In the Silences

GCLS Goldie Awards
In the Silences — Winner, Young Adult.

FROM THE AUTHOR

"What do you do if the people around you are hurting someone you love, but won’t even question what they’re doing?

I’ve seen a lot of anti-gay and anti-trans bias, having worked in corporate America for most of my adult life. I hadn’t been nearly as good at spotting implicit racism until it was right in my face.

In the Silences grew out of a series of incidents in my workplace. Over the course of a year, I saw how my friend Ha’Londra, as a black woman, was treated worse than the white women in our office.

At first, because I’m not the most woke white person, I thought it was weird office politics. I tried to make changes and kept getting shut down, even though I had a lot of seniority at that company. That showed me how pervasive the implicit bias was.

As my attempts to talk to other white people and change the situation continued to not work—even when I got louder and more blunt about it—I became curious about what would be more effective. To figure that out, I wrote a book.

What if that same pervasive but invisible (to the white people) racism was happening in a school system? What if a white main character loved a black girl and had to learn how to be an effective ally? What does it take to be powerful white ally who is also respectful and humble in the face of people of color’s much greater knowledge and experience about racism in the US?"

—Rachel Gold

Chapter One

August 2015

There was nobody else in the world I wanted to kiss—not even famous people or superheroes—only Aisha. I’d been thinking about kissing her since the end of eighth grade, not even three months. Summer meant more reading together, more of her telling me stories about our favorite books, comic books, movies. She saw parts of the characters I missed and explained them in startling, genius ways.

I wanted to put my lips on hers and inhale her words into my brain.

I should’ve asked Aisha out on the anniversary of the day we met. I wish I could’ve kissed her then.

* * *

I met Aisha because I got roped into setting up our block’s annual shindig. Due to my grandmom Milo’s unofficial standing as Queen-Emperor of the block, the party happened in front of our house. My job included carrying a ton of folding chairs from our open garage to the street and setting them in big circles.

Wolverine—“Wolvie” to her friends—my big, silly loveball of a dog walked with me, her leash looped over my belt. That reminded her to stick close, except when she saw other dogs and squirrels. It was early for squirrel season and we didn’t have a lot of dogs on our block, plus the street had already been blocked off for the party.

Behind me, I heard a car pull around the “street closed” signs and stop a few houses down. I didn’t realize the leash had come loose and Wolvie wasn’t beside me until I heard a man yell, “Get your dog away from me!”

Wolvie is seventy pounds of black-and-brown fuzzy love, half German Shepherd, half Lab. Her size can scare people who don’t know her—especially when she body-checks them out of joy.

She’d backed this man against his car, but only because he wasn’t petting her. Square-faced, graying brown hair, peach skin, he looked older than my mom but not as old as my grandpop. He held his hands out, trying to ward off Wolvie, who pushed into his thighs, wriggling.

He glared past me, down the street, yelling, “Dammit, girl, get over here and get this dog off me!”

A girl’s resonant voice called back, “That’s not my dog.”

I turned one-eighty to see who he was yelling at. A brown-skinned girl held a puffy white Bichon Frise in her skinny arms. Even with her curly black hair piled up on her head, she wasn’t taller than me. Couldn’t have been older than thirteen or fourteen. Anger narrowed her eyes and set creases at the edges of her mouth.

She had to be from the new family that’d moved in across the alley weeks ago. Our town was about ninety-five percent white and less than two percent black; a black family moving in was hard to miss. From my treehouse, I’d seen an older boy and his dad in the yard across the alley. I didn’t know they had a girl my age.

“Of course this is your dog!” The man was spitting mad at the girl. “Don’t play dumb with me. You get over here right now.”

I was half the distance away from this guy and standing in plain sight. Why would he think Wolvie belonged to her?

“Wolverine, down!” I yelled.

Wolvie dropped to her belly, tail wagging, watching me. She opened her mouth in a happy, befuddled pant, the edge of her tongue over her black lips.

