I’m so glad Ben Franklin didn’t betray a brother tonight. I didn’t say anything to Sallie, but I was nervous as hell as I walked with her across his bridge. Check it out: in the afternoon, right after school, I went to the Ben Franklin Bridge to strategically place some Post-it love notes I’d written her for Valentine’s Day so that I could bring her there later to see them. As I put the Post-its on the beams and railings, I had this bad feeling that the wind was going to knock them away by the time I came back with Sallie, so I Scotch-taped each Post-it for extra reinforcement. You know how it is with Post-its: their adhesive is mad wimpy. Post-its are basically the paper version of fair-weather friends: they’ll stick with you while shit is mellow, but the minute shit hits the fan, they’re more gone than Vaughn and out of there like Vladimir. Even with the Scotch tape in place, I was still afraid that the wind would be too strong for all the Post-its to hang in there and that a couple of them would get blown away, making my entire love message sound like something from Cookie Monster: Dear Sallie, when kissed inside stomach, you filled life, love you, Happy, and Sallie would be like, “What the hell?” But to my relieved surprise, all the Post-its were on point.
So a deluxe shout-out to Ben Franklin and Scotch tape: wherever you are, thank you for not making a brother look bad.
I know that message I wrote her was kind of corduroy, but a girl like Sallie can legit pull out the poet in you. I think every guy has an inner Walt Whitman. Even the most hardcore, most gangsta brother out there—you show him the right girl and I’ll show you a guy putting a long-stemmed rose inside her favorite book while putting a bow on top of a box of chocolates while practicing a speech peppered with words like “hither” and “whither” and “yonder” and phrases like “let me count the ways” and “till we part.” Maybe that’s why those chocolates are called Whitman’s Samplers?
When I got back home tonight I tried doing my homework but I was still in a Sallie fog, seeing her dark eyes on every page of the Algebra 2 textbook.
What kind of snapped me out of it was my sister, who kept pacing back and forth in front of the living room couch where I was sitting. She usually does that when she has some heavy shit on her mind. Finally I looked up and said, “What’s up with the one-woman march?”
She looked at me and said, “Wanna do a CakeTalk?”
I could tell she wanted me to say yes so I nodded, closed my book, and got up.
We went to the kitchen and I gathered the pan, big bowl, and stirring spoon while Regina collected the eggs, butter, flour, vanilla extract, etc.
The CakeTalk is something she and I usually do on Tuesday nights, but sometimes we do it on other nights when something—it could be anything from a funny piece of scandalous gossip to a serious personal problem—is weighing on us too hard to wait till Tuesday. I guess you could say the CakeTalk really started when she and I were little and our mom used to talk to us about our day while she baked an after-dinner cake; Mom would do all the baking while Regina and I mostly watched but also handed her things as she needed them, all to the sound of classic Philly soul (the O’Jays, Spinners, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes, etc.)—my mother’s favorite music, which played on a CD boom box she kept in a corner of the counter. When Mom got sick, Regina and I continued the CakeTalk, mainly to fix her something that would cheer her up enough to make her forget that she was confined to a bed; but it also gave us a chance to be each other’s therapist and unload our feelings about the mom situation. After our mother passed, Regina and I kept the CakeTalk going: mothers might go away, but not problems, if you can feel me on that. So the CakeTalk is still in business, right down to the Philly soul music.
As Lou Rawls crooned “See You When I Git There” from my sister’s phone, which sat in a corner of the kitchen counter, she cracked the eggs into the big bowl I held out for her.
After cracking the second egg, she finally spoke. “Lemme ask you something. Leona Walls’s campaign slogan—where you stayin’ on that?”
I said, “You mean the You Know She’s Right So Be A Leonite one?”
Regina said, “No, that other shit—Turn Knight Back To Day.”
I actually knew she was talking about that one the whole time. I said, “Real talk? I’m not down with it.”
Cracking the next egg, she said, “Yeah, me neither. But check it out: when I went to Mr. Woolery today to complain, he was all like, ‘I don’t see what’s racist about it. The way I see it, she’s just using a play on words. The name of our school and the dark time of day—Knight, night—and how she wants to symbolically turn the darkness back to the opposite: brightness and hope.’ And so then I was like, ‘Well, the way I see it is, she’s trying to say night is black and day is white, and let’s turn this school white like it was way back in the day, before it let in the Oakville and Woodlawn kids, who are mostly black, and who she said should be kicked out of this school in her speech the other day.’ So then he was like, ‘Regina, I think you’re reading too much into this. I can’t make a girl take down her campaign posters over some subtext that might not even be there. I can only go by what I see, and the poster plainly says Knight to Day, not Black to White.’ And so we start goin’ back and forth like that and after a while, I was just like, ‘Fuck it’ and left. I mean, I didn’t actually say, ‘Fuck it’ to him; I didn’t wanna get my ass suspended, but you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” I said.
