The Highest of Seven Hills by Dawnie Walton
The Highest of Seven Hills
Dawnie Walton
I took the SAT for the first time junior year, and scored well enough that every few days I came home to find, stuffed in the mailbox, fat packets addressed to my full legal name.
Colleges blared application deadlines in neon starbursts: Brown, Oberlin, that one school in Portland that didn’t do grades.
The day NYU finally showed up, my fingers trembled over the slick pamphlet outlining student housing options.
Live at the center of the excitement! it read.
That night I floated my interest in the living room, while clearing our dinner dishes between sitcoms. “Nia,” Mama said, dragging out my name the way she did whenever she deemed me ridiculous. “Girl, what you know about New York City? You know how cold it gets up there?”
“There’s such a thing as a coat.” I laughed, working overtime to watch my tone.
“Can I come visit?” my baby brother whined from his spot on the floor, forever too close to the television. And though the look I shot Omari said That’s out of the question, I silently thanked him for seeing it too.
But in those days, Daddy, God rest his soul, pronounced the final word. He pushed his tray toward me and leaned back in his recliner. “Get that NYU money,” he said, “and then we can talk.”
Challenge accepted, I thought, and raced to my bedroom to call Kelly Traynor.
She was the one who first sparked my love for New York, Kelly Traynor, with her art magazines and Sonic Youth CDs, with those grimy indie movies we’d watch at her house.
Kelly Traynor, a say-both-names kind of white girl, because even in the confines of our private high school my best friend was an outré legend.
We had to wear uniforms at Eagleton Prep back in those days, the typical white button-downs and plaid skirts, but we could do what we wanted with the rest of our look, and Kelly’s hair was very East Village.
Cut sharp at the chin, bangs in the eyes, dyed so shiny black it looked like her whole head had been dunked in gel nail polish.
She drove a cherry-red Saturn, a Christmas gift from her dad after her parents’ divorce.
The first time she took me for a ride in it, she turned to me with that hair and said, “You know what, Nia? Let’s go now. ”
We were heading up Beach Boulevard, sunroof open, and while the faux fur of her leopard-print jacket rippled in the wind, while the ends of my braids slapped me across the face, that brutal helmet of hers barely moved.
We missed the marquee for the movie theater, and the strip mall with the Blockbuster Video.
“Kelly,” I whimpered through chattering teeth, but she wouldn’t answer.
She climbed the on-ramp for I-95. And for several terrifying minutes, with the guitars screeching on the stereo, with Kelly Traynor’s clove cigarette burning, with her fingers so lax on the steering wheel as we zoomed past the Jacksonville city limits, I thought she might actually do it—bust us all the way north to St. Mark’s Place.
Then she swerved into an exit lane, and by the time I felt safe to open my eyes we were parked outside of a Taco Bell.
“You should’ve seen the look on your face,” she said, still snickering once we got on the line.
I tied back my hair and ordered nachos—not my usual, but as she mocked my puckered expression and my grip on the armrest, I imagined the cheese gluing my guts back together.
With any other Eagleton kid I stayed on guard against being the butt of a joke, because that’s how I’d been treated since I got in on academic scholarship: like a funny, fluky little laugh.
But Kelly Traynor, I thought, was different—a real-deal alternative, a self-selecting misfit.
Obviously I had no clue who the hell I was, as the one Black girl in such a white place.
Linking arms with my friend in the breezeways, though, I learned to shoot off a look that screamed Thank God I don’t have to be any of YOU.
Sometime that year, outside of school, we discovered the Taco Bell near Kona, a skate park across the St. Johns River.
If we lingered there long enough on a Saturday, refilling our large sodas as an excuse to hold on to a table, the public school boys who skated next door would show up in a ravenous pack.
Nails caked with grime, scraggly hair stuffed beneath pilling skullcaps.
Their black XXL T-shirts, dusted white up the backs from their skids across concrete, said Misfits, Fugazi, Black Flag .
Boys like this didn’t go to Eagleton; we’d only seen their kind in pictures and movies, in the 1 a.m. hour on MTV.
Their names and faces blur together now, but I remember how obnoxious they could get—flicking burrito wrappers and ice at each other, competing to see who could burp the loudest. Their charms wore out pretty quick for me, but somehow Kelly Traynor remained amused.
