Adela

I wasn’t from this town and, frankly, I didn’t want to be here. What sixteen-year-old girl wants to live out her golden years in a poor beach town in Florida, of all places, sharing a shack with her grandmother?

I certainly didn’t, and I knew Dad would say Adela, these are the consequences of your actions in this taut voice that was just a veil for what he really sounded like. Southern. Black. Florida. He’d always described Padua Beach as the last stop on a trip to hell, a wasteland of reckless men and guns. Dad described it as though there was nothing but polluted water and rednecks in all of the small town. The forgotten Panhandle of Florida that was better off remaining forgotten.

I guess it was the perfect punishment for my situation. That’s what they called it. Mom and Dad decided they would stay back in our Indianapolis suburb, with the country club men still pleased to grab a drink, the other mothers thrilled to discuss how a blond beauty like Mom found herself with…Dad. Their reputations intact. My actions, well, consequated.

You’d think I’d started drug dealing or burned down a building with the way they talked about it. Unthinkable, unforgivable, unfortunate. But really, I was just pregnant. And, honestly, sitting in the backseat of my noni’s car, looking out the window at a place I’d never wanted to be, I didn’t think I deserved this, pregnant or not.

Sure, it was pretty. At least the trees were, wrapping around each other, making arches of Spanish moss that looked like open mouths, only to turn into a stretch of reaching pines. But then Noni took a left off the highway, away from the ocean, and suddenly we were on a strip of gravel and dirt and all these men in sagging sweatpants and wifebeaters slouched across the street without waiting for our car to stop.

I’d never seen so many other Black people in my life, not ones like these. They were gritty, and I was embarrassed to admit I was afraid of them. I knew I was part of them in some ways, but also not at all, and it made me feel small and out of place.

Another turn and I watched two women slink toward a porch with their stomachs hanging out, a piece of someone’s tracks sweeping in the breeze like a tumbleweed. I wondered if it was one of those Girls’ hair.

We passed the Girls on the way into town and, the moment I saw them, I knew they were ruthless. It was the way their lips spread wide to show gap teeth and tonsils enlarged in the heat of the air they’d fed on long before I arrived. Their hips already the shelved slopes mine were becoming, children running around and clinging to their shins even as each Girl placed hands to the inside of her thighs and popped her hips. Left, right, left, right. Faster and faster until the jiggle of their inner thighs matched the beat coming from the stereo inside the truck.

The Girls knew how to run wild and, at first, I, like most of this town, feared them. Children mothering children and never apologizing for it, the country’s shame clear as the gloss of the babies’ eyes staring up as they suckled on their mothers’ breasts. I feared the Girls until the day I realized I was becoming one of them, that every week my skin was stretching me closer to the way they let loose. The pregnancy showed itself eventually and the Girls rubbed off on me like sand on wet feet, so I could not be rid of them.

But in the beginning, when I first caught a glimpse of them from the backseat of my grandmother’s neon-orange Civic, I thought they were crazy.

Noni, insistent that I was still too young to sit in the passenger seat, flashed me a look over her shoulder, pointed to them dancing in the empty parking lot of the Baptist church, and said, “Those them Girls. Stay away from ’em.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

She shook her head. “They what you gonna be if you don’t got some sense. Droppin’ outta school, running around with whatever boys would have ’em, popping out ten babies before they even hit eighteen. Ain’t right.”

And when I looked back at them, hanging from that red pickup truck, taking videos of each other with their old Samsungs like it was 2012, I saw it: the ones who pressed a hand below their stomachs, cradling them as if to relieve the weight. Others spoon-feeding blubber-cheeked children something from a jar held in the crook of their elbows. Another with a toddler on her shoulders allowing her the freedom of her limbs to swing in sync with the beat. All of them pregnant or recently birthed. All of them with the same youthful ripple in their cheeks.

I wanted to ask Noni if I wasn’t already like them, but I knew what she’d say. I couldn’t be like them; I was destined for something; I was so much more. After all, I would have said the same thing back then. Back before I knew the Girls.

---

Panhandle Florida was a landscape of green and sky, unrelenting thick heat that made my throat feel soggy from the moment I stepped outside the car, hugging my duffel bag to my stomach, trying to see past the live oak leaves obscuring the house from sight. All I could see was a red door, which didn’t surprise me. Noni loved anything that screamed.

“You coming inside?” Noni asked, already pushing past the tree branches, holding them above her like a doorway for me to duck my head beneath. I rushed to follow, and behind the curtain of leaves, the house was in full sight.

It was low to the ground, a slight A-frame that seemed to want to collapse at its small peak. So few windows, shingles missing from the roof, a dog door that had been nailed shut. It was nothing I imagined, and I wished there was at least some kind of charm to it, but it was just fading beige paint and a bright red door, pillars that seemed to do nothing to hold the house up framing the barely there porch.

