Sobechi knows the power his voice has over them.
Sure, the uniform helps, though it’s still a little loose around the waist and his shoulders haven’t quite grown all the way into his jacket, and the khaki pants spill onto his dress shoes. But his striped tie is expertly knotted, and a silk kerchief pokes its head out of his jacket pocket to provide just the right amount of accent to the whole outfit. He’s good with his hands, though he knows he needs to get better. He can do the claw to accentuate a point, can spread his arms just wide enough to highlight how far ahead his argument is from his opponent’s, can do that thing where it seems he’s holding the entirety of his point in one hand like a snowball, tight and succinct enough for the judges to see and analyze and nod their heads at. But it’s his voice, he knows. His voice does the heavy lifting.
His mother sometimes makes him practice his speeches with his eyes closed. At first, he protested. “Mummy, if I can’t see my audience, how can I tell how they are hearing my words?”
“Eh-eh, are you talking with your eyes, now? Are you seeing with your mouth? It is called de-bate, not SEE-bate. Now, go on. Start over.”
And, just like that, she had taken apart his position. And it had helped. Late at night, when he used to practice in front of his mirror, perfecting his posture and trying to keep his hands from wandering, his eyes would rove everywhere. He would get so nervous, staring at himself. When he would pause, he would look at the ceiling, and the first few times he did it in front of Mum, she had taken off her slipper and smacked him over the head with it.
When Sobechi practiced in front of both his parents, Daddy would usually have his back turned, working pots and pans over the stove, and the familiar, pungent smell of beans and peppers Mum used for moi-moi would fill the air. You could open all the windows in the house and fan your arms until they were about to fall off, and you wouldn’t be rid of the smell.
Then, over dinner, they would critique his performance. Daddy would ladle the bean pudding, shaped like slanted pyramids, onto everyone’s plates while Mum went straight to the chase. “You shuffle, left oo right, ugu left oo right, like ants ah live in your pants. You cut your hand this way; oya, cut it like this.” Her hands and arms dance, and Sobechi wonders what on earth speech she’s trying to give. “And you hunch, always. You hunch like you fi enter small small room. Stand up your back.” She demonstrates in her chair, makes her spine into a pillar holding up the sky.
Daddy occasionally glances up from his fried rice and moi-moi to smirk at Sobechi during the critique session. Solidarity.
But it’s Mummy’s words that live inside Sobechi as he speaks now to his audience. He has given this closing statement enough times that the words just come out of him. He doesn’t even hear them anymore.
Then the rapturous applause.
The clapping continues long enough that Sobechi knows his team has won. Even before they make the announcement, he can hear their victory. Just like Mummy taught him to.
The center judge, an older white man with a head full of silver hair, shuffles the papers before him. His face looks like it was carved out of a cliff. Sobechi knows it intimidates the others, his teammates and his opponents alike. But he recognizes that type of face. That impassive expression that betrays nothing. That waits for you to make the mistake. But that man is on their side. He has been converted. So has the African American woman to his right, and the older white woman to that center judge’s left.
The center judge clears his throat. “The committee will take fifteen minutes to review the arguments made by both teams, then will announce its decision.” He bangs the gavel, and everyone starts moving at once.
Coach Carter emerges from the wings and beckons the team, and they huddle backstage. Angelica moves slower than the rest of them, head bowed low, and Coach puts a hand to her shoulder. “Angie, hey, you did fine.”
She has her fists balled at her sides, shoulders tense beneath her suit jacket. She’s practically trembling. “Fine? I botched our entire argument. I couldn’t remember point number two and had to skip literally the most important part of my speech.” Tears well up in her eyes, and Coach places his arm around her shoulder and pulls her in, whispering, “It’s okay, Angie. It’s okay.”
Grayson has already loosened his tie. He smells victory in the air too, but he reacts entirely different. He lets himself go, messes up his blond hair a bit and sticks his tongue out as he drapes an arm over Sobechi.
“Not that it matters,” Grayson says too loud. “Slam-Dunk Sobe put the team on his back. As usual!” At a sharp look from Angelica, Grayson raises his hands in self-defense. “Look, we got this in the bag. It’s a Reynolds Wrap. You see how they’re clapping for us out there?”
“For him,” Angelica growls.
“Hey,” Coach says. “We’re a team, okay? We win and lose as a team.”
But Sobechi pays no attention to them. He looks at the curtain, looks past it. His lips move silently, going over the words he’s spent weeks memorizing, the bits of improvisation he’s sprinkled throughout, which lines landed, which ones didn’t, whether that joke should have been moved elsewhere, whether he emphasized the right syllables in the right words in the right sentence. He’s already thinking about the next round. Nationals.
But the biggest reason he doesn’t confer with his teammates is that he has to rest his voice.
