Black and White

 

by
Arjun Bhattacharya

 

 

I never knew what he wrote in that black diary of his.  He would pull it out at the most perfect moments, interrupting them with a spew of relentless scribbling.  It was almost mechanical for Reid: he usually wore a blazer or a jacket with a hidden interior pocket in which he could neatly place his journal.  Then, he would pull out his pen and either uncap it with his teeth or click the back of the pen on the side of his cheek.

 

I had known Reid since our diaper days.  Of course, all I know about our relationship was hearsay, that our mothers would meet up every other day in the morning for coffee.  They would unleash us in the living room with a myriad of toys: stuffed animals, rattles, trains, cars.  My mom loved telling me stories about how Reid and I would play.  Apparently, I was an abusive child; I would hit and scream and spit in his hair, but Reid patiently bore it.

 

It was rather unusual that the two of us pretty much spent our entire childhoods together.  We both attended the Little Learners preschool right outside our neighborhood.  Our teacher thought we were fraternal twins because we spent every waking moment of class with one another.  We would scribe the alphabet next to each other and fight for the squishy green eraser. We would eat our lunches together—peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with four carrot sticks and a milk pouch.  Even though he had the Y chromosome between the two of us, I was usually the one who tried to squirt milk through my nose.  It was a smooth role reversal at that age; I was the clown in the pair, and he was the big brother.  During nap time, we would place our blankets next to each other and have staring contests, anything to avoid going to sleep.  Invariably, we were placed in the same class every year for elementary school.  Whether it was karma or some sort of figment of chance, I can’t say, but Reid and I were inseparable.  It was a fun time.

 

Remember that time in fourth grade?  Maybe it was earlier, but Mrs. Randolph spent a couple of hours in class talking about the horrors of global warming.  She gave a rousing speech, a call to arms of sorts, telling us to take the matter into our own hands, that the youth would rise to conquer the world’s savage problems.  Unfortunately, those savage problems were much too big to fit in our nine-year old hands.

 

It was that creek behind our neighborhood that we frequented all the time.  The creek where we found the bullfrog that we took back to your place. We thought that to save the world we had to rescue wildlife from the treacherous perils of pollution and deforestation. I can still remember your mom’s face when the two of us walked into the house, clothes soiled, hands muddied, bullfrog in your arms.  She didn’t notice the frog until it let out a massive croak and jumped out of your hands, right at your mother’s feet.  I swear she jumped back a mile and gave a scream that the entire block could hear.  But it was always encouraging that your mother never objected to us, even though we always got into so much trouble.

 

Year after year went by, and Reid and I didn’t make any other friends probably because we didn’t need to.  In fifth grade, Reid was selected to be placed in the honors program; it was a tragic day for me when he broke the news to me.

 

“Kelsey, they put me in AG.”  He looked like the police was about to take him to get hanged.  Maybe my ensuing fury was just as bad as getting hanged.

 

“What? You’re going to be in the class with the smart people?”  After asking that seemingly pointed rhetorical question, I stormed off in my denim overalls and white Skechers.  It was the first day of school, and I was looking forward to another year of “shenanigans and hoopla,” as Mrs. Randolph used to call our antics.  Throughout the entire morning of the first day, I sat at my desk and looked at the red second hand circle around the clock, waiting for both black hands to meet each other at the zenith of their path.  The teacher may have called on me a couple of times to get my attention, but I kept trying to think of how I could yell at Reid for abandoning me.  His actions showed a blatant lack of concern for me.  How could he have thought that I could get through a day, let alone an entire year, without him in the class?  At lunch, I found him sitting at a table with his new classmates, and I went up to him and smacked him.  I knew I made a point.  Then, I walked away and ate my lunch alone; it didn’t feel good making a point.

 

On the bus back home, I purposely sat away from Reid; as it was, I was making a point.  Reid kept looking back at me longingly, but I channeled some of the attention I didn’t use for school to keep my head pointed straight ahead.  I even contemplated taking a nap, but that was probably an extreme alternative.  When the bus came to a halt, I took the head of the line of kids neatly filing out of the bus.  I raced home like a horse in a derby, blinders on, not wanting to look over my shoulder.  I didn’t want to see Reid’s pathetic face.  He was probably dejected after I ignored him the entire day.  I even chuckled a little when I realized that I had made my point.

