Emory
Smart girls aren’t supposed to get in trouble. I knew that, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t help I was at the top of my class, just like I couldn’t help the tongue that lashed from my mouth like an iguana’s. The week I went back to school for the first time since I had Kai, the only thing I was thinking about was Adela. Her and what colleges I was gonna apply to. But mostly her.
Adela was the seed of so many beginnings. A pollinator for everything that would bloom and multiply and outgrow us. But what came with Adela, with beginnings, with the spread of wild blooms, was a little bit of sting. A little bit of trouble. So it was only natural that the first day I spoke to Adela, face-to-face, also happened to be the first time I’d ever been called into the dean’s office.
Mrs. Simmons, the dean of students, was one of those women whose favorite day of the month was when all her magazine subscriptions came in. I bet she had all of them: Elle and Cosmopolitan and Sports Illustrated (for the swimsuit edition, a miserable time of the year, when she prob’ly sat down with her vat of wine and flipped through the pages just to rot in the sulfuric waste of her self-esteem) and some of the more obscure ones too, like Private Islands and Positive News, for when life got tough and Mrs. Simmons just really needed a pick-me-up. That’s how I imagined her, anyway.
Getting called into Mrs. Simmons’s office didn’t necessarily mean you were in trouble, ’cause Mrs. Simmons was conflict avoidant and would never lead with that, but it wasn’t exactly a nice way to spend a period, especially in the only high school in this town and the one over, where Mrs. Simmons probably had hundreds of kids to indirectly scold and still chose you.
I was good at school. I got into tiffs with my teachers sometimes, but they tended to let it slide because my work was good and my effect on their overall test scores was better, so the Friday of my first week back at school was the first day I’d ever been called out of class. I’d nearly made it through the week without mishap, besides a few times when Kai woke up and started crying in the middle of a Government lecture or my tits started leaking through my shirt and I had to wad up toilet paper and slip it into my bra. But still, I was starting to think that Grammy was wrong, that I could really do this. Especially with Kai feeding, I was feeling like a good mother. A good student. A good girl.
And then Mrs. Simmons showed up at the end of my favorite class, Biology, and told me she’d love to see me in her office, glancing down at Kai curled up and wrapped to my front in one of Grammy’s zebra-print scarves.
Now Mrs. Simmons smiled at me in her little office, which was definitely meant to be a janitorial closet, her sitting in her office chair and me sunk into a beanbag chair across from her, which was causing the back pain I’d had since Kai was born to flare like a lizard’s neck at the sight of a starved hawk.
“So, Miss Reid, I can see you got a whole lot goin’ on, what with the child and all, and you know Jayden’s like a grandson to me, yes he is, been friends with his grandmama all my life,” Mrs. Simmons started, going off on a tangent about how Jay’s grandmother and her met back when this school was only for white people, and that’s when Mrs. Simmons nodded at me and I shrunk back in the seat even more.
All these old folks only cared about race, but not me. I cared about people and animals and things more innate than color. It was primitive, seeing things all black and white. I prided myself on being evolved.
Mrs. Simmons continued, “Anyways, I do have to tell you that, unfortunately, you can’t be bringing no baby to school. A few teachers and students have come to me expressing their discomfort and I just can’t endorse a disruption to our learnin’ environment.” Mrs. Simmons left the last letter off every word so it bled into the next, then she leaned back waiting for my response.
“That doesn’t even make sense,” I said, and if I was a lizard and she’d turned hawk, then she was a threat to my young. “ ’Cause he sleeps all day and if he’s fussin’, I take him into the hall. Besides, isn’t there some kind of law that says you can’t be discriminating against me ’cause I got a child? Maybe I’d know if you didn’t pull me out before Gov just to sit here and listen to this mess.”
Mrs. Simmons sucked her big bottom lip under her top one and started rifling around in her desk drawer. I thought maybe she was looking for one of her magazines to calm her down a bit. But then she pulled out a brochure and passed it across the desk to me. Kai let out a mewling sound like he did when he was hungry. I loosened the scarf so I could unclasp the front of my bra and do what Simone taught me, touching my nipple to his cupid’s bow until he yawned and then stuffing it in his mouth.
