Kaitlyn Greenidge - We Love You, Charlie Freeman

He didn’t know why he said it. It had broken out of him. He’d wanted to speak with love: that was all that he’d asked for that day, but now there was a shocked silence. Martin still leaned forward, his mouth agape. Oh shit, Charles thought. I’m fired for sure.

And then, a miracle. The whole classroom broke into relieved laughter. The girls up front giggled through their tears, his fan boys laughed expectantly. Hakim’s whole face broke into a proud, wide grin, even though his hands stayed clenched in fists. Even Martin Wade grinned. “Oh, you burned,” the boy beside him called out, then swatted Martin’s stringy tricep.

How did they get the joke? Charles wondered as he smiled thinly at the class. How did they get the joke?

He let the laughter wash over him. It was the first time he’d spoken truthfully in Courtland County, without pretense. It was the first time he’d spoken the truth without trying to make it a joke. He let the laughter wash over him and he watched the light spattering against the back wall of his classroom, dashing and dappling and turning his classroom walls to mud.

“Jesus,” Adia said, “your dad is good. ”

By the end of the day, the whole school knew about his outburst. He had become, in the constant retelling, a kind of folk hero. The same girls who hovered around me at lunch came up to me as classes let out, eager to talk, breathless with my father’s transgression. Adia, who had quickly found her way back to my side, glared at them until they backed away.

“I can’t believe they don’t care.” We lay now, curled together in the blankets on her bedroom floor. “They have to at least care .”

I didn’t say anything, only tried to concentrate on her side pressed against me.

“You can’t talk to those girls anymore.” She settled in closer. “Or if you do talk to them, you have to tell them the truth.”

“C’mon, Adia.” I played with her fingers. “They’re my friends—” She took her hand out of mine. “Or. . we’re friendly. I’m not gonna start lecturing them about this stuff.”

“You’re just scared.” Adia sighed. “You’re always so scared.”

I slid further under Adia’s blankets. “Don’t say that,” I said, very small.

“It’s the truth.” Adia sat up. “I think we can both agree you’re not a very brave person, Charlotte.”

“Neither are you,” I said, even smaller.

“No,” Adia sang now, “no. I don’t think so. I’m much, much, braver than you are.” She turned on her side, away from me, and crooked her arm around her sketch pad. “Even your father is braver than you.”

She was so engrossed she didn’t hear me as I slid across the space between us and kissed the back of her neck, right where it met her skull. I could feel the very slight bristle of her hair, the tiny bit of it left by the errant razor blade. Adia jerked forward as if I had pinched her.

“What was that for?” she said, sharply, glancing over her shoulder.

“I’m braver than you.” I kissed her arm.

She pulled her arm away, rubbed the back of her neck, as if she was trying to get off some stain.

“I’m braver than you are,” I said again, pushing forward. The only thing to do now, I realized, was to keep going. If I backed down now, she would be right.

“Get away,” Adia hissed, but she didn’t move. She hadn’t turned on her side toward me, either. She was still stubbornly rubbing the back of her head, her face turned out toward the room.

I inched closer to her, until I was pressed up against her back, until I wrapped my arms around her front and slipped my hands underneath her T-shirt. When I kissed the back of her head again, she didn’t flinch. She didn’t move at all. She went terribly, terribly still, not even a breath, not even a sigh. Then her spine curled into me and she collapsed down and that was it.

She wouldn’t get under blankets afterward, though I did immediately, despite the heat in Adia’s house. Instead, when she was awake again, she stood up, in only that too-big T-shirt, and began to pace the room.

“I told you I was brave,” I said, if only to see what she would do next. If only to see how she would keep the game going. I didn’t want it to be a game anymore. I spoke to give her a chance to make it stop but she only nodded curtly. “I’ve got something better.”

I pulled on my sweater. I got up and stood in front of her to stop her pacing. Side by side, she was only an inch or so taller than me. Her eyes had gone all drowsy again, her mouth half open and she breathed sweet, “You’re really going to like it.”

She knelt down to pick up the notebook she’d been worrying, rummaging through it until she found the page she wanted. She pulled back the cover and handed it to me.

There was my mother, her neat Jheri curl scribbled into a nest of worms. There was Callie, then myself, our cheeks and lips distended, our chests and stomachs and laps doubled into a mass of half circles. In the drawing, Adia gave us both buck teeth, and Callie didn’t have any eyes, just two blank discs for glasses like Little Orphan Annie. In the middle of us was Charlie, a tail circled around his midsection. My mother brandished a glass pitcher with a facsimile of the Kool-Aid Man’s smile plastered across it. “Who wants grape drink?” she was asking. On the plates in front of us were heaping piles of fried chicken. All of our mouths outlined in wide rubbery, thick red lips.

“Do you like it?” Adia shook my knee. “It’s good, right?”

My hands felt too weak to hold up the notebook. “Why did you draw this?”

“You don’t get it.” Adia laughed. “I knew you wouldn’t get it.”

“It’s ugly,” I said.

“It’s ironic.” Adia nodded proudly, and then she stood back, scanning my face for a dawn of recognition.

Marie’s favorite word, and now Adia was adopting it as her own. But neither one had ever succeeded in explaining what it meant to them.

“Why did you draw Callie’s eyes like that? And what did you do to my teeth? Why did you make us so ugly?”

Adia assured me that that, too, was irony. “Don’t you get it?” she said. “That’s what your mom is doing to you. She’s making you ugly like that, by making you stay there, making you be in that experiment. That’s why she’s feeding you the Kool-Aid. I can’t believe you don’t get it.”

“You made us so ugly.”

“Because that’s how they see it. That’s how they all see it: Max and Dr. Paulsen and those dumb girls at school, the ones pretending to be nice to you. You’re ugly to every last one of them. That’s what the cartoon is about.”

“But you drew it.”

Adia shook her head impatiently. “That’s what everyone thinks about you, anyway. But they’re too polite to say it. That’s your problem, Charlotte. You’re afraid of making people answer for things.”

I just made you answer, I thought to myself. I just made you answer after months of you and me asking the same question to each other over and over again, and you don’t care.

Adia was bouncing on her heels, now, beaming. “I gave it to the school paper—”

“You did?” I felt tears in my eyes.

“Yeah, I submitted it, but Mr. Carver said he can’t publish it, that it’s too offensive. But I could see, deep down, it’s what he’s really thinking.”

“You showed this to other people?”

“So what I think we do now,” Adia continued, “is make photocopies. Like, a million photocopies. And we plaster them everywhere. In school, downtown, all over the Toneybee Institute so that everybody knows, gets, it. Everybody is confronted—”

“No,” I said.