 

The next day, I gave him the same silent treatment on the way to school.  I had to make him come to me, I couldn’t cave in right now. But he kept following me.  Straight to my class.  He even sat down right next to me.  I turned to him angrily.  “Why are following me?”

 

“I’m not following you.  This is my class now too.” 

 

My face lit up.

 

They say that hobbies are a way to get your mind off of everyday life.  You’re working for school every day, hour after hour, and you need something to do so that you won’t go completely insane.  That’s where a hobby kicks in to divert your attention.  We were watching ESPN Classic and they were showing Michael Jordan’s 1988 game against Cleveland.  He elevated right in front of Craig Ehlo and rattled in the game-winning shot.  It was the most perfect basketball play I had ever witnessed.  That was the moment I fixed in my mind that basketball would be my hobby.  It didn’t occur to me that it would take a little bit of athleticism to actually pursue basketball actively.  But I knew that I was the Second Coming of Jordan.

 

I pleaded with my parents to buy me a basketball hoop for our driveway.  You took me to a local garage sale, where I found that beat-up basketball.  I haggled the price down from three dollars to a buck fifty.  You should have seen the face of the woman selling the goods.  The disbelief written over her face was priceless.  There I was, a mere boy of twelve, bargaining for a basketball at an already bargained price.  I think I dribbled the ball all the way back home and shot around until it was dark; I think you were a little jealous of my new best fried.  Mom yelled at me for staying outside so long in the summertime because I might have “caught a heatstroke or gotten bitten by a rattlesnake.”  Needless to say, that comment went in one ear and straight out the other, and since when do rattlesnakes live in New York?

 

When tryouts for school came along, I felt the urge to bring my talents to the school gym and show off my improvement.  The tryouts were open to public, so you were sitting in the front row of the bleachers.  We started with a few sprints to assess our speed, lateral and straight.  We slalomed through cones, shot free throws, drove for layups, did a rebounding drill, passed the ball into a set target.  After an hour, most of the spectators had already left; I can’t blame them—watching a group of seventh grade boys dribble around was mind-numbing at best.  Then we started our scrimmages.  I think that I was in the running for the team at that point; I had made the most free throws and I dribbled around the cones without losing the ball at all.  But the scrimmage was the moment that I was not looking forward to; all of the other boys were taller, bigger, faster, stronger than me.  But I remembered what Michael Jordan had said after his shot over Craig Ehlo, that you can’t give up and you have to keep on being aggressive.  I might have misinterpreted his comments.

 

On my team’s second offensive play, the point guard passed me the ball at the corner of the three-point arc.  I faked a shot and ran by the perimeter defender. I knew that I would be able to lay the ball in after throwing off my initial defender.  I steamed along to the hoop with my head straight down, but when I looked up at the goal, the center was there.  He was huge—at twelve he already had well-defined muscles, he was at least six feet tall and at that height, he wasn’t about to draw a charge.  I jumped to gain some air on my layup, but he timed his jump perfectly.  His hand came down on the ball, knocking it cleanly out of my hands and right onto my face.  The force of the impact dropped me to the ground.  I could feel the warm blood flowing from my nose, and then the world became dark.  When I woke up, I was lying in the hospital and you were sitting in the easy chair in the corner of the room.  You walked to my bedside and told me to never play basketball again; there was a hint of sternness in your voice, but most of it was a worry that I had never heard in your voice or seen on your face.  So I took up writing instead.

 

The transition into high school wasn’t as rough as people advertised.  English to Algebra II to Biology to lunch to class after class after class.  It wasn’t rough, it was just tediously boring.  The teachers were stricter, more meticulous.  Reid and I had the same freshman English teacher, Mrs. Feinstein; I bet she was a spinster who lived at home with twenty cats.  I think Feinstein loved Reid and his quirky writing style more than she hated me, which is definitely a compliment for Reid.  She assigned an in-class essay every Friday, during which she would sit at her desk, tilting her glasses to the hilt of her nose.  I still don’t understand what the point of that was; she taught us the word “myopic” by relating the term to her own vision.  If she needed her glasses to see distances, why would she push them away from her eyes?  Whenever I asked Reid that question, he would burst out laughing and told me to “just hang in there.”  High school brought a lot of changes: my mom started buying me dresses and girly clothes.  I learned to stay quiet and not grumble about them.  Reid’s wardrobe started to include those blazers, and at first it was a brown herringbone jacket with the professor elbow pads.  He told me that it was classy; he also told me that it matched my eyes.  I think he was trying to hit on me.

