The False Flat

CHAPTER 40

HALF-WHITE, HALF-BLACK

“Listen, I’ve got a really busy day tomorrow, and I’m scheduled for a test at my doctor’s office,” Grant said as we neared my house on the way back to Nashville. “We might not see much of each other this week.”

I straightened in the passenger seat, put the bite of trail mix that was on its way to my mouth back in the bag.

I didn’t know how to take his words and the cautious way in which he’d said them. But the possibility of him not wanting to see me was what loomed largest. Then I reheard the word “test.”

I stared out the window into the dark. “What kind of test?”

He swallowed. “It’s nothing, just a CT scan, maybe something else. Routine.”

“Okay.” The acid in my stomach bubbled like a cauldron.

We pulled into my driveway. Erin wasn’t here, and I remembered that she was moving out, probably already gone.

I opened the car door to get out, but Grant grabbed my arm. “I shouldn’t have told you I loved you.”

Tears instantly burned my eyes. He was taking it back.

“No, no.” He pulled me closer, kissed my head. “I’m handling this all wrong. I do love you.” He closed his eyes and inhaled. “I’m freaking not sleeping with you until you’re sure; then I go and tell you I love you. I’m an idiot because I know you’re not ready. It just slipped out, and it’s not fair.” He put his head on his steering wheel. “None of this is fair.”

“Grant, I—”

He held up a hand to stop me, then gently cupped my chin as he looked directly into my eyes. “I meant every word, but I don’t want to pressure you. I’m not sorry I said the words. I’m just sorry I said them now. It’s not the right time. Am I making sense?”

I nodded. If I spoke, I’d cry, so I held on to his hand and squeezed.

Then, he gutted me. “I think we should take some time apart. I need time to digest some things, okay?”

The words bumbled around my body, bruising every organ they hit up against.

We’d barely had any time together, and now—

I knew I needed to say something. But I didn’t. Because I couldn’t.

He saw me to my door and kissed my cheek, all without looking into my eyes. Then he walked back to his car and drove away. And I’d said nothing. I hadn’t fought for him. Hadn’t fought for us.

I dropped to my knees in my partially filled living room, my heart shattering to bits and scattering like confetti all over the old carpet that still needed to be replaced. I should’ve known this was how it would end.

But then Grant’s face materialized in the darkness as I pressed my palms against my eyes, his bright face in the woods. Earnest. No one could hold that much intensity in their eyes and not mean what they said. Then, in his car, he’d apologized for loving me. He hadn’t taken it back. He still loved me. If the tables had been turned, and I’d told him I loved him and he hadn’t been able to say it back to me, wouldn’t I be crushed? More than crushed?

He was only human.

And while a part of me—a large part—was still scared of that love, I didn’t want to be someone he had to apologize to for loving.

Which meant facing my biggest fear: the possibility that I could lose the person I loved. I’d done all the work to let him in, and for what? To let him go again? Because I was scared? Grant was there, waiting—for me. All I had to do was meet him halfway, not even halfway. He was simply asking me to take a step forward.

I smiled, hope thrumming through my veins because I’d just realized something. I was the cause of my own misery. I stood, shaking but filled with determination, and went to the downstairs closet, where I’d stashed the box of Brandon’s keepsakes, a small container that held way too much power.

I pulled it out of the darkness, into the dim light of the living room. My heart was already racing, but when I saw the box, it was ready to leap out of my body. What if, instead of helping me move forward, this pulled me back even more? What if Hannah was wrong? I was about to open a box filled with memories that only made me think of all that had become impossible when Brandon took his last breath.

The past is only as big as you allow it to be.

I’d allowed my past to grow without restraint until it had overshadowed my whole life, which was what it was doing now with Grant, letting it threaten what was starting for us.

I’d unfairly tacked my life’s ruination on my brother’s death. I had to let him go, had to let go of the fear of losing someone I loved. Grant wasn’t going anywhere. I had to stop my past from being an excuse to remain stagnant. It didn’t own me; I owned it.

Hannah had put a lot in perspective in a short time. I wanted a new life; I wanted freedom. And I wanted it so badly that it was like lighting a pile of kindling with a match.

She’d also said something about forgiving my parents, but one step at a time, right? I didn’t even know what that would look like, especially since my dad was dead and my mother was a humaniform droid who didn’t think she’d done anything that warranted forgiveness.

I went to the kitchen for a knife, then returned and folded my legs under me right in front of the box. I took a deep breath, then sliced into the tape around the lid, slowly lifting one corner to peer inside, as if my whole childhood might leap out and laugh in the face of my progress.

A weathered paperback copy of Old Yeller was on top. I pulled it out, thumbed through the pages, and let the memory overtake me.

My brother, framed in his upstairs bedroom window, carefully folded a page of Old Yeller down to hold his place as he looked out to see what the commotion was in our front yard, where my twelve-year-old friends and I were no longer playing.

A group of Black girls, the ones who hadn’t taken well to my new haircut, shoved the group around until I was standing in the middle of their circle of four. I’d never forget the look on their faces, like by existing, I was ruining their lives. It scared me. I looked up at Brandon, so far away, yet the cover of Old Yeller was crystal clear, a blond Lab with the saddest look on his face, like the dog sympathized with me.

“Why don’t you put grease in your hair?” one of the girls said, Tameka. She’d picked on me before, pulled my braid, when my hair was long enough to have a braid, and pretended she hadn’t when I confronted her.

“Because I don’t want to,” I said, trying to be brave, trying to stand up for myself. I didn’t know what they were talking about, why they were so angry over a hair product, or why they were surrounding me.

