The Beauty That Remains Read online

  SASHA’S LAST BLOG POST

  lifeaccordingtoleuk

  Dying flowers are the prettiest.

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  BAMF // SASHA’S SENSES REVIEW…FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS

  Looks like: a (New Age) boy band…

  Sounds like: (with) damn good writing

  Tastes like: Sour (Cabbage) Patch kids (this should be the new name for this band. You don’t even have to give me credit if you use it)

  3/5

  Sasha died three months ago today. Ever since, I’ve felt a little out of control.

  But there’s something about music that tethers me to the rest of the world.

  I’m screaming lyrics at the top of my lungs, so I barely even register the bodies pressing against me from all sides. The music is so loud that the bass is filling up my chest, so I can’t feel my always-racing heart. I know the faces onstage, the set list, and that the people on either side of me are loving every second of sound as much as I am, so I don’t have that clogged feeling in my throat that usually makes me want to sob or fight or run whenever I’m in a crowd.

  Music is the only reason I can ever ignore the feelings that always have me on edge; that almost never leave me alone.

  The set ends. I’m sweaty and smiling and tingly all over, and we’re all still screaming—we’re desperate for Fasten Your Seat Belts to come back and do one more song. But they can’t tonight because the schedule is packed, and when I pull up the invite for this show on my phone, I see that Rohan’s new band, Our Numbered Days, is up next.

  Without music playing, the room fades into painfully sharp focus: Flashes of light from a dozen phones taking selfies in the dark. Scratches across the stage as stagehands dressed in as much black as I reorganize the setup. The clatter of glasses from people ordering at the bar, and voices shouting for friends or laughing. Hands, everywhere, reaching.

  The space inside my head that the music filled up with warmth moments earlier overflows with something icy. It sends all the messed-up, mixed-up signals to the rest of me.

  My stomach and chest flood with the hot, bad kind of butterflies. My palms get slick, and I instantly wish I had my sister’s cool fingers to grab—she was always my safety net when the world got to be too much. Her hospital bracelet, the one I haven’t taken off since the night she died, suddenly feels too tight on my wrist. I look at the glowing emergency exit sign, and I make my way toward it before the alarms sounding in my body get any louder.

  * * *

  —

  When I come back inside, Rohan is onstage with Marc and Jo and Pooja. They’re playing a song I don’t recognize, but the melody is catchy as hell. I say hi to a few kids as I make my way through the crowd, trying to lie kinda low, so Ro doesn’t notice me walking back in during his set, but kids keep shouting my name from almost every direction. It’s hard not to know everyone in this scene if you go to enough shows, and I go to more than enough shows. I have to for the fan site I started with my sister: Badass Music Fanatics.

  I holler a few more hellos, but I want to find the rest of the BAMF contingent (aka my real friends), like, now. I’m not sure how much of Rohan’s set I’ve missed, so I pull out my phone to text Deedee. I’ll never find her in a crowd like this, in spite of her hair, which is almost as big as mine, and that in a sea of white faces, she and I are the only two black girls here.

  Deedee texts and says she’s only a few feet from the stage and that she’s found Callie, but before I can text back, Jerome is beside me with his lips against my ear.

  “Shay,” he says, and I can tell by his voice that he’s been smoking.

  I turn around and look at Jerome’s lips, mostly to make sure I hear whatever he says next, but then I can’t look away. They’re heart-shaped and pretty, and he licks them, like he’s going to start talking again, but I stop him by pressing my finger against his mouth. I close my eyes, and I kiss Jerome’s pretty lips because I’ve been kissing them (him?) all month. I don’t want Jerome to say anything because I have a feeling I know what he wants to tell me: something about how he likes me; something about how we should be more than the occasional kiss. But I can barely stay in a room, so I don’t even want to think about trying to stay in a relationship. I’ve never had a boyfriend, and I can’t even imagine it.

