“Ki-ki, we’re about to eat dinner. What should I wear?” I groaned in frustration.
“Since when do you care what you wear?” she answered, chuckling. We both knew I was rather offhand about my appearance.
“We’re going out to dinner,” I said with a moan.
“Again? Your aunty rich or what?” Akilah asked seriously.
“Nah. Food over here so cheap, Ki-ki,” I said incredulously. “If you see the fridge! Packed with food. I’ll show you. Next time. Now, can you please help me figure out what to put on?” The question came out as a wail. “All I ever wear is jeans and a T-shirt. Jillian does it and it looks cool. I do it and I look like a hobo. I feel my Aunty Julie would appreciate my trying on something different for a change. Like a dress or something.”
“I haven’t seen you in a dress since First Communion,” Akilah teased. “Besides, you look good in jeans and a T-shirt. Make that booty pop,” she said. I looked at her wide grin on the screen, trying to read whether she was being serious or not.
“Leave my booty out of it,” I murmured.
“What kind of Trinidadian woman are you, if you don’t care about your butt?” Now she was laughing outright. “We sing songs about it, even! ‘Sugar bum, sugar bum-bum,’ ” she sang.
The lyrics to a famous calypso didn’t impress me. “Blah, blah, blah,” I answered. Out of the blue, I thought of the pig in the party hat at the bus station. I asked her, “Ki-ki? Do you think I’m pretty?”
She was quiet for a long moment. “I’ve told you. Yeah, sometimes.”
“Wow, that’s a ringing endorsement.” My shoulders slumped, and my disappointment must have been clear from my tone.
“No, that’s not what I mean,” she said. “You have a really pretty face and a nice figure, but you hide yourself away in baggy, shapeless clothes like you’re afraid someone will notice you’re beautiful. That’s why I said ‘sometimes.’ What I should have said is you’re always pretty but sometimes you don’t let it show. It’s like you’re scared of people finding you attractive.”
“Meh, shut up.” I scowled but I knew she was right. I had major hang-ups about the way I looked. “You know that every Trinidadian boy only wants a red-skinned girlfriend with long, curly hair and a big butt. Brown-skinned girls are okay, but their lips and noses can’t be too African—”
“Boys are dumb.”
“Yeah, but I’m too dark, my hair is too picky, and worst of all, my butt is flat! I’ll never get a boyfriend,” I bawled in mock agony.
“Papa! I never knew you wanted a boyfriend,” Akilah teased. “You always have your head stuck in a book. Boys at your school don’t even know you exist.”
A truthful girl, Akilah. Which was neither here nor there at the moment; the point was that she went to an all-girls school, so how would she know what anyone at my coed institution thought of me? “What would a convent girl like you know about boys at my school, anyway?” I grumbled, picking at an old scab. It still killed me that Akilah—who always aced her exams—had been placed in the very prestigious school I had dreamed of attending, while I had been placed in an ordinary one. All because of that one exam.
“I saw that girl we went to primary school with, the one who’s in your class—what’s her name? Britney? She was at the mall. You might think nobody talks your business but she said your whole school is full of rumors about why you left so suddenly before the end of the school year. The talk is that you got pregnant and your mother sent you away—except that nobody can figure out who the baby daddy was that knocked you up. They think you have never been alone with a boy in your life.”
“Who’s this ‘they’ and why do ‘they’ maco so much? I had an immaculate conception, then?” I giggled, but I was nauseated. Not for blasphemy; I went to church with my mom, yeah, but I was not at all religious. Of course, “they,” whoever they were, were right. I never had been alone with a boy. To be honest, I wouldn’t have known what to do if someone found me interesting. And the thought that anybody was talking about me made me a little sick. I much preferred to be invisible. But I put those thoughts behind me. “Ki-ki, back to my IRL problems. What am I going to wear?”
“All right,” she said, flexing her arms and swinging her fists like a boxer warming up for a fight. “What do we have to choose from?”
I panned the camera to show the contents of the small closet lit by a dim overhead bulb. Bright red plaid flannel caught my eye. “What about this?” I pulled out the long-sleeved shirt and put it on to show Akilah.
“With what?”
“Dunno.”
She pursed her lips and tapped them with her index finger thoughtfully. “I know. What about that little green thing you showed me the other day?”
“With the crossbones on it? Okay. With which jeans?” I’d already pulled out three different washes and tossed them on the bed. I rummaged in the dresser drawer where I kept my T-shirts and selected the baggy crop top she’d recommended. I put it next to the black, the indigo, and the faded blue. “Yasssss,” Akilah squealed.
“Boyfriend jeans for the win!” I shouted giddily. I could not forget that I was getting dressed to go shopping and to dinner, both of which would make my anxiety shoot through the roof. Yet I felt so happy in that moment. My best friend and I were laughing together and planning outfits like normal girls. Aunty Jillian and Aunty Julie were the coolest foster parents in the world. It was just a brief excursion. What could go wrong?
journal session 2
“Write about your mom,” he said. “It will help,” he said.
If my mom and I were in a Facebook relationship our status would be “It’s Complicated.” My mom calls regularly. That is both a good thing and a bad thing.
I know it might not sound like it, but I love my mom. She gave me life and I owe her my eyes and my good cheekbones and my long legs and my razor-sharp wit and my love of reading. We have the same skin color, and my hair is like hers—or would have been if she didn’t straighten it with chemicals every two months. But despite our similarities, I’ve always been a huge disappointment to her. I looked into her eyes and saw the shadowed hopes that one day I’d turn into the kind of girl she wanted: a nice, sweet, kind girl who wears dresses constantly and goes to parties and has lots of friends and went to a prestigious school and did well in all the suitable subjects. What she ended up with was me. I knew that every time she looked at me, she saw all the things I could have been but—as she put it—I chose not to be. I was a walking failure to her.