Back to Issue Fifty-Seven

BRAIN KID

by ADESUWA AGBONILE

When Miss Goddy found out about my sponge brain, she got real excited. That was the summer of ‘91, when I was slurping up World Book Encyclopedias like melting milkshakes. I’d sit next to Mr. Mo under the AC in the library and read through a whole book in the same amount of time it took him to get through that week’s classifieds. Miss Goddy sat at her librarian desk and chuckled whenever I came to get a new book. I knew she thought I was just looking at the pictures, so I demanded she quiz me on what I had read. Got every question right. Sponge brain. But then Miss Goddy marched me over to the 870s part of the library and got me started on Virgil and Cicero. I found those guys a lot less interesting than the stuff about arachnids and bird life and crispr that I was learning in the Encyclopedias, but for every book I finished Miss Goddy would buy me whatever bag of candy I wanted from the vending machine, which felt like a pretty good deal. That all ended a few weeks later when Mom declined to make meatloaf for dinner and I shouted, O tempora, O mores! The very next day she showed up at the library to drag me by the ear down to 896 section.

“Don’t even think about going back to those Latin guys until you read every African author in this damn building,” she said, in her scariest voice. Every word coming straight from the chest. It was how I imagined chickadee alarm calls must sound. Only the predator she was warning me about was her.

On the last Thinking Day in August, Mom and I agreed that I could take a break from the 896s. Reading Devil On The Cross taught me that people in Kenya were getting robbed by greedy capitalists just like people in Harlem were, and I wanted to learn more about post-colonial political economies. To the 330s I went.

Thinking Days are when Mom and I discuss what we learned that week, how we learned it, and what it made us want to learn next. Other people call Thinking Days Sundays. On Thinking Days, we wake up in the morning and go outside to watch what Mom calls the Harlem promenade – everyone walking down 125th, dressed like they want to be looked at, going to church. Our church is Sonny’s, the bagel place five blocks from our apartment. At Sonny’s, we sit at a corner table and write our Thinking Day poems on the brown paper bags in ballpoint pen and read them to each other on our walk home. I like to make up new words and put them in my poems. Like fillyfelly, an adjective that describes the light, silly feeling I get when I read my best friend Jayla’s comics, or grunch, a verb for how I walk home from school after Donald and them call me a pussy for hanging out with only girls or hide my books in weird places. Mom and I agreed during a Thinking Day that language is malleable like clay; we get to come up with new words that work better for us.

After the Thinking Day poems are read and we return home, the serious Thinking begins. We cuddle up in Mom’s bedroom, which is also the living room but becomes a bedroom when Mom converts the sofa into a bed. Of course, we think every other day too. But Thinking Days are the only days for thinking. Every other day is for working as many jobs as you can find and trying to organize every animate object within a two mile radius, if you’re Mom, or going to school and then grunching as far away from Trouble as you can manage, if you’re me.

My very first memory is a Thinking Day. I’m two years old and tiny enough to fit into Mom’s lap perfect. Wrapped up in her sort of stale-sweet morning smell. Watching her finger trace the words of the poem she’s reading aloud to me. It’s a poem she wrote just for me. When she gets to the word translucent, five lines down, I’ve already sounded it out in my head. I can feel its sound up there, banging around, beautiful. And I think to myself, let me keep this word with me, and all the other ones I read, too. Let me keep them all up here in my head so I’ll always have all this banging beautiful. Always, always.

*

Near the end of that encyclopedia/896/330 summer, while I was hunkered down in the stacks wondering how I might learn whether Marx knew any Black people or not, Miss Goddy shoved a flyer into my face.

“This’ll buy you way more candy than I ever could,” she said.

The flyer advertised a brand new trivia game show called BrainKidz. The winner got a prize of ten thousand dollars. That Thinking Day, after Mom and I discussed what she had learned about how to sue landlords for repairs (she was helping Miss Yolanda organize a teach-in), I looked at our window which didn’t stay open unless Mom propped a piece of plywood under it and said, “This week I learned that there’s a new game show called BrainKidz and the grand prize is ten thousand dollars and to get it all I have to do is take some standardized tests and then go on TV.”

“And how did you learn that?” Mom asked.

