Clap When You Land(10)
“Is it true, Yaya?”
& I hear the tremble in her voice
that threatens the wobble in my own.
Dre loved Papi
as if he were her own family.
Would make Papi laugh with her precise school Spanish & North Carolina manners.
“I don’t know, Dre.
Anything is possi—”
I stop myself midway.
It feels like such a lie.
Nothing & no one feels possible anymore.
I cannot see her nodding.
But I know that she is.
I know that tears are streaming down her clay-brown cheeks.
She tucks her long legs through the window & folds herself onto the floor, rests her head against my knee & hugs my legs.
“I’m here, Yaya. I’m here.”
For hours we sit. Just like that.
Dre is originally from Raleigh.
& although she’s lived in New York for a long time, every now & then her accent will switch up.
Especially when she’s upset
or hurting or trying to be strong.
When New Yorkers are mad?
Our words take on an edge,
we speed talk like relay racers
struggling to pass the baton to the next snide phrase.
But Dre, when she’s upset, her words slow down, & she becomes even more polite, & I know then she is Dr. Johnson’s child through & through.
Dr. Johnson takes on that same precise & calm manner, her words an unrolling ribbon that you aren’t sure you’ll see the end of.
When Dr. Johnson is upset, her hands fold in front of her stomach, & her head cocks to the side as she lectures us on why we should have finished our homework sooner, or why a certain movie or social-media clip wasn’t actually as funny as we thought if we put it in a larger context.
Mr. Johnson, or should I say, Senior Master Sergeant Johnson, is in the Air Force. I’ve only met him a handful of times, & he didn’t talk enough for me to evaluate how quick or slow, how calm or angry the pacing of his speech was.
But Dre speaks to me slowly. Like I’ve seen her whisper to a drooping plant. Believing that her own breath can unfurl a dying leaf. Can sing it back to health.
Can unwilt the stalk.
The summer before seventh grade, Dre grew tall. When extended completely,
her legs stretched beyond the bars
of the fire escape & hung over the edge like Jordan-clad pigeon perches.
Dre wants to study speech therapy in college, but I’ve always thought she should do agriculture.
I’ve never seen anyone make as much grow
in a small pot on a fire escape as I’ve seen Dre coax small seeds to bud & flower here.
She has a railing planter where she grows okra; on our side of the fire escape, which gets better light, she’s planted tomatoes. One time she planted these little peppers that came out green & spicy.
Although the landlord has sent notices
that her fire-escape nursery is a fire hazard, Dre just figures out another way to stack her plants, or hang them on the railing, or hide them in plain sight, so she can blossom. Even when the pigeons pick at her seedlings, or squirrels munch on fresh shoots, Dre just laughs & puts her black hands back in the soil: decides to grow us something good.
Papi never saw what Dre & I were to each other. At least, he never mentioned it.
Ma is more watchful.
& it’s not that Ma did not like that I liked Dre. It’s that she understood I wanted no big deal to be made.
There is an artist my mother loved, Juan Gabriel, who was once asked in an interview if he was gay.
His reply: What’s understood need not be said.
I remember how Mami’s eyes
fluttered to me
like a bee on a flower
acknowledging the pollen is sweet.
I have never had to tell
Mami I like girls.
She knew. & she knew that Dre was special.
Last year, for Valentine’s Day, before I left for school, Mami handed me an envelope with a twenty-dollar bill inside, stirring a pot of something fragrant while she said, “Pa que le compre algo nice a Andreita.”
With her, I did not have to pretend my best friend was just a friend.
The girl next door being the girl for you is the kind of trope my English teacher would have us write essays about in class.
But that’s how it happened for Dre & me.
One day we were best friends, & the next day we were best friends who stared at each other’s mouths when we shared lip gloss.
I don’t think I understood the word W O N D E R
until the day our tongues touched & we both wanted
to have them touch again. This girl felt about me how I felt about her.
The day we first kissed,
I walked into my parents’ bedroom & offered thanks to the little porcelain saint Papi kept on his armoire:
thank you, thank you.
I whispered to everything that listened.
The only thing about Dre that gets on my nerves is that Dre is sometimes too good. She has a scale for doing what’s right that always balances out nice & evenly for her.
Which is why she was so disappointed that I didn’t “come out” in the way she wanted me to.