The summer leading into Patience’s junior year was the start of a string of miserably hot and dry ones. There was nothing like that heat, the type that scorched you from the inside out so that there would be no relief regardless of how short or nonexistent the sleeves and shorts you wore were, or how high you turned up the fan. It was the kind that drove everyone on her block out of their houses after boiling each room into a muggy, thick soup, out onto their front porches with paper fans fashioned from old bills and cups of ice to chew on.

School had only been in session for a week. After two long, drawn out years she’d finally become an upperclassman, and as a gift, her teachers were intent on doling out seemingly endless amounts of work with less class time to do it in order to prepare them early on for the workload college would bring them. The conclusion of her sophomore year had been spent attempting to tailor her schedule to fit at least one of her three friends into all of her eight classes, but through a careless mistake one had slipped through the cracks. It was an error that left Patience stuck alone in English at 7:30 AM, a class that she found worthless on a good day and dreadful on a bad one. As it was, she learned early on that most of them would probably be the latter; the syllabus was still warm when Mrs. Rhett assigned the class their first essay, a three-page minimum paper on who represented what in the Great Gatsby.

 There were a plethora of reasons as to why she didn’t have her first draft printed off when she walked into class that Tuesday. The buses left for those that lived out in the city were often the ones that were on their last legs; the graffitied seats often had holes picked through all the way to the rubbery foam beneath, the exhaustion pipes spat thick, black smoke if the driver pushed anywhere beyond fifty miles per hour on the highway, and air conditioning was unheard of. When she boarded the bus that morning, it felt as if she was stepping into soup, and she had been unable to get comfortable enough to nap as she usually did during the long ride; as a result, she arrived forty-five minutes later sweaty, aggravated, and without the ability to care enough to make a rush trip to the library to print it off. By that time in her academic career, she was well aware it didn’t really matter what her reasons were – they all ended with her sitting beside Mrs. Rhett’s desk with the written version of her essay that included three paragraphs in a tight, neat scrawl, four if she decided to be generous.

Patience watched, arms crossed as her teacher smoothed out the crumbled pages of her notebook on top of her desk, her chapped lips pressed into a disapproving line.

“You’ve got to be more organized than this, Patience. Do you think your college professors will accept work like this?” The more she read, the more her features seemed to pinch up as if she had smelled something altogether terrible. She tapped the paper. “You’re a junior now. By now, you have to have learned how to use proper grammar.” She rubbed her temples as if untangling the snarled mass of thoughts inside her head that her essay had left behind; Patience would have preferred them to stay there. “This is unacceptable.” Again, her index finger made contact with the page. “For example, here. You’re using slang, ‘in the cut.’ What is that supposed to mean?”

Her tone suggested that she didn’t actually want an answer, so Patience didn’t supply her with one. Rather, she watched the way her poorly bleached mustache moved with each word. 

“Here’s what I want you to do; go back and revise. Your thesis is excellent, and I know from your previous English teacher that you’re extremely well spoken – your delivery just needs some work, okay?” The reassuring smile on her face only served to annoy her further, and it was all Patience could do not to snatch her notebook back and forsake the class altogether.

She was already halfway out of the chair by the time her teacher relinquished her notebook to her, her shoulder aching from the chip she knew she would carry for the rest of the day. She all but slammed herself down into her desk, scowling into her paper as if it were the one who had betrayed her until the letters broke apart into unintelligible symbols and the heat that boiled beneath her skin cooled.

One of the only things her mother taught her that Patience found held water was to talk like she had some sense – but that was talking. There was, at least to her, something much more visceral in saying a man ‘knocked his wife upside the head’ rather than simply saying ‘he hit her in the head.’

“The Great Gatsby is a boring book anyways, don’t worry too much about it.” The voice came from her left, and it took her a full minute to realize that the words were directed towards her.

Twisting slightly in her seat, Patience unconsciously shielded her notebook with her arm and squinted at the speaker. First period started before she was ready to acknowledge other people as people, and so she had yet to register any of her classmates as anything more than seat fillers. The face that she saw was wholly unfamiliar and made more so because it was a face that Patience would have remembered had she seen it before.

