Obviously Read online

  It was also the portal to a world where I could be whoever I wanted to be. Back then you didn’t want anyone to know where you were anywhere at any time. Heaven forbid you were home when someone you didn’t know rang your doorbell. Every stranger was a potential kidnapper. Now we order strangers to pick us up in their Toyota Camrys and tell them exactly where we will be in the event that they actually drop us off and don’t gut us like fish. I quickly created an alter ego: Zoe Maloney. She was an average-height white girl with red hair and green eyes (the description I’d give in the Neopets chat rooms). She was on the cheerleading squad (because I wasn’t) but never made a big deal about it (although sometimes she would wear her uniform to school). Oh, and she had every flavor of Lip Smackers because of her generational wealth. Before you jump down my throat, yes, I pretended to be a white ten-year-old online when I was a black ten-year-old. In my defense: Beyoncé had not yet been introduced into pop culture, and I went to a school with a bunch of white kids who were actively learning to judge me because their parents judged black people. It was exhausting. So yes, before I let myself be invited and then uninvited to a sleepover (because Cassie’s mom was uncomfortable with having a ten-year-old black girl in her house), in the chat room, I decided that it was easier to be anyone else online because it felt easier to be anyone else in the real world.

  The ritual of sitting down at a computer and just searching for whatever I could think of was the best way to pass the time. Nostalgia started before puberty for my generation—digging through our memories to find toys from our childhood, commercials we remembered being funny, and getting to relive every canceled show, forgotten book, and moment whenever we wanted. None of us was really considered all that cool, but we were certainly before our time in terms of wasting time on the internet.

  AOL instant messenger ushered in more reasons to commandeer the phone line. Why would I talk to these kids on the phone when I could type, like, ten words a minute with my tiny ten-year-old hands?

  In The Lion King, Simba’s adolescence is portrayed as him walking across an endless log with Timon and Pumbaa. Well, my puberty log was dial-up internet and LiveJournal (archaic Tumblr), and instead of us singing “Hakuna Matata,” I just listened to that really obnoxious AOL CD’s fax machine–esque sound. I think most millennials relate.

  I am now a fully formed internet person, and that’s far more accepted now than it was when I was a little kid. Is it woefully misunderstood still? Yes. But those early days were the genesis of my story. Talking to strangers online and investigating Neopia and writing fan fiction for other kids informed how cool people would think I was online later, when I could look back fondly at how small the internet was. We built entire societies with other people, while other people were finishing their homework and watching TV. We should give Neopets, Zoog Disney, and all the weirdos therein the credit they deserve. Twitter, Facebook, and the internet as we know it now would not exist if not for the geniuses who taught us how to be people online. The internet was a subculture, and sometimes I mourn that loss, but it’s now for everyone, and everyone is better for those who spent all of their free time knowing the internet could be more than just a solo experience.

  Racism to a Fifteen-Year-Old Girl

  I’ve had a recurring dream my whole life about being shot in the back.

  The news media talks about race like it’s the annual flu vaccine or poll results after an election. They talk about figureheads who are long dead or long gray, speaking about “progress” and “the mountaintop” and “the dream.” They add numerical statistics like “Black people are thirty-one times as likely to be gunned down by police as white people” or “Black people are seven times less likely to be armed when shot by police than white people.” They speak in numbers instead of families, friends—people. They talk about race like it is an abstract occurrence that might happen to other people, but certainly isn’t happening to them. How can we solve the race problem? Is there a race problem? What race problem?

  Racism is different to a fifteen-year-old girl.

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old-girl is being told she’s pretty for a black girl, as if she is pretty in spite of her beautiful grandmother, aunts, and mother.

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old girl is reading “classic” literature that’s classically racist with more than thirty incidents of the word “nigger” on a page, and being asked by her teacher why she’s uncomfortable—effectively making the other twenty-four white students in class uncomfortable.

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old girl is being told by her white classmate that she is whiter than him because of her less-stereotypical interests, regardless of the fact that she is the only black person he has ever met and had the nerve to speak to.

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old girl is a river of white tears about Anne Frank’s diary and the horrors of the Holocaust juxtaposed with rolling eyes, disdain, and exasperation at the mention of American slavery.

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old-girl is being mocked for having short relaxed hair when her naturally long curly hair was too “kinky” and “coarse” to be lovable, either.

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old girl is sitting on a bus while the boys list all the most beautiful women in the world and realizing they are all white women.

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old girl is the pin-dropping silence from her classmates turned strangers at the mention of Black History Month.

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old girl is being shamed out of wearing her hair in braids by kids who call her “Kris Kross” while they simultaneously “ooh!” and “ahh!” over her white classmate’s cornrow souvenir from her spring break trip to Jamaica.

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old girl is a friend proclaiming that she can go to the “hood,” but only if she’ll accompany her because she’s “scary enough to protect her.”

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old girl is crying at night because her crush thinks her nose and lips are too big—and he doesn’t know why he thinks that, so he assumes it’s not a societally influenced impulse, but rather an objective predilection.

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old girl is being called scary because her skin doesn’t burn in the sun.

