A Chorus Rises Read online

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  To the Black girls who loved ourselves from jump.

  Chapter I

  NAEMA

  “Effie,” I hear her say, and even though her voice is calm, it carries a telltale vibrato that I register too late. I’m standing across from a siren and there’s a call in her voice. Whatever she says next will have power.

  “Stone her.”

  There’s no time after that. Not to think, she wouldn’t dare do this to me, and not to dare her. To tell her that I am through playing nice, that you don’t threaten Eloko, and that she and her snake sister had better start thinking of what comes after Portland because they are never going to live this night down.

  There’s no time to run, when what was a wobbling pillar of scales and haunted hair stiffens—and then I do, too.

  It hits me in my core. Deep inside my body, something goes hard.

  I gasp, but the air doesn’t get in. Not really. It comes into my throat but then stops. I can’t get it into my chest. That’s where my panic starts. Am I going to suffocate? Is being Stoned by a siren and her snake sister actually dying? No one knows. No one’s ever come back from the stone. Which means the sisters don’t know either, and they’re doing it anyway.

  I don’t know how long it takes from the outside. They’re watching me turn gray like the other promgoers in this courtyard, and the man in the cemetery, and the kids in Triton Park—but I don’t know if it seems fast or slow. I just know I’m terrified that my lungs will start burning any moment from the air I can’t force into them, that the legs I can’t feel anymore aren’t there, that the stone has broken somehow even though I’ve never seen it happen. What else am I supposed to think when thinking is all I can do? I can’t feel anything, once the hardening starts. It feels like nothing, except that it’s spreading.

  I want to look down, to see my body, that it’s still there. I want to look away so that the last thing I see isn’t Tavia Philips.

  But there’s no time.

  Chapter II

  Woke Portland: a Year After the Awakening

  Contributor | June 2021

  Last month, a year after the Awakening, four children gathered in Triton Park. They had been surrounded by their families and members of the Portland community, the way they often were during their nearly decade-long suspended animation. But Mere, Tabor, Wiley, and Ashleigh—first names only, to protect the families’ privacy—stand out among the crowd. Partly because of the reverent space they’re given, all but close family keeping a considerate distance from the children rarely seen in public. Only a year after being stone themselves, the Triton Park Four still look very much like the sculpture unveiled in the place where their childhoods passed them by.

  The anniversary has come and gone, the sculpture christened with colorful wreaths nearly identical to the ones left for the children when they were in stone. The foursome has retreated back into the reclusive cocoon of their families. They probably won’t be seen until the next Awakening Day—assuming this is a tradition that continues, and how could it not?

  But there were others freed from the stone. It’s impossible to forget the few days before the Awakening, when other gray statues appeared in quick succession, leading up to the panic at the prom. Their imprisonments were, thankfully, considerably shorter than those of the children of Triton Park. They were pedestrians mostly, unfortunate and hapless victims. And then, of course, there were the promgoers, with only one known Eloko afflicted—and there was also one siren.

  Tavia Philips was never a victim of her best friend Effie Freeman’s gorgon spell, but the day she Awakened those who were, she set herself free, too. She won’t say so, not on the record at least, but the facts speak for themselves. One day, no one knew there was a siren living in Portland, and the next, we were grateful to have been wrong.

  Tavia’s reluctance to comment comes as a surprise, given the national attention her YouTube channel, Siren Speaks, has garnered. For the past year, she’s gathered quite a following speaking out on the alleged marginalization and systemic oppression she says sirens have faced. Soon, she won’t just be a powerful voice in advocacy and activism. This month will see the streaming debut of an original film made about the teenage siren and the day she saved PDX. While one would expect her to be enjoying the fanfare, Tavia intentionally appears to distance herself ahead of the release.

  To be fair, she recently graduated from Beckett High, for anyone who forgot this firebrand is actually still a teenager, though any attempt at “average” would be a stretch. Perhaps she’s focusing on summer freedom, and college plans. Professor Heather Vesper-Holmes, of the University of Portland, however, provides a much more likely explanation for Tavia Philips to eschew the limelight of Awakening Day.

  “Except for Tavia’s, the freedom granted by Awakening was from a curse her adoptive sister unleashed,” Professor Vesper-Holmes says. She stares out from behind her wide desk, stacked with books and legal pads covered in layer upon layer of scribblings. The thirtysomething academic is hard not to take seriously. Much of her earlier research has been discredited: years of studying sprites under the hypothesis that they were capable of capturing children in stone. But Professor Vesper-Holmes has the distinction of being the one to discredit her own previous work, briefly turning her academic attention to the gorgon who was actually responsible. Now with Effie Freeman nowhere to be found—or studied—the professor has become the first in her field to launch contemporary research on Portland’s beloved population of Eloko, prompted by one Eloko’s involvement in Tavia Philips’s Awakening.

