Locked Gray Linked Blue by Kem Joy Ukwu

Author:Kem Joy Ukwu [Ukwu, Kem Joy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: diaspora, black, short stories, family, New York, urban
Publisher: Kindred Books
Published: 2018-02-06T06:00:00+00:00

A year and a half later, my mother told me she wanted to send me away to boarding school per the suggestion of her boss, the only senior partner at her law firm who was a woman of color. She declared to me one evening, “You are going to be her, that’s going to be you.”

And if I was going to be her, asserted my mother, I had to go to private school. Not just one in the city, but one where I wouldn’t live in my home. Her boss had sent her own daughter to a boarding school in upstate New York the year before. She encouraged my mother to have me apply to the same school, telling her that the school offered scholarships.

I thought the idea was mean. Like it was a legal way to give me away without giving me away. I completed the application, took the required exams, was given an interview, and was informed that I would receive their decision later on that semester.

I told Serine about the whole thing one February afternoon during our eighth-grade year in my apartment, several days before my bull escaped me. Sprawled on my couch, I yapped away. Serine sat on the carpeted floor in front of me, leaning against one of the armrests.

“She wants to get rid of me so she can have the place to herself. She probably wants to bring men home.”

Serine nodded.

“She’d miss me, though. She’d miss me more than I’d miss her, I know that much. She’s going to want me back,” I said, nodding my head up and down like I was listening to my own sermon. “She’s going to miss me.”

“I’d miss you,” Serine said, looking at me.

What would she have missed about me? My chatter? I knew I’d miss her. I didn’t want to miss her. I didn’t want the opportunity.

I grabbed the school’s brochure from my backpack on the couch by my feet.

“No, you wouldn’t, because you’d be there.”

Serine didn’t respond. She sang a Michael Jackson tune, “Will You Be There.”

“If you apply,” I continued, “you’d get in.”

Serine stopped singing. Her face fell slightly.

“Ms. Lambdy loves you.”

Ms. Lambdy is how Serine addressed my mother. My mother loved her for that. Her respect. Serine loved my mother too. She never told me that, but I knew. She saw the hug my mother gave me many evenings when she came home from work. One evening, I glanced at her face after my mother hugged me. Longing.

“She loves me soooo much,” I said, rolling my eyes, flitting my hand in the air, personifying drama. “She wants to send me away.”

“Yup.”

I stared at the brochure’s cover, two students walking on a pathway, surrounded by lush trees and grass. I looked back at Serine. It was the first time that I thought ahead, imagining an afternoon during the following year if I got accepted. What my day would look like without her. What her day would look like without me.

Reaching over, I dropped the brochure on her lap.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.