Pride

by Ibi Zoboi

“I know Colin is taking it rough. Madrina was like his real mom.

“Colin’s selling the building. A developer offered him a lot of money.” I quickly look up. “What?” I don’t understand what he’s saying. “We have to move, Zuri.” “Move? We can’t just leave!” My stomach twists as the

WHUT WHATT WHUTTTTT

Sometimes love is not enough to keep a community together. There needs to be something more tangible, like fair housing, opportunities, and access to resources. Lifeboats and lifelines are not supposed to just be a way for us to get out. They should be ways to let us stay in and survive. And thrive.

In no time, Janae joins us with a big smile on her face.

“He offered to drive me up to school,” she says with a soft, sweet voice. “What?” I ask, walking over to her. “His school, Cornell, is about an hour away from Syracuse. So we can go up together. I’ll have to squeeze my stuff into his back seat, but . . .” She’s

“Zuri?” Someone says my name quietly. I sniff and try to hold back my tears, but I can’t. I don’t turn around to see who it is, but I know the voice. I don’t dare move. He touches my shoulder. Still I don’t move. “Hey.” He gently turns me around. I cross my arms and don’t look up at him. He pulls me in, hugs me, and kisses my forehead.

The very last thing I do in this building is kiss a boy—the boy who moved in across the street and changed everything. Maybe this is what Madrina wanted all along: for me to find love and take it with me when I leave this place.

Papi takes his hand and gives him a hard dap. “You take care, okay, buddy?”

Then Papi pulls Darius in and gives him one of those homie hugs. This is the thing that melts my heart the most. It’s as if my whole neighborhood has said yes to the boy who moved in across the street, to me and him.

Right there, in front of the place I used to call home, the place I spent the first seventeen years of my life, are the letters and words Z + D FOREVER inside a heart with an arrow.

Thank you to the great literary figure Jane Austen, for writing and publishing Pride and Prejudice in 1813, amidst everything that was happening in her world at

the time. Austen gifted us with a story about not only love but class, expectations, and a woman’s place in the world. Even as she, a woman in nineteenth-century England, had the audacity to write, observe, and speak truth to power with such wit, humor, and grace.

Thank you to my dear husband of eighteen ...

I am ever grateful to my teen daughters, Abadai and Bahati, wise, opinionated, no-holds-barred beta readers; as well as my son, Zuberi, who couldn’t care less, but I have to include him.