When I returned my gaze to Mrs. Simmons, her eyes were fixed on my tit. “What, you never seen a woman breastfeed before?” I asked, then tried to lean in enough to read the front page of the brochure before falling back into my chair. “I’m not goin’ to some reform school, Mrs. Simmons. I’m your best student, I don’t need that.”
She pushed the brochure even closer to me so I could see the two girls on it, one African American and one probably Puerto Rican, holding hands in front of a tree that I’d never seen before in this part of Florida, maybe some kind of dwarf magnolia, the African American girl pregnant and the Puerto Rican girl with a toddler on her hip. When I saw them holding hands like that and smiling, I knew the picture was fake. Which probably meant the school couldn’t get any better photos ’cause all the real girls were sad and refused to hold hands.
“You could at least try to cover up now, Miss Reid. We value modesty here. And the West Florida Hope Center isn’t a reform school, it’s the only school in this county that offers the Teenage Parent Program to support young ladies like yourself. They have over a dozen young mothers, and they partner with a daycare and all you gotta do is switch over there. I’d help you set it all up.” Mrs. Simmons tapped her gels on the table and nodded, and I knew she thought she was being nice, but what would have really been nice was if she offered to hold Kai so I could go take a piss on my own for once.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but you don’t understand. I only have one year left and I’m gonna graduate at the top of my class and go off to college next fall. Changing schools, especially to some reform school an hour away, would mess up all my plans. Besides, I don’t have a car or a license and I can’t be living so far away from my grandparents and my friends and Jayden.”
Mrs. Simmons clasped her hands together and sighed, looking down at her thumbs. “I think we need to…adjust your expectations. You made some choices, Miss Reid, and those choices have consequences. Yours is that you’re probably not gonna go to college, at least not anytime soon, and certainly not to any school where you’d be living on campus. Let’s be more realistic, hmm? How about you transfer to the West Florida Hope Center and you work on graduating, and then maybe you can take some classes at the junior college next fall?”
I stared at her. She didn’t even have the gall to look back at me, and I was so tired of being ignored like I was a window, a sheet of glass for birds to slam into, again and again. I slapped my hands down on her desk and started shimmying up and out of my chair. “Well, Mrs. Simmons, I knew you were a bitter old woman, but I didn’t know you were so jealous of me you’d go to such lengths to make sure I don’t succeed. I’ll be keeping my baby with me and if anyone’s got a problem with it, they can bring it to court or something.”
I don’t really know why I said that. I certainly wasn’t in a position to go to court and pay any lawyer fees, but it seemed to do the trick. Mrs. Simmons went quiet, removing the brochure from her desk and slipping it back into a drawer. I took my tit out of Kai’s mouth and tucked it into my bra, retying the scarf so he was secure, and I wished Mrs. Simmons a good rest of her day as Grammy would tell me to do. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, she’d say. Then I marched right out of there, imagining Mrs. Simmons’s pouty face when she gave me the apology I was owed come graduation.
It was lunch now. I knew ’cause nobody was lingering in the halls and all the classroom doors were swung open to try to get some airflow in this September heat. I wove through the hall to the back door, bouncing Kai until his eyelids slid shut again, and made my way out to the lawn.
Padua Beach High was less than a mile from both the beach and the bayou and just about a mile from the dune lake. Half the kids went to smoke or take a dip in the water or down some moonshine during lunch, and those of us who wanted to do our homework or scroll our phones or just didn’t have anything better to do sat out at one of the six picnic tables and contemplated whether any of this was really worth it.
I used to be one of the people who went to the beach during lunch, with a group of girls that lived on the seaside of the highway, in new-build houses that had two or three stories. Girls who lived in the kind of house we used to. The one I knew Pawpaw still dreamed of when he fell asleep eating dinner in front of the TV.
Those seaside girls and me would strip off all our clothes and dive into the ocean, then grab something from Earl Ford’s fish shack, and half the group would ditch the rest of the school day. The other half of us, me included, would head back to school and put everything we had into trying to remember which countries were on what side of World War II.
