A Chorus Rises Read online

  “Is that why I’ve never heard the Ancestors before now? Because I’ve been in Portland? Or because I wasn’t around family?”

  “It’s not that you’re near family. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of family back home, too. It’s because you got quiet. Or something forced you to.”

  Lovely. So it really does all come back to Tavia Philips, whether I want it to or not. Whether it’s the devastating quiet of being Stoned, or the quiet I never knew existed until the chaos made Portland unbearable and I finally got on a plane, it started with junior prom.

  “Somebody’s gonna take me home, right?” Great-Gram asks suddenly.

  “Oh. Are you ready to go?”

  “Oh yeah. I don’t stay out after sunset. These bugs’ll eat me up out here.”

  I smile, and know that when I do, I look very much like her.

  “I’ll take you home,” I say, wondering if she’ll agree with me on Courtney’s ugly car, too.

  Chapter XV

  NAEMA

  I should’ve asked Great-Gram Lorraine why the Ancestors speak to Eloko—or are supposed to. So much happened at the BBQ, though, and not just an unexpectedly confrontational conversation with Leona Fowl. I let the wind loose inside me, and I found out whose voices they are. Besides which, for weeks I’ve been wondering what being Eloko means besides a melody and a bell charm and a place at the top of the social food chain; when someone finally told me I was right to wonder, that there was something more, I needed a minute to process it before I got to the How Come.

  I’ve been feeling the wind at odd times, too many to see a pattern, to be honest. But the times the swell has been strong enough to nearly make me sick stand out.

  When I felt like two parts of my identity—being Black and being Eloko—were being pitted against each other.

  When Priam promised that Portland would always love me best. Because I’m Eloko. Like he couldn’t see how my Elokoness was under attack.

  When Leona Fowl asked how I knew Tavia was a siren. When no one outside the network’s supposed to know I did.

  Every time, I knew something was off—like, way off—and then the Ancestors flared up. Which totally makes them sound like a medical condition, I realize. But their wind, or voices, were like a gut punch of confirmation, too strong to miss. Which, if Eloko mythos is all about Ancestral Wisdom, makes total sense.

  The thing they aren’t, apparently, is a Magic 8 Ball. The whispers brought family photos and lineage to my mind in an instant, yet they can’t be bothered to tell me what to do about the things they Gut Punch Agree on. Which is honestly fine, because as much as I like old folks, I can think for myself. I mean. I’m still Darren Bradshaw’s daughter.

  We can talk, I texted Priam while Courtney and I chauffeured Great-Gram Lorraine home. Wanna come visit?

  His reply was exactly the categorically ecstatic Yes you’d expect it to be.

  “So all y’all got Last-Minute Plane Tickets money?” Courtney asked when I told him I needed to borrow his keys today. “What do his parents do?”

  “His dad’s a cop,” I answered, despite being bored. Or pretending to be, anyway. I really hadn’t thought anything of asking Priam to fly down on a whim, and I wasn’t surprised when he said he would.

  It never occurred to me until now that every Eloko family I know in Portland seems to live pretty comfortably. Obviously, not everybody’s Bradshaw comfortable, but disposable-income comfortable. It’s like even just having an Eloko kid gets you a better rate on your mortgage and credit card, and maybe being seen favorably by the entire city means unconscious favor, like more frequent promotions and, I don’t know, grace periods or something.

  None of which is magic, so much as good ole-fashioned privilege.

  Have I mentioned Professor Vesper-Holmes gets on my nerves?

  Anyway, Priam being able to hop a flight because I said we could talk and being Eloko potentially directly impacting a family’s economic flexibility is why I’m back at the airport first thing the next morning. Also because despite having another family reunion event to help with, something tells me it wouldn’t be nice to make Priam Uber to me. And I’m all about making sure people think I’m that, remember.

  He comes out of the automatic doors, and even when a hot gust of wind rearranges his hair, he just shrugs as if the strap of his messenger bag threatened to make a move, too. He takes in the assembly line of vehicles waiting for their travelers, the drivers eyeing the stalking security guard and ignoring the blare of the airport intercom that warns against idling in this area. Now a seasoned traveler, I feel equipped to declare airports and the act of being in or just outside them fresh hell, but that’s beside the point.

