A Chorus Rises Read online

  There’re also at least two other Eloko on the flight, distributed throughout the airplane, and melodies are pinging across the space so no one can tell for sure where exactly we are. I can spot the travelers glancing around to try to triangulate the sources, and before my neighbor becomes one of them, I discreetly slip my necklace inside my top.

  For some reason.

  Then I pop in my earbuds and return to LOVE.

  For some reason.

  Back to the livestream of Priam and me, the palpable excitement of preparing for prom, which I mute despite having my buds in.

  I’ve gotten texts from Jamie and Gavin ever since leaving the skating rink last night, none of which I’ve opened yet, but none from him. Which I guess makes sense, since I broke up with him. Now he can get back to whatever he was doing when he said he’d be with Gavin, I guess.

  Still no word from Naema??

  Is it just me or has LOVE taken down more of her posts??

  Her posts keep disappearing! Why has LOVE turned on its own?

  Hi! LOVE team member here! We haven’t removed any additional posts, although the account holder may choose to. Thanks for your inquiry!

  You shouldn’t have removed the last one! Way to censor a Stoning victim!

  You have had an entire Y E A R to put it together. She didn’t know she’d be Stoned when she posted other people being attacked. They took it down because it was upsetting to the families of the other victims. Google is your friend.

  I don’t need to google it, my dude. It was all over the news for a f*n year, remember? LOVE still should’ve had her back.

  Looking for a site loyal to Naema? KnightsOfNaema

  There it is again.

  Who the hell are the Knights of Naema? And why do they sound like something out of Effie’s timeline?

  The captain informs us that there’s traffic on the runway—don’t people fly to avoid traffic? What?—and we’ll be taxiing for at least twenty minutes before we can take off. No need to switch to airplane mode, so I click the embedded link and my phone swaps apps, opening a web browser.

  At first it’s just a lovely deep purple background and nothing else, but as the site loads, various avatars populate, and their posts, and finally a header. Which is a stretched-out, pixelated picture of me, taken from my LOVE account no doubt, with “Knights of Naema” written over it in some cursive font—purple, of course.

  I will say immediately that whoever made this site didn’t take into account mobile users. It’s sort of a mess, and difficult to navigate without zooming in so as not to accidentally tap the wrong icons. But I get the gist.

  Which is, Naema.

  I release a slow breath.

  I’m everywhere. Aside from the header, my image is used over and over again, because several members have downloaded photos of me from LOVE or from screenshots used in last year’s media hoopla surrounding my livestream and used them for their avatars.

  From what I can tell, there are only a couple hundred members thus far—despite the moderator spamming my LOVE comment section with the link ever since the app announced they’d be making changes—and the posts are mostly more of my pictures transplanted from elsewhere.

  That said, the congregation might be small, but they’re active. Most pictures that aren’t way too small or distorted beyond recognition have upvotes equaling at least half their overall number. As an influencer myself, I’m impressed. That’s a decent level of interaction, not to mention the bursting comments section under every post.

  When I toggle to see the site in order of popularity, I find that the most popular post at the moment is a picture of me and Jamie, the day of this year’s prom. I’ve basically kept up with Jamie’s and Gavin’s profiles—mostly Gavin’s, because obviously—but I’ll be honest. Posts from this past year have a weird, bewildering effect on me. Senior year was a warbly kind of slog, but also somehow a blur, and seeing any particular piece of it paused and immortalized doesn’t exactly make sense. Very little of this past year does. It’s actually been easier to go back to my own inactive profile from the time before.

  Anyway, the Knights had to go to Jamie’s feed to get this. We weren’t in our dresses yet, but our hair was done and we’d just gotten our makeovers. Priam was our photographer, as usual, and for some reason, we were posing against the tiny hood of my Fiat, blowing kisses, because naturally.

  She’s gorgeous.

  That’s the top-voted comment, and I mean. I roll my eyes, but I’m smirking back a grin. Sure it’s simple, but it’s also impressive in its succinctness. Sometimes less is more.

