The Brood Comb

“Mr. Moreno?”

“Hmm?”

“Permission to speak freely?”

Paul scrunched his brow, eyes up from his desk. “Speak freely? We’re not in the military, Lil.” She cut him a glance. “My bad. Lily.”

“I mean, can I speak candidly? Like no admin/student pretenses?”

Oh no. “Well, Lily, we’re both adults here. What can I do for you?” Mr. Moreno knew he probably shouldn’t have asked that question, but Lily wasn’t going to ask for permission twice.

“Look Mo. With all due respect, this is bullshit…respectfully.”

Paul chuckled lightly, suddenly feeling the massive strain on his temples, the weight of his waist-long dreadlocks. “Right, right, respectfully.”

I suppose a bit more context is needed here. “Mr. Moreno, if I wanted to get insults and racial slurs thrown at me by a bunch of white kids, I’d go on a Call of Duty forum. This is not what I signed up for.” In actuality, it was exactly what she signed up for. The Opportunity Teachers Alliance Program was designed to a) give kids in struggling and underfunded school districts the opportunity to be taught for one to two years by bright-eyed new college graduates, and b) give recent college graduates too scared for the Peace Corps the opportunity to do something noble for a year without people continually asking what the next “big plan” is. What she hadn’t anticipated was,

“Honeycomb, West Virginia?! Seriously Mo?!”

Paul expected it to be a hard sell for any student here. When he signed on to be the OTAP liaison at Cheyney University, he hadn’t expected assignments like this to come across his desk. But they were desperate and Paul knew Lily was the perfect candidate, even if she had been anticipating, 

“Chicago, not fucking coal country! I mean, shit Paul, anywhere but there. Detroit, Bridgeport, any where else I put as location preferences on my application. Was this even listed as an option?” His shiffle-shuffle of papers and avoidance of eye contact gave Lily the sense that no, it wasn’t, only adding to her ire and frustration. She tried to ground herself, stopping her from succumbing to waves of panic, depression, and overall pissed-off ness. 

“Look, Lily. White kids need Black teachers too. It’s a new opportunity, a fresh start.”

Lily’s mind drifted to that documentary on ants she watched with her Dad. 

“I’ve spoken at length with the principal there, and they are tremendously excited to have you there. They don’t get a lot of staff from big cities - hell, they don’t seem to get a lot of staff from outside the state or the county at all.”

Lily liked ants. Loved them even. They reminded her of Philly. Everyone organized neatly in perfect little Penn-like rows, even, bustling but an order underneath the chaos.

“And look, there’s a town close by, let me check my notes…Beckley. Beckley, West Virginia. It’s 23 percent Black. That’s the same percentage of Black as Pittsburgh!”

She remembered her dad leaning into the TV, as fascinated as her if not more. This particular one was about a fungus that took over the ant’s minds, “Almost like Walking Dead, Last of Us zombies!”, her dad had quipped.

“There’s a long history of Black people in that region. We think of Appalachians as poor Southern white folk, but there’s so much more to that region than we could even imagine!”

Except, the more you watched the documentary, the more you realized the horrifying truth. The fungus didn’t control the brain. It crept its way into the nervous system, spreading spores into the bug’s legs, making it move, however, wherever it wanted.

“Bill Withers even grew up there. And B. Kwaku Duren was born there…granted, they moved to Cleveland, but still-”

The ant’s brain was still intact. It knew what it wanted, and it knew what was happening. It was powerless, at the mercy of the moss in its brain.

Lily heard Mr. Moreno the entire time. Now she was listening. “Am I the only one going? To Honeycomb, I mean?” 

A pause. Paul Moreno drummed his fingers on the armrests of his leather chair and cleared his throat again. Lily knew what that meant.

She wondered if an ant could scream.

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Lily barely heard her dad on the drive back from Cheyney to Philly. She hadn’t exactly divulged the secrets of her next venture to him, and she wasn’t quite sure why. He’d always been supportive of her, even among the pain of mom’s leaving and lights off and tremulous walks home from school down Kensington Avenue when he couldn’t get off work to pick her up.