  People are buzzing all around him, shouting into phones, and gesturing wildly to rides stuck farther back in the procession, but Priam stands still. He can’t see me yet—he thankfully has no idea what Courtney’s car looks like—so I watch him. The way his face is both blank and tense. The way even the bustle of the airport can’t distract him. He’s waiting. For me.

  He is pretty.

  I can almost hear his melody. I can’t, literally. It’s always a delicate sound, like a shop’s welcome when a customer arrives, and the airport and the traffic drown it out before it reaches me. But I know it by heart, and I can tell a couple of people hear it, because they perk up and look around, like maybe they’ve just thought of something. It’s one of the differences between Portland and here; that people aren’t constantly preoccupied with Eloko presence. Here, even when people see my bell, it seems to take a moment to register what it means. Sometimes they ask, or I’ll catch someone sneaking a picture of my necklace and then typing as though googling or texting someone to confirm.

  Anyway. Priam doesn’t wear his bell; he keeps it loose in his pocket most of the time, so the travelers who get close enough to hear his melody don’t seem to figure out that the boy beside them is the source.

  I pull Courtney’s ugly truck into a recently vacant stretch of curb and honk, but it’s Little Bit who calls his name like her prince has finally come. Something tells me it wasn’t just Courtney who watched my LOVE streams and posts, because this girl is swooning like a long-held dream has come to life.

  “Priam!” She has to call again, and this time she hangs the top half of her body out the passenger window and waves most of it. I don’t know if she expects him to recognize her or what, but at least it works. It’s only a moment more before he sees me behind the wheel.

  He almost smiles, but it doesn’t quite take.

  “Little Bit, can Priam sit up front?” I ask her as he approaches, and then I whisper, “It’ll make staring a whole lot easier.”

  When her eyes flick down but her cheeks perk up, it’s the Black girl equivalent of blushing, but she hops out and repositions herself directly behind my seat where the looking is good. Priam takes her place and I almost lean over to kiss him, playing it off by stretching the opposite way, too, before pulling away from the curb.

  “Hi,” he says, and looks me over while I drive. So I’m pretty sure he noticed.

  “Hey. Priam, this is my baby cousin, Carmen,” I introduce them, careful not to use her nickname. Which is apparently not good enough because she quick-punches the back of my seat.

  “You can just say cousin,” she says through gritted teeth, and then, “Hi, Priam, I’m Carmen, I’m Naema’s cousin.” I can hear the full mouth grin, and roll my eyes. Adorbs.

  “Hi, Carmen.” At least he’s smiling now, too.

  “Where’s your luggage?” she asks, and it’s such an immediate follow-up she may as well have pounced on him.

  “Little Bit, do you have your seat belt on?”

  She catches my eye in the rearview mirror and bulges her bright eyes at me before mouthing, Whyyyy. When I snort, Priam catches wind and looks between us.

  “I’m just here till tonight, so. No luggage.” Then he twists in his seat and grins at her. “Little Bit, huh? I like it.”

  In the re
arview, I bulge my eyes back, and then roll them when she can’t contain a smile.

  * * *

  Today’s perfect for Priam’s visit because the Babcock Family Reunion is split up for separate group activities, which means I won’t have to parade a white boy around the entire tribe at once. He wouldn’t be the only one, but he’d be the one with Sheba, the Eloko cousin from the Pacific Northwest, and something tells me that would be a whole thing, even if they were just doing it to get under my skin.

  Courtney, it turns out, deserves as much credit for organizing this whole shindig as his mom. I discover this when he informs me that he is—and now we are—responsible for shepherding a herd of young Babcocks to something called an Indoor Action Sports Playground, which, if we’re being honest, just sounds like word salad or a poor translation. But apparently it really is a thing. It also happens to be a big deal in this town, and despite my misgivings, when the kids find out they’re taking a Ninja Warrior class, they go wackadoodle. It also happens to afford me a solid hour of freedom (to stay within eyesight), and since Courtney isn’t not going to partake in walking handstands, Priam and I have it to ourselves.