She always wanted us to join their table, but when those boys would start getting wild—when I felt the one other Black kid in the place, who worked there wiping down the tables, glaring over at us rowdy squatters—I’d whisper to her, “Can we please go outside?” In the back lot by the dumpster, she’d roll down all the windows of the Saturn and crank her stereo, and the two of us would perch on the hood while the boys jumped their boards over the parking stops.
“If you crash into my car, I’ll murder you,” she’d yell, a queen to her subjects.
Sometimes she would even sip from a flask they passed, but I stayed away from all that.
I just knew my mama would sniff that out.
All the cigarette smoke made me skittish enough, as did that other Black kid who worked there.
“My manager says y’all need to go home,” he would say when he came to take out the trash, in his rubber apron and Taco Bell visor.
And though he’d be shouting in the skaters’ direction, shaking his head at their aggrieved yo-yo-yo!
’s, I remember the edges of my ears going hot. As if he were speaking directly to me.
“But what do y’all do ?” Mama asked me one Saturday night, when I slid in the house on the edge of my curfew. Mama was always, always waiting up. Peering out the blinds in her robe and her curlers, the Saturn’s headlights catching her frown.
“Nothing, really,” I said, shrugging, “because there’s really nothing to do around here.”
“Well, who was that in your friend’s back seat?”
“Just Kelly’s cousin,” I said, because lying was easier than trying to explain we were giving a ride to some white boy too drunk off Zima to get himself home.
And I’d thought it was fine, but later that week, on the other side of my bedroom wall, I could overhear Mama and Daddy talking.
Sometimes on these long nights they worried over money; occasionally they worried about Omari, how at such a young age he was nearly as tall as Daddy, ripe for the world to misinterpret him.
But now, for the first time, my parents discussed me. My associations, as Mama called them.
“Seems to me she’s doing fine,” I overheard Daddy say. “Her grades are good.”
“That girl got my baby smelling like a nightclub. And you should have seen this child who climbed out the back the other night. Looking like don’t nobody love him.”
“Then what do you suggest we do?”
“Maybe we should join a church.”
Daddy laughed.
“ Or make her go to an HBCU,” Mama said.
“By the time she’s college age, Deb, you can’t make the girl do whatever you want.
” For a long while Daddy was quiet, and I thought he’d dropped off to sleep.
My heart, riled by this talk of my future, began to quiet too.
Then he said, “But I don’t see what a campus visit could hurt,” and I lay awake the rest of the night—our New York escape, it seemed, slipping away.
To this day I tease Mama about that year, and how she must’ve thought she was slick.
How she suddenly “discovered” a recruiting event at Florida A&M University.
Daddy would stay home with Omari, she said, but at the start of May, Mama would chaperone me to the campus, halfway through the panhandle but just two and a half hours’ drive from our house, so that we could spend one special weekend with other college-bound high schoolers and their parents.
“And you’ll get to stay in a dorm!” Mama said, as if that would be the most exciting thing.
“But what is the point ?” I asked her, in a panic. “You know NYU is my number-one choice! I’m already working on the application!”
“What you need to do is explore your options,” Daddy chimed in from his recliner. His expression demanding Indulge your mother.
“And FAMU is a wonderful place to start,” Mama said. “You might as well. It’s practically right next door.”
Exactly! I thought, but the fix was in.
The appointed weekend, Mama dragged me to the welcome program twenty minutes early, then dithered for ten over where we should sit.
The auditorium was strewn with orange and green bunting, and from our vantage point at orchestra left, projections of the rattlesnake baring its fangs hissed at us sideways from everywhere.
Parents strolled in smiling and nodding at each other, as if they were privy to some secret intel, but a lot of us kids, I’d learn later, were petrified.
I’d felt so defiant that morning, choosing an outfit I’d wear on any other Saturday with Kelly Traynor—my daisy-studded babydoll dress, my oxblood pleather Mary Janes—but glancing at the other students around me, these kids with whom I was meant to share an innate bond, I felt those shields beginning to falter.
“Sit up, ” Mama fussed, and knocked my arms away from where I’d crossed them over my stomach.