“That’s MY baby. Lily Marie Bolton, Bachelor’s degree. I got me a college grad!”

She giggled as he ruffled her hair and slapped his Eagles cap on her head. She’d usually complain about him messing up her wash-and-go, but she let it slide. (For today, at least.)

“Baby girl, I can’t even begin to tell you how proud I am of you. You did it.”

Lily pushed her seat back a bit to gaze at her father’s profile. Same aquiline nose as hers, long with a slight bump in the middle. He was just shy of 55, but he still looked about 20, a trait that reverberated in her baby face.

“We did it, Baba. I couldn’t have done any of this without you.” He smiled at Lily’s old nickname for him, back from when she was having a hard time pronouncing her “D” sounds and the nice Ethiopian man at the corner store told her that his kids called him Baba too.

The metallic, tinny rendition of “Just the Two of Us” alerted Lily’s father to a  call, and reminded Lily of the fact that she’d be living in the singer’s hometown in a few weeks. 

“Maurice Bolton, head of Bolton Cleaning Supplies and Services, how may I be of service to you?”

Lily turned towards her window, watching as Route 3 whirred past like a technicolor laundromat. She tried to keep down the lump in her throat. Worse came to worst, she’d tug her hoodie over her head, lower the aforementioned Eagles cap over her eyes, and pretend to sleep while she cried.

Maurice’s (relic of antiquity) flip phone snapped shut and he tossed it in the cup holder, humming “Money, money, money” (The O’Jays, not ABBA) happily to himself.

Lily grinned. “Big deal coming in, I presume?”

“You presume is right!” He laughed. “Biggest one yet. From now on, yo daddy’s gon’ be cleaning the Walnut Street Theatre.” He switched to his poshest British accent for the latter part, and Lily responded in kind.

“Tally-ho, good Sit Bolton, First of His Name. Do riddle me this, old chap. Shan’t it be your employees cleaning on your behalf? Why you haven’t cleaned a toilet apart from our domicile since I was a wee lass on The Avenue of Kensington.”

A beat passed. She knew she had triggered an uncomfortable string of memories, even when he smiled at her a moment later.

“Yeah, yeah, you know what I meant wicha smart mouth. It’s a big deal, though. Onwards and upwards, Lily May.”

Onwards and upwards, indeed. The one-bedroom apartment in Zombie Land was fine for a while. Until Lily and Maurice saw her mom passed out standing up.

They moved to a motel after that. Lily never could figure out how he got the money for that.

One Mick Jenkins mixtape later, the Bolton’s trusty Ford Transit Connect pulled in front of their brick townhouse on Fern Street. It had been an absolute fright when they first moved in on Lily’s tenth birthday, but her father was nothing if not crafty and determined to make it a home.

She hopped down from the car (at 5 foot 3 on a good day she didn’t have much of a choice) and stretched out, yawning and clearing the crick-crack-cricks in her shoulders and hips. Lily waved at Sister Jenkins across the street, and before she could ask any intrusive post-grad life questions, a rogue football slamming into her rose bushes provided a much-needed distraction. 

Maurice appeared at Lily’s side, arm over her shoulder. He cocked his head toward the truck. “Getting that tomorrow?”

“Absolutely”.

“Usual fare? Meet back at West Godfrey and head to the park?”

Without a word, the two splintered off. Lily to the H-Mart for two rice porridges with snow crab (heated in the staff break room - a perk of the manager’s son having a crush on you). Maurice to Olney Steak and Beer for two roast pork sandwiches (the sole reason why their stint as Messianic Gentiles didn’t work.)

They could have driven, but the late summer air was warm, so they walked down to Fisher Park, posted up against trees as they ate everything and talked about nothing. A perfect Philadelphia evening in Lily’s book.

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She really wished she had just taken the admin job in her dad’s office.

