Emory
I saw Adela first. Out there, in the water. From the moment I caught sight of her, I knew it was only a matter of time before she was gone. Still, I wanted to know her. Needed to know her. It was like what Grammy said about our family. We were always meant to end up here, Emmy, and you know why? ’Cause hundreds of years ago, some pirate ship sunk and spilled treasures all over the bottom of our sea and now the water shines emerald green for us and if that don’t make us treasures too, I don’t know what does. So even when we havin’ a hard time, you just remember the world gon’ send you some treasures when you need it most, even if it takes hundreds of years to see ’em shine.
Adela was my treasure. Even before I knew what she would do to me, to us. Kai was only a few weeks old when I saw Adela for the first time, standing by the water. She was too close to the waves. Thigh-deep and turned away from them and that’s how I knew she wasn’t from here. Wasn’t one of us. That’s how I knew it would swallow her.
I’d never known someone not from the Emerald Coast. Well, that’s not true. The summer before high school, Pawpaw sent me to go work on my uncle’s farm in Georgia and I met folks out there, but they weren’t much different from us. Same gamey mouths. Same curling toenails. Back then I thought maybe I’d own a farm one day. Thought I’d tend to the land, learn how to hunt, maybe build a giant house for Grammy and Pawpaw like the one we used to have. Before Pawpaw got laid off and we moved into my auntie’s house on the other side of the highway.
But now I wasn’t sure that was ever gonna happen. Prob’ly wasn’t. The thing was, I’d gotten pregnant at seventeen. I’d planned it, it was my choice, and, lately, I’d been thinking it was my mistake. I’d been his mom for three weeks and I would’ve done just about anything to reverse it. That makes me sound like an ungrateful bitch. I’m not. I just had a lot to lose and I always thought a baby’d give way more than it took.
I liked babies and I wanted to be his mom and then I was his mom and now I wanted all the other things and nobody told me you couldn’t have all those other things just ’cause you had to carry a little alien around with you. And maybe that means I’m stupid, but I think it just means everybody else was lying about how great it was and they tricked me into thinking it would be something it wasn’t and now I had to suffer ’cause of all those old moms’ lies.
Plus, Grammy and Pawpaw had barely spoken to me in the three weeks since Kai was born. ’Specially Pawpaw, who refused to be seen with my baby inside or outside the house, and I even heard him tell Grammy that she wasn’t supposed to help me neither, said if I wanted help I should have thought about that before I let that Black boy knock me up. Said this wasn’t no town where you could just be out here mixing with the wrong kind of people.
The wrong kind of people. Funny, I thought. It was the only time in my life I’d ever heard Pawpaw talk about us like we were the right kind of people. Usually, he was always going on about the rich folks and the tourists who stayed down in the fancier beach towns, how they didn’t care about people like us. But “us” didn’t include my baby or his daddy or the Girls. And if “us” didn’t include all of them, I didn’t see how it could include me either.
The thing was, I’d always wanted a baby. Up until I had one. Most things are like that, though, but I didn’t know it back then. Time moves fast as a coyote going after a hare.
When I was pregnant, things were good. Hell, I woulda told you I’d do it again and again. I’d spent those thirty-seven weeks Kai was inside me dreaming of his golden curls and green eyes and small dimpled hand wrapped around my finger. His coos as I held him on my hip and walked us along the shore. His pride as he stood, somewhere around five years old, two front teeth missing from his grin, at my college graduation.
I liked to picture later too, at Kai’s high school graduation. I was hoping I’d still be pretty as a pepper, my skin without dips or wrinkles, hair still thick and dyed a seamless bleach blond as I stood beside him, towering over me in cap and gown, saying This my ma when people asked him if I was his half sister or his girlfriend.
It was gonna be a dream of a life. Like the one Ma had meant to give me when I was born. Before my daddy broke her heart. Before she got into some shady shit in Jacksonville and passed me off to Grammy and Pawpaw. I was gonna give my son a good life. We were gonna be happy as two pigs rollin’ in the mud.
