Hiding fandom in the underwear drawer since 1977

Posted by Crystal Sidell

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/laurels/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58843

inspired by Aja Monet’s “saltwater railroad”

we see them, backlit
by the horizon, teetering
on whiskey-sodden legs.
(our cast-off tails twitch.)
when they see us they
grin, lick chapped lips–
cover the distance faster.
ocean-shine blind, they’re
oblivious to the oblivion
in our eyes. how their
wailing knifes us open;
fills our lungs with salt
longing, red and raw.
(liver. kidneys. heart.)
the fiery border ’tween
torment and ecstasy
searing flesh to ash. fury
tongued, we lash the breeze
with our foxing song, the
wanting in our throat
palpable as coral, weighted
as barnacled anchors.
these, our laurels: the bitter
dread of choppy waters,
the salt-seasoned taste
of salvation’s undoing.

[Editor’s Note: The publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from Space Cowboy Books/Jean-Paul L. Garnier during our annual Kickstarter.]

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/laurels/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58843

Posted by Jamie McGhee

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/fiction/skiinfolk/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58873

If I could smash every mirror in the world, I would do it and dance barefoot on the shards.

Anyone would do the same if they looked like me.

Actually—these days, anyone who looks like me just loads up an Augmented Skiin so they stop looking like me.

•

I wish I could load one too. Believe me, I’ve tried.

For my eighth birthday, my father commissioned me a shimmering gold aug. The artificial Skiin slid over my real skin, blooming at my fingertips, hardening up my shoulders and down my legs, glistening in my hair and transforming me into walking sunshine. Gone was my normal, flat brown complexion. In my Skiin, I glowed.

For my ninth birthday, I received a dolphin-blue cerulean that rippled across my body like the Atlantic Ocean.

On my tenth, a muted khaki, then a soy-based beige, then a hypoallergenic tan.

Every single time, the Skiin gave me a rash. I scratched. I scratched so deeply that I clawed through the aug and into my own skin and then I tore out chunks of that too.

So when I turned eleven, I traded in all my failed augmentations for a pair of Skytop sneakers, and I taught myself to dance.

•

I cannot control how my body looks, but I can control how it moves. After ten years, I can split, halo and hit a double backflip. I can jackhammer into a headspin and end in a tombstone freeze, and my footwork flies so fast people think I’m levitating. Every time I head to the dance studio, I feel like I’m glowing.

That feeling never lasts.

Once I see someone augged out, I ache with envy. And everyone is always augged out. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a teenager flipping drive-thru burgers or a single mom trudging home from work, I think, God, what I wouldn’t give to switch places.

It’s even worse when it’s family. My cousins know about my allergy, but they still pose the Question. It’s the same Question that old classmates ask when we bump shoulders at the five-n-dime supermarket; it’s the same Question that ushers whisper when they pass the collection plate at church. “Why’re you still skiinless, Ogden?”

“Because I don’t want one,” I always lie and puff out my chest. “I love my natural color. Black is bold.”

Pity wells up in their expensive rainbow irises. Pity and disbelief.

•

The Question, however, does not bother Laurence Laurens.

Laurence Laurens is the first of his kind. He splashes onto front pages and dominates the airwaves out of nowhere—he has no pedigree or musical training, just dark skin, a clean fade and a Georgia drawl that melts into syrup when he sings. And he sings.

A Black man, skiinless. America would despise him if he didn’t have the voice of an angel. That’s the Josephine Baker effect.

In prime-time interviews, Laurence Laurens grins at the Question whenever he’s asked. “Why am I skiinless? Because I love it, that’s why.”

I’ve seen every single interview. And every single host, glittering in a designer Skiin like frostbite silver or solar-flare yellow, always recoils in horror.

“I had no choice!” Laurence Laurens booms a great big laugh that peaks his mic; the peak is what makes this particular interview my favorite. “Growing up, I couldn’t afford one. So I went natural. I was the only natural kid in all of Cribb County, felt like, and I hated myself for it—Lord, I hated my reflection. All that ugly in one face. I used to get angry at the mirror. But one day, instead of getting mad, I closed my eyes. I prayed, ‘Lord Almighty, won’t you please make me beautiful?’ I opened my eyes. Guess what the Lord did?”

The host looks wary. “What?”

“Nothing!” Laurence Laurens is wearing a ten-thousand-dollar suit, but he slaps his knee as if he were wearing overalls. “I looked the same. Waste of a prayer!”

The camera pans to the audience. They’ve already leapt to their feet because they know what’s coming. Sometimes when I’m rewatching this clip, I stand up too—but only when I’m alone in my apartment and no one else can see me.

Laurence Laurens grows quiet for a moment as he straightens his tie. “But know what? Ugly as I was, I couldn’t deny that God had given me something beautiful: my voice. So I decided right then and there, in my ma’s bathroom, that if I couldn’t make my body look how I wanted, I’d make it sound how I wanted. I swore I’d become a singer.”

He leans back, lacing his fingers like he’s deep in thought. “And now that I can afford augs, I don’t want them anymore. Know why? Because turns out, I never needed to pray to be beautiful. I’d been beautiful all along.”

Laurence Laurens springs up. The audience knows their cue. “Black is what?” he calls.

“Brilliant!” comes the chorus.

“Black is what?”

“Blazing!”

“Black is—”

“Bedazzling!” They stomp and whistle before he can get the full sentence out.

