What She Missed
WRONG WAY. Written in all caps on a red-and-white sign. Ebony sped right by it after she took a left at Stevie’s Boat Rental. A turn too soon. She wasn’t paying attention.
A hard blow to the face. She didn’t know what it was until the airbag started to deflate. She’d hit something. Or worse, someone.
Everything around her grew sharp. Clear. The high, continuous note in her ears. The blood running out of her nose and dripping from her lips. The metallic taste of it, tinged with strawberry-flavored gloss. The cracked windshield streaked red. The headlight beams on the pitch-black road ahead.
Ebony stared at the blood, wondering how she’d been so blind. Her life wasn’t over. She still had so much to discover . . . to create . . . to celebrate . . . to love . . . so much to lose.
Why hadn’t she known that?
Well, she had, but then she forgot. It was crazy how hard it was to keep track of herself. How she could learn something about herself and then forget. Learn it again and think she’d learned something new.
But that night would never leave her. In a flash, it would summon all the scattered moments of the summer that had led her there. Every struggle. Every wild and stupid thing she’d done. The love she was afraid to feel. Every wrong turn.
Chapter1
I wanted to go home.
I thought about opening the back door of Daddy’s pickup truck and jumping out. But at that point, I still had good sense. We were on a highway, not a country road. It was real life, not a movie. I could die, paralyze myself, or get mangled by the U-Haul.
And I still liked myself too much to risk any of that. Well, most of myself. The percentage could fluctuate on any given day. But I liked the way my name matched my dark skin, which complimented any color eyeliner I wore. I liked the way the small gap between my two front teeth made me feel extra cute, especially on days I rocked mismatched prints. I liked my big lips and strong legs. And don’t even get me started on how long I’d grown out my chunky twists. Or the way I signed my name: the s of Jones dramatically traveling off the canvas.
I thought about screaming, You’re ruining my life! at the top of my lungs. But I knew that wouldn’t change anything and only make me feel pathetic. Plus, I didn’t want to hear another one of Mom’s speeches about being positive. She was big on being positive, and it made me sick.
So I just sat there, staring out of the window. Watching miles and miles of nothing go by. No museums or art galleries, no strangers walking by or riding bikes, no ice cream or vintage T-shirt shops, no Chinese spot down the block with the most delicious barbeque bao on earth. Only land and sky. And the June Texas sun glaring at me as it blazed high in the blue, beating down anything out in the open. Killing everything soft.
“Windmill!” shouted Mom, pointing to a wooden tower in a field of yellow grass. “That’s twelve.”
“Twelve is nothing,” Daddy responded.
“It’s one more than you,” Mom popped back.
I wasn’t playing, but I still felt like I was in last place. Twelve to eleven to none.
I imagined myself walking out into the yellow grass and igniting—painted flames shooting from my shoulders, engulfing my head.
I imagined my funeral. Everyone sad and dressed in black. My parents wishing they never would’ve sold our house and made me leave Houston. Justine, Dani, and Cara wishing they wouldn’t have dragged me to the mall my last day there. Knowing I was broke. Knowing I was lying when I said I couldn’t find anything cute or that I didn’t want a cinnamon sugar pretzel from Annie’s. And Miles wishing he would’ve kissed me while he had the
chance.
Can you tell me how a perfect love goes wrong?
Can somebody tell me how to get things back
The way they use to be?
Daddy’s voice strained over Boyz II Men as he sang in Mom’s direction. He was always singing along to some old-school R & B song, but this was one of Mom’s favorites.
Mom took a break from the hunt and smiled at him.
“Windmill! Windmill!” Daddy shouted, and he pointed to two rusted metal towers on adjoining hills.
“Ooh, you dirty!”
Daddy admitted nothing. Only rubbed his short beard and laughed and laughed.
The two of them really got on my nerves sometimes. The way their love seemed to be able to go anywhere, despite anything. It wasn’t like I wanted them to scream and fight like Dani’s parents. But they’d lost a lot, too. I didn’t get them.
Especially Mom. I could count on one hand the number of times she’d been to Gigi’s lake house. Having grown up in a high-rise in Houston’s Galleria area, she was not about that country life. Too quiet, she’d always said. But there she was in a straw bolero hat and a sleeveless denim button up, playing the part.
“Windmill!” they said at the same time and proceeded to argue about whose lips the w came off first.
“Would you please shut the fuck up?” I said under my breath.
The fire in me turned cold. I didn’t mean it. It’s just a phrase I picked up at school, I prepared to lie.
No whips of necks or breaks in debate, and I realized my parents didn’t hear. But even if they had, the way I saw it (safely, in retrospect) was that my parents having so much fun was a cruel affront to the loss I was experiencing.
I tuned them out and tried to remember how close Miles’s lips came to mine the second-to-last day of school. I tried to remember the way he smelled. Like emerald-green trees. Like sunshine and paint. Like something else, but I couldn’t remember. Only three hours outside Houston, and he was already slipping away.