But then Kai was born. He wasn’t anything like I’d pictured. Nearly as brown as his daddy, Jayden, and he was colicky and distrustful of the world. In the few weeks he’d been alive, everything I’d dreamed had faded with my stretch marks, gone almost translucent.
Now Grammy was giving me a talking-to as I leaked milk all over the kitchen, having lost my bra and shirt somewhere between the bedroom and the shower, somewhere between last night and this morning.
“You think I’m gonna help you feed him? What you gonna do when I’m not there, hmm? What you think I’m here for, to hold your little hand after you gone on and acted like some kinda whore for nine months, sleepin’ with all these boys instead of doin’ what you gotta do and marry the boy who done got you pregnant. But that boy don’t wanna marry you, do he? And it’s good too, ’cause you know your Pawpaw’s not about to have him up in his house. So you want help, you go on and ask all your little boyfriends.”
“Grammy, please.”
I’d been crying since I woke up from another one of Kai’s short bursts of sleep, trying to figure out how to get Kai to nurse. Since he was born, he refused to hook his mouth onto my nipple, so I’d been switching off trying to breastfeed and pumping, milk piling up in the freezer.
But then, a few days ago, my pump broke. And now my breasts were so full they’d turned rock-hard and begun to leak when he cried, which was all the time.
I pleaded with Grammy. “I wouldn’t ask y’all for help if I didn’t need it and it’s not like I can call Ma, so if you could just buy me a new pump or teach me how to get him to latch, then I could—”
“Teach you?” Grammy scoffed, throwing a rag down onto the floor and using her foot to wipe up the milk. She was late for her second job at the Walmart one town over and I knew she’d hold it over me, but I didn’t know what else to do. She looked up at me, smacking her gum between her thin teeth. “I am teachin’ you, hon. I’m teachin’ you to not go around openin’ your legs to any colored boy who walks by.”
“Grammy! You’re not supposed to say that anymore. Just ’cause Jay’s African American don’t mean he’s not a good dad.” In fact, Jay was such a good dad it made me angry, how the first time he held Kai, he took his neck into the web of his hand with ease, like it just came naturally to him. “I just need a little help so I know how to nurse Kai for when I go back to school and I gotta come home and feed him real quick at lunchtime.”
“School? Emory, how you gonna raise a child and go to school at the same time? Who gonna be stayin’ with him?”
“I thought maybe you could…”
Grammy’s eyes flared wide and I stopped myself.
Grammy shook her head. “And don’t be asking me to get you nothing else either. Insurance only covered one pump and I’m not buying you another. Not my fault you broke it.”
I nodded. The school year had already started but I made a deal with the dean that I could do the first few weeks online. It was September and I had to go back next week. “I guess I’ll figure it out,” I said.
“You a mother now. You don’t got no choice.” With that, Grammy left the rag on the floor and my tits still dripping and grabbed the keys from the table, slamming the screen door shut on the way out, waking Kai up from his first two-hour nap in his whole life.
You have to understand, we’re not what you think. If you’re thinking me and the Girls are some kind of ratchet group of reckless teen moms, you clearly haven’t ever had to learn how to massage gas out of a baby’s stomach before you learned the basic laws of physics.
And if you think I don’t make sense with all of them just ’cause I’m white, you wouldn’t believe what happens when a girl these days gets knocked up. Suddenly, it’s the most important thing about you. Suddenly, you don’t have green eyes or a two-bedroom shack on Willow Street or straight A’s in Biology. You are nothing but a young mother.
Besides, Padua Beach is full of all kinds of people. I could walk two minutes and be on a street full of African Americans, another minute and I’d be standing in a Filipino’s driveway. We coexist here. There’s even a couple of other mixed babies, but Pawpaw and Grammy don’t understand that ’cause they’re from a different time. A time when Jay and I couldn’t hold hands on the same beach. A time when plenty of girls got pregnant younger than me and no one batted an eye, as long as you were married.
But it’s not like that anymore. Now folks aren’t shocked when we show up with swollen stomachs, they’re disgusted. They think we’re stealing their welfare and ruining the image of God. They think we shouldn’t have been so stupid.
