Obviously Read online

  I knew Meredith Teddy because she had daughters the same age as me and Lanie: Jenny and Jaime. Like my mother, Meredith Teddy had gotten tired of explaining that Jenny and Jaime weren’t twins. With bright red hair, matching outfits and freckles, and expensive gymnastics training, they were our sworn nemeses. The preschool wasn’t big enough for more than one cute duo, and Lanie and I were ready for the challenge.

  Regardless of my one-sided vendetta, Mrs. Teddy was always pretty nice to me. Her kids got picked up by their father after school while she taught the cheerleaders, and it was the sound of the 90210 theme song that first caught my attention. The cheer squad sat in front of chairs that would be used at the pep rally and during halftime at the school’s basketball games. I popped a squat and watched, amazed at the choreography and how cool and adult everyone seemed.

  Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh, duh-nuh-nuh-nuh, clap clap. The girls ran to chairs that were supposed to, in effect, look like they were riding in a car. Two girls knelt in front, while the one on the left pretended to be turning a steering wheel. Their ponytails flipped side to side with their miming. When I was a kid, I truly believed that I saw that car, cup holders and roll-up windows and all. It seemed so magical, so girly. I wanted in desperately.

  After a while I got up, still standing pretty close to the wall so as not to be noticed, and mimicked the dance movements. Five, six, seven, eight, neck roll, snap, walk-walk-skip, sit on the chair, head left, head right, head down, arms up! I memorized the hell out of that dance. If Vine had been alive in the ’90s, I would have become a meme. There were no black cheerleaders on the team, but my little preschool butt was keeping in time and step with all the blonde hair and neon.

  I became an unofficial member of the squad about a month later. Mrs. Teddy had noticed me putting in the work with the squad and taking water breaks with all the girls. I never got a uniform, but my mom got wind of my excitement and scheduled for us to attend the first basketball game where they’d debut the routine.

  The cheerleaders found their spot out of bounds to the left of the bleachers, and I found a spot that was close to that, careful not to obscure them. We were a team and this performance wasn’t just about me. Meredith would call out the name of a cheer and I’d get into my own solo formation, awaiting an older girl calling out, “Ready? Okay!”

  Once I was old enough to try out for the cheerleading squad, I did. Fourth grade at Latonia Elementary School, and wouldn’t you know it, Meredith Teddy was now their cheerleading coach. The tryouts were a week long, and the entire time they tested for things like how loud you can yell, if you can tumble, choreography, general ability to smile under any and all circumstances, etc. I couldn’t tumble. I couldn’t do a toe touch, or a back handspring, or a herkie, or any of the jumpy parts of cheerleading, but no one could touch me on the choreo. I was teaching it to other girls there by the third day.

  Mrs. Teddy even took note of my deep alto voice.

  “Love that yell, Kiwi!” she called, assuring me. I could picture the next week, having to change my AIM username to something about cheerleading, sitting at the popular-girl lunch table just talking about popularity, wearing matching scrunchies, and deciding once and for all who the better boyfriend would be, Dylan or Brandon.

  * * *

  * * *

  The day of the tryouts was like any other. A bread-tangle of pizza with corn for lunch. Watching kids who understood the rules of Pokémon cards at recess. Waiting for the afternoon announcements. Soon I was wandering to the wall outside the music room, waiting my turn to audition. The hallway was too quiet, with girls so nervous that it seemed like they were being lined up for something far more sinister with less of an emphasis on cheer. Privately I considered how I couldn’t afford not to make the team. I was the only black kid in my class, so I was already at a disadvantage socially (see chapter entitled “The South”). I couldn’t afford to buy both the pastel and the metallic gel pens to make up the cool points. My mom thought Lunchables were a scam, so I couldn’t even get a reputation as the girl who gave away her Capri Sun. I often brought pudding as the dessert for my lunch. Nobody likes pudding. We tolerate it, like we tolerate room-temperature soda and ingrown hairs. Would we take any other option if there was one? Yes.

