Chapter 1 :Cedarville
"JORDAN IF YOU DROP MY SKETCHBOOK I WILL END YOU!"
"I'm not gonna drop it!"
"You're holding it with one hand!"
"I have very reliable hands Olivia—"
"JORDAN."
He switched it to two hands. "Happy?"
"Moderately."
That was how the Carter family arrived at 14 Maplewood Drive on a Thursday afternoon in September , my brother hanging out the back of a moving truck arguing with me while my mother told us both to lower our voices because this is a neighborhood, not a stadium and my father stood in the driveway with his hands on his hips looking at our new house like it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen in his life.
I looked at it too.
It was nice. Really nice. Annoyingly, almost personally offensively nice the kind of nice that made it hard to stay in your feelings about the move because you couldn't look at it and say the house was the problem. Big front porch with white columns. Two car garage. A yard with an actual tree in it, just standing there unbothered, like it had been waiting specifically for us.
The neighborhood was something else though.
Quiet. That was the first word that came to me and it wasn't a compliment. Back in Atlanta quiet meant something was wrong. Here it seemed to just be the default setting like Cedarville, Ohio had decided long ago that noise was unnecessary and everyone had agreed and moved on. The street was lined with oak trees turning gold at the tips and perfect lawns and clean driveways and a whole lot of nothing happening.
One bird was going absolutely insane somewhere in one of those oak trees. Just screaming into the void.
I understood exactly how it felt.
"Olivia close your mouth and grab a box," Mom said, appearing beside me with the energy of a woman who had been awake since four in the morning and was not interested in anyone's emotions until the kitchen was unpacked.
"I'm taking in the scenery."
"Take it in while being useful."
"This is actually a cultural adjustment moment, Mom. I read that you're supposed to give yourself time to—"
"Olivia."
"Grabbing a box."
The inside of the house smelled like fresh paint which sounds nice until you realize what it means ...it means nobody has lived here yet. Nobody has cooked in this kitchen or argued in this hallway or left their shoes at the bottom of that curved staircase. It didn't smell like a home yet. It smelled like a possibility, which is a completely different thing.
Our old house in Atlanta smelled like shea butter and whatever Mom was cooking and fifteen years of us living and breathing and being loud in it. You can't box that up. I know because I tried, sort of, when I was packing my room and feeling dramatic about it. You can't take a smell with you. It just stays behind with everything else you leave.
Dad was walking through the rooms with his hands on his hips doing his thing nodding slowly at the high ceilings and the hardwood floors like he was personally approving each one. Marcus Carter had gotten a senior engineering position at TechVance and he had been walking around with this particular energy ever since proud and solid and so genuinely happy that it was almost impossible to be fully mad at him even when I was trying very hard to be.
"Liv." He turned when he heard me come in, spreading his arms wide at the open plan living room. "Look at this place."
I looked. High ceilings. Honey colored light coming through big windows. Floors the color of dark caramel. That staircase curving at the bottom like something from a movie set.
"It's very white," I said.
Dad blinked.
"The walls," I clarified. "Very white walls."
"We can paint."
"I know."
He studied me for a second with that look he had the one that was trying to figure out how much of what I was saying was about the walls. Then he crossed the room and put one hand on top of my head the way he'd been doing since I was four years old, messing up my curls completely.
"Dad—"
"You're going to be okay, Liv."
"I know that."
"I mean it."
"I know you mean it." I ducked out from under his hand and smoothed my hair back down. "Can we not do the moment right now? I'm still in my feelings and I need like three more days before I'm ready for the moment."
He laughed. That big stomach laugh of his that always made it impossible not to smile back even when you didn't want to.
"Three days," he agreed.
"LIV." Jordan's voice came from upstairs like a announcement. "COME SEE YOUR ROOM."
I took the curved staircase two steps at a time.
My brother was standing in the doorway of the second room on the left, leaning against the frame with his arms crossed and the expression of someone extremely pleased with themselves. Jordan Carter was twenty one, home from Howard University for the week to help with the move, and he was and I say this as someone who has known him his entire life and is therefore the most qualified person to make this assessment the most annoyingly good looking person in any room he entered at any given time. Tall, broad, deep brown skin, smile like a problem you didn't mind having. My best friend Kayla had described him once as a threat to public safety and I had told her that was disgusting and she was never allowed near my brother and also she was completely right.
He was also my favorite person on earth. I'd never tell him that. His head was already a structural concern.
"Second room on the left," he said. "Best window in the house. Faces the backyard. I called it for you before I even put my bags down."
I looked past him into the room.
Big. Much bigger than my room in Atlanta. Hardwood floors. A window seat built right into the wall beneath a wide window and through that window the backyard, the oak tree, the late afternoon light coming through the turning leaves like something out of a painting.
I walked past Jordan without saying anything, straight to the window seat, and sat down.
From up here I could see the whole backyard and beyond the fence the quiet organized rows of other Cedarville backyards and in the distance the tops of more oak trees. I could see the edge of Maplewood Drive a woman walking a golden retriever, two kids on bikes, a man three houses down washing his car in his driveway who had looked up when our moving truck pulled in.
He was still looking.
"The nosy neighbor already clocked us," I said.
Jordan came to stand behind me and looked out the window. "Oh yeah. Been watching since we pulled up."
"Welcoming energy."
"Extremely."
We watched the man for a moment. He looked down at his car, then back up at our house, then back down at his car.
Jordan put his hand on my shoulder. "You good?"
"I'm fine."
"Liv."
"I said I'm fine, Jordan."
He didn't say anything to that. He just sat down next to me on the window seat taking up most of it because he was enormous and looked out the window with me at the quiet Cedarville street and the man washing his car and the oak tree in our yard standing there like it had always been ours.
