Like Breathing, by Vonetta Young

Today, a Saturday, in the mall, there are lots of men who remind me of my dad: going bald, not-too-tall, skin the same color as the bark on the pine trees behind my school, tummies starting to poke out. Mommy says that’s what happens when men get old. I am 11-and-three-quarters, and everyone used to tell me I look like my dad. Relatives and people at church would tell me so, even when he wasn’t there with me, and one time, when he took me to K-Mart to buy me a pair of roller skates, a woman neither one of us knew stopped and said, “Ew! She looks just like you!” I laughed because I didn’t think it’s true.

I wish I was here with my friends. I am almost a teenager; teenagers only ever come to the mall with their friends, not their mom and half-sister. Kimi is in college 30 miles away from where Mommy and I live, and this is how we hang out with her, walking around the nice mall in South Charlotte, not buying anything.

Kimi says, “I was like, why would you do that?” She’s angry with her boyfriend, but at least she has one, even if he is a jerk.

Mommy shakes her head and sucks her teeth. She puts on her fake Southern accent. “Ain’t none of ‘em right,” she says, and she and Kimi laugh.

The mall is cold. I cross my arms over my favorite shirt. It’s light blue with clouds and matches my shorts. I love how comfortable it is, but it makes me feel like a little girl because it’s not as cool as the clothes in the Delia*s catalog.

When I realize what I’ve done, I uncross my arms fast. I don’t want Mommy to think I’m upset about something. Then she’ll ask what I’m upset about and tell me to get un-upset real quick. But I’m not upset. I’m just cold.

Walking next to my mom and sister, I wonder if the people in the mall think I’m adopted. I am brown, darker than both of them. They have straight hair styled long or short, however they like. They’re thick, like in old paintings of rich women. I am skinny and wear square wire-rimmed glasses and my hair is slick and curly because from my Wave Nouveau. My eyes bug out a little bit like my dad’s. They are open wide. I can’t help it. I’m lucky that the glasses make them look smaller. No one notices that my eyes are actually pretty, a honey brown that surprises me in right light in mirrors. They just see the glasses, activated hair, and flat chest, if they notice me at all.

Last year, Trevor, the boy I’ve liked since third grade, told me he liked this cloud shirt. I think about him when I wear it. He didn’t say anything about my hair or my glasses, though, when I got them at the beginning of sixth grade now that we go to school with eighth-grade girls who have boobs and wear makeup.

“And then he had a nerve to say, ‘I don’t know,’” Kimi whines. I’ve never heard a boy squeal like that, but that’s how she and Mommy talk when they make fun of men. “I said, ‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’” She rolls her eyes. Mommy smushes her lips together and shakes her head. She made the same face every time Daddy used to leave the room without speaking to her, before they separated.

One time, when we lived with Daddy, he came in the house saying, “Hey, babygirl, how you doin’?” and Mommy turned around, smiling all big. Then she saw Daddy petting the dog. “That’s my girl, that’s my girl,” he said. The beagle licked at his nose. Mommy pressed her lips together, shook her head, and went back to cooking.

Last year, Mommy had a vision. In it, Daddy’s house was destroyed by a massive wave. I shook from her just telling me about it. “Water means judgment,” she said. So, we left his house with trash bags full of our clothes.

It wasn’t good for us to be there, with Daddy ignoring Mommy and me, and telling us that it was his house, not ours. Mommy says that if we had stayed, she would have died. I don’t know how she would have died—Daddy never touched us in bad or good ways. She said she was depressed. All I know is that if she had died, I would have had to die, too.

I haven’t seen or heard from Daddy in months. One of Mommy’s cousins said he’s trying to start a church. I try not to think about why he never calls me, like a pastor should call his kids. Maybe he doesn’t want to. But thinking about that makes me sad, so I instead of thinking about it, I go to school, get on the all-A honor roll, and want to leave North Carolina forever. I want to be a writer because writers can make people act however they want them to.

Voices bounce off the walls and high, high ceilings of the mall. When I hear laughter, I turn my head. A group of white girls who are real teenagers—the kind who come to the mall with their friends and wear spaghetti strap tank tops without caring about their school’s dress code—are giggling, breaking up from a huddle that I can tell started around a whisper.

“Oh my God, I do not like Kevin!” one shrieks.

They laugh and show their metal braces and glossy lips. They are blonde, brunette, never redhead. Their eyes are close together. Their skin is pale or gold from the tanning bed. Their vision is perfect. Or maybe they wear contacts. Mommy says she can’t afford contacts and they probably aren’t good for my eyes, anyway. Each girl has a big bag from American Eagle or Abercrombie and a small one from Claire’s. I guess they bought matching halter tops or baby doll dresses and chokers, like the ones I’ve seen in Delia*s. One after the other, they run their fingers through their hair and tuck it behind their ears. I wonder if they rehearsed that.