“Come. Sit.” Wolvie jogged to my side and sat. “This is my dog,” I told the guy, though it was blazingly obvious at that point.

From behind me, the girl said, “I told you.”

“Don’t mouth off to me,” he snarled. “Bitch.” He stormed up his front steps and slammed the door.

The girl’s mouth scrunched up. More anger or trying not to cry? I couldn’t tell. She turned away, still holding the fluffy white dog to her chest. They must’ve been on a walk and she’d picked up her dog when Wolvie got loose. I didn’t want her to be scared of Wolvie.

“Hey, I’m really sorry,” I called to her. “My dog wouldn’t hurt your dog, I promise. She’s real sweet, loves people.”

The girl half turned back, then glanced down the street like she was going to walk off without saying anything. I picked up Wolvie’s leash, tapped my thigh with the command for “heel” and took a few steps closer to her. Wolvie paced with me. She knew how to behave when she had to. Wolvie sat when I stopped, just the way I’d trained her, two houses away from the girl and her dog, in case she was scared of Wolvie too.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I’m Kaz, this is Wolverine, but you can call her Wolvie.”

The girl’s eyes focused on me, face set serious like this was going to be the most important question in the history of the world.

In a way, it was.

“Logan or Laura?” she asked.

Warm sunny joy burst open in me. Those were the names of classic Wolverine from the X-Men and the new, awesome, All-New Wolverine. I thought I was the only girl for twenty miles who read comics.

“Laura!” I told her, bouncing on my toes from excitement while staying in place so Wolvie wouldn’t get up.

A grin took over her face, dimpling her cheeks, warming her eyes. “I’m Aisha, this is Mr. Pickles.”

“You want to come into my back yard and let Mr. Pickles and Wolvie play? Wolvie’s gentle with small dogs.”

She set Mr. Pickles down and he ran out to the length of his leash but couldn’t reach Wolvie, who was thumping her tail hard but knew better than to break a sit.

Aisha asked, “Are you the house with the treehouse?”

“Sure am. Come on, I’ll show you. Did you move in to that house behind us? You probably met my grandmom, Milo.”

“She brought us brownies.”

Aisha followed me to the side gate and I held it open for her. She wore a white T-shirt with a cute row of buttons at the top, plus blue jeans. Garage dust streaked my blue shirt, making it match my crappy gray jeans and the old tennies with no laces that I used for chores.

I closed the gate. “Wolvie might try to tackle you with love, but she won’t hurt you.”

“I’m not afraid of dogs,” she said, eyes cutting toward the house where the jerk had gone. “But let Pickles go first. You can call him Pickles; he likes you.”

“Sure,” I said. Did her dropping Mr. Pickles’ formal title mean we were on our way to being friends?

As soon as she put Pickles down, he ran up the stairs to the back patio and declared himself king of the hill with his ears up and tail high. I let Pickles sniff a bit before unclipping Wolvie’s leash. She butted against Aisha’s legs, so Aisha bent down to rub her with both hands.

Pickles came back to sniff Wolvie and they did the whole dance of butt-sniffing. Aisha peered up at the treehouse. It was six feet up the big oak in our yard, with a wrap-around staircase so Wolvie could get up there. Four walls, but one opened for good weather.

“You want to see it?” I asked.

“I have to get home soon. Do you want help with those chairs before I go?”

“Yeah, thanks. My brother bailed on me.”

“Older or younger?” she asked as we put the dogs back on their leashes.

“Older,” I said.

“Same here. Two of them, but one’s at college.”

We walked around to the front of the garage and I picked up a folding chair from the stack inside the open door.

“We should have a support group for younger siblings,” I told her. “What comics are you reading?”

As we carried the chairs into the street, Aisha listed her comics and I listed mine. When I brought up Ms. Marvel, her eyes lit up. “That Wolverine crossover in the sewer with the giant alligator? So epic!”

She faced the army of empty chairs. I only saw half of her smile, but it was the best smile, broad and open, but also like she knew a secret, her dimpled cheeks bunching up, crinkling the skin by her eyes. And she smiled like that about comics, about Wolverines and giant alligators. I thought: I am going to be her friend forever.

