Z-Boy breaks the connection, drops the phone into his pocket, and leaves Brady’s room. He heads back past the duty desk and Nurse Rainier, who is still absorbed in her computer. He leaves the cart in the snack alcove and crosses the skyway. He walks with a spring in his step, like a much younger man.
In an hour or two, Rainier or one of the other nurses will find Brady Hartsfield either slumped in his chair or sprawled on the floor on top of his Zappit. There won’t be much concern; he has slipped into total unconsciousness many times before, and always comes out of it.
Dr. Babineau says it’s part of the re-booting process, that each time Hartsfield returns, he’s slightly improved. Our boy is getting well, Babineau says. You might not believe it to look at him, but our boy is really getting well.
You don’t know the half of it, thinks the mind now occupying Library Al’s body. You don’t know the fucking half of it. But you’re starting to, Dr. B. Aren’t you?
Better late than never.
24
“That man who yelled at me on the street was wrong,” Barbara says. “I believed him because the voice told me to believe him, but he was wrong.”
Holly wants to know about the voice from the game, but Barbara may not be ready to talk about that yet. So she asks who the man was, and what he yelled.
“He called me blackish, like on that TV show. The show is funny, but on the street it’s a put-down. It’s—”
“I know the show, and I know how some people use it.”
“But I’m not blackish. Nobody with a dark skin is, not really. Not even if they live in a nice house on a nice street like Teaberry Lane. We’re all black, all the time. Don’t you think I know how I get looked at and talked about at school?”
“Of course you do,” says Holly, who has been looked at and talked about plenty in her own time; her high school nickname was Jibba-Jibba.
“The teachers talk about gender equality, and racial equality. They have a zero tolerance policy, and they mean it—at least most of them do, I guess—but anyone can walk through the halls when the classes are changing and pick out the black kids and the Chinese transfer students and the Muslim girl, because there’s only two dozen of us and we’re like a few grains of pepper that somehow got into the salt shaker.”
She’s picking up steam now, her voice outraged and indignant but also weary.
“I get invited to parties, but there are a lot of parties I don’t get invited to, and I’ve only been asked out on dates twice. One of the boys who asked me was white, and everyone looked at us when we went into the movies, and someone threw popcorn at the back of our heads. I guess at the AMC 12, racial equality stops when the lights go down. And one time when I was playing soccer? Here I go, dribbling the ball up the sideline, got a clear shot, and this white dad in a golf shirt tells his daughter, ‘Guard that jig!’ I pretended I didn’t hear it. The girl kind of smirked. I wanted to knock her over, right there where he could see it, but I didn’t. I swallowed it. And once, when I was a freshman, I left my English book on the bleachers at lunch, and when I went back to get it, someone had put a note in it that said BUCKWHEAT’S GIRLFRIEND. I swallowed that, too. For days it can be good, weeks, even, and then there’s something to swallow. It’s the same with Mom and Dad, I know it is. Maybe it’s different for Jerome at Harvard, but I bet sometimes even he has to swallow it.”
Holly squeezes her hand, but says nothing.
“I’m not blackish, but the voice said I was, just because I didn’t grow up in a tenement with an abusive dad and a drug addict mom. Because I never ate a collard green, or even knew exactly what it was. Because I say pork chop instead of poke chop. Because they’re poor down there in the Low and we’re doing just fine on Teaberry Lane. I have my cash card, and my nice school, and Jere goes to Harvard, but . . . but, don’t you see . . . Holly, don’t you see that I never—”
“You never had a choice about those things,” Holly says. “You were born where you were and what you were, the same as me. The same as all of us, really. And at sixteen, you’ve never been asked to change anything but your clothes.”
“Yes! And I know I shouldn’t be ashamed, but the voice made me ashamed, it made me feel like a useless parasite, and it’s still not all gone. It’s like it left a trail of slime inside my head. Because I never had been in Lowtown before, and it’s horrible down there, and compared to them I really am blackish, and I’m afraid that voice may never go away and my life will be spoiled.”
“You have to strangle it.” Holly speaks with dry, detached certainty.
Barbara looks at her in surprise.
Holly nods. “Yes. You have to choke that voice until it’s dead. It’s the first job. If you don’t take care of yourself, you can’t get better. And if you can’t get better, you can’t make anything else better.”
Barbara says, “I can’t just go back to school and pretend Lowtown doesn’t exist. If I’m going to live, I have to do something. Young or not, I have to do something.”