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Chapter 26

Tashia Carter

New York City, March 2015

Tashia Carter considered herself to be an exceptionally helpful person. She answered phone calls on the first or second ring, always, because she thought it reduced stress for the person making the call. She rushed to help pick things up if someone dropped them. She let people go ahead of her if they seemed to be in a hurry. This was a very un–New York way of life, but she intentionally cultivated this part of herself because she thought it was a good thing to do.

The downside of all this, though, was that people always knew they could ask her for help. She was currently enrolled as a double major at Columbia, working on building a historical photo archive of Black students across the Ivy League. Still sensitive about the experience she had at Dalton, she wanted to expand her art and concentrate on the forgotten students who’d done remarkable things. When Kennedy had texted her, letting her know that she was working on something to debut at her dad’s birthday, Tashia just knew that being asked for help wouldn’t be far behind. Initially she thought that she wouldn’t be able to contribute, but as part of her research, she traveled across the Northeast to all the Ivy League universities to gather their archival imagery of Black students and rephotograph them as a way of contextualizing their experiences with her own. In doing so, at Harvard she had stumbled upon a photo of Kennedy Carter’s father as a student.

The picture was from the early seventies and taken in Ghana with a man named Kofi, who Kennedy had since discovered had died by suicide shortly after graduating. Her heart sank, weighed down by the pressure that she knew that Kofi had to be feeling, a pressure that she was all too familiar with. At present, she was trying to complete an ambitious photography project that would hopefully catapult her to the next level. She dared to dream about potential careers as a professional photographer that would allow her to pay off her debt, be a caring daughter, sister, and friend while also working as Kennedy’s unofficial assistant, a volunteer position she hadn’t really asked for. It was hard for her to say no to Kennedy, whom Tashia considered to be as helpless and pitiful as a newborn animal.

Tashia smiled to herself as she thought back to when she and Kennedy were technically enemies. Tashia arrived at Dalton already pretty secure in her attitudes, preferences, and tastes, so she almost immediately felt extremely skeptical of the way that the other Black students had been inducted into the culture of the school and the Upper East Side as a whole. She had come from a grade school where murals of radical Black leaders like Malcolm X and Huey P. Newton covered the walls. The school was over 80 percent Black and Latino, meaning that oftentimes, overheard conversations were conducted in Spanglish. Tashia hadn’t needed a tutor or a nanny to teach her another language. She had sharpened her vocabulary the old-fashioned way by making friends and listening.

By comparison, Dalton was multilingual in a different way. The culture was so insistently formal that sometimes, even as a native English speaker, she was finding herself struggling through literature classes. For the first time in her young life, Tashia felt herself not enjoying school. A quick learner and a serious student, Tashia prided herself on being a model academic. Her intelligence was rewarded with praise and attention from her teachers and respect from her classmates. She liked that everyone always knew she did the homework, that when the teacher asked a question, she would almost always be able to respond with the right answer. But when she arrived at Dalton, she found herself panicking, feeling very behind the curve even though she did all the summer reading. Her grades after the first four weeks of the term were distressingly average. When she logged on to her student portal, which was a sophisticated program accessible on all the Dalton-issued laptops, she was looking at letters of the alphabet that she never associated with grades, and yet right there were a cluster of Cs and Bs, making her question her whole life.

Aside from the fact that she needed a glossary for a whole new set of terms that she was learning (words like Bridgehampton, Upper School, Lululemon), she even found socializing to be a strain. A rabid basketball fan, Tashia found that she most naturally gravitated toward the boys, the jocks, simple creatures only interested in sharing their knowledge of sports statistics. Unbeknownst to her, though, this would make her an enemy to girls who were eager for their attention. The girls treated Tashia with a frosty indifference, making it clear in their own coded way that she was unwelcome. This was just as well for Tashia, who didn’t feel like she needed to play nice with these little princesses anyway, with Kennedy Carter being the most annoying princess of all.

Tashia made her disdain for the celebration or elevation of all things white-coded pretty clear from the start, and it became important to her to distance herself from Kennedy, the other Carter specifically, whom she saw as a walking betrayal of their Black roots. One day in October, a month into the start of the school year, both Carter girls in their introductory biology class had been paired with one other girl and one boy to diagram the body of a marsupial to later present to the class.

In the moment, Kennedy said, “Do you think we should, like, draw something really big or work on something on the computer?”

And what Tashia repeated was, “Do like you like think like we like should like draw like something like really big like or like work on like some like sort like of like digital like rendering that like costs like a million like dollars?” It was like a bad SNL skit, Tashia clearly trying to insinuate that Kennedy talked like a white girl.

Tashia immediately watched Kennedy flinch and felt a sting of shame. Kennedy forced out a laugh, which Tashia thought was an admirable attempt to appear good-natured. The other two students in their group were certainly waiting on Kennedy to dictate how they would react. Upon seeing that she wasn’t going to be openly contemptuous, they chuckled weakly.

“Well, I actually like the idea of, um, a big drawing,” said the boy, somewhat self-conscious.

“Same,” the girl agreed, and Kennedy nodded enthusiastically.

