Ned cut him off. “So what are you guys up to the rest of the evening? Gonna go get started on Michelangelo’s
Ghetto David
?” He didn’t
quite
sound nasty, thought Kenya.
“Naw. Working on my nude studies. Your mom said she’d pose for me.” Commodore mimed a woman’s curvy figure with his hands.
Ned laughed. “Oh yeah? I’m pretty sure you’d pay her to put her clothes back on.”
As if trying to move past the prickly moment that had just passed, the boys fell into each other laughing. When Commodore asked to borrow his bicycle, Ned seemed to make a point of loaning him the newer, fancier one.
“That was getting a little fucked-up,” Kenya said when they were safely on the elevator.
Commodore shrugged. “Yeah, Ned’s jealous. But that kid is crazy talented in his own right.”
Kenya gave him a side eye. “That’s not what I meant.”
Then Commodore spoke matter-of-factly. “Oh, Ned’s a little racist. They all are. Well, some are more than a little. But what I found out is that racist white people—I mean the ones without guns—are not as scary as our parents made them out to be. And let’s be real—not all black people are that cool.”
“I guess,” said Kenya.
“Sometimes I don’t really like Ned’s vibe,” Commodore said. “But his house is a dope place to hang out. And he always has the dope.” He laughed at his own joke as they emerged onto the warm, dark street. “Do you have to go home now?”
“Not really,” Kenya said, though it was getting close to dinnertime, which was when she told her mother she’d be back.
Commodore pointed to the bike. “So get up here. In front.”
“Couldn’t we get a ticket or something? And aren’t you high?”
“Up!” barked Commodore, rolling his eyes.
“Where are we going?”
“My cousin’s barbecue. And I’d like to get there before it ends, already.”
By the time they got to Overbrook, all that remained of the barbecue were a few dried-up burger patties and the dregs of some mayonnaise-heavy salads. But the party, in Cousin Jamal’s blue-lit basement, was just beginning. Girls in brightly colored short sets with Tilt-A-Whirl permed hairstyles clumped together; guys in sunglasses and exaggeratedly preppie summer outfits—one wore an ascot with a short-sleeved rugby shirt—clumped nearby. Commodore’s cousin, whose fade was higher even than Commodore’s and who wore a leather Africa medallion, greeted them with “Peace, God, peace, Earth.” He complimented Kenya’s name.
People danced erratically without commitment, some in couples and some solo. Then the opening guitar sample of “My Part of Town” slashed the air, and the DJ got into a frantic groove. Commodore, who had toured the room, distributing pounds to some of the boys and hugging a couple of loud girls, pulled Kenya into the crowd and they danced together, not quite touching, to music that throbbed and shrieked. The crowd, some doing a lazy two-step, some jumping in the air, kept cheering as if Big Daddy Kane, KRS-One, Queen Latifah, and EPMD were actually there and not just vibrations trapped in vinyl. Kenya remembered how exhilarated she’d felt skating that night before Teddy Jaffrey came into her room. But this was better. There were the parties she was used to, and then there was this blue planet, where she was neither a black hole nor a curiosity. She might not be beautiful, but she was a girl, dancing.
The spell ended when the basement flooded with red light and then Kenya heard the murky opening strains of “Piece of My Love,” where it sounded as if Aaron Hall was saying
dumb bitch
. Couples clutched each other and started grinding hard.
“Phew,” Commodore said, deftly maneuvering them off the floor. “I still gotta bike you to the train.”
“Yeah, I
really
have to go now,” Kenya said. But then she proposed a stop on the way.
* * *
A couple of weeks later, when nothing had happened, and Commodore called with ecstatic talk of Pippa and then not again for weeks, Kenya couldn’t believe it, and also couldn’t believe that she couldn’t believe it. What was she tripping on anyway? All it had been was an afternoon at the museum, which had free admission on Sundays. And Cousin Jamal’s had been, for Commodore, just another party.
Besides, what had it meant to him that he’d stood beside her on Irving Street, in front of the house where she had grown up? The short, narrow block looked shockingly shabby, especially since Kenya had learned that aluminum siding was for people with limited tastes, poor black people, ethnic whites. Standing in front of her old house, which looked tiny and generic with its white paint and dark green trim, Kenya realized she had never really looked at it. Then she noticed that heavy-looking drapes had replaced the boards on the windows. There was no hint of who had once lived there or what had happened to them. Now it looked like the home of normal black people: Christians, patriots, eaters of pork.
