My Heart and Other Black Holes (16 page)

“But why? If it doesn’t matter anyway, why do you need to know?” His voice is soft and calm. No pressure. No judgment.

I’m overwhelmed with the urge to hug FrozenRobot. I love that his question isn’t what my dad did. He isn’t interested in the gory details. I stare at his broad shoulders and imagine my face pressed up against his chest. I can’t let myself think like that, so I shift my eyes to the ground, zeroing in on the soft-pretzel stand. My dad loved soft pretzels. He used to joke that they were one of the best things about life in America. He’d buy a cinnamon-sugar one for me and a cheddar-cheese-and-onion one for him. We’d stroll around the festival, pretzels in hand, pointing at the different rides and debating which ones we should check out. And in those
rare moments, I felt at home.

“Hey, wake up.” Roman taps my shoulder and waves his hand in front of my face.

“Sorry. I guess I spaced out. I like looking at the ground below. I like watching everything get smaller.”

“Right, but you still haven’t answered my question. I want to understand, Aysel. I really do. But I don’t. If you’re going to jump with me on April seventh, why does it matter why your dad did what he did?”

I bite my thumbnail and force myself to think about the weeks leading up to my father’s crime. He’d been on edge, even more than usual. He was convinced he was losing money because kids were shoplifting, pocketing candy bars and magazines when he wasn’t looking. I remember one day I bounded into the store after school and found him sitting behind the counter, maniacally leafing through papers. He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes. “I try and I try, Zellie. But I just don’t know if it’s going to be enough.” Part of me wanted to run far away from those eyes, but I swallowed my fear and joined him behind the counter. I put my arms around him and pressed my nose into the fabric of his shirt, which always smelled like garlic. After a few moments, he started to hum a piece from Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 1.

I squeeze my eyes shut. Sometimes I can still hear my dad’s low voice in my ear. “I don’t know, Roman.” I sigh and
open my eyes. “But he raised me, you know? I just need some closure.”

Our car comes to a stop at the bottom and we jump out of it. Roman drapes his arm around my shoulder and pulls me close to him. “As long as you aren’t flaking out.”

“I told you, I’m not a flake.”

“That’s my girl.”

My heart jumps a little when he says that and I remind myself to get a grip. Anyway, Roman’s wrong: I’m not flaking out or looking for reasons to live. I’m looking to validate my reasons for dying. But when I glance up at his face and see the dark shadows under his eyes, I’m not sure if it’s him or me I’m trying to convince of that.
I’m not a flake
, I repeat mentally to myself.
I’m not a flake. This is what I want.

“What’s going on with you?” Roman frowns.

“Nothing,” I say, and I wish that were the case. “So can you go with me this Saturday?”

“To visit your dad?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure, I guess,” he says. “I’ll have to come up with something to tell my mom so I can get away.”

“Okay. I’ll pick you up Saturday morning. Probably pretty early. Does that work?”

He shrugs. “Just text me.”

“Okay.”

We stand in silence for a few awkward moments. “Well,
you dragged me here. We might as well try to have some fun.” He says the word “fun” like it’s a foreign word, a joke.

He steers me toward the mini basketball game stand. He hands the worker some rumpled bills and she gives him a basketball. I don’t recognize the woman, but she’s probably one of my classmates’ moms. She gives me a look like she knows who I am and who my dad is, but she doesn’t say anything.

He holds the basketball in his hands and eyes the hoop. I write the physics practice question in my head, trying to calculate the potential energy of the ball. Roman puts the ball down on the edge of the booth and looks at me. “You’re doing it again, aren’t you?”

“What?” I cross my arms over my chest. The woman working at the booth raises her eyebrows at me. I can tell she’s one of those moms that gets off on teenage drama. Great.

“Your science nerd thing. You’re always thinking about physics.”

My cheeks burn. “How did you know?”

His face lights up with his familiar crooked smile. “You had the same face you made when you were taking photos at the zoo. Like you’re really concentrating on something.” He turns back to the basketball hoop and takes the shot. Swoosh. It goes through the net effortlessly. FrozenRobot has game.

The woman running the booth holds up one thin finger
to indicate he scored a point.
Thanks for that. We can count to one. We’re suicidal, not innumerate.
I nod at her to let her know we understand.