Kids stream out of the arts center into the waiting arms of their parents, some sobbing, others completely limp, unable to move their arms and hold the parents who hug them so tightly. Sobechi’s mother, in a yellow-patterned gown and gele so bright her outfit practically glows in the night, waits by their Subaru Legacy. Her smile, when she sees the plaque in Sobechi’s hands proclaiming him the best Individual Interlocutor of the Northeast Consortium Regional Debate Competition, is genuine. Even after all this time, no matter how many of these he brings home, Mummy’s smile is genuine.
“Come here, my son,” she says, arms wide open.
Coach isn’t far behind. “Mrs. Onyekachi, your son was a wonder to listen to once again.”
Sobechi’s mother’s dimples show when she smiles. “Why, thank you, Coach. He practices relentlessly, always so focused.” Her Nigerian accent has practically disappeared. In its place is the British inflection Sobechi uses during competitions. It gives their consonants sharp edges. She switches into it so swiftly that it’s like she never left England all those years ago to meet Daddy in America. “We are so very proud.”
“With a voice like that, and with his skills at oratory, he’d make an excellent lawyer,” Coach says.
Mrs. Onyekachi laughs with a hand to her chest. “Or a minister.” She hugs Sobechi tight to her side. “His cousin is a pastor in Providence, Rhode Island. We say he learned how to talk reading the Bible.”
“Oh.” Coach Carter chuckles. “Well, either way, Sobechi is very gifted, but you already know that. Sobechi, make sure to have some fun next weekend, all right? We won’t start prepping for Nationals until next month, so enjoy your time off, all right?” He winks at Sobechi. “A pleasure, as always, Mrs. Onyekachi.”
“The pleasure is mine, Coach,” she says.
The ride home passes in silence, except for the soft whispering of Sobechi in the passenger’s seat redoing his arguments.
When they round the corner into their neighborhood, Sobechi sees a car, a van, and a U-Haul truck outside the house next to theirs, and a family carrying things indoors. A man and his wife struggling with a large couch, a girl holding a plastic bag full of various knickknacks in her teeth, her arms laden with totes and other assorted baggage.
“Ah, I knew they’d sold that house,” Mrs. Onyekachi says as they pull into their driveway.
Sobechi stares, doesn’t know why he’s so entranced. It’s nighttime, so he can’t see all of the things the new family’s moving inside.
His mother nudges him in his ribs. “Oya, go and help them carry their things.”
Sobechi is exhausted, but he knows better than to complain, so he climbs out of car, puts his plaque back on the passenger’s seat, and heads their way.
“Oya, come come come.”
Sobechi comes back so that Mummy, through the driver’s-side window, can fix his tie. “But, Mummy, I am going to carry things and sweat. Why do I need to fix my tie?”
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” she replies.
When she finishes, Sobechi straightens his back and walks over stiffly, waving when he gets close enough. The man Sobechi assumes to be the father glances over and stops in his tracks, nearly dropping the shelves he’s carrying. “Oh, hey!” he grunts with a smile. “You must be our neighbor!”
Sobechi sticks his hand out. “Sobechi Onyekachi. Pleased to meet you.”
“Alphonse, or just Al.” The father wobbles, manages to sneak a sweaty hand out for a quick, limp handshake. “I told Eve we weren’t gonna be the only Black family on the block!”
“May I help?”
The father glances at the shelves and laughs. “This might be a little heavy. Uh, my niece might need some help with her band equipment.” He pivots slightly. “Hey, Dez! Come meet our neighbors!”
By now, Mum is out of the car, and Daddy is with her, wearing a suit jacket and jeans but with the top button of his dress shirt undone. While they’re making introductions and Alphonse wobbles under the weight of his shelves, Sobechi cranes his neck and sees a shape moving by the U-Haul.
Out of the shadows of the U-Haul’s belly comes a girl who looks more or less his age, maybe a little older, black, hair combed down so that it covers one eye. She’s dressed in all black with a chain from her belt to her front pocket jingling while she drags a big, square-shaped thing backward, occasionally glancing over her shoulder.
“Al, what is it?”
She disappears for a little, and Sobechi is left to wonder what on earth is the relationship between Dez and Alphonse that allows Dez to address him by his first name (and not even his full name, at that!) and not catch a fiery slap across the face. In a minute she’s back, and she stares directly at Sobechi, sizes him up. “You sure you can help me lift that? It’s heavy, and you’re a little . . . skinny.”
Was she going to lift it herself? Sobechi wonders, almost in shock. “I can help!” he says at last. He can’t help but sound offended. Skinny!
“’Kay. I’ll climb back in, push a little bit, then you can get the other side. Ready?”
She hops back into the U-Haul, and immediately, they’re at work. Her voice is husky, deeper than any girl’s voice he’s ever heard before, with a little bit of a rasp, like it’s being dragged over something. Maybe she needs water. Sobechi will make sure to offer her some when they’ve finished.
“What is this thing?” Sobechi asks, his long, narrow back already aflame from the effort of carrying it inside and down two flights of stairs.
“It’s my amp. Well, one of them.”