At the end of my sophomore year I met Jayden. After we got together, I’d abandon the seaside girls once or twice a week to sneak off with him. We’d go to the edge of the bayou and fuck in the tall grass. All kinds of bugs would bite my ass and Grammy would have to apply salve later, after she scolded me about my tiny bikini and the karmic justice God enacted when a lady showed too much cheek.
But now Jay and I weren’t together. And, even if we were, he wasn’t in school anymore. He was working in construction on a hotel renovation over in Panama City and, even when he was in Padua Beach, I didn’t really want to see him. Not like I used to. Drooping at his scent. Going wild at the sound of my name in his mouth.
After the seaside girls found out I was pregnant with Jay’s baby last spring, they slowly stopped texting. Stopped inviting me to go dive into the ocean at lunch. Stopped speaking to me at all. I wasn’t sure if it was because he was African American or even poorer than me, or maybe ’cause their parents didn’t want them to catch the pregnancy disease, but in the end it didn’t really matter. They were never my friends. I was always gonna be alone.
At least before the Girls scooped me into their coven and showed me how to be warm without the body heat of all the people who’d left me. Except the Girls had all dropped out of school, or took online classes from shared computers with babies drooling wet patches on the fronts of their shirts, or got their GEDs, so even with them in my life, on school grounds it was just me and Kai.
Every day this week, I spent lunch sitting at an empty picnic table, nursing Kai or begging him to sleep, watching boys in camo dip and spit into the dirt, and when Kai was securely in a milk-induced doze, I’d pull out my notebook and start working on my college essays.
Padua Beach High didn’t even bother putting brochures in our homerooms for any colleges outside of Florida ’cause they didn’t think any of us could possibly get in anyway. I’d done my own research and had a list two dozen long of places to escape to. I was gonna go. I didn’t care where, so I figured I’d apply to them all. I was gonna make a whole lotta people suffocate on the echo of their own words. I was going to do it all.
Despite Mrs. Simmons, today was a lucky day. Today, when I walked outside the school building, Adela was sitting at one of those picnic tables.
I’d been hoping she’d come sit outside at some point after I saw her walk into my senior Government class on my first day back at school even though she was a junior, that back even more sculpted up close. But all week I’d spied her having lunch inside, hunched at a desk in her homeroom class doing her schoolwork. I’m sure her teacher wasn’t too pleased by that, but it didn’t seem like she knew any better. She wasn’t from here.
After Mrs. Simmons, I was thinking about going straight home and climbing into bed instead of returning for afternoon classes, but the sight of Adela made me change my mind and beeline for her and her shaded table.
“Mind if I sit with you?” I asked.
She shook her head, quickly taking in Kai on my chest. “Go for it,” she said, and her voice was like rubbing velvet the wrong way. Not smooth, but captivating.
I sat across from her and pulled out the plastic bag I’d put three johnnycakes and a microwave corn dog in this morning and set it on the table with my notebook and pen. I pretended to read over a paragraph, skimming it with my pen, but really I was just thinking about her. Who she was and why I itched with the bristling sense of fate when I saw her.
I’d never had a friend I cared much about before. Except maybe Simone, but she was family. I’d never had somebody who I wanted to listen to as much as I wanted to talk, and it didn’t make sense that this girl the color of silt from a suburb I couldn’t comprehend could be somebody I was meant to know, but I was sure she was. Surer than I was of the thud of my own heart hitting the bottom of my stomach when I realized for the first time my child was real and mine.
I took a bite of one of the johnnycakes and found it had lost all its smooth crunch in the sweaty hours in my bag. All I tasted was soggy cornmeal. Ever since I’d gotten Kai to latch last week, I’d been starving, so I ate the whole thing anyway. And then another. And then, after half my corn dog was gone, my stomach wasn’t churning anymore, so I put the other half back in the plastic bag. I could tell Adela was watching me from across the table, even as she was typing something on her laptop.
“Where’s your lunch?” I asked. “Don’t you eat?”
She laughed and I could tell I’d embarrassed her.
“I’ll eat when I get home,” she said.
I shook my head and pushed my food toward her. “You should eat this. It’s hot, we don’t want you passing out.”
