With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo

 

Sisterhood

When the baby bump began to show, the kids at school and around the way began to talk shit. (I know I’m supposed to be working on my cursing, but there’s really no other way to put it.) We’d had pregnant girls in school before, but it was like I was something brand-new. Maybe because I was young and petite, yet by the end of freshman year I looked like a basketball was trying to set itself free from inside my belly. Maybe because people thought I was conceited since I mostly kept to myself. Maybe because even though Tyrone didn’t go to our school, most of the girls at Schomburg Charter knew him or had heard about him and no one could really figure out why he’d chosen to get with me.

The snide comments and behind-my-back chatter was happening before Angelica came out, when all the guys on the football team were trying to bag her and the girls all wanted her to sit with them at lunch. I waited for her to start talking mess, too, because it’s just the way things seemed to go even if we’d been friends forever. But if we’d been close before, we became even closer then. Angelica? She shut that mess all the way down. Anytime she heard a whisper of someone talking about me she was in their face. If a guy made a comment about me being a ho she cursed him out and never spoke to him again.

When she told me she was a lesbian, I asked her if she’d had a crush on me. If that was why she’d been so hell-bent on defending me.

“Ew, no,” she’d said, her face twisted as if she’d smelled week-old milk. “That’d be like incest or something. Do you have a crush on everyone you’re friends with or defend?”

I learned a lot about what it meant to be a fierce friend, to protect someone and learn more about what it was like to walk in their shoes. When she did come out junior year, I held her down like she did me. Walked beside her when people talked behind their hands. Made sure to get to our locker every day before she did and pull off any ugly Post-its kids had taped there.

And when people had the balls to ask us if we were girlfriends, I held her hand tight, the way she’d held mine when I was pregnant and scared, and we walked down the halls together. And folks learned quick, if they had a problem with Angelica, they could mix me. If they had a problem with me, they were facing two of us.

And ain’t that what it means to be a sister? Holding things tight when the other one is falling apart?