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“Why would that be cliché?”
“Because my focus would be dermatology and—” She paused to gesture to her face and body and the vitiligo that had caused patches of her skin to lose pigment.
“Are you doing it because you want to help people or because you think it’s what you should want to do?”
Atlas seemed to mull it over before she lifted her chin and met my gaze. “I want to help people. I spent years feeling uncomfortable in my own skin because of my skin. It took me a long time to understand that this disease wasn’t my fault and that I shouldn’t be ashamed of it. I may not be beautiful by traditional standards, but it’s okay to think I’m beautiful by my own standards.”
“Sounds like a good enough reason to me. And you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself. I don’t know too many teenage girls whose self-esteem didn’t start in the toilet or who didn’t wish they could wear someone else’s skin. The fact that you caught on so soon and thought, ‘fuck what anyone else thinks,’ means you’re already ahead of the curve.” I paused, biting my lip to keep my next words down before saying fuck it. “After what you just told me, the last thing I want to do is make you think your journey needs validation, but I have to say it. I look at you, Atlas, and all I see is art. I don’t think you’re beautiful despite your condition or because of it. You just are. Period.”
I watched a slow smile etch across her pretty face. “City Girls period?”
“You got me fucked up.”
We burst out laughing and then fell into an easy silence that ended when she said, “Thank you.”
I was thankful I’d stopped at a red light before I crashed my fucking car from staring at her pretty ass for so long. “Ain’t shit.”
The light turned green, so I focused on the road as I sped away.
“So, what about you?” she asked. “What made you want to be a mechanic?”
“Kind of fell into it, I guess. I bought my first whip out of an auction when I was sixteen, but I couldn’t afford much, so it was basically a heap of junk that kept breaking down. My pops told me if I wanted to keep it, I had to pay for the repairs myself. Money was tight since he and my mom were both out of work, but on the real, it was his way of punishing me because he didn’t approve of the way I’d gotten the money to buy the car in the first place.
“How did you get the money?” she asked me quietly.
“Whatever I had to,” I answered cryptically. You never knew who could be listening. I glanced at her, and noticing my attention, she nodded her understanding, and I returned my focus to the road. “Anyway, he had been cussing my ass out for months about staying off the streets and becoming another black male stereotype, but I wasn’t trying to listen, you feel me? People would take one look at me and assume I’d grown up in a broken home anyway, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. My parents were solid. They loved each other, and they loved me. Life just got in the fucking way. We were already in the middle of another recession when motherfuckers started flying planes into buildings and shit. People were getting downsized left and right after the country literally took another hit, and neither of my parents was exempt. I’d just made sixteen, and in my head, I was pretty much a man, so I did what men are supposed to do. I stepped up. My pops was no square, but he still didn’t want me throwing my future away by getting sent to the pen or dying, but I think it killed his pride too. His teenage son was providing when he couldn’t, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. After that, he barely had two words for me, and that lasted a few years until some shit went down with my mom.”
I fell silent, lost in the bitter memories, until Atlas’s soft voice gently guided me back to the now. “What happened?” I could hear the urgency in her request for me to continue.
I just shook my head, not quite ready to get that deep with her. “It doesn’t matter. My pops still resented me and low-key blamed me too. It didn’t matter that I’d proved him wrong. I’d graduated high school and wasn’t in and out of jail like he’d predicted. Yeah, I was doing dirt and digging myself deeper into it every day, but I was smarter than most. I never took more risks than was necessary. I wasn’t trying to become hood rich or famous. I just wanted to survive. I wanted to give my parents the security they’d sacrificed to give me all my life. It didn’t matter to my father, though. Every time I came around, he would have some slick shit to say. We’d argue, and my mom would almost kill herself each and every time to stop it.”
I found myself gulping as the memory of our last fight played in my head with crystal-fucking-clarity as if it had happened only yesterday.
“Eventually, my father got it into his head to disown me even though I’d already moved out and was taking care of myself. He knew that, so he called himself changing the locks on me and banning me from the house.”
“What did you do?” Atlas whispered. The veiled horror in her voice told me she knew it wasn’t anything good. I hadn’t reacted well to being turned awayat all.
I sighed and found myself hesitating—almost like I was ashamed of my actions for the very first time. “I kicked the fucking door in,” I grumbled.
“Owen.”
Strangling the steering wheel, I forced my grip to relax, only to clench my teeth, knowing that I hadn’t told her the worst of it yet. “My father was there, and when he confronted me, he told me I wasn’t welcome in their home as long as I was in the streets. I told him he could try to keep me out, but as long as my mom was there, he’d have to either deal with me or kill me.”
I heard Atlas’s sharp inhale. “What did your father say?”
I bucked my eyes as I glanced at her with a shit-eating grin. “He didn’t say shit. He just laid my ass out.”
A choked sound escaped Atlas. “He…what?”
“You heard me.” I was cackling now despite the bittersweet memories. “I was standing in my parents’ living room with my chest puffed out like I was the baddest thing walking when my pops started going across my shit.”
It had been the first time I’d gotten a taste of my own medicine in a fight. Whenever I threw a punch one way, my pops was already coming at me from another direction. It was like fighting a rabid pitbull and a tornado at the same time. Impossible.
“He was throwing hammers left and right, and I was throwing them back, but I was green to the man my father really was and no match for him and four years’ worth of aggression.”
My father had been a professional boxer and was just shy of a heavyweight champion when he ended his short career mere months after I was born. I guess he’d decided that he’d rather see his son grow into a man than chase a title. Maybe he even hoped I’d follow in his footsteps when he taught me everything I knew.
He’d warned me once that no teacher was ever as good as experience. I’d taken those words to heart and made him regret ever uttering them after I provoked as many fights wherever I went as I could.