Laurence Laurens claps his hands above his head. “Black is bedazzling, and black is bold. Amen.”

When he says it, I believe him.

•

“Wait, Ogden!” The dance instructor yanks my backpack strap. “Wait, you must wait.”

Tonight’s waacking workshop is over, and I’m not in the mood to talk. But I’m also not in the mood to have my bag ripped, so I come to a reluctant stop.

Kerstina shifts her grip from my backpack to my wrist. “Have you thought about what I told you last time?”

I pull away, tensing. “I can’t do it.”

“And why not? Is this about—”

“Of course it is.” I massage my neck. A headache is building at the base of my skull.

“That’s nonsense.” Kerstina clucks her tongue. She moved here fifteen years ago but still judges what she calls American aug mania. That’s probably because in her native Stockholm, everyone naturally has seafoam-blue irises and cloud-white skin. They don’t have to pay $40,000 for it.

“It’s fine,” I say.

“It’s not fine.” She folds her arms. “You do not have the ‘look,’ but you are not so ugly. If I had to get any of these augmentations, I would get a Black one because it is more interesting.”

The headache grows. I don’t have the patience to remind her that Black Skiins don’t exist. Start-ups have attempted “augmentations of color” before, stamped with names like Taste of the Nile and Jungle Book Fever, but even the best ones looked less African American and more African Alien. The companies all went bankrupt.

Instead of explaining this again, I turn to leave. “Thanks.”

She tugs me back. “Let me finish. You do not have the ‘look,’ but do you have the talent. You should be onstage.”

I avert my eyes, embarrassed, and hope other students aren’t listening as they stream out of the studio. Deep down, I agree with Kerstina. If not for my aug allergy, I’d be dancing backup, performing behind the biggest singers in the biggest stadiums in the world—or at least making a living on a mid-sized circuit. But every casting director wants a certain aesthetic, wants a certain flair, demands that their dancers radiate celestial purple when the music starts. I can’t compete.

So instead, I collect penny paychecks doing mo-cap for schlocky action games. Motion capture. Animators glue me into spandex suits, slap on retroreflective markers and make me loop the same moves over, and over, and over again. Mo-cap is mind-numbing work, but it’s the only job where no one has to see me. Once they digitize my skeleton, they can slap any skin onto the game character and sell it.

“Do you think I haven’t tried?” I roll the tension out of my ankle. The bone keeps clicking. “No one will hire—”

“Times are changing.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“Yes, yes, you’re feeling sorry for yourself.” She digs in her duffel bag. “But have you seen this?”

She slides me an audition flyer: old-fashioned, actual paper. There are always dozens plastering the barricades around the studio, but I never toss them a second glance. She’s right, though. This one is different.

I read it once, squint, and read it again, half-convinced I’m imagining the swirling letters. This torn scrap of paper, still crinkled and sticky with tape, still smelling vaguely of the salt licorice in her duffel bag, could change my life.

“No,” I say finally. “I hadn’t seen it.”

Laurence Laurens is holding auditions.

•

There’s no use getting my hopes up.

I trash the flyer.

Then I dig it out again.

And I recycle it.

•

And I dig it out again. Shoot.

•

NO AUGS. That’s what the flyer says. NATURAL ONLY.

This makes the other dancers nervous. On audition day, as they queue for the registration table, they are itchy and twitchy and shy without their augs; they slump their shoulders, they pull down their sleeves, they powder and glitter their faces to hide what’s underneath. I know the feeling.

But for the first time, I keep my head high. As we adjust our numbered bibs, I chat with a trembling girl to distract her from her nerves. As we warm up in a practice room, I help someone stretch into a forward fold and assure them that the moles dappling their thighs aren’t hideous.

After we spread out, the choreographer demonstrates the combo. When I mark and memorize it, each move feels natural as it flows outward from my body, and when we split into heats to perform, I don’t apologize for how I look.

On the back wall, a life-sized poster of Laurence Laurens crosses a proud fist over his chest. A celebrity like him would never have time to watch open call auditions in person, especially in a backwater like South Grotto, but his gaze warms something in my stomach anyway.

The first round begins with a breakbeat cross-fused into a jazzy ragtime. The groove starts in my fingers and sweeps down to my knees. Soon I am sliding and gliding as the melody itself lifts me up. Dancing has never felt so easy. So right.

I’m waved into the second evaluation round, where the acidfunk zaps electricity up my spine. It would be impossible not to meet the music with my body, not to snake swivel and sweeten it with a kip-up. The song zigs, zags. Detonates. By the time it spins to a stop, I’m gripping my knees and gasping for breath as my heaving chest crinkles the bib. Satisfied sweat rolls into my shirt.

At the final cut, fourteen of us remain out of a hundred. The coordinators will accept up to six from South Grotto, since they’ve already signed fifty from five other cities. Detroit, Birmingham, Baltimore, Flint, Macon, they’re only recruiting from places that remind Laurence Laurens of home. Another Black dancer and I lock eyes and nod. I try not to smile. We’ve got this in the bag. Finally.

That is, until the casting director strolls forward, scribbling on a clipboard. “Quick question before we proceed: What color Skiins do you have?”

I stiffen. “Isn’t this a no-aug call?” I make accidental eye contact with the Laurence Laurens poster and glance away.

“The audition, yes, but we haven’t finished designing the show.” She says it slowly, looking at me like I’m dim.