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old girl is a football player proclaiming proudly in a social studies class debate that he doesn’t see race—something she literally has to live and breathe every single moment of her life.

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old girl is worrying about the rise of gun violence in America, and fearing that if it ever happens at her school, she’d definitely be on the hit list—not because she’s a bully, but because unwarranted hate toward her appearance goes unchecked.

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old girl is hearing “I’m tired of talking about race” when it is twice as exhausting living it, as if she derives some secret pleasure in talking about the devastating effects of diaspora.

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old girl is going to every dance alone, because none of her friends’ white parents will consent to their children formally attending anything with a black girl and there aren’t any other black kids at her school.

  Racism to a fifteen-year-old girl is real. It is pervasive and ugly. It is the constant threat of depression, anxiety, and self-loathing.

  And racism to a fifteen-year-old girl is wishing everyone you knew would understand that. It’s wishing that you could survive the pimples and the braces and the crushes and the social hierarchy without the added burden of having to be aware of your skin color and how it makes other people feel all the time.

  Best Friendship

  Mindy Kaling tapped into something so true when she said, “Best friend isn’t a person, it’s a tier.” Throughout the years I’ve had many best friends, and one ride-or-die forever best friend that I hope to die on the same day as because I can’t fathom facing this world without her, even for a day. Plus I’d want her opinion on my funeral and vice versa. It would be a whole-ass mess
without her. But sometimes you meet people who are acquaintances in best friend clothing.

  Tiffany introduced herself to me by shoving me down on the playground in fourth grade. I like to run my mouth, even now, and I had apparently said too loudly that her best friend, Liz, had failed to look like Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century with her half-up pigtails, half-down hairdo. I was right, but that wasn’t the point. Tiffany is loyal to a fault and had decided to stick up for her friend.

  We were in different classes, so I didn’t really run into her the rest of the year. Maybe we rode the same bus on our field trip to the state capital or the zoo, but it would require the passing of a few seasons for me to be reunited with this lanky white girl with full lips and freckles.

  I’ve mentioned before that my elementary school was toilet white, so it shouldn’t surprise you that Tiffany and I became friends when I stuck up for her after Teisa made fun of her lips (of all things) before social studies class.

  “They’re DSLs!” Teisa teased.

  Teisa was on the cheerleading squad and had fiery red hair, freckles, braces, and no discernable upper lip. You remember that girl in elementary school that took gymnastics and would constantly be showing everyone how flexible she was by doing backbends, splits, and cartwheels like the lunch hour was a talent show? That was Teisa.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “Dick-sucking lips!” she roared, and her friends with varying degrees of perversion laughed at this assertion. “And you have them, too!”

  “Huh. Well, I suppose those kinds of lips are better than no lips at all. When you drink Kool-Aid does it just go everywhere?” I mimed a person desperately trying and failing to keep the sugar water inside their mouth.

  “Bitch.” Teisa pouted. Happy to have lightened the mood, I continued slurping and mocking her until I got a notification sheet for presumably having too hilarious a stand-up special.

  From then on, Tiffany and I suffered the injustice of childhood and adolescence together.

  Every night we’d talk on the phone for roughly an hour. That was the amount of time it took me to do a speed-run of Sonic CD on the old family PC and for Tiffany to get in trouble for not doing any number of chores and get kicked off the phone. The topics started with her crush, Chase, another gawky, tall white kid who wasn’t in the “gifted” program. We were never superior about having been placed in the “smart kid classes,” but we were curious about what the kids who weren’t got to do instead of French class. After a half hour of musing, we’d talk about our celebrity crushes (since I had already decided all the boys I’d met were totally too boring to talk to for more than a minute). Hers was N*SYNC (Justin Timberlake was so cute and his favorite color was baby blue, too), and mine was Backstreet Boys (AJ had a bad-boy appeal that I was beginning to lean into). Sometimes there’d be lulls in conversation for minutes and minutes at a time while we both listened to the radio, separately but together. One such time a wedding classic, “Let’s Get Married” by Jagged Edge, played to our captivated silence. It was the remix, and once the magnanimous rap line “WHAT’S GOING ON ACROSS THE SEAS” came in we were both rapping through the entire verse. It became known as our song™. We promised each other we would rap it at each other’s weddings.

  I liked Tiffany because she was always the most open-minded person in the room. When we argued it wouldn’t last long because she was always willing to see multiple sides and then make a rational call, one that encouraged agreement. She also knew all the black people songs and all the white people songs. As much as she loved pop groups, she also knew the latest dance moves and R & B songs. I never had to worry about if she’d fit in with my family. She’d fit in with anybody.

  The friendship quickly moved into sleepover territory. My mom hates when people come over with any amount of warning. If you spring people on her, she typically laments how “dirty our house is” for the better part of an hour and then enjoys the new person and getting a break from entertaining us. So, I was the first houseguest.

  Standing on Tiffany’s doorstep, my mom called to Tiffany’s mom, Renee, from the car.

  “She brought her own pillow case ’cause she has some hair grease that might get on your pillows! She knows the phone number. I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon!” And with that newfound freedom she peeled off.