“Thanks,” she murmured. I watched her open the bag and take out the johnnycake and tear off a bite so small, I’d even consider feeding it to Kai at only one month old, and then she placed it on her tongue to dissolve and nodded. “It’s good. What is it?”
I could tell she didn’t really like it, but I appreciated that she was trying to be polite, especially to some random girl with a baby. “It’s a johnnycake. Or some people call them hoecakes, but my grammy says that doesn’t give off the right impression.”
Adela laughed for real this time.
She reached her hand across the table and said, “I’m Adela,” even though I already knew. I’d listened for her name when they took attendance in Government that first day back at school and chewed it around in my mouth every day since.
“Emory,” I said, shaking her hand and feeling funny, like we were on Law & Order or something. “Where you from?”
Adela tucked a piece of fried curl behind her ear that resisted and sprung right back up as she said, “Indiana. But my dad’s from here.”
“My family’s lived in Padua for generations, so I know all the folks around here. What’s your last name?”
“Woods.”
“Like Eve? You Eve’s daughter?”
Adela shook her head. “Granddaughter.”
I beamed. “I hear Eve knows how to make a window sparkle. And, once, my grammy’s brother’s stepdaughter bought a dress Eve made for her prom and it might just be one of the prettiest dresses I’ve ever seen.”
Adela nodded and returned her eyes to her computer. I worried she was done talking to me before I’d even gotten to tell her anything about me. She probably thought I was some hillbilly’s daughter who fucked everyone she saw and forgot to use a condom. But she had to know it wasn’t like that. She had to.
I twisted my body so my back was to Adela and Kai’s wrinkled sleeping face was visible.
“This is Kai,” I said. “He’s almost five weeks and these teachers are trying to get me to move to some reform school or leave him at home, but I’ve got other plans, Adela. Actually, I’m writing my college applications right now.” I tapped the notebook with my pen and faced her again after I made sure she’d gotten a good look at Kai’s round face, bubbles escaping his lips.
“Really?” Adela asked. “Where are you applying?”
I grinned wider. She was hooked. “Everywhere,” I said. “I got a fee waiver, so I figured I’d just apply wherever’s got a good Biology program and looks pretty enough for me and Kai. All the UCs, Miami, NYU, Hawaii. Oh, and Emory University, of course, ’cause wouldn’t it just be cool to say, ‘Hi, nice to meet y’all, my name is Emory and I go to Emory.’ ”
She giggled and it was the same jingle as a snowy tree cricket’s wings rubbing together in the night.
She took a full bite of the johnnycake and after she swallowed, she said, “I’m hoping to go to Stanford or UCLA.” Her neck hinged and dropped. “Actually, I was supposed to be scouted this year, but since I’ll be here, I’m just going to have to hope they’ll take me anyway.”
“Scouted? Like, for cheer? I know a girl who did that.”
Adela shook her head, mouth full of corn dog that she seemed to suddenly devour. “For swimming. I want to go to the Olympics. That’s the goal anyway.”
No wonder that wave hadn’t taken her under. She knew water. She lived in it. I was just about to ask her if she wanted to go swimming with me sometime or if she wanted to come over and study with me this weekend, since maybe Pawpaw would think Adela was different from all the other African American girls at my school, better than the Girls, because Adela had dreams. Then again, maybe he’d feel like someone as pretty and smart as Adela was some kinda threat to Grammy and him and the life they’d battled for, so maybe it was better to keep her to myself.
I didn’t get to offer anyway ’cause Raymond Stewart spit out his dip and hollered, “Gator!,” his lips puffed out so you could see the black of his tongue. Everyone at the tables stood, grabbing backpacks and sodas and stray pieces of paper, and sprinted to the door that led to the auditorium. I stood to do the same but when I looked back, Adela was still just sitting there, her eyebrows one wavy line, munching on my corn dog.
“What’d he say?” she asked, and I realized this girl prob’ly didn’t understand half the things anyone said in class. Didn’t know how to read through the way we led with the back of our tongues in every word so the vowels came first and everything else trailed behind.