The choreographer steps in. “The lighting designer may want to play with the lights a little, that’s all.”

“Exactly. It’s going to be, uh, shoot, beautiful, bountiful.” The casting director snaps her fingers as if trying to recall the right word. “Bedazzling!”

I offer weakly, “But black is …”

She blinks.

The other dancer raises his hand. “I have midnight indigo and burnt-sienna blaze.”

“Wonderful,” she says to him, and turns away from me. “Wonderful.”

•

When you’re too ugly to dance in the light, the only place to go is the dark.

Tonight, that means the darkest corner of the darkest floor of South Grotto’s dingiest club, KOLE. My mouth is full of vodka and my nose is full of nitrites and I dance until the sweat peels like paint down my skin. It’s masquerade night. Beneath the fabric on my face, I pretend I could be anyone.

The speakers blast and rattle with industrial techno. Techno requires no choreography and no groove—just me swinging punches against the notes in the air.

As the music climbs and the sonic grime gets gritty, there is suddenly a man. Then there are many men, glittering like disco balls. They are emerald and sapphire and technicolor teal. They are gyrating into me, bumping and grinding. They are closing in. Stinking of sweat and shaving cream, beer so syrupy on their breath that it sticks inside my throat. They tear off my mask.

I push them away. They push back harder. I stumble. They whistle. They are pawing my arms. They are licking my neck. They are cooing that I am beautiful and miming what they would do to a little black boy like me.

“And what would y’all do to me?” A voice shatters the darkness.

The men freeze.

A stranger parts the crowds, strolls forward and looms over them, extinguishing their light in his shadow. Beneath their augs, they turn phantom white and scuttle away like roaches, swearing and slurring racial slurs.

I meet the stranger’s eyes and turn away fast, reflexively shielding my face so he can’t see how plain it is. But he bends in close, adding heat to the air, smelling like wood and smoke, like whiskey and a bonfire. He skates a finger across the mole on my left shoulder. Before he removes his mask, I know his voice. The room breaks into gasps and whispers. A groupie with a shaved head snaps a photo, a woman with green dreadlocks wrinkles her nose, a kid covered in tattoos looks like they’ll faint. The man ignores them all and leans in closer to me.

“Nice aug,” says Laurence Laurens. “Looks expensive.”

A ringing sound pierces my ears as reality drops away.

I sway on my feet. “I…”

He raises an eyebrow.

“I …”

Then the vodka rushes back up my throat and I cover my mouth and I grip my forehead and I blurt, of all things, like an idiot, “It is.”

•

Laurence Laurens escorts me into the VIP section that I didn’t know existed. In a semi-private bathroom stall, I offer my body in gratitude. I don’t have anything else to give.

“No, thanks, peaches,” he says casually, as if he gets this offer ten times a day. “You were in a bad way, so it wouldn’t be right.” He starts to leave. “I was just passing through. Enjoy your evening.”

“Wait!” My hand flies out to seize his forearm.

Beneath my trembling fingers, his skin looks like chestnut, like mahogany; it is warm with summer and soft with charcoal curls of hair.

Peaches. Maybe he thinks I’m white under here.

“You should know.” I grip tighter. “This isn’t an aug.”

His shoulders stiffen.

“I don’t know why I lied.” My feet shift anxiously. “I actually can’t wear augs, although I wish I could, but I wasn’t thinking, and then I saw you, and you’re you, and I panicked and—”

He crushes my mouth in a kiss. Our bodies intertwine in the sticky stall, and, after I assure him that I’m sure, I let him overtake me in his heat and his hunger, and then I come up for air, and I let him overtake me again.

•

At sunrise, I dance my way home across the city, twirling up and down Central Avenue, spinning underneath an overpass, leapfrogging over a bench outside of a church. The stars transform into diamonds and pour down from the sky: It’s raining, I realize after a moment, but the cold doesn’t touch me. Nothing can touch me. Nothing except Laurence Laurens. I bury my nose in the fold of my shirt and inhale. Stay, I whisper to his smell. Stay forever.

With a wild whoop, I spring high in the air and hit a split leap, a mid-sky split, a grand jeté, and shoot my fist up. I jump higher than I ever have before. I could punch a hole in the sun.

•

I text every single cousin who has ever smugly asked me the Question. They pile into my apartment, slurp chimarrão in a circle and decide they do not believe me. They do, however, demand details.

They snort. “What would Laurence Laurens be doing in a club?”

They snigger. “What would Laurence Laurens be doing rescuing a nobody?”

They sneer. “What would Laurence Laurens be doing …”

Bzzt.

We all stare down at my phone. It rattles itself off the table.

What would Laurence Laurens be doing calling me?

•

On the rooftop of his hotel, I dance for him. Assistants lay down gripmats so that I don’t trip into the infinity pool. Laurence Laurens reclines with his legs dangling in the water, adjusts his sunglasses and angles his gaze out at the industrial South Grotto skyline, crammed with factories and smoke. He doesn’t look at me.

I dance, I fall.

As the music restarts, he tosses back a bottle of painkillers and drains a seltzer. Water droplets glisten on the chiseled contours of his stomach.

I fall.

He swims a lap.

I fall.

The casting director, clipboard at her hip, folds her mouth down into a frown. Her Skiin glows a cranky tangerine.

I fall, I fall, I—

“That’s enough.” Laurence Laurens raises a finger to halt the music.