In West African languages, one sound can mean up to three different things based on intonation. It’s basically the same thing with Mom’s sentences. When you listen to her talk, you have to listen to the tone of her words to get the full meaning. For example, when she said how all low and growly I knew that the full translation of her sentence was why are you wasting time thinking about a game show broadcast on television, a medium fueled by capitalist propaganda?

“Miss Goddy gave me a flyer.”

“Miss Goddy sure loves giving you things to read! Doesn’t that woman have books to organize?”

“Not that many people come into the library.”

“Hm. Maybe tomorrow when you go, you should find someone to invite. Because it’s not like people don’t want to be there. In fact – well. First off. What did seeing this flyer make you want to learn next?”

I was pretty sure I would win, so what I really wanted to learn next was what would happen when I had ten thousand dollars. Mom and I agreed that the economic principles that underwrote modern racial capitalism were more fictitious than most fiction books; the strength of the US dollar was an illusion based on a future guaranteed by nothing but the invisible gun (or the invisible nuclear bomb, Mom mused) of the American military. So I never felt guilty about stealing Skittles from the bodega down the street, because money was fake and sugar was addictive and the owner of the bodega was part of a petit-bourgeoise class of thieves and robbers hoarding wealth which belonged to the masses, and, to make things worse, he wasn’t even Black. But sometimes as I walked past the boarded up houses just off of 125th I wondered if there was a point in knowing you lived in an illusion if you still had to live in it. If everything was fake then didn’t I need some fake stuff too, to be real? I wanted the ten thousand dollars just to see what it would be like. To see what it might make me. I couldn’t say this to Mom, though. Aunt Sister had taught me that sometimes in negotiation you have to hold off on saying everything you think, and focus on saying what will make the other person want to agree. So when Mom asked what reading the flyer made me want to learn next, I told her it made me want to learn more about how to practice discipline.

This won Mom over like I knew it would. She was always lecturing me about practicing discipline; school was so easy I had started sleeping through class. (I was interested in practicing lucid dreaming. Mrs. Shuleyer, my fifth grade teacher, did not think this was a valuable use of classroom time.)

After we agreed I would take the first standardized test, Mom clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Bon voyage, mister,” which meant it’s your bedtime, man. This signaled the beginning of the Thinking Night – which was when Mom sat in her bed alone and talked to Aunt Sister on the landline. Their phone calls were strictly limited to two hours; in that time they still managed to get through a whole month’s worth of Thinking Days.

Listening to them go at it was like listening to two CIA agents talking in code. You just knew they were up to something nefarious and spookily powerful. I always tried to stay awake for as long as I could to catch all the things they said that I didn’t know about yet, so I could look them up at the library later. Hortense Spillers, Combahee, Conk.

Once, I heard Aunt Sister say over the phone, too many people who come to visit the ocean on this damn coast don’t even take the time to listen to what the water is saying to them. I had no idea what that meant, so the next Thinking Day I asked Mom about it, and she told me that whenever I was in the bath, I should just watch out and listen up and one day something will talk back. Later, after many weeks of silent baths, I asked Mr. Macnarra – who is my favorite teacher because he lets me do science experiments after school – if he had ever heard water talk. He thought about it for a while and then said, I can neither confirm nor deny, son. Now watch out before that Bunsen burner catches your fingers.

On the Thinking Day I convinced Mom to let me do BrainKidz, I fell asleep to the sound of Mom’s laughter filling the bedroom. She was laughing the really good kind of laugh, the kind that hurts your sides and is so serious and deep that it doesn’t even make any sound coming out; it just stays inside your body, rattling you up and scrubbing off all the hard edges that have been built up over the week. It was a laugh that only Aunt Sister knew how to get out of Mom. She only got to laugh like that on Thinking Nights.

*

Walking down Lexington Avenue to take my first test for BrainKidz, some yuppie walked past me, going up. Up – towards 125th.

Every adult in our building was talking about it. While they were fussing over their mail or carrying up their groceries or pretending to play checkers while actually waiting for Tamera and them to slide by – rent was going up. I had grown two inches that summer but everyone grousing about everything going up, up, up had me feeling three feet shorter. Even Miss Sharon, who had been holding a grudge against Mom ever since she replaced the Christmas decorations at the front of the building with Kwanzaa ones, let bygones be bygones just to report that she had seen a white person on 134th Street.

“A white cop,” Mom said to Miss Sharon, in the same way she corrected my grammar sometimes as I spoke.

“Not even,” Miss Sharon said. “Just a man. Walking up the street. Just walking.”

