Speak No Evil Read online

  Can I see you, I ask. I’m not invisible, he laughs. It’s our joke now, just like the end of the bar is our spot now and that two hours between lunch and track is our time for cookies and milk and quick but soft brushes against each other’s knees and bare arms. When I touch him he smiles. When he touches me I jump and look around to see if anyone has noticed. I am nervous, but after seeing him, I hit my speed workouts harder and Coach Erickson is pleased. After seeing him I don’t think too much about Meredith or the fact that I’ve seen her talking to Rowan after class more, and the fact that he likes to say her name in the locker room and talk about her ass. Meredith has no ass and she knows it too. We used to laugh about that when we still laughed about things together. Now our eyes sometimes catch but it isn’t laughter we see.

  She was my best friend I tell Damien as he eats his chocolate chip cookie, but now we don’t really speak. I don’t speak to anyone from my high school. Fuck ’em, I was like buh bye, Damien says, the world is too big a place. Except that I’m still in high school, I say, and it sucks to be surrounded by people who live for their silly parties on Friday nights. You mean what you were doing when I met you, he says with that wicked smile, that all-knowing smile and wall of teeth primed perfectly to hold back secrets, to let them go if they should choose. I’m just playing, Damien says, you can relax. His hand rubs my back. You can relax, he says, and his palm touches my face. There are first times. Seriously, he says. I say, seriously man you’re in college, you’re free, you don’t know what it’s like being trapped anymore. I go to school and it’s just me. I go home and it’s just me. But you come here and it’s also me, he says. His hands are on my hands, on my knees that I bounce nervously. I look at the clock. I have to go, I say and begin to gather the books and papers I bring to make myself think that people, if they are watching, see this for something other than what it is, but I’m a senior and this is spring—work has lost its meaning. Did I say something wrong, he asks. No it’s just, I’m just frustrated, this feels so odd, there is never enough time. It’s not ideal. Then let’s make more time, he says, and he gets up when I get up. Most afternoons he simply waves goodbye. Today he walks me around the corner to the alley where I parked my car. It is empty except for an agitated cat that circles a Dumpster meowing. I like spending time with you so I spend the time there is to spend. I like the way you feel but I know it scares you to feel me—sometimes it scares me too, he says. He laughs but I don’t. So I enjoy the little you let yourself be touched, there’s nothing ideal so I see no reason to complain. I have one foot in the car and the other planted firmly on the ground. Damien folds his arms over the door between us. The small diamond studs in his ears catch the sunlight. You think too much, and it makes you feel alone, he says. We’re different, I can’t not think and I’m nowhere near as strong as you, I say. I can’t just tell my parents, my friends, everybody to go away. What’s left for me? Damien says, the world. His face is insistent. You’re stronger than you think, he says with eyes wide and full of light, his brow arched and his lips pressed together. These are the fragments of a face that got me an Uber home and they are everything. I want to touch him, to sneak my fingers toward his fingers, put my hands on his hands and let my skin rub his skin. I want to put my lips to his lips, but my only experience with that is Meredith and I am still scared by the idea of being completely connected to something so separate, so much a part of something that is completely me and also not me. A kiss is the ultimate uncanny, Ms. McConnell said in class after we read The Passion. Simple and pure, driven by lust, a separation that knows no boundaries. You are not fully yourself and yet you are totally self-aware.

  Damien moves towards me and all I can think is, I don’t want this door to be here, but nothing is ever ideal. His lips brush my lips too quickly for me to feel shame, too fast to feel indecent, too fast. Then everything is slow and I feel him fully, and my body stiffens, my body melts, and I want to say stop, but those salty lips, but that searching tongue. The cat meows. I bring my hands to my lips to see if they are still mine. They tingle and buzz. Oh my God, I say, I have to go. Damien doesn’t say a word.