I failed. I curl my body into a ball and fold my arms over my neck, willing the heat behind my eyes not to turn into tears. As he approaches, I focus anywhere but his face. I don’t want to see the disappointment in it, or, worse, my own reflection in his lenses. Ugly. Black. I failed.

“You’re stiff.” He drapes his hands over mine. It is surprisingly gentle. “You’re all in your head, kid. I can feel you overthinking. Come on, let’s take a few deep breaths.”

An assistant tosses him a towel. Laurence Laurens stretches out on a lounger, but this time, he lowers his glasses to look at me.

As if by themselves, my legs push me up. I am standing again and the ground feels firm.

“From the top, peaches.”

My body, which refused me, now obeys him.

•

I’ve hardly finished the first combo when Laurence Laurens decides it’s time to eat.

At Ola’s Nigerian Restaurant, he scoops jollof rice and something orange onto my plate. “Nkwobi,” he says.

“What’s—”

“Cow foot.” He shoves a fork into my hand. “Beware the uda pepper.”

I try. But the instant it touches my tongue, my entire mouth combusts into flames, and I guzzle fermented milk so fast that it gushes down my chin. As I blubber an apology, he dabs my shirt clean and orders two sachets of uda pepper in a gift-wrapped box. He slides them across the table. “Take ‘em home,” he says. “And practice.”

In Nairobi Fabric Co., Laurence Laurens holds bolts of eggshell tabinet and ivory linen against my skin and pays the seamstress to sew me something he calls a kanzu. “Why, who needs a tux?” he says. “This suits you better.”

When I stare at him blankly, he explains that a kanzu is a type of suit in Kenya. When I keep staring, his assistant explains that Laurence Laurens was making a pun. By the time I realize I need to be laughing, Laurence Laurens is already on his phone, ordering Jamaican jerk chicken for delivery. “You’re too skinny, peaches.” He pinches my cheek as if that explains everything. “Eat up.”

In between meals, his assistant walks me through the NDA.

While I sign the papers, Laurence Laurens apologizes and says he has to spend the afternoon in meetings. He mentions that the meetings concern his tour but doesn’t mention whether my hotel dance counted as a callback. He leaves me a stack of cash that I gawk at but don’t dare spend, and when he returns, his driver ferries us two hours away to a touring production of The Color Purple. Although the show is about slavery, there are more spectators with purple Skiins than black skin in the audience; tickets, I will later learn, cost more than a thousand dollars for the cheapest balcony seats.

During the show, I plant my hands on my knees and keep my back rigid and am careful not to touch Laurence Laurens.

At intermission, he leans over. “Are you okay?”

“Aren’t you worried that people will see us?”

He cranks his neck left, right. Other theatergoers are eying him, squinting. Most of them are older—and, despite their Skiins, whiter—than his typical demographic. Are they trying to remember where they know him from? Or are they wondering what a star like him is doing with a charity case like me? He’s debasing himself, being around a skiinless nobody.

But the more they stare, the wider he grins. Suddenly, he lets out a big, booming laugh that makes a woman in the next row jump. And he kisses me and kisses me—hard—filling my mouth with mint and lavender. He kisses me until my lips ache, and when he pulls back I frown because I never want him to stop. He presses a thumb to the corner of my swollen mouth. “You’re black and blue, peaches,” he says. “You know, I have a Cameroonian ndop cloth in these same colors.”

•

Then the photo appears.

•

I find out about the photo at 1:17 am, two days later. That’s when Laurence Laurens rings my doorbell. He strolls inside before my brain, still fogged from sleep, registers it’s him.

“Wait!” I cry, snapping awake. “My apartment’s not clean.”

“Do you think I mind a little dirt? Do you think I mind cockroaches or rats? Don’t you know how I grew up?”

There are no cockroaches or rats in my studio apartment, just milky spoons in the sink; I’ve been practicing with the uda pepper, so I bought a tub of blueberry yogurt to counteract the sting. I rush to scrub the dishes.

“How did you grow up, anyway?” I ask. His interviews never mentioned cockroaches, just Cribb County and his mother’s bathroom mirror. I feel myself flush when I realize that he’s not only visiting me, but he’s also trusting me with secrets. Maybe I mean something to him.

“I grew up just like you, peaches. More or less.” He passes me a folder.

“What’s this?” I dry my hands before I open the folder, but it turns out I don’t need to; for some reason, he’s laminated the pages.

As I flip through it, he smiles.

I don’t. “What … What is this?”

I see it, but I don’t understand it. The first sheet is a photo of us from some tabloid site. It’s not a romantic shot of our theatre kiss or even the rooftop dance. Instead, paparazzi have caught me mid-bite at Ola’s Nigerian Restaurant, shoveling cow foot into my throat as fermented milk dribbles down my shirt. In the image, Laurence Laurens reaches delicately forward with a napkin like a mother toward a pitiful child, attempting to pat me dry.

My knees buckle, but as I flip to the next page, I realize the photo isn’t the worst of it. He’s also printed out the comments people left online.

so LL has a new pet monkey ???

Okay, but why does he look so dirty? Tell me that’s not his skin.

my dogs droppings look better than him js

My stomach turns to acid. Is this a cruel joke? “Wait, what? Why would you…?” Why would he show it to me? Why would he laminate it? I want to ask both but can’t bring myself to voice either.

