Tender

Abstract

Tender Cherline Bazile (bio) My best friend doesn't like me much. She said so herself. We were driving to her house so she could braid my hair. I was upset that at the hair store she took her time trying on wigs she wouldn't buy. The braids would take hours. If I wasn't home by ten, my mom would wring my braids around my neck. In the car, the thick heat, the harsh green numbers on the dashboard that read 5:46 p.m. made me so angry I couldn't move. I didn't bother taking off my jacket. I kept the bag of hair extensions scrunched between my seatbelt and my chest, as if it could shield the world from my rage. I didn't respond when she said, I'll finish what I can tonight and do the rest tomorrow after school. Easy. After fifteen minutes of driving in silence, Best Friend said, It's ninety degrees. Take your jacket off. You have a death wish? I'm fine, I said. And that's when she said it. I wish I liked you more. Then she switched on the radio. [End Page 292] ________ We became friends back in the day, the only two Black girls in all of Lee Elementary. We were losers. Mostly because we had immigrant mothers who wore bulging scarves around their heads and weren't afraid to hit or yell at us in public. They sent us to school with saucy, smelly chicken and rice, which ensured we had no friends, because in our part of Florida no one knew how to deal with difference except to hate it. Soon after Best Friend showed up from Kenya with four large piggy tails and pink barrettes, we sat next to each other every day and pretended we spoke the same language. When the kids made fun of us for being weird, we cursed at them in our respective languages, and the teachers wouldn't say anything because when they tried Best Friend called them racist, the insult her mother told her to use if someone did her wrong. Even after Best Friend realized I understood these kids more than her, that they never asked me questions about living among lions and monkeys, we stuck together, partly out of habit, partly because we liked each other well enough, and partly because we were more like each other than we were like anyone else. We knew how to be mean in a way that was suggestive of love. We knew when to switch to our nice voices, though we didn't do this often. We sang together, shared our lunch, swapped clothes until our mothers found out and warned us that was a fast track for someone to cast a spell on you. Senior year, Best Friend grew up or whatever and decided who to care about. Which did not include me. And that might have been all right except I care so much that some days I smile so hard my lips get sore. At night I can't sleep. [End Page 293] ________ Best Friend lives with her mom and dad in a three-bedroom house in a gated community. In her living room, I sit near the leather sofa and her legs straddle me. I take the hair out of the packaging, cut off the beige rubber band, and hold out a chunk in my palm. I don't like asking her to do my hair. She thinks I'm embarrassed because I can't pay her. Really, she just braids too tight. She plucks an inch from the pile in my palm, splits it into two strands, crosses them, and presses them into a small section of my hair with her thumb. I feel the pressure on my scalp, even after she releases it. I wonder: when she pulls my baby hairs into the braid, tucks them beneath a hill of hair, repeats, does she know she hates me, and just how much? Is it finger length? Root length? Or maybe the kind that has no length at all because it never stops growing? She turns on The...