Page 17

Persephone held John’s cell to his face with a trembling hand.

She hadn’t realized she was shaking and tried to breathe through it.

The camera never lied, and the last thing she wanted was to look tense for her debut.

All this press, all this Presence, was exactly what she’d hoped for.

As John reviewed his talking points, she swiped down.

They were about to hold a series of interviews—their first sit-downs as a couple.

There were the asterisked pointers on how to avoid getting mired in anything too political or religious, and there were some afterlife ones that she’d be leaving to John anyway, but many of the talking points were related to Persephone.

However, since they were mostly made up—how they met, his and her cute quirks, their favorite activities—they weren’t easy for John to remember, but they had to get them right.

In twenty minutes they were sitting on a love seat and staring down a camera while ignoring the boom mic that hovered over

them.

“Are we ready?” asked the bubbly correspondent from the nation’s highest-rated entertainment channel.

Each interview lasted between ten and twenty minutes, and the questions were softball. John was saying everything everyone

wanted to hear, wearing a perpetual smile, as if it could heal the sick and comfort the downtrodden. Sometimes she thought

he might really mean it, like when he said one of his biggest concerns was that children all over the world had food, water,

and emotional support. Every child deserves love and care, and to know that they matter. Persephone caught herself looking up at him with a genuine smile. But she wasn’t flying by the seat of her pants through this

thing. She made sure to smile at the right moments, turn slightly toward him, lean her knees toward her new love. She gave

cute, tiny shrugs (these had to be very emotive, because they were done in lieu of touching his arm or holding his hand),

mimicking the celebrity and royal-couple interviews she’d seen. By the fifth interview, she felt herself going into autopilot,

but an unexpected question sent her diving for the controls.

“I’m sorry?” Persephone said.

“Corpus Christi,” the Black woman from Time magazine repeated. “Are you planning to go back? I bet there are plenty who’d love to meet John.”

Returning to Corpus Christi would be like going to a cemetery and exhuming something that should stay buried. Bad things happened

in Corpus Christi. Her ballet career. Parker and his downward spiral. Mama.

“Ah.” Persephone looked at John with a Meghan Markle–worthy smile, and with all the warmth she’d exude if they were clasping

their hands tight, said, “We’ll make it there eventually.”

When I’m not just John’s Girlfriend. When I’m More.

And then the interviewer asked the question that no one had yet asked, but Persephone had known would come up. It was the

question she dreaded.

“There has been a lot of coverage regarding John’s being Black. Has that affected you two at all?”

The implication here was that there would be no Celebrating Black Love spreads, that John was Black and that Persephone was

not. But this was untrue.

At least, it was untrue in the sense that in the United States of America, a drop of Black blood meant you were Black. Persephone

was Black in a way that she could never be white, because whiteness as a racial concept was precarious, and so you couldn’t

be white and be something else, too. Yet she didn’t look Black at all; in fact, she coded so white, even when she was with

Mama, people who didn’t know them couldn’t believe Persephone had come from her womb.

Parker was a lil’ toasty , as Mama liked to say when they were little, but he looked about as Black as the rapper Logic, which was to say, not so much.

Yet they’d been raised by their mother, a Black woman with a much-envied Coke-bottle figure and smooth, medium-brown skin

that shone when she oiled it, and hair that she relaxed and wore teased high above her head; they’d been raised by a woman

who made sure they lotioned their elbows and knees and heels even if you don’t show any ash ; they’d been raised by a woman who rinsed their chicken before she cooked it because dropping it from the package straight

into the pan was just nasty ; they’d been raised by a woman who made sweet potato pie for holidays, not pumpkin; they’d been raised by a woman who, whenever they went to a different city or town or to another part of Corpus Christi, had to suffer double takes and sometimes hostile questions from whites about the true nature of their relationship; they’d been raised by a woman who had, more than once, been told—by family and so-called friends, no less—that she couldn’t have expected any different, layin’ up with a white man who just wanted a taste.

Never mind that she and this white man had gotten married and had a decent enough relationship until they hadn’t.