I thought it would be more spread out from all the other houses, would have been easier that way, to do what I had come here to do: hole up in whatever room Noni gave me, speak to no one, find a pool to practice in, and wait until I could give birth and go back home, leave with as much speed and downturned eyes as I had arrived. Maybe the child would even come early and let me off the hook before my seventeenth birthday.

It had only taken a week since my parents found out about the pregnancy before they’d arranged everything with Noni and put me on a plane so I didn’t miss any more school, since Florida’s school year started earlier. All because Violet DeFleur couldn’t stand that I had a better freestyle time than she did. She knew I was going to be the best swimmer in the country, maybe even the world, and she was going to find herself in a state school dorm room watching me win gold in the 2028 Olympics.

She wouldn’t admit that she snitched on me, not even when I confronted her the day before Dad drove me to the airport and left me there, but only the other girls on the swim team could have gotten into my locker and found the tests, told Coach, who called my parents in and ruined eight years of training in one day. Either that or Coach knew I hadn’t gotten my period when I said I had and figured out the reason why.

Either way, I knew the minute Coach told my parents, my life was basically over. Mom and Dad met at a Christian college in Indiana and about the only things they had in common were their faith and me. I heard them fighting in their room the night after they found out, and Dad said the word terminate, which made Mom scream like her tongue was on fire, and the next day they sat me down and told me I was leaving.

Now here I was, in Florida, not more than an hour from Alabama and Georgia, in the liver of the South, and I didn’t have any choices. Or at least, I didn’t think I did on the day I arrived. Before I knew the Girls, before Florida became a solace and a punishment all at once, I wouldn’t have expected to end up where I did at the end of those months.

At the time, I thought the choice was simple. Get this baby out and go home. But I had at least seven months of Florida life to live, a life that would cause my choice to blur, flail, and falter, and I had no idea what was coming when I arrived at Noni’s house that day.

She took my duffel bag from me, opened the door, and led me inside. I watched her sneak a glance at my stomach. I wondered if she was surprised to find nothing there, not even a hint of a slope. She didn’t say anything, though, let me take in the summer storm stirring inside her house.

Noni had lived alone since my dad left two decades ago and her house showed it. Overflowing, as if she’d never bothered to donate or throw anything out, instead piling every newspaper, magazine, and bill she’d ever gotten on any available surface. She’d filled the house with antique lamps, ones with beads and gems and embroidered shades that, if she ever changed the lightbulbs, would have surely blinded us.

“I like to go on into Pensacola to the flea market sometimes,” Noni said, gesturing with a brazen pride to the worn furniture, the quilts stitched out of what appeared to be old bandanas, the box television screen the only thing void of dust as we wove through the living room and down the hall.

Noni pointed to a door, said it was her room and I wasn’t to go in there, ever, and then opened the door beside it that revealed stairs leading me down into a basement. Here, beside tubs and boxes of storage, she’d turned the sofa into a pull-out bed and put sheets on it already. Floral ones, suited for a granddaughter much younger than me, like she’d expected me a decade before and I never showed up. Not until now.

Noni set my duffel bag on the bed and turned to me, pulling me into her chest, rubbing the back of my neck with her other hand. For the first moment since she’d picked me up from the airport, she paused. “My grandbaby. You alright?”

I let myself relax into her sun-worn chest, scent a mix of eucalyptus and dust. I wanted to shake my head into her chest, tell her no, I wasn’t. I wanted to sprint up the stairs, out of the house, take her car and drive it all the way back home. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t let her know how scared I was, how badly I wanted to undo what I’d done and return to my life.

Instead, I said, “I’m fine, Noni. Thank you for letting me stay with you. I know it’s probably not ideal for you, especially once I start, like, showing.” I pulled away from her and went to my duffel bag, fished out a tank top and shorts to replace my sweatpants so I could change and go back outside, go anywhere. I had already sweated my roots limp and Noni’s house smelled like cinnamon and age, and the only thing I could think about was how these missed months of training would ruin me.

Noni understood I wasn’t going to confess to her, seemed to respect that and headed back toward the stairs, but before she climbed them, she turned to me and said, “I’m not embarrassed of you, Adela. For the longest time, I thought you and your daddy was embarrassed of me. Still do.”

I looked over my shoulder, caught the sight of Noni’s skirt hem fluttering as she disappeared upstairs. I felt instantly ashamed to have said what I said to her in the car, when we drove past a group of people standing in front of a McDonald’s, eating out of paper bags and cackling. I could never live like that.

I knew from the moment I said it that I’d done something wrong. Noni had been going on about how my dad used to love to go fishing out on the Gulf when he was a kid and the moment I said it, she quieted. Didn’t respond or cajole me or tell me who those people were and which ones were distantly related to us, which I’d soon learn she’d say of just about anyone we saw in town.

After another few minutes of complete silence, Noni said, “The woman in the wheelchair’s name is Carol and we have dinner after church together every Sunday. The man with the long beard, that’s Lawrence and he’s my daddy’s stepson, so he’s kinda like my brother, and we get each other something for Christmas every year. And that restaurant”—I couldn’t believe she called McDonald’s a restaurant—“that restaurant is my favorite place to get some lunch while I’m at work if I’m lucky enough to have a little extra time and money.”