“Do you want to come to the cookout?” I asked.

“Let me take Pickles home and ask my parents if it’s okay.”

She set the last chair into place in a big oblong that took up the middle of the street. Getting Pickles’ leash from where she’d looped it around another chair, she waved and walked off down the block.

I wondered how we’d look together: a white girl walking a mostly black dog and a black girl walking a white dog. Did that look like a commercial for world peace or fabric softener?

* * *

I wanted Aisha to come to the block party cookout so much! If she didn’t, how weird would it be to show up at her house with a stack of comic books?

I’d invited my best friend Jon to the cookout, even though he would diss everything about it, so I had to stay. If Aisha didn’t return, maybe tomorrow I could walk over to her house. Or I could hang a sign on my treehouse that said, “Come over! Read comics!” Would she see that from her yard?

After carrying out cutlery and napkins and condiments, I went inside to change. If Mom didn’t drive around the signs, like that jerk guy had, she’d have to park in the alley, by the big, heated shed that held Milo’s woodworking equipment. I didn’t see Mom’s current favorite purse on the hooks by the garage door, or thrown on the dining room table, which was more likely. I stopped in the kitchen to drink half a glass of water and poured the other half into Wolvie’s bowl to cool it down.

A quick check out the back window showed no car. Maybe I’d get lucky and Mom would be stuck at work. She did a lot of evening shifts because she assistant-managed a Maurice’s, a chain women’s clothing store that also sold shoes and accessories, but not any that I’d wear. Mom didn’t like me bringing Wolvie to neighborhood events, but it wasn’t fair to leave Wolvie in the house with so many people right out front.

My grandpop, who we all called Pops, stood in the back yard, cleaning the surface of a grille that was already cleaner than any other grille in our town. Like always, he wore khakis and a blue short-sleeved button-down shirt. In winter he switched to long sleeved. Milo bought his shirts a dozen at a time. He wore them buttoned all the way up, an uncannily hip old guy, but I think he was being hip on accident.

Hearing rustling from the basement, I yelled down to Milo, “Need help?”

“Nope,” she called back. “Go wash up.”

I headed for my room. My brother Brock must’ve come and gone because our bathroom stank of his acrid body spray. I could smell it from the top of the stairs, even though my bedroom comes before the bathroom. Brock’s room is in the basement, but he shares this bathroom with me because Mom, Milo and Pops kicked him out of the other two bathrooms. He left his socks, underwear and shirts in every corner and they reeked like thousand-year-old cabbage.

Pops and Milo have lived here for way longer than I’ve been alive, like since the eighties, when my mom was a teenager. She used to have my room, or I had hers, however that worked. Now she slept in the first floor den that Milo converted into a bedroom when we moved in. Milo and Pops slept in the big bedroom on the second floor and I had the little one, which was still plenty big for me.

After a quick shower, I changed into my blue Wolverine T-shirt, the one with Laura on it rather than Logan, and less-torn jeans. I switched the dog treats from the pocket of the other jeans to these. When I got back to the street with Wolvie on her leash, Pops had the grille rolled out and fired up. The smell of pork fat and spices rested heavy in the warm summer air. I gave Wolvie a treat since she wasn’t allowed to eat bratwurst—though she’d steal part of one off the ground later and then have gas that made everything Brock smell like air freshener.

Milo sat in a folding chair with people all around her since she was the official/unofficial royalty of our neighborhood. Adults had taken up most of the chairs, but I saw a blanket on our front lawn with Jon and Brock on it. Jon had biked over from the fancy housing development on the other side of the river. This used to be a small town when Milo and Pops first moved here, but then people noticed it was a pleasant twenty-five minute drive from Saint Paul, so new houses kept getting built for the corporate folks who wanted big yards. And the small, old houses in my neighborhood got built onto or torn down and replaced with big, new ones, like the one across the alley, where Aisha lived.