“That’s that,” Commodore had said with a shrug, so she couldn’t exactly be shocked now that he seemed to have vanished. But his arm had grazed hers.
And the bike ride to the train was just a way of avoiding the unpleasant fluorescence of a city bus. So what if their bodies had been touching, and the city had suddenly seemed both mysterious and like home? So what if the smell of his cologne and his sweat made her dizzy? So what if at the time she had thought,
I know he feels this, too.
During a long, air-conditioned summer spent sorting out the dentist’s files while the receptionist listened to the excruciating oldies station, Kenya made a daily mental tally of what she had lost. She had not given anything up to Commodore that really mattered. She had never actually told him she was a virgin or that she felt they were made for each other and that fate had united them again. She had never told him about Teddy Jaffrey or about the gun and her mother. She’d never gotten drunk or high or sloppy in front of him. She tried not to imagine how she fared in conversations he had with Pippa, but she couldn’t help it. He probably said she was “crazy cool” or something equally patronizing. Then it struck her with almost physical force that he’d probably never mentioned her to Pippa at all.
Since she’d all but completely abandoned Zaineb and the others, her own conversations about him were usually with herself, and sometimes they made her dig her nails into her palm or speak aloud. They had only just begun to let up in August, when he resurfaced, announcing that he was now really done with Pippa, who’d gone to California for college and was never there when he called. And that he wanted to hang out with Kenya and “catch up.”
Walking by his side down South Street, Kenya concentrated on not hoping for anything until she spotted something that made her breathless.
There were three boys walking in front of her and Commodore. “Uh-oh!” one of them yelled, elbowing his friend. “It’s Public Enema!” Kenya’s eyes followed the taunt.
Two young hippie types sat in front of the beading shop with a strangely sleek and well-fed-looking black dog slumped between them. The boy alternated between two chords on the guitar, over and over, singing some melancholy thing without a chorus. Verse spilled into verse, linked by the words
and the
.
And the frog will dance with the fly, and the earth will spin a web, and …
Kenya stopped short and grabbed Commodore’s arm to steady her suddenly wobbly stance. “I know that girl,” she said.
It was Devi Warren on the tambourine, singing “Oooooooooooh.” Her hair was long and matted, bedecked with a single daisy. She was very brown with sun, reminding Kenya of her bizarre lie. Her purple eyes were both calm and empty. She sat cross-legged in a long cotton skirt, from which her grimy bare feet peeked out.
They sounded terrible. Kenya’s legs wobbled and she took a deep breath, and she finally understood that the lie was how Devi had felt. And now, brown, broke, and abandoned, she was on the outside what she’d felt on the inside.
That could happen to you
, Kenya thought as she and Commodore hustled past. She let his arm go.
“Man,” he said, “you know the singer from Public Enema? Ooga Booga, you never tell me about your connections!”
“She went to Barrett. I can’t deal.”
“And she can’t sing,” Commodore observed. “But she’s kinda cute. You know, in a scruffy way.”
“Com, you are so fucked,” said Kenya.
“What about
you,
Dad?” he said, a joke from
The Breakfast Club
they sometimes lobbed at each other. “What about you?”
“No, I mean it,” Kenya said, her voice growing surprisingly icy. “There is something really wrong with you.”
“Wait a minute,” Commodore said, “what just happened? Who is that girl?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Kenya said. “None of it matters.”
“None of what?” he asked.
* * *
A thought struck Kenya as she sat eating deliciously salty fries at midnight in a café on Wesleyan’s campus during her visit in the fall of senior year. She was with two pretty dark-skinned girls, one black and one Indian, who were complaining about a male English professor and his constant attempt to find the lesbian subtext in everything they read.
“He tried to find the lesbian subtext in
Lolita
,” the black girl, Candace, said.
“He could find the lesbian subtext in those fries!” exclaimed the Indian girl, Karen. Kenya threw her head back and laughed, and she could tell that this made them happy. As she laughed, she had the (unhappy) thought that it had been a long time since she had truly looked forward to something.
