While I was in France a new family moved into the vacant house next door. Soon after I got home I met their eldest daughter, Stacey, a girl my age who hit me smooth, sweet, and strong, like a shot of single malt scotch.
Stacey was from Alabama. She was white, but she knew Black people. As she told me stories from her childhood in the South, I secretly interrogated her words for every clue, studying what she knew to learn more about my own kind.
She had a stash of Prince’s cassette tapes her parents forbade her to listen to. One tape was actually contraband—illegal for distribution in America—but Stacey was the kind of girl who could get her hands on such things. Sitting in my car with Stacey we listened to “Little Red Corvette,” “Soft and Wet,” “Bambi,” “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” and my favorite, “Controversy.”
Stacey and I pierced our ears in her upstairs bathroom with some blocks of ice and a safety pin. She was my first transgressive friend, transgressing her parents’ rules, transgressing rules for girls, transgressing whiteness. She crossed all kinds of borders into the liminal space, which is where she found me—floundering about like I was learning to swim and looking for something stable to hold on to.