A More Deserving Blackness Read Online Free PDF

to tell you she loves you, and she misses you.”
                  I smile and nod again, and Trish tells me she’ll be back late, and to call if I need anything.
                  The front door closes and I can already feel the soothing licks of pain radiating up my arm.               
                  I know they love me.  My mom, my dad, Trish.  They all care about me, worry about me.  And yes, my parents miss me.  Of course they miss me.  But they miss the girl I used to be, before.  Not the girl that had barely allowed them to hug her in the driveway of her childhood home at the beginning of the summer, unresponsive before she’d climbed into Trish’s car.  They miss their daughter, and I’m not that girl anymore.
                  I’m what was left.
     
                  It’s the second Wednesday of classes when Erik asks me out on a date.
                  “It’s not a date or anything, I just -” he lowers his voice, leans toward me.  “Jess is going to be there and I don’t want to show up alone, you know?  You want to come with me?  It’ll be fun, I promise.”
                  I stare at him.  Jess?  Oh, right.  The girlfriend that had dumped him after the first day of school.  Classy.
                  I highly doubt the fun part, and I hesitate, but going to a party was the height of normal as a teenager.  Trish would be thrilled, and so, in turn, would my parents.  Erik didn’t strike me as dangerous, either, but still.
                  Besides, pre-calc Dylan keeps mentioning something about this weekend, suggestively leaving it hanging in the air like I’m supposed to grab at it gratefully.  Poor little mute girl, throw her a bone.  Maybe he’s just trying to be nice, trying to include me, but I wish he’d stop.
                  “Please?”
                  It’s the please that gets me, and I realize it’s been so long since anyone has asked anything of me.  Everyone who knows me thinks – knows? – thinks I would shatter at the smallest request, and everyone who doesn’t is too put off by my freakish refusal to speak to approach me.  Even my teachers ask little more from me than that I show up in order to pass their classes. 
                  Erik is waiting, with a little shake of his head and a lift of his eyebrows.  Well?
                  I’m surprised to feel myself nodding slowly.  As I write down my address on Erik’s palm as he insists I do, eyebrows waggling and adorable dimples flashing, I can’t help but feel the burn of a set of dark, serious eyes on my back.  But when I look behind me the guy is just staring down at the desktop between his forearms, alone and quiet as usual.
                  The movement of turning toward him knocks my notebook, pages fluttering, to the aisle between the tables, smacking onto the hard floor like a broken white bird.  They guy leans over, slowly reaching an arm down over his knee and plucking up the notebook with his long middle finger hooked into the spine.  He rights the pages and then hands it over to me, and when I try to thank him with a look I see the blank, spectral void of his stare.  Not unkind, not angry at all, but utterly detached.  It passes through me like I’m not even there.
                 
                  Erik picks me up at my house at seven o’clock on Friday.  He knocks at the door and I hear Trish answer it, hear her laugh a little too loudly while they wait for me.  I glance in the mirror in the hallway as I pass.  I didn’t think much about my outfit, just tugged a pair of dark jeans over the swell of my hips and a v-neck grey t-shirt over my ample boobs like always, plaiting my reddish hair into a quick braid that hung to the middle of my back, not trying to impress anyone.  Add that to the