Go Home! by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

Author:Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936932030
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 2018-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

JESSICA HAD LOST most of her friends come middle school, and she needed to get back in with me. I can’t remember how or why, but she found her way into my circle. I think people like her were just good at that. Plus in a sixth grade class of sixty-odd students, the burnt-out mean girls had to be put somewhere. Briarcliff, as shrouded as we were by the many trappings of innocence afforded by wealth, was the kind of place where a young woman could hit peak it-girl status by twelve. In Jessica’s case, I probably got her because of the cul-de-sac.

Some things stayed the same or otherwise just evolved from their earlier iterations. The same guys we’d known since kindergarten who now provided Jessica and the other girls I hung out with a steady rotation of boyfriends were also the ones who etched GO BACK TO INDIA BABU into the desks at school for me to find after the period changed. We had both grown up some, but I did not grow out of my difference. Her hair was colored like Angela Chase from box dye labeled “Chestnut,” a hue that brought out the harsh pallor of her skin; I rocked chola bangs, curled each morning with high heat and a round brush, with silver hoop earrings that matched my braces. I admit that, for a little while, I still had a moustache.

When I was alone, I obsessively monitored the radio to make mixtapes of AZ with Miss Jones, Lauryn and Erykah, The Lost Boyz, Gina Thompson with Missy, and for the first time I imagined I could be a person in the world. But since I got in trouble for breathing or walking while Rekha studied for the SATs, much less turning up the bass on Hot 97, I once again found myself in Jessica’s room overlooking low hills of freshly cut lawn and the rock wall that separated the vast splay of her backyard from the intermittent whoosh of the Taconic. We lay on the floor listening to Biggie and Wu-Tang, pressing our fingers into molten candle wax and thinking we were really gangster.

It was during these years that I learned the word “exotic.” Jessica would tell me, with the blind confidence of her toddlerhood preciousness, that this quality, this bird-of-paradise-esque thing I supposedly possessed, is what had the guys at the Westchester Mall gawking and, if they were older, trying out their game.

“They fucking love you,” she said, they delineating a specific set of boys, with names like Chauncey and Terrell instead of the Jakes and Scotts we knew and coming from places like Sleepy Hollow or Ardsley, surrounding towns with a broader mix of people and closer, by mere miles, to the city. “It’s because you’re so exotic. You have these big almond eyes and tan skin. You’re just so exotic.” I guessed she’d failed to notice from our childhood baths together and all the subsequent years of knowing me that my skin was just plain brown.

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