The smartest thing any of us did was join the Girls. I didn’t intend to, said up until I was about thirty weeks along I would never be one of them, but then I began to feel it: the eyes shifting along the circumference of my stomach, whispers that traveled from church ladies to high school hallways, boys who no longer sought me out at the beach parties but found me in an empty room at school, asking if fucking would hurt the baby.
Nobody got it. I was used to that, though. I’d spent my whole life baking under a cruel sun, and even when I felt crisp, I still knew how to suck water from damp places beyond sight. I was from Florida, after all. I could survive any summer, pretend like I was made for this harsh heat. But things changed quick.
In the weeks when the pregnancy embedded and became real, one degree of heat tipped the scale and, suddenly, I couldn’t handle the sun I was birthed beneath. I was downright dying. Felt like a tropical plant gasping for life in a drought, and I looked around and saw everybody else thriving, their leaves reaching for the sun like a toddler’s outstretched hand, but I was choking.
I was tired of feeling like I was hanging in the trenches of hell with the devil. That’s when I really started to pay attention to the Girls. They were boiling and burdened by the same air, but they’d found ways to irrigate, to stretch and assemble their own life source. They knew how to survive when you could no longer pretend you were perfect. The sun was theirs, the glory they glowed beneath.
When I first approached Simone, Jayden’s sister and their leader, she took me on a ride in the truck that altered everything I knew. For the first time in months, or maybe ever, I belonged somewhere.
I hadn’t seen them since I had Kai, though. The newborn daze kept me captive. Besides, Pawpaw said the Girls weren’t allowed around the house. And, until today, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to leave. But now Kai wasn’t giving me much of a choice.
I’d been trying to get Kai to latch right since the day he was born, but even when I got him on my tit, I wasn’t sure he was getting anything from it. It’d take an hour to feed him from my nipple and when I finally pulled him off, they still felt full. That was okay, though, because I had plenty of milk in the freezer and more coming every day. But with my pump broken and my tits swollen, I had to get him to eat or I was pretty sure they’d burst, so I went searching for my nursing bra and some shorts and wrapped Kai in his blanket, off to find the Girls.
Simone’s always been the easiest one to find. Hard to miss her with those swinging blond braids that don’t match her real hair at all and how she’s always climbing up onto the top of the truck cab, standing and dancing until her twins start trying to climb up there too. I used to think she was crazy. Still do, but I love it now.
It’s like when you’re a kid and you go to the zoo, you think all the animals are happy as can be up in their cages. But when you go back, older, you start to see the glaze of those chimpanzees’ eyes, the twitch of the gorilla’s neck, and it makes you wanna climb into the cage and set them all free. Padua was full of caged monkeys, but Simone wasn’t like that. She was free.
I found the Girls parked in the church parking lot off the main road. Took me twenty minutes of walking around town to all their favorite places to park, my thighs gone slick with sweat at first and now bumpy in red chafe. When I walked up, they hollered. Simone jumped down from the truck and strutted to me.
“Girl, you lookin’ like a goddamn mayhaw bush, all red in the face and shit.” Simone cackled and then reached out for Kai, careful not to puncture the back of his soft neck with her acrylics as I handed him over. “Let me see my nephew. Hi baby, your mama takin’ good care of you? She leavin’ you with your wack-ass great-grandmama?” Simone cooed, and if I wasn’t so tired I might have protested that no matter what she thought about her, she was still talking about my grammy.
April and Jamilah came up next, each with the other’s baby on her hip. They were the youngest in the group, fourteen and fifteen, and ever since they’d met hadn’t left each other’s side, always making out in the truck bed when they thought the rest of us were asleep. I wasn’t judging or nothing, but it wasn’t natural. They had kids and baby daddies and all they were focused on was sucking each other’s faces. We’d all silently and collectively decided not to discuss it, to let them go on like it was some secret love when really it was as clear as the pines peaking in the distance.
“He’s beautiful,” Jamilah said, widening her eyes at Kai’s face, as though he could see her pupils. He barely opened his eyes, except for right before he started crying. Sometimes I thought he was dumb. I didn’t tell anybody, but it’s true.