“Your hair looks stupid,” the larger one, Vee, said—her name was Virginia, but everyone called her Vee. She came toward me, broke the circle so she bumped my arm with her belly, hard. I fell. And they laughed, except for one girl in the four. A look of regret passed over her face. I’d talked to her, thought we were, if not friends, friendly acquaintances. But the look passed, and she joined in, especially when some of the other kids around started laughing too. My friends, the ones I’d thought of as friends at least, looked embarrassed, backing away like they’d just realized they should probably question their association with me too.

Mr. Goff, the gigantic White art teacher with hands like tennis rackets, walked down the sidewalk with his one-eyed shih tzu that always appeared in desperate need of a bath. He looked at me, and for a few precious seconds, I thought he was coming to help. I think Brandon did, too, because he stayed in the window. But when Mr. Goff saw me, he leaned down, picked up his dog, and hurried back to his house three doors down.

Tameka came up to me on the ground, and I braced myself, wrapping my arms around my middle, sure she was going to kick me, but she didn’t. Instead, she reached down and grabbed one of the many colorful clips in my hair, what I used to keep my too-short style from flying all around my face. It was the first time I’d thought my hair was kind of pretty, like artwork on my head. I’d even received a few compliments at school earlier that day. My mother had told me that morning, as she and I placed one clip after another in my hair, to embrace my curls. They were different, she’d said, but they were beautiful, and everyone was going to love my new style.

My mother had been wrong. These girls did not love my new style. Tameka’s hand came away with one of the clips and a hunk of my hair. I screamed. Someone else pulled out another clip, more hair. They laughed, and I tried to crawl away, but someone was holding me down. I realized it was the girl who had looked regretful for those few seconds, her sympathy evaporated.

As suddenly as I’d been attacked, it stopped, and all the kids were gone, except for one who held my shoulders as I cried on the ground, my new shoes scuffed with dirt, my pants the same.

Brandon.

He held me in his arms, apologizing over and over again, apologizing for taking so long to get downstairs, apologizing for my hair, apologizing for what those girls had done and for what everyone else hadn’t.

I couldn’t stop crying. I blubbered at him, telling him, between rasping sobs, that I wished I was White and that my hair was straight and that my lips weren’t as full, so I’d stop getting picked on, so I’d stop feeling like I was always waiting to be picked for one of the teams. Because which side did we belong on, he and I? We weren’t Black. We weren’t White. And neither side knew what to do with us.

He let me cry until it was all out. When I’d fallen silent and the yard glowed as the sun transformed from its afternoon sharpness to the subtle golden gleam of early evening, he pushed me up and told me it would be okay, that we had each other. We were the same. As long as I had him, I’d have someone who knew what it was like to be in the middle, to belong between two big groups.

We were the mixed kids, the ones who had light skin but coarse, curly hair that our parents didn’t know what to do with. He told me I had it harder because I was a girl, and girls were meaner than boys at my age. He held my hand as we walked inside and up to my bathroom, where I cried some more when I saw my hair.

My brother told me I was beautiful, that I’d be beautiful even if I shaved my head, because what I looked like on the outside didn’t matter. I didn’t believe him, of course, because it did matter. The hesitation on the White kids’ faces told me it mattered. The open disgust on the Black girls’ faces told me it mattered. But he’d been trying to calm me down, and it had partially worked. It got me to stop crying, at least.

He tried to fix my hair, to repair the matted, torn bits sticking out all over the place, but in the end, he’d called a friend of his, and his friend’s mother came to our house with a bag full of hair products, a gorgeous Black woman whose curls were defined, big, and unapologetic. Her kindness as she washed my hair, layered in products, and gently combed out my curls didn’t change what had happened to me in our front yard, but it changed how I saw people. Black, White, Hispanic, mixed: it wasn’t the color of your skin that made you who you were; it was how you lived and how you treated other people.

She told me the girls who’d bullied me were angry because I had Black in me but had light skin and could get away with things they couldn’t. She told me that they probably didn’t even understand why they’d done it. She told me it would get easier.

Later that night, after dinner, Brandon asked me if I was okay.

I nodded. I wasn’t, but I was tired of talking about it. “Thanks, B. I love you.”

He sprang one of my temporarily defined curls. “I love you too, little sis.”

A large tear fell onto the faded cover of Old Yeller in my lap. In the first years of my life, my brother was always there. The two of us had been a team. When our mom was out climbing the corporate ladder and our dad was busy building his medical practice, it was Brandon who had been there. Every. Single. Time.

And nothing else mattered because together, we could get through anything.

I sat for a long time, pulling at the feelings woven around my heart like loose threads. It was more than losing my brother and friend; it was losing someone who understood what it was like to be me.

I placed the book beside me, then riffled through the rest of the box. The lump in my throat was nearly unbearable when I palmed the scrappy little monkey wearing a red bow tie. My brother had kept it under his pillow for good luck.

The monkey got a special place in my lap as I moved from a gnawed, stubby pencil Brandon had used to do his last sheet of math homework, to the mint-condition baseball card he had kept on his bedroom shelf. It wasn’t until I saw the leather-bound notebook that my hand stopped moving.

Instead of picking up the journal—Brandon would never let anyone call it a “diary”—the one he’d started writing in after his diagnosis, I returned the contents to the box, everything but the monkey.

That was enough for tonight; I wasn’t as brave as Brandon had been. Brave even on his last day, when he’d folded the journal into my hand and told me to read it whenever I missed him.

I had never opened it.

I looked up at the ceiling. “I miss you, brother. It’s been twenty years, and I miss you like I lost you yesterday.”

I closed my eyes and slowly inhaled, holding the breath for as long as I could. Then I pushed upright, carried the box back to my bedroom, and, as I placed Brandon’s monkey next to the purple Beanie Baby on my bed, I told them both I’d read the journal within a week.

Before I did, I needed another session with Hannah.