She cracked the last egg into the bowl and I started stirring the yolk into the flour and sugar and stuff while she swept a big block of butter up and down a cake pan.
Just to stay real here: I wanted to ask Sallie about that Knight To Day campaign slogan and why her sister had thought of something like that. But I didn’t because I thought maybe I was overthinking it and being paranoid, mistaking charm for harm. Sometimes a baseball bat just wants to play baseball and not beat somebody’s brains out.
But when I heard Regina’s complaint tonight it was kind of a relief to know I wasn’t the only one who saw a fly in the milk Leona was making the school drink.
“. . . have no idea how pissed off I was.” My sister’s voice snapped me out of my daze. “He couldn’t see that she’s just usin’ code words to pretty up her racism.” She turned on the oven, setting the temp to 450, then said, “This is the second bullet this girl has dodged, and I’m tired of it. I mean, check it: if none of the other stuff happened and all she said was that slogan, I’d be down with the whole she-didn’t-mean-it-that-way darkness-to-hope interp. But she also threw shade at not only the Oakville kids but the Woodlawn kids too. My whole thing is this: if you see a fish in the living room—no problem; if you see a fish in the bedroom—a little strange, but no problem; but if you see a fish in the bathroom too, it’s time to say, ‘Something fishy is going on.’ And something fishy is definitely going on with this girl. I mean, we’re all watchin’ a bigotry beanstalk getting taller and taller right in front of us, and nobody’s sayin’ a damn thing. What’s up with that? Just ’cause she’s pretty? Well, fuck that. All this silence is startin’ to hurt my ears. It’s time to bring the noise. It’s time to shut a bitch down.”
I kind of mumbled, “Yeah, I hear you.” I was wondering if this was a good time to tell her that I was madly in love with the sister of this bigotry-beanstalker, but as fired up as Regina was at that moment, you can best believe I kept my mouth shut—at the rate she was going, she was liable to bake me before the cake.
She glanced at my bowl. “Is it ready?”
I looked down at the batter I’d created. “Yeah.”
She pointed at the cake pan on the stove and said, “Okay, pour that shit.”
As I poured the batter into the pan, she said, “So I made a big decision today. And I want you to tell me what you think. And I want you to be straight with me. You know how I roll: Keep It Real Or Keep It Killed.”
I nodded. “I gotcha.”
She opened the oven door. I slid the pan in and she closed it. Then I looked at her, waiting.
She said, “I’ve decided to run for president.”
That was great news, right? So why did my stomach suddenly feel the way it does when I’m on a rollercoaster that’s dropping thousands of feet? As my intestinal insides went down, my eyebrows went up and I said, “On the real?”
She nodded and said, “I gave notice to Mr. Dranger this afternoon. I’m officially In now . . . You think I made a mistake?”
Hoping she didn’t hear the flopping in my stomach, I said, “No. Hell no. If anybody can bring the noise right, it’s you. You’re gonna be large and in charge.”
My sister gave me one of her rare smiles. “Real talk? You think so?”
“Hell yeah,” I said.
She said, “The only thing that’s kinda fuckin’ with my head is, I don’t know all that much about politics. But when it comes to recognizing a racist, all you really need is a brain, not a campaign.”
“That’s what I’m sayin’,” I said.
Then she gave me this weird look. For a long time. She finally said, “So, check it: I was wonderin’ if you could do me a favor—like, a big one. But before I ask, I need to know something.”
That made my heartbeat switch to Olympics sprinter mode, but I played it off like everything was bacon. I nodded and said, “What’s up?”
She said, “Do you agree with me that Leona Walls is runnin’ a racist campaign?”
I nodded. “I agree.”
She said, “Then I was wonderin’ if you’d help me—you know, with my campaign. Be my . . . whatchamacallit. What do they call that?—the person who keeps the campaign organized and running smoothly? Campaign director?”
“Campaign manager?” I said.
“Yeah that’s it. Could you be my campaign manager?” she asked.
There was now an orchestra playing inside me and “No! No! No!” was the only song it knew, but I ignored it and told her, “Okay.”
“For real? You don’t look like you’re sure or something.”
“No, I’m sure,” I said. “I’m down with it. Your campaign manager—I can do that.”
I forgot all about my discomfort when I saw Regina’s smile. This time it was her all-cylinders, full-throttle smile—the one that lights up her whole face and makes you think you’re related to an angel: it’s a smile she breaks out about as often as your family takes out the good china or takes the plastic off the couch—only on the most special of occasions—but when you see it, you always know it was worth the wait.
“Thank you,” she said.
I shrugged and said, “No prob.”
Since the cake was already in the oven, we had to do the Waiting thing now. And as we always do during this phase of CakeTalk, we both leaned against the counter, took out our phones, and started tapping away.
After a while, Regina said, “Love you, lil bro.”
I said, “Love you, big sis.”
We didn’t say anything else until it was time to take the cake out.
