The Chaos (8 page)

“I think it’s so neat that you’re each a different mix. You’re both unique.”

Okay, a step in the right direction. I gave him a little smile.

Again he tried to hide how hard he was checking me out. I knew this blouse would rock with these jeans! Totally worth the price I’d paid for it.

He leaned forward and said, “But you know what’s really cool?”

“What?”

“You don’t look like you’re half black. I mean, you could be almost anything at all, you know?”

And, he’s down. Down AND out.
My smile froze on my face.
Nothing left but the shouting, folks
. “I could, huh?”

“Yeah! You could be Jewish, or Arabic, or Persian. I had a Persian girlfriend once. You could even—”

“Pass for white?”

He stopped, a confused frown on his face. “Well, yeah, if you wanted to. But you don’t have to be black or white. You’re, like, a child of the world!” He smiled, threw his arms out to punctuate his not-the-least-bit-triumphant conclusion.

I slid off my stool, picked up my drink. “Yup, that’s me. Child of the world, daughter to none. I’m going back to my table now.”

“Oh. Well, can I come and sit with you guys?” He was halfway off his own stool.

“No, you can’t.”

He stopped midslide, one foot frozen in midair, the other on the floor. “What? You really mean that?”

“I really do.”

“What’s wrong? Did I say something?”

“Oh, you said plenty.” He genuinely had no clue. They never did. I was seething as I walked back to our table. I could be anything. Right. I could pretend to be Jewish, maybe from one of those old Montreal families. Invent a whole different set of parents, of relatives. Disown my brother, maybe, so no one would see him and wonder about me. Disown my mum, too.
Or I could hint at some “exotic” Middle Eastern heritage. Or Greek, or Gypsy. I could be anything but what I actually was; the daughter of a white Jamaican and a black American. Yeah, that would be so freaking cool, to have no people, no culture.

I threw myself into one of the empty chairs at our table. “People can be so stupid,” I told Rich.

He didn’t look up from the sheet of paper in his hand. “Who was it? That guy you were talking to?”

“Yeah.”

“Which kind of stupid was it? He say something sleazy, something dumb, or something racist?”

Fake brightly, I chirped, “I’ll pick numbers two and three, please!”

He smiled a little, shook his head. “Yeah, well it be’s like that some days. Most days, actually.” He tore his eyes away from the piece of paper. “Hey; you okay? He didn’t do anything creepy, did he?”

I shook my head. “Naw. He was just trying to be friendly. In a thoughtless kind of way.”

Rich made he-man muscles with his arms. “You want me to go over there and kick his ass?”

I giggled. “It’s okay.”

“Cool.” His eyes were back on the wrinkled piece of paper.

“I don’t know how you can even see your handwriting in this dark room.”

“Shush. I’m trying to concentrate.”

“Yuh bumbo.”

“You know Dad would ground you for a week if he heard you say that.”

“Yuh bumbo.”

“After he got done laughing at your accent, that is. Just let me concentrate for a few minutes, nuh?”

I sighed. Rich could be so irritating. One minute he’d talk to me like an adult, and the next he’d be going all older brother on me, trying to tell me what to do. “You should already know your stuff by heart.”

His shoulders slumped. “I did when I came in here.”

That’s when I realized just how nervous he was. I leaned over and lightly cuffed his shoulder. “You’ll knock ’em dead,” I said. “Don’t fret.”

“Yeah, okay.” Then he was back to whispering at his piece of paper, like a wizard’s apprentice muttering a spell he was unsure of.

“Hey,” said a voice from beside our table. My heart leapt in recognition at the voice before I even looked up to see who it was. Sure enough, it was Tafari. He scowled at me.

Rich looked up from his piece of paper, saw Tafari, and leapt to his feet. “Bro!” They gave each other that shoulder-bump hug-to-the-side thing that straight black guys do. Tafari pointed at me with his thumb and hissed, “What’s she doing here, man? She could get the place shut down.”

I glared at him. “I will not! Why’re you talking to me like I’m some kid?”

He ignored me. “Rich, if your parole officer finds out you snuck a minor into a bar . . .”

“Scotch is all right. She’ll be cool.”

