(From the novel, She Woke Up With the Words in Her Mouth)
by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
Children in jean jackets and brightly colored sweaters rushed through the glass doors of the coffee shop and bounded onto the bus. The fifth- and sixth-graders were the first up the stairs, their long legs giving them a head start over younger children like Malaya, who, at eight years old, waddled like a short-legged pigeon in the walk from the door to the curb. The “big kids”—all smaller than Malaya, who weighed 140 lbs at her last doctor’s visit three months ago—seemed to manage the motion from their coffee shop stools to their school bus seats in one long leap, flying like the cats on the Felines of the Jungle fact cards she liked to copy in her diary. The older children sped toward the cherished seats at the back of the bus, which they would turn into their private den for laughing and talking and singing love songs, purring and hissing about things only big kids could know. Malaya thought of the sprawl of leopards’ and cheetahs’ limbs as she watched them dart through the bus’s narrow aisle. She scuttled behind them at a piglet pace, doing her best to keep up.
She waved goodbye to her mother and climbed the bus stairs behind Shaniece Guzmán, one of her two best friends, ready to listen to the big kids’ morning songs and to eat what was for Malaya the second breakfast of the day. At the coffee shop, with her mother, she was careful to Order Smart, to choose foods sanctioned by the caucus of round black women at the Pound Pinchers Plus meetings she and her mother had been attending for the past two years, starting when she was six. Malaya would push herself onto the stool, her stomach spilling two inches past the rim of the counter, and ask for “a fruit cup and a small iced tea, no sugar” in her thinnest and most grown-up voice. Then, once the school bus pulled down Broadway and cleared her mother’s sightline, she unpacked her lunch, which was the same every morning: a tuna or turkey or low-fat-peanut butter sandwich, always on light bread with light mayo or reduced sugar jelly; a cup of light yogurt; a sugar-free juice box, and an apple.
Thankfully, Shaniece was always willing to share her treats. Her lunch was always a collection of the most delicious Forbidden Foods from the corner bodega—pork rinds and Doritos and cans of Coke; beef jerky and caramel corn with Now-and-Laters and a quarter-water; deli sandwiches as thick as fists and two fifty-cent pies—always accompanied by a handful of dulce de coco candies wrapped in greasy wax paper. Shaniece usually said this was her second meal, too, though Malaya wasn’t sure if she could believe her. Each morning, she talked about the marvelous meals her mother had made her—sausages, potatoes, guava bread and all kinds of jellies. According to Shaniece, her mother was a beautiful woman with a name almost as fancy as ice cream á la mode, Pat-RI-ci-a, the t and r-i of which stuck fabulously together over Malaya’s tongue when she said it and slid into a delicious lace of soft s and vowel sounds. Patricia Guzmán was a miracle of motherhood, in Shaniece’s account. She came from a beautiful place called Santo Domingo, where, in Malaya’s mind at least, the sweet dulce de coco candies grew in sweeter. Malaya had never met Shaniece’s mother in the three years the two girls had been best friends, and Shaniece always walked to the bus stop alone. Still, when Shaniece talked about her mother on the bus, Malaya imagined Patricia to be tall and curvy as a tomato vine, her blonde hair falling like a splash of lemonade behind her, her body sprawling and rolling to the rhythm of her name.
The morning bus ride was the high point of Malaya’s day, not only because of the food, but also because she got to hear the fifth-grader Daundré Harris sing at the back of the bus with Shaniece pressed close beside her. Early in the second grade, Malaya discovered that when she and Shaniece sat together and talked about boys, she felt as though little turbo-charged ants were shooting over her skin, running from her legs to her neck to the backs of her knees in milliseconds. Having no real boys in her life to talk about, Malaya made up stories about imaginary boys on her block who liked her. She gave them names like Quentin and Romulus, names she had come across in books and on TV, though she had a hard time spelling them when she wrote about them in her Hello Kitty diary. These boys bought her candy every day, she told Shaniece, and kissed her on the lips in secret on underneath the front stoop each night while her parents stayed late at work. Shaniece usually frowned and responded with stories of her own, about sixth-grade boys who sang her love songs in Spanish and didn’t even need to get allowance because they had jobs at the bodega every day after school.