  “I missed you,” Priam says when I’ve taken a seat. He hasn’t. Instead he looks like he waited as long as he could, and ran out of composure just before sitting down.

  “I miss you, too, Priam.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Are you going to sit? We need to talk while everybody’s preoccupied.”

  “What does it mean that I said ‘missed’ and you said ‘miss’?”

  “I don’t know,” I say through a sigh. “I guess that I understand it’s still going?”

  He chews the inside of his lip, puts his hand on the back of the chair he’s still refusing to inhabit. “Why?”

  “Because the entire time we were together, you had a weird fixation with someone I don’t like? And you never explained, despite having plenty of opportunities? And it made me look like a jealous girlfriend, which please. I feel like I said all this already, Priam. And anyway, talking about this isn’t why you’re here.”

  “Yes,” he says with surprising insistence, but he finally sits down. “It is.”

  “Okay, then it’s not why I asked you to come.” I lean to the side so I can see my cousins, who are all following the instructor’s lead in their warm-up stretch, except of course for Courtney, who is waving him off and tickling his sister and the others when the adult isn’t looking. “Sorry. It’s good we have some privacy, but I also feel like Courtney probably doesn’t count as supervision.”

  I realize I’m laughing, and Priam is decidedly not, so I reel it in. I don’t even get an opportunity to be annoyed at having to batten down my spirits so as not to offend before he softens.

  “You do seem better down here.” He leans forward so he can take hold of the tendrils I’ve purposely left out of my ponytail. (See? Beauty tip for the win.) “You look really happy again.”

  “Yeah.” I gaze into his dark eyes. I can’t say I’ve missed them, since I have an endless supply of pictures. I may be good at not answering his texts; I’m less good at going without seeing him altogether. But it’s different, having him in front of me. I realize what I’ve missed is the feeling of him admiring me. The way I know he loves the things I love about myself. The way he smiles at my snark and never tells me to tone it down. Never tells me to be nice. Never says I’m too pretty for my own good, the way even my own parents have on occasion, like it’s the only thing making my personality palatable.

  He never thinks palatable is something I need to be.

  “I am happy. I’m glad I came.” I haven’t been wearing it every day like I do back home, but now I take hold of my necklace so I won’t take Priam’s hand. “I’m not glad about us.” There’s no harm in confessing that to him.

  “Neither am I.” He shuffles around in his seat like he wishes the table weren’t between us. “So can we get back to normal now?”

  “I think normal’s gonna be new from now on,” I say, because there’s a lot I want to tell him, once the big thing is out of the way. Before he has an opportunity to wonder, I ask, “What did you tell Leona Fowl?”

  “Wait, the producer? Why?”

  “What did you tell her you heard? At prom? Between Tavia and me?”

  “I just,” he starts, which is enough to confirm that—just as I concluded—he’s the one she spoke to. Despite the fact that I’m the one who reached out to her, she—for some reason—found it beneficial to speak to Priam before she spoke to me.

  I’m sure there’s a super compelling, perfectly unproblematic reason for why that would be. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the other aspects of Priam’s identity making him trustworthy enough to vet me to someone who’s a total stranger to us both. I’m sure it’s just because he showcases in the prom footage I showed her, and maybe even in the unchopped livestream footage where I captured Gorgon Effie streaking around the courtyard. Maybe she saw him in a blur, and knew he hadn’t been Stoned, and—What? Why would that mean she spoke to him first when she knows we’re both Eloko.

  That isn’t a question, because there’s no good answer.

  Priam’s brows are knitted and tense, and he’s recalling. But then they ease, and he looks at me, sharp as the point his hair comes to just above his mole. “Is that why you wanted me to visit? To talk about your movie?”

  “Not to talk about the movie I didn’t get a chance to tell you about because some producer already had, to talk about what you told a strange woman about something you don’t understand. And something you never brought up to me.”

