Mandy leaves me a message in the morning. Something about Wake up, Solo and eat something; smell the city smoke. Remember, you're alive. Remember: You're alive.
I close my eyes while I look for clothes in the closet. Run my fingers too slowly over the belts and they become snakes, slithering in my palms. I decide that I hate snakes, and accept Eve as my true birth mother.
The St. Martha Public Library is one mile from the Brick and Stone apartment complex, sitting in Brooklyn like a blood rose in the middle of a dying garden. I tend to her like the gardener I am, four days a week, from ten to five. It's just me and the second floor and the water leaking from the toilet in the roof for the first four hours. Then, rush hour begins.
Jeremy appears in the library at two-thirteen p.m. everyday, and with him he brings the entire population of neighboring public schools—young and hardly old, elementary school first. Fifth graders roll in like flocks of birds, thick in the masses, squawking like they do. About the spoiled milk served with lunch and who plus who equals love and whose Mama walked into home room and fought with the teacher today.
Then high school. Groups weave in and out between shelves, underneath and on top of tables. Black and brown kids float around, sprinkling parts of themselves in conversations typed out on computer screens, phone numbers scratched into wooden round tables, and carving spaces out to fit their needs. Biography section is where you smoke. History, hair braiders. Extensions and combs were hidden in the spines of textbooks. Children's educational fiction—lovers' island.
Then there are the ones who read. They slip in between the masses like sand through a sieve. On the outdoor benches, behind the religion shelves. Smooth as sand.
Marla. She reads something new every week—Christianity, queer theory, fuckshit about aliens and their eyes piercing humans and the Earth. She's a bench girl, —but today, she's by science. There's a boy attached to her hip, nuzzling her neck, kissing her fingers. He's inhaling her, I think. All that girl smell. All that love.
"Who are you looking at, Soleil?" Jeremy asks. He's submersed in a pile of returned books, curly black hair peeking out from underneath.
"Nobody," I tell him. "Marla. You know who that boy is?"
"You know I don't talk to anybody who goes to Nathaniel, Soleil. It's against my religious beliefs," he answers, standing up from the pile. "Why? You got a crush on a high school student?"
"It's probably her boyfriend," I continue, ignoring him. "They're probably in love."
"Really? I thought she was just letting him suck on her neck 'cause they were friends," Jeremy tells me sarcastically. "We should try that too sometime, Soleil."
I keep on looking at Marla and her boy. Tangled up. Intertwined. Her eyes like cups of coffee, sweetened just for him. I wonder if he knows how much she loves Huey P. Newton. Or how many essays and articles she reads about alternatives to college, about student loans and trade school. Or all the book she reads about dieting while eating ice cream in the bathroom. I wonder if she knows that I know that.
"His name is Daniel, and he's a college boy," Jeremy tells her eventually, detachment in his voice. "Messes with juniors for fun. But I've never seen him hang around with one for this long. Maybe he's changed."
"Maybe he hasn't," I reply. "Maybe he's just trying to make it hurt more in the end."
Jeremy shrugs. "I wouldn't know."
The boy looks manufactured beautiful. Brand beautiful. Sharp jaw, pillow lips, long fingers and pretty, dark eyelashes, cocoa skin, clean hands pushing hair back from her face, caressing the center of her lips. Hands that could probably split her apart, split me apart, if they pulled hard enough.
