Something like right, p.2
Something Like Right, page 2
How did my life get like this?
I never really had dreams or hopes for anything special in my life. Maybe that’s where I went wrong. Once upon a time, I’d hoped my pops would come back, but I gave that up a long time ago and never really replaced it with anything else. I missed him until I couldn’t anymore. And that taught me that dreaming for something doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t change anything. It’s just a dream. You can’t make it come true.
You either get lucky, or you let it go.
I stared at the ceiling. The flat white walls surrounding me started to squeeze in closer and closer, and I felt sad about my life.
Sad that it sucked. And that I didn’t know how to fix it.
LESSON 1.3
Don’t Answer the Door for Strangers
The knocks came so softly through the door and into our apartment that I don’t know how I heard them. I raised myself out of bed and wiped my eyes, looked at my phone—1:17 p.m. Thursday. I had been taking a nap. A good one. Truthfully, the nap was taking me. But as my brain rebooted, I remembered who and where I was. And I heard the knocks again.
I dragged myself to the front door and cracked it open, peered into the sliver of daylight coming through. The visitor was a white man, crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, a thick, full beard with gray streaked through the brown. He looked kind. Maybe a little fearful too. He had dark brown hair shaved close to his scalp.
His body was shaped like mine—not big, not small. Something in between. Something with the potential to be impressive, but you’d have to work with it. He wore black pants and some generic-looking black shoes. The pants sagged off his waist because he didn’t have a belt. White shirt with buttons. Not like a dress shirt, though, just a few buttons at the top and no collar. It looked like he’d worn it 1,000 days in a row already. I wanted to close the door in his face, but I couldn’t. It looked too much like my own. I opened the door a little wider.
“What’s up, kid?” he asked. He smiled without showing his teeth.
My breath caught in my chest as the realization struck me. I could feel my heart beating through my temples. My mouth, as dry as kindling.
I didn’t know what else to do with Keith, my father. So I let him in the house.
He entered quietly, taking his shoes off at the door before softly padding across the carpet. He set his stuff—a garbage bag full of clothes and who knows what else—outside my ma’s bedroom door. We sat down together in the living room, in silence. I guess he’d had enough of the quiet, because after a while he started tapping his foot twice per second. I looked at him. He stopped.
“What … are you doing here?” I asked.
His face twitched. He was clearly taken aback by the question. He smoothed his expression quickly though and smiled.
“I’m out. I’m back. Your um … your mom didn’t tell you, I guess? We’ve been talking about me staying here. She said it would be okay. Get myself together, you know?”
“Mm,” I said.
He rubbed the back of his neck and searched for more words. When he didn’t find them, he looked at me and chuckled, then cleared his throat. He looked over my head toward the kitchen.
“May I have some water, please?”
“Yeah, I got you.”
I walked into the kitchen, just a few steps away, and filled him up a glass from the tap. I turned to walk back to the living room and heard his voice. I stopped midstride.
“Could you drop a couple ice cubes in it for me?” he asked.
I resumed my stride, handed him the iceless cup, and plopped back down on the couch.
“Icemaker broke,” I said, turning my attention to my phone. I started a text to my ma, but I couldn’t decide what to say. What the hell was she thinking, inviting him back here? Why wouldn’t she tell me? A tornado of frustration and betrayal started to swirl inside me. The slow, loud gulps Keith took from his cup replaced the noise from his earlier foot tapping. I saw him wipe his mouth with the back of his sleeve out of the corner of my eye.
“Man, it’s kinda hard to know where to start. I mean, what to say.” He took another gulp and set the glass down, but as soon as it hit the coaster, a fit of coughing came over him. He covered his mouth with both hands and tried to talk through the coughing, but it was really kicking his ass. Sometimes Ma would pat my back when I was a kid and couldn’t stop coughing. I ain’t really feel like I should do that for him though. Finally, the coughing subsided, and he rasped, “Went down the wrong pipe.” I nodded.
“How’s school?” he asked once he regained his composure.
“Shitty,” I responded. “I got suspended.”
He nodded, eight of his fingers clasped together and his thumbs circling each other. “You know what time Tameka usually comes home?”
“Usually around now,” I responded.
As if by magic, my ma cruised down the street and swerved into our driveway. Through the window, we both watched her get out of the car, grab her bags, and make her way to the door. She fiddled with the lock, then pushed the door open. We both stood. She turned, and then did a double take. She dropped her bags and stared at us, side by side.
“Hi,” she breathed.
“Hey, Mimi,” he said. They kept gazing at each other long enough that I turned and started to make my way to my room on the other side of the house.
“Zay—hold on a minute,” my ma called. “I need to talk to you.”
I let my head fall back and looked at the ceiling, exhaling an audible sigh. She only ever wanted to talk when she wanted to talk. My face must have betrayed me, because right after I turned around, she said, “Don’t look like that, it’s only going to take a minute.”
We left Keith in the living room and went back to her room.
“Grab that,” she said as we passed my pops’s bag. I picked it up and brought it into her room with me. I set the bag down at the foot of the bed and started talking. I wanted to get my points out before she shut down, like she always did.
