Pure Slang and Shoe Game

from Crest2023

That Girl Clara Ottati

Patterson Grant

While the morning is dark, and the highway roads are bumpy, I sigh. The red Toyota SUV jerks, swerves and flies me around down highway 92 since I was too lazy to put on my seatbelt. To me, summer is walking down Michigan Ave, window shopping with friends; not driving thirty minutes to the Southside of Chicago wondering what you did wrong to be going here. I shouldn’t dread the darkness waking me up because “correction camp” was at 8:00 am. I wasn’t built in the hood. I wasn’t created for the violence and slang that came with the city.

“This camp will be better for you. It’ll help you connect with your hood side.” Those eight words resonate an echo in my hollow brain. It’ll help me connect with my hood side. A long way of saying: I’m not black enough. The stars are no longer visible - saying goodbye to one another, akin to me and my mother this morning - and the sun is rising, bringing a source of light to this eerie car. Of course, the radio is broken, adding to the greatness of my day, forcing the thickness of silence to clog my ears. I’m spoken to but don’t speak. Instead, I give subtle ‘yes’ to questions I don’t know. I can see my chauffeur, a talkative lady I assume, mouthing her lips; the plum lipstick on her teeth as she smiles words. I envy her smile: I copy the curve of her lips in my brain printer, saving it as my smile for meeting what my mom wishes I was.

If I was given the choice to go here, the curved walls of my room would replace the janky, rusted SUV. My twin bed with green sheets would comfort my body instead of the ripping leather cushion. The chirping crickets I feed my lizards at night is what I am yearning to have again, while I’m instead stuck with two snoring children to the left of me - a snot bubble pulsing in and out of their noses simultaneously, reminding me of The Shining twins. It doesn’t help that there is construction on the road, forcing my legs in the direction of the child next to me as we coast above cracks in the hood. Cement mounts the potholes and the scent slaps my nose hair follicles in the face. Why can’t I be the hole? The cement covering my body would give me a reason to not be in this car which is on the verge of breaking down on the shoulder of the road.

The reflecting sunlight on her phone blinds my eyes as the GPS reads 2 minutes. 2 minutes until I’m surrounded by Jordan Retro Shoes fresh out of the box accessorized with sentences leaving out important vowels; things I am not used to. The stiff silence in my ears is now replaced by screaming children, the thumping of basketballs grazing the cement, and chirping birds bringing me back to my early mornings of Elementary School; a faint sense of peace. The plum purple lips signal me out of the car as the SUV doors automatically open. Overwhelmingly hyper pre-teens laugh as if they are so familiar with each other; this is their neighborhood, so why wouldn’t they be? I get chills on my shoulders from my paranoid eyes as they observe my surroundings. The feeling of comfortability, to me, seems foreign. “This is going to be a piece of cake,” she would say; but the weird stares at my straightened hair, busted air force ones and jean shorts tell me differently.

My feet carry my legs down the narrow hallways as I hum a tune to keep me sane. Remembering scorching hot sand burning my feet, trying to dive to hit the white and blue volleyball that ended up on my face; remembering all the summers that started better than this one. The floors are freshly polished, smelling of artificial citrus oranges, making my head ache as I scan my surroundings. Three children no older than sixteen carry flaming hot Cheetos and cheese, the tiger on the bag joyous to be there accompanied by his black sunglasses, while the girls talk amongst each other. The silhouette in the middle has hair that seems longer than a ten-foot rope and dark dewy, milky skin. Her outfit seemed…boujee, with tight black ripped jeans and a white graphic tee paired with red Jordans. At that moment I wanted to be her. She fit in; she was the blueprint building this camp. The mastermind architect, building her lair. I must have missed the memo since I look nothing like her. I look out of place. Thoughts aside, to please my mother I walk towards the three girls remembering the plum-toothed smile.

“What is that? It looks so soggy and gross.” If impressions were getting an F in History class, I would have done so well. I’m not religious, never will be, but I pray zip ties are holding my mouth shut. I pray my guardian angel will sense helplessness. I pray I was never here in the first place since if I vanished I would not have been asked, “Why you sound like that?” I quickly translate her vocabulary mistakes to why do you sound like that, for better understanding. “Sound like what?” I choke on my words as they form a hairball in my throat. All itchy and irritated.

“White.” White? I double-check the fronts and backs of my hand, having no other choice but to do so considering I’ve never been this young experiencing teenage girls making fun of how I talk. Weakness fills my bones and I do nothing but internally cry. “Well, if I was from Australia and moved to America then I would sound different.” Stupid, stupid, stupid. If you were from Australia… really? You’re not from Australia, you’re from Oak Park. A white town. It feels as if the Joker threw laugh gas directly at the three musketeers in front of me. The green and purple smoke replaced the brightness of the cracked lights above me, and all I can do is think about how many more times I have to come here. Approximately 36 days. 5.14 weeks. Too long. The crinkling of the flaming hot Cheetos bag haunts my soul as I support myself back outside to hopefully catch my chauffeur. The whirring of the engine lets me know I’m stuck here for half my summer. The woman who insisted on conversations about God-knows-what is taken away into the abyss, leaving me isolated. I regret not listening to her stories and questions because maybe, just maybe the Toyota would have stayed for 10 extra seconds and I would have had an escape. Yet, instead of window shopping, I stare out the window; my breath and remorse creating warm fog on the window sill. While I could be with friends, I’m stuck with being the outcast because I have not a single pair of Jordan shoes. I don’t know slang. I don’t know how to prepare comebacks in my head after being called white; I don’t know how to be black.

The Hindenburg

Shea Richards

A man lies on a brown leather couch in his dull, paralyzed living room. He breathes from his mouth, for he can’t seem to feel his nose, or rather, most of his face. The quiet, ear-splitting whir of his oscillating fan two feet from his eyes bullies the curls of his hair, but it can’t drown out his thoughts, and his head harasses him. He barely hears the chatter of frogs in the humid summer night over the pounding of his own mind. Slivers of silver moonlight crawl through the window onto the floor and glare back at him. The metronome behind his bloodshot eyes thumps louder. Louder. He groans and holds his head in his hands. Walls he can’t see close in on him. The sofa under his legs becomes enormous. He feels as if he was balancing on top of a zeppelin, the wind crying in the voices of a dozen people he knows, he thinks he knows. The moon on the floor cackles at him. He screams.

Something knocks furiously on the door of his mind. Something wants in. It wants in. He obliges.

Rusted hinges of thought creak and are then blown open as an overwhelming surge of watercolor floods his mind. The walls retreat, only to flash and transform into a complex fractal of shimmering mirrors and prisms. Rainbows scatter throughout the room and into his eyes. The moonlight on the liquid floor stands up and hugs him with milky arms before vanishing into a bright vanilla cloud. The rotating fan melts into the floor right in front of his eyes, and the deafening, awful noise it once made is replaced with an ethereal lullaby from the frogs outside his window. The man touches his face. He can feel every groove in his fingerprint caress his cheeks. The ceiling fades into dust and the night sky appears. The Milky Way smiles at him and the stars applaud. He feels weightless, and looks down to see his disco ball room floating in a sea of liquid mercury. The indigo colors of Neptune dance in the ripples of the ocean. And yet, he hears a faint cry from his tangled imagination. As the night sky begins to swallow him whole, the pounding returns. Fragments of the air around him become stiff and fizzle out. The edges of his vision blur and redshift. The lullaby is slowly replaced with a long, choleric sigh. Stars start to stumble from the sky and he is suddenly again surrounded by pitch blackness.

As the whir of the fan returns, he panics, for a forbidden thought has crossed his mind.