Gone Like Yesterday by Janelle M. Williams

Author:Janelle M. Williams [Williams, Janelle M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

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Sammie sits down at the kitchen table to work on her college essay. The house feels empty, silent, eerie. She works on her computer but holds a blue-and-white Spelman pen in her right hand, clicking it absentmindedly, the sound welcome over the house’s hunger pains.

Sammie enjoyed the tour of the AUC. She could see herself on Spelman’s or Clark’s campus next fall, rushing to class in a college-branded crewneck, making friends like her Spelman tour guide, a girl with perfectly arched eyebrows and contoured makeup and a black, silky weave that she flung across her shoulders as she spoke. Sammie sees them laughing on the quad, going to house parties, flirting with cute boys like the ones she saw huddled together at Morehouse. She sees herself taking all sorts of art and history classes, English and literature. Maybe she’ll join a sorority. Maybe she’ll run for student body president, something she could never see herself winning at P & P.

Sammie wonders what would happen if she and Noah started dating now and remained an item through college. What would visiting her be like? Would he be uncomfortable around so many Black people? She’d had to grow comfortable around the white people at P & P, so maybe it would be only fair for him to have a similar turn.

It would be much easier to be with a boy like Gram’s neighbor, who is Black like her and does the same knotty mess to her stomach as Noah. She wouldn’t have to explain things to him, wouldn’t have to hide whole parts of herself. She sees herself touring Atlanta with Noah, then with the neighbor, then without a boy flanking her side at all, all alone or with a group of girlfriends, taking in long green landscapes and the sounds of birds, then classmates, then crickets. But just like New York, she could never imagine Atlanta quiet. There’s always something happening, something moving—things she can see, and things she can’t, too.

Sammie thought she saw Derrick today. Derrick hitchhiking on the side of the highway, Derrick flirting with a woman in the AUC library by the Tupac archives, Derrick using one of the vending machines near the coed dorms at Clark, and finally Derrick sitting right across from them at the Busy Bee cafe, where they stopped to eat lunch. She has memorized his face from Gram’s pictures, so she sees Derrick at all ages. Sometimes he’s just a young boy, ten or eleven. Then he’s close to the age he is now, only now he’s never smiling but pensive in a way that makes her want to save him from himself.

She takes out her stolen photo of Derrick, now kept in her sketchbook, a bookmark between blank pages and her doodles and drawings. She stares at him intently, his eyes a maze and a magnet. A feeling washes over her, and she looks over her shoulder to see what’s crept into her space, the kitchen, Gram’s house. The feeling

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