Chapter Forty-Two
I close my eyes and lift my face to the sky, enjoying the sun’s warmth. It’s the first time in months that I’ve felt the sun on my skin. Winter was brutal. Esosa complained every single day. I, on the other hand, have a greater appreciation for all the seasons. At first, I was certain nothing could beat summer, and then fall came. The colors and ambiance made it a real contender for my favorite. During winter, I stared out of windows a lot, always watching snow fall or admiring the way layers of it covered rooftops and tree branches. It was absolutely picturesque. But now it’s spring, the first day of April, and my new favorite thing is helping Auntie Sara in the garden, planting, and then watching the gradual process of flowers bloom.
Metaphorically, the cycle of the seasons is reminiscent of my life in the past year.
Summer: my father is alive, and my family is whole and happy.
Fall: my father gets diagnosed and we watch him slowly grow ill, weaker and weaker every day.
Winter: he dies and we mourn.
Spring: there’s hope.
Just last week, my mom learned she passed the USMLE Step 1. It took her three tries, but she did it. She still has a long way to go before she can practice medicine in America. There are a few more tests and a residency program, but she’s determined. Deciding to stay in America even though things weren’t perfect was hard. She did it for me and Esosa, so we could have a future with the endless possibilities our father hoped for. Passing her exam gave her a future too. She said for the first time since we immigrated, she felt grounded in America.
“Hey,” Davi says, shuffling along the bleachers until we’re side by side, our knees touching. “Are you ready?”
I look at my phone and then at his. My heart thumps—brisk and hard, like it fully intends to break free. Our futures are literally in our hands. With a few taps, we’ll see if we got accepted into our dream colleges. I cringe at the thought of rejection.
“Hey.” Davi takes my clammy hand. “It’s going to be okay. No matter what happens, we’ll get through it.”
“Okay.” I breathe deeply and look at the track field, where a gym class is in progress. At the beginning of the school year, we sat in this exact spot, exchanging home-cooked meals and talking about the teen movies I watched. It seems like so much has happened since then. It took some convincing from Auntie Sara, the certified advocate for teenagers living their best life, for Mom to agree to meet Davi. The whole family gathered for dinner in January, the week of my eighteenth birthday, and there was a formal introduction. Davi came with flowers, a box of chocolates, and a plate of his grandmother’s p?o de queijo. Throughout dinner, he talked about his plans to attend Columbia University and study political science. He made a great first impression.
Mom has significantly warmed up to him. Though she refuses to acknowledge he’s my boyfriend. She calls him my friend. And sometimes, my little friend. Regardless, she knows Davi and I are serious, as serious as two teenagers can be when their future is uncertain. Once we graduate and summer ends, we’ll go to our respective colleges. I’ll miss the routine we’ve established—sitting side by side during class, having lunch together, driving home together. But if Davi gets into Columbia and I get into Juilliard, we’ll only be a short subway ride from each other. We could establish a new routine. My fingers are crossed.
I think back to my Juilliard audition in early January. Ara and her mom helped me prepare for it. I think Ara was happy to introduce her mom to someone who actually wants a Broadway career, and her mom was more than happy to be a mentor. With their guidance, I prepared the song “She Used to Be Mine” from the musical Waitress. It’s a big, emotional song, and I did my absolute best. And now, I’m hoping for the best.
“Do you want to do it together, or one at a time?” Davi asks.
“Together,” I answer. “Definitely together.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
We look down at our phones, and our fingers work against the screens.
A moment of silence passes, then Davi and I look at each other.
“So?” he asks. “Did you…”
I sigh and press my eyes closed. Tears are on the verge of falling, but I hold them back. “Yeah. I got in.” I can’t celebrate. Not yet. “What about you?”
He shows me his phone screen. “Accepted.”
A sigh of relief rushes out of me, and then immediately after, I laugh. “Oh my God!”
Davi and I hold each other, our grip tight.
“This is wild,” he says.
“It’s incredible.”
When we pull apart, we look at each other, and that’s when the tears I’ve been holding in fall. Suddenly, I think back to the first rule I broke.