Sobechi gulps. “One of them?”
Dez squints at him after they set the thing down in a large room that’s already a jungle of cables and what looks like pieces of a drum set and a whole bunch of other sticks and cords and instruments he’s never seen before. Then she laughs with her whole body, and her voice changes, becomes thicker yet more musical. The raggedness has vanished. “Heavy, wasn’t it.”
She sticks her hand out. “Desirée. Or Dez, for short.”
This close and in the light, he sees how beautiful she is. She wears no makeup; the skin of her face is a smooth, unblemished brown. Her hazel eyes shine. Her body, with its muscles and confidence, seems to own the air around it. It seems almost wrong to call her a girl.
“Sobechi,” he manages to say, holding her hand, dry yet firm when it grips his.
“Nice to meet you.” She jerks her head toward the stairs. “Now, let’s get the rest of it. It’s not all that heavy.” She laughs. It’s too warm outside for the full black outfit she wears. Her long-sleeve T-shirt, worn gray at the elbows and with faded lettering on the front, must have been baggy on her once upon a time, but now it hugs an athletic body as tall as his but . . . fuller.
By the end, after all the moving and the overlong greetings among the adults and Sobechi brushing his teeth and showering and after his nightly prayer with Mum and Daddy, when he’s lying in bed, he does not even notice how he can barely move his arms anymore or how much his back is paining him. The only thing he sees, staring straight through the ceiling, is Desirée’s face. He smiles, then realizes with shock the reason she feels so different.
She’s the first Black girl he has ever known who wasn’t somehow related to him. Suddenly, thoughts climb over themselves in his head, a confusion of hopes and fears and wondering more tangled than the wires in the room with all that music equipment. His body is warm with a different kind of fire now.
He must see her again.
Even though it’s Saturday, Mummy has Sobechi up early. First the sound—SOBEEEECHI!—and only after Mummy’s voice has echoed several times through the house does he smell the jollof rice she’s making.
When he makes it down to the kitchen, containers are already filled almost to bursting. Mum has brought out one of her fine ceramic bowls, a large one with flower patterns and a top that sits snugly on it.
“For the neighbors?” Sobechi asks his mother, leaning over her shoulder.
She busies herself with readying the containers. “Bring the big one over to greet our new neighbors. And tell them if they would like to come over tonight, they are welcome.”
“Yes, Mummy,” he says, slipping his hands under the big dish and making sure to cradle it properly in his arms.
“And speak correctly. I don’t want to hear later that you were speaking all jagga-jagga.”
He nods and assumes a straight face all the way to Desirée and Alphonse’s front door.
Lifting one knee up and tempting fate, he manages to poke a finger at the doorbell. It swings open and Desirée stands in the doorway, coarse but straight hair in her face, clothes loose on her frame. So she is one of these teenagers who get to sleep in on Saturdays. Sobechi has heard of these people.
“Good morning,” Sobechi says, smiling cheerily like in those Colgate commercials. “Is Mr. . . .” He panics. He didn’t get Al’s last name. “Um . . .” He does not dare use the man’s first name.
She slaps her forehead. “Oh, duh. You mean my uncle. No, he’s out. Running some errands or whatever, I dunno. Here. Let me get that.”
Before he can properly protest, she’s taken the dish from him and turns to head back inside. “Wow, this smells good. Oh, hey, come on in. The place is messy, and I, like, just woke up, but it’s not like I was getting ready to go anywhere.”
Nothing she says makes sense to Sobechi. Why did she not let him carry the plate inside like a gentleman? How is it nine thirty in the morning and she is still in her pink pajama pants? Does she greet all strangers like this?
Inside, the place is cool and almost odorless, with cardboard boxes everywhere, and only some of the furniture is unpacked. Desirée places the dish on the kitchen countertop. “Oh, by the way, thanks for helping last night. It would’ve taken so much longer if it was just me and Al. Eve checked out after they brought the couch in. Al’s friend.” She opens the top of the dish and sniffs. “Hey, I got a friend coming over. Maybe you know her? Goes to school around here? Dominique Reyes?”
Sobechi’s mind darts in a dozen different directions. Does he know someone who knows Desirée? Who could that person possibly be? Dominique Reyes? He shrugs.
“Anyway, we’re gonna jam for a little bit if you wanna meet her.”
“Yes,” Sobechi manages.
She smiles at him, and it’s perfect. “Cool,” she says, then fetches some spoons from a drawer. She hands him one, then, with the other, starts digging into the jollof rice.
Sobechi’s eyes widen in horror.
She sees his face out of the corner of her eye, then chuckles shyly, hand to mouth to catch stray grains of rice. Why does her sloppiness make Sobechi want to spend even more time with her?
“I’m a mess today,” she mumbles, still smiling. “But this is really good.” She stares at Sobechi for a beat, then goes, “Come on. You gotta help me with this. It’s a lot.”
