What's Mine and Yours(60)

Jade’s voice cut soberly through the room. “My son doesn’t have to be anything. He’s got a right to be at that school, and if those white kids don’t have to prove they belong, then neither does he.”

“Well, there I disagree with you. You see, the torch is a metaphor—”

“I don’t care about your metaphor.”

“It’s Shakespeare’s.”

“When it comes to my son, my opinion is the only one that matters.”

“And Gee’s,” Andrea said, her voice sweet and clear, but Gee didn’t miss the challenge in it.

The women smiled at each other.

“That’s right,” Jade said. “What matters is what Gee wants.”

There was an opening then for someone to ask him what it was he wanted, his opinion, but no one did. It was Andrea who broke the quiet, asking who wanted pie. Mr. Riley rose to help her, and they busied themselves brewing coffee and making plates. Jade remained at the table with Gee. She smiled at him and arched her eyebrows at the Rileys, their backs turned, but Gee didn’t smile back. He wished he were home, in his room, a picture of Andrea in his head. His shoulders ached from the way he’d been sitting at the table this whole time: too stiff and alert.

He thought about Adira, those white girls who had pulled her hair. He hadn’t told his mother, and he didn’t think he ever would. If there was someone he knew who was a torch, it was Adira, and it hadn’t spared her. Her parents couldn’t spare her, and neither could Mr. Riley, or Jade. Whatever was going to happen would happen—to Adira, to him, to everyone. There was nothing the grown-ups could do to watch over them, really, although they liked to talk as if they had control. They could go on talking, as far as Gee was concerned. It was mostly for themselves anyway. It was what they needed to get by.



Gee was especially quiet on the drive home, and Jade played the rock station hoping they’d air the tracks she knew, the songs that had helped her say, Fuck you, to anyone who didn’t like her precisely the way she was. The music gave her courage, the clarity of rage. It was the perfect antidote to Mr. Riley’s influence, but Gee didn’t seem interested.

A Nirvana song came on, and she turned the radio up. “Listen,” she said.

Gee kept his eyes away from her, the lights reeling past on the freeway.

“Listen,” she said again, and he indulged her.

The song had its own kind of groove, the beat a hypnosis that sent her head swinging from side to side. Gee stayed still.

“What’s this song even about?”

“I don’t know,” Jade said, realizing it for the first time. She knew the lyrics, but they didn’t matter much to her. It was more about the way the music made her feel. It was Kurt Cobain, his gruff voice, reciting the same line over and over. It was a prayer, an incantation. The guitar riff cracked her wide open.

She wanted Gee to know this music was for him, that irreverence and rage weren’t just for white boys. He could get a little drunk if he wanted to; he could play in a band; he could say shocking things, wear a dress, pierce his ears, any part of his body that he wanted; he could scream and break things, as long as they belonged to him and it wasn’t in her house. She didn’t want him to act out, but she didn’t want him to worry too much about how the world would see him either. He’d wind up only punishing himself. She wanted him to be free.

“So, what do you think?”

“I have no idea what he’s saying,” Gee said. “But it’s all right.”

He started to bop his head along, and Jade felt her heart might explode. To be a mother was like this: to fight desperately to hold on to yourself most days, to struggle against the snare of your child, to focus on his future instead of your own. And then, suddenly, to feel bowled over by your love for him, to feel his breath is your breath, your music his music, and you are the same. It was a sensation she hadn’t had in a long time. She let the feeling fill her.



When she dropped him off at home, she didn’t offer any vague excuses about where she was going. She told him good night and then she left.

León Henriquez lived in a cul-de-sac on the southern edge of town, off the road that ran between the two university hospitals. The houses in his neighborhood were tall and white; they looked like wedding cakes lit up in the dark. The cars were parked on large paved circles at the bottom of the pitched lawns. Jade pulled into a spot and climbed to León’s door, let herself in.

He was in the parlor, sitting cross-legged in an armchair, a book open in his lap. He held up a finger for her to wait a moment, then he snapped the book closed and went to her. He kissed her, softly, wetly, then brandished the book before her.

“Epigenetics,” he said, tapping the cover. “It’s not all bad news. There’s good evidence that we can rewrite ourselves, our genetic code, for the better. We can, in a way, rewrite our history.”

“Is that right?” Jade shrugged off her jacket, led him back to the armchair, and settled into his lap. León was always reading about the world’s problems, one tome after another. It seemed to calm the unease he felt about his big house, the gap between his life and his patients’. The reading, at least, gave him an outlet, but Jade didn’t care to hear his case studies about inequality, trauma. She took his book and set it on the side table.