I’d been taller than Jon when we first met and he’d started to catch up. Plus he’d discovered fashion. I didn’t like either of those trends. He had on dark blue skinny jeans and a short-sleeved button-up, black with pink flamingos, ironic and stylish. Jon’s jeans looked like they wouldn’t be caught dead in the same store as mine. He’d been growing out his very black hair, now past his ears, and it made him even more handsome-pretty.

Brock wore his usual sleeveless T-shirt and baggy jeans. He’d been allergic to sleeves since last spring when some girl at school talked up his arm muscles. They were bigger than Jon’s arms, but Brock had a ways to go to catch up to Pops in muscles, size and height. Brock got the freckles in the family and with the acne and sad attempts at shaving, most days it looked like his brush of red hair had launched a partially successful missile attack on his face.

I dropped onto my butt on the blanket and bent my knees up so I could rest my arms on them. Wolvie sighed because she knew she so wasn’t getting at a brat anytime soon and flopped on her side against my hip.

“Kaz, just in time,” Jon said. “Pick a hero.”

Jon had more interests than having superheroes fight each other, but this was the one that crossed over to Brocks’ interests, or at least his old interests. Now that Brock was starting tenth grade and had approximately seven hairs on his face, he was trying to give up that kid stuff.

Jon had another version of this game in which you described the heroes going on dates, but no way Brock would play that.

“I’ll be Wolverine,” I said. Because it was a very Wolverine day, in the best ways.

“X-23, Laura Kinney?” he asked.

“No, Logan.”

“You can’t be Logan,” Brock said. “You’re a girl. You’re Laura.”

My brother the traitor. He hadn’t cared when we were little if I was guys as often as I was girls. The whole idea of tenth grade had corrupted him.

“It’s a game,” I insisted, loudly. “I can be whoever I want. I can be a guy.”

“You’re Laura!” Brock came back louder.

“Why can’t Kaz be whoever she wants?” asked a newly familiar voice from behind and above my left shoulder.

I hopped up and pressed my arms to my sides because I already wanted to hug Aisha and that would be so weird when we’d only met today. Jon and Brock also got up, Brock with a more WTF stance: legs wide, arms crossed.

“Aisha moved in across the alley,” I told them. “This is Jon and my brother Brock.”

Everybody said “hey,” with varying levels of enthusiasm. Brock picked up his pop bottle and didn’t quite turn back to face her.

To me, Aisha said, “Laura does have more cutting force per claw, so bear that in mind.”

“What? How?” Jon asked. He ran a hand through his hair and it sifted down ending up looking as great as when it had started. My hair was only an inch longer than Jon’s, light brown instead of black, about as straight, but it never did that—only got frizzy if I touched it, sometimes even when I didn’t.

Aisha rocked back and shrugged in a no-big-deal, this-is-obvious way. She’d put a light jacket over her delicate shirt, a patchwork of orange fabrics, different colors and patterns. It fit close to her shoulders and made them look tiny.

She said, “Two claws instead of three means the total force of the strike is split fifty-fifty, rather than into thirds, so even if her striking power is less than Logan’s, he’d have to hit significantly harder to match her. Plus a lot of their strikes aren’t based in muscle force, they’re based in momentum, so she basically owns.”

“Cool, okay then I am Laura,” I said and sat back down on the blanket because Wolvie had been gazing up at me like: For real? Are you going to keep standing and make me get up for nothing?

Aisha sat on the other side of Wolvie and ruffled the thick fur by her ears. Wolvie huffed and rested her head on Aisha’s thigh.

Brock sprawled out on a whole third of the blanket, and Jon took the remaining edge. He said, “You’re still never going to win because Quentin will just mind control you.” These days, he aways picked Quentin, who was queer and a super powerful telepath.

“Not with Jean Grey on her team,” Aisha said.

“You’re not Storm?” Jon asked.

“Why would I be Storm?” Aisha pitched the question with full curiosity.