“Yeah,” I said. “He won’t eat, though. I’ve been pumping, but whenever I try to nurse he just cries and now my pump broke and my tits feel like they’re about to explode and I don’t know what else to do.”
Simone stuck a fingernail into Kai’s mouth and lifted his top lip, found his tongue, and moved it around. “He don’t got no tongue tie. What’s the problem?”
“I don’t know.” I was about to start crying again, but the twins came up and started pulling at my shorts and asking me to let them braid my hair ’cause it was so soft and straight. I didn’t want them to start asking what was wrong and have to say everything.
Simone understood, nodded at the twins. “Go on and find the Goldfish in the glove compartment.” The twins did as their mother said, running toward the truck, and Simone turned to me. “Take that bra off and let’s get this baby some titty.”
I followed Simone to the truck bed and she had me perch on the back, breasts drooping heavier than I’d ever felt them, leaking again. She handed Kai to me, upright, eye to eye.
“Make sure he’s stomach to stomach with you, and you hold his head up with your thumb.”
I did what Simone said and positioned Kai so I was really looking at his face, and he blinked his eyes open just for a moment, all those lines like cobwebs around his pretty black eyes, and his mouth moved just a little, like he was smacking those small lips, and, for the first time since he was born, I thought he actually looked kind of cute.
“See his hands?” Simone asked. I looked at his balled-up fists squirming on his chest. “If he makin’ fists, it mean he wanna fight ’cause he hungry. When he’s full, he won’t make no fists.”
I tried to think back to a time in the past few days when his hands were open and could barely remember a single moment, maybe only after he took a bottle. There was nothing worse than knowing he’d been laying there most of the day, hungry, and I hadn’t even known. I just thought he was a skinny baby, that he didn’t like the way milk tasted, that he had colic.
“Okay, so now you gonna squeeze your titty and touch your nipple to the spot between his nose and mouth and then he gonna yawn and that’s your chance to bring his head to you and stick it in his mouth. Try to get as much in there as possible, above his tongue, and it should feel like a vacuum, kinda. And then it might hurt for just a minute, but once he start sucking you won’t feel much more than a little tugging at your nipple, like when a guy be sucking on your titties. But not my brother.”
Simone’s lips squirmed at the thought. I laughed, remembering back to when Jayden used to do that. Back when I was delusional enough to think we were something, that the baby would bring us close. I took a breath and went through the steps Simone told me. For this moment, she felt like a sister. Squeeze, touch to his cupid’s bow, bring his head to my tit.
Just like that, I felt something I hadn’t felt before. Like pricks running through me and then this little fucker just suckling on my nipple, like he’d known how to do it this whole time. Draining my breast of all the milk that had nowhere to go before.
“It doesn’t even hurt,” I said, the relief cosmic.
“It’s not supposed to hurt none, not more than your feet after a long day of walkin’. If they scabbin’ and bleeding, something’s wrong,” Simone said. I’d thought the pain was just another punishment of motherhood. “Don’t forget to switch him to the other one too. Look at you go, bitch. You joinin’ the club.”
I grinned up at her and I couldn’t imagine a life without the Girls, without Simone. She’d done all this before and now here she was, twenty years old and helping me latch an infant onto my tit when she could’ve been anywhere else, could’ve married that man who got her pregnant five years ago and tried to do what so many of the Girls before us did. Reverse it all, cover her sin up in attempts to mother the way the whole town urged her to, while still whispering behind her back about what a fool she was to have ended up a mother at all. They wanted us to be anything but what we were.
There wasn’t no way to satisfy the rest of the world, but the Girls didn’t care whether I used cloth diapers or graduated or stayed with Kai’s daddy. They lived on whims of want and need, nomadic and ravenous and naked in their hurt. We weren’t nothing like what was expected of us, and, for the first time since my baby was born, I didn’t feel like the sky was about to collapse on top of me.
Sitting in the truck, with Kai finally feeding, I wondered if Grammy was wrong. Maybe I could do everything I wanted. Maybe I could have it all.