We stop in front of Talbots so Mommy can look at the stiff suits on the mannequins. “That is sharp!” She says. “I’m gonna dress nice like this for work again one day. And wear shoes that don’t stink!” Kimi laughs. I would laugh, too, but I’m too busy imagining what the white girls’ bedrooms look like. They probably look like DJ Tanner’s, but with Hanson and Backstreet Boys posters on the walls. The walls move a little bit when the girls slam their doors because they’re mad at their moms for not letting them go to the mall because they didn’t do their homework the night before. Then their dad probably comes and knocks on the door softly, and the girl yells, “Go away!” but he comes in anyway. And he sits on the pink comforter, where she’s lying with her face in a Laura Ashley pillow, and he says, “You know we love you. If you do your homework now, I’ll take you to the mall.” And so she jumps up and hugs him, and bounces over to her desk while her dad leaves her room, smiling as he shuts the door softly.

I want a door to slam. Not the one I share with my mom now that we live in a bedroom at her cousin’s house. I want a door so I can slam it hard, so my dad will tell me he loves me and will take me to the mall to hang out with my friends. I want to go to Claire’s and buy earrings and laugh and tell my friends I don’t like Kevin, even though I really do. I want my next trip to mall to be the only thing I ever care about.

The air conditioning hits me like wind, and I shiver. I cross my arms again, but only for a second.

My sneakers squeak on the mall floor. They’re old. I look down at them like that will make them stop squeaking. When I look up, I see a little girl with blond ringlets who seems like she’s suspended in midair.

She is on her father’s shoulders. She giggles. She wraps her arms around his head, nearly blindfolding him with her sleeve. He chuckles and says, “Whoa, there! Peek-a-boo!” Smiling anyway, he holds onto her legs to keep her from falling from such a high height.

“I told you they’re all crazy,” Mommy says. They’re still talking about the boyfriend. “I asked Vonetta’s dad for child support and he said he couldn’t, talkin’ ‘bout he needs to start his church…”

My ears stop up. It’s weird. I know there’s a lot of noise—shoes on the floor, Mommy and Kimi laughing—but all I can hear and see is the little blond girl on her dad’s shoulders. The light from the clothing store window shines on them as the little girl pats her father’s head with both of her tiny white hands. She’s wearing a pink dress with frills on the edges of the shoulders and the bottom, and jelly sandals that glitter in the light. He’s wearing a button-down shirt and khaki pants, like he’s going to work on a Saturday. I wonder where the mom is, but as they walk closer to me, toward the hallway to the bathrooms, a thin white woman with curly blonde hair comes out and turns her head like she’s looking for them. When she sees them, she grins, and they walk off together, down the mall until I can’t see them anymore.

I watch my mom and my sister ahead of me, talking about the boyfriend who is stupid and my dad who is stupid, too. I wonder if they saw the family that has everything we don’t have. I guess that they did. They just didn’t say anything because they don’t want to remind themselves of what we don’t have.

In our family, fatherlessness is like breathing, something everyone does, and nobody thinks about it until someone isn’t doing it anymore. Mommy and Kimi grew up without their dads; Mommy, from when she was a baby, and Kimi, from when she was a little girl. So I can’t tell them, “I want my dad to love me,” because I got more time with mine than both of them put together. Maybe my mom and sister used to be mad, but they don’t seem mad anymore. They’ve never talked to me about feeling angry and alone and invisible.

Even though I clench my jaw and tell them not to, tears well up in my eyes. I don’t want them to get my glasses wet. And I pray that Mommy doesn’t see because she doesn’t like for me to be sad because it could mean that I might be depressed, too, and she doesn’t want me to be depressed. Then she’ll say that I should pray about it, and even though I pray about a lot of things, I don’t want to pray about this. I’m just angry, and I want to be angry, but being angry is a sin, and I don’t want to go to hell for being angry.

“What’s wrong, Netta?” Kimi asks. She’s stopped and seen me. Mommy stops, too.

I realize that this is our life. Maybe Mommy is right. If my dad can’t love me and I can’t change that, why should I be upset about it? I should just accept it. It will hurt less if I do. Mommy doesn’t want me to hurt.

My mother and sister are still looking at me, probably wondering why I’m crying. I don’t know how to say anything I’m feeling. I just know it hurts, and I’m not allowed to hurt inside, only on the outside, when some body part that doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.

“Cramps,” I finally spit.

I scrunch up my face. I’m not entirely sure where cramps actually happen. I haven’t gotten my period yet, and Mommy and Kimi both know it. I clutch my side and bare my teeth in all the pain that I feel in my chest.

“I’m sorry,” Mommy says. She starts walking again.

We pass a window full of mannequins, hands on their hips, wearing baby doll dresses and chokers. They look over their shoulders, not at us. We don’t stop to look at them either.

Vonetta Young is a writer and financial services consultant living in Washington, DC. Her essays have been published in Catapult, DASH, and Lunch Ticket, among others. Her short fiction has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue and is forthcoming in Gargoyle. She has written a memoir about growing up with an absent father who was a minister, and is working on a story collection about Black women being messy. Follow her on Twitter at @VonettaWrites.