Chapter 3: Hair (Kali Muburu)

        When I was a kid, I had long hair, and I liked to play with it just like any other girl. I combed it, brushed it, styled it, and went to the hairdresser twice a year to have it done. I looked through the magazines and the style catalogs and tried out the different styles to varying degrees of success. I've had cornrows, dreads, single braids, highlights, waves, and weaves. My hair was long and black and somehow managed to be free of the kinkiness that affected the rest of my family. My mother's hair was puffy, my brother's was frizzy, and I couldn't tell what my father's was because he kept it buzzed off. But mine was an anomaly, and it disappointed the hell out of my mother that I never wore it loose. She would say, “Your hair's a blessing, Kaliwanara. You should show more of it.” I think this was the reason that I didn't show more of it; no teenager wants to do what their mother says. The other more sensible reason was that it was always in the damn way. I was a runner, and the stuff weighed me down. It whipped out behind me like a banner strapped to my head and bounced against the back of my neck while I ran. It got caught in necklaces, scarves, and zippers. It snagged on fences and even doorknobs I was passing by. I ran around in the woods and the hills and came back with who-the-hell-knows-what in it. It seemed like my hair was only a blessing to somebody like my mother, a conservative Ghanan woman who worked at a law firm and cooked and didn't do much else.
        I began to admire the women on my father's side of the family. These were Kenyan women, with burnt cinnamon skin and long arms and legs like sycamore branches. Most of them had no more hair than my father, if any at all, and the heads of the bald ones gleamed like golden coins in the sun. They could probably run like bullets, and never had to worry about their hair being yanked in a fight or pulled by some idiot boy who sat behind them.
        I decided that this look was something to work up to, to get a feel for. In my sophomore year, I got my hair cut short so that it fell just above my ears. I had inherited my father's ears that stuck out like wings, and the idiot kids called me “Dumbo the Elephant.” But they would've called me anything; in ninth grade I was “Siren-Mouth” because I was loud, and in eighth grade I was “Skeletor” for my long, skinny legs. I'd been made fun of enough to stop giving a damn about being made fun of. All I cared about was that I was free from the shackles of long hair. I ran like a bolt with nothing weighing me down, and Dumbo-like or not, my ears were glad to be free. At the beginning of my junior year, I got gauge piercings and nobody called me Dumbo anymore. By then they had moved on to calling me “Riot” for mouthing off and getting into fights. I still don't see how that was supposed to be an insult.
        They say that changing your hair marks a change in who you are, that it's the first outward sign that you're an entirely different person than who you were before. When I finally had my hair buzzed off completely, just after I had gone away to college, I looked in the mirror and saw a different Kali looking back at me. This Kali had a hard face and fiery, eager eyes, ready to see the whole world that existed beyond her little West Virginia town. She was strong, built like a tree from years of running. She pursed her lips and looked angry, fierce. She smiled, and her teeth shone stark-white against a dark chocolate complexion. I loved this fierce-looking, bald-headed Kenyan-Ghanan girl, and I wanted her to love me back.
        That Christmas, I came back home without a single hair on my head. My brother, who was still a little shit when he wanted to be, cried out, “Ha ha! Kali's a cueball!” My father smiled and told me it was a good look for me. “Now you look like a true Muburu,” he said, comparing me to all the aunts and cousins with shaved heads on his side of the family. I thought about how they'd all react the next time they saw me.
But then there was my mother. My mother would never have stopped me from expressing myself in any way I wanted—of course, she drew the line at a tramp stamp or a nipple piercing, but she believed that my body was my own to do what I wanted with it within reason. She let me have the gauge piercings and did not object to the coiled snake tattoos around my right arm for my eighteenth birthday. I'd gone around with my hair in neon yarn falls or dyed the color of red velvet cake, and she didn't protest. If I wanted to buzz off my hair, that was my decision to make. She knew that and she respected it.
        But she couldn't hide the hurt and disappointment in her eyes. My hair, my “blessing,” the kind of hair that she herself had longed for but never got to have, was gone.