  Tiffany’s house was small but nice. I put my stuff on the top bunk and turned around to see a man whose head nearly touched the ceiling lumbering through the room.

  “Hey,” her dad, Rob, mumbled as he made his way to the kitchen to hang with Tiffany’s mom and little sister, Ashley.

  After descending the bed frame’s ladder, Tiffany presented me with options of what we could do.

  “I have a PS2 and Crash Bandicoot,” she offered. And we ate an icebox cake and played for hours until her parents got sick of us laughing. It felt good to know that all parents tire of children’s laughter after a few too many hours.

  The next morning her parents made a full breakfast of bacon, sausage, goetta, biscuits and gravy, and eggs over medium. I’d never had over-medium eggs. My mom doesn’t like any food that isn’t well-done. She believes foodborne illness is a real threat against which we should remain vigilant.

  In addition to being in the talent show with a barely choreographed number to “5, 6, 7, 8” by Steps (one the many events I’m glad occurred in my life PRIOR to the boom of social media), she was my partner for all class projects. In sixth grade we made a trifold cardboard presentation about how marijuana was bad (it was a different time) and recorded a theme song to the rhythm of “The Lollipop Guild” song from The Wizard of Oz.

  We represent

  The non-potheads

  The non-potheads

  The non-potheads

  And in the name of

  The non-potheads

  We wish you would abstain

  From smoking weed.

  I like to believe we got at least a B-plus.

  * * *

  * * *

  When I skipped two grades and then transferred to public school, we still remained close. Since no one wanted to take me to the homecoming dance, I invited Tiffany. Since Kentucky is so small, kids from other schools coming to your dance was always a big deal.

  Tiffany danced with everybody, and lo and behold all the boys who ignored me routinely were dancing back. I had a crush on Mr. Raney, a “permanent substitute” who was filling in for a math teacher on maternity leave, but wasn’t so unrealistic as to believe we would ever date (come on). Still, I suggested we stalk him around the dance, keeping a healthy distance but giving me enough information to write a diary entry about it the next day.

  “No! I’m dancing!” Tiffany protested.

  “Come on! These guys are so boring!” I whined. But unfortunately, our stalking wouldn’t work anyway. See, the guys liked Tiffany so much that even as we tried to perch near the cookies and punch table, all the guys followed us there, instantly blowing our cover.

  “Hi, Mr. Raney,” I said sheepishly.

  “Hey, Akilah! Are you having a good time?” I was forever in the student zone. I knew this, but the heart wants what it wants. And the sadness I felt as he definitely went to go talk to other teachers (the most boring!) over me was a devastating blow. I tried to have a good time, but how could I? One day I’d have to grow into my own cuteness and find a boy my own age who liked me.

  Our friendship was unshaken even as Tiffany entered high school. There’d be more dances and musicals and reasons for us to check out what was happening at the other’s school. We rated the hotness of different boys by looking through old yearbooks.* Tiffany made another best friend at her school, Emily, and I made one at my school, Stacy. I immediately liked Emily. She was quiet and maybe a bit too Jesus-y for my taste. But I can handle Bible-thumping. Tiffany did not like Stacy. Not even a little.

  Stacy was also tall and white,
but with jet-black hair and green eyes that she covered with blue contacts every day. One afternoon while I was wasting time pretending to take photos for “yearbook class,” I noticed her in the special needs classroom. She was strikingly beautiful and sitting alone at a desk, appearing to take a test. I have no idea why I noticed her, but when she got on the bus for speech and drama at 4:30 a.m. one Saturday a few weeks later, I remembered.

  “She is SO HOT,” Isaac said. All the boys were beside themselves.

  “Oh yeah, is she on the team now? I saw her in the special needs classroom the other week when I was taking pictures.” It was so early that it hadn’t occurred to me that this information might affect the way the guys saw her.

  “She’s like retarded hot,” Isaac deadpanned idiotically. I listened to them reduce her to all of her “best” body parts until I couldn’t take it anymore and went and sat by her.

  “Hey, I’m Akilah. Don’t look but all the junior guys are staring at you.”

  She turned her head to glance and they ducked behind the tattered leather seats.

  “I’m Stacy. I just started as a freshman at Boone.”

  “Oh yeah? I saw you in the special needs room and didn’t know if . . .”

  “I was just taking a make-up exam. Did you tell everyone you saw me in there?” She blushed.

  And I just had to laugh. But she laughed, too, and we drove the boys crazy all year.

  * * *

  * * *

  In all honesty, this is what I liked about my friendship with Stacy. I finally got to be cool and fawned over. If a boy wanted a chance with Stacy he’d have to be nice to me, too. And Stacy really trusted me. I was often the third wheel that would put her parents at ease when she wanted to go on a proper date. If there was a video montage of my junior year of high school, it would be set to “You Make My Dreams” by Hall & Oates, and it would be footage of Stacy and her boyfriend holding hands at the skating rink, the bowling alley, and on her couch, and pan to the left or right to see me, just happy to be there.