Absolute Brightness (7 page)

“No,” I said, because in fact I was not saying that and he was totally missing the point. “I'm saying that you can't go around looking like a big sissy or you'll get the shit beat out of you just like Winona did.”

“But it turned out okay for Winona Ryder, didn't it?”

“Look,” I said to him, lowering my voice and trying a different tack, “I don't care one way or the other if you're gay or if you're not gay. I'm just saying do you have to be so obvious about it all the time?”

“Obvious? How do you mean?”

“The shoes? The beret? The pants? I mean, just for starters.”

“But I like the way they look. They make me feel good.”

“Good?” I asked. “How can they make you feel good? You look ridiculous and everybody's laughing at you.”

He glanced down at himself—his pants, his shoes, and the parts of himself that he could see. Maybe he was trying to get an idea of how he looked from someone else's point of view. He shook his head.

“I'm just being myself. I mean, obviously.”

That was pretty much the end of our discussion. I left him sitting there and went inside the house to do something that at the time I considered important but now can't even remember. About an hour later, when Mom called up the stairs to tell us it was snowing, I looked out my bedroom window to see for myself. That's when I noticed Leonard; he was still sitting there on the trash bin, leaning back, dangling his stupid platform sneakers and singing like a girl in a high soprano voice.

“Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes,

Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes,

Silver-white winters that melt into springs—

These are a few of my favorite things.”

I couldn't believe my eyes—or my ears. And I remember thinking,
If he doesn't understand that being himself in the world is a complete and total liability, then he deserves whatever comes down the pike to bite him on the ass. The kid's an idiot. Obviously.

 

five

MY BEST FRIEND
, Electra Wheeler, had her hands around Leonard's throat and she was pressing her two big thumbs into the hollow areas on either side of his Adam's apple. His wind was cut off, which would explain why his face had gone bright red, his lips were turning blue, and his eyes were bugging out of his skull. He was gagging.

“Careful you don't kill him,” I warned from my place on the sideline.

My job was to stand next to Electra and hold her dreads behind her neck. We didn't want them to swing down in Leonard's face and distract her from the business at hand. I refused to be the one who actually did the choking. I couldn't trust myself to not go too far and accidentally murder Leonard.

Ever since school started, he had been making my life a living nightmare. Everyone knew Leonard was my cousin by marriage, and as a result random schoolmates were always approaching me to ask me what was up with him. As if I could explain. By spring break, Leonard had become famous because of the way he dressed, because of the way he walked, because of the way he talked, and because he sang show tunes in the school corridors. He just couldn't see how far outside the bounds of normal behavior he had strayed, and so he kept acting more and more outrageous. His name had even appeared in
The Trident
, our school newspaper, when the senior class jokingly nominated him for queen of the Christmas Cotillion. Everyone on the committee was hoping that he would accept the nomination, go on to be crowned, and make history at Neptune High. For weeks, the talk in the cafeteria was all about what Leonard might wear to the cotillion. Leonard, in his usual style, pretended that it wasn't happening. Christmas came and went, and just when I thought the whole thing had blown over, rumors started to circulate that Leonard's name was being put forward as a possibility for queen of the prom. When he was confronted with the news, he said he had other, more important things on his mind.

The choking game was Leonard's idea. He wanted to give it a try after he'd heard about it from several girls in his class who had recently gotten very good at it and had lived to tell the tale. I was against it from the start. But then Leonard offered Electra and me actual money to do the honors, and how could we refuse? Forty dollars could buy us each a movie with all the extras, like a combo popcorn, Twizzlers, and maybe even an order of nachos. We decided that there was no harm in providing Leonard with his idea of a good time.

Electra could have been beading a necklace or hemming a skirt; she was that into it. Her brows were furrowed, her eyes neatly focused, her mouth shut tight, her lips sucked into her mouth. Her cocoa-colored skin was flush with excitement, and I could see a natural blush blooming on both cheeks.

Some people think that black people don't blush, but that's because they probably never knew a black person or maybe they never really looked at one closely enough. If they had, they would have discovered that African Americans not only blush, but they also can get sunburned pretty badly, too.

Mom liked to embarrass me by telling a story about the first time I saw an actual black person. It was years ago, before Neptune got all mixed up racially, and folks hadn't yet moved beyond the bounds of what was considered
their
area and into what was known as
our
area. There were still little enclaves of Asian families or Hispanics or whites or blacks, each of them separated by the invisible barriers that were only understood by each respective group. This is
ours;
that is
theirs
. People pretty much stuck to their own areas for reasons that made sense only to themselves. The weird part is, the areas weren't that big; they could extend for maybe a half a block on one side of the street, and once you crossed over to the other side you could be in a whole other area, populated by a different race of human. But it wasn't as though people were being forced to live within their assigned areas; people just naturally stuck to their own.

Then in the mid-nineties it all just broke down and everyone started moving all over the place. Money became the primary factor in determining where a person chose to live. If you had the bucks to buy a big house, no sweat, you could move in and no one was going to give you a hard time or even raise an eyebrow—at least to your face. After a while, we even started to consider Neptune a progressive town because we had all these ethnic groups living smashed up against one another and pretty much everyone got along. We even forgot the fact that only ten years earlier everything had been completely different. My mother often told the story about me, not with the intention of embarrassing me but rather to make the point that the situation in Neptune had changed for the better.

As the story goes, I was about three or four years old and playing with my dolls on our front steps. A black man came walking down our street. I don't remember this, but Mom says I started yelling to her, telling her to come quick, because there was a chocolate man in front of our house. She said I was frantic with excitement.

