HOUSTON
AUGUST 2017
We thought the rain would come in through the front door. Polite. Maybe it knocks first.
But it didn’t, no matter how much we stared it down in the black of night. No matter how much we peered through our windows, wishing we could be lulled to sleep by the beating drums of fifty million raindrops into water that’s been collecting for days instead of tortured awake night and day by the sound.
To be fair, water did come in the front door for some of us, leaking under wood and fiberglass and spilling everywhere like blood and guts. But for many of us, water came up like a ghost that can haunt you through any crack or crevice, through any space it wants.
Water came for us. It made us clamber up onto kitchen counters and climb up into attics and haul ourselves onto rooftops. It entered our homes and it entered our lives and it rose indiscriminately in every neighborhood across this city. And we had to run from it, or try to.
We were people on the news. Worldwide coverage. We were refugees in our own neighborhoods. We were pitiable and for good reason.
It rained and it rained and it rained and it rained. For four days and four nights it rained. We had built homes here and had done so much living. We had grown and thrived and endured and constructed a city of steel and freeways where once had stood swamps.
Like all human beings through all time and space, we believed there was something untouchable about us. Something powerful and resistant and strong.
But water does whatever it wants.
ELIZA
Clutching my junior year schedule in my hand, I scan my list of classes as bodies bump around me, waiting to be let into Southwest High School, a boxy behemoth of a building up ahead.
I can’t believe this is my life.
I should be tired, actually. My baby cousin, Ethan, kept me up all night, fussing in his crib. It’s hard to believe that six weeks ago I had my own room with a queen bed and an attached bathroom (two sinks!) and now I’m sharing a bedroom with a six-month-old. My aunt Heather came in around two in the morning to feed him, tiptoeing so as not to make the wooden floorboards creak.
They creaked.
I’d lain still, eyes closed, even though I’d wanted to sit up and scream that it was my first day of school the next day, and it was junior year, for crying out loud. The most important year of high school, so says everyone. So says me. The year I’d been waiting for since it dawned on me in fifth grade that UT Austin only lets in the very best of the best and I liked being the best and therefore I would be going to UT Austin.
But since I’m as conscious of being polite as I am of being good, I’d squeezed my eyes shut and dug my fingernails into my palms to keep from exploding, trying to keep my breathing nice and even, listening as Heather cooed to baby Ethan and fed him and rocked him gently in the glider that sits inches from the twin bed I’ve been sleeping in since my entire universe was flipped on its head.
I’m not sure I ever went back to sleep, even after Heather tiptoed out and Ethan gurgled and shifted, the crinkly sound of his diaper setting my teeth on edge until he finally settled. But I didn’t settle. I’d just lain there, trying to adjust my 5'10" frame in a tiny twin, missing my old big bed like I missed my old everything. I’d frowned at the glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling, examining the outlines of animals and trees painted onto the walls of Ethan’s nature-themed nursery, wishing that the actual planet could be as pleasant and lovely as the artificial universe my aunt and uncle had made for their miracle baby, the one they thought they’d never be able to have. The baby who, while superadorable and innocent and sweet, wears plastic diapers that will exist in a landfill for longer than either he or I will be around.
Who thinks this way about some poor, innocent baby? Sometimes I think I might be a terrible person deep down inside.
But terrible or not, tired or not, here I am. The first day of school at last.
“Eliza, is that you?”
I turn and spy Olivia Chen and Olivia Patterson, OC and OP as they call themselves, heading toward me, their faces as wary as mine must be. We’ve been in every advanced and AP class together since ninth grade, and they’ve joined me here at Southwest High, along with every other Baldwin High kid whose parents either couldn’t afford private school or were too married to their liberal agendas to admit they were nervous about sending their kids to a high school full of Black and brown kids.
“Hey,” I answer. “I’m so glad to see familiar faces.” I pull out my reusable water bottle with its Reduce Reuse Recycle sticker on it from the side pocket of my backpack to take a sip and wonder briefly if Southwest has working water fountains. I hold my paper up in the air. “Wanna compare schedules?”
“Let’s just hope the counselors haven’t totally messed them up,” says OC, sliding a crisp piece of paper out of her backpack.
Instead of getting ready to compare notes, OP crosses her arms and scans the crowd building around us.
“If this were a movie,” she says, her girly upspeak punctuating every phrase with a question mark, “it would be a rom-com and Southwest High and Baldwin High are having a meet-cute. Only this isn’t a movie. And this is just weird.”
My eyes take in the scene again, even though I’ve been silently making notes since I got here. The Southwest High kids, almost all kids of color, wearing their uniform-issued blue Southwest High T-shirts and dress code–ordered jeans, and the Baldwin High kids, a mix of white and Asian and Black and brown, dressed in whatever we want because that’s one of the perks of going to Baldwin.
It doesn’t seem fair to me that the Southwest High kids have to stay in dress code and we don’t, but nothing about the past few months has felt particularly fair to me.
Even though it’s late September, over a month since we should have started the school year, Houston’s humidity still reigns, and I start praying for the opening bell so we can enter this strange place that’s supposed to be my school home for the next year. I’ve heard rumors about Southwest High’s less-than-stellar facilities, but it’s got to be against the law for a Texas high school to not have air-conditioning, right? Then again, it’s air-conditioning that’s helping destroy the planet, and for the millionth time in the last few weeks my stomach knots up as a wave of anxiety slides over me. I take a deep breath and ride it out, then will the opening bell to ring. At last it does, and amid shouts and curses in Spanish and English, the future of America troops up the front steps.
A buzz goes off in my pocket, and I slide my phone out as I walk through the front doors with OC and OP, the three of us venturing into a strange new world. My eyes look down. It’s a text from my best friend, Isabella.
Have you gotten stabbed yet or what?
This is followed by several laugh/cry emojis.
A prickle of irritation races up my spine as I take in Isabella’s assumptions about the sort of kids I’m in school with. She’s supposed to be my oldest friend, so it might be nice if she could be supportive for half a minute. I roll my eyes as I’m bumped by bodies. I only half-hear OC and OP asking each other where they think a certain classroom might be.
Copyright © 2023 by Jennifer Mathieu
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