Heads of the Colored People(34)
80 thumbs up
She appreciated the positive feedback, but sometimes Raina felt, briefly, that everyone wanted or saw only a piece of her, not a whole, that she was mere flesh, a series of keywords to help identify her:
ASMR whispers rain tingles black African American African-American full thick DDs long-hair-don’t-care natural curly massage soft spoken binaural bob ross water sounds storytelling hair brushing gentle role play adenoids spa day fairy tales tapping mind massage autonomous sensory meridian response breasts cleavage
As she deleted one of the latest offensive comments, which were fewer and farther between this round, her eyes found another post, clearly from Kevin or one of his sidekicks, maybe Adam or Michael.
SmexyandIKnowIt: I want it you got it lemme get it come on wit it Raina.
This one was probably Michael’s work; his punctuation was always the worst of the three guys, even though he sat three seats to the left of Raina in AP English now. Kevin was their leader of sorts. He had been nicer in elementary school, though his mean edge was present if you crossed him. Raina almost liked him then, admiring his short brown hair and the way his green eyes contrasted with his tan. But around sixth grade, he became really mean to a lot of the girls, not just Raina, though he often made comments about the size of her chest. It was only when he tried to feel her up on a class trip to Catalina that they became enemies. She had pushed him into a row of kayaks, causing him to knock them over. Crying, she ran off; he told his friends—and subsequently the entire class—that Raina was a slut who had flashed him her boobs.
She hadn’t felt safe around him since. Occasionally, he caught her when she was isolated, after school or near her locker. Once, a month ago, he whispered some of the things he would do to her, that first he was going to grab her breasts and then cut one of them off. Raina hadn’t told anyone at first. It would be her word against his, just as it had been the time she told her mother and the principal about the incident in Catalina. Her mother had said she wanted to “deal with this situation,” but she also asked Raina, “Did you do anything to make him think he could touch you like that? Did you give him any ideas?” Carmen wouldn’t understand these whispers any more than she understood why Raina wanted to leave Dorsey. And anyway, Kevin didn’t put any actual threats in writing. She had no proof—with his many avatars and handles—that any of the online harassment even came from Kevin or whether Kevin would act on anything he said. But sometimes she wondered if the stress of the ongoing, implied danger might be just as harmful. It was the idea of the idea of Kevin that kept Raina anxious.
She blocked SmexyandIKnowIt before looking at the recent uploads from other ASMR channels. Raina was one of only a handful of black ASMR providers, and so far only one other black girl had more subscribers than she, but that girl was older and had been making videos longer. Raina hoped to compete with the nonblack majority of ASMR makers, some of whom had hundreds of thousands of followers and videos with millions of views. If she counted her previous two YouTube names, she had a total of three million views—though at least a thousand of those were probably from Carmen. Under her current name, Rainwhispers, Raina’s most-watched video was at nearly 900,000. Her income from the videos meant she could bypass her father and buy herself the 3-D headset she used with Dom and in her videos, but she didn’t make big purchases often.
Her mother never relented in her disapproval of the means, but she approved of Raina’s profits and agreed that a money market account would help Raina secure her future, without having to depend on a man, even her father. “All of this, this lifestyle, isn’t just from the divorce settlement,” Carmen reminded Raina regularly, pointing around the house. “I was on the payroll. Always make sure you’re on the payroll.” She wondered if her mother knew that it wasn’t her father’s money that burdened her, but the way her mother showed it—Dorsey, the Town Car, endless luncheons and benefits. Raina vowed to send her own kids to public school, somewhere where they’d never be the only one of anything, and to create as safe and nurturing an environment as she could.
? ? ?
Carmen blew in through the house around seven, her hands full of large brown-and-white paper bags with twine handles. She filled the room, despite her thin frame. “Did you eat?” she asked Raina, who was seated at the kitchen island, half watching a reality show and half thinking about what Dom said.
“Just finished one chicken breast and the Brussels sprouts you left.” Raina sighed. She was still hungry and planning on raiding the freezer for whatever stevia-sweetened sorbet or other low-carb snacks she could find once her mother was out of the room.
“Good. The family commercial is coming up in two weeks, don’t forget.”
“I know, you’ve told me three times and left a note.”
“I never know if you read them or just throw them away,” Carmen said, smoothing one of her brown bags off the counter. “I picked a few things out for you. How was your day, by the way?”
Raina shrugged. She debated telling her mother about Kevin, again, but instead said, “Fine. We had a sub in English today, so I got my homework done during class. The video is doing pretty well so far.”
“Hmm,” Carmen said, her lips pinched together as she rifled through the shopping bags. “I wish you had left out the boob shot, but the story was cute. I’m thinking this blue one is the best dress for the commercial; your father will be in blue, though I’ll probably wear gray or green—I haven’t decided.”