Page 6 of Shâhzâdeh

“YOU THINK YOU can tell me what you aren’t going to do?”

I looked into my brother’s face trying to understand what the world he was saying. He’d bust into my room spouting nonsense. It wasn’t the nicest room, but it was my tiny corner of this hellscape. With barely enough room for a dresser and my twin sized bed, our legs were almost touching despite how close he was to the door.

“Johnny why are you being like this?”

He stood up taller and faced me with the same posture that our father always had. He wore a polo style shirt and khakis with his curly hair slicked down on his head.

“You can’t be a good wife if this is how you’re going to behave.” His head shook in disappointment, the words he was saying confusing me. Despite having heard him, I was struggling to register what he meant.

“We are too young to get married and I don’t like anyone like that.”

“You don’t have to. We are going to marry each other.” He was blunt, as though the matter was already settled.

I blinked not understanding what he meant despite comprehending the words. “You’re my brother. This is nasty.”

“Dynasties of Egypt married brothers and sisters together. Besides, we don’t even share the same blood.” Johnny shrugged off my concerns in a way that told me they’d already been addressed and dismissed by someone with more authority over us. That was a problem. My life had always been planned out without my consent or my input. I’d been holding my breath until I hit eighteen but now this was messing things up.

“But I don’t feel like that about you. You’re my friend…my brother.” I gagged every time I thought about marrying someone I’d grown up with. I looked around the bare walls of the glorified closet I lived in when I could rest. With the number of chores I had to do, that came few and far between.

Johnny shrugged again, as though my words meant nothing because his were law. It was foreshadowing just how badly things would be if they went through with making me do this. “You will change your mind. And love isn’t something that is necessary for us to have a successful marriage.”

I jumped up off the bed and stood up to him because I couldn’t be who they wanted me to be. My long red hair that they hated was pulled back in the bun as they demanded. The headaches I endured were a problem daily. My clothes were secondhand and my height wasn’t taken into consideration so they were always ill-fitting. I’d taken their indifference without complaint for years. The promise of freedom being far more alluring than winning a battle that would be nothing more than a hollow victory. And now I felt like I should’ve raised hell all along if this was going to be my fate. My life was being snuffed out before I even lived it.

“But that’s what I want. To go to school and to wait until I’m older to get married. To travel outside of North Carolina.”

“Well, I go to school and I don’t think this is the best idea for you.” His arms folded across his chest like he was putting his foot down and my stomach knotted, realizing he was going to be just as bad, if not worse, than our parents.

“Why do you think you can tell me what to do with my life? When I’m eighteen I’m an adult and I don’t have to listen to anyone.”

He grinned like he’d expected me to behave this way. I was sure he did because he’d listen to my dreams, we’d discuss how we wanted to live differently and now that information was being used against me.

“And what are you going to do without an education? You haven’t ever been anywhere but here and the church or to help at the office. You think the outside world is going to accept you? To them you look weird and dress funny. You don’t know about anything secular and they’d bully you. You’d get swallowed up by a shark the first second you tried to leave.”

“Is that what they do to you in school? Bully you?” I felt sorry for him because he looked as though he was speaking from experience.

Instead of us having a moment like we used to, his face changed angrily and he stepped even closer to me. “No, why would you say that?”

“You’re the one who brought it up.” I mirrored his anger because I wasn’t going to let him talk to me however he wanted.

He pushed my shoulder forcing me to flop back on the bed. This wasn’t the playful roughhousing we’d done before, this push felt like it held authority. The promise of worse happening if I didn’t listen.

“Are you trying to be funny with me?” He looked like he was gearing up for a fight and I wasn’t sure how I became his enemy.

“No! I’m asking a question. Why are you being weird?”

“Father promised you to me and I’m not going to tolerate you behaving in a way that is unsuitable.”

“What in the world do you mean, promised?”

“You are too valuable to get away and it’s been decided we’re going to get married.” He said it with his shoulders rolled back and the same absolute tone our father spoke in.

“But I didn’t agree to that.”

His lip quivered slightly like my trying to make sense of the situation frustrated him. “Does it matter? Our parents have given their okay so that’s what’s going to happen. You don’t have to agree, nobody cares what you want.”

“Why are you acting like this? We always said that we would do more than what they wanted us to. That the things they say about us and people like us are wrong. We don’t even know if we are blood brothers and sisters. They just say that we aren’t. What if they’ve been lying and—”

“Well, they aren’t. You have to see that. They got that colored man in the office thinking that he is gonna take away the rights of good white people.” He was spouting bullshit about President Obama and I was so disgusted. He sounded like them. I had been proud that he’d been elected and given the chance, I would vote for him myself.

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