Her skin reminded her of the surface of a terracotta pot, but the freckles peppered across the bridge of her nose could have come from anyone and anywhere. She went back and forth on her hair that, although the same kind of curly as Patience’s underneath the protective braids she wore, were the color of earth soaked through with rain. Her features told Patience too much at once whilst at the same time being insufficient in evidence to prove that she was safe. She wondered if the stranger was dissecting her as Patience was her. A bubble burst and she became aware that she was staring.

She took a moment to edit the contractions out of her speech before opening her mouth, tearing her eyes away. “Honestly, I haven’t read a single book in any one of these classes that wasn’t, so you don’t have to tell me. But thank you.” She leaned forward, folding her arms into a makeshift pillow, expecting the conversation to drop there. She was well on her way to a nap when the girl spoke up again, voice lowered to a whisper so as not to attract attention from Mrs. Rhett, who had paused between conferences to shuffle through a pile of papers on her desk.

“I’m Emoni.”

Patience exhaled and sat back in her seat. “Patience.”

“I was going to wait until the end of class to ask, but would you mind showing me to my next class? I was assigned a guide, but he seems…” She paused. Patience could see her sifting through her mind for the appropriate word before giving up. “Not very good at it?” Her tongue cradled the syllables, a subtle accent spreading them out and crunching them in odd places.

She sat up with a yawn, lifting her shoulders before letting them fall. Tired tears gathered in the corners of her eyes and she wiped them away with the back of her hand before they had a chance to fall. “A guide? Are you new or something?” She flinched internally immediately after the words passed through her lips. A dumb question with an obvious answer. 

Mercifully, if the girl noticed, she didn’t comment.

Not another moment of that class was spent on her essay; instead, she took the time to create a loose map for her new classmate, giving her what little information she had on the teachers Patience knew on her schedule. At least half of them were located in the art department, so much so that on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, she wouldn’t even have to leave that area of the school to get to her next class.

When the time came to go, she waited by the door for her to scrape her items off her desk, keeping an eye on the clock. It was rare for Darius to arrive at school before second period began, but it wasn’t unheard of. She wasn’t in the mood to act happy to see him, so the sooner she showed Emoni to her class, the sooner Patience could be on a route he wouldn’t think to look for her on; she struggled to do so much as draw a stick figure, so she hadn’t had an art class since freshman year. The pair were the last ones to leave, and when they stepped out into the hallway, the body count had already thinned a little.

“Remind me, what’s your next class?”

She glanced at the wrinkled paper in her hands. “Ah… I have an art block with… Mr. Lynch?”

Patience hummed. “That’s far from here, you’re going to have to book it to make it on time in the future. Did you not take a tour of the school or something before you enrolled?”

“Nah. But I don’t mind walking.”

The art department was virtually on the complete other side of the building, also quite far away from her own next class, but Patience couldn’t have cared less about being late. At least she showed up. 

Along the way, she filled the silence with pointers about how to avoid the freshman stampedes, pointed out which halls were deadends, which teachers were the worst for which class and the best for others, where the counseling department was and where the best nooks were for eating lunch if you didn’t want to be bothered to find a table in the cafeteria, which was a bloodthirsty free for all at best. God forbid you didn’t come equipped with friends; it was next to impossible to find a single seat.

“What lunch period do you have?” She found herself asking, readjusting the frayed straps of her backpack on her shoulders. "Lunch is based off your second period on A and B days; if you’ve got an art class, you’ve got third lunch.”

Emoni’s face split open with relief. “Third, then.”

Patience nodded.  “Cool. I got third too. If you want, you can come sit with me and my friends; they’re a bunch of crackheads, but I think you’ll like them. Especially Qway.”

She made a noise of recognition. “Qway! That’s the guy the office assigned to show me around; he was terrible at it. I don’t think he even went to his class.” She paused, shaking her head. “That’s the perfect description for him now that I think about it.”