But somehow, Laurence Laurens seems to understand. “Because fame is temporary, Ogden. Me, I’ve probably already peaked.” He rolls up his sleeves and begins drying my dishes. “But your star is still on the rise. One day, when you’re a famous dancer—a skiinless Black dancer from South Grotto of all places—then people will claim they have always loved you. They haven’t. Bring these comments to your first big interview. Show the world how much hate you had to overcome just for wearing your own skin. The audience likes a story. Let this be yours.”

I close the folder slowly. “I … I don’t think …”

“Are you ashamed?” he asks.

“I’m ashamed.”

“Ashamed of your skin, or ashamed of the things people say about it?”

“Is there a difference?”

Laurence Laurens shakes water off his hands and sinks into my bed. The mattress sighs. He gazes up into my face with a rare, dewy softness that rounds his sharp features.

“I know you want to hide from these comments.” He weaves his fingers around mine. His touch is gentle and his voice is low enough to tingle down the back of my neck. “But this world won’t get better unless you force folks to confront themselves. You have to shove their own ignorance in their faces.”

I draw closer, and he pulls me in. As he leans back, the corner of his shirt inches up, moonlight pools in the deep lines of his stomach and then, for the first time, I am on top of him. My breath sticks in my chest. I want to stick to every part of him.

“Can you do that, Og?” he asks as his hipbone flexes beneath me. “Are you strong enough?”

•

At dawn, Laurence Laurens leaves for another meeting. I take the photo and I hang it on my wall. I do not hang the comments. I am not that strong yet. But I tack the photo right above the bed, because it is a nice image of Laurence Laurens, the way his sculpted cheekbones slice into the light. The folder smells like him. Mint and lavender, bonfire and whiskey. So do the sheets. I sink in deep.

•

Laurence Laurens calls me in to audition for a third time. When I arrive, the hotel conference room is packed with executives.

Today, I do not fall. Laurence Laurens kisses me beforehand, and he kisses me after, and in between, I soar across the gilded tile, dancing like smoke, lighter than air.

“See?” He beams at the executives. “What’d I tell you?”

They swarm me. They caress my arms and knead my hands and poke and stroke and prod the tendons.

“What lovely skin,” they coo, crowding closer. “What lovely, lovely skin.”

•

Dance rehearsals for the tour will begin in Los Angeles tomorrow.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“So I didn’t book the job?”

A pause. Again: “I’m sorry.”

Laurence Laurens breaks the news over the phone. His voice sounds far away, like he’s tossed his cell into a suitcase and has half forgotten about it.

I sink down into a chair. “Oh.”

It’s his last night in town. “But I can come back,” he says. “I can visit if I want.”

“Do you want to?” I ask, and blow past the question before he can hurt me again. “Don’t answer that. Can I see you tonight? Can I say goodbye?”

“I wish I could, peaches,” he says. “But not tonight. Some … difficulties came up.”

“Difficulties?”

“Technically speaking.”

“Can I help with—”

“But I can come back if I want,” he says again, quickly. “Will you still be here?”

Where else would I go?

•

His plane leaves South Grotto at nine am. It should land in L.A. at two.

After six hours, I text him: Did you get in safe?

I pace for twelve hours. Then another twelve. In between fits of worry, I gig it for a mo-cap job, and my anxious tremors spike on the monitor. The animators are not pleased. One calls me frenetic.

After a full day, I finally check online tabloids. It turns out Laurence Laurens got in safely. He’s grinning straight into the paparazzi camera. Never been better.

•

On the way to dance class, I trudge by all the new flyers four, five, six times. Kerstina gives me a long look each time but says nothing.

After a month, I rip one down and sign up for an audition.

The job I’m trying out for is tiny. I’d be the background dancer for the background dancers in an indie revival of an Off-Off-Broadway play. But a gig is a gig.

I’m the only one going skiinless, but I dance anyway. I dance as if Laurence Laurens will hear about it. I dance as if Laurence Laurens will never come back to South Grotto unless I barrel spin and twist-pop my heart out.

After the music jerks to a stop, the casting director eyeballs me up and down from crown to sole. “Lemme ask you something.”

“Me?”

“You’ve heard about Laurence Laurens’ tour, right? What do you think?”

“I don’t know much,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

I don’t. For the past six weeks, I’ve deactivated socials. I’ve ducked my head to avoid seeing his billboards. I’ve skipped past any videos that start with his ads.

“Still, you must be so proud, right?” He taps a pen against his teeth. “A Black man lifting up your community.”

“Yes.” My stomach sinks. “Overjoyed.”

“And your aug.” He jabs the wet, chewed-up end of his pen at me. “Is that fresh out the box?”

“Pardon?”

“Mahogany Chestnut, the Laurens Collection, right?” He pinches an inch of flesh at my hip. “But I didn’t know they were on sale yet. Where’d you buy yours?”

•

“... which is why I wanted you, my biggest fans, to be the first to know about my new Black Is Bedazzling Augmented Skiin line!”

In the clip, Laurence Laurens stands onstage in Chicago, grinning, sweating through his white button-up while the crew swaps the set between songs.

He ushers a glittering blue dancer forward. She unskiins, and her face dulls to a fleshy, speckled pink. The video cuts to an audience member who gags as if witnessing a dissection. Boos rise from the crowd.

“Now, now,” says Laurence Laurens. “All skins are beautiful.”

