“Why didn’t I call you sooner? Are you even listening to yourself? Do you know what Ma would say if she heard this?”
Byron turns and walks off down the hallway, muttering, “This is not the Bennett way.” Then he winces. He sounds so much like Dad.
Benny shouts at his back. “Wrong, Byron. This has always been the Bennett way. No missteps allowed, no room for comprehension, no room for dissension.”
Byron stops, stands still, but doesn’t look back.
“I used to think it was because we were black, you know?” Benny says. “That our parents wanted us to achieve, that we had to work twice as hard, be beyond reproach, that sort of thing. But now I get it. We had to be perfect to make up for the fact that our family was built on a colossal lie.”
When Byron finally reaches the living room, Mr. Mitch isn’t there. Byron hears the water running in the guest bathroom. He doesn’t know that Mr. Mitch is simply leaning against the dusty pink wall in there, eyes closed, pretending not to have heard all the shouting.
Lost
Charles Mitch has seen worse. Siblings who don’t care about each other. Relatives who are only looking for what they can inherit. He can see that Byron and Benny aren’t like that but this is turning out to be a struggle, anyway. They’ve lost their mother and they can’t seem to find their way back to each other. Yes, Eleanor warned him that it might be like this, worse yet because Byron and Benny used to be inseparable.
Benny’s world used to begin and end with her brother. When did he become this person? Or had he always been this way? Byron has accused Benny of not being there for her family. But what about Benny? Has it ever occurred to Byron, so accustomed to being cheered on by the whole world, that someone needed to be there for Benny, too?
Byron doesn’t know what to do about Benny. They haven’t said a civil word to each other since she arrived. It’s like she’s hostile one minute and needy the next. But this is not a new thing, Benny making a bigger deal of things than she needs to. It’s been this way for a long time now, ever since Benny dropped out of college. Yep, that’s really where it started.
How to Become a College Dropout
Benny, at the school of her parents’ dreams.
Benny, seventeen, at the top of her class.
Benny, getting the side-eye at the black student union.
Benny, not black enough. Benny, not white enough.
Benny, not straight enough. Benny, not gay enough.
Benny, alone on a Saturday night.
Benny, in bed with bruises all over.
Benny, signing papers in Administration.
Benny, walking down the marble staircase.
Benny, nineteen, a college dropout.
What You Don’t Say
In her third year at college, Benny was cornered in the dorms by two girls who had seen Benny getting flirty with one of the guys from the African American fraternity. They called her a traitor. One of them pushed her into her room and when Benny caught her foot on the metal leg of her bed and fell, she kicked Benny in the face.
It was the surprise of what was happening that caused Benny to stay there on the ground, more than any of the blows landed by her schoolmate. She was, after all, six feet tall, and though she’d never loved the surfing and swimming as much as her parents and Byron, she’d done a bit of sport all the same, she’d grown up pretty strong.
In the end, it was all soft-tissue damage; the bruises would heal in time. But there was a deeper hurt that drove Benny away from the school. These were girls who she’d thought would have supported her for her differences, not lashed out at her. The one who kicked her while she lay on the ground had once danced with her at the student pub, then leaned her against a dark wall that smelled like beer and sneakers and kissed her. They had both smiled, then headed back to the dance floor.
This is the kind of thing a person doesn’t say. That these were senior-year students who’d initially made her glad to be on campus. That instead of closing ranks around Benny, they’d closed her out. That as the one girl kicked Benny where she lay, the other didn’t say stop. But Benny would never report them. She refused to give anyone the chance to look her up and down the way people sometimes did and say, You see?
From then on, with each move, first back home to California, then Italy, then Arizona, Benny yearned consistently for one thing more than any other, a life that felt emotionally unremarkable. A life that felt safe.
Arizona had seemed like a good place to start once Benny had decided to go to art school. She would get as far away as she could from the feel of the northeastern university that she’d left behind. She would study something that interested her, not her parents. She would take that time to figure out exactly how to move forward, how to find her place in the working world.