  I could see the other girls’ minds working on this same problem. We were only ten years old, but we knew the social hierarchy. Pretty girls who do girly things and are generally seen as dainty always come out on top. If you ever challenge them you’re just a big meanie, the grade school equivalent of a total bitch. I tried to get out of my head. Shake it out. You know this, Hughes. You’ve done it forty-five times. Your voice is deeper than all the other girls’, just hit ’em with that “Ready? Okay!” and if they ask you to do a back handspring, change the subject.

  “Number fourteen?” a voice called.

  My cue. I sauntered into the room, practically marching. Head up, smile on, bring it.

  It went fine. When they asked me to do a roundoff, I just didn’t. How can that be a deal breaker in the fourth grade? It just wouldn’t make sense.

  The protocol was put to us that someone would call tonight letting you know if you made the team or not. I got in the car and gushed to my mom, replaying all of the excitement of walking, clapping, and yelling.

  “And then I yelled, ‘Ready? Okay!’ and I really was ready, okay,” I recounted.

  The moment I got home I made sure all the phones were on their chargers. We absolutely would not be missing this phone call because a phone was dead or missing. Bo would insist that that was “bullshit, man” because he really wanted to talk to a girl from class, but high school love would have to wait. If I didn’t get a phone call, I could kiss goodbye all the goodbye kisses in my future. Who would ever love a girl who wasn’t on the cheer squad?

  Hours passed. It approached “rudely late” to call. My mom tried to comfort me, but I couldn’t believe it. Who else at the tryouts had been ready for this moment for more than half their lives? It was too late to call around to hear who else didn’t make the squad. I’d just have to go in the next day and pretend it was fine.

  I was devastated. I lay facedown on my bed, ugly crying, not even caring that my whole shirt was wet with tears. Oh, how unfair life is! It’s not my fault I can’t do a roundoff. Why would the audition be hinged on a skill you can’t really learn in a week anyway? It’s not like the whole team does a roundoff during the halftime show. I knew all the moves, on beat, backward and forward. I was made to cheer! My whole life had been leading up to this moment, mom’s spaghetti, and somehow it wasn’t enough.

  When my mom dropped me off the next morning, all the other kids were talking about who made the team and who didn’t. If I wasn’t super close with the group, I’d tell them I didn’t even try out. If I did I’d tell them that it was rigged. I tried out two more years at the school, and still didn’t make it.

  * * *

  * * *

  One day on the ride home from speech and drama in high school, my mom asked how the day was.

  “Oh, they were holding cheerleading tryouts all week in the gym, so people just kept talking about that.” Trying to denote that it was kind of a sore subject.

  “Well, you know you never made the team because of me,” she said, like I knew that already.

  “Come again?”

  “Mrs. Teddy. She and I go way back, and let’s just say we haven’t always seen eye to eye on things,” she revealed.

  “Huh,” I considered. “So it wasn’t the tumbling?”

  “No, Kilah. Have you seen those cheerleaders? How many of them do you think are doing a flip?”

  In hindsight it was only like two girls at the front who could do anything resembling gymnastics. The rest sort of marched and posed and smiled close to the beat.

  “Damn,” I said, somehow not vindicated by the meritless appointments of the other cheerleaders.

 
It turns out you can be excellent, objectively, at any number of things, and life will come in hot with the unfairness. To Mrs. Teddy’s credit, she was never mean to me and never let on, but I internalized years of not being pretty enough, or white enough, or skinny enough because I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t be that girl.

  Now when I look back on my school years, I can’t imagine how different my life would be if I had been a cheerleader. No one looks at me now and would even suspect that I had dreams of being that girl. That I insisted on watching cheer competitions any time they were on ESPN. That I’ve seen Bring It On more than five times and The Godfather less than one (it’s just really long and I can’t be everything to everybody).

  And had I made the team, knowing what I now know about Mrs. Teddy, all of that doubt and self-hatred probably would have been made worse.

  Besides, I won so many trophies competing in speech and drama and now I can point to high school as a training ground for my current life, where I’m constantly in front of people speaking and making jokes. And our cheerleading team never won anything.

