Shades of Friendship

For one whole year, almost every day after school, I would sit in our backyard garden and wait for Desmond to call me on the phone. Underneath the lush, twisted grapevine poles, clad in green and purple edible fruits, and beside my grandfather’s prized magenta rose bushes, I placed our home portable phone, a soft blanket and a plush cushion from our plastic patio furniture. It was 1993 and I was reading The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield was my decoy, my escape to the outside world, to wait for Desmond, so no one would know we were talking. I was prepared to pick up on the first ring.  
Desmond was from Guyana and had smooth, cocoa powder colored skin. My face was round, chubby and rosy, speckled pink and white. I was 13 and he was 15. We became fast friends after I was jumped in middle school by a group of older girls and he’d often walk me home — waiting on the corner of our local library to make sure I didn’t have to manage the 12 block distance alone. Our after school walks were short lived once neighbors started talking and after my grandfather saw me standing in front of his house. Desmond’s family was one of the first families of color to move on to our Brooklyn neighborhood block. My brother Louie could play with him, but I couldn’t be close to him. Those were the rules. 
Our daily meet-ups were relegated to secret after school phone calls so no one would see us together. He called once a week, sometimes twice. I would lay on my back, listen to his voice, and daydream about a first kiss that never was. And when I rolled on to my right side, I could see through the large rose bushes to his top window where he would call me from his home portable phone. The only boy who didn’t call me “Louie’s little sister” and who never made fun of me for being fat. 
Hours would pass, my neck creaked with my ear to the phone. Someone who cared that I felt alone. 
The color of Desmond’s skin never crossed my mind. As I held my book to my chest, a book I eventually read when I went to bed at night, I wondered how two friends could be kept apart because of their color. I wondered how it was ok to have girlfriends with different colored skin, but why the rules changed for Aubrey and I. Eventually our calls faded. He moved and we never said goodbye. I still think about him and a first kiss that never happened.