Slowly, carefully, he digs his spoon in and takes out a good hunk of rice. Using his free hand as a safety net, he guides the spoon to his mouth. Desirée peers at him, like he’s some sort of alien. He makes it without spilling a single grain, and it’s the most triumphant bite of jollof he can remember ever having.
“You were literally gonna take all day,” says Desirée in disbelief. Then she’s laughing, and Sobechi’s heart flips again so that he almost chokes on the rice.
When he finishes coughing, he starts laughing too, then suddenly, he falls into her rhythm and they begin talking and Sobechi finds that some small gate has opened in him, a single lock expertly picked.
The doorbell rings.
Even as something taps a fast rhythm on the door, Desirée is out of her seat and racing across the living room. She flings the door open and wraps her arms around the waist of whoever’s on the other side. “Dom!” she bellows, pulling the other girl close. When Dom straightens, the drumsticks she holds twirl over fingers whose tips poke out through ratty gloves.
“Dom, this is . . . um—”
“Sobechi,” he says, sticking his hand out.
“What up, what up?” Dom says, eyeing him up and down. Tight curls frame a face the color of sand. Then she’s got eyes only for Desirée. She chews her gum with her mouth open and is always tapping the sticks on a different part of herself. Now, her thigh. Now, her collar. “So, Desert Eagle, we jamming or what?”
Desirée looks over at Sobechi, and it’s like the two of them, she and Dominique, fit perfectly beside each other. Desirée with her bony elbows and wild hair and Dom with a plaid shirt tied around her wide waist and a bandanna taming her curly hair. Desirée able to stand completely still and Dom constantly moving some part of her body.
“You down?” Desirée asks.
Mummy never said what time Sobechi needed to be home, so, loosened by the risk he took with the rice, he shrugs and grins. “Yes.”
“Shit yeah,” Dom cheers, swaying.
“Dominique!” Desirée can barely keep the frown on her face. “Our guest!”
Dom twirls a drumstick in her fingers. Her grin nearly splits her face. “Oh, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet, my guy.”
Dominique sits at the drum kit in the basement, moves her snares a little bit, then moves them back, checks the cymbals, and occasionally steps on her kick-drum pedal. Desirée plays with her guitar. A cord connects it to one of her amps, and a bevy of pedals lies at her bare feet. She strums idly. Her fingers dance over the neck of the thing, and she’s not even looking at it, but the notes climb over each other in the air. Single trills and arpeggios, then, every so often, a CHUG-CHUG that nearly knocks him out of his folding chair. The guitar growls. That’s the only way Sobechi can explain it. Something like a tiger or a dragon from the fantasy novels he sneaks into his room without his mum seeing.
Desirée and Dominique whisper to each other. Sobechi catches words like “periphery” and “system” and “August burns red.” The girls giggle. Desirée shakes her head, darts a look at Sobechi, then confers with Dominique once more. They seem to come to an agreement.
“Okay,” Desirée says, once again facing Sobechi. “We’re a little rusty, and the song sounds a little weird without backup vocals, but here goes.”
The guitar growls: chug-chug-chug-chug BRUNUNUBUNUBUNUNUU. Dominique bangs on the drums and each kick joins forces with each stroke from Desirée, the barrage so powerful Sobechi falls out of his seat. He covers his ears. They might actually start bleeding.
Then there’s only drums, then a softer melody, and a voice. Desirée’s singing. Sort of.
When he can separate the sounds, he hears “Life in a bubble jungle”—gibberish—“but I was in there for you”—what is she saying?—“life in a bubble jungle.” Then . . .
BRUNUNUBUNUBUNUNUU. “Seeing you, believing”—gibberish—“THE POWER STRUGGLE, believing and healing, appeasing, THE POWER STRUGGLE.”
It makes absolutely no sense. The newness of it all makes Sobechi dizzy, so dizzy he almost vomits, but after what seems like forever, they’re done. It’s over.
Dominique cackles behind her cymbals and snares. “Oh my God, I’m crying.”
“Sobechi, you okay?”
She’s back to normal. Sobechi looks up, and Desirée’s face is right in front of his. She’s kneeling, her guitar-that-sounds-like-a-dragon-and-a-bear on a strap around her neck. Her hand is on his shoulder.
“Hey,” she whispers. “You good?”
“I . . .”
She smirks. “That was a lot. We were a little loud.”
“What was that?” Sobechi manages to murmur.
“Hah! That was System of a Down.”
“Best band ever!” Dominique shouts from behind the drums.
“But . . . those sounds. I’ve never . . .”
Desirée’s eyes go wide. “Wait, you’ve never heard metal before?”
“What is metal?”
Desirée chuckles. “Metal, my friend, is the most freeing sound in the world.” Her gaze softens. “But we kinda threw you in the deep end.” She squeezes his shoulder. “Let’s show you something a little softer.” She’s up again. “Let’s do Dead Sara.”
Dominique pouts. “But that’s not really metal.”
