Skye Falling by Mia Mckenzie

Author:Mia Mckenzie [McKenzie, Mia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

it would save me the trouble of doing it later and having to endure another fake fainting scene; and

lesbianism would seem ho-hum in comparison.

I was wrong on all counts. As soon as the words “I’m gay” came out of my mouth, my mother started screaming about Viva being the devil come to corrupt her children, and pretended to faint a second time. Viva left, swearing she’d never set foot in my mother’s house again. My mother spent the entire next week in bed, only getting up to go to church, where I assume she prayed for my brother and me at length. When I came home a few months later, for spring break—which I only did because I didn’t have money to go anywhere else—and was holed up in my room, depressed over some white girl I’d fallen for at school, I called Viva. She brought over butterfly shrimp and the first two seasons of Sanford and Son on DVD to cheer me up. She knew my mother might come home any minute and freak out on her. She risked further humiliation for me. Luckily, when my mother did arrive home, she didn’t freak out. She knocked on my closed door and said, “I ordered some buffalo wings for y’all. Those ones Viva likes. I’ll holler when they get here.”

I haven’t thought about this in years. Or, to be honest, I’ve only thought about the part where my mother acted a whole-ass lunatic. I haven’t thought about her saucy peace offering.

I lean back in my chair and rub my eyes. I think about the ways good and not-so-good times fold together and overlap, the ways a memory of stress and one of reparation can sleep like lovers in the same bed, touching fingertips in the quiet, and I question myself. Why do I pretend it was all bad?

“What are you thinking about?” Viva asks, sitting back down across the table a minute later. She seems more relaxed now, not annoyed anymore. “Your face is all scrunched up.”

What I’m thinking feels too new to talk about, so I say, “You remember that Thanksgiving when my mother—”

“Sí,” she says before I can finish. “Girl. How could I forget it?” She places the back of her hand on her forehead in a fake-swooning gesture. “Oh, Lord! Sweet Jesus!”

I burst out laughing and Viva does, too.

I don’t ask her if she really thinks I’m self-centered. Hearing the ways I suck sounds like a terrible way to spend breakfast. Also, despite what Tasha said, I’m not totally lacking in self-reflection. There’s probably not much Viva could tell me about myself that I don’t already know. The knowing is the easy part. It’s the shaking it loose that’s hard.

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