A burst of laughter bubbled past her lips. With the fog of sleep gone, it occurred to her that she was quite easy to talk to, and just as easy to not talk to. When they fell into silence as the bell rang but the two maintained an easy, unhurried gait between them, Patience decided she liked her.

Loud, excitable talking from the morning drawing class drifted down the hall towards us. At the sound, she allowed herself to relax a little; Darius avoided this hall like the plague. He thought the artistic kids were contagiously weird.

“I think this is me here,” She had stopped in front of a room where the thick scent of acrylic paint wafted out, so strong that it would linger on the back of Patience’s tongue even after she left. Only a few other students were in the room, some flipping through the biggest sketch books she had ever seen, some watching the teacher’s back as he wrote on the white board what she assumed to be what they would be working on for the day. There were so few of them that they each occupied their own table with some left over, a wide array of supplies spread out on the surface. 

Emoni must’ve been in one of the more advanced courses. The beginner art classes were always full, bursting at the seams with seniors and freshman students looking for an easy A.

She nodded, turning on her heel. “I can come back after this class. Just wait for me here.”

The next hour and a half was spent listening to yet another teacher lay out the foundations of their class, information that drained out of Patience’s ears as soon as the lunch bell rang. When she arrived, Emoni had acquired her own oversized sketchbook. Her arm strained to hold the thing securely beneath it. She stood outside of the classroom door, offering just enough space so that students could come and go whilst she talked to a white boy Patience had never seen before.

She moved off to the side and pretended to read something on her phone, unwilling to engage. Just as she was about to give up and go alone, Emoni’s stare drifted from the boy’s face towards Patience, her mouth shaping into an o. Whatever she said to him was lost to the shrill, demanding ring of the second lunch bell before she all but skipped to Patience’s side. 

“Finally. I forgot how long an hour and a half was. Damn.”

Patience snorted out a laugh. “Girl, and let me tell you the food ain’t even worth it. They used to let upperclassmen go off campus to get food but then everybody started coming back late so now you need to get a pass and sign in and out. They really got out of pocket this year.” 

“A pass?” She asked, aghast. “This school got any side doors?”

Throwing out an arm, Patience stopped. Emoni’s chest bumped into her, the girl stumbling back in surprise. Patience snatched her arm back as if she’d been burned. Swallowing, she tried to let the moment roll over and off of her shoulders. “See, I can already tell I like you.”

Patience could smell the Cafeteria long before they made their way past the courtyard into the main building. It was an almost wholly unpleasant smell, dominated by sweat, old meat, and the various meals that students brought in from the outside. 

“Do you need to go through the line? I don’t usually eat they food but I can wait in line with you just in case.”

“No, I’ll just pick something up after school.”

When they arrived at their table, LaToya and Asia were already seated. The moment that Emoni was within arm’s length, LaToya’s hand was out, snagging a stray lock of hair between her thumb and index finger. Patience blanched. 

“Girl, what is you to have hair like this?” LaToya leaned in closer, peering straight into Emoni’s face as if she possessed the power to see the structure of her DNA, allowing the hair to snap back into its s shape. “You got that good hair.”

Emoni recoiled, a wrinkle appearing between her brows. “Um, black as far as I know.”

Qway slid into the seat beside Patience, dropping his tray onto the table as he slung his backpack onto the floor. “Wassup. Ya’ll finish that history homework? I need somebody to copy off of. Patience, I know yo’ smart ass probably did it, don’t lie.” He spoke through a mouthful of fries, already reaching for her backpack with greasy fingers. 

She slapped it away. “Back up. I ain’t got that class until tomorrow, I was gon’ do it tonight.”

Asia snatched a fry from his tray. “I just wasn’t gon’ do it.”

Qway cursed. “Ya’ll is irresponsible as fuck, waiting until the last minute. Damn. Now imma get a zero.” He swallowed hard, taking a large bite from an unappetizing chicken patty. He paused, noticing Emoni for the first time. “Oh, hey. I completely forgot I was supposed to be showing you around or some shit. My bad.”