 

The thing about high school was keeping up.  Feinstein said that high school is the first kilometer of the 25K marathon of life.  As far as I remember, I rolled my eyes at that metaphor and continued doodling in my notebook.  But, as much as it tickles a sense of chagrin, she was right.  So many things happened at the same time: clubs, SATs, exams for school, sports.  You couldn’t stop for a little while to catch your breath because, sooner or later, you’d fall behind.  For that reason, Reid and I would allocate every Friday night to either pizza and a movie or pizza and the NBA doubleheader.  It was a weekly thing through sophomore year.  Since we didn’t have any classes together that year, that was our only way to catch up and stay attuned to each other’s lives.

 

With junior year came a black jacket, a gray wool one, and a beige worsted coat.  Reid would cycle through his coats every week and on Fridays he would wear a sweater vest.  We tried to keep the Friday pizza night alive, but we both had our constraints.  I had joined the school’s tennis team.  When I told Reid that I was trying out for the tennis team, he smiled and said, “You realize that tennis is a pretty feminine sport, right?”  My comeback was to tell him that the Williams sisters are pretty manly.  We both bowled over with laughter.  At the same time, Reid started focusing on submitting his writings to journals and literary magazines.  One of his essays from freshman year had been published in our school’s annual writing symposium.  He had started reading Nietzche and Kant and Thoreau and Voltaire and the philosophies of other dead people.  His goal was to get an essay published in the Journal of Philosophy by the end of high school.  When most of the other kids at school were focused on driving to school, Reid would walk to school with a treatise from some European philosopher in hand, disregarding any worldly object around him, including any cars as he crossed the street.  Sometimes, instead of driving to school, I would walk with him, mainly to make sure he didn’t get run over by an SUV.

 

The world isn’t supposed to be black; it’s supposed to have colors, rich blues and bold reds and lush greens and soft yellows.  It’s supposed to be a palate of tastes and textures for your eyes, with backdrops and foregrounds, details and layers.  As majestic as that sounds, life is monochromatic: there’s only white, black, and other shades of gray.  But that’s colorful, right?

 

 I submitted my paper to a listserv for the Journal of Philosophy for critique, and today I’ve already gotten twenty e-mails from philosophy professors around the country, trying to recruit me for college.  I have to owe all of this to you, Kelsey.  I couldn’t have mustered the courage to post that essay.  Even though you give me a hard time for my writing and my blazers and my shoes, it’s all a façade.  When I first donned that mocha suit I found in my dad’s closet, you looked at me with disbelief.  Then you grinned and mockingly commented, “Who wears that to school, Reid?  Did you want a blast from the past with that coat?”  You and your one-line zingers.  Sometimes I feel like you said those type of things to push my buttons and push me along, encourage me.

 

I was driving home for tennis practice on a Friday night.  Second semester seniors, a role that every high school student strives for.  The ability to go to school and come home and not have any tying strings called homework holding you down.  Even though it was strictly against the law, I picked up my phone and called Reid.  I had hardly seen him this year, probably because of applications and my tennis and his writing.  Even though we lived next to each other, I never saw him.  We didn’t have any classes together either in school; actually, I hadn’t seen him in a while.  Over the summer, we had agreed on going to a local coffee and sandwich joint near school once a week.  But the plan never followed out to fruition.  I had assumed that he was probably in the library, writing or reading, so I ate lunch with the girls from the tennis team.

 

I was free for the night, and I thought that we could resurrect pizza and a movie after a year and a half hiatus.  The phone rang five times and a mechanical voice came through.  I clicked my phone off because there wasn’t a point to leaving a message; Reid wasn’t the biggest fan of technology.  I decided to drop by his house and ask him in person.  I pulled my car into his driveway.  My parents had bought me a new cerulean car after I told them that Columbia accepted me with a tennis scholarship.  It worked well because Reid had been accepted to NYU for his philosophy credentials.  I was scared at first about moving to straight to New York City after living in suburbia for my entire life, but having Reid, at least in the same vicinity, made it a lot less daunting.

 

I rang the doorbell, and his mother opened the door.  Reid’s mother was soft-spoken woman, but she had become much quieter since her husband died.  She gave a small half-smile, exposing the wrinkles outside her eyes, “Hi Kelsey.  Reid went out for a minute, I’ll tell him to call you when he gets back.”  She was usually a warm and friendly woman, but her tone was much colder.  She looked almost worried.