ULY
I had my first dream about Sallie this morning. It was beautiful in a mad bizarre way. I was standing on a corner, waiting for a bus at night in some Vegas-type city (neon-lit casino signs were all over the place). When the bus came, I got on and saw Sallie sitting there behind the wheel. For some reason she was dressed like an old-school locomotive driver: visored cap and overalls.
“Sallie?” I said, happy and confused.
She didn’t respond. She just stared at me, closed the double doors, and continued driving. I sat in the first seat right across from her and I watched as she steered the bus. I guess I was waiting for her to recognize me and smile or something, but she kept her stare straight ahead. Then, after a few minutes, she turned to me, grinned, and pressed a gigantic red square button on her dashboard—it was a button I hadn’t noticed before; when she pressed it, it turned green and it blinked with the word wings.
I shook my head and said, “Bullshit.”
Still grinning, she looked at me and nodded.
And suddenly I heard this metallic thump, like something was popping out from both sides of the damn bus.
And the bus started rising, sailing above the highway railing that, just seconds before, had been to the left and right.
I shouted out something but I can’t remember exactly what it was. Sallie laughed as she steered the bus higher and higher into the sky. When the bus was in licking distance of the moon she let go of the wheel, walked over to me, and sat on my lap. I think I said something like, “Wait, what about the bus?” but Sallie ignored the question; she just smiled at me, took off her cap, put it on my head, and gave me this long kiss. As we made out, a part of me wondered when the bus was going to realize it had no driver and drop our asses to a fiery death, but a horrendous crash from the sky didn’t seem worth interrupting a make-out session for, so I kept the kiss going; and the bus didn’t seem to be in much of a dropping mood anyway—it was on some weird kind of autopilot, even though it wasn’t a plane. In the middle of the make-out, I suddenly remembered that a bunch of passengers were watching us, so I tore my lips away from Sallie’s and whispered to her, “Maybe we shouldn’t do this here, in front of everybody.” Sallie whispered, “There’s nobody here” and she pointed behind me; when I turned around I saw that the entire bus, which had been at least half full when I’d gotten on, was now empty. With a smile that some corduroy-ass romance novel might describe as “naughty,” Sallie moved her forehead to mine and whispered, “So, do you want to bake the salad, or should I?” Before I could ask her what she meant, she kissed me again, and just as our tongues were about to touch I heard a voice—that didn’t belong to Sallie—call my name.
“Uly!”
It was a familiar voice.
“Uly!”
A female voice.
“ULY!!”
It sounded like it was coming from outside the flying bus.
“ULY!!!!!”
It was my sister.
Waking me the hell up.
My eyes opened to the anticlimactic sight of the living room and my sister standing over my sofa bed with a fistful of magic markers just inches above my face.
“What?” I murmured.
She said, “I need you up and out. We got some defacin’ to do.”
It took my groggy mind a few seconds to connect her comment to the markers in her hand but before I could even congratulate myself I noticed that there was someone standing behind her: sophomore Narmeen Saad, my sister’s best friend. A stunned blink of my eye was all the time it took for me to go from sleepy to self-conscious. I hate when Regina brings her friends to the apartment while I’m still in bed.
Tightening the blanket around me, I told my sister, “Damn, Jeen. Can’t a brotha get outta bed first before you turn the living room into a tourist attraction? Whassup, Narmeen.”
Narmeen just nodded. She doesn’t talk much. I noticed she was holding a small ladder, but I was too pissed off to ask about it.
When I looked at my watch and saw 5:30 I got even more pissed. I told my sister, “I don’t get up for another thirty minutes. What’s up with this early shit?”
Regina said, “We’re gonna give Miss Leona’s campaign posters a little magic-marker makeover. But we gotta do it before everybody gets there so we’re done before anybody can point a gun. Come on—up and out!”
With my eyes I said, “Just let me sleep for twenty more minutes.”
With her mouth she said, “Did you agree to be my campaign manager last night or not?”
I said, “Well, yeah, but . . . messin’ up somebody’s posters? I ain’t sure I wanna live there.”
Regina said, “Oh, what?—you wanna live in a place full of signs tellin’ us we’re not wanted there? ’Cause that sure as hell ain’t where I’m stayin’.”
I said, “I feel you on that. It’s just—isn’t there something else we can do?”
She nodded. “Oh yeah, there are about thirty things we can do.” She raised the fistful of markers higher. “This just happens to be the first one. Are you down or not?”
After a moment, I nodded. “I’m down.”
She pulled my arm. “Then I need you up and out. Come on, campaign manager!” She thrust the markers into my hand.
When we got to Knight it was so empty you could actually hear echoes in the hallways.
