Heads of the Colored People(15)
I never understood how Christinia decided to choose her target each day. I wasn’t the only one, but I was her favorite—the only other black girl, the one with the special name, the girl who sometimes insisted on wearing eighties clothes in the nineties. When I met her in second grade, I assumed that Christinia and I would be friends. We had skin color and intelligence in common, and our mothers were both doctors, and my mother wanted me to have a black friend, black friends plural if there had been more options. She said it would round out my experience, but really, I think it was one of the ways she could justify putting me in an otherwise white school. But Christinia and I were different. She was the kind of black girl who wore fake hair, something I could never do, and who bragged about having “Indian in my blood” to white listeners who seemed bored or amused but clearly unimpressed. Her stomach made her one of the heftier girls in the class, and when I got up the courage to look down on her, I made a point of flaunting my thinness—the only desirable thing about my body—over her tendency toward chubby. People could make up their nicknames, but I made sure no one would ever call me Fati, Fatty.
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Biniam leads us through Garudasana (Eagle Pose) and Sputa, which sounds like a dirty word in Spanish, but which means Fixed-Firm Pose. Biniam is vaguely African—Eritrean, Ethiopian—with a thin nose and thick, shiny curls. He says, in that accent that women find attractive, “Fatima, relax the shoulders, soften the gaze.” With the new black woman, there are three of us in this class. She flops down flat on her soft stomach instead of taking a vinyasa on the way to Down Dog, collapses instead of hovering. Once, Biniam said, “Fatima,” dragging out the last syllable, “that name is honorable; you should look up its history.” I know its history.
“Turn your gaze inward,” he says, making his way toward me. I try, but I watch the woman. Her eye catches mine again. I look away.
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I don’t know if it was the differences between our bodies or the one similarity that made Christinia hate me on first sight. But she expressed her disdain for me in the five years that followed in sporadic, disjointed ways that were interspersed with kindness. The unpredictability amounted to emotional abuse. One day she’d pull up my shirt in front of the entire class and reveal the pink undershirt that should have been a bra, and the next day she’d give me a really expensive present, like the Hello Kitty pencil box from the Sanrio Store with all the compartments and the matching erasers.
“I wish I had some good tweezers to make this easier,” she’d said once as she helped me remove the splinter from my clammy hand after an accident on the balance beam. I barely felt a prick when she pinched the skin around my palm and then held up the tiny wood between her index finger and thumb. “Got it.”
“That wasn’t bad,” I said, examining the tiny pink hole Christinia had left in my palm.
She paused then and grabbed my hand again. “You have a lot of calluses,” she said.
“Monkey bars. Remember in elementary? I used to play on them every day.”
“My mom says calluses are the body’s defenses against itself,” Christinia said. Her mother wasn’t that kind of doctor—she had a PhD, like my mother, and they both let everyone know it—but Christinia was a walking medical book. She paused, still holding my hand. “I can read your fortune,” she said.
“I don’t believe in that stuff.” I backed up, taking my hand with me.
“Just real quick,” she said.
Warmth passed between us and she ran her finger over my palm.
“You’re going to die young,” she said with seriousness in her face.
“Where does it say that?” I pulled my hand away again to search it myself.
She laughed. It was a throaty, almost phlegmy laugh with a shrill edge. Hihihihi, like she used the wrong vowel. Who laughs with an i sound instead of an a or an e? “You’re so gullible!” she yelled and ran off.
Later that school year, we wrestled, in a fight that almost got us both expelled—for the second time—over her accusation that I thought I was better than she was. She made me feel confused and unstable. I avoided her; she sought me out.
The day she sniffed me, I heard her coming. As she approached the pencil sharpener, she made the kind of noises she always made when she set out to make fun of something. I heard her horse-whinny hihihi, the same sound she’d made in second grade when she, on her way to sharpen a pencil, convinced Rhianne to stick the tack on Renee Potts’s seat. She made the same whinny the next day when she found out that Renee had to get a tetanus shot.
I know I didn’t smell like Teen Spirit. No deodorant can completely eliminate the odor produced by a combination of excessive sweating, excessive anxiety, an excessive coat, and the hormones an eleven-year-old body produced. But I was still surprised when, like ants, my classmates one by one made their way to the pencil sharpener and sniffed me on the way back to their seats, carrying over their heads the words “musty,” “gross,” and “so weird.” I sat frozen in a cold sweat, imagining myself somewhere else. Mrs. Trebble never directly let on that she noticed, but she gave me a piece of candy, a half-melted Hershey’s Kiss, after class.
The whole thing was more embarrassing than the time I had to leave the classroom because I was upset by the Holocaust movie. It was even more embarrassing than when I misread Jason’s kindness and asked him to be my boyfriend and when he kindly said no offense, but no. It was worse than all those things because it said something about my inherent inability to be something normal, to be a girl, to be perfect all or even some of the time.