Gone like yesterday, p.15
Gone Like Yesterday, page 15
Sammie flips her long braids so that they no longer fall in her eyes but are out of the way, graceful, behind her shoulders. She makes a concerted effort to show that she’s thinking. “But I can’t talk about my depression, right?”
“You’re depressed?”
“To be honest, I’m not really sure, but sometimes it feels like I’m in a hole that I don’t know how to get out of. And when good things happen to me, say I get an A on a test or I win a debate match, sometimes they don’t make me feel good at all. But shouldn’t they?”
“I don’t know that you should ever feel any particular way.” Though the debate team? That’s impressive.
Sammie nods. “It’s hard to explain.”
“And that’s exactly why you can’t write about it,” Zahra says. “You can’t write a personal essay about something that you haven’t figured out yet. So what do you know? What have you figured out about yourself, about this world, about the people around you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, take some time to think about it.”
“But I don’t have a lot of time.”
“Sure you do.”
“Not if I’m applying early decision to Stanford.”
“You are?”
“Maybe . . .”
“You shouldn’t.” Zahra doesn’t like telling her students what to do. It’s not her style, and frankly, it’s not her business. But Sammie is different from the others. The stakes are higher here, with a girl who’s Black like Zahra, who will have to figure out how to navigate the moths, who will have to figure out how to navigate the white girls, the white boys, the white faculty. She will have to figure out where to get her hair braided, where to buy her hair products, where the Black people party and pray, partake of soul food and well-seasoned poultry. She will be desperate to find a Black roommate, someone who wraps their hair at night and lotions their whole body after every shower.
“What’s wrong with Stanford?” Sammie asks.
Zahra sighs. She hates talking about her alma mater and doesn’t really want to pull that trump card, but Sammie’s leaving her no other option. “I went to Stanford,” she says.
Sammie huffs. “So then you should get why I want to go.”
“Never said I didn’t.”
“Well, then?”
“Well, it won’t make you feel better about yourself. In fact, it might make you feel worse. In fact, Stanford, although a great school, doesn’t give a shit about you. All they do is uphold the status quo. They’re elitist.”
“So I’ve heard a lot of HBCUs are too.”
“It’s different.”
“How?”
“It’s different when the people look like you, when they don’t have years and years of racism and brainwashing to back up their prejudice, trust me.”
Zahra knows it’s a big request, asking Sammie to trust her with such a difficult decision. She remembers her own senior year of high school, how choosing college felt like cherry-picking her future, how her classmates decorated their lockers with college acceptance letters, some people with as many as fifteen letters taped one on top of another, paper peeking from underneath more paper, just enough room to see the school’s name and Congratulations. An Ivy League trumped everything else—HBCUs, state schools, scholarships. Going to your locker every morning was a measure in self-assurance, I’m going places. Now Sammie wanted that same feeling, a little bit of pride, a little bit of fuck you.
“I’ll think about it,” Sammie says. “It’s not like I have anything against Spelman.”
Zahra nods, closing the conversation. The music seems louder, and Zahra dismisses the endless needs and navigational skills Sammie will have to tend to at a white school, the vindication she’s sure not to receive there. “God I used to listen to music all the time. Derrick and I both. Music was such a core part of who we were.” She changes the subject.
“Were? You don’t listen anymore?”
“I forget to. Isn’t that crazy? There are whole days when I just forget to listen to music.” And she doesn’t feel like herself anymore. But now, here, in this moment, she does. She is high school Zahra again. The one with all the feels, who hadn’t distanced herself to any one emotion because lying in her bed, listening to music, she would feel them all. Songs on the radio, all day, new music, old music. “God, when did I lose the capacity?”
Sammie looks like she wants to offer an answer but only shrugs. “Do you want to be young again?” she asks.
“God, no. I wouldn’t go that far.”
Sammie smiles like she understands. She tilts her head, looking at Zahra, scrutinizing her. It’s a little uncomfortable to be looked at so intensely. Zahra covers her face with her hands until Sammie says, “You’re so much like Uncle.”
“Am I?” Zahra shifts her hands to the side of her face, so that they frame it now.