Desirée makes a stern face, and Dominique relents.
“‘Weatherman’?”
Desirée nods. “‘Weatherman.’”
Her guitar goes again, no chugs, just riffs, riffs, riffs, then drums, soft at first, snares, rising, then—Sobechi braces himself—badumdum.
“Come on!” Then it hits, but it’s kinder this time, more intelligible.
The drums are slower, and he can hear her singing.
“Addicted to the love of ourselves
I’m the weatherman
And tell no one else
I’m the weatherman
SO GO FOR THE KILL”
Her voice warbles and strikes, and it’s got that rasp he recognizes. He can actually see that type of sound coming from an actual human being.
As she sings, she flicks her hair back, but her mouth is always pressed to the microphone in front of her. Sweat soaks her shirt, brings a sheen to her face, so that she’s glowing in the fluorescent light. Occasionally, still strumming, she looks back at Dom, who smiles broadly. Then things go quiet.
Then it’s just Desirée.
“I sing for the melody and I sing for a reason
. . . for all that un-American
SO GO FOR THE KIIIIIILL”
Then she’s back to head-banging, dancing around in place, contained in a booth surrounding that microphone. But wild and crazy, her hair going every which way, like the music has possessed her. It has replaced her blood and her bones. She has become those sounds, that music.
By the time they finish, she’s spent and looks like she just climbed out of a swimming pool, but she looks so happy. Sobechi has never seen anyone so ecstatic.
Something flutters in his chest, and he wants to freeze that moment, to stare at that smiling face and to make sure the sounds that make Desirée grin like that never, ever stop.
“He likes that one,” Dominique chirps, pointing a drumstick at him.
Desirée’s laugh is even more music coming from her throat. “We’re gonna make a metalhead out of you.”
He has no idea what that means, but it doesn’t matter. His body is alive. More alive than it’s ever been. His sternum thrums from more than the echo of the growling and roaring of the amplifiers. His fingers tingle. Blood rushes to his face.
He feels like he has been struck by lightning. Thunder still rings in his ears. His insides are on fire. And he wants to do this again.
Desirée throws him right into it. Playing her favorite bands, breaking down the different genres. Explaining the difference between death metal and math metal. Turning her nose up at most nu-metal, but there are a few bands she likes. When she plays certain bands, even though they may not have the technical brilliance he recognizes in others, Desirée gets a faraway look in her eyes, and Sobechi can tell she’s transported to a different place, a different time, then she’ll tell him about how, when she and Al would move around a lot, Korn was always playing on her iPod. Jonathan Davis’s screams held so much of what she felt.
They sit in her music room now, a week after she screamed about power struggles and a weatherman, with “Tempest” from the Deftones’s Koi No Yokan album playing softly in the background.
“I know I was ragging on nu-metal, but Linkin Park was literally all I listened to after I went to live with Al.” She smiles at the ceiling, then at Sobechi. “I used to practice Chester Bennington’s screams in the shower. Aunt Eve was always banging on the walls. ‘Cut that shit out!’ ‘Dez, if that’s you howling in there . . .’”
Sobechi wants to ask what happened to her parents. He realizes with a shock he can’t find the words.
“When I found out Chester had died, Sobe, I cried for the whole rest of the week.” Even now, remembering it, she grows quiet, and tears well in her eyes.
It’s more emotion than he has ever seen in his life, so much of it coming from one person.
“But System, that’s my love right there. Toxicity’s easily one of my favorite albums of all time.” She gets up from the carpet they’re both lying on and slips her acoustic guitar’s strap over her shoulder. She has that inspired shine in her eyes again. Sobechi presses pause on his iPod and disconnects it, and Chino’s crooning cuts off midlyric.
Almost immediately, Desirée starts playing. He recognizes the first notes as the beginning of the title track off that System of a Down album. Over and over, Desirée plays it, extending the intro, then goes in a drumless breakdown of the chorus, singing it rather than shouting it like Serj. “Somewhere, between the scared silence and sleep, disorder, disorder, disoooooorrrrder,” then humming.
“More wood for their fires, loud neighbours”
Before he knows what’s happening, Sobechi is on his feet and singing the words, first a murmur, then something deep and rumbling coming from his chest.
“Flashlight reveries caught in the headlights of a truck
Eeeeeating seeeeeeds as a pastime activity
The toxicity of our city, of our city”
Desirée, playing absently, stares in wonder at him, then smiles.
Together, they sing,
“You!
What do you own the world
How do you own disorder, disorder
Now!
Somewhere between the sacred silence
Sacred silence and sleep . . .”
Both of them, mouths nearly touching the microphone, mouths nearly touching each other.
“YOU! WHAT DO YOU OWN THE WORLD
HOW DO YOU OWN DISORRDEERRRRR”
They’re louder now, shouting the chorus, but still singing, until they both get to that long, drawn-out scream at the end, and the music stops, and they’re both suddenly so tired. But they can’t stop looking at each other.