I stuck my tongue out at Tafari. Okay, so now I was acting like some kid, but whatever. It was the best I could come up with while fighting the urge to get up and kiss him, tell him I was sorry, take him to a quiet table where I could explain everything. About the marks on me. About the Horseless Head Men. And then he’d look at me like I was some freak, and first his eyes would get far away, and then the rest of him. I could be magic like that.

Tafari said, “But she’s got a drink!”

As though he’d never snuck me a vodka tonic or two when we were on dates.

Rich’s eyes were all for the empty stage. He darted a quick glance at my glass. “Bet you she doesn’t.”

He hadn’t even asked me first. He just trusted that I wouldn’t do anything stupid. I loved my brother so much right then, I could barely stand it. Smirking, I held my glass out to Tafari. “It’s ginger ale. Here, smell.”

He waved it away, shaking his head. “If the place gets busted, I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

That hurt.

Rich was so jittery; tapping his fingers on the rickety round table, looking around every which way.

“Still nervous?” I asked him.

He smiled. “Yeah.”

“When do you go on?”

“There’s an opening act. Some chick. Open mike starts after that.”

“And?”

“I’m the first one up.”

“Wow. No pressure there, huh?”

Rich didn’t look as though he appreciated the joke. I tried again. “But that’s good, right? That way, you get it over with quickly.”

“Put it like that, I guess so.” He didn’t seem reassured.

Tafari clapped him on the shoulder. Rich jumped nearly a foot. “You’re gonna kick butt,” said Tafari. “Serious poetry slam butt.”

Over by the bar, the guy I’d dissed was talking to someone else; an olive-skinned girl with long, wavy black hair. Her background was even harder to place than mine. Maybe he had
a thing for that. Maybe he’d be smart enough to try a different line on her.

Tafari and Rich had their heads together. Looked like Rich was repeating his pieces and Tafari was coaching him. He could, too; like me, he’d heard those rhymes till he could recite them in his sleep. Kinda weird, being jealous of your own brother’s friendship with your boyfriend. Your ex-boyfriend. While Tafari and I were still dating, it hadn’t bothered me that he and Rich were best buddies. It was just one more thing we had in common. But now I was on the outs, but Rich could still call Taf up for a chat, go hang with him at the mall, and do stuff together.

Oh, I was such a shit. How could I begrudge Rich having a friend to hang with? Three months ago, he hadn’t been able to go anywhere, with anyone.

My wrist was itching. I slipped the other hand under the sleeve of my blouse and scratched the slightly raised place. If this kept up, pretty soon, I’d be nothing but one big, sticky blob. A real, live tar baby.

I checked out Mr. Be-Everyone-But-Yourself again. He and that other girl had progressed to laughing at each other’s jokes, occasionally giving each other a light touch on the knee or shoulder.

He hadn’t been able to tell I was black. Was I really looking that pale? My skin did tend to fade to a more yellowy brown in the winter, but it was only mid-September.

There was another guy eyeing me, from one of the tables over by the wall. He was sitting with three other guys, all of them excited, yakking at the tops of their voices. He was cute.

“Soon come,” I said to Rich and Tafari. I stood up and gave the guy a quick eye flash. You know; the kind where they’re not exactly sure they’ve caught you looking? Then I looked down demurely, like I was too shy to keep looking.
I’d wander back his way after I’d checked on my makeup. Tafari saw what I was doing, and scowled. It was pretty much the same way I’d caught his attention, those first few times at school. I looked away from him. It’s not like I was trying to hurt him. It was just better if we both moved on.

I had that ointment in my purse. Not the nighttime mixture from the naturopath; the other stuff, the one that Mom and Dad didn’t know about. The guy who’d sold it to me had said I could put it on anytime I wanted, as many times a day as I felt like. “Be right back,” I said to Taf and Rich. Taf’s scowl deepened.

I found the signs to the women’s washroom and headed where they pointed. Down narrow stairs, brick walls with about an inch of latex paint layered on. So tacky.

