Sublime

In the dormitories, she’d been surrounded by the relentlessly ambitious, but in that West Hollywood apartment building, all of the neighbors she met were people whose dreams of fame had already been dashed. Cinematographers working at Kodak stores, screenwriters teaching English to immigrants, actors starring in burlesque shows in seedy bars. The p

She felt too young to be washed up, but then again, she had ridden an improbable string of luck. Her whole life, in fact, had been a gift of good fortune—she had been given whiteness. Blonde hair, a pretty face, a nice figure, a rich father. She’d sobbed out of speeding tickets, flirted her way to endless second chances. Her whole life, a bounty of

Neither blackness nor “people of color” stimulates in me notions of excessive, limitless love, anarchy, or routine dread.

She doubted that she would find any shade to match her skin and besides, she knew what people called dark girls wearing red lipstick. Baboon ass.

thoughts pinging the closed windows like a trapped bee.

The summer that author Toni Morrison died, I went on a binge-read of her majestic novels and essays. For years, she had been a beacon for me: a truth teller, a way finder, a culture changer. A woman who bore witness to her own experience and courageously told her story.

She was smarter than him and they both knew it. It wasn’t just school—Lane Dean was in accounting and business and did all right, he was hanging in there. She was a year older, she was twenty, but it was also more—she had always seemed to Lane to be on good terms with her life in a way age could not account for. His mother had put it that she knew

paltry

knowledge