The Highest of Seven Hills by Dawnie Walton #3
The bus slows, approaching the opposite edge of the Set.
We hop off and stroll arm in arm toward the university commons, where the larger group is gathering.
A few of the kids are now wearing their T-shirts from the tote bags we got at the welcome ceremony, and on the perimeter, their parents snap discreet photos with their own phones.
In the distance, the sound of the band floats in the air—the whole reason me and my girls bothered going to the football games in the first place, dancing in the stands at halftime and then dipping, the drums still shaking our bones on our way out the gates.
They’re practicing out of season, Jossy and I have been told, for some secret engagement coming up in Paris.
Whatever hip-hop loop the horn section’s blaring now, I couldn’t say, but my baby recognizes it.
Beside me I feel her swaying, a gentle tug on my arm.
“Okay, so back to this story,” she says as she pulls me toward a trash can to throw away the dregs of her coffee.
“Bye-bye, NYU and Kelly Traynor; hello, FAMU and Jeremiah…?”
She’s waiting for me to fill in the blank. There’s nothing left to do, then, but confess.
“Jeremiah Rashad Jarvis,” I say. “Uh-huh.”
“ Ooo-ooo-ooh, ” she teases, in a sitcom singsong. Then I see it hit her, right there on the red brick. She grips my arm hard, eyes bugging out. “Wait, Dr. J. R. Jarvis? Not the dude who invited us here?”
I give her a wink that says clever girl.
“The dean of students,” I say, scanning the crowd.
And there he is to meet us, outside the caf.
Right on time and as tall as I remember, and wearing a suit with a paisley pocket square I’ll clown him for later.
He hasn’t spotted me yet. I can’t stop grinning.
“Ma!” barks Jossy, mortified.
“Didn’t I mention?” I say, then pluck at the tee that I’m wearing—a favorite amid my alumni gear, the forest green screen-printed with bright orange letters: Famuly Is Forever.
3.
By six o’clock, the sun relents. Jossy heads off with the other prospects to the Essential Theatre, for a special production of Two Trains Running, and I dash back to our hotel room in Railroad Square to freshen up before meeting Jeremiah for dinner.
I’ve packed a dress that makes me feel happy and free, in a bold yellow Viola Davis would slay.
The worst wrinkles steam out during my shower, but when I zip up the dress and study myself in the harsh bathroom light, I know there’s no hiding these thirty pounds I’ve gained.
I pin up my hair, then dab vanilla-scented oil behind each ear, on either side of my neck, at the places where I feel the thump of my pulse.
My phone vibrates; the group chat has voted. Ruby Woo it is, I text them back, but whew chile, I don’t think I can do them heels.
In the Lyft, inspecting the pedicure inside my cutest flat sandals, I replay my reunion with Jeremiah.
Why should I feel so self-conscious right now, I wonder, when both of us have visibly aged?
Grays spring out at my temples, sure, but they also salt his goatee, and the locs I helped him start freshman year are long gone.
“Hey, Mr. Clean,” I’d crowed when he’d bent down to hug me, for the first time in literal decades.
We’d swayed and laughed through it like the elders do, as Jossy made silly faces behind his back.
The car drops me in front of another admin building on campus I don’t recognize. Jeremiah, still in his suit, meets me in the lobby and hugs me again—not as long or as tight as the first time, but it’s nice enough that my eyes instinctively close. “You look great,” he says.
“Just tryna keep up with you.”
“In fact, I’d say you almost too fancy for Tallahassee, but we got…whatchamacallits now. Gastropubs!”
“But do y’all have farm-to-table, though?” I say, squinting.
He rolls his eyes and laughs. “Come check out my office?”
Inside, it’s all chrome and new-carpet smell, closed for the day and quiet except for the hum of computers and a copy machine in the middle of some complex collating job.
He drapes his suit jacket and tie across the back of his desk chair, and changes into a pair of black-and-white Vans he might’ve worn back in the day.
While he returns a few phone calls—summer-term students he’s helping push through to the fall, I gather, and who, I can tell, are lucky to have him as their champion—I look around at the photos he’s hung: There’s Jeremiah in ceremonial regalia at commencement, a group of fresh graduates tossing up peace signs around him.
Jeremiah on the cover of the alumni magazine in 2017, the year he got promoted to this job.
Jeremiah on break back in Jacksonville, grinning outside Kona between his eight-year-old sons.
Their neon-green helmets make them look like Marvin the Martian times two.