April laid a blanket in the truck bed right below the sun umbrella they put up in the corner. I scooted back under it, Kai still furiously sucking on my nipple. A few of the Girls were napping with their children, but most were entertaining the kids however they could in the glaring heat or staring at me and waiting for me to talk.
“We haven’t seen you in weeks and you’re not even gonna tell us anything?” April asked after I’d been nursing Kai for a while.
“Don’t have much to say,” I told her, smoothing Kai’s tuft of hair with my finger. It was always slightly matted with sweat, yet I never saw a drop roll down his furry forehead. Couldn’t understand how he was hiding things from me already. How I would never really know all that was happening inside him.
“Where’s your mans?” Tori asked, bouncing her son on her lap.
“I don’t know. Ask Simone,” I said. “Besides, y’all know Jay’s not mine. He meets me outside the house to see Kai when Pawpaw’s not around, but he’s not allowed in my house and his family doesn’t want me in his.”
“My parents don’t want me in that house either. Surprised they let Jayden stay, after what they did to me. When I talked to him, he seemed to think y’all was good,” Simone said, each of the twins on one of her knees munching on stale Goldfish. “But if you want, I can tell him he best get rid of you while he still can.”
“Fuck you,” I said, but I wasn’t mad.
I’d never had friends. Before the Girls, I hung around people that never gave much of a shit about me. Before that, it was just me and Grammy and Pawpaw. So Simone was more to me than just Jay’s sister; she was my first real friend.
She was also the only person in the world who understood what Jayden was to me, how I had wanted him only when I couldn’t have him, only for what I thought he would give me, and how, when I found out what he actually had to give, it was never enough. Simone understood he was family, like she was, but not the kind of family any of us wanted. He wanted me to be his confidante, his friend, his wife. I wanted him to be my escape. The problem was those things were never meant to exist at once. And now I was finding out Kai was not the saving grace but the reality that had shaken us apart. Finally and forever.
Except it wasn’t that simple. Jay texted me all day begging for time with Kai and, when I got lonely in the days stuck at home with a newborn, I’d respond. He’d show up in his white truck outside my house and swaddle Kai perfectly, comfort him like Jay was the shell Kai grew within. Jay put him to sleep and kissed each of his temples, sang to him, and asked me a whole bunch of questions I wasn’t prepared to answer about the color of Kai’s shit and his cry patterns.
Then I’d take sleeping Kai from Jay’s arms and set him on the dashboard and I’d scoot toward Jay on the truck bench, where I’d bend and give him a blow job until he came in my mouth. I liked it until the moment I swallowed, and then I wanted nothing more than to get away from him again.
That’s how it went with us, over and over. I wanted him until he wanted me back. He wanted me and that made me want to run. We chased each other around this town, and we both ended up sorry for it.
Instead of telling the Girls all that, though, I said, “Y’all know it’s more complicated than us being together or not. Besides, I have bigger dreams than Jay and his horny ass.”
“Big dreams, huh? You gonna try breastfeeding upside down?” Simone pulled the braid one of her twins was trying to undo back and stuck it under her bikini top strap.
“No, I’m gonna graduate, class of 2024, as planned. And then I’m gonna go to college.”
They all paused and looked at me. I don’t think any of them had ever said the word college and definitely not after joining the Girls. Of course they hadn’t. It was dangerous to speak something so far from reach, to allow it to float through the air even if the possibility of it was moments from evaporating. Maybe already had. Even I had to admit the word felt funny on my tongue, like a stray piece of hair that was nearly impossible to find but could be felt in the choke of my throat.
But I was different. I knew I could do it. While the Girls wasted their days and nights dancing or doing nothing that wasn’t for those kids, I was gonna live a big life. If I was being honest, I was just smarter than the rest of them. They probably knew it too, the whole town did, and as much as I loved spending time with them, I knew it wasn’t my forever. I was gonna have more.
As they all stared at me, Crystal’s daughter tried running across the truck bed but tripped on Jamilah’s foot and face-planted. She didn’t even cry, just stood up and started running again, until Crystal swooped her up right before her little legs ran themselves off the edge of the truck, and that’s when she started crying. Not at the pain of falling but at the loss of the chance to do it again.