We started with the Freshman Hallway on the first floor, stopping under one of Leona’s turn knight back to day posters. With her foot Narmeen slid the ladder over to my sister, who mounted it, and uncapped a magic marker. I’m sure you’ve heard of plastic surgery. Well, my sister gave Leona’s poster some paper surgery, inserting an L between the B and A in BACK and making the O in TO and the D in DAY bigger so that they looked like one word instead of two. When the magic-marker makeover was done, this is what the poster said:
turn knight black today
Then she moved her marker to a corner of the poster and wrote, in cursive, vote regina gates and circled it.
I knew it was wrong but the shit felt so right.
“Damn, Jeen,” I told her. “That’s cold-blooded.”
“Honey, I’m just gettin’ warmed up,” my sister said. She jabbed two markers down at me. “Here, I need you to do the second floor.”
As I stared at the markers that orchestra inside me piped up again but the music was hard to enjoy because it was playing three songs at the same damn time: “Don’t Do It,” “What Will Sallie Think?” and “But You Promised Your Sister You’d Have Her Back.” As the three songs click-clacked back and forth inside my head I nodded and grabbed the markers.
Regina said, “That’s what’s up. And don’t forget to write ‘Vote Regina Gates.’ Narmeen’s gonna hang down here with me.”
As I performed paper surgery on all of Leona’s second-floor posters I tried to give my conscience some Tylenol by rubber-stamping my brain with the message Relax, You’re Just Trying To Change The World. But here’s the problem with that: when you hold that message in front of the mirror, it looks like this message: You’re Hurting Your Girlfriend’s Sister . . . And Maybe Your Girlfriend Too.
Sallie
Three minutes into school this morning, Leona and I saw that all her turn knight back to day posters had been defaced.
Five minutes into school this morning, I saw that the posters had been defaced by Regina Gates.
Regina Gates.
Also Known As: Uly’s older sister.
Uly.
Also Known As: my boyfriend.
Regina Gates.
My boyfriend’s sister.
She’s running for president.
Against Leona Walls.
Leona Walls.
Also Known As: my sister.
Six minutes into school this morning, I felt like throwing up.
Seven minutes into school this morning, I wondered exactly when Uly’s sister made the decision to run against my sister.
Seven-and-a-half minutes into school this morning, I wondered why Uly hadn’t told me his sister wanted to run against my sister.
Seven-and-three-quarter-minutes into school this morning, I figured he had a good reason for not telling me, but I wondered what it was.
Eight minutes into school this morning, I took out my phone to text Uly.
Eight minutes and two seconds into school this morning, I had to put away my phone and calm down my sister, who was going from poster to poster, screaming, “I can’t believe she did this!!”
Twelve minutes into school this morning, we saw that the posters on the second floor were defaced too.
Fifteen minutes into school this morning, we saw that the third floor had a lot in common with the second floor and first floor.
Twenty minutes into school this morning, I realized I was three minutes late for English, but, being my sister’s campaign manager, I felt I couldn’t desert my post, so I walked shotgun with her as she stormed toward Mr. Dranger’s office.
Leona barged into the office, practically stomped toward Mr. Dranger’s desk, and showed him a defaced poster she’d torn from the wall. Glaring at him, she said, “Did you see this?!”
With his oversize polka-dot mug suspended in coffee interruptus between his desk and his mouth, he squinted at the revised words on Leona’s poster then leaned back in his chair and said, “I guess I just did.” He didn’t seem as agitated as I thought he’d be. Actually, he didn’t seem agitated at all.
“‘Turn Knight Black Today’?” my sister said, quoting the poster. “She’s disqualified now, right?”
“Absolutely not,” Mr. Dranger said.
My sister’s eyes went way wide and she held her defaced poster higher. “You’re still letting her run after what she did to all my posters??”
“Absolutely,” Mr. Dranger said, still leaning back in his chair, now cradling the back of his head with his hands.
My sister’s eyes went even wider and she said, “How can you let her stay?? This is school property she defaced!”
Mr. Dranger said, “Uh, actually, it’s your property she defaced.”
Leona said, “But it was hanging here in the school, so doesn’t that make it the school’s property too??”
“Did the school pay for it?” Mr. Dranger asked.
Leona said, “Well, no, but—”
“Who paid for it?” he asked.
Leona said, “Well, I did, but—”
“So that makes it your property,” he said. “The school just lent you some wall space so you could temporarily hang it up. Think about it: if you go to a club and hang your coat on one of their coatracks and somebody rips up your coat, was it the club’s property that was destroyed, or yours?”
My sister was stumped to silence. And she wasn’t the only one.
She broke the silence with a crumple of the poster and said, “It’s so not fair that she gets away with this.”
Still leaning back in his chair, Mr. Dranger shrugged and said, “Welcome to democracy. It’s a muzzle-free zone. Everybody has a say.”
Pointing at her half-crumpled poster, my sister told him, “But she’s saying this whole school should be black!”
Mr. Dranger shrugged and said, “Well, some could say your original poster implied that this whole school should be white.”
The space between my eyebrows got more crumpled than my sister’s poster. I asked him, “What do you mean?”
