What's Mine and Yours

by Naima Coster

If there was something Ray admired about Linette, it was that she wasn’t afraid to dream, once you showed her she wouldn’t be doing all the dreaming alone.

She collected his laughter in her ears. It was the greatest accomplishment of her day.

He liked the way a photograph could preserve the secret life of a person, a place. It was as if the world were offering itself continually if you would only look.

Diane wasn’t sure whether she believed in other lives, beyond this one, but if they were real, she wouldn’t be surprised if she and Alma had known each other in them all.

She wanted Gee to know this music was for him, that irreverence and rage weren’t just for white boys. He could get a little drunk if he wanted to; he could play in a band; he could say shocking things, wear a dress, pierce his ears, any part of his body that he wanted; he could scream and break things, as long as they belonged to him and it wasn’t in her house. She didn’t want him to act out, but she didn’t want him to worry too much about how the world would see him either. He’d wind up only punishing himself. She wanted him to be free.

Related to this so hard. As a Black girl growing up in white spaces, I learned how to be palatable and make sure I wasn’t seen as too much of any one thing. The pressure to be perfect was suffocating and is something I’m still unlearning. The freedom to express a full range of emotions and to live without the your actions being attributed to your race is a birth right for white people and a privilege we don’t discuss enough. To be white is to be seen as an individual. To be a poc is to be seen largely as interchangeable. I wish for all Black children to grow up with the freedom to make choices based on their own desires thoughts and feelings without worrying about if they’re perpetuating a stereotype. We’re not spokespeople for an entire race.

She could be petty or fussy or ecstatic, and he would look at her, every time, as if there were no piece of her that he couldn’t enjoy.

She hadn’t needed lectures or coddling; most girls didn’t. They needed choices.

“It’s not as bad as people say. It isn’t easy, but hard and bad aren’t the same thing.

Noelle figured this was bound to be her life if she stayed tethered to the people she had known since she was a girl. They’d be decent in some ways; they’d astonish her with how they seemed to keep up with the news, the shifting language around identity and race. Once, she’d even overheard Lacey May refer to Alma as a person of color. But they’d be incensed, too, by the encroachments they saw on their world—the stars cast in movie franchises they had formerly adored, the people who had the nerve to go to marches and complain and vote in elections. They would guard everything they had, however little, as if their lives were prizes they’d rightly won that others had no right to claim. They’d never admit how willingly they’d played their parts.

They watched her, and they watched the water. They held hands under the table and, only once in a while, took sips of their wine. It was like they were in their own world, and the girl was a part of it, but, really, it was mostly the two of them. I thought of the girl growing up, passing in and out of their lives, as all children do when they’re grown, but they’d still be at that table, holding hands, glancing over at each other from time to time. It was beautiful. It broke my heart.

He was tired of everyone making excuses for grown-ups who didn’t know how to act.