“I’m serious,” he continued. “I want to know what you think.”
Fine, then. “There eh nothing to do,” Bitter snapped, her voice heavy. She didn’t want to look at him. “Everyone does keep fighting and fighting, one generation after another, and nothing changes. If you born lucky, then you live lucky. Otherwise …” She let her voice trail off because it had nowhere to go. “It is what it is.”
Saying the words made Bitter feel like a dark cloud had hugged her, wrapping her in soft, thick gray, numbing her skin. She pulled her knees up on the sofa and picked at the ring in her lip, circling it around. Aloe probably wasn’t going to like her now, but that didn’t matter. None of this mattered; none of this was real. Her little spiral was interrupted by the sound of Aloe chuckling softly to himself.
Bitter glared at him. “What’s so funny?” If he was laughing at her, she was going to punch him in the face.
Aloe leaned forward and took her hand, the warmth of his palm surprising her. His eyes were gentle. “No, no, nothing is funny,” he said, even as he smiled. “I just—I don’t believe you.”
“Excuse me?”
He squeezed her hand, and a small thrill rushed over Bitter’s skin. She ignored it, holding her breath as Aloe kept talking, his words tripping over each other in their animation.
“I don’t believe that you think nothing can change. You’re an artist! You imagine things all the time, and you’re trying to tell me that you can’t imagine anything different from this? Another kind of world? That you’ve never imagined something better than what’s happening now?”
Bitter exhaled softly and pulled her hand away. Another world. She bit the inside of her lip as a traitorous memory crept up on her, smelling like ash and blood and salt. There had been one photograph. One photograph of the woman who shared Bitter’s hard cheekbones and bare eyebrows, the same wide mouth. Her mother, trapped in an image forever, before she’d met the monster that would make her daughter, before Bitter was ever born. Her last guardians had given it to Bitter when she was much younger, in a rare moment of kindness. “So at least yuh could know what she looked like,” the woman had said. “Since you can’t remember.”
Well, Bitter would never forget, not after she drew her mother over and over again, forming the lines of her face until they were perfect, her tall figure with the graceful dress. She’d practiced until it was flawless, then Bitter had cut herself to wake the drawing up, dabbing her blood on her mother’s face, on her sleeves, her neck, her hands. She tried it so many times, until people started noticing her cut-up arms and the woman she lived with pulled her aside and warned her to stop whatever nonsense she was doing because they weren’t doing anything to her and she was walking around making them look bad. Bitter kept trying, hid the cuts better, but one day as she was sobbing over a splattered drawing, she realized it was never going to work. Her mother was never going to come back to life, and that was never going to change. That was never going to be different.
She had burned the photograph then. It wasn’t real and it didn’t matter. Her mother’s face met her every morning in the mirror, and besides, Bitter’s muscles couldn’t forget how to draw her even if she tried to wash the memory away. Aloe was staring at her.
“Don’t you imagine something better?” he was asking. “Ever?”
Bitter stared back at him. “I used to,” she said. “I stopped.”
“Why?” His voice was urgent, his face sharpened into intensity. “You live in Eucalyptus. I’m sure that’s better than wherever you came from. Things changed for you, Bitter. They changed for me. The fact that we’re sitting here proves it. Why can’t you believe that they can change for Lucille too?”
“Why’s it so important to you?” she shot back. “What I believe, what I doh believe. You recruiting for Assata now, or what?”
“No, I just—”
“Allyuh does like to say the same damn thing over and over. Change, believe, something better. What if there’s nothing better? What if you keep feeding people this—this hope that eh going nowhere!”
Aloe took her hand again, grabbing it so hard that the bones pressed against each other. “Hope is what we need,” he said. “Hope is what got me out of my father’s house, what helped me keep going. Don’t you want to keep going?”
Tears built behind Bitter’s eyes, flooding her head. “No,” she whispered, shocked to hear the truth leave her mouth. “No, I want to stop. I want it to stop, I want everything to stop.” She was crying now, and this was why she didn’t like to talk about these things, why she walked away and drew something real instead, because now that she’d started, she couldn’t make herself stop any more than she could make the world stop. “It hurting all the time and I cyah feel it, I cyah let mehself feel it, ’cause then ah go break in so many pieces, yuh could never find enough of me to put back together. How yuh expect me to go fight, be out there facing these people who doh care if we alive or if we dead, they killing us all the time and is ah game to them. All we doing is throwing more and more of us into their damn teeth. Fuh what? Fuh hope?”
She sniffled and dragged the sleeve of her sweatshirt across her face, swiping roughly at her eyes and nose. Aloe had let go of her hand, but he was still listening intently, his eyes soft.
“Hope is a waste of fucking time,” Bitter said. “It doh matter if we at the school—you know how many kids they never find? How many girls like me just … disappear because someone selling them? Is like we get a life jacket and then you still know there’s people out there drowning and you just sitting on a boat watching them drown and you remember what the drowning was like but you cyah bring yourself to go back.” She shook her head. “It doh matter. We cyah make all of us safe, and unless all of us are safe, none of us are safe.”
Bitter grabbed a napkin and blew her nose loudly, not caring how she looked in front of Aloe anymore. He probably couldn’t even understand half of what she was saying, she had slipped so strongly back into her accent. This date was already a disaster. She just wanted to go back to Eucalyptus, put on her headphones, and lie in bed listening to something loud enough to erase all these feelings she’d thrown up in front of this guy.
“Hey.” Aloe touched her wrist lightly, and Bitter looked up to see him staring at her, his own eyes damp. “Can I give you a hug?” he asked, his voice tentative. “Please?”
She was so surprised that he was crying, all she could do was nod, and then Aloe was wrapping his arms around her, swallowing her up in his wingspan, in his broad shoulders and chest, anchoring her. Bitter felt her heart wrench—he was hugging her like he needed to be held too, so she slid her arms around his ribs, smelling the lemon of his shirt, his back wide under her hands. Tension clicked free inside her, loosening her muscles, and she let out a jagged breath against his neck.
“You’re not alone,” Aloe whispered. “I know how impossible it feels. I know it hurts. You don’t have to feel any of this alone, Bitter.” He released her, and Bitter wiped at her eyes again, not sure if she could believe him. “And hope is not a waste of time. Hope is a discipline.” Aloe said the words with such complete confidence, with such a backbone of faith, that this time Bitter let them seep into her, just enough to register. She knew about discipline from her work; she knew about rigor and how you had to practice and practice and practice until you carried it with you in your bones. She’d never thought of hope like that—as something serious and deliberate instead of something wishful and desperate.