 

“Is everything ok, Mrs. Matthews?”  I took caution when I asked her that.  I knew that something was amiss, and I knew that it had to do with Reid.  “Where’s Reid?”

 

            “Oh, just out and about.  You know him, trying to find some inspiration for his writings.”  I caught that lie too quickly.

 

“That’s odd.  His inspiration usually comes from reading philosophy.”  I decided to play devil’s advocate.  “Has he turned to poetry or something?  He always hated that.”

 

“No, I just told him to get some fresh air so he could refocus on his work.”

 

“Oh, ok, that makes a lot more sense.  Well, I guess you could tell him that I dropped by.  I’d like to if you could tell him to call me when he gets home.”  As I walked away from the porch, his mother slammed the door.  Obviously, there was something wrong.  Reid’s intellectualism came from his mother, but I was able to make her talk herself in circles.  I spent the entire night looking out my window at Reid’s porch, hoping that his mother was actually telling the truth, that Reid would emerge, journal in hand, donning one of his coats.  But Reid did not come back from the walk that his mother talked about.  I went over to Reid’s house a couple of times and pestered Mrs. Matthews about Reid, but every time she would come up with some excuse to dismiss me.  I even blatantly asked her if Reid “was okay,” but she just gathered herself very weakly and mustered an “of course.”  After a few days, I decided that it wasn’t worth it.  I had enough evidence proving that there was something wrong, and I would just wait until Reid came to me.  That was a naïve decision.

 

A week later, a UPS delivery man rang our doorbell; I opened the door because my parents were out.  He handed me a cardboard box, addressed to me.  After signing off on the delivery man’s registry, I ran to my kitchen and used a knife to tear the tape on the box away.  It was nearing my birthday, and my grandmother usually sends me my present a week or two in advance.  Apparently, the postal services in America aren’t like they used to be.  I ripped open the box, but it wasn’t a present from my grandmother.  I held up a black notebook.  The covers of the book were scaly, probably made of some cheap leather; a latch stretched from the back of the book to the front to hold the book together.  I unhooked the bronze latch.  The pages were slightly yellowed, but I recognized the handwriting distinctly.  I started reading the journal, page after page, until I reached the last entry.  Two days ago.

 

God is not dead.  You just have to give birth to him.  Find your own niche and then expand it.  Broader and broader, higher and higher, until you can give rise to a fledgling God, something worth living for and something worth dying for.  I’m happy to say that I found that niche, I was lucky enough to find that niche in my eighteen years.

 

Kelsey, if you’re reading this, then you should probably know that I’m gone.  I started writing this journal for a way to gather my thoughts and think.  But it didn’t turn out to be that at all.  It was actually a collection of memories that I wanted to hold on to, regardless of what it took.  Usually friends live separate lives together or similar lives separately, but I’m lucky to say that we lived similar lives together.  Our interests may have deviated, but you were there for me every step of the way.  And I grew tired of that.

 

I want you to forgive me for growing tired of that.  You didn’t care for me through obligation, and childishly, I did not recognize that.  Don’t be mad at me.  Cancer does strange things to your rational mind. 

 

I stopped short.  Why did he not tell me about it?  Tears were already streaming down my face, but I could feel a sense of anger building inside me.  Maybe I could have done something to help him, I could have asked my father to pull some strings at the hospital, shift him to another hospital, find him some cure.  How could he hide such a serious issue from me?  My eyes hazy, I continued on.

It’s cruel, it attacks a seemingly unneeded part of your body and then spreads and finds its own niche.  And then it kills silently and slowly.  And there’s nothing anyone can do.  I give up, Kelsey.  I can’t take it anymore.  The chemo is unbearable, the radiation just hurts too much. 

 

Why did I not tell you?  That’s a good question because I don’t know.  Perhaps I couldn’t bear seeing you worried.  You’re always the light, jumpy, bright sort of girl who takes the optimistic road not taken.  Showing you reality didn’t appeal to me.  So I wrote this.  It isn’t a journal anymore; it’s a tribute, a dedication of sorts.  I’m no good for anything else; all I can do is write and preach what I’ve learned.  Peel away an onion layer by layer.      In the end, it’s just you now in our niche.  But maybe you’ll remember me with this notebook.

 

Oh, and by the way, I was hitting on you that one day.

 

I didn’t know if I should have laughed or cried.  I did both.

 

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WillyCon XIII (2011) Short Story Contest - 1st place (tie) for High School Category