Tashia’s heart soon thawed when it came to Kennedy, realizing that her fellow Carter was just as scared and lonely as she sometimes felt. Kennedy turned out to be a deeply sensitive girl with an astounding knowledge of old-school films and TV shows for someone her age. She often treated Tashia to peace offerings throughout the semester, ranging from lending her driver to take her all the way home to the Bronx or buying her camping gear for the class trip when Tashia said she didn’t have any.

As Tashia’s grades gradually improved and she accepted Dalton for what it was, she tried to be a helpful person in Kennedy’s life by explaining to her the nuances of some of the racial divides at school that the girls experienced over the years, including countless microaggressions from some of the white girls. And Tashia was sure that wannabe Backstreet Boy Ollie, Kennedy’s boyfriend during their senior year, was just trying to have a Black girl on the low, wanting to hide her in order to escape other people’s judgment. Tashia thought this was clearly evident by how he was adamant about “keeping things casual.”

“You really gonna let that white boy keep you as a dirty little secret?” she had said to her friend while stuffing pretzel sticks in her mouth as they sat in the student center.

“Shhhhh!” Kennedy’s eyes widened, and she leaned in toward Tashia, looking around to see if they’d been overheard. “It’s not like that,” she whispered.

“I think it is,” Tashia whispered back, wishing for once that her friend would stop caring so much about what people thought of her.

Kennedy rolled her eyes. “Not everything is about that,” Kennedy whispered back to Tashia with an edge to her words.

“I know that’s what you think,” Tashia said, leaving the meaning of her words hanging there for Kennedy to do something with.

Over time, Tashia had come to understand that Kennedy lived a very different life than she did, and this was something she knew, but she had never really seen the application of it so clearly. These were Tashia’s people for only a limited amount of time, but Kennedy would have to deal with them forever. Tashia would be free from this place, these people, their snobbery and petty authorities, but Kennedy would not.

That’s why Tashia didn’t gloat when Ollie plagiarized Kennedy’s paper and got her in trouble. After doing everything in her power not to retaliate when she saw him at school (another Black girl getting expelled just wouldn’t be acceptable), Tashia called Kennedy every day after her parents pulled her out of Dalton. She went over to her apartment and waited in the sprawling and silent mirrored lobby to be let upstairs. When she stepped out of the elevator and turned to the only door on the floor, she began unlacing her sneakers. A housekeeper opened the door and greeted Tashia, taking her shoes in one hand and her backpack in the other. It had become so routine to Tashia by that point that she didn’t even question the ritual. The first time it was strange, but she was surprised at what she could get used to. After being kicked out of Dalton, Kennedy stayed upstairs in her room, bundled in bed like a fictional sick person, like she thought she was an injured soldier with amnesia.

Tashia rolled her eyes. “Kennedy, get up ,” she said, pulling at her limp wrist when Kennedy didn’t move.

She allowed herself to be forced into an upright seated position, but she didn’t get up from the bed. “I can’t,” she squeaked out.

Tashia fingered Kennedy’s embroidered bedding. Tiny hand-sewn rosettes bloomed under her hands. She sighed.

“You have to,” she said looking into Kennedy’s withdrawn eyes, “because if this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you in your life, your life’s actually ... fine, so come on.”

Kennedy was better soon after that, and by the end of the week, she was bathing regularly and had agreed to go outside so long as they went to Tashia’s Bronx neighborhood where no one knew her. They took Kennedy’s car up, and her security followed a few paces behind as they looped through St. Mary’s Park. Tashia saw Kennedy come back to herself. Tashia just listened as Kennedy cried on her shoulder and vented about being betrayed, wanting to do everything she could to help out her emotionally fragile friend.

Just like now. As she was in a coffee shop in Washington Heights, flipping through images that she collected, she noticed the barista staring at her. She had bought a single black coffee three and a half hours ago, but the place was empty, so she didn’t really understand his hyperfocused attention. She stared back at him defiantly. If he wanted her to buy something else, she was going to make him say it. She tore her eyes away and went back to recording the dates of the photographs on her laptop screen with renewed concentration, which was how she didn’t notice the barista inching closer to her table before he was right beside her. She jumped when she felt him very near.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Tashia caught her breath. “No, it’s all right.”

“Can I ask what you’re working on?” he said, taking a pointed look at her screen.

She reflexively shut the laptop and then apologized, feeling awkward and fumbling. “Oh, it’s a photography project, sort of a Black history retrospective. It’s about the isolation of Black students at Ivy League universities.”

“Wow, no way. That’s crazy,” he said. “I went to Princeton.”

Tashia immediately perked up. They spent the next twenty minutes talking excitedly about her project, his feelings about having gone from a majority Black city to Princeton and then all the way to Ghana. She shared with him her thesis and why she wanted to preserve these images. She told him about the rumor she uncovered about a secret society for Black men at Harvard throughout the sixties and seventies. After another customer came in and began loudly clearing his throat for service, Ernest realized that he had to get up and go back to work. He asked Tashia for her number. She hesitated just for a moment but then agreed. He was skinny and dorky but cute in his own way.

“What’s your name?” she asked as he was going back to the register.

“Ernest, Ernest Morris,” he said with a big smile before turning to the customer.