Flying Lessons & Other Stories(30)

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I didn’t tell Celeste this. I didn’t say, The people who don’t want breaks sometimes get them. But maybe she saw something in the way I stared at the ground. We were at the park, which was empty and cold. We were dragging our feet below our swings, moving slowly back and forth.

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You miss her, huh?

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I nodded.

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I miss my dad, Celeste said. And I miss New York. I know me some missing.

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I looked up and she was smiling. Then we were laughing again. That quickly, we were looking at each other and laughing so hard we had to bend over, nearly falling out of our swings.



I had never known anyone brown, and Celeste had never lived in a place where brown people didn’t.

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It’s Negro-less, she said, smiling. It’s a Negro-free zone.

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I thought we didn’t say that word anymore.

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Celeste looked at me. You can’t, but I can. It’s in the language rulebook, I swear.

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You’re lying, right? There isn’t really a language rule book.

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Nope. Not lying. There’re all kinds of rule books. The New Hampshire rule book says only one family that’s not white can live here at a time. When I move away, another family will come, I swear. It’s in the rule book!

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Celeste looked at me a moment. Then smiled. I swear.

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But you’re not going to move away. I wasn’t smiling.

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Not tomorrow.

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That was the year my other friends disappeared. One by one they wanted to know why, when we had all been friends since forever, I needed this new friend now.

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The one black person my mother knew stole stuff, Casey said.

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They love rap music, Lisabeth said. Does she teach you dances?

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Celeste plays piano, I said quietly. She’s been playing since she was small. Beethoven! She can play Beethoven.

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The others and I were still friends then, our dolls between our laps, their blond hair getting wrapped into braids and curls and cut and dyed. I sat in their pink bedrooms, the rooms I’d sat in for as long as I could sit alone and listened without knowing what to say back.

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It hurts here and here, I was thinking. And I don’t know why it hurts. But it does.

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Aren’t you scared? they asked. She might take things from you. She might have a gun. Or a knife. Her feet are big. Her hair is strange. There was one at our school once, you remember? She was adopted or something, that’s all I remember.

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My mom said I shouldn’t eat with the new one. You shouldn’t either.

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Celeste arrived long after the doctors told my mother there was nothing they could do, and at night my father sat behind the bathroom door gulping back sobs. She arrived long after we buried my mother, my father and me at the graveside, our gloved hands locked together, Lisabeth and Casey behind me, standing between their own parents, safe from cancer and dead parents and holes opened in the ground. Celeste arrived in the late winter…and smiled at me.

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Your mom would be mad if she knew, Lisabeth and Casey said.



Celeste pulled me through town making me name the trees we passed—white birch, barberry, sugar maple, catalpa…

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How do you do that? she asked again and again. How do you know?

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Black walnut, beech, oak, pine, I said, because I loved the feeling of her hand in mine, loved the surprising softness. I didn’t tell her I had never touched a black person before and how surprised I was the first time I touched her hair. But the second time I reached for it, Celeste’s hand shot up, caught mine just inches from her head.

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Stop! she said once when I was reaching for her hair. I’m not a dog to be petted!

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The following autumn, we buried Celeste’s pet rabbit Joe in her backyard, sprinkling crushed leaves over his tiny grave. We had been friends for close to a year and somewhere in that time had grown to the same height, wore our jeans rolled at the ankle, and tied our shirts in matching knots at our waists. Celeste wore her hair out, an amazing black halo floating over her head. I had learned to keep my hands out of it, but at school, she was constantly slapping the other kids’ hands away. Some mornings, when she thought no one was looking, I saw her face dip into a sadness I had only seen on my father. Those days, I wanted to grab her hand and hold on tight. But we were eleven. What did we know about anything?

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Spring came again. I like you, Treetop, Celeste said to me one morning. But I don’t like it here.

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But you love the leaves. And egg creams!

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My mom said we’d give it a year. It’s been more than a year, Celeste said. She wouldn’t look at me. And then, finally, she did. New York is only four and a half hours away.

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I know.

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But we both knew—the distance between New Hampshire and New York was forever away. A whole lifetime.

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Celeste laced her fingers inside of mine. The way our fingers go, she said, brown, white, brown, white…It’s like the same God or Mother Nature or Universe that decided to make the leaves here all crazy colored said this—she held up our hands—this is right, too.