  Fifth Grade Is a Scam

  Like many children in the ’90s, I was considered “gifted and talented.” Do I believe I was smarter than most other kids? I don’t know. The work didn’t bother me, and I tended to get good grades, but being good at memorizing things has only helped me in adulthood for auditions and nothing else.

  Back-to-school is my favorite season. Not only did my birthday often fall right smack in the middle of all the hoopla, but it feels like the universe giving you another chance at resolutions. Maybe in January I wasn’t ready to change, but every school year can be different from the last. I liked picking an outfit from my new clothes. I loved the smell of fresh school supplies. I thought there was no higher calling than deciding which notebook and folder went with which class. My Trapper Keeper might as well have been a Mercedes-Benz. Before the first day of school I always had a hard time sleeping. The anticipation was on par with Christmas Day. Who had gotten taller? Who had a good story to tell about their summer? Who would want to hear about my Barbie car washes and tree-climbing?

  In third grade I switched from the school my mother works at to Latonia Elementary School. It was the only school in the district with a program dedicated to high- achieving children, and it was a lot different from Ninth District.

  I instantly noticed the lack of melanin in my new school. Lanie had gone to fourth grade there already and was entering fifth when I got there. There was one other black girl in my grade, and one biracial boy, but that was it. A far cry from classrooms with kids from everywhere at my old school. None of the faculty and staff was darker than a paper bag. Don’t get me wrong, I’d noticed I was black before, it was just this was the first time I realized that some people assumed that was a bad thing.

  To their credit, most kids didn’t seem fazed by it at all. The biggest difference between the schools was the workload. At Latonia I’d have homework every night, for at least an hour. This was good for me, because I was so bored not having to do anything. The schoolwork never stumped me. I joined the A Honor Roll as soon as it was an option and tried a few after-school activities. I finished the year with a perfect record, new friends, and a hope for repeated success the next year.

  That summer sucked. My grandmother died, and none of us took it well. Even now I don’t know what “taking it well” looks like when someone who is in your life every day suddenly isn’t. But that summer was incredibly difficult. I spent a lot of time alone, crying, but trying not to stress my mom out for any reason. When school rolled back around I was relieved to have something besides abject sadness to occupy my time.

  Little did I know I was about to meet my archnemesis, the woman who would make my fifth-grade life hell: Ms. Murphy. To put it bluntly, we did not get along. I thought she was racist; she thought I was out to get her.

  Our first of many classes in the day was gym, and our teacher, Mr. Dweeble, was basically an overly tan WWF wrestler from the ’80s. In fourth grade I remember him telling the class that if we wanted to stay skinny (?) we should only eat bacon (???). In hindsight, how on earth? We were little kids? About to hit puberty? And he just gave some unsolicited diet advice? I couldn’t even then, and I can’t even now.

  In the gym everything was red and tan. Like in most Kentucky elementary schools I’ve visited, the gym doubled as an auditorium, so there was a cape-esque red curtain that was open, revealing old personal trampolines and inflatable balls with handles that would be a hot commodity come recess. We did some “stretching,” which was more like flopping our arms around and failing to reach our toes, and then we were asked to run five laps around the gym.

  It was at that moment that I realized two things: (1) I needed a sports bra or any kind of bra honestly, because there were boobs and they were bouncing, and (2) my shoes squeaked. At the time the former seemed far more urgent than the latter. No one else had boobs yet. I needed to blend in with my less shapely peers.

  As that class ended and we walked back to our homeroom class, Ms. Murphy, my homeroom teacher, kept sighing loudly. Though it appeared that I was still (hopefully?) the only one who realized I needed a bra, it was suddenly clear that I was not the only one who’d noticed my shoes squeaked. As we entered the classroom, Ms. Murphy snapped. She laid into me in front of the entire class about my squeaky shoes, of all things.

  I was stunned. “I didn’t do it on purpose,” I stammered. That got me a notification slip for talking back. Maybe you’re wondering what a notification slip is. I was, too, because I was a good kid and had no idea there were tiers to punishment when you were a “bad” kid.

