We didn’t have any structure or curfews in the new apartment; it was too late for that. In two years I’d start helping with the rent. We didn’t have a table to eat at together, so we had no family meals, no traditions, no rituals. But there were walls between us now. Now we had doors. I shut mine and locked it until I was ready to leave. All of my secrets remained mine for the first time since I was nine years old.
I moved out on my own at the age of twenty-five. If you think that’s old, keep in mind that this is New York City. Shit is expensive! My mom moved into my old room and finally had her own door to close for the first time in many years. A part of me wishes that life could’ve been different for Alice. She never dated after leaving Ibnou. Ahmed would’ve hated that, but I always wished she had. I wish she’d found a soul mate who could’ve provided a stable life for her. Undying love and devotion. Financial security. A retirement plan. Prettier children. But I know now that’s not what Alice wanted. All she’s ever wanted is to be happy, and because Alice gets what Alice wants, she is happy. I often think that my family is too small to be a family. There’s just three of us. We’re more like three people with the same DNA who all lived together once. Like roommates. But Alice and Ahmed are my entire world. I worry more about them than I worry about myself. I keep my ringer on at night in case they need me. I care about them so much that it infuriates me. I pay their rent before I pay my own. As much as I want to pretend that seeing the two of them for the holidays doesn’t really matter because we don’t have any traditions, it warms my heart to spend time with them. Ugh! I sound like an Olsen twins movie or something. But I mean it. I love visiting them. I love knowing that my mom misses me. I love crawling into bed with her and listening to her tell me how great she is and how much her fans love her.
This year I went home to that two-bedroom apartment to have Thanksgiving with Alice and Ahmed, who lives there still. Since my mom moved into my old bedroom, the living-room furniture has changed. There’s a dining-room table with chairs, and there’s an armchair and a couch. I asked if we could all sit at that table and eat together. We’d never done that. We did. We all sat together, we held hands as Alice prayed over the food, and then we ate. It was nice even if it didn’t really make us a closer family. But we’re not as fractured as I sometimes think. We’re all we have, yes, but we’re enough.
9
Obituary
The only truthful bit of this “article” is that my name is Gabourey Sidibe. Even that is debatable.
—my Twitter
AN OLD FRIEND FROM ELEMENTARY school texted me and asked if I had heard that I was dead. “Did you hear about your death?” is how she put it. I responded sarcastically, “No. Please, do tell.” “You had a fatal asthma attack.” “Oh, shit! Then what happened?” “You died. Are you okay? I saw it on Facebook. Want me to send the link to you?” “Oh, yes! Please!” And then she sent a link to an article about my death to my Facebook page. Did this bitch not know I was being sarcastic? I hate that sarcasm is hard to convey in a text. There should be a special font for sarcasm so people can tell when I’m being an asshole. Of course I’d heard!
This is week five of my friends and family texting or calling me to find out if I’m dead. The report has been circulating throughout all the social media. I’ve seen it on both my Instagram and my Twitter, but Facebook is where it got started. Facebook! You know, that social-media site you use to spy on your ex and figure out at election time which of your family members are racist. Everything anyone has ever written on Facebook has to be 100 percent true. If not, Mark Zuckerberg has to punch a sloth in the face. He doesn’t want to, but those are the rules. (You can tell this is sarcasm, right?) At first, the Gabby-is-dead article was from a surely reputable online news site called Can’t Stop Hip-Hop Worldwide (I’m pretty sure I heard that Diane Sawyer once interned there). According to them, I was filming a scene for an upcoming movie in which I played a detective. The scene required me to run, and during a take, I stopped running and motioned for someone to help me. I was experiencing shortness of breath. I guess my big fat heart couldn’t take it. The ambulance was called but I “expired en route to the hospital” of a fatal asthma attack. My friends and family are devastated by the sudden loss. Such a shame. I was so young and so beloved. I should’ve known better than to be fat and run at the same time. I was so foolish to think that I could have it all. There’s no date or location in the article, so it’s unclear when and where I died. Even if I do something publicly to make it known that I’m still among the living, the article will spawn Gabby-is-dead conspiracy junkies unto eternity. If you read the news today, you assume it happened last night, so even if I tweeted something at 7 p.m. yesterday like “Hi! I’m alive! Stop asking!” you figure I probably died right afterward. If you read the news tomorrow, no tweet of mine will stop you from being sure I died right after posting it. I’d better be careful. Death’s a’comin’!
While it was obviously jarring to see my name in a poorly written article about my death, I know that this is just one of those things that happen to celebrities. It comes with the territory. Famous people get free clothes, they get instant reservations and a good table at fancy restaurants, and they get false reports about their deaths. It’s happened to friends of mine. It didn’t bother me that much at first. Then it moved from Facebook to Twitter. Here and there, people would tweet me and ask if I was okay. They’d extend their condolences to my family. Some knew it was a hoax so they wanted me to “clear it up.” How? By being alive? I ignored these requests because I figured that even if I didn’t tweet my aliveness in the next week or so, folks would figure it out. None of my friends or the famous people I’ve worked with would be releasing a statement about how amazing a person I was, how desperately I’d be missed, and how they couldn’t go on living without me. People would see that, clearly, I wasn’t gone. I was on TV every week. I didn’t have to clear shit up. I just had to be alive. People were commenting “RIP” under all of my photos on Instagram, but I thought it would go away eventually. That it was kind of funny. That it was no big deal. Then my dad called me.