These stories Malaya could believe, mainly because of how Shaniece looked. She was a pudgy, butter-colored girl with hair the color of brown construction paper left out in the sun. Her hair fell lazily down from her head, swiping at the collar of her jean jacket almost like a white girl’s, but with sharp, jagged edges that reminded Malaya of the points of scissors. Malaya’s mother, a Black Studies and Psychology professor, would not let her relax her hair until her sixteenth birthday—an impossible distance away. So Malaya looked at the stiff flap and slight flow of Shaniece’s hair with envy, stealing pats and rubs of it whenever she could.
She never touched Shaniece at school, mainly because Shaniece was skinnier and had light skin like the fourth grader Amandra Wilson, Daundré’s girlfriend. Malaya felt like a gargoyle next to her. Sometimes, thinking of how she looked next to girls like Amandra and Shaniece made her want to stick her head under her mother’s iron, rub her skin with an eraser until all the dark brown was gone, and slice inches off her stomach with a cake knife. Malaya did her best to steer as clear as possible from Amandra and not talk too much to Shaniece at school. And if someone did catch her and Shaniece together, she made sure to say something mean about Shaniece’s grades or breath or family later.
But up in Harlem it was a different story. Shaniece came to Malaya’s house for play dates a few times each week, which gave Malaya a chance to feel Shaniece beside her and touch her hair all she wanted. Although in almost all parts of her life her body made her feel like a disaster, the play dates were among the very few occasions when her size worked in her favor. Shaniece’s thickness was concentrated tightly and evenly from her shoulders to her ankles, giving her the slightly bulging shape of a banana. Malaya, on the other hand, was round everywhere, and though she had no waist to speak of, she did have soft, deep cups of flesh around her nipples, which had grown so full in the last few months that she’d begun sneaking into her mother’s drawers at night to steal bras to wear to school. The flesh sacs on her chest annoyed Malaya, as they meant more weight to worry about. But it also meant that when the two played, she got to be the girl.
She and Shaniece would sneak together into her mother’s bathroom on the brownstone’s second floor while Colette, the baby sitter, cooked dinner downstairs. They pinned the ends of her parents’ towels to the floor with brushes and blow driers and her mother’s African masks, sliding her mother’s makeup carousel to the center of the circle to give their tent a shape. Malaya would lie beneath Shaniece, squeezing herself against the girl’s narrower body until heat burst from a quiet place just below her stomach. When the feeling got good, she would to lock small tufts of Shaniece’s hair between her knuckles and wiggle her hand, letting the strands prick the crevices between her fingers, sending the turbo-ants down to her armpits and the meaty folds of her legs. Sometimes she would imagine Shaniece was Daundré Harris and she was Amandra Wilson. Sometimes Shaniece would slide her arms into Malaya’s sweatshirt sleeves and touch Malaya’s palms so that it looked like the small butter-colored hand coming out of the shirt was Malaya’s own.
Malaya and Shaniece never talked about these games at Francis Galton Academy, and let them lie as a quiet memory of flesh when the two sat pressed together on the school bus. During each morning’s ride, it was the talk of boys and food that locked them together, collaborating on dreams of other, more dazzling lives.
“My mom gave me extra dulce today,” Shaniece said once the two had settled into their seat. She hoisted her beat-up Gem backpack onto her lap. “She told me to share it with Rodrigo cause she knows he likes me.” She smiled, revealing a missing canine tooth.
“Cool,” Malaya said casually. She imagined the burnt coconut shreds melting in her cheeks and on her fingers, leaving moist brown pads of sweetness on her finger tips, gooey lakes of coconut sloshing around her teeth and under her tongue. She bit into her turkey sandwich, feeling the mayonnaise soak through the pores of the bread.
They began to talk and munch, both preoccupied with the theatrics of the big kids in the back of the bus. They sang a song that Malaya knew well, having heard it from the street outside her window at night. It was a fast-clapping song about a pretty girl who made boys fall in love with her by smiling at them. Her block was full of these songs—songs about love, about lonely boyfriends, angry girlfriends, and people who were so happy they could neither sleep nor eat, and could manage only to sing. Perched against her windowsill, she listened to these songs closely every night, copying lyrics down as best she could, repeating them to herself in the mirror to master the syllables and tones so that when the songs cropped up in the back of the bus, she could imagine herself back there, too, next to Daundré Harris, belting a duet about their love together.