Sammie nods excitedly. “Yeah. You’re both so shy. On high alert, like you’re looking for all the ways someone will make you mad, or sad. He likes you, you know.”
Sammie’s confidence changes the way Zahra sees her last interaction with Trey. Sammie’s right—Zahra’s been on high alert in the worst way. She’ll push him away if she keeps up the attitude. But now she tries to hide a smile. She likes him; she feels like more of a high schooler than she ever was in the 2000s, though this tickly feeling is definitely familiar. She tries to keep it together in front of Sammie, who’s dramatically covering her mouth with both hands, as if she needs the physical barrier to keep from saying any more than she’s already divulged.
“He told you that?” Zahra needs clarity.
Sammie nods, still refusing to speak.
Zahra tries to downplay it. “Well, it’s not such a big deal, is it? I mean, we’re both adults. Single adults. It was nice of him to drive me here.”
“That’s what I said,” Sammie says, quickly giving up the charade of silence.
“You know,” Zahra says, thinking about Sammie’s boldness. “This is how you should tell Noah. I mean, just throw it out there. What’s the worst that could happen?”
“He could say he’s never thought of me like that, which would be the worst.”
“The absolute worst, but it won’t happen.” There is something about Sammie. A twinkle then a thud. Both soft- and sure-footed. How could a boy not like that? Not to mention, she is commercially pretty, the sort of Black beauty that people deem an exception. Zahra knows that this is how people see her too. It is what she loves and hates most about herself.
Zahra looks up and sees the little scaly-winged creatures she knew would be there. The moths, three or four of them, are swarming the ceiling fan that Gram replaced when Zahra was in tenth grade. The fan’s walnut-colored blades move slowly and the moths navigate it like an obstacle course, over, under, through.
One day the moths are tiny caterpillars, ones you let inch along your knee while you marvel at their accordion-like abdomens, and the next day there is a single, lonely moth that you think nothing of, that you can barely remember. Then there are hundreds of them, they have taken over your backyard like dandelions or crabgrass, and they begin to fall in love with you, so they follow you, singing as they go. And you think you’re the only one who can hear them, you and Derrick, of course, but now, here’s Sammie. Sharp, sensical Sammie, and she can hear them too.
Now is the time to ask Sammie what she’s really been dying to know, but if Sammie meant something different in the car or if Zahra misheard what she thinks Sammie said . . . Well, Zahra just has to be very delicate with how she asks the question. Sammie doesn’t seem to notice the moths overhead, but Zahra pushes the question out anyway.
“Sammie, I want to ask you something, and I don’t want you to get weirded out or worried, but it’s something you said in the car, when we drove through all those moths. I thought I heard you say that you could hear them. . . .”
Sammie’s face says it all.
“You did hear them. Didn’t you?”
“Well, what do you mean by hear?” Sammie’s face is all contorted. She leans away from Zahra, as if the conversation is contagious.
“The music. The voices.”
“I thought . . .” Sammie pauses. “Are you crazy?”
Zahra shakes her head, surprised by Sammie’s bluntness but not thrown. “I hear them. All the time, but I’ve never met anyone, other than Derrick, who can hear them too. And I sort of think . . . Well, it’s far-fetched but there’s something your uncle said earlier that makes me think maybe, maybe, they brought me to you.” Zahra looks away from Sammie, realizing it’s a lot to dump on her.
“You think moths did what?”
“It’s just . . . they were all over you that day, the first day I met you. They were everywhere. How could you not notice them?” Zahra points to the ceiling. One, two, three, at least ten of them. Doesn’t Sammie see them? She looks at Sammie for confirmation, holding her arms out, palms up, Well? . . .
Sammie shakes her head again. “This is a lot. This is crazy.”
“This is the way it’s been my whole life. You’ll get used to it.”
Sammie backs away farther. Now she’s on the edge of the bed. “But I’m not like you. I’m really different from you.”
Zahra is hurt, and her face must show it, because Sammie says, “It’s not a bad thing that we’re different. It’s just . . . I don’t really believe in voodoo, you know? And I’m not interested in practicing . . . witchcraft.”
