In the Silences Read online

  No matter whether Aisha wanted to or not, she couldn’t trace that part of her family tree back any farther than “John,” a name he hadn’t even been born with. How did Brock not get how awful that was?

  Probably because I’d said “we.”

  And in truth I was still getting my head around that. Seeing that family at the crosswalk having the right of way but afraid to take it, watching us like we were dangerous, because we were. We didn’t have to be openly racist assholes who wanted to smash through them on their bikes, only ignorant white people who could look away, hurt them with our carelessness and call it an accident.

  I knew how it felt to be scared and watching the people around you, from wearing Brock’s old clothes to school and feeling the threats that no one had to say aloud. I’d been the one staring with wide eyes, waiting to see signs that someone was going to hurt me.

  I didn’t know what to do when I was the person who had to be watched. How were you supposed to behave if you’re the one who’s dangerous?

  Chapter Six

  October 2016

  I’d gotten a late start on my education about race in America. At least, according to me. Brock probably thought I shouldn’t even be reading the books Aisha’s mom recommended.

  I’d been seven when our first black president took office so of course racism was over. And Aisha didn’t talk to me about race the first eight months of our friendship, which I’d figured meant everything was okay. I hadn’t realized it was like me talking about gender: I didn’t do it if I thought the other person wouldn’t get it.

  While I’d been testing Aisha with comments like Beast being the hero I saw myself as, even though he was a guy, she’d been suggesting comics, books and movies with mostly black characters and watching how I responded. Slowly my brain started to see race in new ways.

  I didn’t manage to bring up race as a topic in any reasonable way, just blurted stuff out. The first hot, sunny day in April of our eighth-grade year—four months before the cops at the CVS—Brock got a blazing sunburn from riding his bike out to see the girl he’d started dating.

  Sitting in Aisha’s backyard with Pickles in my lap, tossing a ball for Wolvie, who kept taking breaks to chew the fuzz off it with her little front teeth, I said, “Both our brothers are redder than we are.” As soon as I said it, I thought that I shouldn’t have.

  “What?” Aisha glanced up from our history textbook, nose crinkled in confusion and concern. She’d been reading me the important bits, fingers toying with her curls. An orange headband held her hair back and she caught the lower curls and tugged at them while thinking.

  I said, “You know, how Riq’s a redder brown and Brock’s pink, even when he’s not burned all lobster.”

  She shook her head. “He looks white to me.”

  The feeling that we shouldn’t talk about this started to dissipate. Did that feeling come from the same place as the message that I wasn’t supposed to smile at people of color in public?

  “Seriously?” I asked. “But I’m pasty white and he’s pink white. You don’t see that?”

  Aisha’s hand rested on the textbook while she studied my face. “You both just look white.”

  I was too busy thinking to close my half-open mouth. Mom had the same pinkish complexion as Brock and always fussed about how hard it was for her to tan and how easily she blushed. How many kinds of white did I know? At least four, not counting sunburns and fake tans.

  How many kinds of brown? Until I’d gotten to thinking about how Tariq was redder than Aisha, I’d have lumped them together. So maybe two? Just light and dark. Were we all light white to Aisha?

  I grinned about the idea of my mom not looking pinkish and Aisha asked, “Why’s that funny?”

  “Because my mom would freak with joy if she knew you don’t see how pink she is.”

  “She’s pink too?” Aisha said like she didn’t quite believe this many pink people existed just across the alley from her.

  “Pink-white. She’s Maple, you know, on the wood stain chart in Milo’s workshop.”

  “What are you?” Aisha asked.

  “Oak.”

  Her eyes narrowed without any smile lines around them. “What am I?”

  “Walnut.”

  “What kind of tree is that? Is it good?”

  “It’s extra good,” I told her. “First off, actual walnuts, which are delicious, but also the wood is great to work with, at least according to Milo. Plus walnut trees look awesome.