  A notification slip is a piece of white paper that details how you’ve misbehaved—in Ms. Murphy’s crappy handwriting. There’s a space for a parent signature. If you get a notification slip, you don’t get to watch the movie on Friday with the class, but rather you have to do some redundant chore like washing the chalkboard or sharpening pencils for hours until the bell rings at 1:45. I never saw any of the movies that year. One time I got close to seeing Old Yeller, but then I got in trouble for sneezing and was banished to eraser-cleaning duty.

  Every week that I brought one home my mom was mad at me. She was mad at me a lot that year. I felt terrible adding disappointment to her plate after her mother had died. I thought I was responsible for my mom’s happiness, and every week I failed. I didn’t know it then, but I was quickly falling into a depression.

  And it wasn’t just sadness. My grades started to reflect it. The day I was handed my report card and had a C in social studies I cried. That’s an understatement. I wailed. I blubbered. I rode the bus, sobbing. My stop, the elementary school my mother works at across town, was the last one. I sat alone, paralyzed by the disappointment I was sure to inspire when she finally saw that I’d brought home the lowest grade I’d ever had on a report card up to this point. It was a C-minus. Not even just a C, but basically a D-plus. I’d had straight As up until now, but fifth grade was my first real brush with “not-good-enough-ness.”

  My eyes were almost swollen shut. My nose was running. My throat ached. I slowly walked through the school to her office and couldn’t speak. She ran to me and held me to her chest.

  “What, Kilah? What happened?” she asked. She must have assumed I’d seen a dead body and had been framed for murder.

  She was disappointed, and since my mother’s approval was all I had going for me anymore, I was shattered. I found comfort in food and sleeping, coming home after school and eating bowls of cereal and handfuls of chips and then lying down around eight p.m. to face the next day. I stopped believing I was smart. Perhaps it was an elaborate lie, a cruel trick that had set me up and everyone was laughing because I’d fallen for it. I’d have to find a new identity. Akilah the High Achiever was now retired. Who was I now?

  Back at school, things were getting worse, not better. I still get enraged when
I think about Black History Month that year. What was usually a joyous occasion of a big-butt TV being rolled in and the lights being dimmed was now tainted by racism by omission. Ms. Murphy took the VHS out of its cardboard and slid it into the VCR as the room lit up with that familiar blue light.

  It was a video day. Video days were a rare treat. Typically Ms. Murphy gave some sort of introduction to the video we were about to watch, explaining how it was related to the overall lesson plan and wasn’t just an excuse for us to goof off while she graded homework. But today Ms. Murphy hit play without an explanation of any kind. The video was footage of dogs biting young black people wearing their Sunday best. Powerful hoses knocked down elderly black people. Acid was poured into swimming pools. The ugliest things humanity was capable of was the cinematic selection for the afternoon . . . Yay. The other fifth graders (all of them were white) laughed. Hard. And who could blame them? Without a basic understanding of the fact that this was not fiction, not a slapstick comedy, and with hardly any concept of Martin Luther King being literally murdered soon after this footage was taken, it feels so fantastical as to not be real. My face felt hot. I hated everyone.

  These kids were my friends. I’d played with them at recess, gushed about movies and books and TV shows with them. Ate lunch with them. Stayed at their houses, and they had no idea why I was crying. Why I felt singled out. Why this was the most painful public experience I’d gone through at that point in my young life.

  I left the room, claiming I had to go to the bathroom (notification slip, getting up without raising my hand), and found a bathroom farther down the hall than the one right outside our class. I had to hide. I had to be alone and get it all out. Fifteen minutes or so of solace seemed fair, and I eventually came back to class, fixed my face, and pretended it was fine. After all, the only thing worse than watching white children laugh about the horrors and racism of the ’60s is having to explain to them why they shouldn’t laugh about the horrors and racism of the ’60s. I was tired. It’s an exhaustion that still lives in my bones today.