“But isn’t the Bible all about love?” I interject, startling myself. “You know, basically?”
We’ve all read the Bible several times during our years at school, memorized huge chunks of it, acted it out, analyzed it. And this is what I really believe about the best parts of that book: that it’s a book about love.
(I’m such a nerd that once, sitting with my dad at a black barbershop filled with old black men, I corrected a “biblical scholar,” who was getting a haircut, on a Scripture citation. I was like thirteen.)
“Yeah. She’s right,” Meg says evenly. “I mean, Jesus was friends with prostitutes.” She smiles my way, and I get a jolt of confidence.
“Nowadays he would have been pretty radical, actually, if you think about it,” I blurt, sitting up. “He probably would have voted Democrat!”
“Um, I don’t think so,” Kelly shoots flatly, and purses her lips. Last year in history, I was outed as our class’s only Democrat, because “most black people are,” according to Mr. K. (Is that true? I have no freaking idea, but it sounds right.) Still, why the hell did I even go there?
James steps back onto the patio, humming “Eleanor Rigby.”
“What are we talking about?”
Meg smirks. “Well, Morgan here was just providing the blasphemous but highly probable theory that—” (My heart stumbles around on its knees.)
“We were just changing the subject,” Kelly says quickly. She turns to me, and her face softens. It looks like pity. Like Sarah McLachlan in those commercials about orphaned puppies.
“No offense, Morgan. I totally respect that your walk with the Lord is different from mine. Plus, I know you’re just kidding.”
“Totally.”
Disappear, I think. Blend in, disappear, disappear, disappear.
Kelly goes on about youth group. Meg sings that Kelly only wants to go to see her booooyfriend, Adam. Kelly blushes and is like, “Nuh-uh!”
I check the time on my phone (as I have been doing every four minutes or so since I got here, waiting for a moment to easily exit), and I’m so relieved it’s been over an hour.
I “suddenly remember dinner at my aunt’s house” and say a lightning round of goodbyes. It isn’t smooth: I do that thing where you feel super awkward so you try to flee from the situation but that makes it more awkward. All I can do is fumble my way out of the house and across the lawn, speed-walk down the street to my car.
Driving home, listening to Ella Fitzgerald & Billie Holiday at Newport, I’m so enraged with myself that I’m beyond tears. Who can’t even handle a simple tea party? What is my problem? (Why can’t I blend in with the manicured bushes that line every sidewalk, the Susans grinning as they jog? Will it always feel like this—carrying a secret shame, leaving parties early to cry?)
Cell phone towers blur past my side-view mirrors, dressed up as pine trees among the palms. I grit my teeth listening to Billie’s “Lady Sings the Blues.” I think I feel my car’s engine stall as I take the first left into our gated community.
Maybe I was always supposed to suffer my episodes and “fits.” Maybe the heaviness is a test I’m meant to endure, like Job, the actual saddest character in the entire Bible. God just kept making things shitty for poor Job and telling him that it was worth it, that his suffering was good and holy, that it would bring him happiness in the end. As if a vague promise of future relief is any consolation for complete torment.
Then something mysterious happens.
After I pull into the driveway, I see what I’ve done. Feathers are backlit in the evening dark by headlights, casting shadows of fluttering brownish wisps. I shriek, leap out of the driver’s seat, and peer around to the bumper. A carcass. Bloodied, smashed into the grille. Even in its disfigurement, how it’s pasted to the front of the car like gum on the bottom of a shoe, I recognize what kind of bird it is.
In eighth-grade Creation Science, we spent an inordinate amount of time deeply studying seven species of birds common to our area. This is a mourning dove, a sad-looking species with a dull sandbox-brown color and a weirdly long neck. I’ve always been struck by the name.
What is it trying to tell me?
Maybe I’m being paranoid. Maybe Bible stories and chemical imbalance have finally rendered me unable to distinguish fiction from reality. But this pitiful, ruined thing is here for a reason. It reminds me of the white dove that God sent to Noah after the flood, to assure him that everything was okay, that hope and peace were on the horizon. Except, you know, the opposite.
BLACK EMO: HOW TO BE A WALKING SAD-WHITE-WOMAN-FOR-DUMMIES BY MORGAN PARKER
I don’t fit. That’s it, no big mystery, no trigger that flipped the depressive disorder switch. I’m one of a few token black kids at Vista Christian, another place I hate, because it’s like going to high school inside a church inside a PacSun. I’m basically a loner with the wrong taste in everything, the wrong dreams and fears and wardrobe staples. I couldn’t be more awkward and incorrect.
Is there a history of mental illness in your family? I mean, probably. We don’t talk about it, at least not that way. There’s the delusional cousin who brags about braiding Snoop Dogg’s hair, the uncle with all the far-fetched government conspiracy theories. These people are referred to as “kinda different” or “crazy.” No one has any kind of diagnosis.
Therapy definitely isn’t a black thing. It’s like emotional stability is the least of our worries. Part of why I’m so ashamed of my depression is that it feels bratty, uncalled-for, a privilege I haven’t earned. (“What do you have to cry about?” my parents scream when we fight, 100 percent perplexed.) Being emo is not black. At least I’m pretty sure it’s not. My parents call my music “white music.” In sixth grade, some boys in my class told me that I “act white,” and it stung more than I want to admit. (That was the last time I ate lunch with the black kids.)
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve been told I’m not really black, how many times I’ve been the only black girl at the sleepover, the only black person in the mosh pit, the only black person in the theater for The Squid and the Whale, or the only person at all who listens to Sunny Day Real Estate. I get that I’m not like black people on TV, and I don’t only listen to rap or dress like any of my cousins, but being unique and depressed doesn’t change my skin color. (Why should Modest Mouse or Noah Baumbach films or John Steinbeck be white things, belonging only to white people? Is it wrong that I love them?)
Not that I really know many black people outside of my family. There’s another black girl in my class, Stacy Johnson, but she calls herself “mixed.” She won’t even use the bulky “African American people” that our teachers gingerly pronounce. The same goes for most of the other splotches of color around school—like, if no one says “I’m black” outright, it won’t be a thing. A version of passing for kids who grew up in the nineties.