While the big kids sang this morning’s selection, Malaya drifted in her mind to the last seat of the bus, where she was that girl Daundré sang about.
It’s driving me out of my mind/ that’s why it’s hard for me to find/ can’t get it out of my head/ miss her, kiss her, love her…
Daundré’s soft voice drizzled over the drums like caramel over ice cream. While Shaniece talked about her weekend with her mother, Malaya danced with Daundré in her imagination, fast dances like in her African dance class when the beat thumped frantically, then slower, closer, like in her games with Shaniece. Caught in Daundré’s arms, she did not notice when the big kids stopped singing. She heard only Daundré’s voice lingering in the air:
If I were you, I’d take…
Her chest fluttered as the next word pushed up in her throat. She stuffed the sandwich back into its bag. Jostling Shaniece with her hips and elbows, she pushed herself up and looked over the back of her seat, her stomach pressed against the hard leather. Daundré was sitting alone in the last row, his backpack beside him, saving room for Amandra, Malaya guessed. A run of black curls sat neatly on top of his head and the faded edges at either side of his face peeked out over the top of the seat. Stretching a little further forward, Malaya could see his smooth penny-colored forehead, his mouth slightly open, his eyes straining to remember the next word.
“Pre-cau-shuuuuun!” Malaya’s voice was so loud it startled her.
Daundré raised his head up over the seat.
“Before I step to meet a fly girl…” Malaya murmured, shrinking back and lowering her eyes.
“Cause it’s some potionnnn…” Daundré sang. He wrinkled his eyes into a smile and nodded at Malaya.
Daundré turned to the sixth-grade boy across the aisle. “You’ll think she’s the best thing in the wo-o-rld…”
He had gotten the line wrong, but it didn’t matter. Malaya had become, for an instant, that fly girl to whom someone like Daundré would sing. She settled back into her seat, feeling good, better than good. While Shaniece described the delicious empanadas her mother had made the night before, Malaya counted her Breads. The sandwich would cost her one Bread point, plus at least two Proteins, she guessed, for the turkey, and one Milk for the cheese. She would skip lunch, she decided, pulling her Hello Kitty diary from her backpack. She calculated her Point Values on a blank page. If she was careful throughout the day, she’d be left with two Breads for dinner. Even if Colette made her good Haitian rice with ground meat and corn, Malaya would eat only a little. She would ask her to put only two Breads’ worth of rice and two Proteins’ worth of meat on her plate. She would find the Control the meeting ladies always talked about. She would just think of her song with Daundré and she would make herself stop.
There would be no stealing money for food at the ice cream truck today, no begging for free pizza and French fries at the cafeteria, her face pinched around a tale about her lunch left at home. Today had no room for overeating and elaborate lies, only for dreams, promises, plans: Malaya would stay On Program. She would count each thing she ate and follow every single rule from this moment until the time in the future when she became, finally, a pretty thing, a fly girl, a cat.
She turned to tell Shaniece about her decision just as the last of the coconut candy disappeared into the girl’s mouth. Malaya decided to say nothing, unsure that her friend would understand.
The classroom was quiet as Randall Creighton, a tall girl with hair the color of fruit punch, walked around the clusters of desks, dropping a manila envelope in front of each student. The third-grade teacher, Miss Brooke, sat at her desk cooing softly and consoling Ben Heath, who had turned bright pink and begun to heave loudly as soon as she’d pulled the report cards from her desk. As Ben’s groans fell to a whimper, the other children tore their envelopes open, each taking a few seconds to scan the grids where grades of Outstanding, Very Good, Satisfactory and Unsatisfactory were recorded. After a few minutes of whispering and comparing grades, most of the students stuffed the envelopes into their Eddie Bauer and L.L. Bean backpacks and ran for the hallway, pouring like a jar of jellybeans onto the courtyard for lunch. A few children—like Ben and Sasha Westland—cried at the sight of their envelopes, hugging them to their chests.
Malaya opened her report card quickly and glanced over the grid, checking to be sure that the only grade to be found in the Art, Music, Spanish, and English grids was O. This done, she sat at her desk and waited for her classroom friend, Rachel Greenstein, to do the same, deciding that the less important grades like Math, Science, and P.E. could wait until the afternoon bus ride. For now, she wanted to leap outside with her friend like a thin girl would, to start her new life as a new person in the pulsing world of games and chatter on the courtyard.