And yet Persephone had never been comfortable talking about her Blackness, or lack thereof, especially so far from home, when

out here in the City of Dreams and Nightmares, she had all but become white. Even Christine didn’t know the truth, and if

Persephone started speaking about it now, wouldn’t that just be weird? People would think she’d been purposely hiding it all

this time, that she’d swept out her Black identity to monetize it. It wasn’t that she was ashamed to be Black, but rather

she felt out of turn speaking about it; her features and skin tone meant she didn’t have to deal with the realities of being

Black in America, and so a big part of her felt that she not only had nothing of value to contribute to the conversation,

but that she had no right. And even if she did have a right, she was sure she’d say the wrong thing, because what was the

right thing, coming from her lips, from her face, from her out-facing whiteness? She’d asked Mama about it a few times, being Black,

being Black in Texas, being Black and married to a white man, having children who didn’t look like you, but Mama hated to

talk about it, and aside from admitting that she was actually relieved she didn’t have to worry about Parker being shot by

the police for no reason, she said no more about it than, You’re Black and you’re white. You’re mixed. It is what it is, no matter what any damned body says. And that was that.

So she looked back at the interviewer now, her pasted-on smile burning tight at the edges, and said, “More than anything,

John’s gotten a lot of love. We like to focus on that.”

It was a bullshit answer, but the woman sitting across from her pasted on a smile that mirrored Persephone’s own and let it

go.

4

On the day she left the only home she’d known, Persephone propped a note against Parker’s football.

She was so scared, then. Brave, but scared. Or maybe she was brave because she was scared. With three summers’ worth of savings in her fanny pack, she boarded the Peter Pan bus graduation night. She

hadn’t gone home after the ceremony, telling Mama and Parker she was going to Applebee’s with friends, because somehow going

home for even a few minutes meant getting stuck, like home was one of those bogs she saw on nature shows. She could hardly

keep still as she climbed the bus stairs.

She was going to Los Angeles, where she’d cease to be broken and past her peak; where she’d reach such heights, she’d leave

the earth itself and would cease to be a person at all, but would transmute into a star, an idol; where Persephone would become

an Idea.

Even the name of the bus indicated she was onto something: not Greyhound, not a running dog. Peter Pan. A forever-young boy

who could fly, youth and dreams incarnate. He, too, was an Idea. As the Peter Pan bus pulled from the station, Persephone

smiled lazily at the starry sky, settling into her fate while relishing how with every passing streetlamp, her reflected face

shone there against the constellations.

5

John breathed a sigh of relief when the last tripod and set of lights were collapsed and toted away. Now he and Persephone

were sitting in Giorgio Baldi, a posh restaurant in Pacific Palisades, under a bombardment of stares from nearly everyone

in a restaurant no larger than a cottage’s great room. William had suggested coming to Giorgio Baldi for dinner. That the

paparazzi practically lived on the front sidewalk was entirely the point.

Persephone, in a blue Yankees ball cap and post-TV-interview makeup, sat pensively as she drank her still water from a straw.

“I think our first day was a hit,” John said as their waiter brought their white truffle pappardelle.

It hadn’t escaped John that the Black man who’d just crossed over had found himself a blonde, white girlfriend in a hurry,

but if William, or for that matter Hannah and co., had any thoughts on the optics, they made no indications.

“Hannah’s been really generous. Technically I’m William’s client, but I think he’s more my point person and I’m more his test

run. Sorry, is it weird, your appetizer being a prop?”

“I assume he won’t be her assistant forever,” John said, ignoring her personal question. “Good for you.”

“No, yeah, I really appreciate it. I know he’s more than capable. I’m grateful, really. That’s not it. It’s just...”

This was a moment in which someone other than himself would gently ask, What’s really bothering you? “Good,” he repeated.

The sound of shattering crystal and clattering plates reverberated through the small restaurant. A woman in a bright orange

parka dodged the server who’d tried grabbing her as she came straight for John. “New World Order devil!” She swung for him.

“Illuminati! But I’m awake, we’re all awake!”

She grabbed someone’s lobster dinner and sent the plate flying toward John.

Everything slowed.

From his periphery he was aware of Persephone leaping to her feet.