Did he just say he puts pineapple on his pizza? said Kayla, evidently unmindful of said moment. What’d I tell you about him?
Charlie smiled, but she could see a flicker of concern across Austin’s eyes.
What did she tell you about me?
None of your business. Roommate talk.
Fine—what’s your pizza?
B-b-q _______, said Kayla.
What?
C-h-i-c-k-e-n. Chicken.
Charlie started to copy Kayla’s sign, but Austin held up a hand to stop her.
Sign it like this, he said.
The signs were quite different—Kayla’s had been two-handed, a pinching of the pointer and middle fingers and thumbs, like a pair of beaks pecking downward, while Austin’s was one-handed, the pointer finger and thumb creating a slender beak beside his nose. Charlie raised a hand to her own face skeptically, copying Austin’s sign.
Chicken, chicken. Same difference.
Your sign looks like, _______
Austin said to Kayla. Then, turning to Charlie: d-i-a-p-e-r.
Tinker Bell, who had been drawn to the growing heat of the conversation, stifled a laugh at this, and Charlie had to admit, Kayla’s sign for chicken looked nearly indistinguishable from the one Austin had just done.
Fuck you and your diaper, said Kayla, and stormed off.
You’re not the only one who’s got Deaf family, you know! Alisha said to Austin.
Then she looked to Charlie.
It’s Black ASL, her sign.
There’s…Black ASL? said Charlie.
Of course. Deaf schools were also _______.
What?
S-e-g-r-e-g-a-t-e-d. Language developed differently.
But, wasn’t that a long time ago?
It’s cultural, said Alisha, then looked back to Austin. And you’re being racist.
Charlie didn’t know the sign for “racist” but Alisha had mouthed the English word with such vigor there was no mistaking it. For his part, Austin’s whole body had gone rigid, and Charlie could see he was about to protest, but instead let his hands drop. Alisha kept walking until she’d caught up with the rest of the group, motioning for Charlie to come with her. Charlie felt herself hesitate, but when she found her feet again, Alisha pretended not to have noticed.
Charlie tried to take in the conversation between Alisha and one of the Lost Boys, but she couldn’t concentrate. She knew it was unrealistic, but she’d so wanted River Valley to be different than the rest of the world. They had been mostly welcoming to her, and she’d assumed that was the benefit of a school full of rejects. But the realization that segregation and racism pervaded here, too, meant the Deaf world was just as fraught as everywhere else.
She looked over her shoulder for Austin, but he was no longer behind them—at some point he’d circled round and caught up with Kayla. The two were having a fast and emphatic conversation Charlie doubted she would understand even if she were close enough. At the pizza place, Charlie ended up on the opposite end of the table from both of them, stuck beside Tinker Bell, who wanted to talk exclusively about Broadway shows Charlie had never seen. The waiter arrived looking peeved and threw a spread of menus down in the middle of the table, a pile of napkins atop that, leaving them mostly to fend for themselves.
By the time the pizza arrived, Tinker Bell had given up trying to make conversation with her, and Charlie was content to gaze out the storefront window. It was twilight, and the foot traffic was already clearing. Then, into the center of the frame stepped Gabriella, staring directly at her with a grin she didn’t like. She pointed at Charlie.
Me? she said.
Gabriella nodded, then signed Austin’s name, eyebrows raised in request. Charlie waved across the table to get his attention—asking someone to tap or flag down a friend was common practice in a world where calling one by name was pretty much useless—but regretted it as soon as he looked up. The fact that her body had chosen this particular moment to fully integrate this cultural norm into her muscle memory was annoying; she certainly did not want to help Gabriella. Plus, now everyone was staring at her.
Your girlfriend…e-x girlfriend, wants you…
A few people giggled, but Austin just looked bewildered.
I mean, she’s outside. Standing in the window.
Austin blanched, then got up and walked toward Charlie’s side of the table. When Gabriella saw him, she waved, and he gave a reluctant hello nod. Then she pulled a sandy-haired, muscular boy—he looked too old to be a River Valley student—into view and thrust her tongue into his mouth. Austin blushed and made a beeline for the bathroom.
Somebody’s having a rough day, Alisha said.
And while Austin had deserved the trouble he’d caught that afternoon, Charlie also found herself relieved that he would not hear his classmates now erupting into laughter.
kayla could see that Austin had done it automatically, not like he was actively trying to be a dick. But did it matter? The hurt had come automatically, too.
And so had the sign. Usually, Kayla was careful to switch to blander, more standard versions of signs in mixed company to avoid the inevitable white people meltdown—not to appease them or anything, just because she just didn’t feel like dealing with them. At least on this side of the Ohio. When her family had done a stint in Texas, things were slippier. More BASL users meant less shock and awe when a Black person happened to use a different sign.
But that was the problem with the North in general—things were still racist, they were just coy about it, all holier than thou because they happened to be living on the “right” side of some invisible line.
Anyway, Kayla decided to go easy on Austin this time. She could’ve gotten him in trouble if she wanted. She could have gone in and talked to Sybeck, or even Headmistress Waters—she knew neither of them played when it came to that kind of thing. But Austin had already doled out the harshest punishment to himself, acting a fool in front of Charlie like that, her looking at him like someone had ripped the stars right out of her eyes.
That didn’t mean Kayla wasn’t going to leverage his clout, though, and Austin was agreeable in the way guilty-feeling people are. So she had brought him on her TikTok and slapped him. The video went like this:
Kayla signs “chicken” and Austin makes his correction; Kayla slaps him and Austin spins round dramatically and falls to the floor, where Kayla zooms in and lays a caption over his eyes that says, BASL WITH THE KO. Austin rouses briefly to sign a groggy “Respect BASL” before passing out again.
It wasn’t her best work, but it was something. And it already had four thousand views.
She had plans for a follow-up series—the history of BASL, or something about how in some cases segregation wound up giving Black kids better language access, because when oralism took over white Deaf schools, Deaf teachers were sent to Black Deaf schools, since no one cared whether Black kids learned to talk. She was still working on the angle, though. Most people swiped right by a video unless it was funny. Then again, a system so hateful that it ended up depriving white kids of language and accidentally giving it to Black kids was kind of funny, in a way.
Kayla loved the internet. TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Twitch—she consumed it all. It reminded her that there were other people out there, beyond the claustrophobic walls and iron gates of River Valley. Sometimes she dreamt of going viral, the kind of viral that made you money, the kind of money that could free her mom and aunt from a life of cleaning other people’s houses or clearing other people’s plates. She would pay someone to clean their house and take them out to restaurants; she would buy her own damn sheets for her dorm bed; she would hire a personal interpreter who followed her around to every event, and she would sign chicken any way she pleased.