There had been a few weeks with Commodore, which later started to seem like some kind of sickness, but before that, what? Lame parties? Dinners with her mother and Teddy Jaffrey? She had sent her father a letter after hearing he was out of prison and in a halfway house in Yeadon, but she had heard nothing back. Since that was going on two years ago, she’d long since stopped looking forward to hearing from him. But as of this moment she was looking forward to coming to this school.
Back home from her visit, at dinner, she announced that she would apply to Wesleyan Early Decision.
“But you’ve only visited two places, and one was Penn. So it barely counts as a visit.”
“Yeah, but I want to go to Wesleyan.”
“Well,” Sheila said, looking sad and dreamy, “I guess that’s a pretty good school.”
“Isn’t that all girls?” asked Teddy Jaffrey.
“But?” Kenya asked her mother, ignoring him. “‘I guess that’s a pretty good school’ but?”
“It’s just—well, Alma says that Grace is only applying to Ivies.”
“Well, maybe if I don’t get into Wesleyan, I can use Harvard as a safety,” said Kenya.
“Watch it, Kenya.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. But, um, have you seen my grades?”
“Your grades are fine. And it’s not just about grades. I just want you to keep your options open.”
“By applying to Ivy League schools?”
“You know what I mean.”
Teddy Jaffrey, who had not finished college, gave a speech about how “people make different choices.” This kind of pointless utterance was his specialty. Kenya often wondered if the nature of her mother’s feelings toward him had changed. She had seen a movie on TV where a man had proclaimed his love for a woman, explaining that he found something new to love about her every day. She found it hard to imagine her mother saying this about Teddy. In fact, Kenya was fairly sure she sometimes saw Sheila’s eyes cloud over when he spoke.
Kenya got into Wesleyan. Despite the matching Mercedes in the driveway and the money Grandmama had left, it seemed that both she and Sheila would have to take out loans. The college provided just enough aid for them to scrape by. After a brief spell of self-righteous anger over the fact that Wesleyan hadn’t recognized Kenya’s genius with a more generous financial aid package, Sheila became sentimental.
“The little girl is going off,” she said once, brushing a braid from Kenya’s face. “Going off and leaving me.”
“No, I’m not,” protested Kenya, but she was leaving, and she was not sad about it. She imagined that being several hours away would bring her and her mother closer than they’d been for years. She hoped Sheila would come to visit without Teddy.
The year dragged on toward its inevitable conclusion: prom and graduation. Kenya was equally disinterested in both and went to prom with Zaineb, who was not allowed to date. Phyllis Fagin brought a balding man she kept insisting was younger than he looked, though she did not deny the rumor that he dealt cocaine to the best schools on the Main Line. Lolly’s parents had handpicked her date, a beige-skinned nerd who was distantly related to Thomas Jefferson.
For Kenya, whose college plans were set, watching the keyed-up anguish and hope of Barrett girls whose futures lay in the balance was more entertaining than prom. Lolly was wait-listed at Penn. Zaineb was off to Northwestern. Dorrie Futter had gotten into Yale, where China (who had finally gotten over Prince and now had a serious boyfriend) had gone. Generally, though, Kenya was surprised at how extremely un-prestigious things had become for many of the girls. Boston University? Um,
okay
. Bryn Mawr was a good enough school—but it was literally across the street from Barrett. Then there was some talk of something called a gap year. Phyllis Fagin was taking one of those. She hadn’t gotten into any of the fifteen schools to which she’d applied.
“Guess you can’t buy everything,” Sheila said.
* * *
In the midst of all this, two things materialized. The first was a letter addressed to Kenya from Johnbrown.
The letter was long and detailed, but also elliptical. He hadn’t contacted her, he said, because he was trying to get his life settled, but he wanted her to come for a visit as soon as she could.
“Mom,” she asked one night as the two of them sat half watching a TV movie, “where is Freedom, Pennsylvania?”
She grimaced. “Beats me. Why?”
“That’s where Baba lives, on a farm. He says he wants me to come out there for the summer.”
“A farm?” Sheila said with a little laugh.
“That’s what it says here.”
“So when are you going?” Sheila asked. Kenya could tell that her mother had committed herself to a supportive pose. Her eyes were painfully wide in an “excited” way, and she kept blinking.