  “Tavia had to undo something her sister did. And while Effie, the gorgon who didn’t know she was a gorgon at a time when—to be fair—few knew gorgons actually exist, has been all but forgiven, she still chose to disappear. I think that’s pretty traumatic for Tavia.”

  It’s a reasonable deduction, and Professor Vesper-Holmes may be right. But if it’s trauma, it’s also just the kind of origin story you’d expect from a hero in the making.

  Chapter III

  NAEMA

  The first time I sat with Dr. Corey, it was only days after being Awakened, and I opened up immediately, just to prove that I am still Naema Bradshaw. Whatever you think you know about what I can or will do, I promise, you don’t.

  I say “sat with” because it was not my first time seeing Dr. Corey. She’s been my pediatrician all my life, but for the past year she’s also been my stand-in therapist based solely on the fact that she, too, is Eloko. Which—if I’m being honest—I hoped would be as meaningful as my parents thought it’d be. I mean, if you can’t trust an Eloko, you’re basically screwed.

  “What was it like?” she asked me
a year ago, mere weeks after prom. “Coming back.”

  My eyes didn’t wander, or fog, and my breath didn’t hitch. People who fluster assume the only way you don’t is by force of will, by putting on a tough front meant to disguise that everyone is biting back tears. Like we’re all undone, we just refuse to show it. Which is what they clearly need to believe. It’s easier than accepting that there are just some of us who aren’t so easily shook. So despite the fact that I had really good reason to break into a million pieces, I was pleased to find that I still didn’t.

  “You’re asking what it was like to be Stoned—the thing where you’re consumed by gray rock due to a gorgon’s curse, not that more fun thing where you’re high—or what it was like when the spell was broken, or what it was like to come out of being Stoned and be face to face with your least favorite person in Portland?” I set my chin against my fist. “Which part of ‘coming back’ do you mean?”

  Dr. Corey’s not a therapist, but sometimes she does a passable job at pretending.

  “Tavia Philips is your least favorite person in Portland? Still, even though it was her voice that broke the curse?”

  I could’ve outed Tavia right there. I could’ve told Dr. Corey and everyone else how Effie hadn’t just happened to curse me; how after years of being part of the network that hid Tavia, the bish sicced her sister on me. But instead I just scoffed and rolled my eyes.

  “What do you remember about those first moments?” she asked, like it might not be much.

  “Everything. I remember the courtyard materializing like it’d been surrounding me all along.”

  “Hadn’t it?”

  “No.” I stopped and exchanged blinks with the good doctor for a moment. “It hadn’t.”

  To her credit, she matched my gaze, maybe because of what we have in common. Yes, Dr. Corey’s Eloko; she’s used to being wise, or insightful, or discerning—whichever word you want to attribute to the characteristic we’re said to share due to supposed Ancestral Wisdom. She’s used to getting it right, even if sometimes it’s by accident. But she hasn’t ever been consumed. She knew nothing of the stone, and it showed. So I told her about it. Just a little, and because I could.

  “You’re Stoned,” I stressed, lifting one eyebrow like the distinction I was getting ready to make should’ve been common sense. It wasn’t, but I couldn’t help what I knew. I couldn’t help that in that room—and in the majority of them since—I am the expert on this. “That doesn’t mean you’re inside the stone.”

  My pediatrician-cum-therapist lifted her chin.

  “I wasn’t in the courtyard. I was nowhere. I was in the gray.”

  There was a hitch then, or more like a glitch. I forgot how to keep my breath and my saliva separate for a moment, and made a kind of abbreviated gargle sound like the last word had been difficult to say. I could’ve slapped myself. There was no way she wasn’t going to read into that, despite that it was involuntary and completely meaningless. I just took a breath, let my lips break into a tight smile, and continued.

  “I was a disembodied consciousness, suspended in … gray.”

  The next breath I took rattled in my chest, but at least I had one. At least it had gotten that far.

  “What was that like?” she asked, and I might have been annoyed, except that she was genuinely asking. There was a gape to her small mouth, and the hand that usually held her pen above her notebook was lying on it.

  I started by shaking my head.

  “I couldn’t explain it if I wanted to. And you don’t want to know.”

  Who wants to hear that time crashes to a halt—or that it stretches without passing? Or that maybe it does neither, or both?

  Who would tell their doctor that what felt like immediately upon being Stoned, my brain wanted to blow through my cranium and escape, except that I had neither. No brain, no cranium. No beginning or end of myself … and something worse.

  Who would want to say that there is something worse than all that? That there is a quiet that no one but Eloko would’ve noticed. No one who hasn’t been hearing a gentle and occasional tinkling since birth, like a simple wind chime just outside their window, or a delicate bell. Because from the beginning of our lives, we hear a lovely, quiet reminder of our beauty and magic. Other people hear it most audibly when an Eloko first approaches them, but it comforts us as babies, and our parents say we cry less. All through childhood, we hear it in an odd silence and remember who we are, so we’re never lonely, and we’re prone to suddenly smile. Then we put that sound in our bell charms so we can share it with the world, our unique melodies. No wonder they adore us.