I tugged at her hand, holding Kai to me and scanning the grass for the alligator. She was over at the other end, by the vending machine, a good eight feet long at least, and I knew she moved fast, that she could be beside us any minute. “Ga-tor,” I said, sounding out every part until Adela’s eyes split open in panic and she slammed her laptop closed and shoved it into her bag and then you wouldn’t believe what this girl started doing.
Right in front of me, Adela started running in zigzags across the lawn. She looked like a rag doll or something, her limbs flying and every turn of her heel slowing her down. If anything, she was getting the gator’s attention. I ran up to her, holding Kai’s head to my chest, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her straight with me across the dirt to the auditorium door. I pushed her inside, that alligator still out there, now having climbed on top of the table we were just sitting at as I yanked the door shut.
In the auditorium, the whole school gathered, at least everyone who was still on campus, as we waited for the alligator wranglers to arrive and haul her out. Adela was shaking on the floor in the corner and I was trying to calm her while, once again, nursing a ravenous Kai.
“It happens sometimes, Adela. We’re right by the water, so it’s kinda like we’re neighbors,” I said, reaching out to touch her knee and then retreating.
She shook her head. “It was so…big.”
I was trying to soothe her, but to tell the truth and shame the devil, I was glad to be trapped in a room with her. Being near Adela made me feel something. Something more like I’d felt before having Kai, almost like being in the ocean at just the right time of day, when you could look down at the water and see the sunlight threaded through it, the ripples making constellations out of light so it looked like a spiderweb of lightning beneath a shimmer of blue. She made me feel like that, and I liked it.
“If it helps, that gator was only about eight feet, so either it was a youngin or a female and either way, that’s a little less scary, don’t you think?” She shrugged. “Why’d you run like that from her?”
“I heard you’re supposed to run in zigzags from an alligator.”
I laughed. “That don’t even make sense, ’cause gators have eyes on the sides of their heads, so the only time you’re out of sight is when you’re in front of ’em.” Kai grasped onto one of my fingers and held tight. “You wanna know something else about gators?”
She shrugged again, but I knew she did.
“They don’t have normal sex chromosomes like we do, so instead the sex of the baby gators gets decided by the temperature during incubation. So, one little degree can change the whole thing, and then there’s a gray area, somewhere between eighty-six and ninety-three degrees, where it’s a toss-up. Could be a boy or a girl.”
She squinted at me. “How do you know all that?”
I smiled. “I told you, I’m gonna major in Biology.”
Adela sat up more fully. “You know, you’re the first person to talk to me for more than a minute this whole week? So thanks, for talking to me and for, like, saving me from an alligator attack.”
I wanted to tell Adela that I’d been meaning to talk to her since the moment I saw her and if I wasn’t so nervous, I would’ve gone up to her on my first day back at school or maybe even when I saw her on the beach last week. But I didn’t want to scare her or seem overeager, so instead I said, “She wasn’t gonna attack. Not unless you tried to hurt her. Isn’t that how we all are?”
She got it. I knew she did. We stared at each other for a moment that made the blood in my veins swish. When you meet someone who already knows the temperature of the life inside you, there’s almost nothing left to say. But, at the same time, you want to tell them everything in every language that’s ever existed. Call it destiny or soulmates or best friends, but Adela was the other pea cocooned in my pod, the twin flame hissing with the same fervor as mine, a feather plucked from the same squawking bird.
I was gonna talk again, ask her about where she came from, when Kai started fussing. I tried sticking a pinky in his mouth to soothe him, tried burping, tried everything, but he wouldn’t stop. Adela stared at her phone and then when Kai was just quieting, Mrs. Simmons got on the loudspeaker and said, “The gator has been detained. All y’all head to class.”
Adela stood and slung her bag over her shoulder, and she smiled at me, a smile that meant goodbye, but I couldn’t let it end like this. I needed my shimmer, my treasure.
“Wait!” I called. “I promised some of my friends I’d meet them at the lake after school and I thought maybe you’d wanna come?”
Adela glanced down at Kai, and I wondered if she was just being polite, if she had planned not to ever talk to me again, but then she looked back up at me and nodded.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’d love to.”