“I’m not a witch, at least not the dramatic televised definition,” Zahra says. “I don’t have any powers. I don’t know anything about magic.”
“But moths sing to you?”
“But moths sing to me.”
Sammie seems to consider this. She rubs her forehead hard. She shakes her head in what Zahra guesses is an attempt to free her thoughts.
Sammie says, “I don’t know, but I’m really exhausted. It’s been a long day.”
“It has.” Zahra nods, not wanting to talk about it anymore either. “Tell me more about Noah.”
They lay on the bed, facing each other, propped up on opposite elbows. Zahra has worked with students for years now, but she has never felt the simultaneous need to teach and protect or the constant worry that she’s saying all the wrong things or, for the lack of a better, more appropriate term, motherly. She and Sammie fall asleep with the lights on, music turned up, on top of the covers, comfortable.
* * *
—
Zahra wakes up at around one in the morning. She turns off the music, which has come back around to “Tennessee,” and throws an afghan on Sammie. She stops and stares at her for a second, wondering if it could be true that an invasive species she used to think nothing of brought them together. That it wasn’t Sammie’s college essay but something less fortuitous, something of God’s design.
The wooden floors creak loudly. A haunting? No, just the house settling itself, Gram would say, but Zahra always imagined differently. Footsteps, growing up they were definitely footsteps, because she could not imagine a house settling itself in the way that Uncle Richard sat in the big armchair after work, rocking slightly from side to side, digging each buttock into the chair until he was at maximum comfort. No, a house would not settle in such an extreme way. Unlike Uncle Richard, it didn’t clock a nine-to-seven Monday through Friday or push a lawn mower that’s cord needed yanking every few yards to restart on the weekends. So she worried that someone was there, someone coming to get her. She would run to Derrick’s bed and sleep at his feet—the only polite way for sisters to sleep with their brothers.
Now Zahra is not so scared as much as curious, having already rebutted the rules of science years ago. She leaves the bedroom and walks to the living room, the one with the good couch, which Gram will not let you sit on without throwing down a sheet first. If you spilled food or drink, your butt was on the line, and if you didn’t, your butt was still on the line because that couch was for special occasions, and your skin was dirty. Now, in the dark, the couch’s green viny design is almost imperceptible, though she can see the moon waxing crescent in the floor-to-ceiling windows behind it. There, in the center of the three windows, is where the tree used to stand like the house’s witness, a bailiff but not a judge. She looks for it now, and though she knows Uncle Richard cut it down a long time ago, she can almost see it. Thriving, tall, wide, and leafy.
She can feel a moth, like an itch, on the tip of her nose. She doesn’t swat it away but allows it to look with her, at what used to be, at a time when she and Derrick used to laugh together, when laughing came so easy, too easy. They laughed the first time they heard the moths, like marionette Marvin Gayes and Tammi Terrells.
“No way,” Zahra had told Derrick. “You’re making things up.” But then she had heard them too, while on the tree singing, Jig-a-low, jig, jig-a-low, dancing on opposing branches, friends and cousins echoing from below. She’d looked at Derrick wide-eyed, and then they’d laughed so hard, holding their stomachs, almost falling to unpropitious fates, which Mom and Gram continuously warned of.
One day they heard Gram and Uncle Richard talking about the gypsy moths and snuck off to the library to read about them. What Zahra remembers is now in snippets, shaken up and mixed together with her more recent Google searches—can completely defoliate trees; hundreds of eggs; flying long distance; spreading; but at some point, doesn’t an invasive species become native?
Zahra walks up to the window. She cups her hands around her eyes and peers outside. At the space where the tree used to live. She gasps, thinking something’s there. But just as quickly, it is gone. Her eyes readjust to the darkness, and she backs away from the window.
FOURTEEN
It feels good to be behind the wheel. She’d forgotten this feeling of freedom having been sucked into the public transportation of New York. Where could Derrick have possibly gone without taking his Honda? She moves the seat up, compensating for Derrick’s long legs, and feels as if she’s interrupted the equilibrium. A creature of habit, how long has it been since he’s changed anything in here? It’s like this car has been on pause since he got it in 2010.
