“How is your mom, by the way?” Jillian asked Josh. “I haven’t seen Shelly in…gosh, I don’t know how long. Is she still an awesome dancer?”
Nathan jumped in mischievously. “She never was as good a dancer as you, Jillian.”
“Ha!” They shared a fond look. My aunt laughed and shook her head. “Nathan used to run after me back in the days when he thought I was straight,” she confided to me across the table in an outrageously loud whisper, much to the Cute Boy’s mortification and the other adults’ amusement. Good, I thought, watching him blush. At least I’m not the only one who has to suffer through this ordeal of Death by Shame.
“Can you blame me?” Nathan asked, fake leering at Jillian. “Look at you. What’s not to love? Besides, you never told me you were gay back then.”
Jillian laughed again. “I never told anyone I was gay back then. Coming out was a process. Besides, Shelly was so much more into you.”
“Good thing I married her,” Nathan quipped. “Though God knows that didn’t go how we planned.”
His joke fell flat. A short, uncomfortable silence fell over the table. I guessed Nathan and Shelly had had a rough divorce. The fact that she’d moved to another country afterward was probably a giant clue.
“How do you like Edmonton?” Julie asked Josh, changing the subject.
Before he could say anything, Nathan answered for him while looking squarely at me. “Biracial kids like Joshua have a hard time living in largely white communities like Edmonton.” He sounded like he’d read that in a manual. I nodded, choking down a dry tortilla chip I hastily grabbed from the basket in front of me so I wouldn’t have to respond.
I personally thought Edmonton was as homogenous as you wanted it to be. I saw plenty of black and brown people in the city when I walked around.
Julie seemed to agree with my thought. “Come on, Nathan. I think you can safely call Edmonton multicultural. Even right here in this restaurant, there is diversity: I was born in Canada but I’m South Asian, Indian to be specific. And Jillian and her niece are black, from Trinidad. The waiter is Indigenous. The hostess is Latin American. And at least two of us at this table are gay, a minority in itself—don’t you think that counts as diversity?”
Nathan hemmed and hawed while he tried to figure out how to reply. I could tell he and Bill were work partners, not romantic partners, from the way they talked to one another. For some reason Nathan hadn’t hung out with Jillian and Julie for a really long time. As Nathan kept talking, I began to guess why. “Yes, yes, I guess Edmonton has those people….” He waved his hand in a vague, dismissive gesture. I presumed by “those people” he meant gay people, black people, Caribbean people, Asian people, Native Canadians…pretty much anyone who wasn’t a straight white man. I wasn’t crazy, because even Bill began to look at him with a frown. “Yes, there’s diversity. But compared to New York? To Toronto, eh? Those people still aren’t the ones in power. Look at Edmonton’s City Council. Hardly any of those people there.”
There was something in his tone that made me ashamed of my skin. It made me feel insignificant, even though he was saying words that should have been inclusive. Instead, I felt invisible. I wondered what he called black people when his son and other people of color weren’t around. Josh just sat there with his face turning redder and redder; soon he was the same shade as his freckles.
I didn’t say anything. I toyed with my phone, spinning it around and around on the table. The food arrived in record time and I instantly regretted my order when I saw how much sauce there was on the dish. While the adults kept their conversation up, I scraped off the sticky brown goop and cut up my chicken. I dipped the slivers of meat cautiously into the sauce and ate them one at a time. Or tried to. I had never been so hungry but so completely incapable of eating. My anxiety made my mouth arid. Everything took forever to chew, ending up in an pasty, tasteless lump at the back of my tongue. I had to force myself to swallow with a gulp. It was noisy. My ears burned in mortification. There was a fiery ball where my stomach should have been.
But it wasn’t all bad. Even though eighty percent of me was freaking out, there was a good twenty percent left. That part of me was focused entirely on Josh. I heard him breathing. I smelled his cologne; it was nice and reminded me of a park or something sunny and fresh. We had plenty of space between us but somehow, I could feel how warm he was from all the way in my seat.
Josh and I kept sneaking peeks at each other when we thought the other wasn’t looking, a fact that wasn’t lost on Nathan, who thought it was a good idea to draw attention to our glances.
“These two can’t keep their eyes off each other, Jill,” he chortled.
I thought the restaurant floor should open right up and swallow me whole, but it didn’t and I was stuck there, sitting next to the Cute Boy and feeling sicker and sicker. The lumpy food and Nathan’s offhand comment stuck in my throat. I started to sweat, which made everything worse because now I was feeling not just badly dressed, but damp, too. As soon as I could, I excused myself and dashed to the bathroom. For a while I leaned my wet forehead against the large, cold mirror, trying to collect myself, trying to ketch mehself, as Trinis would say. I stood back. The mirror was surrounded by tiny sombreros and maracas and chili peppers. The décor here was super cheesy, and at another time I might have laughed about it with Akilah, but it didn’t matter to me now. All I felt was my deep shame, and the awful pain in the center of my belly. Looking at myself, all I could see was a skinny, ugly girl in garish, mismatched clothes that didn’t fit.
I took ten deep breaths, as Dr. Khan had taught me in our first session when I described what a panic attack felt like. He’d said the breathing should calm me down, but it didn’t, not now. I reminded myself that I was in a public restroom and it was no place for a meltdown. I kept repeating in my head, trying to convince myself, I will not scream, I will not scream, I will not scream. Somebody was trying to come in, pushing against the door, so I went into one of the three cubicles to hide. Locked in, I went through the mantra again. I will not scream, I will not scream, I will not scream.
I reached a shaky hand into my pocket for my phone, but it wasn’t there. I must have left it on the table when I fled.
I will not scream, I will not scream.
Nope.
I screamed. I stuffed my fist in my mouth and I screamed and screamed again. It was a little scream, but it burst the dam and I started to cry. I tried my best to muffle the huge, ugly gulps and gasps, pressing my face into my hands to hold in the noise, my tears, and the trailing clear snat that dripped from my nostrils. When the woman in the stall next to mine asked very timidly, “Are you okay in there?” I quickly got my act together and ceased crying and stopped my hands from shaking and generally tried to sound normal.