Rent was going up while I was walking down, down, down Lexington Avenue to see what ten thousand dollars might make me. It was the part of fall where none of the leaves had fallen but they were all beautiful and dead, frozen up on their branches, teasing the sidewalk with their splendidity. (I thought of that word looking at one of the trees while waiting to cross 72nd.)

The pencil lines on my map led me to a tall building on East 70th. I waited inside a big room with lots of leather chairs and felt myself getting shorter by the minute. Most of the other kids were there with their mothers, which surprised me. I mean, I figured most people’s moms wouldn’t be hosting a teach-in on J.A. Rogers like mine was that Saturday afternoon, but still, I thought their moms would all have somewhere else to be. I wondered where else these moms followed their kids to. School? The playground?

Everyone was looking at everyone else sort of scared and hostile-like, radiating – what was the word? Something with lots of sharp points that fought your tongue on the way out. Skeevesknickled, I decided. That’s what everyone was looking around like. Skeevesknickled. After I thought of that word I felt a little taller, which brought me back to my original height. One of the moms kept staring at me, so I bared my teeth at her and clicked my tongue on the roof of my mouth. Aunt Sister taught me to do that when people bother me. This will only work until you hit your growth spurt, she told me, and then you’ll have to start acting respectable to stay alive, so milk it while you can.

Eventually the proctors took all us kids into a big, woodpaneled room and told the parents to wait outside. A lot of the kids had brought stuff with them – pencils, erasers, calculators; one real skeevesknickled kid even had a whole encyclopedia with him – but they made us leave all of that outside and gave us each two yellow pencils to use for the test. The test was fifty pages of multiple choice questions about a bunch of random stuff. The name of the tallest building in the world, the capital of Wyoming, the prime factors of 1,778. To ace it you just had to know a bunch of facts and be decent at math; there weren’t any questions that required you to really think. Mom would have hated the test. She always said that the true sign of intelligence is critical thinking, which is why you’re more likely to meet a genius at the dollar store than at Harvard.

When I handed my finished test to the proctor he looked at me with doe-eyes that let me know he thought I had flat-out failed. I bared my teeth and clicked at him. It was rare that I had to employ my clicking technique twice in one day. It disturbed me a little. The next Thinking Day, when we got a letter from BrainKiz saying I had advanced to the next round, I told Mom I didn’t want to do it anymore.

“Now, see? This is where the discipline comes in. You started something and now you have to see it through to the end. And when it’s finished you’ll be able to know what you learned.”

Fair enough. With that, the Thinking Day transitioned into a Thinking Night. When Aunt Sister called, Mom picked up the landline and started up right in the middle of a sentence, talking like they had already been going at it for the last eight hours.

*

A picture thumbtacked to the wall of my room reminds me of a memory I don’t remember: me when I was one day old; scrunched up tiny in Aunt Sister’s arms. Mom is standing next to her, beaming big and serene. They’re looking at each other and both of their mouths are blurry smudges; they didn’t stop talking to smile for the camera.

I tell people Aunt Sister is my father, which I used to really believe until I turned eight and learned about sperm. That’s when I realized that factually, Aunt Sister is not my father. But a feeling inside of me says different. I came up with a word for this feeling – glowfizz. Aunt Sister had an energy in her, a core, a glowing, purple something. And that energy, pooled together with Mom’s energy – fizzy green something – made me. I know both those energies are inside me, glowing purple and fizzy green. I can see that knowing feeling in my one-day-old yowling face. Glowfizz.

Eight is when I learned there is a difference between a fact and the truth. Aunt Sister is my father, and that’s the truth, so that’s what I say – no matter how confused it makes people’s faces.

After Aunt Sister moved to Oakland, Mom and Aunt Sister would call each other every single day after work and talk for hours. Then, a year or so before BrainKidz, Mom was doing her finances – which, for her, meant staring at various opened bills, scratching out figures on a piece of notebook paper and sighing a lot. After about an hour of staring, scratching and sighing, she picked up the AT&T phone bill, looked at it grimly, and then started crying serious tears. I didn’t know what to do so I just sat there and watched her.

The next day was a Thinking Day. I said, “The thing I’d like to learn next is how to make people feel better when they get sad. Do you have any recommendations on where to start?”

