In the Silences by Rachel Gold

Author:Rachel Gold [Gold, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642470369
Publisher: Bella Books
Published: 2019-05-15T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

We didn’t talk on the bus home except when I asked, “Treehouse?” and Aisha said, “Sure.” I missed when we could walk, but the high school was a half-mile farther from our houses than the junior high.

The bus dropped us at her house. We went through her yard, across the alley and into mine. I sped up the stairs to the treehouse, Aisha right behind me. For the first time, I wanted us to be younger than we were, just a few months, early summer.

When she got up the stairs and sat, I held out my hand. Aisha wrapped her fingers around mine and tugged. I crawled toward her, put my arms around her. She held onto me as I pressed my lips to the side of her face.

Milo must’ve seen us go up the treehouse stairs and let Wolvie out, because seventy pounds of dog love pelted up the stairs and body-checked both of us. We were a pile of human limbs and dog body for a while. Aisha got laughing from the way Wolvie kept head-butting her chest, trying to get even closer, and I realized I hadn’t heard her laugh at all at school the four days we’d been in tenth grade.

“I want to tell people you’re my girlfriend,” I said. “Is that okay?”

“I don’t know,” she answered.

The way she said it sounded so low that my breath stuck in my chest. “But we are, right? We’re going to stay together no matter what…right?”

She turned her face and kissed me. Pulled back only enough to press our foreheads together.

“We are,” she said. “Of course we are.”

“But it’s not safe?” I asked. “And it’s less safe for you than me?”

She shifted back to sitting next to me, Wolvie now wriggling into both our laps. I put an arm around Aisha and rubbed Wolvie’s belly with my other hand.

“Yeah,” she said.

“Do you think it would be different if I didn’t look so much like a girl? More like a guy?”

A long quiet followed, only Wolvie panting and Aisha saying “Oof” when Wolvie kicked her in the boob.

She said, “If you looked one-hundred percent like a guy, maybe, except that you grew up here being seen as a girl and people don’t forget that. You know, that whole history of white women and black men, I think that trumps me being a girl.”

I shuddered. As a white guy with Aisha, people would think I was experimenting or…worse. But when I was read as a white girl…historically black boys and men got killed if white women even said the men, or boys, had been flirting with them. I felt dangerous, and sad, but that was for me to deal with later because I wasn’t the one who’d get hurt. I was the safe one, the one with superpowers in this situation.

“You want to give it more time and see?” I asked.

I clicked my tongue at Wolvie and patted the space next to me so she’d stop squirming in our laps and settle at my side.

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