“’Cause she’s African American,” Brock told her, sounding both like he was talking to a little kid and like African American was not a great thing.

“Oh, you’re going with the obvious reason,” Aisha said. “Yeah, we’re both black, but as someone wise once said, ‘It’s a game. I can be whoever I want.’ I’m Jean Grey. Who are you?”

“Apocalypse,” he declared.

“Shoulda picked Franklin Richards,” Aisha told him with a dramatic sigh and a single shake of her head. “Well, that was a short fight. I’m going to get a burger.”

“Try the brats, they’re better,” I said, unable to stop grinning.

“Who the hell is Franklin Richards?” Jon sputtered.

“No way,” Brock insisted. “If I empower Quentin, you two are fucked.”

Aisha tipped her face down and looked up at Brock out of the tops of her eyes, like she was staring over glasses even though she wasn’t wearing any. She raised her eyebrows and kept them up.

“Let me break this down for you. I shield Kaz’s mind and she goes in as a distraction. Sure you can defeat her in a minute, but it’ll take you a minute. And any damage you do, she can heal from. Meanwhile, I use the Phoenix Force to reach back in time and push around a few minor details in the universe, step on a butterfly, whatever. Now Apocalypse is born as a normal human and Quentin is much less of a jerk. Fight’s over before it even started. Should not have messed with the Phoenix.”

“No, what? No!” Jon sputtered.

“Why are you being like this?” Brock asked me.

“I thought the point of the game was to win,” I replied. But I could see the point of the game, today at least, was for them to win. They didn’t think they could lose to me and Aisha. And somehow this was worse than losing to me alone.

“Show me to the brats?” Aisha asked and I pointed to Pops’ grille. She got up and offered me her hand. I let her pull me up because of how her fingers tightened around mine.

As we walked over, Wolvie heeling next to me, I said, “That’s only the third time I’ve won against Jon. You’re amazing.”

“Phoenix is pretty much always the answer,” she said, grinning. “Are you usually Wolverine?”

“In the fights, yeah. But by myself, Beast. He’s super smart but he’s also funny, goofy, especially in the earlier stuff. Are you always Jean?”

“Yep. You know, people underestimate Beast,” Aisha said. “Maybe ’cause he doesn’t look like they think a genius should.”

I introduced Aisha to Pops and we got two brats, lightly charred on one side, perfection. We heaped them with relish, mustard and ketchup. Aisha bit into hers and widened her eyes.

“Oh this is good. It’s like a hotdog that got bitten by a radioactive spice truck.”

“You were going to let me feed you something bad?”

She shrugged and smirked, all cute. I just dug into my brat, radiating inside because she trusted me enough to take my recommendation.

Jon and Brock pounced on us before we even got back to the blanket, coming around either side of the cooler as we got drinks.

“If you didn’t have the Phoenix, we’d totally win,” Jon said to Aisha.

“Yeah, you’re not shit without that,” Brock added. “So we win. We just wait for a time when you don’t have it.”

“You know Jean can call the Phoenix, right?” Aisha said. “I mean, that’s literally how she got it in the first place. She used her powers to draw it to her and save her own life. So, no. You still lose.”

Brock faced me, his cheeks ruddy with anger. “Have fun cleaning up by yourself. Your new pal’s not going to win a lot of friends around here with that attitude.” He stomped off toward the house and Jon headed back to the blanket.

“I’m sorry, my brother’s a pretty bad loser,” I told Aisha.

“Yeah.” From her tone, she didn’t buy that. “Or the obvious reason.”

She’d turned away from me, as if she could see through my house to hers. In this one day, she’d had to deal with the mean neighbor calling her a bitch, Brock and Jon being hyper-aggressive and me clueless about all that.

It took almost a year for me to see how much of the time when Aisha held her ground with a white person, even with as small and smart and funny as she was, they’d come back at her hard. I didn’t understand how in my town, and not only mine, blackness acted as a lightning rod for white people’s anger.

Took me a lot longer to figure out what to do about it.

Chapter Two

August 2016