TJ wore satisfaction on his face like good lotion, and Jasmine wore confusion on hers like she’d been slapped with a gluey palm.
“Wrong,” she clapped back.
“You ain’t gotta believe me,” TJ said, holding the door for Jasmine as they finally made it out of the building.
“Oh, I don’t.”
“You don’t have to,” TJ repeated. “But that don’t mean it ain’t true. See, no matter what you think I be doing in school, I really be learning. And seriously, I need to start teaching because while all these so-called scientists and teachers like Mr. Fantana be busy trying to figure out if aliens are real, I’ve already figured out that boogers are like… the babiest form of babies!”
This made Jasmine spit air. See, even though TJ was ridiculous and annoying and sometimes gross, she appreciated the fact that he always made her laugh whether she wanted to or not. Whether he was trying to or not. He was always there to chip some of the hard off. Tear at the toughness Jasmine had built up over the school year.
It had been a rough one for her.
It started with her parents separating and her father moving out. There was no drama around it. No fighting. Nothing ugly. Nothing like the movies. At least not that she knew of. Just a really uncomfortable conversation at the kitchen table with her folks looking at her like she was an exotic fish in a sandwich bag, darting back and forth, while she squirmed in her seat as if her skin were too tight for her body.
“We love you very much.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Sometimes relationships change.”
“Sometimes people are better apart.”
“None of this is your fault.”
“Your father and I love you very much.”
“Your mother and I love you very much.”
Actually, that part was just like the movies. Especially the ones about girls her age. The kitchen-table conference. The follow-up knock-knock on the bedroom door. The kid cussing at the dad. The mom saying, “Language!” The weekend visits. The awkwardness of both parents asking if everything is all right,
over and over and over and over and over and over again.
And that was just the first quarter. That was before she had her worst attack. And not an attack by someone else. She ain’t get jumped or nothing. Instead her body attacked itself. Jasmine had a blood disease since birth—sickle cell anemia—which can affect almost every part of the body. Organs, joints, even vision. But for the most part it hadn’t given Jasmine any real problems. A little pain sometimes, but nothing too bad until this year when she went into full-on crisis and her body became a blaze. At least that’s what it felt like. Her hands and feet swelled like plastic gloves full of water, heavy and tight, ready to burst. Her muscles felt like they’d become wood and she imagined her bones were splintering and growing bones of their own.
Jasmine was out sick for a month. Her locker unopened. The lock, unturned.
Her mom and dad, together and apart, weirdly hovering over her hospital bed like aliens from movies even cornier than teenage family dramas. Her parents’ coldness thawed by the one and only TJ, who would show up, crack some jokes, break some ice, and leave some empty potato chip bags next to Jasmine’s bed to add to the thirty he’d left in her locker. Friendship flags.
And when Jasmine finally returned to Latimer Middle School two days ago, after being jumped with questions from classmates who’d almost never spoken to her before she got sick—people who looked at her sideways for being so close to TJ because “boys and girls can’t just be friends”—Jasmine (and the guidance counselor, Ms. Lane) had to figure out how she was going to catch up on her work. Couldn’t do it while she was laid up because she could barely move. It hurt to hold a pen. Hurt to turn a page. Which was how she knew she wasn’t a booger. Couldn’t have been a booger. She wasn’t gooey enough.
* * *
Maybe all boys are boogers. Always acting like rocks when really y’all just blobs of dusty water,” Jasmine joked as she and TJ crossed at the light, the crosswalk like a bridge leading them over the tar-water, from school to neighborhood. They turned down Portal Avenue, a route they’d taken hundreds of times. A route TJ had been forced to take alone for the last month. And even though Jasmine had been at school yesterday, her mother had been too nervous to let her walk on her first day back. So this was their first day walking home together again. “But not me,” she continued. “I mean, come on, boogers get wiped away, get blown out.”
“Okay, so if you ain’t no booger, then what are you?” TJ asked.
Jasmine shrugged. “Um… a girl? I’m me.”
“Come on, Jasmine. Work with me here.” Now TJ was spreading his arms. Talked with his body like an old street hustler trying to convince people that stolen goods are a steal. “If you ain’t no booger, but you had to be something else, what would you be?”
Jasmine thought about it as they turned left down Marston, a street lined with houses that her mother always said had been around for a long time. An old neighborhood, she’d ramble whenever they drove through newer, seemingly nicer communities, where every house looked like the last house, like a choir of homes dressed in the same robes, turned the same way, singing the same melody in the same key, which makes for a boring, boring song. But Marston Street was lined with a little bit of everything, from small brick to fancy vinyl. From bay windows to Colonial style. From ramblers all on one level to three stories. A fence here and there, a gate there and here. Grass. Gravel. Blacktop. Pavement. Everything old enough to look lived in. To look tried on. Old enough to be warm and worn by a generation or two. Maybe even three.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I mean, what was that thing Mr. Fantana was talking about in class today? The thing he pulled up the picture of? I mean, it kinda looked like a booger.”
“You talking about that ugly slug-looking thing? What he call it… a space bear?”
“Yeah,” she started, then stopped. “Hold up.… First of all, I ain’t no ugly thing. Just so we clear. But I’m that. A water bear.” Jasmine nodded.
“Yeah, water bear,” TJ said, chuckling. “That thing got like eight legs and it got them long nails like my old mother. And that weird mouth… like my old mother—” TJ poked his lips out, then pulled them in, then poked them out and pulled them in again as if he were chewing on a giant piece of bubble gum. “That thing would be super scary—like my old mother—if it wasn’t so teeny-tiny, which definitely ain’t like my old mother. At. All.”
“Ms. Macy not scary, boy.”
“Ms. Macy ain’t my old mother. She my new mother. And my mother mother I don’t really know like that.”
“Right… right.” Jasmine tried to keep all the mothers organized in her head. A different equation on a different invisible board.
“But my old mother…” TJ let the thought trail off, shuddering like something shot through his body. Just for a moment. A bad memory, maybe. “Anyway, why would you want to be that thing? The water bear or whatever. Can’t nobody even see it. At least we can see boogers.”