He loads in a new aug for the girl. In a blink, a warm brown washes over her arms, spreads down her legs and climbs up her neck. She exhales, visibly relieved to be skiinned again.

My stomach sours.

Black Skiins don’t exist because Black Skiins don’t work. That’s a fact. They turn out ugly and uncanny. They turn out ashy and alien. I’ve explained that to Kerstina at least once a month.

So what the hell is this?

This is the first one that looks real. Too real. The person onstage could be me.

Something wet and wistful comes to Laurence Laurens’ eyes. “These colors are inspired by my favorite people. Cinnamon Bark is the tea my auntie used to brew us piglets down in Georgia. Bronze Tobacco reminds me of my pa letting me puff on his cigar every Sunday. And Mahogany Chestnut …”

I look down at my arm. And back at the screen. It’s the same, down to the mole on my left shoulder. My breath catches.

“… is from my ma, who roasted chestnuts over an open fire like it was Christmas all year long.”

My body goes cold.

“Say it with me!” Laurence Laurens shouts. “Black is what?”

•

“What’s going on?

“How could you?

“You could have asked permission!

“It’s my skin! What the hell is wrong with you?

“I won’t be mad. I’m not mad. Just—call me. Please.”

I send Laurence Laurens voice note after voice note after voice note, and I sink into my mattress. Why did I wash these sheets? Now they smell like me. I wish they still smelled like him. I wish they smelled like our last night together. I bury my head between my knees.

He doesn’t listen to a single one.

•

At first, everyone wants the new Skiin but no one dares buy it. It’s wrapped in too much stigma—virtual blackface, cybernetic minstrelsy. Think pieces circulate: “What Is Race in the Era of Black Skiin?” Still, the public is curious. What would it be like?

Then a few people try it out, mostly trendsetters and livestreamers hungry for attention. Plus artists who need a gimmick. Rage gets views.

More people hop on. Allies who claim that living Black will help them build empathy. White scholars who declare that the only way to analyze the Black body is to inhabit the Black body. Libertarians who believe all skiintones should be for sale.

Within a week, it’s everywhere.

Suddenly, no one looks twice when I skulk down the street. When I doze off on the bus, no cops report me for vagrancy. When I shop for groceries, no old classmates dampen their eyes with pity. I never get asked the Question. One dance audition calls me back, and then another. My skin is in.

•

This should feel good. Right? But I still avert my eyes from the mirror. I still feel like a dirty smudge.

•

“Forget KOLE,” I text my cousins. “Let’s go dance at Eagl.”

Last month, an upscale nightclub like Eagl, where cocktails cost more than my rent, would never let me in. But tonight, the bouncer nods me through. Kente cloth drapes the walls and once-white people roam in textured wigs and Black Skiin, purring jive and cat and dig and claiming to know a few words of “that one African language with the clicks.” The air is thick and sweet with incense.

It’s offensive, but at least no one gropes me, and no one shoves me against a wall. One person asks why my aug looks more realistic than hers and demands to know how much I paid for it, but another person advises me to replace my aug soon because the clarity is run-down. I ask both of them to buy me a drink, and they do. Why wouldn’t they? Tonight, I’m one of them.

After I drain both glasses, I stagger into the bathroom for a break from the pounding djembe drums and slur yet another voice note into my phone. “I know your concert tour schedule, Laur. I know you’re coming to town tomorrow. I wanna see you. Call me.”

I stumble back out, tripping my way across the dance floor, and hunt by nose: I need a new aroma for my bedsheets. Eventually, I find a shy, fidgeting man who smells pretty good, and I say, “Let me buy you a drink.”

See? I’m nothing like Laurence Laurens. I’m not all take-take-take. I give.

I lean on the counter and bob to the music as the bartender mixes crème de menthe and Amarula. Around us, people scrutinize the man I’ve picked, wrinkling their brows in disdain. I imagine what they’re thinking. White skin? How out of style, brother.

“Wipe off that smug grin, kid.” The bartender slams two radioactive green springbokkies in front of me. “Don’t get a big head just because you have that fancy aug. Within a week, it’ll be passé.” She says this, yet she’s wearing one too. Complete with green dreadlocks.

I pound the shot. It fills my head with bubbles so I don't have to think anymore.

“When it’s passé,” I say, “I’ll just buy new skin.”

•

The man I picked has eyes like shriveled blueberries and hair pale as yogurt and I’ll call him Blondie, and I kiss him, and I surrender myself to him just because he’s nothing like Laurence Laurens, because he is better, is sweeter, is kinder, and after a few drunken kisses I tell him that I’d peel off my skin for him and give it away, I’d done it before.

We are kissing underneath an overpass and then I am crawling on top of him and I grab his face in mine and I look at his long lashes and pale skin, and in between kisses he stops me.

“Wait!” He gasps for air. “Could we just … talk?”

No more talking, no more talking, no more talking. Talking is for people like Laurence Laurens, who know how to use their voice. I’m a dancer. I have my body. That body is numb all over, and tingling, and drowning in cold and rain and alcohol, but it’s all I have to give.

•

When I wake up, I am staring at Laurence Laurens.

“Laurence!” I shoot straight up in bed. But then I realize, through the hangover haze, that it’s just the tabloid photo tacked above my bed. I tear it down.

At the stove, Blondie crushes garlic into a pot of soup. The room warms with the aroma of tomato and basil. “Are you quite all right, Ogden?”

