On Rotation by Shirlene Obuobi
Dedication
For the Black nerdy girls who were led to believe that who they were was an anomaly. For the 4 percent of medical students
in the United States who are Black women. For the dark-skinned girls for whom self-love is a continued, arduous process. For
me, at age twelve, scouring the shelves for books about girls who looked like me, whose suffering wasn’t supposed to be the
subject of discussion in English class. For all my girls who spent their youth reading about other people falling in love
and making no effort whatsoever to experience it themselves. This one is for y’all.
One
The worst thing I ever did was grow an ass. It announced its presence loud and clear before the rest of my body could figure out what was happening; one day, I was skinny thighs and gangly arms and protruding belly button, and the next, my thighs were bursting the seams off my jeans and my ass was projecting out so far from my back that you could fit a pencil bag down the gap, fit an orange, fit an asshole thirteen-year-old boy’s hand. No belt could contain it, and spandex-polyester-blend “curvy”-fit Levi’s didn’t stand a chance. The Ass had taken over. It didn’t care that it was 2002 and asses were out of style. It didn’t care that it had robbed me of the chance to be that girl from the movies, the one scrutinizing her slim, toned body in her full-length mirror, peering over her shoulder and asking her bum of a boyfriend “Does this dress make my butt look big?” Because for me, the answer would always be yes, and it would be unjust to blame the dress.
(No, sweetie, movie boyfriends always say. You look great. Three minutes later, they’ll complain to their boys about how annoying it is when she asks questions that have no right answer. They’ll make fun of the fat chick, for no reason other than fat girls are funny, in the scene after that.)
Real men, the ones who existed off-screen, had no quarrel with the Ass. I knew what it meant to know that a guy was fucking you with his eyes before I knew what fucking was, knew enough to feel sticky-sick from their sleepy, half-lidded gazes and curled lips and damn, mamas. I learned to clutch my fists tightly over my barely budded chest and shuffle out of sight, legs clamped together to keep the Ass from jiggling too much, not that it helped. The Ass had tossed me into womanhood without my consent, thrown me out on a platter for consumption, and left me there to smile vapidly at the Uncle Who Was Just Visiting as his eyes went hooded and he said, “Ay! Angie! All grown up, I see.”
For a while, no man who wasn’t “hood” would ever fess up to being into ass, not until the time when ass came into style and every other Instagram post featured some skinny-waisted, big-bootied video vixen in a bodycon bandage dress. I would have given the Ass a pass for all the trouble it brought me if only it had remembered that I didn’t have the right phenotype. Big asses were glamour if you were Kim K or a light bright Dominicana, but on a dark-skinned nappy-headed ho like me they were too jungle, too much Saartjie Baartman and not enough Marilyn Monroe.
Frederick, my (first ever!) boyfriend of six months, loved the Ass. He liked to rest his hand on the small of my back and stroke down the satin-smooth skin until the high, round cut of it was cupped in his palm. Momma had always said I was lucky—my ass came from my back on a steady slope, not jutting out assertively like so many of my aunties’ did—and Frederick enjoyed that incline, resting his hand along it when we were watching Netflix or falling asleep on his double.
I think the Ass might have been the only thing he actually liked about me, in the end.
“I’m . . . not coming with you.”
I hoisted my duffel bag higher onto my shoulder, giving my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend an appraising look. Frederick looked sheepish, leaning against his perfectly-parallel-parked Lexus with his hands shoved into his pockets and his gaze directed determinedly into the distance. He was the kind of guy whose fashion sense swung dramatically between runway sharp and basement-dweller sloppy, and today, in his sun-bleached high school debate tee and raggedy sweats, he was flagrantly going for the latter. It was an outfit barely acceptable for bed, let alone for meeting my judgmental Ghanaian parents. I still remembered what he’d worn on our first date: a blue blazer, starched white button-down, gray slacks. That outfit, paired with his sculpted frame, even brown skin, and thick-rimmed glasses? He’d looked good enough to eat. I’d taken one look at him, thought, Oh, you’ll do, and praised the geniuses behind the Hinge app algorithm for bringing his existence to my attention. Everything about the way he presented himself in public was so deliberate, and once upon a time, that effort had been attractive to me.
But now? I knew, with certainty, that he had specifically chosen this monstrosity of an outfit to signal to me that I would be driving to Naperville alone. He’d probably spent thirty minutes hunting down the rattiest tee in his dresser just to get the point across. He would’ve done better to spit at my feet.
“Clearly,” I said with a defeated sigh. “So. What are you doing here, then?”
We both knew the answer to that question. After all, Frederick had been playing the Nice Guy game for weeks now—the one little boys play when they want to break up with their perfectly fine girlfriends but don’t want to bear the responsibility of hurting her feelings, and so drag things out and misbehave until the girl loses patience and breaks it off first. And he’d played it so well: responding to my complaints about my Step exam* with a halfhearted “that sucks,” commenting at large on how hot he found women who looked nothing like me, finding reasons to be too busy to see me that somehow were not present for his boys. He’d been mean, when all he’d had to be was honest.