Freshwater(16)
“You should give me a call,” the driver replied. “I’ll take you out on my bike one day.” He gave Ada his card. The boy lost his temper when he found out and ripped the card into pieces. A few days later, he found Ada out back behind the dorm, weighing a broadsword with both hands, looking at knives that one of her collector friends had brought over in his truck. The boy got angry and banned Ada from ever playing with blades again. Ada looked at him and I stared through her eyes and kept her silent. She and I watched his anger bounce around and we did nothing, said nothing. What was there to say? It was more interesting to watch his fury grow at the dullness in Ada’s eyes, the smooth emptiness of her face. It is not easy to look at me, I know this very well.
When Ada first met the boy, he told her this story about how much he loved his mother, how he and his brother went and drove nails through the hands of a man who threw stones at her in Denmark. I remembered it when I arrived. The image of the man being held against the ground, his palm forced open, the boys baring their teeth. The nail tearing through flesh and ligaments with metal purpose, the man’s screams, the blood bursting. It was true, and me, I like true things. Yet, when Ada started to think that she loved the boy, I allowed it. It would make things easier for her. She was not like me; she was not strong. One time, the boy was leaving for a volleyball tournament and Ada held her hand to his face as they said good-bye. I watched through her eyes as his smile went away.
“Stop it,” he told her. “My mother looks at me like that.”
She must have been in front of me that time. I never looked at him with anything that could have been contained in his mother’s face. The boy made Ada a gibbering thing in a corner—this is the truth, but he would never get her again. I had arrived, flesh from flesh, true blood from true blood. I was the wildness under the skin, the skin into a weapon, the weapon over the flesh. I was here. No one would ever touch her again.
When the May term ended, Ada left her school and that little run-down town in the pretty mountains, and flew to Georgia to stay with Itohan. Soren flew to Denmark, but he took her teddy bear, Hershey, with him. If you didn’t know him, you could call that cute, but he was such a thief, you know, he stole and stole and stole. Fucking bastard. In Georgia, Itohan took Ada to a hair salon. Ada sat in one of the raised chairs and stared at her reflection, all that heavy hair hanging from her scalp.
“Cut it off,” she said.
The stylists, even the other clients, were appalled. They were Black women who paid and took money to get and give long hair, thick hair, straight hair, and she had it pouring from her head like an afterthought.
“All that pretty hair?” they asked, horrified. “You sure?”
“I’m sure,” Ada said. Of course she was sure. I was sure. Me, I remembered when Ada had been born, with wet hair that was black as jet and slick as a fish. The hair she had now was dead, deader than hair usually is. Besides, I had arrived and something had to mark that, so cutting her hair felt correct.
“Make the first cut then,” the stylist said. She didn’t believe Ada would do it, but she didn’t know her and she certainly didn’t know us.
Ada took the scissors from her, took a piece of hair from right above her forehead, pulled it down before her eyes, and snipped near the roots. The women in the room gasped, staring in shock. I grinned—shebi I told you the girl belonged to me now. Ada dropped the hair into her lap, on the smock they had put around her neck.
“Can you cut the rest, please?” she said.
The stylist shook her head and took the scissors from her. When she finished, Ada asked for her eyebrows to be waxed, and then she walked out of the salon, looking more like me. She was about to turn nineteen. Back at Itohan’s apartment, she called another boy in Virginia, the brother of a friend, who’d arrived from Togo the semester before with a starched wide shirt collar that made Ada think of home. He and Ada had been flirting for hours each day, ever since the summer started. There were a few days when he wouldn’t take her calls, after she told him about Soren, that she had a boyfriend. I grimaced when she said that, but I had promised to let her hold her lies if they would keep her sane. After a while, the brother called her and said it didn’t matter. Somehow, that made it easier. Ada called Soren and told him she was breaking up with him. I stood heavy in her bones when she did it. The boy was so boring in his sobbing anger, I had her hang up on him. Ada never got her teddy bear back. I told you he was a thief.
After Georgia, the Ada went to see Saachi, who was softer in the body now. The human mother had moved to America the year before. She stopped in Nigeria first to collect A?uli, then they went to America and rented a small apartment in a town in the Southwest. Saachi had wanted Saul to come because he could get his green card, but old failures in London meant he wouldn’t be able to practice medicine in America, so the man refused.
“What am I going there to do? To go and sell popcorn?” he said.
“And what’s wrong with that?” Saachi had replied. She didn’t believe in pride when it came to Ada and the others. But Saul was the way he had always been, so Saachi and A?uli moved without him. The two of them lived in the one-bedroom space and A?uli slept on a futon in a small room with no door, next to the kitchenette. When Ada came to visit, she slept on the sofa in the living room. One morning, she woke up and Saachi was standing in the kitchenette, looking at her. She was holding a cup of coffee and Ada knew it would be black, just like she knew all of Saachi’s glasses of Coke would be laced with Bacardi. Many things were always the same.