Brown Girls

Brown Girls

We live in the dregs of Queens, New York, where airplanes fly so low that we are certain they will crush us. On our block a lonely tree grows. Its branches tangle in power lines. Its roots upend sidewalks where we ride our bikes before they are stolen. Roots that render the concrete slabs uneven, like a row of crooked teeth. In our front yards, grandmothers string laundry lines, hang bedsheets, our brothers' shorts, and our sneakers scrubbed to look brand new. Take those down! our mothers hiss. This isn't back home. In front yards, not to be confused with actual lawns, grow tomatoes that have fought their way through the hard earth.

Our grandmothers refuse canes. Our brothers dress in wifebeaters. We all sit on stoops made of brick. The Italian boys with their shaved heads zoom by on bikes, staring, their laughter harsh as their shiny, gold chains. Our grandparents weed their gardens and our brothers smoke their cigarettes and, in time, stronger substances we cannot recognize. Whose scent makes our heads pulse. Our brothers, who ride on bikes, lifting their front wheels high into the air.

"Brown"

If you really want to know, we are the color of 7-Eleven root beer. The color of sand at Rockaway Beach when it blisters the bottoms of our feet. Color of soil. Color of the charcoal pencil our sisters use to rim their eyes. Color of grilled hamburger patties. Color of our mother's darkest thread that she loops through the needle. Color of peanut butter. Of the odd gene that makes us fair and white as snow, like whatshername, is it Snow White? (But don't get it twisted — we're still brown.) Dark as 7:00 p.m. dusk, when our mothers switch on the light in the empty room. Exclaim, Oh! There you are.

Brown Boys

We stare at brown boys with their obsidian hair, their fingers and cheekbones, and think, He looks like my brother. He looks like the boy from the restaurant where we ordered kabobs, lechón, jerk chicken, plátanos. He looks like the boy at the bodega who rang up our barbecue chips, our ninety-nine-cent cans of iced tea. He's beautiful, we think, but we'd never go out with him. We'd never date him. Why? Because he doesn't look — You know. Because he looks like — And anyway, he only likes those kinds of girls, the Vanessa Kleinberg types, we heard him say so. We stare at brown boys, listen to the way they say lieberry. They fascinate us, but we ignore them. Except one day when our class goes down for a visit to the library — Lie-brair-ree, we mouth, alone with brown boys behind a bookshelf. Library. Follow my lips. Say it like this.

Territory

It'll be fun, we say, and we take our white boys on a trip to Queens. From the subway we watch high-rises transform to squat buildings and bodegas. We point out city hospitals where we were born, where some of our parents work as janitors, nurses, social workers, paper pushers. This is the playground where we'd chill with our brothers and sisters, we say. Touch the monkey bars dull from children's hands. Around us, a cacophony of Spanish and Mandarin, Urdu and Tagalog and Vietnamese. Our ears are trained to hear them. Look at this place! they say. Walking along sidewalks, we hold our white boys' hands. (Or maybe they are the ones clinging onto us?) We pass a little boy dressed in a Spiderman costume even though it isn't Halloween, as he walks with his abuela.

We hear the shuh shuh sound of the brown boys' sneakers playing basketball. Feet blurred, swift as wind. Brown boys say, Hey — What's good? and ignore the white boys at our sides. Toss their chins up at us. Fresh, you looking mad fresh, their eyes say. Some of the boys simply stop, ball in hand, as we walk by. Yo! When you over him, you know where I'm at! We hear them...