Rule #1: Avoid interacting with or befriending anyone who is popular.
Breaking that one rule led to me breaking more—four, to be exact.
Rule #2: Control your heart and your hormones. No crushes. And absolutely no boyfriends.
Rule #3: Don’t do anything to draw attention to yourself. Keep a low profile.
Rule #4: Don’t make any enemies or start a rivalry.
Rule #5: In the unfortunate event that you make an enemy, try by all means to stay away from them.
Even with my effort and determination, I broke multiple rules—the ones I set for myself and also the ones my mom set for me. But maybe they were the right rules to break, necessary acts of rebellion to get me to where I am now. My father, aware of how structured and obedient I was, used to give me one piece of advice repeatedly. The day before school began, while writing my list of high school dos and don’ts, I wrote his advice as a rule.
Rule #9: Don’t be afraid to break the right rules.?
I know he would be proud of me, proud to see his daughter divert off the straight and narrow path paved with practicality and obligation to create her own way.
I’m proud of myself too. As there isn’t an exact blueprint to navigating high school, there isn’t a blueprint to surviving loss. Grief can be consuming. It can dig a hole inside a person, uprooting hope and joy until all that’s left is a void. Sometimes the void seems bottomless, like nothing can ever fill it. But that isn’t true. It fills slowly, like droplets of water falling into a bucket. It takes time. Every day, I fill the void inside me with moments with Davi, moments when I sing on a stage or in the choir, moments when Esosa and I laugh so hard our stomachs hurt, moments when my mom and I go on long walks and just talk, moments with my friends.
I’m only eighteen. I will live a big life—meet interesting people, have wonderful experiences, do incredible things, and have my own family one day—and that hole, that void, will keep filling up with all the beauty in my life.
“Okay,” Davi shouts. “Let’s celebrate! With some food.” He opens his backpack and pulls out a container. “I’ve got coxinhas and brigadeiros. My mom made them.”
“Oh. Hand it over.” I reach out to take the container, but he pulls away.
“Not so fast. You know how this works.” He nods at my bag on the bleacher. “Show me what you’ve got.”
“Fine.” I laugh while unzipping my bag. “I’ve got jollof rice and suya.”
“Ahh. All right. Now you’re talking.” The grin on his face is wide.
As we exchange containers, I wonder about the alternative to the future we now have.
“What if we hadn’t gotten in?” Those words leave a bad taste in my mouth.
“Well…” He thinks for a moment, then shakes his head. “Then that would have really sucked, and this would have been comfort food.”
“I prefer celebratory food.”
“Same.”
We toast with our cans of cherry Coke and eat while watching the gym class on the field.
“Hey,” Davi says. “You never told me what your favorite teen movie is.”
I chew and swallow a piece of coxinha, then clear my throat. “I actually don’t know. I loved a lot of them—Sugar Spice, Sierra Burgess Is a Loser, She’s All That. But a favorite?” I think, then shrug. “I don’t know.”
“Come on. You’ve watched all those movies and don’t have a favorite?” He arches an eyebrow and stares pointedly at me.
“Well, I didn’t really think about it until now. But yeah.” I nod slowly as an answer comes to me. “I do have a favorite.”
“Okay. Which one?”
“This one.” The one when I—a dark-skinned girl with box braids and a non-American accent—am the star, alongside a boy with hazel-green eyes and a golden-brown complexion. “This, us, is my favorite teen movie.”
Davi smiles while nodding. “Yeah.” He throws an arm around my shoulders and draws me into his side. “This is my favorite one too.”
It’s a perfect spring day in Bellwood. Outside Bellwood High, students run around a track field, while a coach urges them to move faster by blowing a whistle. I’m sitting on the bleachers with my boyfriend. We’re having lunch. His arm is around me. I’m happy. Really happy.
I take this movie-perfect moment and store it in my mind, along with other wonderful memories I’ve made over the last few months. And then mentally, I cross out the last rule on my list.
Rule #10: Try your best to make some good memories.
I’ve made many.