and love as endless as bottles of Presidente beer
shared on the stoops all over Bushwick
late into the night, Papi.
I met this boy.
Canarsie really is the very edge of the world, or at least Brooklyn. It feels that way since it takes so long for me to get to and from my old neighborhood. My sisters and I have to leave the house by six thirty in the morning just to get to school on time. Canarsie is the first and last stop on the L train, just like Darius said.
My new hood is nothing like my old hood. If there are newcomers here, they’re black or Latinx like our family. No one is coming here to throw anything away. There’s room to spread my arms and not hit anybody in the head. I can go a whole day sitting in front of the house and only see about five people. But no one sits on stoops here. No one pulls out a barbecue grill on the sidewalk, or a small table for a game of dominoes. The bodega is more than five blocks away, and we have to drive to the closest supermarket or Laundromat. But Mama and Papi still don’t know how to drive and don’t have a car. So most of our days are spent commuting to and from everywhere and stuck inside the small two-story house, minding our own business. Marisol and the twins spend more time at school with extracurricular activities, and Mama cooks way too much food, since our kitchen is much bigger now. Howard University has my new address, and they’ve been filling our mailbox with catalogs and postcards. I take that as a good sign.
We have more space and less time. And the love we had for our whole neighborhood now only fits into this wood-frame house in the middle of a quiet block. We don’t know the people who live across the street or on either side of us.
After my first day of senior year, I take a trip to my old block. Darius has been wanting to come see me, but we still had boxes and I was still trying to make sense of it all. I wanted more than anything to step back onto Jefferson and Bushwick Avenues, but only when I knew I was ready.
Darius meets me at the Halsey Street and Wyckoff Avenue station off the L train. It’s as if he hasn’t seen me in years, the way he hugs me and lifts me off my feet. We walk through my old hood, hand in hand, talking small talk about school, college, SATs, and Bushwick. I can spot the renovations happening to our old building from a block away.
The windows have been taken out, and the whole inside of the building has been gutted. My stomach sinks, and a wave of sadness makes me want to fall to the ground and wail. Darius squeezes my hand.
“Do you know who bought it?” I ask.
“Does it matter?” he says.
“Yeah, you might not like your new neighbors.” I smile.
“You’re right. There’ll probably be some rich white girl who’ll be afraid of me and then she’ll realize that I’m not that bad since I go to private school and all and we’ll fall madly in love and the rest is history.”
“Why you trying to put that out there like that, Darius?”
“Are you jealous?”
“Hell yeah!” I say.
“Well, don’t be, ’cause I want to show you something.”
We get closer to my old building, and I notice that the crumbling sidewalk has been repaved. A tree stump that used to be there is now gone, and so is the rickety gate. My heart feels like it’s about to split in half. In about a year, I won’t recognize this place.
Darius pulls my hand and crouches down on the ground right in front of the building. And I immediately start laughing. “What are you doing?” I ask. It’s the corniest and sweetest thing I’ve ever seen. In elementary school, we’d spray paint on the handball wall, or on a park bench. But since sidewalks don’t usually get paved in this part of the hood, initials carved into the concrete are something I don’t usually see.
“I wish I could’ve showed off my artistic skills a little better,” Darius says with a huge smile on his face. “But I know you want me to . . . K.I.S.S.”
“Boy, I am not crouching down on that ground to kiss you!” I say, laughing.
“No. I just kept it simple stupid. K, I, S, S.” He grins from ear to ear, as if he just said the cleverest thing.
“You know what? With all that fancy education, you sure know how to keep it original.”
“I try,” he says. “So. Do you like?”
Right there, in front of the place I used to call home, the place I spent the first seventeen years of my life, are the letters and words Z + D FOREVER inside a heart with an arrow.
“I love it,” I say, taking his hand as he gets up from the ground. “So, forever?”
“Forever,” he says, slipping his arms around my waist. “Well . . . that will be there forever if they don’t repave it.” He tries to hold in a laugh.
I punch him lightly on the arm and say, “You wish it could be there forever, Darius Darcy!”
I wrap my arms around his shoulders, pull him in, and give Darius a deep, long kiss for what feels like forever.
Acknowledgments
I wanted to write a love story filled with sweetness, joy, and beauty. But our current political situation was a constant noise and distraction. So much was happening in the world, and at times, it was hard to focus on the magic of first love. The early drafts of something almost like a love story were a muddy pool of disappointment, anger, and fear. I needed an anchor—a structure to hold on to, something that would guide this love story toward healing and reconciliation, if not for the characters themselves, then for me.
Thank you to the great literary figure Jane Austen, for writing and publishing Pride and Prejudice in 1813, amidst everything that was happening in her world at the time. Austen gifted us with a story about not only love but class, expectations, and a woman’s place in the world. Even as she, a woman in nineteenth-century England, had the audacity to write, observe, and speak truth to power with such wit, humor, and grace.
Thank you to my dear husband of eighteen years, Joseph. The memories we share allowed me to tap into sweetness, tenderness, and of course, revolution.
Thank you to my many high school secret crushes, soulmates, this-is-forevers, one-and-only-trues, unrequited loves, hate-love-hate-agains, and infatuations. I have enough love stories to last me a lifetime.
I am ever grateful to my teen daughters, Abadai and Bahati, wise, opinionated, no-holds-barred beta readers; as well as my son, Zuberi, who couldn’t care less, but I have to include him.
Ammi-Joan Paquette, thank you for always championing my ideas and visions. I am truly honored to have you as a literary agent, and to be a part of the wonderful EMLA.
I could not have tackled a Pride and Prejudice retelling without my editor extraordinaire and super Austen fan, Alessandra Balzer. Thank you so much for loving these characters and rooting for them.
Thank you to Team Zuri at Alloy. Hayley Wagreich, your attention to detail is truly one for the books. Literally. I’ve learned so much from you. Thank you, Sara Shandler, for your unwavering enthusiasm. Josh Bank, Joelle Hobeika, and Les Morgenstein, thank you for crossing uncharted roads and paving new paths. It has been a wonderful journey.
I’m so proud and honored to be a part of the Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins family. Thank you, Kelsey Murphy, Donna Bray, Kate Jackson, Suzanne Murphy, Andrea Pappenheimer, Kerry Moynagh, Kathy Faber, Jen Wygand, Jessica Malone, Megan Beatie, Olivia Russo, Patty Rosati, Molly Motch, Nellie Kurtzman, Ebony LaDelle, Bess Braswell, Alison Donalty, Mark Rifkin, Renée Cafiero, Caitlin Garing, Kristen Eckhardt, and Vanessa Nuttry—you’ve all made my dreams come true.
I could not have asked for a better voice for Zuri than Elizabeth Acevedo—a wise and passionate wordsmith. Thank you so much for your friendship and lending your dope performance skills to this story.