  I slip my hands into the pockets of his oversize cardigan and grab his lighter at the same time. Then my hands are in the back pockets of his saggy-bottomed corduroys, looking for what’s left of his joint. “Aha!” I say, pulling my clenched fist from his pocket. He smiles, but he doesn’t laugh.

  “I saw you run outta here,” he says. “You cool?”

  I pull away and look up (because his lips aren’t the only pretty parts of him), but his light brown eyes are searching mine for something I don’t want to share. So I look back down at the things in my hands. He’s one of the few people who understands that when I fly from a room, I need space to catch my breath. It’s one of the many reasons I like kissing him. I nod.

  “Cool,” he says.

  I give him a quick peck on the cheek before I flick open his lighter and hit his joint. The tiny flame illuminates the ripped band T-shirt I’m wearing, my arm full of bangles, how little space there is between the two of us. Jerome tucks one finger into the stretched out neck of my shirt and another through a loop in my jeans. I inhale smoke, and calm, and him.

  This venue is teens only, which means no drinking and definitely no smoking, but I’ve never really let those rules stop me before. I feel my tense muscles relax the tiniest bit as I blow a thin ribbon of smoke into the barely-there space between us where no one will notice it.

  He tips his head in my direction like I’m royalty, and the weathered metal of the vintage rings he’s always wearing glint dully under the stage lights. He slips the joint from my fingers and puts it out between two of his own. As he moves away from me, I can see longing in his bloodshot eyes. I wonder if he can see the same thing in mine.

  A minute later, I find Deedee. She’s pressed against the wall on the far side of the stage with Callie and a few other people we know from school and shows like this one.

  “Hey,” I say. I wedge my shoulder between two guys I know from cross-country and nod at them. My heart revs up from their closeness, but I hook my arm through Deedee’s, and I feel a little better.

  “ ‘Hey’?” Callie says, looking annoyed. Her thin, dark T-shirt has holes in it, and her pale skin is almost glowing from beneath it, like pinholes of light.

  “Yeah,” Deedee agrees. “Where the heck have you been?” She slaps at my arm. She’s pulled all her super-thick hair away from her eyes into a loose ponytail she probably can’t get any tighter. Her glasses are fogged up, so I pull them off her face and wipe them with the hem of my shirt.

  “You almost missed his whole set, and they’re sooo damn good.”

  “Unraveling Lovely good?” I ask. (They’re my gold standard for everything.) I place her glasses back on her nose.

  “Close,” she says. Then I look at Callie. Her hazel eyes and pursed, glossy lips seem to add, But not quite.

  Deedee shows me a few pictures she took of Rohan when he got down on his knees during a guitar solo, and I post the best one to the BAMF account with just the name of his band: Our Numbered Days. I tag my location, and I add a rating: five shooting star emojis in a row. But I want to do a little extra since this is Rohan’s new band. I add a trio of heart-eyed smileys, like I’ve fallen in love with music I’ve barely heard.

  “Them likes, though,” Callie says as she looks over my shoulder. She’s a nerd for numbers, and my post has twenty-two likes and eight comments almost immediately.

  “Pays to be a little bit Internet famous,” I say, and Deedee adds, “At least on Long Island.”

  I silently wish Sasha could see how much our followers love that Ro is in a new band. BAMF was he
r idea.

  The two of us have been obsessed with pop-punk and indie rock since our babysitter introduced us to some of her favorite bands when we were nine, the year before Sasha was diagnosed, so as I listen to Rohan’s next song, I think about what Sasha might have said about it. She’d point out the lyrics of the bridge (something I never notice) or that the bass line is subtle but necessary. And I think that maybe that’s why I love this music so much. Every piece of it—from the distortion on Rohan’s guitar, to the way I can’t help but nod my head to the beat—reminds me of her.

  We were so into our music in a way not very many black kids are. So a few years ago, when we started going to shows and seeing how outnumbered we were, Sasha wanted kids like us to have a place where they could unabashedly love the music they love and not feel weird about it. BAMF was born, and the blog was how we met Rohan: he recruited Sasha and me to manage his old band, and managing Unraveling Lovely made us blow up.