He gave me that look people give you when they’re pretty sure you’re an idiot but not 100 percent sure. “Knight and Day. Night equals dark, black. Day equals light, white.” He looked back at my sister and said, “Maybe you didn’t mean it that way, but some students of color thought you did.” He pointed at the crumpled poster in her hands. “Well, now you know how they felt.”
With a sarcastic smile, my sister said, “Oh my God, that is so . . .” I’m not sure what else she was going to say, but whatever it was, I guess she decided it wasn’t worth saying. So instead she said, “So what’re you saying—if I put up some more of these posters, and she defaces them again, you’re gonna let her keep getting away with it?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” Mr. Dranger said. “If you don’t want her to directly say this whole school should be black, then don’t indirectly say this whole school should be white. Other than that, I don’t know what else to tell you.”
I nodded, looked at my sister, and told her, “Maybe you should just stick with the Leonite one.”
Leona snapped, “Whatever” and stormed out of the office.
I looked back at our advisor and said, “Uh, thank you, Mr. Dranger.”
When I caught up to Leona in the hall she said, “That hack asshole. He probably gets a hundred grand a year. To do what? Sit on his fat ass and drink coffee from a dirty mug and give bullshit advice.”
I said, “I think he was just trying to—”
“And you’re supposed to be my campaign manager. Why didn’t you back me up?” she snapped.
I couldn’t believe my ears. “I did back you up. I’m, like, ten minutes late to class right now from backing you up. And I think he’s right.” I pointed at her dead poster. “She never would’ve done this if you hadn’t done that.” I pointed above at one of the few knight to day posters that Uly’s sister hadn’t gotten to.
“Whatever,” my sister said as she disappeared down a staircase, leaving me alone in the hallway with nothing to keep me company but a bunch of thoughts that thoughtlessly tormented me: Why is my sister mad at me? Why didn’t I know that her Knight To Day slogan is racist? Is Uly mad at me for not knowing? Does he think I was the one who came up with the slogan? Is Mr. Bauer going to be mad at me for being eleven minutes late? Were we supposed to read up to page thirty-seven or forty-seven in Handmaid’s Tale last night? Is he going to be in one of his sadistic moods today and randomly call on people and ask plot-related questions? Why am I still standing in this hallway?
I eventually stopped standing in the hallway and went to class, and over the next few minutes and hours, discovered the following three things:
When I got home I saw Ashley and her boyfriend Skip lying on the floor, gluing glitter to one of my sister’s LEONITE campaign posters, but they seemed to be gluing lips more than glitter.
“Hey guys,” I said.
“Hey Sallie,” Ashley said, coming up for breath from her make-outing. “Hey, did you hear? John Smith is running.”
“Yeah, I heard,” I said. Then I sort of looked around the room and said, “Where is she?”
Ashley gave me a confused look. “She? John Smith is a he.”
I said, “No, I meant—my sister. Where is she?”
“Oh, she’s upstairs with my brother.” She went back to gluing lips more than glitter.
As I walked to Leona’s bedroom Wilk walked out of it, closing the door behind him.
“Hey,” I greeted as I walked past him.
But he wouldn’t let me walk past. He was sort of blocking the door.
“What?” I said.
“It’s not a good time,” he said.
I said, “What do you mean it’s not a good time?”
“She needs to be alone right now,” he said. “She’s getting ready for tomorrow’s Speechathon and she doesn’t need any distractions.”
I said, “Okay, first of all, I’m not a distraction, I’m her sister. And second of all, how about getting the fuck out of my way so I can go inside and talk to her?”
He stared at me for a moment, then he grinned and said, “You know, if she’d taken my advice, you wouldn’t be her campaign manager. You should never send a girl to do a man’s job.”
I said, “Well, when you see a man, you can offer him the job. But for right now, I’m the one punching in. That’s a hint, by the way.”
He pointed at her door and said, “She’s really upset right now. And whenever she’s upset, I’m upset. You know what She’s Upset plus I’m Upset equals? An ex-campaign manager.”
I said, “Well, you know what She’s Upset plus I’m Upset plus I Told Her You Upset Me equals? An ex-boyfriend. Now, get out my way.”
He said, “All I’m asking, Sallie, is that you do your job so my girlfriend can see a win this June.”
I said, “And all I’m asking, Wilk, is that you get away from this door so you can see tomorrow.”
He stared at me for another moment then he moved away from the door, finally.
I really don’t know what got into him tonight. He and my sister have been dating for about a year and for the most part, he and I have gotten along, but sometimes he treats her like her name is Wilk’s Property instead of Leona Walls and it really pisses me off.
When I walked into my sister’s bedroom she was pacing like pacing was going to be banned after tonight.
I leaned against her dresser and said, “What’s wrong? You worried about John Smith?”
She gave the thought a dismissive wave and said, “I could beat him with my eyes closed.”
I sort of cringed and said, “That’s probably not the best choice of words.”
