typical. I didn’t really know how to go about it. I read Roots. That seemed like a good idea. It was very long. Do I feel blacker? I wondered. I couldn’t say yes, but I couldn’t say no. I read it again.
I also joined the Black Awareness Club, an extracurricular in the Upper School that was part affinity group and part educational group. Once a year, we’d host a Black Awareness Day for the Upper School, which, from the title, sounds like someone marching up and down the halls banging together pots and pans and yelling, “Slavery! Have you heard of it?!” It wasn’t that, but I do suggest that for all your diversity needs. We’d put together workshops on various aspects of black life in America, invite speakers, and host discussions. The rest of the year, when we weren’t planning the event, we would meet in a French classroom to have discussions about our experiences and conceptions of ourselves. And sometimes have snacks.
Electra never came to the Black Awareness Club meetings. I found that fascinating. We would sometimes send various emissaries from the club to invite her. Perhaps she was not aware of the Awareness Club? She still never came. I found that even more fascinating.
I was not an emissary. I think by the time I met her we’d gotten the hint. We were introduced formally in the middle of her tenth-grade year. Up to that point, she’d been an enigma, the new black girl who kept to herself. Passing her in the hall or seeing her in the cafeteria, I’d sometimes stare, trying to intuit what her deal was. I ticked off the details in my mind with all the precision and remoteness of a police sketch artist. She had light skin and huge, alert eyes. Her voice was high-pitched but gravelly. When she spoke, it was a sort of chirp and a croak. She was tall and thin and moved spryly but perhaps cautiously. She never wore makeup, and though she relaxed her hair, she didn’t usually style it beyond brushing it back, away from her face. She wore black jeans seemingly every day, and they were always just a little short.
* * *
—
One day, in the library, we said hello to each other like a couple of normal people and not one normal person and one dude who is constantly gaping and filling in the other person’s details from his imagination. I was using the microfiche catalog to do research on birth order, as was my ritual. I did this literally once a week, retrieving and printing the same articles that said maybe the reason I was the way I was came from my position as the oldest child or maybe it didn’t. Who can say? I was obsessed with finding a root cause for my being, and more broadly, I was obsessed with figuring out who I was.
I asked her the origin of her name, assuming that she had a connection to Greek mythology. No, she said, that would be weird. Her mother had heard the name on a New York City bus and liked it. She said it matter-of-factly and I nodded as if it wasn’t blowing my mind. To be fair, this is the least weird New York City transit story anyone has ever told. And the name does have a certain ring to it.
She’d grown up in New York City, I soon learned, raised by her mom. Then her mother had gotten sick and passed away the year before she came to Park, forcing her to move to Baltimore, with an uncle and an aunt and their new baby. Though we were essentially strangers, she spoke with an open wistfulness about her life in New York and her mother. And she spoke with a glum wariness about her new life now. I was surprised by how forthcoming she was. It didn’t feel like she was oversharing; instead, it seemed to me that she had a level of self-awareness and vulnerability that is rare for anyone, let alone a teenager. She knew that grief was the thing that had forced her out of her old life, waving from the train platform as she left. And it was the malevolent mystery sending her postcards from the past with the words “Wish you were here” scribbled across the back. Grief had been her first friend in this new world. It made itself known, an apparition, at points throughout her history and her present