Emoni folded her arms on top of the table. Patience flinched. The gray surface was visibly sticky, covered in crumbs from the previous period’s lunch. 

“Don’t worry about it. I found a better guide.”

He coughed, spewing bits of chicken over the table. Patience hid her mouth behind her palm, snickering. “I can’t believe you already poisoned this girl against me. Damn, that’s crazy.” 

LaToya laughed. “I like her. She know you ain’t shit and she cute. These thirsty ass niggas is gon’ be all over you, I promise you that much.” Asia and Qway nodded in agreement, and Patience bumped her shoulder gently with hers in what she hoped was a comforting gesture.

“No they ain’t. They gon’ mind they own business is what they gon’ do.” Even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true.

Most of the students that went to her school had been together since kindergarten; anyone new was automatically whispered about until they were swept into one group or another, and if it was a girl, most of the boys took turns shooting shots at her until one of them finally stuck. They didn’t even necessarily have to be attractive, or even a nice person; the novelty was enough.

Patience cleared her throat. “Asia, since we talking about ain’t shit niggas and all, what was you talking about on the bus this morning? I ain’t get to hear the end of it.”

Her carefully shaped eyebrows pulled down into a scowl. Asia sucked her teeth, laying her palms flat on the table as if to brace both herself and her audience for the incoming atrocities. “I sholl forgot. Girl, you better settle in because this nigga really got me fucked up.”

Patience had no interest in listening; the man she was dating was twenty-three, six years her senior and working a dead-end job as a shelf stocker at the Dierbergs on Lincoln Avenue that got robbed at least once a month. Each member of their trio had at least once told her that it was a bad idea, that there was a reason a man like that wasn’t dating anyone his own age. She insisted that he knew she was grown and could see her real age. Every other day, there was a new tale about how he wouldn’t show her his phone, had lied about messaging with some other girl on instagram. Once, he’d even told her that if she left him, he would come find her with a bat.

Of course, she’d written it off. “We just be joking like that. Ya’ll reading too much into it, he just be playing.” She’d said, her nose glued to her phone.

Currently, she was working herself into such a frenzy that it wouldn’t have looked entirely out of place for her to begin frothing at the mouth. Patience felt a tap on her shoulder and glanced over. Emoni tilted her head at her, her glossy lips mouthing a question.  

Patience lifted her shoulders and let them fall exaggeratedly, quickly looking away. As she did, she caught Qway’s eye. His eyebrows were pulled together, and when their eyes met, one of them raised itself into an arch. She quickly replayed the interaction and concluded that it hadn’t been anything noteworthy for him to care about. That didn’t stop the heat that she felt rising in her cheeks. She stared right back at him, mimicking his expression. After a moment, he shrugged. Popping a rubbery French fry into his mouth, he made a face at her and then returned his attention to Asia.

That night, she willed the words of The Great Gatsby to jump off the page and enrapture her the way they seemed to for Mrs. Rhett. The less she could focus, the more irritated she became. After half an hour of attempting to digest the flavorless literature, she tossed the book over the side of her bed and fell back against her pillows. She stared at the ceiling, following the ridges that marred the surface like spidery veins.

She was almost positive that the only reason The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was still taught in classrooms was to give white teachers the chance to say the word nigger without being called racist. She imagined that their lips tingled from the sour feel of the word as it passed through. Sour in the same way as a lemon, a fruit that common sense told you not to take a bite out of, but that folks dripped onto their best cuisines and left floating in their water to give it that twang. At least novels like Of Mice and Men or The Outsiders had some sort of storyline outside of white folks being white folks and could be considered enjoyable - even the Lord of the Flies had its moments. 

She flipped onto her stomach, feeling the sheets for her phone. 

She knew that she couldn’t walk into class and participate in a discussion with the less than thirty pages she’d been able to force down. She couldn’t even remember what she’d read. 

“SparkNotes it is.”

Next Chapter: 23