"You know what Howard taught me?" he said after a moment.
"How to be insufferable at family events?"
"That too. But also—" he nudged my shoulder with his, "that you can build your own world inside any world they put you in. You hear me? Doesn't matter what's outside that window. Doesn't matter who's watching. You build your own world, your own people, your own thing. And nobody can touch that."
I looked at him sideways. "That was almost profound."
"I have my moments."
"Don't let it go to your head."
"Too late."
I laughed. Actually laughed, for the first time since we'd crossed the Ohio state line and I'd looked out the car window at the flat land stretching out in every direction and felt my stomach sink to my knees. Jordan had a gift for that pulling laughter out of you when you were sure there wasn't any left.
"I hate this," I said, but softer now.
"I know."
"I don't want to start a new school."
"I know."
"I don't want to be the new girl."
"I know, Liv."
"And I especially.." I turned to look at him fully, "...do not want to be the new BLACK girl. You know what I'm saying? It's different. It's a whole different thing."
Jordan met my eyes and held them and in his expression was everything he understood and everything he couldn't fix and the particular helpless love of someone who had been navigating those same waters and knew exactly what I meant.
"Yeah," he said quietly. "I know exactly what you're saying."
We sat with that for a moment. Just the two of us and the bird outside losing its mind in the oak tree.
Then Jordan stood up and clapped his hands together.
"Okay. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to go downstairs, we're going to help Mom unpack because if we don't she will make our lives genuinely difficult, we're going to eat whatever she makes for dinner which will be incredible because it always is, and tonight you and me are going to sit on that porch and you're going to tell me every single thing you're scared of so we can make fun of it until it's smaller. Deal?"
I looked up at him.
"Every single thing?"
"Every single thing."
"That might take a while."
"I got time." He held out his hand to pull me up.
I took it.
Dinner was jerk chicken that Mom had marinated the night before the move because Renee Carter did not believe in the first night in a new house being a takeout night. We ate it sitting on the floor of the empty living room around a box that served as a table because all the actual furniture wasn't arriving until Saturday, using paper plates, surrounded by stacked boxes and the smell of fresh paint and the sounds of a neighborhood that was still completely foreign to us.
It was somehow one of the best meals I'd ever eaten.
"To Cedarville," Dad said, raising his plastic cup of sweet tea.
"To Cedarville," Mom echoed, raising hers.
Jordan raised his. Looked at me. Waited.
I picked up my cup.
"To Cedarville," I said. "May it survive us."
Dad pointed at me. "That's the spirit."
"I meant it as a threat."
"I know you did, baby."
Mom laughed — her real laugh, the one that was bigger than she meant it to be, the one she always covered with her hand. And just like that the living room that smelled like nobody's home felt a little warmer. A little more like ours.
After dinner I found my way back upstairs to my room with my sketchbook and my phone and sat back in the window seat while the light outside turned from gold to orange to the deep purple of early evening. The street was quieter now. The man three houses down had finished washing his car and gone inside. The bird had finally run out of things to say.
I opened my sketchbook to a fresh page and just held my pencil for a while without drawing anything.
My phone lit up.
Kayla : girl are you there yet
Kayla : what does it look like
Kayla : is it as white as google maps made it look
Kayla : OLIVIA CARTER ANSWER YOUR PHONE
I smiled so hard it almost hurt.
Me: I'm here I'm here calm down
Me: the house is actually really nice
Me: the neighborhood looks like every suburb in every movie ever made
Me: there is a man down the street who has been watching us since we arrived and a bird that needs therapy
Kayla : LMAOOO
Kayla : ok but real talk how are you
I looked out the window at the dark Cedarville street. At the oak tree in our yard, just a shape in the darkness now. At the houses with their warm lit windows, families inside, lives already built and settled and sure of themselves in a way mine didn't feel right now.
Monday was in four days.
Cedarville High was in four days.
Walking into a school where nobody knew me — where I would be a question mark, a novelty, a first impression nobody had asked to form — that was in four days.
I thought about all of that.
Then I typed —
Me: honestly? complicated
Me: but I'm okay
Kayla : you better be
Kayla : and Liv I mean this
Kayla : girl you better not let those people change you
I read that three times.
Then I put my phone face down on the window seat and picked up my pencil and started drawing. Kayla's face first — easy and automatic, the way you draw something you've drawn so many times it lives in your hands. Her locs and her round cheeks and that expression she had, the one that was always somehow skeptical and warm at the same time. I drew her the way she looked the last morning in Atlanta, standing in my old driveway while the moving truck was being loaded, arms crossed tight, trying extremely hard not to cry.
She cried anyway. We both did.
We hugged for a long time in that driveway and didn't say anything because nothing we could say was big enough for what we meant.
I finished the drawing and looked at it.
Then underneath it in small careful letters I wrote the thing she always said. The thing I was going to need to remember.
Don't let them change you.
I closed the sketchbook.
From downstairs I could hear my family — Dad's voice, Jordan's laugh, the sound of Mom moving through the kitchen getting it organized the way she always did, the particular music of the Carter family filling a new space with themselves. Refusing to be quiet in it. Refusing to be small.
I was my father's stubbornness and my mother's warmth and my brother's humor and Kayla's loyalty and sixteen years of Atlanta in my blood and my bones and my curls and my blue eyes and every single thing I had ever drawn in every sketchbook I had ever filled.
I was Olivia Carter.
And Cedarville, Ohio had absolutely no idea what was coming.
I smiled at that thought really smiled, the private kind, just for me and uncurled from the window seat and went downstairs to be with my family.
Four days.
I'd be ready.