Mom’s nose got all scrunched up, which meant she wanted to cry but was succeeding at not crying. (Her nose got the same scrunch in it last year when I gave her my handwritten literary analysis on The Bluest Eye for her birthday. I cited Mom’s own dissertation, from her self-taught PhD program on Black girls and self-esteem. I even read Faulkner.)

“Honestly,” she said, “I’m starting to think it’s no one’s responsibility to make you feel better when you’re sad except for your own. You have to make yourself feel better. But. I guess if you want to help, you could ask the person what they need, and then try to do that.”

We sat quiet for a little – a contemplative silence, Mom likes to call it. I knew better than to try and fill it. Finally, Mom said, “I’d hope that if this sad person does need something, they’d be brave enough to ask you for it. Brave enough – and trusting enough. Yeah. That’s what I think.”

“Okay. Okay. Well, what do you need to feel better about the phone bill?”

“Aw, baby. Lucky for you, it is not children’s jobs to comfort their parents. At least not until they turn eighteen.”

Silence haunted the house that night. No static Aunt Sister brightening Mom’s bedroom, no lovely laughter. Every corner in my room had some sowed-shut mouth hovering in it. I couldn’t sleep. I think Mom could feel the scary ghost mouths too, because she came into my bedroom and crawled into my bed and took my head in the crook of her arm.

“Look,” she whispered in my ear. “I wasn’t sad about the phone bill, I was just doing the math. I love talking to Aunt Sister on the phone, but I love keeping a roof over our heads too. So I was just thinking about how I’ll just have to call her less. Once a week, for two hours tops, instead of every day. And all the words that need to be said will find a way to be said in the meantime, through the water or the air or some other way.”

Listening to Mom that night, I felt the same way I did when I would strain my ears in the bath, trying to hear the water say something more than just slosh-slosh-slosh. I couldn’t hear her properly; I didn’t quite understand what she was actually saying. Her sentences had no tonal markers.

*

Just as the dandelions began pushing up through every patch of dirt I passed, we got a thick envelope full of pamphlets and contracts explaining that I was officially one of the BrainKidz. There were two live tapings – one with twelve of us, and then a second one with just the final two. Whoever won that walked home with ten thousand dollars.

Mom was a maniac about the paperwork. She read through every line twice before signing. “This is where they get you to sign away all your rights,” she said, rapping her pen on her work desk which was also our coffee table. “If you don’t pay attention. But we’re not tap-dancing our way into their silly little hands.” She kept rap-rap-rapping her pen against her desk. I had to wonder whether the lady wanted to join a jazz band as a drummer.

Mom had to take off work because the rules said I had to have an adult with me. We took the train together to the studio downtown. It was huge. There was a set that looked just like something you’d see on television, and then just beyond it was blank grey, concrete space filled with people rushing all around, everyone looking seriously skeevesknickled. A lady with a clipboard led us over to a line of other BrainKidz and their parents, and gave me a nametag the size of my chest. I recognized basically all of them from the testing center, and I even waved at a few of them, but all of them looked away right after acknowledging me, like they were trying to avoid talking to me. People kept coming up to Mom, and ordering her to do things, and she would have to glare them away. Her glare was sort of like my clicking strategy but more sophisticated. The fifth time it happened, she shouted, “My son is a BrainKid!” Then she sighed, put her forehead into her palm and muttered, “Jesus fuck. What is going on?”

She moved her weight from her left foot to her right foot and used her hand to fluff up her fro, like she was trying to make herself look taller. I was trying to think up a word I could give her, to help (something round in the mouth, something with an m in the middle), but then they were marching us all out onto the stage, and I felt myself entering television. Each of us had our own podium to stand behind. I couldn’t even see Mom out past the lights.

Being in TV was nothing like watching it. There were all these pauses and weird gaps that the host – some apparently famous guy named Brad with teeth so huge I could barely believe it – kept claiming would be filled with music later. There was a live studio audience filled with strangers that watched a glowing sign to know when they could laugh, cheer, or say awwww. During the first round of the show, Brad explained the rules directly into the camera – each kid will be posed a question, for every question the kid gets wrong, they get a strike, three strikes, they’re out, the final two kids get to compete in the BrainKidz Finale – then went around introducing all of the kids. When he got to me, he said, “Kwame spent his summer reading African literature. Kwame, didja pick up a few facts about gorillas ya think ya can use here today?”

The sign told the studio audience to laugh.