High stone walls on either side of the car—the road cutting through solid rock. And for a second, I was my great-great-grandmother, crossing the passage into safety. Gigi’s old story surprised me. So familiar but unfamiliar. Like a movie I’d forgotten most of the parts to.
But I was remembering.
We were close. Another mile or so before the fork in the road, a right toward the southern part of the lake, ten minutes of old highway cutting through dry, rocky earth and tree-covered hills, a left at the fruit stand, a climb up a hill so steep you can only see sky, back down eyeing asphalt, and a few more turns past small wooden houses before Daddy’s tires would crunch over gravel up the final hill to Gigi’s house.
What She Missed
A bouquet of ten black balloons. Caught high between two big branches of an oak tree in front of the fruit stand. Floated over from a wake down the street. Lost but not lost. There for them and then there for her. To mourn. To celebrate. But she didn’t see the long, black strings, bound together, waving at her in the wind.
Chapter2
Gigi’s house was just as I remembered. A light-green bungalow with deep-green shutters, surrounded by white rock, weeds, and trees. As I stepped out of the truck, I paused. Waiting for the screen door to open . . . waiting for Gigi to walk out onto the porch in one of her off-the-shoulder muumuus . . . waiting to feel the warmth of her welcome.
Gigi is dead, I reminded myself. And this is not Gigi’s house anymore. Clearly.
Three wicker lounge chairs from our backyard in Houston were already sitting in the southwest corner of the porch, facing the lake down below. The hanging plants that used to drape over the railing were gone. The potted plants and giant crystals that lined the three steps leading up to the porch were gone. The tear in the bottom left corner of the screen door (where my six-year-old self accidentally kicked it in) was gone, too.
And where was the wind chime? The golden bells that hung from the porch’s east side? Gigi used to say they made the sound of the God.
My phone vibrated on the backseat, and I reached inside the truck to grab it. A group text from Justine: Please tell us you’ve opened it.
Dani added a GIF of Regina Hall anxiously eating a bowl of popcorn.
Cara texted a cat scratching at a door. She was the worst at GIFs.
The three of them wouldn’t let me get that envelope out of my mind. The one I’d found in my art bin after I’d gotten home from the mall. Crisp and red with “Ebony” written in the center in Miles’s neat, cursive handwriting. He must’ve snuck it in on the last day of school.
But I couldn’t bring myself to open it. I figured that having a confirmation of how much Miles liked me . . . of how much he’d miss me . . . in his own words . . . would only make me more pissed that he didn’t kiss me.
I climbed back in the truck, away from the sun, and searched for a responding GIF. A man shoveling dirt over a grave. A baller making a cutting motion to his throat mouthing, “Game over.” A woman in sunglasses throwing her hand in somebody’s face, the words “Stop it” underneath.
But before I could choose, the other back door opened and Mom’s soft arms were lifting two bags out of the backseat. “Indigo, can you help bring in some of these groceries? They’ve been out of the fridge long enough.”
“It’s Eb-on-y,” I corrected her, emphasizing every syllable of my name.
“Sorry,” she replied, and carried the bags toward the house.
I shoved my phone in the front pocket of my jean shorts. It hadn’t been that long since I’d changed my name back, I knew that. But I still couldn’t help getting heated over Mom’s slipups.
See, a year earlier, I’d changed my name to Indigo. The genius thing about it was that Indigo was still a color. A color that better represented who I was. For exactly ten months, three weeks, and five days.
I’d tried to save face by waiting to change my name back to Ebony, the name my parents gave me, as long as I possibly could. Until hearing “Indigo” made me want to take a two-by-four from one of the building sites Daddy used to supervise and smash the word with it—deep-blue and violet splatters everywhere.
But waiting hadn’t saved me from feeling ridiculous. And I was sure Mom called me Indigo from time to time just to make me feel stupid all over again.
When I stepped into the house, I thought I smelled the incense Gigi always burned. But when I took another breath, it wasn’t there. The only thing of Gigi’s in the room was one of the ten-foot plant-dyed canvases she used to sell to boutiques in Austin. It was hanging behind the sofa, unstretched—Sam Gilliam–style—covered in faded blues and purples. I walked over to it and ran the tip of my nose across its edge to see if I could smell elderberries or hyacinth or woad. Nothing.
“In here,” Mom called out.
I hated how she acted like she hadn’t sent me to stay there every summer of my childhood while she traveled for work. “I’m pretty sure I know where the kitchen is, Mom.”
“Ebony,” Daddy sang softly, walking past carrying two duffle bags toward the hall. He always played referee.
I dropped the groceries off on the kitchen counter, ran a hand over its scalloped teal tile, and headed to my room before Mom could ask me to do anything else.
Daddy had been going back and forth to get the house ready for weeks, but I’d told him to leave my old room alone. The plain white comforter and pillows. The polished cherry oak wardrobe with an oval mirror on the front. Paintings by my younger self, framed and hung gallery-style on the white walls. Colorful strokes so filled with joy they felt foreign.
I picked up a pillow and brought it to my nose. Hoping to smell rosewater or incense or bacon or smoke.
