Luke Lawson II lived in a doorman building with his new family. It was only a few subway stops from the tiny Brooklyn walk-up where he’d lived with Lux and her mom for sixteen years, but it seemed worlds away. A few days after her expulsion, Lux stood staring up at the building. It was modern and made mostly of glass. She could see Hispanic families making dinner and young white couples watching TV. The building hid nothing, but it made her want to hide.
Lux’s dad had been furious when her mom called him to explain their daughter’s latest fight—so mad, in fact, that he didn’t want to speak to Lux at all. Lux overheard her mother’s half of the conversation from her bedroom, though, her ear pressed to the wall.
“I’m just as pissed as you are, Luke,” Genevieve said. “But she’s clearly out of control . . . No. We are not sending our daughter to military school. Absolutely not . . . My friend is the vice principal at an arts school over in Harlem. I can try to pull some strings . . . What she needs is a fresh start, and a firmer hand than mine . . . I know you just had a baby. But your other daughter needs you, too.”
Now, Lux nodded to the uniformed man holding open the door, hating everything about where she’d ended up. And after she gave her name at the front desk, before she’d even made it into the elevator, she knew she’d hate living in this snooty place, too.
“Are you new to the building?” a narrow-shouldered white woman asked Lux, her high-heeled boots clicking as she walked over. She looked at Lux’s sneakers, her beaded twists, her pin-covered backpack, and her beat-up suitcase as if nothing about her belonged there.
Lux tossed her hair over her shoulder and pulled her headphones from her ears, settling them around her neck. “Yeah,” Lux said, and left it at that. She didn’t owe this woman anything. After stepping into the elevator, she punched the button for her dad’s floor and texted him, I’m on my way up.
“Well, I’ve never seen you here before,” the woman said, tucking her red hair behind her ears.
Lux looked at her and blinked. “So?” Lux replied.
“Which apartment do you live in?” the woman continued, and Lux shook her head, getting more and more pissed by the minute. She couldn’t stop the heat spreading across her chest and rising up the back of her neck. Why did people insist on trying her at the worst possible moments?
“Look, lady. Chill out. I’m not gonna screw up your day. How about you don’t screw with mine?”
The woman stretched her blue eyes wide. And when the elevator arrived on the seventh floor, Lux stepped into the hall without looking back.
Newborn babies are loud.
Lux could hear the kid before her father even opened his front door. Once he did, and Lux stepped inside, she immediately slipped her headphones firmly back in place, hoping they’d cancel out some of the noise.
“Luxana,” her father said, calling her by the full name she despised. She hadn’t seen him in nearly four months and she’d forgotten about his salt-and-pepper goatee, his broad shoulders and thick eyebrows. Something inside her softened the tiniest bit. He smiled crookedly for only a second as he reached out and pulled her into a half hug with one of his arms.
“Take those headphones off,” he said, and slowly, Lux did. He took her suitcase and told her she should take off her shoes before stepping farther inside. “Lillia and Penny are in the baby’s room. She’s trying to get her to go down for a nap.”
Missed you, too, Dad, Lux thought but didn’t say.
She followed him down the hall, and he turned into a small room. When he first moved away, he told her he got a place with three bedrooms so she could have her own space if she wanted to come stay for the weekend or longer. But this was the first time Lux had stepped foot inside the apartment. For all their visits so far, she’d just asked him to meet her at a park or a store, or he’d taken her out to dinner and given her money for a taxi home at the end of the night. Once Penny started the last trimester of her pregnancy, he felt anxious about leaving her, so Lux hadn’t seen him at all.
The room had three bare white walls and a twin-size bed covered with purple sheets. A floor-to-ceiling glass window made up the fourth wall. Lux felt exposed inside the room and somehow trapped at the same time. She flopped down on the bed and tossed her backpack onto the floor. She turned away from her dad to look through the window.
“Hang that on the hook in the closet,” Luke said instantly. “I know how things were at your mom’s, but you’re not going to just do whatever you want to here.”
Her father couldn’t have been more wrong. Lux’s mom hadn’t changed—she ruled their home with the same iron fist she always had. The only difference now was that he was gone.
Lux couldn’t stop reimagining the day he left. The way he’d barely looked at her the night before; the way she’d woken up to find him and all his things gone without warning. He disappeared, like a coward, and now she finally knew why. He’d decided this random woman, this Penny, was much more important to him than his actual family.
