I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself

by Marisa Crane

“What is she like?” I imagine you asking. “I can’t see, so tell me, Kris. Who is our child? Is she perfect?” “I don’t know her very well yet,” I tell your urn. “But something tells me that if I asked nicely, she’d agree to sing karaoke with me.”

We held each other’s hands tightly. The same hands we sometimes dropped in public when we felt unsafe—we had that privilege unlike so many others; whiteness meant we could remove our otherness like a sweater if we wanted. We could walk five feet apart and temporarily become gal pals.

Honestly, I can hardly believe the Child Services Unit actually exists. One day, Randy came into school with hand-shaped bruises on his neck. It’s nothing, he said, waving me away when I asked him what happened. You don’t know what you’re talking about, he said. He started seven fights throughout the rest of the day. As with all the other reports I made, it felt like his never went anywhere. Poof! That’s how I felt about all those child endangerment reports. Poof!

I wish I could turn off his despair with the ease of a light switch. It has always made me uncomfortable seeing his sadness on display. As a teenager, I wanted to ask him if he liked being alive, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I could talk about suicide with strangers online but with my own family? Impossible.

My parents must have sensed my queerness, possibly as young as three, but instead of sitting me down and saying, We love you, we love you. Here’s what you need to know about the people who won’t, my father ignored me, and my mother redirected me toward princess crowns and pink frilly dresses. If I ever run into her again, I might drop the word femme into the conversation.

Before bed, I read the thumb-sucking kid a children’s book about a woman with two shadows who beats all the odds and becomes an astronaut. Her name is Skys. Like more than one sky, spelled incorrectly. I had to scour the dark web for something this progressive, a book the Department considers too dangerous, a form of propaganda. Someone had been selling it secondhand; I wasn’t sure how they’d acquired it, and they spoke in code when they messaged me from their anonymous profile.

Pop Quiz: Q: Who controls your body? Q: How much do you trust them?

“I need to alert the authorities. I’ve just spotted a white man acknowledging his privilege in the wild!”

Pop Quiz: Q: What does it mean to harm someone? A: Define someone.

I told you I wanted to live in a world in which the antidote to shame is not honor, but honesty. MAGGIE NELSON

One night, I saw my ex-coworker, this white woman Joanna who wore expensive leggings and dangly bracelets. Just so you know, I’m really pissed about what they did to you, she said. Yeah, thanks, I said. It feels like it happened overnight, she said, her eyes asking something of me—forgiveness maybe—no, that wasn’t right. Praise I think it was. She wanted a gold star. I knew for a fact that she’d voted President Colestein back into office. Had she been paying attention, she would have known it hadn’t happened overnight, that it took a million tiny stabs to bleed democracy dry.

Many people in the United States find it ____ to ____ about _____ until it _____ to them.

Like so many in power before him, President Colestein is an expert at tapping into this country’s shared anxiety, at using it to fuel mass delusion. That’s why the term limit was scrapped after President Colestein’s second, why he was voted back in for a fourth. Do you want to pay for other people to think about what they’ve done? In nicer prisons than our apartments and condos and houses, he’d said, not really asking—no, he already knew the answer, knew the economic crisis that plagued the country, knew that the masses needed a new scapegoat. He’d planted the seed of resentment, watered it with constant news coverage of prisoners going to college, learning trade skills, reading books, working out, doing the things they did with their time. And in the same breath, he could feign innocence whenever he received opposition, could hold his hands up and say, Don’t blame me for the cycle of violence. If anything, I’ve set everyone free.

I don’t want to be one of those delusional parents who promises their child that they can do anything they set their mind to—I know the state of the world, how by the time the kid is a teen, the world will have swallowed her and spit her out several times already, but I also know change is possible. I’m not sure how, but history has proved it so. I just need to hold on and trust that the words I’m saying to the kid are dipped in more truth than fallacy.

If you researched the pathway to change, you’d notice the graph looks eerily similar to the pathway of grief. Both more or less begin with denial and end with acceptance.

“Social workers aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, you know. It’s like how-to-spot-a-white-savior 101.”

“The wrong people have all the power,” she says.

I’ve never been afraid of anything more than I’ve been afraid of my own happiness. But I want it, oh I want it. Something tells me it isn’t happiness without fear. This small fact keeps me breathing and sleeping.

Michelle writes on our new whiteboard: “What is a fact? Do facts actually exist? Why or why not?” “My teacher said it’s a fact that the shadow law keeps our country safe,” says the kid. “So, no, facts don’t exist.”