Again, nothing.
Then I turned and saw the picture of me and my friends on the nightstand. I’d left the photo in the bottom drawer of my old dresser, hoping it would get lost in storage. But I guess Daddy had found it and framed it.
We were sitting on the school lawn the Friday before spring break. Dani was holding a piece of popcorn up to the sky like a champagne glass. She was blurry but smiling. Justine was palming the bottom of the buttery bag. Her lips were barely closed over her full mouth. Cara had her tongue out and her eyes closed. Her right
elbow, hanging over her thigh, was ashy. She was leaning on me. My head was tilted. My bra straps were showing. And I was looking straight at the camera mid-laugh.
That was happiness. And it was all about to get snatched away from me. But in the picture, I didn’t know it yet.
My right hip vibrated. Another group text from Dani: Well?
Just leave it alone, I responded. Jealous they’d get to stay together. Mad they’d get to hang out all summer and go back to Houston’s Academy of the Arts in the fall while I was stuck in the boonies.
I tossed my phone on the bed and headed out back to Gigi’s old studio: a converted garage with glass doors and a row of windows running along the sides and back. In front of it, the big black cauldron Gigi used to dye her canvases in wasn’t over the fire pit. Now there were only half-burned branches sticking up out of ashes.
It was hot inside, but I didn’t bother trying to find the remote control for the air-conditioning unit above the door. My paintings hung on walls, sat on shelves, and were propped up against buckets and stools. Gigi’s huge canvases covered the ceiling. Her crystals and rock formations (spirals, lines, and stacks) were spread out on tables with her books and ceramic pots. My paintbrushes, colored pencils, and markers waved hello to me from Gigi’s mason jars. My paint tubes seemed to be saying whee as they dangled upside down in the air—their ends squeezed by binder clips, which hung from a row of nails halfway hammered into the wood-planked walls.
I heard a tinkling sound coming from the back corner of the studio and walked toward it. The golden bells! I thought, seeing them hanging outside the window. Daddy had somehow gathered me and Gigi together in the same light-filled space and reminded me of how art could make me feel like I was everything.
Until I spotted my self-portrait on the easel under the back windows and felt like nothing. I starred at the blue-black blotch I’d painted over my face until my eyes welled up. Then I ran out of the studio and tried to forget about it.
Chapter3
When I woke the next morning, my room was gray—sun almost completely blocked by the dark-green curtains. Despite the gap in the middle of the drapery, where light crept through, the room mostly matched the cloud I saw hanging over my future. And I was glad to feel like something finally understood my misery.
Until, in the corner of the room, I saw two rainbow lines on the edge of the wardrobe mirror, where the glass was beveled. They almost touched but didn’t. I moved my head this way and that, hoping to make them disappear, but the colors only changed from hot blues and greens to reds and yellows to indigos and violets.
When I realized I was playing with light, I stopped.
A few minutes later, there was a knock at my door.
“Yeah?” I moaned.
“There’s someone here to see you.” Mom’s voice was muffled.
The only person it could’ve been was Jalen, my best friend from way back who lived in the house next door. Growing up, summers were an endless cycle of us playing together along the rocky shoreline of the lake and swimming together to cool down. But I hadn’t seen him since Gigi died six years ago. An eternity.
And yet when I walked down the hall toward the kitchen and saw Jalen standing in front of the sink, talking to Daddy, he looked the same: tall and lanky with a goofy grin and an even goofier-looking bucket hat. Same light blue as his old hat with the same elastic drawstring that hung down around his chin. Same type of plain white T and faded swim trunks.
I wondered how he could stay the same all these years when I was constantly tweaking myself. My clothes, the way I wore my makeup, even my name. His sameness felt disorienting. It took me back to being in the kitchen with him and Gigi. At the table eating bacon and grapes (what Gigi called a light breakfast) before we all went down to the lake. Hungry and ready for biscuits, grits, and catfish after we came back. Making grilled cheese sandwiches on days Gigi disappeared into her studio.
As soon as Jalen spotted me, he clapped his hands together, screeched with glee, and high-stepped across the kitchen. “Ebony!” he exclaimed in a voice with more bass than I expected, and wrapped his arms around me.
“Jalen,” I said,
half-happy to see him and half-overwhelmed by how happy he was to see me. His brightness was a lot for me that morning. It made me want to duck off to find shade.
“About time!” he said, and let me go.
“You have a mustache,” I replied, and stroked his short hairs with my pointer finger.
Smiling, he swatted my hand away like a fly. “Do you know how long I’ve been waiting for you to come back?”
“And hair on your chin.” It made me wish I had boobs— big, bouncy boobs—to show off. But I still had little apricots.
“I’m serious, Ebony! Every summer I hoped you’d be back. Every time I saw your dad’s truck parked in the driveway, I hoped you’d be with him. But you never were. And now you’re here for good.”
“Yeah, unfortunately,” I said, staring at the new angles in his face, betting they had all the girls around town thinking he was fine. ...
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