“Well, no,” I said. “ Actually, I learned about how colonial powers like Britain, France and America constructed sham democracies on the continent in the post-colonial era, which – ”

Brad cut me off with a strained laugh that showed off all his whopper teeth. He avoided asking me any more questions about myself after that, which made me feel sort of – sad. Or, short, I guess. Brad only asked me trivia questions. Pretty easy ones – the twenty-fourth number in the Fibonacci sequence, the five newest countries added to the UN, the translation of two common Latin phrases (thanks, Miss Goddy!). No questions from the 896s, or even the 810.9s. No questions that required real thinking; just facts I had to remember. So I spent most of my time on television thinking about how I could have answered Brad’s first question better, so that he would have nodded and said, oh wow, ya know, that’s a good point Kwame, it makes me think, jeez, perhaps imperial powers, like, say, the country we live in, aren’t as pro-democracy as they purport, and maybe learning more about their meddling abroad can also shine a light on the ways they’ve suppressed the people’s power right here at home, in fact, Kwame, can you enlighten our viewers about the CIA’s war against the Black Panthers?

What should I have said to get Brad to say something like that?

In an hour and a half, everyone except for me and one other kid, Steven, had three strikes. Steven had two strikes. I had zero. Brad told the studio audience we’d be back next week with the finale episode. Then they cut the cameras and some harried woman grunched towards us and told us we’d have to come back in two weeks to film the finale.

“In different clothes,” she said, looking right at me; barely speaking to Steven. I bared my teeth and clicked at her, but my heart wasn’t even really in it. All the TV lights had turned off, so I could see out into the studio audience. I scanned the crowd to find Mom. Maybe she was smiling with joy or bouncing with pride or something else. I just wanted her face. I wanted my eyes to hold onto a familiar thing. But she wasn’t there. All I could see was a whole world of people who didn’t know a thing about me, looking and looking and looking at me.

I took the pen they gave us during the taping and scribbled the word translucent onto my palm, then skimmed my eyes over it. I read it over and over and over, waiting for that beautiful banging in my head but all I could think about instead was the definition of the word, the fact of it. Translucent. Something not solid enough to be seen for what it is; something absolutely see-through-able.

*

The morning before the finale taping, there was a knock on the door. When Mom answered it she drew in a big breath, then started sobbing. It reminded me of the weekend Mom and I spent helping the brothers and sisters who were just getting out of jail reunite with their loved ones. Some of them, when they stepped out onto the sidewalk and saw their families, just started weeping. Because they were finally safe, in the arms of their comrades, their people. That’s how Mom started crying, when she opened the door. She cried like she was finally safe.

Aunt Sister had come to visit.

“I’ve come to see my boy become a Brain Kid!” she shouted, shaking her arms and moving her hips. Mom kept crying. I started jumping up and down.

Like always, Aunt Sister brought presents. This time, she brought me a copy of Breaking Bread, by bell hooks and Cornel West, which, she informed me, was a real treat because it hadn’t even been published yet, she managed to get sent a copy because of her job. She worked at a small press in Oakland that paid shit – her words, which is why I’m allowed to write them – but published gold. She also brought me an enormous bag of candy, because, she said, you’re eleven years old and you shouldn’t forget it. I had Airheads, Jawbreakers and Runtz for dinner, and read over half of my new book. I could have read more, but I kept on stopping and going back over the words, sucking on each sentence the same way I sucked my candy.

Aunt Sister and Mom stayed up all night talking in Mom’s bed. I fell asleep lulled by the jump rope beat of their conversation, thrilling in how they talked over and under each other like the best girls get their feet to move in double dutch. Instead of dreaming, I did some sleep-thinking, my brain grinding against the problem of BrainKidz. When I won, surely Brad would have to offer me the microphone, to say something. What would I say? What were the words that would give me the force of the ten thousand dollars, before I even had it? Or maybe that’s what I needed, for the words to matter – maybe I would be handed the ten thousand dollars, and then the sentence that would change everything and everyone would arrive in my mouth, blazing and ready to go, I’d say –

The words bolted from my brain as soon as they sensed the sun climbing through my window. I woke up with a headache. Mom and Aunt Sister were still talking.

“– of course I said no.” Mom was saying.

“Do you know what you could do with that kind of money?”

“He wants Kwame to look stupid. In front of everyone.”