        Nine years later, I still don’t have any hair. I've contemplated letting it grow out again, and got as far as letting a bit of fuzz accumulate before deciding to buzz it all off again. Bald is freedom. It's the summer sun warming the top of my head and it's looking good in every hat when winter comes around. Bald is saving money on shampoo, brushes, and combs and having a shorter morning routine, free of wrestling with tangles and mats. Most of all, bald is driving the neighborhood men crazy.
        They hate it. With my bald head and boyish clothes, but womanly figure and particularly visible assets, they can't tell what the hell I'm supposed to be. While most of the hair-topped ladies I know—the pretty Anna Ming, the tall Bex Driver, the small and quirky Vera Sherwood—have been catcalled or flirted with at some point, the guys that I pass by don't seem to know what to do with me.
        “Man, what do you think that is?” one of the men across the bar asked, his eyes and his seedy friend's eyes fixed right on me. He wasn't even pretending or trying to be subtle about it; I and the other “RiffRaff” around here can never tell if it's worse when people try to be subtle and judge you silently, or when they come right out with it.
        I stood up and propped one elbow against the bar. “Now, I'm not an expert on such things,” I said, pinning them to the bar with my left eye, “but I think that she might be a human being, and therefore not to be referred to as that. Am I right?”
        The guys immediately turned their heads away and pretended they were never looking and had never said a word. Who's this crazy bitch? What's she going on about?
        “Am I right?” I asked again. “Go on, tell me if I'm right. Is there ever a moment when it's appropriate to refer to a person as 'that?' Well, is there?”
        They didn't answer. They just got up and moved away, taking their beers with them.
        When you're grown up, no one calls you Dumbo for your big ears anymore. They don't point at your bald head and call you Cueball, or comment on your Siren-Mouth. Nobody really pays any attention to you at all, until they can't decide whether or not they want to fuck you.

        “Hey, you look like a monk.”
        I open my eyes and behold Rickie Johnson, standing there looking at me like I'm an interesting specimen under a microscope. “A monk, huh.” I sit up and fold my legs into the traditional “zen monk” position, with my hands resting on my kneecaps and three fingers curled into the air. I doubt that very many monks wear long black t-shirts with “STONESVILLE ROCKATHON 2016” printed on them.
        “Yeah,” he says, “a monk. Very calm, very zen.”
        I close my eyes. “Ohhhhhmmmm.” Taking advantage of the situation, Rickie starts flicking the top of my head.
        “Ohhhhm-if-you-don't-cut-that-out-I'mma-snap-that-finger-clean-offffffff....”
        I open my eyes. Rickie's way too close to my face. I sock him on the nose, but it's all in jest, and we crack up. Rickie's probably the closest thing to a more-than-best-friend I have, but there's no commitment involved; Rickie has made it clear time and time again that I'm not his type when it comes to that. His “type” includes Greta Slokov, a raven-haired, red-lipped cookiecutter beauty who walks around the grocery store in uber-tight crop tops that land just under her boobs. My personal opinion is that if you're going to be showing that much navel, you had better have a barbel piercing to show for it. Her personal opinion is that the appearance of a man and the appearance of a woman should not overlap, and if you're going to walk around in button-downs and shorts you should at least have the decency to have a full head of hair, or if you're going to be a bald-headed woman you should at least put on some dresses and some skirts because it's your god-given duty to keep from confusing people. To sum it up, she finds me disgusting and the feeling is mutual. Rickie is way too good for that bitch.
        I haul ass down the paved trails while Rickie chases me. I run to the jungle gym and jump up onto the ladder, scrambling up there in about two seconds using my runner's legs. Rickie crawls up the slide to come after me, and I throw myself down the opposite side and take off like a bolt. The mothers with their strollers shoot glances in our direction, but what the hell are they going to say? I'm laughing too hard to breathe. Rickie catches up to me and fires a few finger guns, and I block them with an imaginary bulletproof shield.
        We're crazy.
        Would we be less of a spectacle if I had hair and looked like a woman? Probably not. But in a hick town like Tanager, where absolutely nothing happens, a bald woman and some blonde guy running around the park like two kids is probably the most interesting thing they've seen all day.
        But I've got something even more interesting.
        “C'mere,” I tell Rickie. I grab his hand and he doesn't object. I may not be “his type,” but he's never actually passed up an opportunity to get close to me. I don't know if it means anything, or if he's just so desperate for the touch of a woman that he's willing to take it even from a bald one. Either way, he lets me lead him far away from the playground and out to a private little cluster of trees where guys usually take their ladies for a quickie. It's broad daylight and nobody's really doing anything, but there's one or two couples here and there, holding hands in the grass and making out the picnic tables. Otherwise there's just people passing through.
        I tug at Rickie's hand. “Let's give 'em a show.”
        He's all for it. “How?”
        I sit myself down right in front of the Latina woman locking lips with a guy with a guitar on his back, folding my legs into the “zen monk” position. “I'm Buddha,” I tell Rickie. “Rub my bald head for a hundred years of good fortune.”
        “Only a hundred?” Rickie asks. “I don't know, I plan on living longer than that.”
        “Then kiss it,” I tell him. “Kiss it and you will live for a thousand years.”
        Rickie kneels down. “A thousand, huh? Well, I don't think I can rightly pass that up.”
        He puts his lips right where the sun warms the top of my head. There's something raw and just so right about the feeling of lips against a bare head. Hair acts like a shield; it blocks out the soft feeling of the two lips and suppresses the pressure of them pressing against you. He holds them there for fifty full seconds counted in my head, then he pulls away. “Was that worth a thousand years?” he asks me.
        I grab him by the collar and pull him down. He's so close to me that his moustache stubble scratches against my bare head. I move his hand on top of my head and hold it there, and there's no hair to block out just how warm it feels. I hear the Latina girl go “ugh,” and she and her guitar guy take off for elsewhere.
        “It was worth eternity.”