I cover my face and groan in slow agony. “I want to die.”

Last night’s numbness is giving way to rolling nausea and a jackhammer headache. I grab my knotting stomach. My body is mine again, but that means this pain belongs to me and only me. Great.

Blondie scrutinizes the uda pepper, then seems to think better of it and ladles noodles into a bowl. “This soup is good for hangovers. I thought perhaps you’d—”

“I—I’m sorry.” I stagger to my feet. The room spins. “I’m not trying to be rude, but there’s something I need to go do.”

He picks up the photo I ripped down. “That’s …”

“Yeah. Don’t ask me how, but I know—” I swallow to keep my voice from breaking. I need to start talking about him in the past tense. “I used to know Laurence Laurens.”

•

My legs are shaking as I storm up the hotel’s front steps, but I have to get answers. His concert is tomorrow night, so there’s a good chance he’ll check in today. Of course, maybe he won’t talk to me. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed he won’t talk to me. But I have to try.

I slow from a manic run to a civilized walk so that the doorman will let me into the hotel lobby. I wish I could race all the way up to the presidential suite, but instead, I have to sit in the lobby and wait in case he happens to come down. I sink into a chair by the elevator. Usually, security would hound a person who looks like me, demanding to see my keycard and prodding me to move along. But today, the clientele is a mixture of artificial brown and beige Skiins. The bartender was right. I do blend right in. And I’ll keep blending in until Black goes back out of style.

I glance into the parking lot, where Blondie sits in a rental car, fixing his bedhead in the rearview mirror. I asked him to keep the engine running; I might need a fast getaway and a rebound hookup when Laurence Laurens inevitably turns me away.

I call Laurence Laurens again. I’ve called him once, I’ve called him twice; it goes to voicemail every time.

I send another text: I’m in the hotel lobby. I’ll give you ten minutes.

Undelivered. Just like the last four texts. Either he’s still on the plane, or he’s blocked me. Or both.

I just need to know: Why, Laurence Laurens, did you sell my skin?

I want answers. I want my skin back. Instead, all I can do is sit.

Eventually, the doorman does amble over, but he looks more pitying than suspicious. It reminds me of the look my classmates used to give me when they asked why I was still skiinless. “Do you need help, sir?”

I clench my teeth. “I’m fine.”

“Are you certain, sir?”

I grip the armrest hard enough to kill it. “I’m waiting for—”

“A friend.” A cold hand settles on my shoulder.

I snap my head up. “Laur—! Oh.” It’s Blondie.

Except, Blondie is now gazing at me the same way the doorman is, with pity, with terrible pity. I shrug away from his touch. He smells like my shampoo and I wish he’d asked me before using my shower. My shampoo isn’t made for his hair, isn’t made for his skin, isn’t made for him.

“I’m sure Laurence Laurens will be down any minute.” I cross my arms. “Let me just call him again.”

This time, the phone rings. My heart leaps. He didn’t block me.

And it rings.

In fact, it rings right beside me.

I look up slowly. And my stomach sinks.

Looking pained, Blondie rejects the call.

•

Everything happens all at once and in a crash of light and sound, escalating into the most terrible crescendo: I shout obscenities and he stutters apologies; his feet shuffle and skid, and mine storm and stomp; my fists fly into couch cushions, his voice cracks falsettos, my fury rattles the chandelier. The bewildered doorman ushers us into a conference room, and I clap my hands over my ears because my body does not know how to move to the cacophony we’ve created of each other. When Blondie speaks, I refuse to believe his words are real. His mouth is moving, but I don’t know who he is.

“You son of a—!”

Ogden, I—

“How? Why?”

I can explain.

“Which one is the real you?”

This is the real me. My name is Anthony.

“Then who the hell is Laurence?”

A persona. A custom Skiin. An experiment and a gift from my father. He wanted to learn how to create Skiin in every color.

“So you’re not—”

Black? Not by birth. But what does that mean anyway? Look, I decided to make a change in society, in the music industry—

“Through blackface?”

Black augmentation!

“So you stole my skin?”

I was inspired by your skin.

“You stole it. You sold it.”

Your skin is bedazzling! Black is bedazzling! And now the whole world thinks you’re bedazzling too.

“This isn’t what I wanted.”

But you’re booking shows now, right? Your life is better now, right? People want you now, right?

“Please stop.”

But people finally agree. Black is—!

•

I hook my fist inside Blondie’s shirt, and I shake him, searching for answers or remorse in his pale, puzzled eyes.

Instead, the man I once called Laurence Laurens brushes a thumb along my jaw. His voice changes, dipping low into his famous Georgia drawl, like daffodils and slow, sunny days; like porch swings and lemonade. “Peaches,” he whispers. “Let’s start over.”

Start over? In the familiar melody of his words, part of me wants to. If I closed my eyes, it would be so easy to pull him back into my bedsheets. To dance for him. To wait for him. To give him whatever is left of me: my nails, my hair.

God.

I take a deep breath.

And I walk away. And I keep walking. Then I run.

•

No wonder he assumed my skin was fake the first time we met.

No wonder he couldn’t meet me when he had technical difficulties. His aug was probably malfunctioning.

But why now? Why did he unskiin now?

And where am I running to?

•

My body, my body, my body. I need to connect back to my own body. I don’t realize where I’m going until I’m there—until I’m pushing open the doors of the dance studio—until I’m running inside the building and—

“Ogden! Wait!” Someone yanks my arm.

