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There are things you’re not allowed to say. When I was very young, it was the curses I’d heard my mother use, the words erupting from her mouth but disconnected—too ugly to belong to someone as beautiful as my mother. One morning, I stood in front of the mirror, saying the words over and over. My father found me this way. Neither of us knew that exactly eight days from that moment, my mother would move on to the next place. We thought the doctors were wrong. We prayed, Please, doctors, in the name of our Holy Father, be wrong.
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What are you saying? my father said when he heard me. Don’t ever say those words. Ever.
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But Mama says them.
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She’s in pain, my father said. Those words should only be said by people in pain.
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I wanted to tell him I was in pain. I wanted to show him where it hurt. Point to my head, my heart, my belly. Say, Here, Daddy. And here. And here. But I didn’t. I was eight years old. He would say I was too young to know real pain. After all, he’d say, you’ve never even had a skinned knee, Treetop! Then rub my head and smile that halfway real, halfway crying smile. That winter, I hurt every place my mother hurt. As I pressed wet cloths to her sweating forehead, as I let her hold my hand to wait out the pain, as I read to her from gossip magazines and gently brushed her thinning hair, each twist of pain moving through her moved through me. I wanted to tell my father this—that once I had lived inside my mother, a part of her. I wanted to say, How could I NOT know her pain?
What kind of name is Treetop, anyway? Celeste asked the first time she heard my father call me this. We were nine years old, and Celeste was my new best friend. She had moved to New Hampshire from New York City. She was tall and brown and beautiful. Her mother had modeled for magazines.
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The first time I asked him where babies came from, he said Treetops.
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Celeste squinted, pulled her lips to the side. I had practiced doing this in the mirror, but it never looked all the amazing things hers looked.
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You know that’s not true, right?
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Yeah. Of course. But the name stuck.
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My dad would never say that, Celeste told me. He’d say Look it up. But he’d never call me Look It Up. Just saying.
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We laughed. From the moment we became friends, it seemed we spent so much of our time laughing.
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She told me her father spent his days figuring out what to do with other people’s money. He likes counting it, she said. And recounting and recounting. He’s tall like me, she said. She said her parents were taking a break from each other. After all, eleven years is a long time to be together, don’t you think?
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I shrugged. When my mother died, she and my father had been together twenty years. They had been middle school sweethearts. My father said he couldn’t imagine living without her.
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I didn’t tell Celeste this. I didn’t say, The people who don’t want breaks sometimes get them. But maybe she saw something in the way I stared at the ground. We were at the park, which was empty and cold. We were dragging our feet below our swings, moving slowly back and forth.
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You miss her, huh?
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I nodded.
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I miss my dad, Celeste said. And I miss New York. I know me some missing.
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I looked up and she was smiling. Then we were laughing again. That quickly, we were looking at each other and laughing so hard we had to bend over, nearly falling out of our swings.
I had never known anyone brown, and Celeste had never lived in a place where brown people didn’t.
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It’s Negro-less, she said, smiling. It’s a Negro-free zone.
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I thought we didn’t say that word anymore.
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Celeste looked at me. You can’t, but I can. It’s in the language rulebook, I swear.
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You’re lying, right? There isn’t really a language rule book.
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Nope. Not lying. There’re all kinds of rule books. The New Hampshire rule book says only one family that’s not white can live here at a time. When I move away, another family will come, I swear. It’s in the rule book!
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Celeste looked at me a moment. Then smiled. I swear.
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But you’re not going to move away. I wasn’t smiling.
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Not tomorrow.
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That was the year my other friends disappeared. One by one they wanted to know why, when we had all been friends since forever, I needed this new friend now.
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The one black person my mother knew stole stuff, Casey said.
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They love rap music, Lisabeth said. Does she teach you dances?
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Celeste plays piano, I said quietly. She’s been playing since she was small. Beethoven! She can play Beethoven.
—
The others and I were still friends then, our dolls between our laps, their blond hair getting wrapped into braids and curls and cut and dyed. I sat in their pink bedrooms, the rooms I’d sat in for as long as I could sit alone and listened without knowing what to say back.