  Obviously, anyone who loves music is welcome in the BAMF community, but with our faces front and center on the “About” page as the creators—and Deedee as the photographer—we’ve always hoped to help other brown and black kids with our taste in music feel a little less alone.

  Despite Unraveling Lovely’s upset at Battle of the Bands, people still trust what we have to say about music. So I’ve always done show coverage. Deedee takes all the pictures. Callie does a pretty low-budget, biweekly podcast where she interviews aspiring musicians. Sasha used to do pretty much everything else, including writing demo and album reviews, so now we’re going to have to find someone else to help us out.

  I mostly try not to think about it.

  “So, thanks so much for coming out tonight,” Rohan says into the mike after the song ends and the audience quiets down. He pushes his dark hair away from his even darker eyes, and he’s grinning, all dimples and whiskers. I’m pretty bummed I almost missed the whole set, and Ro won’t be happy about it either. Still, I let out a long, loud “Wooooo!” before he says anything else, and he grins.

  “This is the last song we’re gonna play tonight. It’s a cover of one of my favorites. Today is a pretty rough day…so I want to dedicate it to someone.”

  His voice sounds pinched, like it’s too big for his throat, and my stomach clenches because I’m almost positive I know what’s coming. Today marks three months since…And it looks like he might be scanning the crowd for me.

  “This one’s for you, Sasha,” he finishes.

  I just got back, and I want so desperately to hear the rest of his set, but her name rips me wide open again when I’d only just managed to put myself back together. I look at Deedee, and she’s biting her bottom lip, already untangling her arm from mine because she knows what’s coming.

  Callie tries to stop me. She says, “Shay, just wait,” but I can’t. I shove my way through the crowd, back toward the exit, before he sings the first note.

  * * *

  —

  In the parking lot, it takes me three tries to unlock my bike because everything about me is shaking. But when I push my headphones on over my hair and press play, the perfect song spills into my ears. I turn it up, focusing on the singer’s desperate voice and pedaling to the bass line. I let the steady drums and the clearest notes from the guitar flow through me like a current.

  The last time I heard the song Rohan was about to play, we were in Sasha’s hospital room. His voice mixed with mine as we sang it to her. I was holding her hand, and when I looked around the room, Mom was shaking and the nurses were sniffling. There was Rohan, who I couldn’t bear to watch, and a priest who I abruptly decided to hate.

  Sasha looked at me when the song ended and said, “Fucking Luke,” and we both smiled even as tears spilled onto our cheeks. When her eyes closed, and the nurses confirmed she was in a coma, Mom looked at me, and I knew her face mirrored my own expression. It was official: Sasha wouldn’t wake up.

  I couldn’t watch. I didn’t want to know which organ would fail my sister first. I kissed her chilly fingers and wiped my tears away with my thumbs. I pushed my way out of the room because I knew Mom was too distraught to stop me, and I could feel the tension building in my limbs.

  That hadn’t been the first time my body betrayed me—my heart squeezing, sweat breaking out across my upper lip—but it was the first time I didn’t have Sasha to bring me back from the edge, to tell me that I’d be okay. Ever since that night, whatever goes haywire inside me has been showing itself a lot more often.

  “Fucking Luke” and sometimes “Motherfucking Luke” is what Sasha and I always said in unison whenever something new went wrong for her, as if the cancer were a crappy boyfriend she couldn’t shake instead of leukemia.

  The music is helping (it always does). I can breathe again, and I feel a little more in control. Even though I’m all alone, pedaling like mad down a darkened back road, when the song ends, I tilt my head up to the sky. I scream at the stars.

  “MOTHERFUCKING LUKE!”

  I’m only about a half mile away from home when Rohan catches up to me in the Band Wagon, aka his crappy black minivan. The side of it is still spray-painted with a huge “Unraveling Lovely” from when the band went on their mini-tour, so there’s no mistaking him for anyone else.