  “Cool.” She flashed me a grin that settled into a slight upturn of her lips.

  “How many colors of brown are there? I only see light and dark.”

  Closing the history book, she put it next to her knee. “Depends how you’re asking because it’s not only about the shade of someone’s skin. They might be light tan but also a black girl and that’s different from a light tan Asian girl. So if you mean just black girls, I’d say about six to nine. How many kinds of white are there?”

  “Four. Or six if you count tanning and burning.”

  “For real? I thought there was just white and people who pass.”

  “Hang on,” I told her and ran across the alley to Milo’s workshop.

  Wolvie came with me, but I tossed the ball over the tall wooden fence so she ran back into Aisha’s yard. I got the stain chart from Milo’s workshop wall and took it back to Aisha’s yard, putting it on the ground in front of us.

  “See here, what they’re calling Autumn Oak and Natural Maple, that’s me and Brock and I tan to this Golden Oak color and he just burns pink. They don’t have a stain for white-person sunburn because no one would buy it. And Pops is Golden Hickory, so he starts out tan and then he can tan darker to this Country Pine color. That’s six kinds of white.”

  Aisha placed her hand like a karate chop diagonally across the chart, separating the top third from the bottom two thirds. “And the rest of these are everyone else.”

  “That’s a lot!”

  “Yeah but you don’t need to know all that unless you’re doing makeup. Your two-color system works fine. Just know that all the people who are lighter—Cherry and Pine and Cinnamon—usually get treated better than the rest of us. That’s all these colors: Walnut, Black Walnut, Mission Oak, Mahogany, Midnight.”

  She took her hand away from the chart and I put a finger on Autumn Oak and one on Country Pine, my other hand connecting Cherry and Walnut. “These two don’t get treated differently, they’re just white,” I said, indicating the first two colors. “Why are these other two different?”

  “Because colorism is real,” she said.

  Wolvie dropped her ball by me and I threw it, then shook my head because I hadn’t figured out what that meant.

  “Oh, sometimes I forget how white you are. So okay racism hits everyone, but then darker people get it worse because colorism, because—hey, Mom.”

  Aisha’s mom, who’d passed the open back door, came back and stood inside the screen door. She looked at the wood stain chart and the two of us and shook her head.

  “Would you define colorism for Kaz?” Aisha asked.

  Aisha’s mom sat on the back porch steps. Even though it was warm for spring, she had on her big slippers with the leather bottoms and fluffy lining, plus jeans and a gray “USC” sweatshirt over a red thermal shirt.

  Mrs. Warren said, “It’s a bias that arises alongside anti-Blackness and considers everything white and light to be better than black and dark. On a practical level, it’s what’s happening when people are considerate with white or light-skinned kids and rough to darker-skinned kids.” She met my eyes and held them before saying, “People are going to treat you better than Aisha. Or they’re going to treat you worse for being with her.”

  “But it’s twenty-sixteen—isn’t that all way past?”

  Mrs. Warren’s eyebrows lifted slowly toward her scalp and stayed in two very dubious arches. “Sweetie, we’re black and a lot of people are going to see our blackness before they see anything el
se about us. Even in twenty-sixteen. Aisha might be the most brilliant person in the world and some people are only going to see that she’s black and a girl and they’re going to think all manner of negative things. It’s best if you don’t forget that.”

  “Mom,” Aisha said in a half-exasperated sigh.

  “I’m not telling Kaz to watch out for you, you know what to do. But she’s got to know to watch out for herself and she’s got to understand why there’s a different standard. Summer’s coming, it’s about time she got the talk.”

  “What’s the talk?” I asked.

  “How to behave around cops,” Aisha said quietly. “And white people with power, or who think they have power or are trying to take power. And white guys in general.”

  “Have you seen the two of you get treated differently?” Mrs. Warren asked me.

  “Sometimes, but not right away. More often I get it afterward, at least the times when Aisha changes.”

  “I what?”

