& North Carolina manners.
“I don’t know, Dre.
Anything is possi—”
I stop myself midway.
It feels like such a lie.
Nothing & no one feels possible anymore.
I cannot see her nodding.
But I know that she is.
I know that tears are streaming
down her clay-brown cheeks.
She tucks her long legs through
the window & folds herself onto the floor,
rests her head against my knee
& hugs my legs.
“I’m here, Yaya. I’m here.”
For hours we sit. Just like that.
Dre is originally from Raleigh.
& although she’s lived in New York
for a long time, every now & then
her accent will switch up.
Especially when she’s upset
or hurting or trying to be strong.
When New Yorkers are mad?
Our words take on an edge,
we speed talk like relay racers
struggling to pass the baton to the next snide phrase.
But Dre, when she’s upset, her words slow down,
& she becomes even more polite, & I know then
she is Dr. Johnson’s child through & through.
Dr. Johnson takes on that same precise & calm manner,
her words an unrolling ribbon that you aren’t sure
you’ll see the end of.
When Dr. Johnson is upset, her hands fold
in front of her stomach, & her head cocks to the side
as she lectures us on why we should have finished
our homework sooner, or why a certain movie or social-media clip
wasn’t actually as funny as we thought
if we put it in a larger context.
Mr. Johnson, or should I say, Senior Master Sergeant Johnson,
is in the Air Force. I’ve only met him a handful of times,
& he didn’t talk enough for me to evaluate how quick or slow,
how calm or angry the pacing of his speech was.
But Dre speaks to me slowly. Like I’ve seen her
whisper to a drooping plant. Believing that her own breath
can unfurl a dying leaf. Can sing it back to health.
Can unwilt the stalk.
The summer before seventh grade,
Dre grew tall. When extended completely,
her legs stretched beyond the bars
of the fire escape & hung over the edge
like Jordan-clad pigeon perches.
Dre wants to study speech therapy in college,
but I’ve always thought she should do agriculture.
I’ve never seen anyone make as much grow
in a small pot on a fire escape as I’ve seen
Dre coax small seeds to bud & flower here.
She has a railing planter where she grows okra;
on our side of the fire escape, which gets better light,
she’s planted tomatoes. One time she planted
these little peppers that came out green & spicy.
Although the landlord has sent notices
that her fire-escape nursery is a fire hazard,
Dre just figures out another way to stack her plants,
or hang them on the railing, or hide them in plain sight,
so she can blossom. Even when the pigeons pick at her
seedlings, or squirrels munch on fresh shoots,
Dre just laughs & puts her black hands back in the soil:
decides to grow us something good.
Papi never saw what Dre
& I were to each other. At least,
he never mentioned it.
Ma is more watchful.
& it’s not that Ma did not like
that I liked Dre. It’s that she understood
I wanted no big deal to be made.
There is an artist my mother loved,
Juan Gabriel, who was once asked
in an interview if he was gay.
His reply: What’s understood need not be said.
I remember how Mami’s eyes
fluttered to me
like a bee on a flower
acknowledging the pollen is sweet.
I have never had to tell
Mami I like girls.
She knew. & she knew that Dre was special.
Last year, for Valentine’s Day, before I left for school,
Mami handed me an envelope
with a twenty-dollar bill inside,
stirring a pot of something fragrant
while she said, “Pa que le compre algo nice a Andreita.”
With her, I did not have to pretend
my best friend was just a friend.
The girl next door being the girl for you
is the kind of trope my English teacher
would have us write essays about in class.
But that’s how it happened for Dre & me.
One day we were best friends,
& the next day we were best friends
who stared at each other’s mouths
when we shared lip gloss.
I don’t think I understood the word
W O N D E R
until the day our tongues touched
& we both wanted
to have them touch again. This girl
felt about me how I felt about her.
The day we first kissed,
I walked into my parents’ bedroom
& offered thanks to the little porcelain saint
Papi kept on his armoire:
thank you, thank you.
I whispered to everything that listened.
The only thing about Dre
that gets on my nerves
is that Dre is sometimes
too good. She has a scale
for doing what’s right
that always balances out
nice & evenly for her.
Which is why she was
so disappointed that I
didn’t “come out” in
the way she wanted me to.
She said we shouldn’t hide
what we are to each other.
& I told her I wasn’t hiding,
I just wasn’t making
a loudspeaker announcement
to my parents or anyone.
People who know me, know.
Dre’s quirks come out
in other ways too.
Sometimes Dre wants me
to have a clear opinion
on plastic straws, or
water rights, or my feelings
about Papi, & she doesn’t
always see I need time
to watch the board,
to come to terms with
the possibilities.
I’m telling you about my skin,
& my home, & mostly about Dre,
because it’s easier than telling you
Papiisdead.
If I say those words,
if I snap apart the air with them,
whatever is binding me together
will split too.
The house phone has been ringing
off the hook all day.
Reporters from American
& Latin American channels
& newspapers & magazines
& podcasts & websites.
Family members
from the Bronx & DR.
The neighborhood association,
which invites us to grief counseling,
special sessions that will be
held at the church.
The phone rings & rings,
& Mami’s voice,
raw as unprocessed sugar,
responds & responds
but does not answer
where we’ll go from here.
Here is a thing that no one knows,
& probably wouldn’t believe if I told them.