She stopped pacing and shot me an irritated glare. “What, everybody’s supposed to forget what a big, bullying, stuck-up asshole he was before he was blind? Two years of beating up freshmen and yanking down girls’ skirts, and we’re all supposed to Clear History just ’cause he was lucky enough to go through a windshield and slam his head against a brick wall one fine summer day when he was texting instead of watching the road? I don’t think so.”
I said, “Okay, calm down.”
She started pacing again.
I said, “So what is it?”
“Regina Gates!—who else!” she blared. “She ruined all my Knight To Day posters and now I can’t put any more up, all ’cause of her race-card victim bullshit! But that’s okay. She wants to break my life, but I’m not gonna let her. I never liked her anyway. Always walking around with that smug look on her face, like her shit smells like strawberry shortcake. I can’t wait for her to go down, and the only face she’ll be looking up at is mine. She just messed with the wrong white girl. I’m gonna be president this June, and I will destroy anybody who tries to get in the way, whether it’s Regina or John Smith or anybody else who adds their name to the running.”
I said, “It’ll just be those two. Today was the deadline.”
She nodded and said, “Then the skeletal remains of two people will be at the school entrance, come June.”
I said, “Okay, well, on that happy note, why don’t we go over your speech for tomorrow. Have you written it yet? Let me take a—”
“No, no,” she snapped, “I don’t write down my speeches. I like to speak as it comes to me. It’s more fresh that way. If I write it, I’ll have to read from it, and that’ll make me sound too mechanical and rehearsed. I want everybody to feel like I’m having a conversation with them right in my living room or something.”
I could feel my throat getting dry as a vision of my boyfriend’s offended face crash-landed in my head. I gulped away the dryness and asked my sister, “You sure that’s a good idea, after what happened the last time?”
Leona threw another irritated look at me.
“I just don’t want you to get misunderstood again,” I explained.
My sister stopped pacing; she picked up one of the hairbrushes from her bureau and started brushing her hair in the bureau’s mirror. “Look, I know what I’m doing,” she told me. “You’re my campaign manager, not my babysitter. You handle the campaign, I’ll handle my speeches.”
I looked at my watch and thought about my best friend. I really needed to talk to her. When you have Sister stuff and Boyfriend stuff on your mind, the best person to talk to isn’t always your sister or boyfriend. So I told Leona, “Well, I’m gonna head over to Dandee’s now.”
My sister put down her brush and looked at me like I’d just confessed a mass murder. “You’re leaving?”
I said, “Yeah. Why?”
She said, “The Speechathon is tomorrow and you’re leaving??”
I half-threw up my hands and said, “I don’t know what you want me to do, Lee. I offered to help you with your speech but you Swiped Left on that. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to—”
“You know what? Just go,” she said, and went back to brushing her hair.
I moved toward her. “Look, if you want me to stay, I can st—”
“I said go!” she snapped. “Have a dandy time at Dandee’s.”
She kept brushing her hair in the mirror. I kept standing there, waiting to see if she was going to move her eyes from mirror to me, but she didn’t; that’s when I knew she really wanted me to go. So I went.
Dandee lives on the other side of town, and since Collingswood is a fairly small town, I didn’t have too far to go.
When she opened the door—she’s always the one who opens the door at her house—she said, “You look weird. Something’s wrong.”
I nodded and said, “Your eyes are working.”
As always she led me to her basement bedroom. She actually has a regular non-basement bedroom on the second floor but she’s been running a computer-repair business since she was fourteen and she persuaded her parents to bedroom-ify the basement for her so she can dream and American-Dream in the same space.
I could actually fill up an entire journal on Dandee. She’s the closest thing to a superhero I’ve ever known, right down to her full name: Dandelion Majestyk. That’s the actual name that appears on her birth certificate. She showed me once. I’ve always been secretly jealous of her name. Not that I hate my name, but, come on: Sallie Walls? It’s so bland and beige you can practically taste the vanilla. Sallie Walls knits lace place mats. Sallie Walls bakes lattice-topped apple pies and uses them to welcome new people to the neighborhood. But Dandelion Majestyk? Shit. Dandelion Majestyk runs up walls and cartwheels from rooftop to rooftop in the middle of the night and can make stubbly faced hard-bitten criminals tearfully confess with just a lift of her left eyebrow and she stalks through the countryside in shiny black leather boots in constant lookout for a chance to preserve truth, justice, and the American Way.
Okay, maybe she doesn’t do all of that, but I swear, if she ever told me she did, I wouldn’t need too much convincing to be convinced.
Even though I’ve known her for three years, there’s still a cloak of mystery she keeps around herself; the cloak has gotten thinner the longer I’ve known her, but the cloak is still there. She only wears black clothes, but whenever I ask her why, she just shrugs and says, “Why not?” And on every black shirt she wears—and when I say every, I mean absolutely nothing less than every—there’s this message:
UNSCRAMBLE:
ielv
It could be either “live,” “evil,” “veil,” or “vile,” but every time I ask her, she just says, “I can’t believe you even have to ask” like it’s the most obvious thing ever.