Why did bathrooms in public places always smell so weird? It’s like the ghost of rotting cabbage from fifty years ago had seeped into the walls and was slowly leaking out. And talk about cold. I didn’t notice that the toilet seat was metal until I sat my naked butt down on it. Yow! My bladder cinched up so tight, it was like the shock had made it forget how to pee. Not quite, though. I peed, washed my hands in water as hot as I could make it. So then I had warm hands, which made the rest of me shiver even more. I got the ointment out of my purse. It was in one of those tiny eight-sided jars, clearly a Tiger Balm jar that someone had soaked the label off and glued a handmade paper label onto. The label used to read, in wavery, badly photocopied black pen,
YONKER GENE’S NATURAL REMEDY FOR BLISTERS AND BLEMISHES
. The tin screw-on lid had the same message glued onto it, also written on cheap white paper. Both labels had mostly worn away through weeks of my handling the jar with damp hands. The Tiger Balm logo on the tin lid was
showing through. I screwed the lid off. My nose wrinkled at the weird sulfur-mint smell of the muddy green ointment inside.

I pushed the sleeve of my blouse up. The new patch of tar on my wrist was like the others; black, weirdly shiny, slightly raised, a teeny bit sticky. I rubbed the ointment into it. It tingled, probably from the peppermint oil the guy in the little shop behind the market had told me was in it. He’d been kinda vague about what else was in it. I rubbed and rubbed until the ointment had all soaked in. I resisted the urge to scrape at the patch of skin. It’d only hurt if I did; I’d found that out long ago. I stopped rubbing, peered at it. Had it spread since last night? Was it edging up onto my hand a little? They did grow. The one on my shoulder had started out as a quarter-sized patch. Now it was bigger than my hand, edging its way around to my armpit, with a little piece of it, like a tributary, heading toward my collarbone. I could never have let Tafari see me like this.

No one knew what was causing my skin condition. My parents had taken me to doctors, skin specialists, allergy specialists, a nutritionist, even a psychologist. I’d been given antibiotics, antihistamines, injections, special diets. I’d been scanned, biopsied, had an MRI. All negative. And none of the treatments worked. Okay, so sometimes I’d cheated on the diets a little. It just wasn’t fair to have to put apple cider vinegar on your popcorn instead of butter and salt.

Whatever we did, the marks just kept on coming. There were three streaks of black on my tummy, from my left side almost all the way to my belly button. The oval patch on my right shoulder blade. I hadn’t told Mum or Dad about it, but I’d found a patch on my scalp, hidden by my hair.

When the conventional pills and potions hadn’t worked out, I’d started hunting down the other kind. The zit treatments advertised in the ads on my MyFace page. Handwritten cure-all
notices taped to telephone poles, the kind of notes that had scrappy tear-off fingers with telephone numbers written on them. Business cards thumbtacked to the notice board in the grocery store. Glory’d been after me to check out this botanica place that she knew about. I’d had to look up what a botanica was. My mom would have sneered at it and forbidden me to ever set foot in an “establishment that pandered to superstition.” That’s what she called churches, tabloids, CNN. Bet you Dad wouldn’t have been so dismissive. When his great aunt had died back in Jamaica last summer, he’d stuck a ton of blue glass bottles upside down over all the branches he could reach on our old crab apple tree out back. To keep her duppy from coming to haunt him. “That woman was mean in life,” he’d told me. “Wouldn’t surprise me if she was vengeful in death, too.”

As my blemishes got bigger, I’d stopped talking to Glory about them. I’d let her think they were fading.

Botanicas didn’t sound so dumb to me. Mom didn’t have any trouble trusting in the herbal tinctures from the nutritionist, or in the vitamin and mineral supplements from the drugstore. Looked like botanicas just did the same kind of thing, with a little bit of faith healing thrown in. Mom even believed in the placebo effect. Said it was the marvelous power of the human mind at work. But I just knew the major shit fit she would throw if I suggested a visit to Seer Angel’s Healing Palace, or whatever it was called. That was the kind of thing that got on my last nerve about my parents. The hypocrisy.

If I concentrated on the marks, I could feel them itch ever so slightly. I mostly didn’t feel them unless I was really quiet and thought about it. But at night, when I was sleeping, I could sense the new ones as they were coming in. Gave me nightmares, and when I woke up, sure enough, there’d be a new one. Mom and Dad didn’t believe me that they showed up
overnight. They were sure the marks came in slowly, and I just didn’t notice until they were way obvious. “You young people,” Dad would say with a mocking smile he meant to be a gentle one. “Heads so full up of yourselves that you can’t see your own nose to spite your face. You think I forget what it was like to be young?” That was another thing that drove me nuts about the ’rents. It was like they didn’t trust the report cards I brought home. All those As and Bs. I worked hard for those! But they thought I was too stupid to notice when new marks showed up on my very own body.