Audre & Bash Are Just Friends(87)
For the first week after her mom brutally ended her only real chance at happiness, Audre stayed on the couch, buried under blankets. She cried racking, silent sobs for three days (until she gave herself a nosebleed from dehydration). Then the nightmares started. She never remembered any specifics, but she always woke up the same way—digging her nails into her palms like she was fighting to hold on to something that was slipping away. The next phase? Feverishly buying relationship self-help books on Kindle. She read The Wisdom of a Broken Heart, The Breakup Bible, and Emotional Self-Care for Black Women, and couldn’t find a single detail on how to remove the section of her heart that ached for Bash Henry.
Losing him was excruciating. Hating her mom was almost as bad.
Audre couldn’t look Eva in the face. During that bedridden hell week, her mom would nudge her lump of a body under the blankets, whispering words of encouragement—but no apology, curiously. Audre simply ignored her or responded with a one-word grunt. (Audre snapped at Shane, too, when he dared to speak. She wasn’t mad at him. But he caught the smoke by association.) It just didn’t make sense that her mom—the person she loved most in the world—had so carelessly stomped on her happiness. Eva had been her age once. She’d been in love with Shane! Yes, apparently, they were a disaster, but it was the real thing since they ended up together.
Audre and Bash weren’t a disaster. They were good for each other. But her mom hadn’t even bothered to hear her out. She couldn’t see past her own teenage destructiveness.
Seven days after the breakup, Audre was done. She no longer wanted to rot on the living room couch, in the middle of the apartment, in front of an audience. Depression without a bedroom was mortifying. So she got up, swept her braids into a high pony, threw on black sweats (she was in mourning), and walked to the Central Library at Grand Army Plaza. Working on her book might distract her from the pain.
Once in the grand, almost museum-like building, she found a table tucked away in the Memoir section. With steely resolve, she sat down and opened a new Word doc entitled “What I Learned This Summer.” The Stanford application process wouldn’t stop just ’cause she was sad. Glumly, she stared at the blank screen for ages. Was her brain broken? She couldn’t think past her sadness. Nothing came to her—until out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a framed poster nestled on a shelf to her left. It was a photo of a nondescript-looking, older white woman with mousy brown hair. Underneath, was a quote.
Take your broken heart, make it into art.
—Bestselling author and Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher
Audre had never heard of Carrie Fisher, and she wasn’t a Star Wars person. But that quote ignited her like fireworks under her ass. It was A Sign.
I can do that, thought Audre. She’s not saying to ignore my sadness. She’s saying to lean in, make something beautiful out of it.
That was all the encouragement she needed. Without a moment’s hesitation, she got to work.
WHAT I LEARNED THIS SUMMER PROLOGUE
When I first started researching this book, I envisioned a guidebook with rules for living your best teen life. But I realized that I was thinking too broadly.
Everyone is different. Every teen, every client, every human. What I discovered this summer? Aside from “be a kind person” and “don’t do murder,” there are very few hard-and-fast, one-size-fits-all rules that apply to everyone. And though I’m a gifted therapist? I, sixteen-year-old Audre Zora Maya Toni Mercy-Moore, don’t have all the answers.
My mom was an underage outlaw. My grandmother “dated” dangerous men to put food on the table. My great-grandmother lied about her race to escape racial terror, and my great-great-grandma was an (alleged) witch and an (actual) murderess. For better or worse, i come from a long line of rule-breakers. They’d probably die laughing at the idea that the secret to life is… more rules. I think it’s more valuable to learn from your bumps in the road. Processing personal trauma. Figuring out how to survive.
Example? This summer, I met a boy who everyone said was a player. Someone to have fun with but not take seriously. Well, I fell for him so hard my head’s still spinning. But we fell apart. And I can’t shake the sadness. I’ve read every self-help book written on breakups, and none of the rules work for me. So, I’m done with them. Instead, I want to talk about lessons. The ones I learned this summer changed my life in immeasurable ways.
Stanford, I’m sure every psychology major applicant reads the same books and drops the same therapy buzzwords. Not me, though. On these pages, I’m drawing from the richness of my own experience instead. Read on, Stanford. because i’ve learned a lot. And at your prestigious institution, I know I can polish my wisdom till it shines like gold.
The words spilled out of her. And soon, her daily writing sessions became a ritual. Every day she marched straight to the library, sat at her little table, and got to work. No veering off course. No talking to anyone. Just focusing on pouring truth from her fingertips. And with each new chapter, her mood lifted just a tiny bit.
And yet.
Audre kept her eyes cast downward on her walks. She was terrified of running into Bash. Despite her precautions, though, she thought she saw him everywhere—in every tall, lanky, deeply bronzed person within a two-mile radius. It always happened the same way. She’d see someone. Her breath would catch in her throat. Her stomach would burn with longing. Then she’d look closer—and it was never him. One time, Audre spotted a pair of pink Crocs walking through Grand Army Plaza and almost fainted. Until she noticed that the Crocs were attached to a statuesque pregnant woman.