Lily tossed and floundered about, trying her best to get comfortable. Her bed was fine, and $2,430 for a fully furnished two-bedroom apartment (partially subsidized by her grandmother) was unheard of in Philly. Her dad installed every apartment-friendly alarm system he could find and refused to leave until he was certain she knew how to manage them. (He’d also tried to get her a gun at the Wal-Mart nearby, but she had politely declined.)

She flipped over to her left side, staring at the faint glow of her cell phone charging across the room. Should she keep it closer to the side of the bed? What if there was an emergency? Or that weird guy Logan down the hall came by trying to be “neighborly” again? He’d offered to help her and Maurice carry groceries in earlier, but as her dad put it, “Man like that, smelling like a pack of Marlboros and a John Deere shirt on? I don’t care how nice he is, you be polite, say hi and leave. Don’t know why you even agreed to come down here, all this ‘Let’s go Brandon’ shit everywhere…”

She’d given up on sleeping. If she couldn’t rest, at least she could get some work done. The mountain air was already chilled, so she padded her way to grab a robe and sat down at the kitchen table. Cocking up an ear, she realized it - it was too damn quiet here! No drunkard arguing, or police sirens, or kids with night-shift parents racing bikes down the street. Just eerie silence.

She shivered, bunching her robe tightly against her chest. The silence wasn’t the only thing weird here. People were just too damn friendly. Rolling a busted shopping cart around Kroger, she assumed the stares and odd smiles and ‘How ya’ll doing’ was because they were new - and Black. But even the Black people here were strange. Like they could smell she wasn’t one of their own. “Close Encounters of the Appalachian Kind” she called it.

Now fully awake, she flipped through the pages of her training manual wondering how on earth she was supposed to approach this mess. Teaching English and Geography classes wasn’t the issue. Her Social Relations major allowed her a lot of flexibility in course concentrations, so she was more than intellectually equipped. But as for everything else…

“One planning period? That’s all you get? What about lunch or recess or somethin’?” her dad exclaimed.

“They’re understaffed, Daddy. I’m the only English teacher guaranteed to sign on for the whole year. The other two are part-time subs, so who knows how that’ll go. The Amandas said sometimes they just let the kids run around in the gym to let off steam if there’s no teacher for certain classes, and they’re trying to incorporate some virtual stuff, but they don’t have enough computers and-”

Maurice cut in. “Wait a minute, run that back. Did you say ‘The Amandas’?”

Yes, she had said ‘The Amandas’. Amanda Hoker, Amanda Grace Jones, and Amanda Lynn Terry. After the kerfuffle that arose when Lily mistakenly called the latter two just “Amanda” and not their (“God-given and doctor-written) full names of Amanda-Grace and Amanda-Lynn, she learned that the three had been part of a state program to encourage West Virginia locals to come back and teach in the area after university. They were nice enough, if not a little…well, vapid. Once “Just Plain Amanda” learned that no, Lily wasn’t really a fan of Beyonce and no, Lily hadn’t seen Black Panther, their attempts at a further connection fizzled out.

It was formerly retired Julie Hawkins that got Lily together. The 75-year-old Texan had found Ms. Bolton curled up in a fetal position and crying under her desk, much to Ms. Bolton’s embarrassment.

“Now hun, I’ve been to Philadelphia. Ain’t nothin’ in these hills a little thing like you ain’t seen before. Get on up and let me show you how the printer works. Damn thing is always giving me trouble.”

Setting aside not knowing what she meant by “a little thing like you”, Lily clung to Mrs. Hawkins for dear life. Maybe it was the mommy issues, but having an old, no-nonsense Southern woman around was a welcome change of pace (even if she still slipped and used the word “colored” sometimes.)

Because had it not been for Mrs. Hawkins on the night of open house, Lily might have run on home, back to the familiar march of Philadelphia streets and away from this altogether alien hum of the Appalachian hills But with a gentle shoulder squeeze and a “You ready?”, Lily thought she might be.

And when a little ruddy-cheeked seventh-grade boy with a body like a bean pole and a head like the Liberty Bell wandered into her classroom and said, 

“Oh! Are you a teacher here? You look like Afro Samurai. That’s neat!”

At that moment, Lily knew she was ready.