“Did you know he was coming? Today? Why didn’t you tell me?”
She sighed. “I wanted to. I tried. I didn’t know how to bring it up.”
“Tuh.” I fidgeted with a picture frame standing on her dresser. Black with yellow swirls painted on. Hand-cut. Another one of my ma’s originals. Inside— a photo of her and her only sister. My aunt Mel.
“How long he staying?” I finally asked.
She kept quiet, looking out of the window in her bedroom. Probably thinking about how to lie to me again. Omitting important information is a form of lying too, you know?
“He staying that long, huh?” I assumed an answer. “So, he live here now? How’s that gonna work?” I asked.
“Look, Zay, I didn’t bring you back here to talk through all these details.”
“So, we can’t talk about it?”
“We can talk about it, just not right now,” she answered.
“When, then?” I fired back.
She rubbed her temples. “You’re stressing me out,” she replied.
I rolled my eyes. “You’re always stressed out,” I muttered.
“Excuse me?” she said. It was one of those “Mom” excuse-me’s though. A finishing move. She was drawing an invisible line and would claim I crossed it. Now, nothing I could say would mean anything because I was being “disrespectful.” Conversation over.
“You right. I am always stressed out. But you don’t know nothing about raising a child by yourself. The only one bringing money in. Responsible for all this shit. Your father is going to get back on his feet and find a way to start contributing around here. That’s the decision and it’s already been made. His help might even make me a little less stressed, your highness. So maybe my attitude will be more fitting for your taste then,” she said. My blood boiled.
“All you had to do was tell me. He just showed up here! I barely even know what he looks like. I live here too. You always talking about I’m supposed to be the man of the house. Seem like you’d be happy I was concerned with random people showing up,” I returned.
“He is not random people. He is your father.”
“I don’t see the difference,” I said.
“Get out of my room, Zay,” she responded.
“Whatever.” I turned to leave. As I reached the door, she called out.
“The school called.”
I froze. We had been waiting all week for the school to decide what kind of punishment I would serve. Sometimes if you got expelled at the end of the year, they’d just let you stay home, make it up in summer school. But if you got expelled at the beginning of the year, you might have to go to an alternative school—a place full of kids expelled from different schools around the state—and finish your year there. The scariest option. The worst option.
I knew a kid once, Jay Mc-something-or-other, who was a star student before he went to alternative school. We called him JMac. Sure, he came back to the district the next school year. But he never graduated. That place changed him. JMac said there were fights every day. No windows in the building. It was like surviving in the jungle. He didn’t even know how he’d managed to make it through. But adjusting back to regular school wasn’t possible.
A whole school year is a long time to have to be in survival mode.
I wasn’t a bad kid. I just took one fight too far. I had never even gotten in-school suspension before. I didn’t love school, but I never wanted to cause all this trouble. I didn’t want to fight every day or look over my shoulder on every trip to the bathroom. All week I had been hoping they’d figure out any other consequence, except alternative school.
“What did they say?” I asked Ma. “What’s my punishment?”
Ma looked into my eyes, then looked away. She put one hand on her hip and the other on her forehead and let out a big sigh.
“You need to start packing, Xavier. You’ve got to do the rest of your year at Broadlawn. I’m going to take you down this weekend. Melanie agreed to let you stay with her until the school year is over.”
My body went cold. “Ma … for real? Stop playing. I can’t go to Broadlawn. That’s, like, hours away!”
Her eyes softened. “That’s where they assigned you. It’s too far to drive you to school every day. And if you don’t go, you won’t be able to come back to Central next year. You’ll have to get a GED. This is just—” She sighed and rubbed her forehead. “I watched this same thing happen to your father when we were teenagers, okay? I know it’s not what you want. But you have to go.”
“This isn’t fair! I never even got in trouble before! Did you talk to them? Did you even try to defend me? There has to be something else we can do,” I choked out. I felt my eyes stinging and my chest getting tight.
“I’m sorry, Zay.”
“Fuck!” I yelled, pounding on the door with my fists. A canvas painted like a sunset rattled on the wall and dropped to the floor.
“Hey!” Ma hollered. “Watch your mouth. And watch my damn art.”
“You don’t even want me here,” I said.
“Huh?” she responded.
“That’s why you invited him back, isn’t it? Because you knew I’d be gone. You just want to spend time with him and have me out of your hair. You’re doing this on purpose. You want me to leave.”
“Zay, that’s not what happened,” Ma protested.
“Whatever.” I stomped out of the room and back into the kitchen.
“Everything alright?” Pops asked.
“Just peachy,” I said. “Your turn to deal with her.”
He scrunched up his eyebrows. “Okay, well, I’m going to make my way back there. Hey, maybe we can catch up later?” he asked from the doorway of the living room. I poured myself a cup of sweet tea and grabbed some chips to take to my room. I approached him.
“I won’t be around,” I muttered, pushing past him into my room and slamming the door.
I plopped down on the bed, started crunching on the chips. I felt like I wanted to cry, but anger built up like pressure behind my eyes and blocked the tears.