Once Rachel had looked over her own report card, the two walked outside and sat beneath the old wooden jungle gym, where they settled in to play W.I.T., an adventure game they had invented the previous year. In this game, they were both beautiful teenage Witches-in-Training, armed with potions and magical powers that would help them slay villains named for boys like Ben Heath and attract suitors who looked and spoke like the boys they liked. They sat beneath the jungle gym and picked up where yesterday’s game had left off, Malaya supporting her weight against one of the structure’s splintering wood beams, and Rachel’s angular shoulders jerking sporadically like the wings of a frail bird as she talked.
“I am Sorrenthia, High Magistrate of the Eighth Dimension,” she cackled, her fingers wiggling in excitement. “What elixir would you like this afternoon, Malaya? What is your pleasure?”
Rachel was, in many ways, Shaniece’s opposite. Where Shaniece was brown and round and ate at least some foods Malaya knew about from the bodega uptown, everything about Rachel’s life was foreign to Malaya. She lived in an apartment off of Park Avenue with a sunken living room and a baby grand piano in the parlor, and her family kept cheesecakes decorated with fresh strawberries in the refrigerator, not only on birthdays, but at all points in the year. Still, Rachel was long and thin, with skin as white and smooth as an uncracked egg, and eyes that reminded Malaya of the underbrush of a Christmas tree.
“But my name is not Malaya,” she said. “I’m not Malaya anymore, remember?”
“Right!” Rachel leaned forward, resuming the voice of the crypt. “Aryala, Witch-in-Training Number Seven.”
Rachel tickled her knee with a dried leaf, and the two fell together into a giggle that soon rolled into full-bodied laugh. Their laughter felt sweet and thick as a layer of frosting tucked into a cupcake. It made a curtain around them where they could lay and laugh, reclining against the rush of extra-galactic winds or the trampling feet of children playing tag; here, under the jungle gym, it was all the same. Malaya exhaled. She had made it through the morning according to her plan. She had eaten only half of her sandwich, and did not steal money for cookies or ice pops from the open pockets of the wealthy first-grade kids. She was so looking forward to her new self, her new life, that when Rachel suggested that they join the game of freeze-tag that was forming on the other side of the courtyard, Malaya felt herself push slowly up from the ground, and heard herself agree.
She felt her classmates’ eyes on her as she and Rachel neared the huddle of small bodies gathered on the blacktop beside the basketball court. Still, thinking of her plan, she let Rachel take her hand and lead her into the group. They stuck their feet into the circle and sang along to the chorus of “Eenie Meenie Miney Moe” as Maurice Orland poked each sneaker in succession, grimacing up at Malaya’s leg when he touched her shoe. She prayed silently that she would not be made it. Soon, the teams divided and the children began to scatter about the wide brick courtyard, running quickly away from Jonah Burkman, the runny-nosed blonde boy whose sneaker was chosen.
Air rushed at Malaya’s face as she ran. She hesitated at first, feeling stiff. But then, reminded of her plan, she made herself loosen, until the running started to feel good. Her arms and legs seemed to stretch and flap freely like strings pinned to her torso. She closed her eyes, floating, thinking of the new, narrow body she would have one day, so so soon. She felt the courtyard soften into a blur of light and color beneath her, and imagined herself transported to a life in which her body could do wild things like rush forward with the speed of air, float and bob on the wind like an ice cube in a cup of soda, fizz fiercely up like a flurry of bubbles.
Whirling around in this weightless state, the only thing that soured the feeling was the thought that at some point she might fall, and that falling from this place of high glide and crashing speed would be worse than anything that could have happened had she never tried to run in the first place.
“I got Malaya!” Ben Heath cackled suddenly, swooping toward her out of nowhere with a greedy laugh. “I got Malaya! I got Malaya!” He dug his fingers into her arm, signaling that she was now it, and that it was her turn to chase.