She sniffs the car’s confined air, the steering wheel, Derrick’s Clark Atlanta sweatshirt in the passenger seat. Trey offered to come with her, and Sammie begged and pleaded, but she needed this, didn’t she? This alone time in Derrick’s car, with Derrick’s things, and Derrick’s smell. She takes off her jean jacket and replaces it with Derrick’s sweatshirt. She rubs her elbows, feels the worn-down fabric against her fingertips. She leans toward the windshield and breathes in the smell of Black Ice, three air fresheners hanging from the rearview mirror along with an African wood necklace, something he might have gotten from South DeKalb Mall or the Underground. She slides her hands along the dashboard, the console, picking up dust. This car is almost a part of him. She feels closer to him here. This is what Derrick has always been attached to—driving, riding, listening.
She takes out a map that she bought on the way here, at a gas station somewhere between Auburn and Atlanta. It feels good to have paper in hand, something that doesn’t reduce Atlanta to a few left and right turns but shows the wide expanse of it. The map unfolds so far out that it tickles the passenger’s door. She looks for home, or at least for Panola Road or Covington Highway, but as she follows 285 down the left edge of the map, she finds that the Eastside has been cut off, the map’s key in its place. Annoyed, she tosses it in the back seat, realizing that it wouldn’t be helpful anyway. She knows the places, has the route sketched in her head like a connect-the-dots game.
She turns on the car, and the radio rattles to life. The Supremes are singing “Come See About Me,” and a memory of the song startles her. She and Derrick headed to Clark to move him in freshman year, the back seat of the car packed to the brim, and Uncle Richard tailing them in his pickup truck. This song coming on in the mix of other old R & B and Derrick pausing their conversation about what dorm life would be like to say, “Must be something crazy in this world to make Florence Ballard just stop singing. You know she wouldn’t for a while, right? Wouldn’t sing at all? Not a note, not a riff.”
He looked so pensive when he said it, like he wasn’t watching the road at all but revisiting something or someone somewhere else. The thought frightened Zahra, so she said, “I bet you’ll have a girlfriend by the end of the semester, bet you’ll be sneaking her into your dorm room.” But even then, she’d known better. That Derrick was the solo type, not that there’d never be romance, but that he wasn’t someone a person could attach themself to. He might shake them free like a wet dog.
When Zahra takes off, she can barely steer the wheel, she’s so drunk on the memories of Derrick, on the thought and smell of him. There are so many places he could be, so many places that are special to him, a true ATLien, a true Eastside stomper.
Atlanta is nothing like Gram’s, not a domain unnaturally trapped in history but a locale very different from how she remembers it. Boarded up or torn down where there used to be buildings, cranes and halfway-there construction where the land used to be low and grazing. The place feels foreign, and Zahra quickly realizes that she doesn’t remember the intricate twists and turns of the backroads that used to take her through thickets of forests and suburbs to the northside by North DeKalb Mall or farther up by Perimeter. Memorial Drive to South Indian Creek, then Brockett Road to Lavista, was it? How could she forget?
She goes to the other side of their neighborhood creek; the hot wings trailer; Golden Glide; Memorial Drive, where Yasin’s used to slang the best whiting sandwiches in the area; Stone Mountain Park; the Dekalb Farmers Market; the Decatur library, or the big library as they called it as children; Wax ’N’ Facts; the Omni; the Tabernacle; the Underground; the Shrine of the Black Madonna. But these places are just shells of the past, and they offer no trace of Derrick other than the memories they evoke. Of breezing along Covington Highway with the windows down, of panicking when they left J. R. Crickets after a N.E.R.D. concert at the Tabernacle to find that someone had stolen Dad’s Jeep Grand Cherokee and they had no way home. Going to parties where they cranked music and the batman, but Derrick was the same old Derrick no matter where he went—the farmers market or the library or the Underground, white parties or Black parties—which meant he was too cool for school let alone to be caught dancing outside of his routine head nod, which got faster and stronger as the beat dropped. It was a staple dance move, and Derrick rocked it the best while driving—one hand on the wheel and leaned back like Terror Squad.