Chapter 2: Little Sister (Vera Sherwood)

My brother Leon knows me more than anyone else in the world. He knows that I'm Vera, his little baby sister, and that even though I turned twenty-six last month, I'm still his little baby sister. I think sometimes he looks at me and still sees the awkward-looking little freckled girl from the old pictures, holding a teddy bear and smiling too big for my face. But Leon also knows that he respects me. If he didn't respect me, he wouldn't have patted me on my shoulder and said, “You hold your own just fine, Vera.” I never loved him more than I did when he said those words. 

Leon knows that I have cerebral palsy, and he knows how it happened. When we were kids, he just loved to tell the story of how I came out with my cord all wrapped around my neck, gasping for air in my very first moments in the world. “But you lived, Vera,” he would say with big wide eyes. “You didn't have any air, and you lived.” The way he said it, he thought I was some kind of superhero for surviving so long with no air. Even if it crippled me, I lived. 
Most of all, Leon knows that he's my big brother and that he has to take care of me. When he finished college and was ready to move out, our parents told him that he had to take care of me now. Leon didn't ask to, and they didn't ask if he wanted to. They just pulled him aside, talked to him for a long time, and told him, “You take care of your sister now.” When Leon moved to this small rental house in Tanager, I went with him. Since then, he's been taking care of me even though he knows that I can hold my own just fine.
Leon knows me more than most brothers know about their sisters. He helps me dress and bathe because I can't reach my arms far enough to do it all on my own, and because my muscles seize and my body spasms and I can't stand up for a shower. All my life, Leon's been right there while my mother ran the warm soapy water over my back and down my neck and shoulders. He watched as she washed my hair and scrubbed my feet, under my arms, and the back of my legs. When we got older, she started sending him out of the room because “Vera needs her privacy right now.” She'd hand me the sponge and say, “You need to wash your under-theres on your own.” Then she'd leave the room. I knew that my “under-theres” meant private parts. 
When I was ten and Leon was thirteen, he started combing my hair instead of my mother doing it. Back then, I had long hair that went all the way down my back. But after a while, I felt too bad that Leon had to comb out all that hair, which could get very tangled when it wanted to. When I was fourteen, I asked for a short cut, and I've worn it ever since. 
Going to the bathroom is the worst, because of the nasty looks we get. He stands outside the bathroom door to wait for me, but then he has to go in to carry me back to my chair after I'm done. Security cops have gone up to Leon before and asked him why he's going with me to the ladies' bathroom. They see me in my chair, they see that my arms seize and my head lolls to the side, and yet they still have to ask! Because I can't go by myself, that's why! Do you want to know what I do in there, too?! Instead of yelling that out, I just show them my medical bracelet, and Leon shows them his own bracelet that says he is my brother and legal caregiver. They let us go, but it doesn't stop the looks. I wondered if I should just start wearing diapers to spare us both the humiliation.
“You don't think shitting in a diaper will be even more humiliating?” Leon asked me. “And I bet you think I'd just love to change a grown woman's diaper.”
“Okay, okay,” I said, “I see your point.” We both laughed, because if you don't laugh, you cry. 