  Sin is a slippery slope, Reverend Olumide says to me when I see him next. My hand goes to my lips because I think he knows. He sits on his couch with his legs crossed and his arm stretched across the backrest while I perch on the edge of the facing armchair. Of course he doesn’t know and yet, he is still a Man of God, they can sense these things. There is a rainbow-colored mix of peanut M&Ms in the bowl on the table between us. Reverend Olumide holds a few in his fist which he pops into his mouth at regular intervals. It’s like these candies I just can’t stop eating, he says, you put one in your mouth, then you want another, and another, and another. Before you know it you’ve eaten the whole bag, your teeth are rotting and about to fall out, your mouth smells like decay, he says. They are so good, but it’s my choice to walk the path of righteousness, or to not and continue to shuffle along in the darkness. That’s God’s greatest gift.

  This doesn’t feel like a choice. It never did. But now I feel like things are completely beyond my control. His kiss—I crave it. I need it. I think about it. Now when we meet we kiss frequently. We make out. Sometimes I kiss with my eyes open just to make sure this is real. It is real, but always so short. He tastes of chocolate chips on some days, ginger tea on others. I want to ask him what I taste like but I’m embarrassed. I keep Tic Tacs in my pocket and Listerine strips in the glove box. Sometimes he is delicate with me, tentative like he wants to see if I really want it. It drives me crazy. My neck tingles and my chest burns. I press myself to him. I pull him towards me and we tumble down that slippery slope on the secluded benches in the darker corners of Meridian Hill Park while the Guatemalans and Salvadorians practice their patriotism on the dusty soccer field in front of us. Other days when he has come from or doesn’t want to go to a shift at work, he is wild, sucking away everything I thought I knew about the way I’m supposed to be in this world. I feel like a star caught in the gravitational pull of a black hole, unraveling, spinning under the control of some unseen force, torn into streams of fire forever spiraling, never to be put together again.

  But I still take the white index cards Reverend Olumide hands me, and I mumble good morning and good night to my parents. I pretend not to notice Meredith pretending not to notice me, though she forgets herself and smiles at me across the room when Ms. McConnell talks about Teju Cole and the African Imaginary. She knows I know she has kissed Rowan. I want to ask her how he tastes, but I won’t speak to her until she speaks to me. I also have pride.

  We can feel summer and graduation. Adam dares the teachers by purposefully not wearing a tie. Rowan copies Adam and soon all the seniors are an army of defiance. We watch the underclassmen scramble home weighted down by backpacks full of textbooks and novels as they moan about papers they have to write and exams that we don’t have to take. We lounge by our cars and skip class to make runs to McDonald’s or the gourmet pizza place across from it on Wisconsin that everybody knows but nobody remembers its name. There are girls’ school versus boys’ school water fights where the boys try to get the girls’ T-shirts wet but the girls are smart and wear bikini tops beneath their school clothes. Sometimes I participate when Adam says, yo Harvard, you coming, but mostly I slip away to Sportzone in Georgetown so I can spend time with Damien on his break. He works endlessly now because he wants to spend the summer in Los Angeles at a dance studio, perfecting his hip-hop. He shows me video after video of their choreography on YouTube, sometimes he tries to get me to do it with him in the park. See over there, I can be me, he says. I smile but it makes me sad. I haven’t found any safe spaces. Damien says, you’re safe with me. Until I’m not. He raises an eyebrow. With you I mean, I add. I dream about an internship on the West Coast, but there is nothing for me to do. I am not the president’s daughter. I’ve never met a movie star. I barely watch television. We could live together in an apartment in Venice Beach, Damien says while he strokes my han
d as we sit in the park by the Potomac River at the sundial in front of the Swedish embassy. The sunlight plays on the ripples stirred by the soft and silent current. We can have an adopted cat named Gordon, he says. He kisses me. He has to move out of his dorm and into a friend’s apartment before he goes to LA. He says I have strong arms that should come in handy. It’s just by Meridian Hill Park, he says, I mean if you want to come. I want to and I have nothing to do until track practice, so I say yes.