Desirée smiles at him, and when he lies in bed later that night, he has System playing on his iPod well after the lights in the house have been turned off.
At dinner the next day, Sobechi’s head is swimming with images. After their first duet, Sobechi had downloaded every song off Toxicity. All night, he had listened, and the whole of it had taken Sobechi to a place he’d never been before, and the lyrics about dropping bombs on children in faraway countries and the failure of America’s drug policies wouldn’t let him go. At the end of the album was a hidden track, a haunting melody with a flute and different drums. There were no words, only humming and moans. Well after he should have been asleep, he’d looked the band up on the internet. They were all Armenian and they were descendants of survivors of the Armenian Genocide. People called them political. “Antiwar because they knew it in their bones,” he read on one site. By the time he’d gone to sleep, the sky had started to lighten.
So Sobechi looks straight at his mum and asks, “Mummy, could you tell me about the Biafran War?” He’d heard about the civil war that had cut through Nigeria in the late sixties; he knew it was part of his mother’s country’s history. But nothing beyond that.
The look on Mum’s face tells Sobechi that this is literally the last thing she’s expected to talk about. Her eyes turn into saucers. Her ball of fufu, greased with pepper soup from her bowl, nearly slips from her fingers.
“You were a child then, right? Younger than me, even,” Sobechi continues.
Daddy stirs in his chair but says nothing.
Mummy gets a hurt look in her eyes, as though Sobechi has wounded her.
“You lived through the Nigerian Civil War, right? I . . . I know nothing about it and I just wanted to—”
“Enough!” Her hands slam down on the table. “Enough of this. Sobechi”—she points her finger straight into his face—“if you ask me one more time about Biafra.” Then a string of Igbo words he doesn’t know, but the meaning of which he understands, darts from her lips. Ask her about Biafra again and she will break his legs.
“But, Mummy, I—”
“Sobechi!”
Fury Sobechi has never known takes hold of him. Suddenly, he’s up on his feet and stomps away without washing his hands, stomps all the way upstairs, then does something he never thought he would ever do. He slams the door to his room. Loudly.
Why won’t Mummy talk about her own history? Shouldn’t she be encouraging him to learn about his country? He’s too angry to think. So he plugs in his earbuds and turns the volume too high on the August Burns Red album Desirée downloaded for him earlier that day. He wants to scream but knows he can’t, so he lets their singer scream for him.
During the ride to school the next morning, Sobechi doesn’t say a word.
It’s the first weekend of debate practice once again, and already, things feel like they’re going back to the way they were. Sobechi can feel himself fighting it. He’s somewhere new, somewhere freer, more colorful.
Daddy pulls up in front of the school. “Do well, Sobechi,” Daddy says, smiling.
“Yes, Daddy.” Sobechi’s voice is so raspy it surprises him. And he coughs, but when he says, “Yes, Daddy” again, it’s the same. He can barely whisper.
Daddy frowns at him. “Are you sick, Sobechi?”
Hand to throat, Sobechi says, “No, Daddy. I’m fine.” Then he’s off before Daddy can make him say more words. He doesn’t even look back to see Daddy drive away.
Everyone is happy to see him again—Coach, Angelica, Grayson, all the others on the practice squad—until he opens his mouth to greet Coach, and everyone goes silent.
“What happened to your voice, man?” Grayson looks like someone just broke wind. “You sound way different.”
Sobechi can’t get it back. His fingers tremble, his heart races. A glance at Coach. A glance at Angelica. He closes his eyes, tries to will it back, then opens his mouth and . . . nothing. Just that harsh gasp that scrapes against the inside of his throat.
It’s gone. His voice is gone.
He can’t even pick his feet up when he walks. So when Daddy opens the front door, Sobechi merely shuffles through, holding his backpack in one hand. He stubs his toe on the leg of a chair and yelps, and it just seems like one more thing gone wrong. After he tried to practice introductory remarks—and couldn’t raise his voice above a whisper!—Grayson went up and improvised his way through it all, pretending to know what he was talking about, because boys like him at school don’t even really study. And he made a mockery of the text, butchered it, and every misplaced sentence and every point Grayson doubled back on and every mispronounced word—it’s DEH-monstrate, not de-MOAN-strate!—made Sobechi cringe until he could barely stand to stay in the room. Angelica seemed to be the only one to improve over the break. It felt good to see her do well, but something was definitely out of whack when Sobechi wasn’t the one being praised by Coach.
He’s so in his own head that it isn’t until he’s all the way down the upstairs hallway that he notices Mummy in his room. She brandishes his iPod like a weapon. She just might hit him with it.
“Sobechi!” Her voice is an arrow cutting right through the fog in his brain. Too many thoughts fall over themselves in his head, but he knows he’s supposed to be scared. She has that look in her eyes that she gets right before she twists his ear. “Sobechi, what is this?”
“Mummy, it’s . . .”