Lux picked up her bag. She hung it on the hook he pointed out. And in that moment she realized her life here would be a lot more difficult.
“Hang up your jacket, too, and then come into the baby’s room to say hello to Penny. Dinner’s at eighteen hundred hours. Your mother made some calls, pulled some strings. You have an interview at Augusta Savage School of the Arts in the morning. Be ready by oh seven hundred.”
Military time. Lux had forgotten her dad’s old habit from his time as a marine. He left the room then, and Lux felt her eyes start to sting—a sure sign of tears. But she wouldn’t let herself cry again today.
“Ugh,” she whispered, taking in her harsh new reality.
Before leaving her old apartment, she’d cried and begged to stay and promised her mom that she would change. But her mom just said, “I can’t do this with you anymore, Lux.” Lux hoped that if she could stay out of fights and avoid trouble for the rest of the semester, then maybe she could move back home.
The baby’s room was small and dark, lit only by an elephant-shaped night-light. Penny, Lux’s new stepmom, sat in a rocking chair in a far corner of the room. Lux waved.
Penny smiled. She was curvy and light-skinned, with fluffy brown hair she always pushed back with a headband, and she had on a tight pair of yoga pants. Even though she’d only just had this baby two weeks ago, Lux could imagine the grossest boys in her old class calling Penny a MILF.
“This is your baby sister, Lillia,” Penny said softly, turning a little so Lux could see the face of the sleeping baby. Lux had met Penny only once before, so she felt like a complete stranger, and though the kid looked cute, it didn’t change anything. It definitely didn’t make Lux think of either of them as family. She felt heat creep up her neck the way it always did before she said or did something she regretted, so she knew she needed an excuse to get away from them fast.
“I gotta go get unpacked,” Lux said. “But I’ll see you at dinner, I guess?”
Penny looked a little disappointed, but Lux didn’t have it in her to get any closer, to coo at or cuddle with the kid.
Back in her room, Lux sat on the bed and scrolled through her phone. She saw photos of Bree and Simone and the rest of the girls from her old school, and it pissed her off that they hadn’t gotten in trouble, but her whole life had changed. A minute later, she decided to unfollow everyone who went to her old school. She needed a fresh start, and dwelling on the past wouldn’t help her move on.
Lillia wailed loudly in the next room, so Lux put her headphones on again and turned her music way up before lying down on her bed. As she rolled over onto her stomach and got ready to hit the unfollow button on someone else’s page, she got a notification that she’d been tagged.
She tapped through to see what it could be, and then she froze. She watched as the on-screen version of herself climbed on top of Simone Harding and began hitting her over and over again.
Lux sat straight up, then jumped out of bed. She paced from her big, too-bright window to her bedroom door and back. She played the video again and again, cringing at her on-screen self. She almost didn’t believe she had that kind of rage inside her.
“Dammit.” She didn’t know what would happen if this spread the way these fight videos sometimes did. But she knew exactly what would happen if her father saw the video—she could kiss the possibility of moving back in with her mother goodbye.
She tried to figure out if someone watching the video would recognize her. Her dark brown skin could be seen pretty clearly, and so could the twists she always wore with the wooden beads at the ends. But her face never showed up front and center. From this angle, she tried to tell herself, she could have been any black girl in Brooklyn.
She soothed herself with this half-truth as she untagged herself. Then she sat on the edge of her bed and continued to quietly panic. There were at least twenty girls in that locker room, and more than half of them took photos and videos of that fight. Lux wondered if anyone else would post it. She wondered if anyone important would see it. She wondered if she’d be untagging herself for the rest of her life.
When her dad called her to dinner, she went and ate everything on her plate, making polite conversation with Penny, even though it made her feel like a huge phony.
But after dinner, Lux played all of her favorite sad songs and cried like she had with her mother, staring through her new, huge window. She’d only been away from home for a few hours and already everything was falling apart. She wished she’d never punched Simone. She hated to admit it, but she wanted her mom.
When she calmed down, she dried her eyes and pulled out her camera. She took photo after photo of the still-twinkling lights of the city until she got too tired to stand. And just before she fell asleep, she pulled out her phone to text her mom.
I hate it here. I want to come home.
Genevieve texted back a few minutes later. I’m sorry, honey. I really am. But you should have thought about that before you got into that fight.