And I’ve never seen her parents. I’ve seen pictures of them in the living room, but I’ve never seen them face to face. Oh, I’ve heard them—sometimes they’ll call out things to her from upstairs (“Dandee, don’t forget to give that form to Mr. Woolery!” or “Dandee, there’s ice cream in the freezer!” or “Dandee, I sewed up that hole on your pants—they’re in your closet!”), but by the time I come back up to the living room, they’re gone. It’s actually really creepy when you think about it; that’s why I don’t think too much about it. Dandee says both of her parents are agoraphobic—they avoid people and the outdoors; whenever the school needs to have a conference with them, they do it either by Skype or by sending Dandee’s aunt as an understudy. So I guess it’s possible they really are agoraphobic; but I wonder if something else might be going on. My sister thinks her parents are sunlight-hating Satan worshippers who are using their only daughter as a decoy—you know, to lure me in and make me comfortable enough to let my guard down so they can swoop down and slice me open as a sacrifice to Lucifer. “You better stop going over there,” Leona is always telling me. “One of these days you won’t come back.”
But I keep going over there, because—to quote Dandee—Why not? I guess I see her not only as my best friend but also as sort of an Amusement Park with a pulse. She’s mystery and intrigue and suspense all rolled up into a sixteen-year-old girl. With her, you get vanishing, voice-only parents and a basement bedroom and black clothes and coded scrambled messages. And admission is completely free. Who wouldn’t keep coming?
And there’s one more thing about her that I probably shouldn’t tell you, but I’ll tell you anyway. About a year ago, she told me she blackmailed Mr. Baumgartner—one of the Tech guys at our school—into giving her a code that will allow her access to the computer account of pretty much every teacher at Knight High. So if she wants to know what websites Mr. Lebrock visits during his spare time, she can know it. If she’s curious about what dating sites Ms. Spadaro visits during her lunch breaks, she’s not curious for long. Dandee won’t tell me exactly what “dirt” she has on Mr. Baumgartner, and, to be honest with you, I’m sort of afraid to know. I’m afraid it might make me lose respect for him or her or him and her. Especially after she wrote this short story last semester for our creative writing class where this sixteen-year-old girl named Diana dyes her hair red and puts in green contacts and pretends to be eighteen years old and sets up an OkCupid account for the sole purpose of meeting up with her school’s Technology Director, who’s also on the site; he meets up with her and they have sex and it’s only after the sex that she reveals to him that she’s a sophomore at his school and that she will tell everybody everything if he doesn’t give her two of the computers from the computer lab. I pray to God that it was only a story and not a memory.
And that’s not all. She also has a habit of secretly recording people—usually students—with her phone if she catches them doing or saying something they probably shouldn’t be doing or saying. And then she stores all the recorded videos’ links on one of her computers in a file called BeigeMail. Why BeigeMail? She said, “I only use it against the person if they screw me over—like, steal my rabbit or borrow money from me and not pay it back or bump into me without saying excuse me. Blackmail is when you’re doing the Screwing Over. But with BeigeMail, you’re the victim.”
If you think Dandee’s BeigeMail thing doesn’t work, think again. Just ask Shannon Filarski. Shannon once called Dandee a “zombie freak” in front of the whole class and everybody laughed. Well, it just so happened that Dandee had recorded Shannon picking her nose in the back of the library about six months earlier and now she had a reason to use the footage. So she sent the link to Shannon’s boyfriend, who got grossed out and promptly broke up with Shannon because shallowness. So now it’s Shannon who looks like a zombie as she wanders around the school, wishing she’d never called Dandee a zombie.
So I never know what Dandee is going to tell me when I visit her. But on this particular night, it was me who had something to tell her.
“So what’s wrong?” she asked as I sat down. She handed me a can of lime Red Bull and sat on top of a broken computer monitor, looking intently up at me. Dandee doesn’t have a lot of friends at school—a lot of kids, especially girls, have told me they think she’s too weird: her intense, unblinking stare, her almost robotic voice, and her black clothes are just too much for them. But if they only knew what a great listener and an even greater advice-giver she is, they’d know they’ve been swimming past a buried treasure.
“So, I have to tell you something,” I said. “You’re the first person I’m telling.”
She said, “Okay.” She took a sip of her lime Red Bull and waited.
With a smile, I said, “Uly Gates and I . . . We’re a Thing now.”
Rubbing the excess drink from her mouth, she said, “I sort of figured that. But I wasn’t sure. I mean, you two seem to always be together at lunch and in the hallways. But I just figured you two were working on a project or something. So you and him are really a Thing, huh?”
I nodded. “Really a Thing.” I could feel my face getting warm with the good-blush. It felt so great to say it out loud.
She said, “You have a thing for black guys.”
That took me by surprise. “Really? I don’t think I do.”