When I first told this story to Electra, she and I were sitting on her canopied bed in her bedroom, confessing the secrets of our youth to each other. It was my turn, and I figured if I told her the chocolate man story myself instead of her hearing it later on from my mother, I might not come off seeming like a pint-size racist. As I set the scene for Electra, I was careful to include all sorts of caveats, like “What did I know? I was only three or four years old,” and “Hey, I'd never seen a black person up close and personal; what could you expect?” She listened to the whole story and then stared at me for an eternity. I thought she was going to hit me, but then, finally and very unexpectedly, she burst out laughing and fell back onto her bed. The idea that she herself could be chocolate seemed to delight her to no end. When she had pulled herself together, she held out her forearm and said, “Lick it, bitch.” We howled and then fell back onto her bed together. After that, whenever anyone showed any kind of racial prejudice or disrespect toward her and I happened to be around, she would hold out her arm to the offending party and say, “Lick it, bitch.” Eventually, all she had to do was hold out her arm and we would both understand and laugh.

“Ohmygod, ohmygod,” said Leonard, trying to catch his breath and looking all excited, like he had just seen Jesus. “That was … ohmygod, that was … wow. I'm like … wait … Okay, it's still … no, it's done. That was fabulous. You guys … you guys should totally try it.”

Electra and I looked at each other and began to laugh out loud. We didn't need to have the oxygen cut off from our brains and then restored in a sudden rush just so we could have a good time. We went in more for watching movies or doing our nails.

“Right. Like I would ever let you put your hands around my throat,” I said to Leonard. “And anyway, you wouldn't do this if you saw your face. You looked gruesome.”

“Totally,” Electra concurred. “Nobody oughta give themselves over to ugly like that 'less it's gonna save lives or get you on
Oprah
.”

Leonard was massaging his neck and examining himself in the mirror, gingerly fingering the bright-red marks that Electra had left around his throat. I wondered whether at home I would get blamed for the telltale bruises and forced to say how it had happened, but then I noticed Leonard putting on his turtleneck and figured that maybe no one would ever find out.

“So when do we get paid?” Electra asked him.

Leonard looked at her and then tilted his head to one side. I knew what was up. He was quietly assessing her look, wondering how he could improve her, make her over, and he was about to offer his services.

“You know, Electra—” he began.

“Forget it,” I told him before he could go any further. “We're going to the movies. Fork it over.”

“I'll pay the money. It's not
instead
of the money. I'm just offering to … I don't know … like the dreads. How important are they to you?”

Electra just stood there and gave him deadeye. She wasn't even going to discuss her look with him. She had witnessed what had happened to Deirdre's hair; and even though the cool kids had revised their thinking and begun to treat Deirdre like one of their own again, Electra didn't want to take any chances. She had worked too hard to find her style, and she wasn't about to give it up for the likes of Leonard.

“Uh. No,” said Electra with imperious finality. “No touch-ee the dreads. Okay? These are my girls, and they ain't goin' nowhere.”

“No prob,” he replied.

Leonard held to his position that the barber had simply chopped off too much of Deirdre's hair, and we all needed to just chill until it filled in. “Wait a week or two,” he kept telling us. “You watch. You'll see.”

And he was right, of course. But right after it happened, Deirdre's just-cut hair was all anyone at school could talk about, and the salon was buzzing with the news as well. Mom hadn't reacted nearly as badly as we thought she would. Everyone knew she was shaken to her core by so unexpected a change, but whenever a customer commented on Deirdre's new look, Mom simply
tsk
ed, checked herself out in the nearest mirror, smiled and said, “Honey, things change.” No one bought it, but everyone was grateful she wasn't making more of a scene.

Deirdre announced right away that the cut had been Leonard's idea, and maybe that was why Mom wasn't too upset. So many of Leonard's innovations for the salon and his improvements of my mother's look had worked out perfectly despite her initial skepticism. So maybe this was just another case of wait-and-see.

We watched, we waited, and sure enough, in time, we saw Deirdre's hair grow back. Soon she began to look “cutting edge” instead of “skinheaded.” The beauty of her features, her eyes, her ears, her cheekbones, which had been eclipsed for too long by the outstanding and overriding beauty of her hair, were suddenly revealed for all the world to admire.

Mom started getting requests from customers who had seen Deirdre's do and wanted to copy it even if it didn't fit the shape of their heads. Mom tried to talk them out of it, fearing that this new shorn look would put her out of business altogether. But once again Leonard stepped in and made it clear to my mother that if she planned to survive as a hair stylist into the twenty-first century, she might want to learn a few new skills. They shopped for a handheld buzzer and then got some helpful hints from the sad-faced barber, Mr. Fallston, who had a shop on Main Street. Mr. Fallston was the guy who'd given Deirdre her look, and though he had been happy to do the honors, he wasn't that interested in expanding his business to include the fairer sex. He said that his customers counted on an all-male environment so that they could feel free to sit back and relax. Mom said the same went for her customers.

And so Mom expanded her business to include the shorn and buzzed, Deirdre began hanging out with the cool kids again, and Leonard's disgrace turned out to be a triumph.

But before the happy ending was in place, something happened that allowed me to see how much it mattered to Leonard to be right.

I had come home from school, and all I wanted to do was go straight to my room and lose myself in
Mansfield Park
. The reality of Deirdre's haircut had been revealed to the entire school that day, and it was all anyone could talk about, but really what I wanted to know was whether Fanny Price would, in the end, marry Edmund Bertram. Added to that, I was sick of answering questions that involved Leonard and Deirdre. I just wanted to be alone.

I was relieved to find the house empty. But as soon as I threw my backpack into the corner of the kitchen, I heard a weird sound coming from downstairs. My heart began to race and I stopped breathing altogether. The noise could've been someone with a slashed throat gasping for his or her last breath, or it could've been the washing machine backing up, choking suds and about to explode. In either case and despite my worst fears, I ventured down the stairs.