By Jennifer Maritza McCauley
Adrienne was late, per usual. She hated being late, but here she was, late for Algebra II and she wasn’t going to embarrass herself in front of all of those white kids by being late. What would they say? Dumb girl from Sharpsburg, of course she’s nothing. Or their eyes would do all the gibbering. Pin-points and spitfire that’s what they’d give her. Who cared? Either way.
She ran from her place on Chapman Street, fast, faster than she normally ran, her backpack slamming up and down on her little back and causing her red pain. As she was running, past trash-thick cans and darkened bars and coffee shops bright and yanking folks in for heavy caffeine, she was thinking about how all she needed to do was get to the bus stop and make it to homeroom and she’d be fine. She could be quiet, nobody would notice her if she blended in and said nothing. She just had to get there. They all knew her, after all she was the only Black girl in the school outside of Tiana, and they knew Adri as the one who Always Did School Right. But here she was late. Per usual.
Halfway through Adri’s sprint down the high stacked rust-red buildings she heard a grunt. It was a woman’s grunt but it was stark enough that Adri stopped in her tracks, thinking someone was hurt. She turned around and approached the alley behind her, black and garbage-filled, the cans drooping with shit and drooping pizza.
She walked past the alleyway and toward an opening behind her, flanked by grafitti’d brick of Black people, hollering and wearing purple, looking royal. In the center of the open space there was a young woman, a little older, but not much more than Adri’s sixteen years. She had long hair in fluffing curls. She wore an ivory dress crimping and flying as she danced. Her eyes were closed. She was meditating, meditating, her muscles tensing, tensing. She sang Bambula, Bambula. Adri stared at this girl, not knowing exactly what to say, and while she was trying to gauge how fast she should run to class, the girl’s eyes snapped open and she saw Adri.
“Who are you?” she said.
“What?” Adri whispered. She could tell this bomba girl was beautiful, her body bronzed and blazing. The bomba girl could be a terrifying stranger but Adri felt soft around this girl. What was she doing in an alley in the middle of Pittsburgh of all places?
“Where are you going?” the bomba girl asked gently, her voice deeper than whatever young age she was.
“To school,” Adri gulped. “Aren’t you in school?”
“No,” she said. “I work in the night. I practice bomba in the day, preparing myself.”
“For what?”
She turned back to her swishing work and spread her hands out, she shook them. The bangles on her wrists clanged and clacked.
“You do this without drums?” Adrienne asked. Her family in Puerto Rico would bomba sometimes, she knew you couldn’t flail and shake without a good beat.
She pressed her hand against her chest. “It’s in here.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“That’s very American. To be so cynical.”
Adrienne shrugged. “Girl, I’m a junior. I’m just trying to get into college.”
She smiled, a half-grin and went back to the quick work of moving her hands about.
“Okay,” she said, in that unnervingly dark voice and Adrienne didn’t know what to do with her. “That’s your path.”
“This is a sacred art,” Adrienne opined. “Why do you do it?
“Girl,” she mimicked Adrienne and swept her hands out. “Aren’t you a sacred art?” Adrienne’s face said “WTF,” and it was true. Adrienne didn’t value herself at all. She was just a high school girl from Sharpsburg with nothing to her name but a bunch of slurs hurled at her face and here was this gorgeous girl talking about how she was something beautiful.
“I guess I am.”
“Say it with your chest, mami.”
“I want to do what you do, freely,” she said. Then she said it with her chest, another cliché: “Puedo hacer cualquier cosa…”
“O le ṣe,” she tried, in a language Adri didn’t know and as she spun around Adrienne saw her own face in her spinning. “There you go,” she said gently. She stopped dancing and came over and tugged at the belt around her waist. “Me quiero tal como soy…”
She reached out and clutched her hands. Adrienne remembered she had homeroom but as she gripped her heated fingers back she suddenly didn’t care. They could say what they wanted. She stretched her back and Adri stretched hers. They were dancing, dancing, dancing African-Boricua music, taking them to palm tree’d places they’d never been, in Pittsburgh’s aching center, not worried about the time.
Jennifer Maritza McCauley is the author of SCAR ON/SCAR OFF, When Trying to Return Home; Stories and Kinds of Grace: Poems. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Kimbilio and CantoMundo and her work has been a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Best Fiction Book of the Year by Kirkus Reviews and a Must-Read by Elle, Latinx in Publishing, Ms. Magazine and Southern Review of Books. She is fiction editor at Pleiades and an assistant professor in English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.