“You do,” she said. “All the guys you’ve been attracted to are black.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
She said, “LaKeith Williams—black. Dwayne Barkley—black. Kenya McCormick—black.”
“What about Raj—he’s not black,” I said.
“Indian—close enough. You definitely have a thing for dark skin.”
I said, “Really? I never saw it that way. I just saw all of them as these cute, funny, smart guys whose skin just happened to be darker than mine. But I wouldn’t say it’s, like, a preference or anything. I mean, if you go to a vending machine and you always pick Pepsi or Dr Pepper, it doesn’t mean you’d never drink Sprite or Sierra Mist. You just happen to have more of a taste for Pepsi or Dr Pepper most of the time.”
“I hate soda,” Dandee said, in sort of a daze. I’m not really sure what her point was, but maybe her point didn’t matter because right then she looked up, smiled at me, tapped my knee, and said, “So give me some deets. What’s he like? How’s the kissing? How’s the . . . everything?”
I spent the next ten minutes telling her everything about the Everything: how Uly is the Real Deal, how I never thought Luck liked me so much that it would let me have a Variety Pack boyfriend: romantic, funny, cute, nice, edgy, stylish, loves The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—all in the same package.
When I was done, Dandee—who’d been hanging on my every word—sat back and got rid of her smile. She said, “You know something? I just realized I’m offended. I really hate you right now.”
My mouth fell open. “What? Why? What did I do?”
She said, “You’ve been dating this guy since November and you’re just now telling me?”
I reached out and took her hand. “Please don’t hate me, Dandee. It’s just, I didn’t wanna say anything till I was really sure. Too many times I’ve told you I’ve met The One, only to not have him be The One, and it’s embarrassing. And I just didn’t wanna be embarrassed again.” I made my eyes go beggar. “Forgive me?”
She said, “No. Actually, yes.”
“Thank you.”
We raised our Red Bull cans and clinked them together in a toast, then sipped.
When she was done sipping she said, “But something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
She said, “Don’t tell me. I wanna guess.”
I said, “Okay.”
She said, “Your sister is running for president.”
I nodded. “Keep going.”
She said, “You’re her campaign manager.”
I nodded. “Keep going.”
She said, “Regina Gates is also running for president.”
I nodded. “Keep going.”
She said, “Uly is Regina’s brother.”
I nodded. “Keep going.”
She said, “Which means you’re the campaign manager of your sister and the girlfriend of the brother of your sister’s opposition. Which basically means you’ve been touching tongues with someone from the enemy camp.”
I thumbs-upped her, then I said, “How screwed am I?”
She said, “It sounds worse than it is.”
I relief-sighed. “Really?”
“No, actually, you’re pretty screwed.”
“Damn.” I looked at her. “On a scale of One To Ten: How screwed?”
She said, “I’d give it a Nine.”
“Wow, that’s bad,” I said.
She said, “Well, it’s a Soft Nine.”
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
She said, “Well, you’re screwed, but not that badly. It’s the sort of thing that’s only a problem if you let it be one.”
I said, “How do I do that?—or how do I not do that? I mean, I don’t wanna stop being my sister’s campaign manager but I also don’t wanna stop being Uly’s girlfriend. But his sister and my sister . . . Isn’t that a . . . What do they call that? A something of interest?”
“Conflict Of Interest,” Dandee said.
“Conflict Of Interest! Isn’t it a conflict of interest?”
Dandee shrugged and said, “Only if you’re conflicted about finding both of ’em interesting. Your sister already knows you’re dating him, right?”
It was time to hang my head in shame. “I haven’t told her yet,” I mumbled.
Dandee’s eyes almost never go wide, but tonight they did. “You haven’t told her yet? The screwometer just went from Nine to Ten.”
“No!” I pleaded.
“Why haven’t you told her?” she asked.
I sort of shrugged and said, “I guess for the same reason I didn’t tell you . . . Does that really put me at a Ten?”
She said, “Most definitely. But here’s how you can get it back to a Nine.”
“I want the soft Nine,” I said.
Dandee held up her hand and said, “Well that’s what I’m about to tell you—how to get it back to a soft Nine. It’s actually pretty simple: just tell your sister you’re dating him. But you have to do it now. The earlier you do it, the less unpleasant it’ll be later. And another plus about telling her is that you’ll be putting the bowling ball back in her lane: when you tell her you’re swapping spit with the enemy camp, she’ll either fire you as campaign manager or she’ll swallow her disgust and keep you on. Either way, the decision-making burden is all on her shoulders. See what I’m saying?”
I nodded. “I see.” I thought for a moment, then said, “I’m gonna tell her.”
Dandee said, “Bacon.” She stood up and headed toward the forest of computers at the back of the room. “So let me tell you about Mr. Morrison. You have got to see his OkCupid profile.” Tapping on the keyboard, she said, “You won’t believe what he wants his dates to wear when they meet him . . .”