You know how when you’re learning to drive, you do it in the car that has two steering wheels? And when you make a mistake, the dude on the other side can just take over and make sure you don’t kill everybody? Well, my life had started to feel like some nervous teen driver on a busy highway. I wanted nothing more than for someone to take control of the other steering wheel and make everything right again. But I was all alone in the car.
My ma chose my pops over me. For all the years he spent locked up, I got the bad end of her anger and disappointment in him. Always comparing me to him, complaining that I was going to end up just like him, warning me about making the same mistakes. She never saw me for me.
But now that he was back, she was so quick to get rid of me just to have him all to herself—the same man she’d spent all these years dragging. It hurt my feelings. But they deserved each other. Maybe I’d go to Broadlawn and never come back. Start a new life there or just skip out on the whole alternative school thing altogether.
Who really cared one way or another?
As I started to pack my bag, stuffing underwear and comics and T-shirts haphazardly into my duffel, I knew I was in for a wild remainder of the school year.
Or, should I say, I thought I knew.
I had no idea.
LESSON 1.4
Broadlawn, USA
Broadlawn ain’t the kind of place you visit on purpose. Maybe you’re passing through and need to stop for a night. Maybe you’ve got some ancient relative who’s still there from the times when it was actually a halfway decent place to live. Nah, Broadlawn is one of those towns where the store clerks know your name and your neighbors remember your birthday. A place where people swallow change like a dose of bitter medicine.
It was not the city. I was not excited.
Broadlawn Alternative School was the only school in the state that would allow me to finish out my junior year after I got expelled for breaking Tracy’s nose. I heard the state gives them a kickback for every head, so they always say yes to district rejects even if they don’t have space for them. Hours before we hit the road, I tried to tell Ma that I could just stay home for a school year and work. Make some money.
I would still be able to finish high school later. Or get a GED. Plenty of my old classmates had done it that way and ended up just fine. Hell, it’s not like Tameka had a real degree—just a couple years of art school. But she didn’t trust me. “You’ll just get into more trouble,” she said. So we headed to Broadlawn.
We took the highway south for about half the route. The final hour took us down hills and around backwoods bends until we passed through a town square with a single four-way stop in the middle. Thick trees with white flowers stretched out and joined arms all along the highway. The air smelled syrupy, and time felt a little slower this far south. Funny how big of a difference 130 miles can make. The farther south we drove, the more people I saw outside their homes, raking leaves, tending to their yards. Most of them stopped to wave as we passed by, even though there’s no way they could have recognized us.
Tameka tapped her fingers on the steering wheel as we wound through the sleepy town.
“I think you’ll like it down here,” she said. “It’s quieter than the city. Moves slower.”
“I don’t know, Ma. Sounds kinda boring.”
“Sometimes boring is good. Gives you a chance to think. I’m hoping your father was bored enough to figure some stuff out for the last ten years. Early release. Seems so, right?”
I hesitated. We’d had a pretty smooth ride down so far. “You really want it to work out this time, huh?”
“Want what to work out?”
“Come on, Ma,” I said. “Don’t try to act like this is just you doing him a favor. You missed him. You think it can work this time?”
She tapped her fingers some more and took in a deep breath, exhaled.
“My hope for your father is the same hope I have for you. Same hope I have for myself, really. That we can take advantage of this time to be the best version of ourselves possible. If that happens, I think we could all be happy … together. If not, then … well…” She swallowed the end of her statement and stared down the road ahead.
I nodded and faced the window again, focusing on the trees. All the buildings in Broadlawn looked like somebody stood them up 100 years ago. Faded stucco, crumbling brick, and all the same colors—clay reds, rusted browns, off-whites. Our car had transformed into a time machine and brought us to a version of the world I knew nothing about.
Maybe—hopefully—it had brought us to a time before our problems started too.
“You know Mel and Smith have been living down here for about twenty years?” Ma started up again. Smith was my aunt’s longtime … whatever-you-call-it. We usually only saw them at Thanksgiving, even though they didn’t live that far away.
“That’s a long time,” I said. “Aunt Mel must like it.”
“Eh. She moved down here with her first husband when I was still at the junior college. He had a good job, worked at the chicken factory. That’s all that’s down here, really—factories. But after they got divorced, she met Smith and decided to stay. I think he’s from Broadlawn.”
“I read a post online that said Broadlawn was ranked the worst place to live in the entire state,” I said flatly.
“Well, I guess you’re gonna find out.” Ma bit back a laugh. I rolled my eyes.
The road finally turned into a dirt path lined with giant maple trees. The air felt thick in my lungs but was delicious to breathe. I stuck my head out of the car window and bathed myself in it. The sky was pale, like somebody had poured cream in a blue coffee. One or two clouds eased by, paying us no mind. We pulled into a long driveway and parked next to a red pickup truck and an old sedan. I got out of the car and stepped on a pine cone, felt the soft crush beneath my foot sink into the earth.
“Hey there, little sista,” called Aunt Mel softly, already waiting for us in the driveway with her hands on her hips. She sported a close-cropped afro with wet, juicy curls. Her plum athleisure top matched her leggings, and both matched her oversize coffee square glasses. She looked just like a more stylish version of my ma.