  “Like this.” I set my jaw, lips pressed together, eyes up but hard, shoulders a set in a line but the left one rolled in, hands clasped, palms pressing, knuckles tight with the pressure.

  “Well,” Mrs. Warren said and it was a full sentence.

  “Is that what I look like?” Aisha asked.

  I relaxed the pose and nodded. “When you’re mad but you’re not saying anything, yeah. And then I try to figure out what happened.”

  “What about you when you’re mad?”

  I ducked my head so my hair fell half across my face and crossed my arms over my chest, shoulders curled forward. Aisha put one hand on my shoulder, the other on my elbow and gently tugged me out of that closed-off position. I brushed my fingers down her hand to say thanks, but didn’t take her hand like I would’ve if we were alone.

  “So what do I do?” I asked Mrs. Warren.

  “You’re used to people giving you the benefit of the doubt,” she said. “If you mess up, they assume you’re having a bad day. When you’re with Aisha and it’s just the two of you, your family isn’t there, most of the time you’ll lose that. Some people will assume you two are up to trouble, and not cute little kid trouble, dangerous trouble. So here’s the talk I gave Aisha, short version: stay away from the police if you can. If they do talk to you, be on your best behavior. Always have your hands in view. Do what they tell you. If you have to move, first tell them what you’re going to do and then move slowly. Do not argue with them but do not give them any more information than is necessary. Start asking ‘may I call my mom?’ and ask that as many times as you need until they let you call or let you go.”

  “Really?” The word slipped out of my mouth.

  Aisha stared at her feet, moving the toes of her sneakers back and forth. She muttered, “There are four times more white people than black people in the U.S., but last year twice as many black people were killed by police as white. Plus black people are more likely to be killed while unarmed.”

  My breath caught at the base of my throat and in my chest, pushing my ribs out painfully.

  “But not here, right?”

  “You have to be careful everywhere,” Mrs. Warren said. “And Kaz, if an accident happens, God forbid, and Aisha needs medical care, people are more likely to think she’s not in pain, more likely not to give her the help she needs, so you need to call me or her father right away and tell us exactly where you are.”

  “I will,” I said.

  Aisha had one hand on her leg, the other rested on the cover of her textbook. The first few times we hung out, I’d been super aware that she was black. I didn’t mean for it to be that way, but that’s what my brain was all about. And then that faded and she’d just been Aisha for most of a year. But a year in which I’d seen her take her quiet-angry stance how many times? Fifty? A hundred?

  Aisha snagged my hand with hers, squeezed my fingers, saying, “We’ll watch out for each other, Mom.”

  Mrs. Warren looked at us for a long time, then nodded. “I think that’s enough of the talk for today. Come to me if you have questions, Kaz. And Aisha can give you some books to read.”

  Aisha squeezed my fingers again, dropped my hand and opened the textbook. “Back to history?”

  “You okay?” I asked her.

  “Kaz, I have brothers and a lot of cousins, I’ve heard that talk at least three times, the first time when I was eight. Are you okay?”

  I wanted to curl up and shake, like Wolvie when a thunderstorm is coming.

  I said, “When I was ten, there were these two guys in my grade, white kids, and I knew if they ever caught me by myself, they were going to beat me up. There was a playground fight I wasn’t even in and one of them dragged me into it, but I kicked him good and Brock saw.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, that’s not my point. They were fourth graders too, they weren’t much bigger than me. Getting beat up would suck, but I’d get through it. Cops are big. They’re not only adults, they’re adults with uniforms and guns. They’re supposed to protect you. You’ve been scared of them since you were eight?”

  “At least. More scared they’d kill Darius or Tariq or Dad or Mom.” She scooted closer to me, our arms almost touching, lowered her voice. “You know what I really hate? Always making sure Mom and Dad know where I am. Always being home on time. Having to be good all the time, even when it’s not enough.”