  The point is, we’re always hearing it, or quietly recalling it. It’s never far. It’s inside of us, and that must mean that when you’re Stoned, while you’re there, you don’t really exist. It’s the only explanation for my melody disappearing with the rest of my body, and the world.

  Weeks after being stolen from myself, I wasn’t ready to tell Dr. Corey the extent of it.

  “And the suspension. Do you feel like you’ve been silenced?” she asked, like she already knew.

  I assumed the alarm that flashed once inside my chest didn’t show up on my face. She looked sympathetic, but definitely not You Had The Very Essence Of Who You Are Stolen From You sympathetic.

  I am the only Eloko to ever have been Stoned. She couldn’t know that I’d lost my melody there. No one could.

  Which meant she was probably referring to LOVE.

  Officially—or originally, anyway—the app’s called Eloko Verified, but we influencers—the Portland Eloko it was designed to attract and amplify—took the Elo and the Ve, and of course our nickname stuck. Why wouldn’t it? Someone created it specifically to give us a platform, or at least to make it easier for our audience to follow and engage with us.

  I had fifty thousand subscribers the night of junior prom. The next morning, I was locked out. When I was finally ready to venture back out in public—but just digitally—I could see my picture, and my custom banner, and the floral wallpaper of my profile. My featured posts, my pictures, and my streams? Gone. In their place was some nonsense about Sensitive And Potentially Upsetting Content, and something about LOVE Fully Investigating Complaints.

  Turns out losing my melody was just the prelude to waking up and seeing what the world would feel like if I’d never had one.

  “Were you upset?” Dr. Corey’d asked me then.

  I tilted my head from one side to the other, satisfied by the sound and the relief of the cracks.

  “Confused, actually. See, I’d just spent six hours out of time and space”—and identity—“so I wasn’t immediately sure what sensitive content they could possibly have been referencing.”

  Her eyes drifted to the side, and then she straightened in her chair before concluding, “So you didn’t remember.”

  “I didn’t remember what?” I asked, and I didn’t adjust. I didn’t tense or straighten, or fidget.

  “I thought maybe being Stoned impacted your short-term memory? Maybe you didn’t remember posting footage of the attack?”

  “I remembered,” I told her, letting my eyelids sink like the boredom might be putting me to sleep. “I just considered it a public service more than anything. I don’t think that’s unreasonable, especially since my footage had already been used to help identify victims. It turned out to be pretty useful when kids didn’t come home that night. And when someone decided to make an official record.”

  I didn’t mention the University of Portland professor who’d reached out several times by then, first to inquire about archiving the original and full-length livestream I’d made that night, and later to tell me she’d shifted her focus entirely to Eloko study. Like I was supposed to be appreciative. Like she’s the first person enamored of us.

  Ma’am. Get in line.

  “Anyway, I know what you’re dancing around,” I told her, and ran my fingers through my hair before studying the recently trimmed ends. “Because it wasn’t a
bout whether the families of the Stoned were upset over the footage of what happened to their loved ones.”

  Dr. Corey looked skeptical, and I rolled my eyes.

  “I was the Stoned, too. Which is how they walked back that suspension, by the way, because they didn’t want to admit that an app I basically helped build—I have the largest number of followers from outside Portland, by the way—was taking the media’s side.”

  She didn’t say a thing, because what could she say? She couldn’t pretend not to know what I was talking about without looking completely ridiculous, so instead she just looked horribly uncomfortable, like she hoped I’d have mercy on her and not let the awkward silence last too long.

  “Despite watching what Effie did, and even though Tavia was right there…”

  I literally bit my tongue for a moment.

  “In less than a day, everyone decided the gorgon was a hapless victim of her unknown powers, and the siren was a conquering heroine. Which means I had to be the problem, for capturing it all.”

  “And then…” she ventured, timidly, but not timid enough to keep from repaying my mercy with a rundown of the allegations against me. “The other kids—well, someone—said you’d exposed Tavia. That you’d outed a siren.”

  “And since that wasn’t in the video, I guess you’ll have to decide who you believe.” And then, precisely because Dr. Corey’s an Eloko, and because there had been no one else whose accusations I’d dignified with an explanation—no one else’s I would—I told her. “I did not out Tavia Philips.”

  I let the words rest with her for a moment, kept my eyes trained on hers. It should not have taken that for a fellow Eloko to believe me, whether it was the whole story or not.

  Because it was true; I never said Tavia was a siren. I said Effie was. Which, yes, was meant to stress Tavia out, because all three of us knew the truth.