“Dad sends you money every month,” I said. “If you needed to buy lunch, I’m sure you could afford something healthier.”

“Healthy? Baby, life’s not all about whole grains and calories. I see how you treat yourself, tryna get ready for all your little swim competitions, making sure you all lean, and I respect that, I do. But don’t you go around thinking you better than us ’cause you’d rather eat some lettuce than something that fills you up, something your body knows as well as it knows the womb it came from. I promise your body don’t know the difference between a french fry and a baked potato.”

I hadn’t gotten a chance to respond, to tell Noni that my body was an instrument of my sport, and it was important I feed it certain things. At least it had been important. Now I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t even sure my body was mine anymore. But before I could consider any of it, we rolled past the Baptist church parking lot and saw the Girls and all other thoughts flew out of my mind, leaving only them and that red truck.

So much had changed in a few short weeks.

I had been simply sixteen, about to begin my junior year of high school, succeeding in all definitions of the term. And now I was a thing to be hidden. Forgotten. At least I would get to go back, at least I would get to return as though I’d gone on a year abroad, looking tanner and older and ready for my senior year. The Girls would have nothing to return to but that truck and the McDonald’s they all seemed to love so much, tearing up a french fry with their acrylics and plopping it into a child’s gummy mouth.

I pulled my tank top away from the sweat collected beneath my breasts and climbed the stairs, found Noni at the dining room table hunched over a sewing machine.

“I’m going on a walk,” I told her.

“If you take a right at the highway and walk a mile, you’ll find the closest beach. Not very nice this time of year, but you prob’ly won’t get bit by no snakes there neither.” Noni lifted a hand and tucked a piece of her pearl-white hair behind her ear. “You be back for dinner in two hours. Time I feed you right,” she said, not lifting her eyes from the fabric.

---

I walked along the gravel road that was Noni’s nameless street. I kept looking for a sign that would tell me what it was called, give me any marker to find my way back, but there were no signs away from the main highway in Padua Beach and every street looked the same. House after house held up by tilting cinder blocks, obscured by a mass of overgrown weeds and trees that threatened to consume.

I knew somewhere around here there was a bayou, one marked by bald cypress trees and a few lone boats on the other side of the water, but I couldn’t see it from here. I couldn’t see anything but what was right in front of me, these small houses and ground dusted in red dirt.

At the fork, I turned left, up to the main road. On the corner of the highway, in front of what looked like a dead trailer park we’d passed on the way in, a group of guys stood around a grill on the other side of the fence sipping beer. They grinned at me, looked me up and down as I passed.

After about twenty minutes of sweating myself into a damp droop on the edge of the highway, I saw sand. I’d never seen anything like it, the sand making mountains Noni said they called dunes and what had been trees on both sides of the highway turned into a tunnel of sand and weeds. Later I would learn there was a parking lot and an entrance onto the beach, but all I saw that first time was the dunes, and so I started to climb them. My feet lost their grip inside the sand, my hands turned ashy, and it took me ten minutes to climb to the top, but once I got there, I saw it.

The water.

Ocean not just in front of me but to all my sides, stretched out so it almost blended with the sky on the horizon. Clear but somehow murky. Even from far away, I could feel the sting of salt on my feet, the soft caress of warm water against my ankles. It was nothing I could have imagined before, not in the movies, not in books, not from descriptions of my friends’ Hawaiian vacations. The real thing was grandiose, endless, pure. A magnificent green blurring into nothing, where sight could no longer comprehend her reach.

Sixteen and I’d never seen the ocean. I’d lived in artificial waters my whole life, thought I knew what it meant to absorb. To look out into blue and feel known. But as I slid down the dune onto the beach and began walking across it, my ankles aching, I was aware of how wrong I’d been.

A pool made you feel invincible, but an ocean did the opposite. It reminded you what a fragile thing you were, how every cell that made you up was nothing in comparison to the waves that could take you down as quickly as a bullet shot through your softest skin. And walking on the beach, that white sand fine as powder and squeaky, I felt, for the first time, how this small thing inside me could consume my whole being. How, in a matter of months, I would have nothing to hide behind.

I just wanted to touch the water.

I stepped into the first edges of it, surprised by its warmth, by how green it was, with some kind of algae floating around in it. After touching it, I needed to feel more, so I kept walking. Shins, knees, thighs, the water lapping at my skin, my fingertips grazing it, and as I breathed the sea in, I heard the sounds of them laughing, music booming.

I turned away from the water to see the Girls across the beach, up in that red truck again, and it seemed like there were even more of them than there had been when we drove into town this afternoon, toddlers crouched in the sand. I thought I could see one of them looking straight at me, but I couldn’t make her face out, not before the wave came up and threatened to take me under.