Jackets and sweaters flew around like bundles of burst balloons, scattering over the open space so quickly that Malaya had no hope of catching one. The courtyard seemed to expand with each step she took, her body growing heavier and heavier, the other children flying further and further away. She looked for Rachel, hoping she would be kind and let her catch her, but she was nowhere around. Running toward the jungle gym, Malaya began to lose her breath. Her shoelaces unraveled and her knee grew hot with pain. Soon a huge group of third and fourth and fifth-graders neared her, bouncing like balls around her. Taking turns, they leaned in toward her, laughing, then retreaded just out of reach when she lunged at them. Maurice Orland ran a circle around her, and she followed behind him panting, a tight pit forming in her chest. Jonah Burkman walked toward her with an exaggerated casualness, then sprang back cackling as she reached for his shoulder. Malaya turned desperately, praying for Rachel’s warm, wintery eyes or Shaniece’s spongecake skin to appear in the circle. Instead she found herself face-to-face with Daundré Harris, who opened his mouth into a gigantic O shape and laughed.
“Haaaaaaa! Haaaaaaa! Faaaat giiiirl caaan’t runnn!”
The taunt seemed to come straight up from his navel and over his tongue, then pour out and fill the courtyard. The whole school itself seemed to open up and laugh with him. Then Amandra Wilson sidled up beside him, pulling at her hair, her lean face tilted to the side as she joined in the laughter.
Dizzy, Malaya heaved through the gaggle of slim bodies and lunged for her backpack beneath the jungle gym. Her hands slick with sweat, she swung the backpack over her shoulder and struggled to push her arm through its tight loop. She tried not to hear the splashes of laughter that seemed to rise higher and higher against the walls of the courtyard. She pinched her eyes closed and shut her ears to the chorus of snickers and laughs that followed behind her as she scuttled back into the school building.
Her face tingled with heat as she shuffled down the endless hallway to the bathroom, to sit on the toilet in the handicapped stall. Her cheeks warm and wet with tears, she pulled out her diary and flipped to the page she had marked that morning: 4 BREDS, 1 FRUTE, 2 PROTEENS. NOW I WIL EAT LES, EXCERSISZE MORE, AND LOOSE WEIGHT. She raked her pencil over the words and numbers until they were covered in shiny gray, bits of lead dust smearing the page. Then pulled out the yogurt, tore its tinfoil top off of the container, and licked it dry. Spoonless, she squeezed the plastic cup and dove into it, lapping the yogurt into her mouth, the sweet cream mixing with the taste of saltwater on her lips.
She shook the folded report card envelope loose from the books, crayons, and candy wrappers that crowded her bag, wiped her fingers on her sweatpants and opened the report card again. Lines of blue and black ink rolled over the bottom of each section of the grid. In English, the teacher had written that she had an excellent mind. The Spanish teacher had said that she was one of the best speakers in the class. The Math teacher said that she had shown marked improvement. P.E. showed a grade of U, with no note attached, and the Science section showed only three words of written comment: “Malaya lacks focus.”
At lunchtime, she decided, she would tell Miss Brooke her mother had forgotten to give her lunch money so that the teacher would buy her a cafeteria meal. She would ask a few of her classmates for their desserts, and would borrow money from one of the first graders or reach into somebody’s pocket and pull out enough change to buy chocolate from the candy truck before going home. Now she hoped that Collette would make her Haitian meat and rice, and that her parents would stay at work until after bedtime so that she could eat as much as she wanted at dinner and give herself extra spoonfuls of tuna or reduced-fat peanut butter while she made her lunch for the next day.
There in the handicapped stall, she turned the yogurt cup inside out and sucked it clean, her tongue registering no flavor, her jaw working so hard it throbbed. As her mouth and stomach filled, Malaya erased pictures from her mind. She had not sung with Daundré Harris, had not felt warmth flood her cheeks as she looked over the line of O’s on her report card. She had not decided that she could become a cheetah, had not planned to find those things the meeting ladies said were so important: “Discipline,” “Will Power,” “Control.” She would not share this with Rachel or Shaniece. She would not play tag, would not sing with Daundré Harris, would not even dream about running ever again. She would finish her yogurt in the bathroom and stare at the walls all through Math class. She would eat as much as she could at lunch, and in Art class she would draw a picture made only of purples, browns and blues. She would take breaks every chance she got in the handicapped stall, sitting and eating and sending her mind away so that by Science class, last period, she would be gone.
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