Heads of the Colored People(35)



“It looks too small,” Raina said, getting up to feel the fabric of a navy blue A-line dress with a narrow rhinestone belt attached to the waist. “It’s a 10/12,” she said louder than she had planned, though she could never control her voice with Carmen. “I’m a fourteen. You know that.”

“Yes, but you have two weeks,” Carmen said, smiling a little and pointing to another bag. “They’re all twelves. At least look at them. I spent an hour of my day looking for pieces that would be flattering.”

“I’m supposed to be calling Dom soon,” Raina said, and left for her bedroom.

? ? ?

Raina sat on her bed, turned on her television, and considered using her trump card—“I can go stay with Dad, then”—but this battle didn’t seem worth it, at least not yet. Maybe if Carmen pushed again about Raina getting the edges of her hair touched up, Raina might invoke the idle but still-useful threat. Her dad didn’t exactly approve of the videos either, but he said they weren’t harming anything as long as she kept them clean. She wasn’t sure if he had seen many of them, but when she opened the money market account, he joked, via text message, that Raina was a budding young businesswoman after his own heart and that maybe he’d let her write and direct one of his commercials eventually. He never followed through, even after Raina presented him with a script. “That’s so cute, honey,” he had emailed. “But we have a professional guy who does that. Love you. Listen to your mother ;)” She emailed him less frequently after that.

Raina hated posing for the commercials. She hunched awkward and chubby against her mother’s tall thinness and blended into her father’s roundness, their features melding together while Carmen’s jutted, smug or confident. Raina inherited her father’s bug eyes. “Sad she takes after him,” she’d overheard a tipsy aunt say once at a holiday party.

The biannual commercials for her father’s car dealerships stopped being cool after about first grade, when she transferred to Dorsey, where the kids of CEOs were not impressed. She tried to laugh it off when Kylie S. and even Megan and Liz, her two friends, joked about the silly slogan her father insisted on. In homage to a DMX song fluffed and smoothed out into R&B, her father sang, “What’s our name? Tyson Family Motors. If you want it, we got it, our cars are with it. Come on.” The original song came out several years before Raina was born, when they still lived in the foothills of Rancho Cucamonga, and her father, fresh out of undergrad, had inherited and rebranded his parents’ dealership, turning one location into four and beginning her family’s ascent—really their move west—from one house in the Inland Empire to one in Westwood and a vacation condo in Aspen. They didn’t ski; it was pure status symbol, that house. Her father lived in Woodland Hills, about thirty minutes away from Raina, with his girlfriend, Manda, a blond twentysomething who basically treated Raina the same way Carmen did; only she thought Raina’s hair “looked so cute that way, with all those little curls.” Raina saw them about six times a year, plus the two commercial shoots, which her mother still participated in four years after the divorce, because she and Raina’s father both agreed that “the family brand is different from the family.”

Scenes from the family brand: Manda standing with a plastered smile, off to the side, off camera; a montage of Raina, Carmen, and Carl Tyson huddled together at the intersection of each dealership and each of her father’s billboards; a family existent only in cuts; her dad making promises in a voice-over; the theme song playing over their poses.

? ? ?

Dom didn’t answer when she tried to call him for a video chat, but he texted five minutes later that he would call in an hour.

“How do you know this Dom guy is even a real person?” her friends had asked, sounding exactly like Carmen, for a change. “Haven’t you seen Catfish?”

Raina knew Dom was real and close to her age, though once he had said seventeen and once he had said fifteen. They had never hung out in person—Dom lived in Connecticut—but she had seen his whole face early on in live video chats, when they used to talk like normal people. It was only after her popularity increased that he started asking her to make it “more like an ASMR video,” quiet and without her face. She would wait another day or so before she asked him again about chatting the old way. Anyway, he was supposed come out to California for a summer program, only five months away, he said; at very worst, they’d see each other then.

Carmen knocked on her door and opened it without Raina’s consent. “I’m sorry about the twelves, Rain. How about we take you to my Pilates class tomorrow, so you’ll feel more confident, lengthen out a little? We can go shopping at the end of the week and you can pick something you like, fourteen, twelve, whatever.”

Raina sighed. “I don’t want to go shopping, Mom.”

“You have to wear something,” Carmen started. She sat on Raina’s bed. Up close, Carmen’s skin was smooth and poreless, nearly as young as Raina’s but for a few skin tags. “What is it, Rain?” she said, her voice nearly affectionate, her hand hovering as though it might touch her daughter’s shoulder. “You never talk to me anymore.”

Raina’s mind browsed the possible answers to this tone-deaf statement: That’s because you’re never home; you don’t listen anyway; maybe because everything you say is a lecture; maybe because you care more about how I look than how I feel; I think Kevin’s posting anonymously on my page, sexually harassing me, again, and what will you even do about it?

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