I couldn’t look her in the face as I asked her, “Do we have to move?”
“Yeah,” she replied weakly. “But it will be okay. You’ll be fine.”
I wanted to believe her, but this move would not affect her. She was eight years older, had graduated from high school at sixteen and moved out of the house shortly afterwards. As my mother and I packed all of our belongings away in preparation for our move to Williamstown, a suburban neighborhood less than fifteen minutes away from Rowan’s campus, I yearned for her companionship.
My mother tried all she could to get me excited about Williamstown. We drove past our new home in a residential lot. It was noticeably bigger than our old one, complete with four bedrooms, a conjoined bathroom to every room, and a large basement. I saw some cute boys hanging around Main Street and that made my heart flicker, but that flame of excitement disappeared as quickly as it came.
Egg Harbor Township, where I had previously lived, and Williamstown had similarities. In the towns themselves, there were the usual bowling alleys and movie theaters. Families resided there for years, and their children almost always came back to perpetuate the cycle. But Egg Harbor Township at least had Atlantic City nearby, and from more rural Williamstown, with its Heritage’s Dairy store, acres upon acres of farmland, and common sightings of wild turkeys, you had to go a long way to get to Philadelphia. And Williamstown was far less racially and ethnically diverse than Egg Harbor Township.
I was more warmly received by the boys when I started eighth grade at Williamstown Middle School. Immediately, I latched onto and befriended a Colombian named Caterine—one of only a handful of Latinx in the school—who was in many of my classes and showed me the ropes. As she shuffled me along different hallways, the black boys did double takes, sometimes going as far as impeding our path to introduce themselves to us before saying one last hello when we parted ways. I was the new girl, and in this small town any novelty was exciting. Lunch came around, and I was informed through whispers that I was “fine.” The speed at which a teenager’s tongue moves could compete with the speed of light.
Caterine didn’t ask me about where I’d moved from, how many siblings I had, or what music I liked. Instead, she would pass notes in class, asking me if I had a boyfriend or whether I was a virgin. When we went to gym, she gossiped with the black girls about who slept with whom over the summer and whose pussy smelled like tuna. I was both revolted and intrigued. Who knew that thirteen-year-old girls could talk like such grown women? One time during lunch, I was teased for not knowing what an orgasm was, as though that were something I should’ve known at that age—like knowing how babies are made. In Williamstown, sex was more palpable, and I could feel its presence like a gnat buzzing near my eardrums. A girl outright told me, “Dick is like food. Once you have it, it’s a must,” and this was before she accused me of wanting the guy who’d taken her virginity the summer before, influencing her friends to ostracize me. But this paled in comparison to the harassment I’d experience from a new student the following year.
Jamirah moved to Williamstown from Virginia the summer before our freshman year of high school, and at first she seemed just as mild-mannered and meek as I was. The most popular girl in our year was Tiana, who was two years older than everyone else, and one of the most unapologetically black girls I’d ever met. During our industrial science class, she would often go to the nearest mirror, take out a toothbrush from her purse, scrape gel onto it, and smooth down her edges. Her laugh could be heard from one end of the room to the other, and she expressed her excitement by clapping her hands. On the flip side, whenever she was disgusted, she pursed her lips, rolled her eyes, and jerked her neck. I was always nice to Tiana because that was my natural disposition and also because I was afraid of her. Everyone was—hence her popularity.
Although Jamirah and I were both soft-spoken, Tiana must have recognized something in Jamirah that she didn’t see in me. Maybe it was because Jamirah immediately started following Tiana around, and consequently Tiana swept her up quickly. Soon, Jamirah became just as boisterous and brash as Tiana and her crew. It didn’t bother me much in the beginning because I wasn’t black like them. They were the kind of “black” that I was not supposed to be, a.k.a. those black people, the ghetto ones, the ones who made the rest of “us” look bad. My mother taught me to suppress those habits that Tiana was known for. As opposed to the other black girls, who wore graphic design T-shirts and hip-hugger jeans, my mother dressed me in cardigans, argyle socks, and plaid skirts so that I would “look the part” at all times.
Tiana and most of her group were in remedial and college-prep classes, and I was on the honors and advanced placement track, working in courses where I was one out of only a handful of black kids, and that is a generous estimate. The worst times for me were the periods when I wasn’t distanced from those who were not on the same academic trajectories: lunch and gym. I hated these egalitarian periods most because they were when I received the most abuse from Jamirah and, to lesser extents, from her friends.
At lunch, she’d yell at Tiana to draw attention to my neck or lack thereof while I was literally sitting right across from her at the same table. She made fun of my wardrobe, my intelligence, my speech, my looks—any and everything that made me a person: “Look at her. She ain’t got no neck. What the fuck you got on? The fuck is that shit?” I was always afraid that at gym, she would push me face-first into one of the lockers and start a fight out of boredom. Both she and Tiana frequently made idle threats about wanting to jump somebody while we changed, our half-naked bodies further emphasizing just how susceptible we all were to an ambush.
It was a kind of meanness that I have never seen matched. I did not know why Jamirah hated me so much. We didn’t like the same guys, didn’t frequent the same places after school, and didn’t speak much to each other. But perhaps this in itself was the reason. I did not want to be boisterous and brash and assert myself in the throes of the black community at high school. I maintained my timidity, preferring to be invisible so that I could commit to my studies and escape from Williamstown in four years. I confided in a few friends about Jamirah’s relentless bullying, and they urged me to retaliate, but I was too afraid of the consequences. If I swung on her—even though I’d never fought before—I’d get suspended, and that would mean that I’d get a bad reputation with teachers. I wouldn’t get those stellar recommendations I needed for college. I dreamed of getting an MD from Columbia and someday taking over my father’s medical practice. I feared I would be categorized as “one of them”: those black girls who were on the bad path in life and would end up pregnant before graduating high school, the black girls who would probably go as far as community college before settling for a waitressing job at a nearby Applebee’s.