from: [email protected]
Yeah but I only know English because I was brought here on a boat against my will haha.
from: [email protected]
You were brought there on a boat against your will?? Are you okay? Who did that to you???
I tried to explain slavery as succinctly as possible.
from: [email protected]
Ah yes, I have heard about that.
Chapter 56
The president wanted to defund PBS and NPR. I thought of all the drowsy weekends spent watchingDragon Tales, Arthur, andThe Magic School Bus, the old NPR morning theme song with that eighties saxophone filling the car, a sound once synonymous with my middle school commute and boring, important adult interests.
I could hear Jay hand-scrubbing his dirty clothes in the bathroom sink over the phone, one of his stress ticks. His cousin worked at PBS. “It’s my fucking optimism. It makes me… I don’t see things coming.”
“You can’t beat yourself up over this. No one can see everything coming.”
He said bitterly, “CNN can.”
The fact that we were still on a break quietly loomed over our conversations, resulting in a learned choreography in which we twisted ourselves not to mention it. Ever since Jay called after my father’s hospitalization, we’d formed an invisible contract. There was too much happening not to speak at all even though we didn’t speak often. We were in danger, and it was closing in on us day by day. People were being disappeared without due process. Students were being surveilled, hunted. This wasn’t the time to abandon each other.
And I was trying to be pragmatic, but what did that even mean anymore? On the way to class the other week, I noticed the flyer advertising an intergroup dialogue on racism, the one I mocked, had been taken down. I’d spent the hour after class wandering campus looking at bulletin boards: the Gender and Sexuality Alliance, SouthAsian Student Association, Arabic Language Club, Women in STEM, all their flyers gone. Time was running low before this was simply our lives. I felt this ticking clock viscerally in my chest.
“How’re you feeling about your dad’s surgery tomorrow?” I asked.
Jay shut off his faucet. “He won’t use his walker and now he’s made it fucking worse. I don’t know if the surgery’s even going to work. I kept telling him, ‘Use your walker,’ but when I went over there the other day the walker was in his fucking closet, like, do you want this shit to get so bad it’s irreversible?”
I’d never heard Jay cuss like this.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “How’s your dad?”
“Don’t be sorry. His foot’s healing. We’ve had the same arguments.”
“It’s hard, I know. Hold on,” he said.
Door hinges creaked in the background, low voices, grocery bags being set down. I heard Tristan’s voice, which confused me.
“Who just walked in?” I asked.
“Tristan.”
I’d been watching Tristan’s Instagram Stories every day from my finsta account like someone insane. He hadn’t posted anything about being in California.
Tristan said, “What’s up,” so coolly into the phone I felt gaslit. (In a lineup: “Miss, are sure this is the man who fucked you face down in his shower? Positive? Well, he sure isn’t acting like it.”)
I heard Jay say, “Can you believe this shit with Shawn? I mean, he’s barely been at PBS a year. He’ll be the first cut, I know it.”
Tristan in a calm voice: “I know. We won’t let him go out like that. But let’s worry about it after tomorrow. Do you want me to drive or—”