  “Wait, first of all, Leona’s Eloko,” he says, both hands slightly off the table. “So—”

  “So what? You don’t know her. We don’t know her.”

  His head jerks back like I’ve slapped him. “So since when is another Eloko a stranger? Like, a stranger stranger?”

  I could say since nary an Eloko came to my defense in Portland, but I’m trying to stay on message here, so instead I tell him, “Since she’s also a movie producer who’s more interested in her project than the people it’s about.”

  “I’m just. I don’t know, that doesn’t sound right coming from you.”

  “Coming from me?”

  “Yes, Naema, coming from you. Being Eloko’s all that matters to you, it’s the most important part of who we are, so why—”

  “That’s not true.”

  “How? How is that not true?” He waits, and he looks genuinely confused.

  “Ask Upside-Down Portland.” Which understandably doesn’t lessen his confusion.

  I guess this is the message now. There’s no avoiding it.

  “Did you not notice how it doesn’t get to be, for me? Portland hasn’t treated me like I’m Eloko first since Tavia became a celebrity herself, and I get that you don’t understand why that is, or how those two things are related, but.” I roll my eyes and exhale like I’m done. “Figure it out.”

  Priam’s quiet for a moment, and then he asks, “Isn’t it a good thing if a known siren can be a celebrity? Doesn’t that mean Portland’s getting something right?”

  “Okay, I’m about to explain something that’s actually super basic, and I mean basic to the point that I really thought it didn’t need explaining. I thought we were all on the same page, which is actually my bad. I get it now. Because despite what I knew, I still thought being Eloko meant we transcended all of this. That’s what I thought. I thought they saw all of me when they poured out their adoration.”

  I’m talking a mile a minute, and I have to stop again, roll my head between my shoulders, and then press my chin to my chest to stretch my neck. If it looks like I’m preparing for a marathon, it’s because that’s what this feels like. And it’s not even the conversation I thought we needed to have. It’s literally the foundation without which that convo can’t even happen.

  “If it’s gonna upset you, we don’t have to talk about it,” Priam offers.


  “Yes, we do, you’re just gonna have to accept that it upsets me, and figure out whether it should upset you, too.”

  This just keeps getting worse. The breakup was about something else, but there’s no scenario in which I can be with someone who doesn’t see what I don’t get a choice in seeing. In experiencing.

  “Okay,” he says. “Then tell me.”

  “I’ve been Portland Famous my whole life, right? And I’m a Black girl. So by your logic, Portland has always been getting race right. I mean, no shade, because that’s what I thought, too. Except, as we know, it’s new that a known, unapologetic siren who isn’t wearing a silencing collar can be a celebrity. So either they were cool with me because I’m Eloko, which means they’ve been overlooking that I’m also a Black girl, which means they’ve never been getting it right with me—or I’m totally safe because they just hate sirens in particular. And since sirens are exclusively Black women—right? Do you see the problem?”

  “Yeah…”

  “So like, neither of those possibilities is acceptable. And neither is holding only enough space for one Black girl to shine at a time. Tavia’s not a litmus test for Portland’s wokeness, she’s just the new exception.” I shake my head. “Portland’s idea of Eloko is not the most important part of me. Not anymore.”

  I want to tell him what being Eloko is really like. About the Ancestors, and the wind, and the fact that it isn’t all about performance or entertaining fans.

  But I can’t. Because I’ve just said so much. And it wasn’t a relief. It didn’t make me feel lighter. It didn’t set me free. If anything, it feels worse. Because these are things I never say. These are things that having a carefree livestream, and an adorable Fiat, and an Eloko boyfriend, and my necklace charm on perpetual display keep me from having to say.

  Which means I don’t even know if it’s coming out right. I don’t know if I’m making myself clear, if I’m saying anything linear or in a way that someone outside it can even understand. After a life in the Portland Eloko Bubble—whether it was real or not—this is the heaviest, most uncomfortable, most joy-crushing reality to face, and that’s without even wondering what it means that I’m only facing it because of something Tavia did, that I high-key hate her for.