  His dorm room is a mess and it’s cold. Half-constructed boxes litter the floor. Overstuffed suitcases and duffel bags burp clothes from between zippers that refuse to close. There are no white curtains or white sheets or white walls. Everything is cream-colored cinder block with half-fallen posters of famous dance icons next to rappers and singers. His sheets have come off the bed at the edges and his pillowcase needs washing. Home sweet home he says. He says, fuck this place. Then he kisses my cheek. Don’t you have to pack, I say. He puts my finger to his lips then he licks it and I am all shivers and uncontrolled sensations. There are first times and there is his bed, uninviting but available. I am not ready for this, but no time is ideal. And yes his hot breath, and yes his lips, and yes something else, that thing that I have that he has that despite all the perfection makes this moment feel somehow very, very wrong. His hands are on my butt and he grinds against me and I feel him stiffen and shiver. The slope is very slippery, Reverend Olumide says. But so is the feel of his hard, bare stomach now that his shirt is off and my hands can feel how it feels to be a dancer. It feels so good. But in eternity, the choices we make echo, Reverend Olumide says and I see my father’s face staring down at me from above, twisted with tears. If there is eternity, I will certainly have hell to pay unless this is just me, truly me, and no stack of Bible cards can change that. But his strong searching hands, sliding lower, uncoupling the things that hold me in, wrapping themselves around me. Stop, Damien, stop it. Stop what? Stop that. But this wave that passes through me. I am possessed. It is everything. Stop, stop, stop. This is all wrong, all so wrong. What’s wrong, he asks through his wicked smile as his arm moves faster. I push him back. No. Then he is not smiling and I feel so very exposed. What’s wrong, he says. I should go. Niru, I don’t understand. I have to go, I say, I just have to go. My head and my heart, my weak legs and the parts of me between now feel so drastically out of place.

  Outside the world is still normal. The cars still honk at each other and people still sweat while waiting for the bus. There are pigeons and sparrows cooing and singing and turning their incomprehensible mating dances. Niru, what the fuck, slow down and talk to me, Damien says. Gravel crunches beneath my sneakers as I walk through Meridian Hill Park to my car. Slow down, he says, I’m right here. I didn’t mean to, I don’t know. I stop beneath a tree. I can’t Damien, I say, I’m freaking out. My arms quiver. My legs shake. I can’t feel my face. Was that too much too fast, he asks. I thought you wanted me to, I thought that’s why you came—why did you come?

  The fountain is in full flair, sending water down the terraces to froth in the lily pad pond below. From this point we can see all the way to the White House and all the buildings between, locked in place, unmoved. I came because you have showed me something inside me that I can’t control, because now the world before with its rules and requirements is not enough, I want to say, but I cannot speak.

  The first boy I kissed was a sailor, Damien says. He was a white boy, skinny as hell, he was nineteen and I was sixteen. He had just joined the Navy, but he had a girlfriend back in Missouri that he said he loved. He said he needed her, but he wanted me. He talked about her all the time like she was some kind of medicine, but he used to call me at night when everybody was asleep and tell me to meet him in parking lots. The first time we fucked it was in a parking lot in his truck. He liked to play trap music and I let him fuck me like that because I thought that’s how disgusting I was, that it should hurt, that I should be ashamed, cause I was his sickness and she was his medicine. He probably fucked her on a bed of flowers for all I know, who the fuck knows anything, but I do know I ain’t nobody’s sickness. I’ve done that. I have to go, I say, I have practice. Well go on and run then, go on and run, but me, I won’t be nobody’s sickness. I don’t look at him as I walk down the steps to Florida Avenue, but I know he hasn’t moved. I’m not doing anything wrong, Damien shouts at me, I’m not, so fuck you if you want to be this way. Just fuck you.

  His words chase me up Sixteenth Street. I speed without care for the cameras or cops, weaving between the slow rollers and the trucks groaning out towards the Beltway. I stop at church and park the car against the curb, leaving the blinkers on. We used to race up these steps as kids. Back then they seemed so tall and so many like they really could lead to heaven. Now they lead to a locked door that refuses to budge. I push and I pull. I kick. I curse. I say a prayer but the doors don’t move, even as I stare up at the sign that tells me All Are Welcome, and plead silently to God for help.

  A police car pulls up behind my Volvo and an officer shouts from his open window, everything all right. I turn around but the glare from the sun prevents me from seeing any faces. Yes sir, I say, just dropping something off, but I can’t get in. Well there’s no standing here, you’ve got to move on, he says. I nod and walk down the steps.