  And more, there are: comments on Jamie and me; comparisons between the two of us, and an unofficial poll on who is Portland’s prettiest Eloko with Jamie being awarded the Maybe In The Traditional Sense title, and me winning But Without Question; poetic waxings-on about the length of my legs, complete with competitive descriptions that culminate in a Pirouettes comparison, which I know are those long cookie sticks filled with chocolate hazelnut because the champion commenter was kind enough to embed a picture of the container for reference. I don’t know if that goes against the whole Don’t Compare Black Girls To Foodstuffs thing, or if that’s only about our skin color, but I’ll allow it. It does make for a vivid picture, after all.

  I completely lose track of time as I scroll, finding photos I completely forgot I’d taken, and laughing at the Knights when they argue over something silly like a proposed favorite accessory of mine, or what genre of music I listen to. When I come across poems or something longer, like a sort of fan-fiction scene wherein the Knight in question usurps Priam, I snort and roll my eyes. I can’t make it through them without cringing in a kind of secondhand embarrassment for the poster, and they’re difficult to read on my phone anyway, so eventually I just scroll past anything that’s not a picture or a poll or a lively comment section.

  Full disclosure: that’s not the only thing that makes me cringe. Mixed in with the adoration and general fanboying is the impressively rare horndog post. They don’t seem to happen often, but they do happen, which makes them more common than is acceptable. Even I can’t excuse them: close-ups of some part of my body that wasn’t the focus of the original photograph; photos that are clearly not of me—usually with the head suspiciously cropped out, or with a not great Photoshop job of affixing my face to someone else’s body. And there are posters who come up repeatedly on that particular brand of content. Posters with names like Nutting4Naema, or something equally unimaginative and pathetic. Members who confess to having cutouts of me in their homes.

  I can’t wrap my mind around it, but then I’ve never fangirled over anyone, favorite actor or musician or anyone. Maybe I’m just not getting the concept of fixating on someone you don’t know, and another fan would think it’s fine? I try not to let it bother me because, for the most part, that’s not what the Knights are about. In fact, some of the few downvotes are on the refocused photos that clearly are of me. And someone in the comments always brings up the fact that I graduated at seventeen, that I’m still underage, and that anything too racy will be removed.

  So when I get to something I can’t access without being a member of the forum, my curiosity is piqued.

  “Fun’s over,” I say to myself. But I don’t close the browser.

  Because there’s no way I’m not getting behind that curtain. Even if it means making a stupid burner account that I’ll deactivate immediately after.

  “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your patience—”

  Which means it’s time for airplane mode. Whatever else the Knights are up to, I’ll have to find out when I land.

  I close the browser and check my email before takeoff.

  Nothing. Well, nothing from Leona Fowl, anyway. Which doesn’t work for me, so I read the message I sent her to see what was so unenticing.

  Catalogue of factual errors in the movie? Check.

  Valid criticism of the production’s dependence on stereotypes and tropes
? Check.

  Thinly veiled suggestion that there is more to Tavia and much more to my story? Check.

  Honestly, I’m totally perplexed by the lack of response, especially given that I supplied not only my reply-to email address, but also my cell and my home phone number.

  Following up on that will have to wait until I land, too.

  * * *

  I don’t quite know how to explain it … but it’s quiet when we land.

  Like before your eardrums pop, when there’s pressure blocking the outside world, and everything’s muted. Except even after I gyrate my face and jaw enough to unclog everything impacted by the altitude, the quiet persists. Like I’ve been in a really loud party and just come outside—except it’s been all of my life. It’s the same kind of stunning calm I couldn’t have known until after the first time I felt the wind, because it was the wind’s absence.

  Air travel’s weird.

