make me react with anything other than argument. That's why I was so upset when I broke the girl's jaw. Not only did I not know that I could hurt someone that badly, but I wasn't the kind of person who hurt people at all.
But somehow, Madison didn't know that.
He wouldn't let me alone, but at least he didn't use physical force on me. His moist little hands kept wandering and he kept pleading, and he watched me. His eyes followed me so much, I was afraid Kayce would notice and blame me. He tried to peek at me in the bathroom—1 caught him at it twice. He tried to watch me in my bedroom when I was dressing.
At 15, I couldn't wait to get out of the house and away from both of them for good.
from The Journals of Lauren Oya Olamina