“College?” Jamilah looked at me like I was crazy. “You know how hard it is to raise a baby and be in high school? How you gonna go to college too?”
“Jamilah’s right,” Crystal said, finally getting her daughter to stop crying by pulling her shirt down and showing her her nipple. “I bet you won’t even graduate high school.”
“Yes, I will,” I said. “I only have one year left and I’ve got good grades. Great, actually. Besides, if any of us are gonna go to college, it’ll be me.”
“So you think you’re better than us?” April crossed her arms. “You’re just like the rest of your family.”
“No, I’m not,” I retorted. “It’s just, I got that scholarship last year for five hundred dollars toward tuition after writing that essay about beavers in the bayou, and my grammy took me on a road trip down to South Florida to see some colleges last summer, and Miss Luella from church says I have a lot of potential. Anyone ever told y’all you got potential?”
“No,” Jamilah whispered. “But my cousins say I’m the smartest one in the family.”
April cut in again. “I just don’t understand why you’re acting like you’re better than us and you can’t even feed your baby.”
Grammy would’ve said not to throw stones when you live in a glass house if she saw me now, but I didn’t care. I loved the Girls, but I wasn’t about to let them dilute my chances of a respectable life. What I was saying was the truth and they could insult me all they wanted, but that wouldn’t change that I was going places and they were staying here, in this red truck, forever.
Simone pushed the twins off her and stood, climbing through the window of the cab and sliding into the driver’s seat. She called into the back, “All y’all can keep fighting, but I don’t give a shit if Em graduates or not, and she’s my brother’s baby mama, so I can’t have y’all fucking with her. Now it’s hot out here and the kids real hungry so hush up and let’s go to the beach.”
Simone revved the engine and pulled out of the parking lot, speeding to the beach, Kai’s mouth still stuck to my left breast.
I saw Adela the moment we pulled up on the beach, all the way onto the sand. She was impossible to miss. Not ’cause she was outstandingly pretty or ’cause her hair protruded from her scalp in a way no other African American girl down here dared to do. The thing about Adela that really got me was her shoulder blades.
I’d never seen someone with a back like hers, sculpted like she was made of clay. She held her shoulders down and back from her ears too, which made me think she looked kind of like she was staring up. Toward heaven or something. A girl like that, whose body looks like it could only exist created by the hands of another person, who held herself with an assuredness that told me she was of something else, it would have mesmerized anyone.
“Who’s that?” I asked the Girls, but none of them heard me. They had turned the music up and started dancing again, laughing, and that’s when Adela turned around.
She looked right at me. Even from this far away, I could tell she was meeting my eyes or at least the place on my forehead between them, and she turned her body even more so that mountain of a back, those dagger shoulder blades were facing the sea and her face was to me and that’s when I saw the wave. It was a wave any surfer would’ve been envious of. A perfect curl. A turquoise that looked like dyed bathwater.
In a single moment, it wrapped itself around Adela and I thought she was going to disappear beneath it, wash away with the tide, but when the water pulled back as it always does, she was standing just the same. Looking at me. The only thing different was her hair, now limp and reaching her shoulders, water not inside it but sitting on top of it, the glint of each droplet shining in the sun’s glare.
I watched her walk out of the water, slip on shoes laying on the dry sand, and make her way up the beach, where she started climbing the dune, until she was standing on the top of it facing the road, her back still strong, impenetrable. Her eyes still on me, until she lifted her feet and glided down the dune hill, out of sight.
I didn’t know she was gonna be one of us when I saw her. I didn’t know why I wanted to run after her or who she would be to me that first sighting, but I knew one thing.
Adela was important. A treasure that landed at the bottom of my sea the same day my baby learned how to feed, and who would become something to me in the same way he would. Slowly, slowly, morphing in front of my eyes until one day I looked at him and knew I loved him more than anything, until one day he was not a baby but a boy and then not a boy but a man. And by his side, by Adela’s side, I would be so much more than I had been before.
I would be the sea itself.