  I knew there wouldn’t be a network welcome wagon in the Southwest, after what happened with the donna and the whole excommunication dealie. But it occurs to me as I’m deboarding that I don’t even know if there’s a network down here at all. Or if anyone in my mom’s family is part of it. If they like sirens more than they like Eloko. And I don’t know if networks share exile information … which I hadn’t thought of. So I guess there’s a chance that someone I’m about to spend the next couple weeks with still has something against Uppity Eloko, which is a phrase I’ve heard a few times over the years between Mommy and her sister Carla Ann when they’re complaining about family criticizing us, and that someone knows that I am Not To Be Trusted. And I won’t know who.

  Cool.

  The thought is as welcoming as the absolutely death-defying heat. It’s like a sweater that wraps around me as soon as I’m off the plane and inside the jetway. It’s seeping in between the accordion folds or something, and besides the jeans and T-shirt, the knee-length floral kimono I wore to de-basic the outfit is too much. My hair is down and that’s immediately a gd torment.

  I regret everything. Every life choice that’s led to this moment, and this heat. I would take it all back, given the chance, because I do not understand how people are alive and living in the Southwest.

  This is nonsense. Cheezus.

  I don’t notice my cousin Courtney until he’s right beside me, and that could be due to the heat and the genuine mental power-down it’s causing, or the fact that I haven’t seen him since he came to visit me in Portland almost ten years ago. At which time, he for sure wasn’t taller than I was, and he also didn’t have a bleached blond coily mushroom top with a super-clean fade. I didn’t know they had style down here, but maybe it just runs in the family.

  “Hey,” I say, but of course he’s not equally surprised, since he clearly saw me from a distance and made his way over.

  “Sup,” and then he leans forward, hands in his pockets, and nods toward the carousel. “Those two yours?”

  “How’d you know?” I ask, but when I look over there’s a flamboyance of black and gray luggage serpentining along, and just one matching set of coral-and-turquoise suitcases with a capital N embroidered in thick mustard thread.

  “Girl, please,” he snarks before making his way over and hoisting them off the conveyor belt.

  So no hug, but he’ll get my luggage.

  Courtney is my Aunt Carla Ann’s eldest. We used to call him lightskint because he got his dad’s buttery light brown complexion, and because it was a way to balance out all the annoyingly frequent compliments his fairer skin got from people. He was really never that fair, to be honest, and he’s less so now, so I take it he spends a lot of his time in the oppressive sun I can almost hear.

  It’s so doggone hot.

  I can’t even think. We’re all the way to his weird pickup/SUV hybrid thing—which is doing entirely too much with its category-breaking design—before I realize he’s led me out of the airport.

  “Where’s Carmen?” I ask.

  “You mean Little Bit?” he asks. “I’m surprised you know her name.” He snorts.

  “Excuse me?”

  We’ve both opened our doors and are staring at each other from opposite sides of his ugly car.

  “Whatchu need?” he says, eyebrow cocked. This boy definitely plucks.

  “Imma need the attitude to dial down, for one thing.”

  “Oh, for real?” He’s amused.

  “For real. It’s hot. I just got here. You can act like you have some sense till you know me better.”

  Now he gets in the car, smirking like a handsome asshat.

  “Till I know you better?” he repeats, face scrunched up dramatically. “I know you well enough, Nina.” He gets behind the wheel.

  Son of a.

  I guess Upside-Down Portland decided to stowaway with me.

  “Naema.” I’m not getting in this car until I’m good and ready. “It’s Naema, Corey.”

  This time when he looks at me, his hand on the steering wheel like he’s ready to go, he lifts his chin.

  “Huh. Okay.”

  I figured he’d remember that.

  He liked me fine when he spent the summer before fourth grade in Portland and told me he’d always hated his name, that he’d been getting picked on at school for supposedly having a girl’s name, and that he wanted me to tell all my Eloko friends his name was Corey instead. He’d asked me to tell them he was Eloko, too, but there was no way of selling that. They’d know. So instead we told them we were closer than twins, and that we could read each other’s minds. For that, we practiced little tells so that when we had to prove it to people, we could hold something behind our backs and we’d be able to signal what it was. Because we kept the things we’d use to prove this psychic connection on us, and eight-year-old kids aren’t super smart, so nobody thought to protest the use of things already on our person.

