Tyler Johnson Was Here(53)

Mama grabs me and we run to the car. Ivy, G-mo, and Faith follow behind. We all wheeze and wheeze for oxygen until we get away from the scene and can breathe in clean air.

Before, when I heard about black and brown kids getting killed by the police, I didn’t think protesting was worth it, that it would do anything at all. I used to think that protests were stupid because they wouldn’t change anything, especially not a racist’s mind. But now I see: This is only the beginning of a long fight. It’s my turn to speak up and resist.





? 27 ?


I can’t draw worth shit, but I spend the next couple weeks sketching the same picture of a boy with a low fade and a wide nose, flat like a pug’s, standing in front of a black hole, one leg engulfed in dark matter, the other in the light. It’s been yet another failed experiment to distract myself, to worry less about whether Officer Monster will get indicted and put in jail for what he did.

I’ve tried everything, even drowning myself in my music, but nothing seems to work—nothing seems to stop the grief from grabbing me by the throat and choking the oxygen right out. I almost think that I get worse as each day passes. I sleep. I wake. I sleep. I wake. And I keep on doing that until they seem to become one and the same.

All my days are a hazy, unhappy mess inside my fragmented home, and outside my window, where real life waits in all of its shadows, the sun getting consumed by the hand of the night, I see white people walking happily down the street and it’s a goddamn aching punch in the gut of something people like me don’t quite yet have: freedom.

I wake up and eat my Lucky Charms slowly. I wake up wondering how many mornings and nights I’ve got left. I wake up trying to convince myself that it was all just a dream. But this only brings more grief. Because this shit isn’t a dream, man.

One day my brother was here, and then the next, he wasn’t.

And it’s such a strange and depressing thing to wonder how many days it’ll take for Mama to stop kissing Tyler’s urn. How long it’ll take for her to stop talking to it in the morning and at night.

My Mondays become Wednesdays and my Wednesdays become Fridays and my Fridays become Mondays again. At least, that’s the way it seems. Time has become such an agonizing thing to bear. There’s only this moment right now, the next one, and the one after that. And I realize that the saying was bullshit all along. Time does not heal. It only anesthetizes.

Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays are days that I spend with Faith. And it’s so nice to have her around. Her presence, though it comes in tiny doses, is like a drink that I down to blur out all the bad things that have happened in my life.

Faith’s also teaching me how to be the only child, which guts me as much as it dulls all this hurt. But I find ways to turn the hurt into anger and the anger into lonely and the lonely into busy, even if it means trying to push through the pointless schoolwork Ms. Tanner drops off at my house every day and drawing shitty-ass stick figures and black blotches of ink.

Faith is doing work for her college one Monday night, flipping through a textbook. I sit on the edge of her bed, watching her, trying not to think about the fact that I have to get my application done since I got an extension, and I don’t think I’ll be able to. Isn’t it fucked up that my brother is gone, and I might get to go to MIT because I fit the kind of black boy category they’re looking for?

“What’re you thinking about?” Faith asks, glancing up from her book.

“Nothing,” I lie. She waits, and I let out a sigh. “Just about college. What I’m going to do.”

“You’re still being considered for MIT, right?”

I shrug. “Yeah.”

“You seem so excited about that,” she says with a small smile.

And the thing is, once upon a time, I really did think I was excited about it. “I used to be. Not so much anymore.”

She closes her textbook. “Why not?”

“Because of everything. Tyler. I don’t know.”

“It can be hard to feel like you’re moving on with your life. After Kayla died, I felt like I didn’t have the right to go to school or anything like that.”

I’m nodding, my eyes tearing up. I’m so fucking sick of crying.

She puts a hand on my knee. “You don’t have to feel guilty.”

“You know, before he died, I told him that he didn’t have to do what was expected of him. Everyone looks at us and expects us to be into the drug life because we’re black, and I told him he didn’t have to go down that path. But I’m doing the same thing, in a way. Applying to MIT just because people say that’s the best school to go to.”

She opens her textbook again. “Sounds to me like you’re not actually that excited about MIT.”





When I get home, I tear open an Oatmeal Creme Pie and stare at my computer screen, looking at MIT’s website. And I exit out. Open up another tab and start looking at other colleges. Best schools to double-major in science and African-American history. Historically Black Colleges and Universities, like Howard University, where a lot of famous black people went. Taraji P. Henson, Chadwick Boseman, Diddy, Zora Neale Hurston, and even Thurgood Marshall.

My bedroom door creaks open.

“Hey.” Mama smiles warmly at me. She’s wearing a black-and-white sundress. “You’ve got a visitor.”