That’s when I realized they were talking about BrainKidz.

“What did Kwame say about it?”

“I didn’t tell him.”

I poked my head into Mom’s bedroom. “Tell me what?” I said.

“Jesus. Nothing,” Mom said. “Go back to sleep. There’s still two more hours until you need to wake up.”

“I can’t sleep. What didn’t you tell me?”

“This apartment is too small for gossip,” Mom muttered. “Tell me what?”

Mom looked at Aunt Sister, who shrugged, like, nothing you can do now.

“Steven’s father wants you to throw the final round,” Mom said. “He wants you to get the answers wrong, so you lose and Steven wins. And he told me that if you do, he’ll give us twenty thousand dollars.”

“Why?” I said, then I tried to answer the question myself. “Well, I guess Steven doesn’t stand a chance against me.”

“He sure doesn’t!” Aunt Sister snapped her fingers like I was a beat poet.

“But it’s not so bad to get second place. And Brad has already asked him tons of questions about himself. He got to talk all about how he chipped his tooth riding a bike, and how he did his last science experiment with potatoes and electricity. And if Steven’s dad has twenty thousand dollars to give you, that must mean they don’t need ten thousand dollars.”

“He wants his son to win because he can’t stand his son losing to you. His whole earth will shatter if the world knows you’re the real Brain Kid.” Mom said, at the same time Aunt Sister said, “He probably has way more than twenty thousand dollars to give. I wonder how much more money you could get out of him?”

Then they looked at each other; a whole twenty-four hours of conversation passed between their eyes. I wanted to reach out and grab onto all those unspoken sentences, find a way to write them down and read them over, so I could be closer to figuring out all the things they knew that I still didn’t.

But I had no idea how to do that. So instead I just folded my arms across my chest and said, “Well, I think I should get to decide if I want to win or lose. I’m the one competing.”

“There’s nothing to decide,” Mom said, in her scariest voice. “You’re going to go out there and compete. Fair and square.”

“Wait a minute now,” Aunt Sister said. “Kwame is the one who signed up for this whole thing. He’s the one who has been working hard and showing discipline. And he’s so good that he’s got Steven’s dad shaking in his tiny little trousers. So why shouldn’t Kwame be the one to decide?”

“Yeah – yeah!” I said. I loved when Aunt Sister came to visit. “Sister. Please.”

“I’m just saying. I think this is at least worth more of a discussion.”

“There’s nothing to discuss, because Kwame isn’t going to take the money. Right, Kwame?”

I knew that I was supposed to say right, Mom, but I started thinking about the plywood from outside that holds up our window, and the AT&T bill, and the thieves and robbers eating dinner in Devil on the Cross, and Brad’s teeth asking me for my thoughts, and the blank faces of the studio audience, and I was just not so sure. I scratched my bare stomach and twisted my big toe back and forth.

“Right?” Mom’s scary voice again.

“I – I don’t know,” I said. “I need to think about it.”

“I think that’s fair enough,” Aunt Sister said. “It’s a complicated decision. How about you go back to bed and sleep on it.”

Back in bed, I was all confused because it was Saturday, not a Thinking Day, and I was alone, not cuddled up next to Mom, and I only had two or three hours to decide whether I should throw this competition and take more money but not get to say anything else to Brad or win the competition and take the money fair and square and get to say something to Brad, and to the whole world by proxy. Obviously, I should take Steven’s dad’s money, I thought. But then I thought about Mom trying to make herself taller by picking out her hair, and me not finding the right word to give her, and I thought, wouldn’t winning be the thing that made us both taller? Or was it the money that would? And if it was the money, wouldn’t it be better to have one hundred percent more money? Or would it be better to have less money and more microphone time? What was fake again? And what was real?

I did not feel like a thinker, or an intellectual. I felt like an idiot little kid. Outside, Aunt Sister and Mom were still talking, softer than before. I strained my ears to hear them.

“It’s just hard,” Mom said. “It’s all so hard.”

“Sister. The struggle continues. You’re not alone.”

“But I am, though. I am. You left.”

“There’s a whole community – ”

“Sister. Listen. I just need someone to say, it’s hard.”

“Sister. It is hard. It is. Fucking. hard.”

And then there’s a long, long, long contemplative silence.

*

On the walk to the subway I lagged a few paces behind Mom and Aunt Sister. When I was sure they weren’t looking, I squatted down and put my ear to the grey water that puddled in front of the crosswalk on 116th.