There's still so much about me that Leon doesn't know. He doesn't know how bad I feel for him—not for me, but for him—because he didn't get to choose whether or not he wanted to take care of me. I wonder if he wanted to get married or have children, and if my parents did give him the choice, would he have said no? I've never asked him because I'm scared of the answer. If I had the choice, I wouldn't want to take a grown woman to the bathroom, or button her jeans, or drop everything and run to her when she has a seizure. Leon doesn't know that I cry because I wish he had a different sister.

Out in the world, people look at us with sad eyes. Oh, you poor crippled girl, their eyes say, and you poor man, taking care of her for the rest of your life! When they don't say that, they say that Leon must be a creep for being so close to a crippled woman that they have no idea is his sister. Somehow, in their messed-up heads, he's the creep for doing what he's supposed to do, and they're not the creeps for minding our businesses and watching after us as we go down the street. They're not the creeps for going up to me when I'm alone and asking, “Miss, do you know that man?” 

“No,” I say. “He just popped outta nowhere. I think he may be an alien and he's trying to abduct me for his experiments...of course I know him, he's my brother.” They walk away without asking anymore nosy questions, looking at me like I'm the crazy one. Leon doesn't know how much I wish I could pluck their all-seeing eyeballs out and crush them under my wheels. He doesn't know how much I wish their watching eyes would bug so far out that they pop off and go rolling down the street. He has no idea about all the tears that I swallow every time things like this happen, because I want to be his little sister who holds her own just fine. 

It's things like this that made me decide one day that I'd had enough. I wasn't going to be crippled anymore. Why did it matter that I was born with no air? What difference should that make now? 

Leon had to run out to get pizza; Kali and Zatch were coming over and we were playing Red Dead Redemption 2. “If they come by,” Leon had told me, “just let 'em in and tell ‘em I'll be right back.”

“You got it, dude,” I said, giving him a thumbs-up and imitating Michelle Tanner from Full House. He gave me a thumbs-up back. You hold your own just fine, Vera, his eyes said. 

“Buzz me if you need me,” he said just before he grabbed his keys and left. “Buzz” meant to hit the button on my chair that told him if I was in trouble. I've had to use it when I felt a seizure coming on, and the one time I pitched forward and fell out of my chair. Please, I pleaded, don't let me need that button today. It would ruin everything that I had planned. 

My walking cane was leaning up against the wall. I used it during PT and when I had to walk for exercise. Usually, Leon held my other arm when I used it. I wheeled over there and reached for it. My hands shook and my heart pounded wildly; what would Leon do when he came back and saw that his sister wasn't crippled anymore. What would he say? He might cry, and I'd take a picture with my phone and save it to my Insta-story. I tapped the cane around on the floor for a few minutes. Then the doorbell rang. I knew that it was time. 

I pressed down hard on the cane, as if I was pushing away a mountain. With my other hand, I pressed down hard on my left armrest. You can do it, I told myself. You can stand. You've done it before. I'd done it plenty of times with Leon, a friend, or a nurse at my side. Billions of people in the world stand every day, and I was one of those billions of people. I pretended to be a phoenix, rising from the ashes. My body rose from the chair. The doorbell rang again, longer and louder. 

“Coming!” I hollered. I tapped the floor with my cane again, refusing to think about falling forward or backward no matter how much my whole body shook. Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot; I sang myself the little song that my parents had taught Leon to sing me when we were kids and he took me out walking. Now I only sang it when I wanted to annoy him. I wouldn't think about what would happen if I put down a right foot instead of a left foot, or a left foot instead of a right foot...

The doorknob was right there. My hand shook and I ignored it. I turned the knob and chucked my cane against the wall. Quickly, I held on to the knob with both hands and pulled the door open, still holding on when I faced Kali and Zatch.

“Hey, Zatch,” I said. “Hey, Kali.” 

“Vera, you're...” Kali's mouth was half-open. She didn't know what to say. She looked at me like I was flying instead of just standing.

“Hi, Kali,” I said again. “Come on in. Leon's picking up some pizza.”

They came inside. Kali couldn't take her eyes off of me. Zatch looked over at my cane lying on the ground, like he wasn't sure if he should go pick it up or not. So when Leon came back with the pizzas, he saw me standing there against the doorframe, my whole body pitching and wobbling but really standing, talking about Red Dead Redemption 2 with Kali and Zatch. 

“Vera!” Leon sounded like he did the day I fell out of my chair and he found me face-down on the floor. I looked at him. “Hi, Leon.” My smile was too big for my face. 

It didn't last. My body finally gave out and I reached out for my chair. Leon almost threw the pizzas down before he took me in both of his hands and guided me into the seat. But he looked right at me, and his eyes told me that he had never been more proud to have me for a little sister. 

