Milk Blood Heat. Dantiel W. Moniz

calling you devil-bitch at school, Duck says, and Zey’s head rears back; it’s the first time she’s ever heard her brother cuss. They say you’re going to Hell.

      Who says that? she asks. He says, Rylan and them. And Pastor. He pulls away from her, looks at her hard until she falls back and lets him pass into the house. Their mother fusses over him as she holds a bag of frozen peas to the bruises on his face. What happened, she demands, and Duck, ever loyal, tells them of the fight but not the reason. Their mother picks up the phone to call the principal, but their father hangs it up. Don’t shame him, he says and chucks her brother beneath his chin. I’m sure the other boy looks worse. He winks.

      Zey sneaks out easily, once her parents are asleep. Though it’s dangerous for a girl to travel this way, she likes how a street can feel at night, clean, almost like she owns it. Occasionally she looks into the quiet sky, her eyes drawn to the brightest lights, and remembers how once in Science her teacher taught the class to tell the difference between stars and planets. Think about “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” he’d said. Mercury, Venus, Mars—the planets never flickered.

      She arrives at New Life First Baptist some quick blocks later. In the dark, the small, steepled church looks exactly as it is: hollow, misleading. A stage. She knows the stories Pastor tells are ones he’s learned from other men, passed through generations like a plague until they become mentality, these adopted laws from a blue-eyed, man-dreamt Heaven. She thinks she knows who Ms. Addler’s “they” is, and what they hoped she’d never learn: that she is not second, not of Adam’s rib; that her whole being is God; that Pastor and those like him will continue to shout from the pulpit, raising boys—her Duck—to be hateful and scared.

      Zey unscrews the cap of her father’s red canister and breathes deep. She’s always liked the smell of gasoline—when she was a kid, her father used to let her work the pump. She likes the scent of something that can burn. She douses the outsized wooden doors and steps back. Thinks for a moment of the headlines tomorrow: black girl burns down black church, and the ways in which this act will be misread; how all the white folks—some black ones too—will be so thrilled for an excuse to talk about self-perpetuated crime. She hesitates one more moment, and then she strikes the match.

      Don’t.

      Zey turns to find Duck standing defiant behind her. He’s in his pajamas, one eye a shiny black moon, the other swollen shut. He and Zey stand off, the match still glowing in her hand, the possibility of inferno heavy around them. Duck moves forward and takes her empty hand, and Zey lets the flame fizzle out.

      On Friday Zey fakes sick, coughing into her palm, and her parents, tired of fighting, barely question her. You’ve made your bed, her mother says. Once the house is empty, Zey gets dressed, goes into the kitchen and spreads two slices of bread thick with peanut butter and apple jelly. She knows that soon she’ll walk through the door of eighteen, pass through her parents’ house into something she can’t quite see but can sense the murky edges of—the shape of her future. She will pack all her knowledge, strings of inky words—pansophy, verisimilitude—into canvas bags and wear them on her womanly body, where they’ll glow like Tahitian pearl, and when she leaves, her parents will wash their hands of her. Duck will send letters only once or twice a year. He will pen his love on cardstock; he will ask her how she is, but never when she’s coming back. Zey will remember Ms. Addler, and make a point to study her own power, to see the shadows beneath other people’s speech. She’ll remember Pastor, and his fear. At times she’ll regret not having burned the church down, but she won’t deny her brother saved her.

      Zey puts the PB&J and a bag of baby carrots into a brown paper sack. She walks to her brother’s school and when she enters the main rotunda, it’s as if time has reversed. Everything’s the same as when she was here—the jungle murals on the walls, the slack-faced administrators. All the places one could count on to hide. In the dean’s office she is all dimples and smiles. She makes small chat with the woman at the desk, who’s been talking to middle schoolers all morning and is grateful for the break. My brother forgot his lunch, Zey tells her. Sweet sister, the woman says. What’s your brother’s name?

      Rylan, Zey says, and the woman looks up the classroom, tells her she’ll page him to meet her on the way. She starts to tell Zey how to get there, but Zey laughs. I remember, she says.

      Out of sight of the woman, Zey drops the lunch sack into the trash, and when she sees Rylan coming toward her—chubby, swaggering—her smile deepens. The boy stops short and stutter-steps, as if about to break and run, before facing her and planting his feet. She asks him, Do you know who I am?

      He jams his hands into his pockets and juts his chin. Yeah, so? What you want?

      Zey drops one hip, lets him see her teeth. What I hear, you’ve got something for me. She knows what she looks like to this boy, frizzy bangs falling into her eyes, skin au lait—she is Venusian, Aphrodite fresh from the sea. Rylan looks over his shoulder, tongue working inside his cheek. A student on hall pass exits a nearby classroom, but otherwise, they’re alone. Zey can guess his dilemma, his ego warring with his common sense. She sees where she should push. You scared?

      Rylan kicks at the ground, and when he speaks his voice is a studied growl, the much lower register of an act. He tells her, I ain’t scared of nothing.

      Then come on, she says.

      He follows her into a supply closet she remembers from her time here, where students kept their science projects, their volcanoes and model suns. It’s dim inside, and smells of glue and something spilt. Zey pushes the boy up against one of the shelves, spits on her palm, and slides her hand inside his pants. He is hard then soft then hard again, and caught up, stays that way. His unwashed smell joins the other scents; his sigh is sticky against her cheek.

      Zey lets him enjoy this a little, her hand slicking slow. And just when the boy thinks this is going to be something else—further clout with his playground friends, fresh material to use beneath the sheets that night—Zey’s hand clamps around him. Don’t move, she whispers into his ear, and the boy goes rigid. Zey squeezes a little harder and stares him in the eyes.

      She says, Next time you fuck with my brother, I’ll find you where you sleep and rip it off. There are no shadows under Zey’s words, nothing hidden, and in that openness, the boy opens too, his fear escaping bravado and legacy to surface on his face. Zey studies it; she savors its plainness. So you understand? she says and the boy nods, because even in the dark she’s incandescent.