Between Jeremiah’s calls, I exclaim over the photo—how cute the twins are, how crazy it is that Kona’s still open—but mostly I’m quiet moving down the gallery wall.
My girls on the group chat will make me confess it: I’m scanning, too, for evidence of a woman, anyone who might be special to Jeremiah these days.
Finding nothing, I’m not sure if I should feel happy or sad.
But I almost gasp when I spy a shot I’ve kept too, marked at the bottom right corner with the same orange digits: 05 18 1997 .
Otherwise known as the day I left town. There’s a whole crew of us at the Tallahassee airport—Black kids crowding the gate, back in the time you could do such a thing.
In the middle Jeremiah has one arm thrown over my shoulders, and in his free hand he holds up the unauthorized culture zine I launched at FAMU sophomore year—one issue of which scored me a crack, finally, at New York, via an assistant gig at a real magazine.
I am twenty-one years old in the photo. Wonky TWA on my head, bulging backpack at my feet.
“Awww, look at baby rock star Ma!” Jossy squealed when she spied it for the first time, flipping through one of my old scrapbooks in prep for this visit.
I understand what it is that she saw: my grin and my bright, shining eyes, my friends who’ve gathered to hype me up.
But whenever I’ve allowed myself to muse over it lately, sipping wine late at night after Jossy’s gone to bed, all I see on my face is what happened the night before.
The thrill of it mixed with the melancholy…
Despite the crowd of people in it, this photo, to me, is strangely intimate.
Much too special for public display. And now I worry Jeremiah sees it differently.
That to him I was, and always will be, just the homie.
“Can you believe,” I hear him say behind me now, “that we were ever this young?”
“ Tuh. Nothing in that backpack but some clothes and a copy of Sister Outsider. ”
“But my girl Nia was ready. Everybody always knew you would get where you wanted, when the time was right.”
We stare at the photo a couple beats longer, then I catch Jeremiah glancing at his watch.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I say. My anxiety’s spiking. “Do we need to go now?”
“Actually…I was just thinking that the restaurant’s close, and we have an hour before our reservation. Up for a wander, for old times’ sake?”
I thank God I didn’t risk the heels.
We head out aimless into the dusk, same way we used to do those first two years we lived on campus.
But both of us move more gingerly now. No more skateboarding for him, Jeremiah says when I ask; his knees tend to ache with every change in the weather.
“But I made sure both my boys can shred,” he says, and I love to hear the pride in his voice.
I tell him more about Jossy, too. Her trophies in debate, her travels to tournaments around the country.
“She’s just as smart as you were, huh?”
“Smarter,” I say. “And so self-possessed. That might matter more.”
“You think we have a shot?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve been telling her she could be a real leader here. And you know how hard I ride for my school, for every way I think it prepared me. But she’s got some strong arguments, J. Valid concerns that alarm me too—first of all, this bum-ass state.”
“Don’t get me started.” Jeremiah lets loose a rueful chuckle. “But I hope you know I’d look out for her. We all would.”
“Of course I know that. But…Well. Her dad, he certainly has his own ideas about where she should go, and no problem putting them in her ear.”
“Ahhh, yes,” says Jeremiah, “the joys of co-parenting.”
“He’s got his own legacy tour lined up for next month.”
“Princeton, right?”
“Yeah. Damn Tiger stripes all up in my house…”
“That’s cool—just remember, Nia: Moms got mad sway! Didn’t yours get you over here in the first place? And you could’ve gone anywhere you wanted, just like Jocelyn.”
“I mean, I guess, but…”
“So then we make that a part of the pitch,” he says. “Think: What convinced the brilliant young you to say yes to FAM?”
“Sir,” I say, smiling, “you betta act like you know.”
“Know what?”
“That you had something to do with that.”
“Me?” Jeremiah plays shocked, but even in the dark I can see him grinning like crazy. “What I do?”
“Remember scholars’ weekend? The welcoming ceremony?”
He pops his collar, like the kind of old-school player he never was. “Ohhhh, you mean the day you first decided you was gon’ humor a nigga.”
My face burns with residual embarrassment. “Okay, okay, I deserve this roast. I had my little identity issues I had to get straight…”
“ That’s what that was? I just thought you ain’t like no Taco Bell brokeys.”
“You was rich in them Cinnamon Twists, though. Listen, if you wanted to go there instead tonight…”
“I thought you New York types only went for churros. ” He exaggerates the rolled r’s.