“It was a probation violation. It wasn’t Shaun’s first arrest. He got in a fight his sophomore year at Temple. With this white kid. They were playing a pickup basketball game and it got heated. Kid called Shaun a stupid nigger.”
Corey flinches at the word.
“Shaun punched him and broke his nose. The guy pressed charges, and just like that Shaun had a felony conviction. He lost his full ride soccer scholarship and couldn’t afford Temple anymore. He owed thousands of dollars for the guy’s medical bills and legal fees, which my family and I are still paying off. All that promise, gone. Just like that. But at least he didn’t have to go to jail. He got ten years’ probation.”
Even without looking at him, I know he’s giving me the look, the Corey look—direct, focused, impossible to hide from.
“When he was arrested in the car, he could have been sent to prison for ten years for the violation. So that weekend, I had to be with my family and support Shaun in court. Thankfully, the judge showed leniency—Shaun was lucky.”
I question my choice of words; nothing about Shaun’s life recently has been lucky. It’s been unfair and stressful and cruel and yet somehow my brother carries on, cracking jokes, keeping his nose down and head up, when he could so easily sink into resentment. I don’t tell him enough how much I admire him for that.
“It was too late to change my flight from LaGuardia. So I got a cab from there to Penn Station.”
“I could have picked you up at the airport. I would have driven you to Philly, Rye. But I didn’t know any of this was happening.”
“And then what? You would come to the jail with me and talk to Shaun in a grimy windowless room?”
“That’s exactly what I would have done.”
Hearing that, his quick steadfast assurances, my heart seizes. A part of me had wanted him to come to Philly, wrap his arms around me and promise me that everything would be all right. Maybe I even wanted his help talking to the lawyers, figuring out the best strategy to ensure Shaun stayed out of prison. But it was my burden, and to bring my boyfriend into it, my white boyfriend, a man whose closest contact with the courts was defending overdue parking tickets, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. And if I couldn’t share this with him? If I couldn’t ask for his help at such a difficult time, how could we build a life together? How could I ever move into his nice two-bedroom apartment in a doorman high-rise off Columbus Circle? Something I had been secretly contemplating. I couldn’t. Not if I couldn’t be honest with him. And so I made up my mind that Corey and I were not meant to go the distance after all. Like a prosecutor, I mined the evidence of why it would never work: The time we went to Proud Papa’s barbecue in a Black neighborhood in Birmingham and he’d asked me if it was “safe.” Or when we were talking about oppression and he volleyed with a point about how the Jews were able to bounce back after the horrors of the Holocaust to build a strong economic foundation, and he didn’t understand why Black people hadn’t been able to do the same after slavery. This was typical of Corey, who always treated any discussion of race and oppression as an intellectual exercise, with the passion and objectivity of a high school debate team champion and not lived experience. I convinced myself that these were deal breakers, trip wires we could never get past, and on top of that there were Gigi’s words: Find one of your own.
And so I made up my mind and trusted my heart would follow. Sitting alone on a hard bench, in a dank hallway of the courthouse, where Shaun would soon be called for his appearance before the judge, I pulled out my phone. As I searched for the right words, I looked up to see two Black teenagers, hands and feet in chains, shuffling down the hall, escorted by a grim-faced white guard. One of them had his head hung so low it was almost at ninety degrees; the other held his head high, though his eyes were a void. If I had been waffling before, something about the scene, this boy’s dead eyes, cemented my decision. My fingers flew across the screen before I could stop myself.
Something came up today and I’m not going to make it this weekend. And I don’t think I can do this, Corey. We’re not right for each other. I’m sorry.
* * *
It’s hard to read Corey’s expression now. Partly because I avoided looking directly at him as I unspooled this story.
I finally turn toward him, and his face is contorted with confusion. “So I still don’t understand. Why couldn’t you tell me all of this then? Why did you just ghost me?”
This is the part that’s hard to explain, why I didn’t want to tell Corey the truth, how I was overwhelmed with shame and embarrassment and I let it control me. I didn’t want to become some sort of stereotype in his eyes, to give him any reason to look down on me or my family. I thought of Corey telling his own parents—with their matching Range Rovers, their annual ski trips to Sun Valley—that my brother was in jail, the judgments and assumptions they would make. How they might even be proud of me for “rising above her circumstances.” For “getting out of the hood.”
The fact that the two of us would never truly be on equal playing fields or share the same experiences had seemed insurmountable. Maybe I was afraid to give the benefit of the doubt, to give someone the leeway to do the right thing. Exactly as Jenny called me out in the car at the hospital. It was easier not to give Corey the benefit of the doubt, not to trust that he would be able to understand, not to give him the chance to create an irreparable breech by saying the wrong thing if we tackled tricky subjects. That fear of being disappointed, or dismissed, was real—and crippling. As with Jenny, there was the worry that talking would be futile and somehow make things worse instead of better. But Jen, or Corey for that matter, had never given me reason to believe they wouldn’t understand, or at least try to understand.
“It’s just hard, Corey… to talk about some of this stuff, like how to explain my experience in the world in a way you’d understand. It scared me that you would be capable because we’re so different. And also, I didn’t want you to think badly of my family,” I mutter. All of my muscles clench with the effort of keeping my emotions, my tears, reined in.
“I would never do that, Rye. Honestly, it kills me that you didn’t think you could tell me any of this. And I would hate to think it was something I said or did to make you feel that way. Because I want you to be able to talk to me about anything… about everything. That’s the only way any relationship works. But especially between us… we’d have to be able and willing to lay it out, even if it’s uncomfortable. That includes me. I admit, I probably shied away from stuff too, but…” He trails off as if he’s trying to summon more words and then changes his mind and decides to let his body say the rest. First his hand is around my shoulders, then he’s pulling me closer. His arm is heavy on my back, a satisfying weight pressing me hard against him, holding me there. I have no choice in the matter; my body relaxes despite itself, though I don’t cry. There’s another kind of release. A year’s worth of regret and anguish and guilt falling away. And in its place a revelation about how wrong I was, how hasty and even cruel it was to disappear. I tried to hide from my feelings. I tried to pretend I was in control, which was laughable, only it wasn’t funny at all. When you know better, you do better. Gigi had a pillow on her lounger with that saying.