Roman turns the ball over in his hands. “I like that thinking look, though. It’s cute.”

I can’t help but laugh. I don’t think anyone in the entire history of my life has ever referred to me as cute. Even when I was little, I was always “unique”—code for not looking like everyone else in Langston—or “sweet”—code for being quiet and unassuming—but never cute.

“What?” He crouches down slightly and thrusts the ball into the air again. It bounces against the rim, but ends up falling through the net. I hold two fingers up at the woman and she gives me a weak smile.

“Yup,” she says. Her southern accent is heavy and thick. “He’s made two and he has two more left.”

Roman studies the different stuffed animals. There are rows and rows of pink pandas and fluorescent-orange tigers. I even spot a few blue elephants. “What can I win?” he asks.

She bounces up, straightening her posture, and does her best game show host impression as she stretches her arm out in front of her, making a sweeping motion in the direction of the stuffed elephants and pandas and tigers. “If you make all four shots, you can pick whatever one you want.”

“Even that huge lion?” Roman asks, craning his neck so he can get a better look at the giant lion that sits at the very
top. Its mane looks like it’d be really itchy if you pressed your face to it, but it’s impressive looking nonetheless.

She smiles wide at me. “Including the lion. Is that the one you want?”

“Me?” I blink at her.

“Yeah. He’s winning the prize for you, sweetheart. Isn’t he?” She makes a clucking sound. I’ve never understood why women from Langston love to do that. I guess they feel some kind of strange affinity with the chicken population.

“I don’t think so.” I slip my hands into the pockets of my black jeans and shift my weight from my right foot to my left.

Roman pretends like he didn’t hear her comment. He prepares to make his next shot. As I watch Roman—his face pulled in concentration, his deep-set eyes wide and eager, his ropy arm muscles tensed—I wonder if he sees something similar to that when he watches me think about physics. Sure, he still looks pretty miserable, pretty FrozenRobot-ish. But yet, there’s something there, like the shadows that sometimes sneak their way into the frame of a picture. Part of me wants to reach out and grab it, bring it into focus.

All of a sudden, I realize what that shadowy something is. It’s joy. FrozenRobot loves basketball. He loves playing it. No matter how hard he tries to push that joy away, it’s there. I wonder if joy has potential energy. Or if there is potential energy that leads to joy, like a happiness serum that lingers
in people’s stomachs and slowly bubbles up to create the sensation we know as happiness.

If that’s true, my black slug eats all of mine. Scratch that. Most of mine. Watching FrozenRobot play basketball has almost made me smile. Key word: almost.

He nails the third shot and the fourth shot. I’ve hardly been paying attention to the actual shots. I like his process of preparing for them more than the actual moment. The moment goes by too fast; it’s almost impossible to catch.

“So what will it be?” the woman asks. I notice she has mulberry-colored lipstick smudged on her front tooth.

“Whatever the lady wants,” Roman says, and I’m completely caught off guard.

The woman with the lipstick-stained tooth turns to me. “The lion, then?”

Any words I had are all jumbled in my throat. FrozenRobot should not be winning me prizes at the carnival. The last thing I need is more stuff to leave behind. The last thing I need is to feel more confused. I shake my head at the lady. “I don’t want anything.”

She frowns, and Roman nudges his shoulder up against mine. “C’mon, Aysel. You have to choose one. I won.”

“I know,” I sputter. “It’s just I want something else.”

The woman’s frown deepens. “These are the only prizes we have available, hon.”

I shake my head again, harder this time. “No, no. I don’t
want a different prize, I just want you to give the prize he won to someone else.”

The woman raises her eyebrows in confusion.

I try my best to explain. “Like if another kid comes to play but doesn’t make any shots. Can you let them have a prize anyway?” I bite my bottom lip.

The woman puts her hands on her hips. “But how will I know what kid to give it to?”

I shrug. “Give it to the one who looks like they need it the most, whoever looks like the loneliest.”

Her nose twitches as she considers this, and then she gives me a small smile. “Okay, darling. Whatever you want. You’re going to make some little kid’s day.”

“That giant lion is going to make someone’s day,” I say, and then whisper to myself, “At least I hope so.”