  My mother is home, seated at the kitchen table when I get back. She is surprised to see me and quickly shuts her laptop as if she is doing something wrong. I know what she searches for because it pops up in the browser on the desktop in her study, the only computer I’m allowed to use. How to talk to your gay son about sex is one. The others are about drug dosages, support bras and Spanx, everything no son wants to know anything about. But it’s hard to keep secrets in this house. Shouldn’t you be in school, she asks as she smooths her hair back and pushes her glasses up her nose. She is fifty but has only started to gray at her temples. The wisps of silver make her look magical, like she combs tinsel into her hair. Her teenage patients say it makes her look like a pop star. Track doesn’t start until late and most of my periods today are free, I say. She pushes back her chair as she stands and says, well are you hungry? My mother is not a small woman. She is taller than most other women and the thin frame of her youth is thicker now, not Oprah but far from Iman who she holds as an ideal for the physical form of a woman her age. When she begins to mother, she grows smaller and less intimidating. How did I give birth to such giants, my mother says as she passes me. She touches my cheek and then stops. She asks, what’s the problem? Nothing, I say. Okay, she says as she moves to the fridge, I can warm some spaghetti, you people always say you want to eat pasta before you run, isn’t it? I stand at the kitchen counter watching her fuss at items in the fridge and talk to something wedged in the very back. I don’t know who keeps putting this thing back here, she mutters, it must be your father. She turns around with hands full of cucumbers and lettuce. Can you make the salad, she says. Mommy, I’m not hungry, I say. She says, anyway if you don’t eat now then we can eat it with dinner. Skin these. She hands me cucumbers. And wash these, she says launching a box of cherry tomatoes to the counter. I rummage around the drawer for a peeler. I can’t find it so I grab a knife. You’re going to hurt yourself with that, my mother says. Mommy I can use a knife. Just use the peeler, she says, it’s in the drawer next to the measuring cups. I didn’t see anything there, I say and start on the cucumbers cutting the tips so I can peel back the skin in thin strips. We have not worked together in the kitchen for a long time, ever since my father made it clear he didn’t think boys should spend too much time learning how to bake. I feel her watching me, hovering, her eyes reaching like desperate hands to steady my motions and prevent an accidental slip of the blade’s sharp edge.

  Sometimes I wonder who my mother might be if she weren’t married to my father. Everyone around him seems that much less free-spirited, that much less open to possibility, so much more controlled. At her office, she is loud and filled with infectious laughter. Here she is m
ore quiet and deferential. I can cut a cucumber, I say more sharply than I intend. She winces and busies herself with searching for the vegetable peeler if only to make a point. Utensils clatter as she sifts through metal and silverware in the drawers. Your father is always moving things around here, she says over the clink and clatter. That’s because you just throw things in drawers, I say. But I know where I put them until you all decide to mess everything up. I say, I cook almost never so it’s not me.

  All I wanted was an empty house and a moment of quiet to process everything Damien has said. I thought I would be able to sit quietly at the kitchen table or even on one of the metal chairs on the deck facing the trees separating our house from the neighbors’. Don’t be rude, my mother says. I’m not being rude. And don’t interrupt me, she says in her voice that stops even my father midsentence. She turns to face me with her arms crossed over her chest and her rear against the open drawer. The lights above shine on spoons, can openers and stainless-steel measuring cups that OJ and I bought her for her birthday some time ago when we still had to ask my parents for money to buy them birthday gifts. I groan softly against my clenched teeth but she hears me all the same. She says, enough, enough, just enough. It’s too much already, I’ve never—thank God—had a problem with any of my children, but now all of a sudden it’s like you are three different people and I don’t ever know which one I’m going to get. It’s exhausting, you hear me, you are exhausting me. Can we not just have some real, genuine peace in this house? Between you and your father everyone here is always walking around like someone has died or someone is about to die. Or people are shouting or sulking or whatever it is you men do. You see my hair. You people are making me old! For once can someone not fucking shout at me for something, I say, I can’t wait until I’m out of this stupid fucking place and no one can yell at me.