The Other Black Girl(54)

Mom always referred to her as a lifesaver. At dinner—when Rebekah wasn’t present, of course, and when Mom was in a looser mood—Dad called her a life-sucker.

I reached up and squeezed one of Elroy’s fingers before going back to curling again. “Well, I know that as of at least fifteen years ago, Rebekah never finished reading a book in her life.”

Elroy stooped down and kissed me again, this time on top of my head. The feeling left much to be desired—I could barely feel the light peck through my wig. “I also know that you’re far, far prettier than she ever was. And far more brilliant. And more open-minded: No way she’d let a man put his hands in her—”

“See, now,” I quipped, pointing at him with the curling rod as he mock-ran out of the bathroom, “you should have stopped at ‘brilliant.’?”

“Open-mindedness is sexy, too!” Elroy called over his shoulder.

I snorted. “Hey, where you going? You’re not leaving without me, are you? One more minute. I promise.”

“Calm down, woman,” he shouted from the bedroom. “I’m not going nowhere. The lighting just got unbearable in there, that’s all. Felt kind of claustrophobic.”

“Sixty seconds,” I sang, turning another piece of hair with the curler over and over again in my right hand the way I’d seen my mother do every morning for nearly eighteen years. Except it had been her own fine hair she’d been burning, not synthetic. I was always careful to make that distinction when I looked in the mirror: that even though I was hiding my own hair, at least it would be healthy for that one day I decided to let it out in the open. It wouldn’t start to fall out the way Mom’s did in her last few years—although, I suppose, the sickness had had a hand in that.

“Do you think this thing is tacky, El?” I asked, reaching for the hairbrush. “This red hair?”

“I think that’s a trap that I’ve known you too long to fall into.”

“But what do you think Vermont people are going to think about it?”

“I wouldn’t think too much about that, Di,” Elroy called. “Those white people can’t even imagine that it’s not yours. And that’s not what they’re there to see, anyway. They’re there to see the brilliant Diana Gordon and the brilliant Kendra Rae Phillips talk about their brilliant—no, the first of what surely will be many brilliant, bestselling—”

His voice cut out abruptly.

“El?” I glanced over at the bathroom door, craning my neck to get a look at him. “What is it?”

He didn’t reply.

“I know it’s been more than sixty seconds,” I said, unplugging the curling iron, “but I just… I don’t know.” I tried to smile at my reflection in the mirror, but it turned into more of a grimace. “I’m just not feeling this look.”

I waited. I’d given Elroy an opening to go on another one of his speeches about natural brown girl beauty and how all makeup was really made for white people, so he didn’t know why I bothered so much. But the only thing I heard was the occasional drip-drop of the faulty toilet tank.

“Baby? Is everything okay?” I grabbed my lipstick, my compact mirror. “Fine, you win. We can get going now,” I said, starting for the door.

I was beginning to think that maybe he’d left to see about a taxi, since he had always been the practical one. But then I saw that he was still very much in the room, hunched over the foot of his bed.

“What are you looking at?” I asked him.

Elroy crumpled up whatever it was that had had his attention over the last few moments and held it behind his back. That worried look had returned. “I’m not going to say it’s nothing, because by now you can obviously see that isn’t the case. But, still… Di…” He exhaled. “It really is nothing. Well, not really. But it will be. In a few days.”

I eyed him suspiciously. “That looks like a newspaper,” I observed.

Elroy hesitated, seeming to consider whether it was worth lying or not. “It is that,” he said awkwardly.

“Let me see it.”

“I…”

“We don’t have time for this,” I said.

He handed it over, facedown—the frustrating equivalent of a child chucking a tennis ball at my head after I’d asked him nicely to hand it over—but I didn’t say anything as I flipped it right side up. Nor did I say anything as my eyes met the black-and-white printed face of the woman with whom I’d been rocketed into the national spotlight over the last three weeks. The woman who had been my best friend for twenty years, since we’d first met in Ms. Abraham’s seventh-grade science class.

I swallowed, took a breath. “Bestselling Burning Heart Editor: ‘If You White, You Ain’t Right with Me,’?” I recited clearly, like I was reading a birthday card. I paused for a moment before looking back up at Elroy. “Jesus Christ. What did Kenny do?”

Elroy tugged at his beard again. He had about as much of an answer as I did. “I don’t know,” he said, “but you’ll probably want to wait until after this event is over to find out.”

“But what if they ask me questions about it during the Q and A?”

Elroy shrugged. “I’m not sure people up here read the New York Times, baby. I only read it because of you.” Then he snapped back into action, seizing the pair of black heels I’d left by the floor-length mirror that hung by the front door of our hotel room and handing them to me. “If I were you, I would play dumb for now,” he said. “Plead the Fifth. It’s the best thing you can do for yourself, and for Kenny. Then maybe you can talk some sense into her. Let’s take her out after this is all over in a few hours.”