“What is this DEVIL-WORSHIPPER MUSIC?! Where did you get this?” She shakes it at him, and the headphone lines flail just like he feels he’s doing.
“Mummy, I can explain.”
“Where did you get this? Is this what has been possessing you of late? Is this why you can barely speak? Where did you get this!”
His head slumps. “Desirée,” he murmurs.
“Who? I cannot hear you! Speak up!”
“Desirée,” he says louder. Still meek. Defeated. It hurts to say her name. Tears spring to his eyes. Whatever beautiful, loud journey he set off on with her, it’s done now. He knows this is the end.
“The neighbor!” Mummy can’t believe it. “I knew as soon as I saw how he let that young girl dress that she was trouble. Eh-HEH! Look at the company you are keeping. Sobechi, if I see you again with that girl”—then a string of menacing Igbo words—“If I catch you with that girl, you will taste fire. I will introduce you myself to the devil. Then you can scream all the wahalla you want. Chineke mbere!” She throws her hands into the air, and her voice breaks, and it’s almost as if she’s ready to join Sobechi in crying. But she stomps past him, muttering to herself and leaving Sobechi to stew in a silence so heavy, so unnatural, that he doesn’t fall asleep for hours.
Slowly, it comes back. In a week, his voice returns to normal. In the week after that one, his confidence is completely restored. It hums in his chest, radiates warmth into his shoulders. He has it back. All of it. The morning he feels ready, he practices speaking in front of the bathroom mirror. The steam from the shower seems to help. And by the time it is his turn in their after-school practice session, he finds he can do all his regular tricks. He can modulate his voice. When he pauses, it’s no longer to clear his throat or to get rid of an itch, it’s to hammer home a point. If anything, his voice, when he speaks, sounds richer. Feels richer. The speech he gives that day, a short excerpt from John F. Kennedy’s “Moon” speech, stuns the room into silence. Then everyone’s on their feet and clapping, and they don’t stop clapping until Coach’s fifth try to get them to calm down. But he’s smiling so hard.
On the way out, everyone claps Sobechi on the shoulder or shakes his hand or grins their thanks right at him. He can’t believe how happy he’s made them. After everyone leaves, Coach slips a hand over Sobechi’s shoulder. “Wherever you went . . . ,” he says quietly, “it’s good to have you back.”
Suddenly, Sobechi doesn’t know why he fought this for so long. Why he resisted. Everything feels right again. All the congratulations, the praise. People needing him again. This is where he’s supposed to be.
These are his thoughts as he makes his way down the hall. But he stops short when he hears noise, muffled voices and what sounds like cymbals. Then he hears it, a guitar riff.
The door swings open to the auditorium. Sobechi sees them onstage. It looks like they’re an entire world away, the stage is that far. But he recognizes them instantly. Desirée, strumming out a few licks, then directing the rest of the band through the next couple of measures; then Dominique, toying with the cymbals and kick drums while she listens; and there’s someone else, someone Sobechi doesn’t recognize, on bass who has a microphone in front of her too. They all seem comfortable around each other, but tired, like they’ve been at it for too long.
As soon as the doors swing shut behind Sobechi, the music stops, midbar, and everyone stares. Sobechi can see the emotions working across Desirée’s face. The confusion, the hurt, the joy, all of it out in the open. Then a mask falls over it all, and she’s saying something quietly to the girls before taking off her guitar and putting it back into its stand. She hops off the stage with practiced nonchalance and meets Sobechi halfway.
For a while, they don’t say anything, Desirée clearly waiting for his explanation. And there’s so much he wants to say, but he needs to say it right, needs to organize his thoughts just like in debate. However, what comes out of his mouth is simply, stupidly, “I was unaware that you practiced here.”
Desirée jerks her head toward the stage. “Yeah, Dayna’s in the school band, and she’s got the hookup. Lets us practice here to get a better feel for our live gigs.”
“Live gigs?”
“Yeah.” Desirée shrugs. “Debate practice?”
“Um, yeah.” He looks at his shoes. “I’m sorry. I just . . . I disappeared.”
“Yeah, no reason, no talk, no nothing. For two weeks. Nothing from you.”
Sobechi winces. “It’s my mother. She . . . she doesn’t like the music. I dunno, she’s old-school, and maybe it’s just too loud or not like what she’s used to. But she doesn’t want me listening to it anymore. Says it’s devil-worshipping music.”
Desirée barks out a chuckle, but Sobechi can hear the hurt in it.
“And the singing was starting to affect my voice.”
“Ah, I see. And why does this mean we can’t hang out?”
Sobechi wants to tell her that debate practice is going to take up more of his time, that it’s where he needs to be, or that he needs to really focus on his studies, or any of the usual excuses he gives people when they ask him to be social—but he knows it’s because if he and Desirée spend any more time together, he will start singing again. He loves it, he realizes. And he will scream his voice into oblivion. He knows that’s what’s going to happen, so he can’t let himself get close to it again. That’s his argument, his position, but he can’t bring himself to breathe a syllable to Desirée.