As we walk away from the game booth, Roman holds out his hand. I grab it and he laces his fingers with mine. I don’t say anything. I know it’s not like that. It’s a different kind of hand-holding. It’s the way we’ll probably hold hands on April 7.

But as much as my mind knows that, a warmth still spreads over my skin. I hope he doesn’t notice. Maybe he’ll just think I have naturally sweaty palms.

“That was really cool,” he says, swinging our hands up in the air and then back down. I let him move my hand like we’re one entity. “Were you a lonely kid?”

I contemplate this for a moment. “Not always.”

He tilts his chin down so he can look me in the eye. He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to. I know he’s asking for me to explain.

“After what happened with my dad, I lost all my friends. Some of them distanced themselves immediately, but some of them I pushed away. It was too scary to let anyone be close to me.” I sigh. “I don’t know how to explain it.”

Roman nods. In the outside light, his eyes are a golden green, like grass that’s been stained by summer sunshine. “No, I understand. It’s like your sadness is so deep and overwhelming that you’re worried it will drown everyone else in your life if you let them too close to it.”

He gets it.
“Exactly.”

He reaches out with his other hand and brushes a strand of hair away from my face. “I did the same thing, you know? I pushed my friends away. But it’s what you have to do, I think. It’s the only way.”

He’s still holding my hand, his fingers entangled with my mine, and I wonder how quickly he’d drop my hand if he knew what my dad did to Timothy Jackson. “Tell me more about it, your sadness,” he presses.

“Why?”

“I want to understand. I like understanding you. It’s been a long time since I related to someone else, but I think I get you.”

My black hole of a heart stalls, sucking all the air out of my lungs. It can’t be like this. It will only make April 7 harder. A crowd of middle school boys rushes by us and makes “oooh” and “ahhh” noises. Roman’s cheeks flush red, but he still doesn’t let go of my hand. I feel myself blushing, too.

We stand still for a few moments, and then he lightly tugs on my hand to encourage me to keep walking and we wander the fairground in silence, our sneakers crunching the straw they’ve laid on the ground to soak up the mud.

As we approach the twirling teacups ride, Roman starts talking again. “Sometimes, for me, it feels like my grief is eating me alive. I always thought that the hardest moments would be when I remember things about her, but that’s not true. The hardest moments are when I miss her in the future. Sure, holidays are hard, but I’m talking about small things, like when we’re at the grocery store and I pass by the frozen section and imagine Madison begging Mom to buy a large pack of Popsicles.” He stops talking for a moment and lets out a low choke of a laugh. “Yeah, for six months, my mom never let me out of her sight. So she forced me to go to the grocery store with her.” He hangs his head, staring at his mud-stained shoes. “The worst part is that I know I’m the reason she’s not there to beg for Popsicles. What I wouldn’t give to see her one more time, to switch places with her.”

I tighten my grip on his hand like I’m scared that he’s
going to disappear, that his grief will devour him right here on the spot.

“That’s why I draw,” he confesses. “Before Madison died, I used to sketch, but I hid it from everyone. It wasn’t something I did seriously. And let’s be real, my basketball buddies would’ve given me so much shit about it. But now I draw because sometimes it feels impossible to talk. It’s like I’m trapped in this deep hole that I can’t get out of. I draw to try to escape it, even though I know I’ll never be able to.”

I swallow the heavy lump in my throat and process everything he just confessed; I’m not sure I’ve ever heard FrozenRobot say so many words in a row before. My body aches for him and I wish there was something I could do, but I know enough to know there isn’t. There’s no saving him from his deep hole. There’s no saving me from my black slug.

“But at least you have a right to miss Madison,” I say softly.

He must understand what I’m trying to say because he asks, “Do you miss him? Your dad?”

“Yeah,” I say without hesitation. “Yeah, I do. And that’s how I know I’m crazy.”

He stops moving and turns to face me, closing the distance between our bodies. We stand chest to chest, or rather, my chin to his chest. He keeps holding my one hand and puts his other on the back of my neck. His palm is warm and clammy. Maybe, just maybe, he’s a little nervous and confused, too.

“I don’t think you’re crazy,” he whispers. “But I understand why it’s confusing. I wish it wasn’t like that for you. That none of it had happened.”