Instinctively, I snap away from their grip; I’m tired of hungry people claiming pieces of me. “What? What?”

“What do you think?” A strange woman spins, showing off how the sunlight splashes down her brown skin. “I told you, if I ever got an augmentation, I would want to become something interesting.”

“I—wait, Kerstina?”

Kerstina beams. “I am finally understanding the mania.”

I don’t have time for this, I don’t have time for this, and I don’t have energy. My head pounds. I back up.

Bzzt. Bzzt. My phone vibrates furiously against my thigh.

“You’re here to audition?” she asks. She jerks her thumb over her shoulder. Despite my better judgment, I look. Behind the building, a line of dancers grows: talking, laughing, stretching, all sporting the exact same shades of Cinnamon Bark and Mahogany Chestnut.

My stomach twists. “Oh, hell.”

She clamps my wrist. “Come warm up with me.”

“I—I can’t do this right now.” I shake her off again and duck inside the studio. I let the world drop away and I let my feet carry me to wherever they want to go, and they carry me to where I used to feel safe.

Bzzt. My phone keeps buzzing:

I don’t wear the aug all the time, peaches. Sometimes I need a break.

I have other colors too. It’s not just a black thing.

Sorry, Black**

I race up the studio’s back staircase, slipping in and out of shadow as the lightbulb flickers, up to the second floor, the third, the fourth. I don’t have proper shoes or proper pants or proper anything with me, but I need to dance. No more words, just movement, because movement makes sense.

I throw open the doors to a practice room—only to realize that another group has already staked their claim. I recoil.

Two women are stretching. Another is twisting her green dreadlocks into a high bun. A man slathers cocoa butter over his shins. They all have dark skin, and I think it’s real.

“No way.” The woman with the dreadlocks narrows her eyes. “No augs here.”

I back up. “I—what?”

“The auditions you want are downstairs.”

“I’m not wearing an—”

“Sure you’re not. ‘Gee, this aug was expensive, Laurence Laurens. Gee, thank you for saving my life, Laurence Laurens.’” She pitches my voice up when she mimics it. “Isn’t that what you said?”

My head spins. “What? When?”

“You know when!”

“Wait.” I think back to the night Laurence Laurens rescued me at KOLE. I dimly remember someone with green dreadlocks in the background, wrinkling her nose, but the whole evening is a haze of sweat and fear. “Were you there the night that—”

“And I saw you sucking face at Eagl.”

It clicks. “You’re the bartender.”

“And you’re the one who started all this aug mess with Laurens.” She squares her shoulders. “You’re the reason everyone is wearing our skin.”

“I can explain—”

Bzzt.

Bzzt. Bzzt.

Bzzt. Bzzt. Bzzt.

Her nostrils flare. “Is that him?”

I dig my phone out of my pocket.

I didn’t expect to run into you last night.

I was going to tell you that I was in town. I came a night early.

Don’t tell anyone. You signed that NDA.

Me wearing it is no different than anyone else wearing it!

YOU could be wearing one for all I know.

Don’t tell anyone. Please.

Please.

I stare numbly at the screen as the words flash across. They just come, and come, and come. They will keep coming until I tell him what he wants to hear: I forgive you. It’s okay. I won’t reveal your secret. Bzzt. I clutch the vibrating phone in my hand, and it feels like a bomb ready to tear me open. Bzzt. Bzzt. Bzzt.

“Laurence Laurens is a thief.” My voice comes out more faintly than I mean it to. I step forward. “I can’t make you believe me, but I can promise that I’m not wearing an aug. And I can tell you that I need to dance.”

She looks suspicious, understandably so. Maybe she wants to believe me. Or maybe she wants to see whether I’ll make a fool of myself. Her friends exchange wary glances. Finally, the bartender gives the slightest of nods and waves me forward, but her face stays pinched tight. “Fine, come freestyle. Just a warm-up, nothing crazy.”

I strip off my sweatshirt as someone smashes play on the stereo. It’s a boombox, must be a century old, from the days before skin came packaged like hair dye.

The song kicks into gear with a pulsating drum rhythm. Inhale, exhale. I stretch my arms above my head. The beat slows to match my heartbeat and my heartbeat races to meet the beat.

The song travels up my hands, up my wrists, and they snap. It wells in my chest, and it pops. It spreads to my neck and I hit icy isolations. By the time the syncopation reaches my forehead I’m dropping into a headspin, then rocking that into a windmill as my legs kick off the floor. The bartender shoots me a look. It’s not a smile, but it’s not a frown either. It might be an upturn, just a little, at the border of one lip. Nothing crazy.

As the groove works up, we all dissolve into the music: The song becomes our bodies and we become the song, absorbing the boom-bap and the kickdrums, the squeaking of our sneakers and the panting of our breath. We are the sweat in the air, trembling with sound.

I glimpse myself in the mirror and automatically turn away.

I always turn away.

But that shame can end today.

As the melody weaves through me, I force my head back up. I study myself in the glass. I study us all. Any way you spin it, we are Blackness, reflected and refracted, the sum of all colors, the spirit of all things. Black in the sun and the moon, the dawn and the dusk. Black as in the light so bright it swallowed itself. Why haven’t I ever looked at myself sooner? I’ve never seen anything so mesmerizing.

I realize now. Black is.

Fiction Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.

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