“If you wanted to start talking, now would be a great time,” I hissed down to it.

Absolute silence. Great, I thought. Just great. No help from the water.

When we got to the BrainKidz studio, a woman in a pencil skirt hurried over to Mom and grabbed her by the wrist. Aunt Sister swatted the woman’s hand away. The woman jumped and skittered backwards. Mom and Aunt Sister both glared at her. Standing together, they both looked way, way taller.

“This is Steven’s dad’s assistant,” Mom said. “Rude assistant,” Aunt Sister muttered.

“I guess she wants us to talk to him.”

“I want to talk to him,” I said. I still didn’t know what I was going to say, but I wanted to see who Steven’s dad was.

The woman in the pencil skirt took Mom, Aunt Sister and I to a room four times the size of my bedroom with a mirror and chairs and a little table with a bowl of fruit and cut-up sandwiches. I was wondering how the heck Steven’s dad had gotten a room like this when he wasn’t even the one who had to take all the standardized tests, but I didn’t have any time to assuage my curiosity because there was only fifteen minutes until Steven and I had to compete in the final round. Mom and Aunt Sister hung back, behind me, flanking the door.

“You must be Kwame,” Steven’s dad said. He stood by the table, dressed in a suit too tight around the thighs.

“Yeah. Where’s Steven?” I asked, looking around.

“In the car,” Steven’s dad said. “Doing some last minute drills. Sorry. Who are you?” Steven’s dad looked behind me, at Aunt Sister.

“That’s my dad,” I said. Steven’s dad laughed, too loud and weirdly forced. I almost felt sad for him, that he would never get the serious pleasure of laughing at a joke that Aunt Sister told. When it was clear no one was laughing with him, he got a really confused look on his face. Then a sort of disgusted look, like the fruit on the table had just gone bad.

“We talked it over and came to the conclusion that you’re asking the wrong person,” Mom said to Steven’s dad. Listening to her voice was like watching snow fall silently from inside of a house with no heat; the dread that comes with knowing the world will only get colder. Way scarier than the scary voice she used with me.

“Kwame should be the one to decide,” Mom said. “Ask him what you asked me.”

I puffed my chest up and tried to look serious, adult, even though not a single drop of water had ever told me anything, I still really didn’t understand Hortense Spillers, and, if I was being honest, my favorite parts of Thinking Days weren’t even really the thinking, it was the getting to cuddle with Mom.

“I heard you were going to give my Mom ten thousand dollars if I pretended to lose the competition,” I said.

“Not if you pretend to lose,” Steven’s dad said. “If you actually lose. You have to actually lose the competition.”

“Thirty thousand,” I said. “What?”

“I’ll do it for thirty thousand.”

Steven’s dad squinted down at me, and then laughed a second time. “You really are a smart kid. Sure. Thirty thousand.”

If they agree quick, it means they could have given you even more – that was another negotiation lesson from Aunt Sister. Steven’s dad agreed too quick. I had to ask for more, before it was too late and the deal was struck. I opened my mouth before I even knew what was going to come out.

“And,” I said.

“And?” Steven’s dad said.

“And – and. …and, you have to pay my mom’s AT&T bill. And Aunt Sister’s too. For the rest of their lives. No matter how much it is. If you do that, plus thirty thousand dollars, I’ll lose. Actually lose.”

Right after I said it, I turned around to see Mom and Aunt Sister’s faces. I was curious if they thought I had made the right choice, the smart one, the intellectual one, even though I hadn’t used a singular Thinking Day to really think it over. So I looked at them, but they weren’t looking at me. They were looking at each other.

I think all the thoughts and feelings moving between their eyes in that moment could be summed up in just one word. A word beautiful and banging, a word making them both taller, a word round in the mouth with an m in the middle, a word deep and full and warm like water in a fresh bath. A word that came to me right away: transmellifecence.

 

Adesuwa Agbonile is a Nigerian-American writer and the host of the Audible podcast Backlash: The Myth of Political Progress. She’s a second-year MFA student at New York University, supported by the Goldwater Fellowship. She’s the winner of the 2025 Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize, and her fiction has appeared in Pleiades, The Loveliest Review, and Hobart Online. In all her work, she aims to twist common conceptions of reality and conjure new ways of thinking and being.

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