  Four months after that conversation, we’d been standing in the drugstore with the tall cop searching Aisha’s tiny purse, with Mrs. Branch the librarian pursing her lips and turning away, like being suspected of a crime was the crime itself.

  * * *

  I’d been afraid to talk about race because in those first months of knowing Aisha I’d been nauseously aware of a horrible voice in my head. It must’ve been there the whole time, only I hadn’t heard it clearly because it sounded like my other thoughts. As if some evil supervillain had gotten into my brain and mimicked my voice, to keep me from questioning.

  In those first weeks, Aisha would be telling me stories we’d read, or ones that she loved that I hadn’t read yet, or fan stories about our favorite characters. I first caught the evil voice when we were walking the dogs. Aisha was telling me about the greatness of America Chavez, the new generation version of Captain America. We’d turned down that long stretch with no trees, where I’d complain that it was too hot and she’d roll her eyes at me because, being from California, nothing here got too hot for her. Prairie flowers and tall grass stretched away from both sides of the path, ending in trees on the park side and houses on the other.

  In the middle of Aisha explaining the university that America attended, this voice in my head said, “She’s too loud, shouldn’t be that loud, drawing attention.”

  I glanced at the houses. They were way far away and even if that old guy in his backyard could hear her, would I care? Why worry about that?

  And then the evil voice said, “She should know her place.”

  I stopped.

  Aisha took a step, turned. “You okay?”

  “Sec,” I said and knelt to fix Wolvie’s collar that didn’t need fixing. I unbuckled and buckled it anyway.

  That voice in my head was not me.

  But what the shit? How did I have an evil voice in my brain that I hadn’t heard before?

  “Sorry.” I stood up and joined her. “I missed what you said. Who’s Prodigy again?”

  I listened to her words but also the sound of them. If Jon was walking next to me, would I think he was too loud? No way. And Aisha had a better voice than Jon.

  I pushed it down under other thoughts, ignored the flashes of shame and the fear of what this voice could do. But after the talk with Aisha and her mom, about colorism and police and how much I did not know, after the cops in the drugstore, I realized I had to stop turning down the volume on that voice.

  Disgusting as it was, I had to turn it up, to hear it first before it could poison my thoughts the way it poisoned Brock’s.

  Mrs. Wa
rren was right, it did tell me that Aisha didn’t feel pain like I did. Not in those words, but I remembered her crying during a movie and a flash of surprise that she felt that deeply, that she had the same emotions as me.

  I remembered being startled at how smart she was, how fast she thought, how she could get to answers before I did.

  I’d grown up with this parasite in me, disguising itself as me.

  And in people I loved, but how could I tell them?

  * * *

  In the months after the cops in the drugstore, I’d been reading everything Aisha’s mom recommended. Once I got settled into the ninth grade routine, I read faster. My plan for ninth grade had been to coast, read books, play with Wolvie, hang out under as many radars as I could, especially my mom’s. She was on rails about this whole “young woman” thing, like that backyard conversation about a third gender inspired her to shove me hard into the “girl” box.

  Aisha had other ideas. Next year, in high school, we could get into an advanced academic program and start earning college credit. She wanted this as much as anything. Like: new computer, more comics, college credit. While I was all: be left alone, more comics, Wolvie and other dogs, Aisha.

  The first few months of ninth grade, this meant that she spent way more time on school homework than I did, which was good ’cause I had a whole lot of real world homework to catch up on. Every time I saw a news story about the election that scared me, I’d curl up in bed with Wolvie and read about the real history of my country, and racism, and how to fight it. And every time I got shocked by a story or a statistic, I’d tell Milo, who usually ended up reading each book as I got done with it.

  Milo was an easy audience. Mom wouldn’t be and Brock for sure not.

  After running errands with Brock devolved into the two of us yelling at each other, I knew I couldn’t simply tell him facts. I couldn’t walk him through the same steps as me, because my steps rested on Aisha being my best friend.