“So that’s it then? We’re never gonna see each other again?”
“I didn’t say that! I just—”
Desirée brushes him off. “Nah, it’s all good. Don’t worry about it. I gotta get back to practice. The girls are waiting.” She storms off and doesn’t say a word about what just happened to either Dom or Dayna. Just starts playing a song from the first Periphery album, all angry chugs and riffs and screaming, where the notes from the guitar become as percussive as the drums, furious beats that have replaced any semblance of conversation whatsoever.
Even though winning Nationals his junior year was supposed to be the culmination of almost an entire life’s worth of effort, it still feels hollow. Everyone cheers for longer than usual. His teammates all beam at him, genuinely, basking in the glow. Angelica knocked it out the park, as they say. And Grayson knew that this was the time to buckle down. Though Sobechi was, as usual, the brightest star, his team could be said to be the best team in the nation. Future debate teams will hear of Sobechi’s talent, his mesmerizing speeches, how he carried the school on his back like Atlas from Greek mythology class holding up the sky. This was what he wanted. But . . .
Even after the celebratory dinner where Mum cooks for Coach and the team, and they all finally taste that magical jollof rice, Sobechi can only pretend to be happy.
Then, it’s over and everyone filters out and Sobechi is still at his seat while Daddy washes dishes and Mummy texts her friends in Nigeria using WhatsApp.
“Mummy?” Sobechi has finally looked up from his hands.
“Yes, my son.” She sounds so joyful and so pleased. He’s going to ruin this.
“Can you . . .” He sighs. Squares his shoulders. “Tell me about Biafra.”
A cloud covers her face. Her fingers stop, and a glower sets into her eyes.
“Mummy, I know what happened. I’ve read about it online. I even checked books out from the library on it. I know it’s part of Nigeria’s history. It’s part of our history. I . . . I want to know about you.” He’s thinking of Serj and Daron and all the other members of System of a Down and how they used their parents’ tragedy to make their art. He’s thinking of their political messaging and their antiwar stands, and he’s thinking about what it means to stand for something in the world. And he hopes maybe there’s some of that for him here too. “Mummy, it’s not to hurt you. I . . . I want to be a good son.” He can feel himself start to break down. “I really do, and I’m sorry. I just . . .” He can’t go any further. He sniffles, then regains control.
But when he looks up, his mother’s staring at the tablecloth, utterly still. “I was in kindergarten when the war began,” she says quietly. “When my family and I were in hiding, we spent time in the forests, eating what we could find. When we came home, soldiers were sleeping in our house. My uncle begged and begged and begged for us to be let back in. The way they made him beg . . . . That night, we all slept in one room. There were twelve of us.” Her shoulders start to shake, and Sobechi realizes it’s the first time he’s seen her cry. All of a sudden, she’s no longer just a force of nature, a powerful typhoon or an overwhelming burst of sunlight. She’s human.
Daddy joins them at the table. And Mummy talks well into the night. There’s music in her voice. The more she speaks, the more it sounds like song.
It’s late spring. And the sun is still shining brightly by the time Sobechi gets back from school.
As they pull into the driveway, he notices Desirée on her front porch. Then he pretends to drop something under his seat.
Mum looks over. “Eh, what is it now?”
“I dropped something. I think it was my USB drive.” It’s a convincing enough excuse, because Mummy eventually gets out and leaves her key on the driver’s seat.
“Remember to lock the car when you get out.”
Desirée has been watching them the whole time, silently.
Sobechi stops his fruitless search, snatches the keys, then hops out and makes a beeline for her. She makes to head back inside her home, but Sobechi catches her just before the screen door closes behind her.
“Your mom’s gonna kill you when she sees us like this.”
Sobechi manages a half smile. “I want to invite you and your uncle over for dinner.”
“Wait, what? I thought I was a devil worshipper or something. Your mom change her mind?”
“She’s being Americanized.” And they both chuckle. When they settle down, he looks at her, really looks at her, to the point where she’s starting to get nervous.
“What?”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
For giving me the gift of metal, Sobechi wants to say. For getting me to scream for the first time. For giving me a place where I could truly be angry or sad or have fun. For giving me music to live my life to, music that gave me the courage to unlock something in my mummy. Music that’s helping me become a better son. But he hasn’t quite figured out how to put that all into argument form. Instead, he smiles and says, “I’m working on a song.” He kicks at a stone on the porch. “It’s political.”
Her face lights up when she realizes what he’s saying, and he knows she can see it too. Both of them onstage, singing into microphones, screaming into them. Faces covered in sweat. Bodies weak from the effort of performing but held up by the bass drums that rock their sternums. Dez launching into a Mark Tremonti–style solo, and Sobechi watching her with what he now realizes is love. And both of them, at the end, wishing the crowd a good night in their best rock-star voices.
“I guess we’re gonna have to change the band name, then.”