  Carmen, Courtney’s younger sister, was a newborn then, so it was like we were both still only children.

  We were close. Really close. When his family came back to pick him up, we promised we’d keep in touch every week, and we were pen pals for a long time. Then he asked me to spend the summer before middle school at his house, even offering to push Carmen off on our childless Aunt Toni, who he said only spoiled his little sister anymore anyway. I can’t remember what happened, but I never did make it down, and I don’t remember why, but we stopped writing around that time, too.

  “You wanna get in and close the door? Maybe stop wasting my a/c.”

  I snort and toss my hair over my shoulder before climbing aboard. “Ain’t nobody worried about your little air-conditioning.”

  “How air-conditioning gonna be little?” he asks, laughing, and starts driving with one hand while the other arm drapes lazy in his lap. “Y’all stupid.”

  I’m barely containing a smirk because by y’all he means me and Auntie Carla Ann, who is notorious for reducing everything and anything to smallness when she’s annoyed. I haven’t seen her any more recently than I’ve seen Courtney, but she and my mom FaceTime pretty regularly, so I know she still does it.

  We drive in comfortable, amused silence for a minute, and he keeps snorting before shaking his head. And then he tries to ruin it.

  “That ain’t the voice you use in those little livestreams of yours.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask through a sigh, keeping my head facing front since I can see with my peripherals that he’s done the same, only cutting his eyes at me like he doesn’t care much about what he’s just said.

  “It means what it means. You got a whole ’nother way of speaking when you post.”

  “So you watch my posts.” I refuse to go where he leads.

  “So you didn’t know your cousin watches your posts.”

  “Boy, I have fifty thousand subscribers. And you aren’t one of them, I know that.”

  “Oh, would you have noticed?”

  “Yep. So you creep, but you don’t comment, or subscribe, and it’s my fault I didn�
��t know you were there.” He doesn’t grunt or snort or scoff at that. “I guess communication only goes both ways in Portland.”

  And then, before I can stop myself: “Had fifty thousand.”

  Now he turns to look at me, while we idle at a stoplight.

  “You think that’s from the glitch, or you really think you lost some?”

  So I guess he noticed the deactivation.

  “Anyway.” I don’t return his gaze. “What’s good to eat?”

  “Hah. I got you,” he says, flicking on his turn signal like I just started something.

  “Oh, it’s that good?”

  “Just wait. Wheeeew, you ain’t ready.” And the easy laughter is back. Like the summer we spent together in Portland was yesterday, and everything in between never happened.

  Chapter XII

  Upside-Down Portland refuses to let me go.

  When my nine-year-old baby cousin, Carmen, comes bounding out to the garage to meet Courtney and me, she’s got a very familiar and fashionable white mask shoved down beneath her chin and I have to actively keep myself from recoiling.

  Courtney made clear he’d seen the movie—or at least knew enough about it to call me Nina—but I was hoping the rest of the family hadn’t. I can’t imagine Mommy hasn’t told Aunt Carla Ann … everything, but for once I was planning to happily stay out of grown folks’ business and pretend I didn’t know she knew I was Stoned. Now I’m struggling to understand what sympathetic, Naema-concerned conversation could’ve taken place and still resulted in everybody not only watching the movie, but also buying a siren synthesizer.

  For the sake of full disclosure: yes. Sprite synthesizers came first. We had them when I was a kid. We used to play with them in parks, if you can believe it. Which obviously fell out of popularity after four kids were turned to statues by what we all thought were mischievous sprites. In a stroke of genius or, as I like to call it, We Are Not Recalling Our Cash Cow, a new ad campaign specifically advised against using the toy outside. Like anybody was gonna listen to an advisory like that.