  When I look over, I see my reflection in his window, and I wish it weren’t an image of phantom me. I wish I were seeing Sasha, healthy Sasha, sitting in Rohan’s truck. We were identical, so if I squint in this kind of dark, I can almost believe it’s true.

  We used to have the same wild, dark hair, precisely the same shade of honey-brown skin, round cheeks, and baby faces. But by the time she died, right before our sixteenth birthday, Sasha had wasted away so much that she only looked like an unfinished sketch of me—a half-drawn picture that hadn’t yet been colored or filled in. I didn’t even know it was possible for black people to be pale. Until there was no other word for what my sister’s skin had become.

  Rohan rolls down his window and then points to my headphones. I pull the cup off the ear closest to him, but I keep pedaling.

  He says, “Shay, slow down” and then “Don’t be like this.” He drives slow to keep up with me, but I keep up my silence.

  He tries “Stop” and then “Let me drive you the rest of the way.” But I scrub at my face, in case there are still tears on my cheeks, and I stand up to pedal when we come to the base of a hill. I don’t want his comfort. I want my twin sister. No one else, not even one of my best friends, will do.

  “How much of my set did you even hear?” he asks, the hurt spilling into his voice.

  I look over at him then. One of his arms is hanging out of his window, and he has to be cold because he’s not wearing his jacket. He must have run out of the club to chase me as soon as he finished the last song.

  I shake my head, and the tears bubble up and over again. I barely manage it, but I whisper, “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he replies, but we both know it isn’t. I just hope he sees the BAMF post later and forgives me.

  I’m huffing and puffing and still kind of crying, and it is so cold. I say the only thing I think I can without completely falling apart again.

  “Just…Can you not play that song, again? At least for a while? I can’t stand it.”

  I look back over at him, and the way he’s looking at me makes me wish for a different face. I love my sister, but he loved her too, and I can’t help but wonder how much of her he sees when he looks at me. I think the same thing about Mom.

  He nods, and stops talking, but he follows close behind until I turn onto my street. As soon as I park my bike and pull out my keys, he drives away.

  When I open the front door, Mom’s not home (because she’s never home), and I should be used to it. She’s always worked a lot, but I miss her more at night now than I did before. Music will have to keep me company for now.

&n
bsp; I unplug my portable speaker from the charger and sync it to my phone. I turn the volume all the way up. I just left a show headlined by Our Numbered Days, but I pull up my Unraveling Lovely playlist. My whole hand feels like its vibrating with bass as I carry the speaker from my dresser to my bed.

  As I sing along to the soundtrack of last summer, I pick up my phone to check on the photo of Rohan I posted earlier instead of doing the homework I still haven’t finished. It has 437 likes and dozens of comments, and I hope it will be enough to win Ro’s forgiveness for missing the majority of his first show with his new band. Without really deciding to, I flick through my pictures, back to three months ago, when my sister was still here.

  In the last photo I posted with Sasha, she and I are curled around each other on the roof of the hospital, wrapped in piles of blankets like newborns. It was October, two weeks before our sixteenth birthday, and when Rohan and I asked Sasha what she wanted, she said, “To see the stars.” Rohan helped me sneak her into the elevator in a wheelchair; then he carried her up the last flight of stairs and out onto the roof. He took this photo of us.

  Mischief managers, the caption reads. It has more than a thousand likes, and as in the comments of any picture of Sasha, all anyone ever says is that they miss her. It makes me feel less alone even knowing most of our followers don’t really know her at all.

  I’m feeling a little calmer after reading a few comments, and after the first UL song ends, but in that dreaded two-second gap between the first and second tracks, I hear the front door slam. A moment later, Mom’s voice is fighting its way up the stairs, competing with Logan’s as the next song starts.

  “Shay, what have I told you about that noise? Turn it down before you and I both go deaf!”

  I cut my music and examine my face in the mirror before I head downstairs. I look okay; not like I sobbed all the way home. I reapply some of my eye makeup, just to be safe. She’s stepping out of her heels when I get to the bottom of the stairs.