Chapter 1: The Art of War (Rickie Johnson)

“The art of war is of vital importance to the state...”
This first line of my recitation for the Tanager Cultural Festival repeats itself over and over in my head. Twenty-five pairs of eyes staring back at me—maybe more, maybe less—and all I can think about is, “The art of war is of vital importance to the state.” The first stupid line of the whole monologue, that’s all. Just that first stupid line.
What a load of bull this is. When I signed up to recite at this festival, I had envisioned myself reciting with the soul of a lyricist, sprinkling my spoken word with bold, powerful flourishes, maybe with a tear or two in my eyes to show just how deeply affected I was by the meaning of the piece. I had imagined every pair of eyes in Tanager widening as their owners took in the true power of my recitation. I'd imagined Greta Slokov, who was somewhere between an 8.5 and a 10, wrapping her long arms around me and looking right into my eyes. “Rickie Johnson,” she would tell me, “a passion for literature is a lovely thing to have.” I'd tell her, “Not as lovely as you, cherie.” But my imagination ended there.
But now here I am, and all I can think of is, “The art of war is of vital importance to the state.” That and “uhhh,” with a sprinkling of “ummmm.”
The twenty-five-or-so pairs of eyes staring back at me are the very picture of the word “blank” in the dictionary. Most of them are on their phones. Somebody's kids wander off. My eyes fall on Greta Slokov, furiously tapping away on a touchscreen. “The art of war,” I say, raising my voice and drawing out my words just for her, “is of vital im-por-tance to the state...” For just a second, she glances at me, before returning her attention to her phone. “Uhhhh…” Dammit!
I just need to remember the words, those magic words that will make her look at me and stay that way. “The art of war...” I begin, and I become increasingly aware that I have to piss.
Bex saves me, or at least she tries to. “It is a matter of life and death,” she whispers over the dead silence, “a road to safety or to ruin.” I inhale. “It..is a matter of life and death,” I stammer, “aroadtosafetyortoruin.” I've lost control. My bladder's screaming at me. “I gotta go,” I say, “like..really go.” Bex looks at me with “sorry” in her eyes, and the silence is broken by uncomfortable laughter that can basically sum up my entire life. I refuse to look at Greta as I make my way past all the folding chairs. It's fine, she's probably not looking at me either. Or maybe she is looking at me, and she feels sorry for me like Bex does. Man, that hurts. Forgetting the piece, fucking up in front of twenty-five-some-odd people, and becoming the laughingstock of the Tanager Cultural Festival are all small potatoes compared to the possibility that Greta Slokov deems me pathetic. Now I've got to see if she's looking at me…
My cheek connects with something cold and metallic, and I fall backwards. More laughter from the crowd. I look up at a metal sign that mocks me in big orange letters reading “5TH ANNUAL TANAGER CULTURAL FESTIVAL.” “Son of a bitch,” I mutter, rubbing where my cheek hit the sign.
Suddenly Bex is there. “Aw man,” she says, shaking her head and holding out her hand for me. Her smile is full of sympathy rather than pity. She knows how things like this are gonna happen to people like us, and if you're people like us, you just gotta smile and laugh. It’s that, or you'll spend your entire life crying.
“I'm fine, Bex,” I say, getting up on my own. “I just gotta piss something awful.” I want to run for the safety of the civic center's open doors and its men's room, but I know that if I run it's all gonna come out right there, and I've endured enough today.
In a surprisingly apt metaphor for my life as a whole, I manage to make it there just in the nick of time.

Prologue: We Are The RiffRaff

Every small town has That Person, the one that makes everyone stare, that one person the neighbors regard as a confusing, enigmatic creature. There's the guy who walks around in his boxer shorts and ruminates aloud on all of his previous contacts with extraterrestrial life. There's the girl who comes out to water her plants and talks to them too—not just talks to them, but sings “Fight Song” and “I Dreamed a Dream” to them on repeat, because she insists that it makes them grow. There's the four weirdos that duck under the hills and scramble round the bushes playing Manhunt at 6-o-clock, marking the community gazebo as their base and therefore getting in the way of the smokers and the lovers holding hands.
You know, Those People. The people that make you stop, look, and go, “What the hell are they doing?” If your town doesn't have at least one of Those People, you probably don't know that you are one of Those People.
We are Those People. We're the local what-the-hells.
We are the RiffRaff.