Ella Staywoke’s real name was Ella Steward but we called her Ella Staywoke because she stayed saying woke things when DeVante and I least expected it.
Like, out of the blue, Ella told me she needed me and DeVante to drive her up north so she could go to the doctor. I asked her why and what procedure she had to get up north and she said, “Y’all mean.”
DeVante was probably the most gifted 14-year-old in the history of Jackson, Mississippi, next to Ella Staywoke. I was gifted as hell at 14, but slightly novice at being gifted at 16.
DeVante’s greatest invention, if you let DeVante tell it, was calling people “ol’ blank-blank-blank-ass nigga” without blinking.
Like, if you ate an apple too fast, DeVante would call you an “ol’ eating-apples-like-they-plums-raisins-grapes-ass nigga,” or if you failed a test, he’d call you an “ol’ TikToking-when-you-shoulda-been-stik-studying-ass nigga.”
If one of us called DeVante a name he didn’t like, DeVante could slap the taste out of your mouth better than any ninth grader, except for Ella Staywoke.
Slapping the tastes out of folks’ mouths, describing smells perfectly, staying woke and weird, memorizing everyone’s pass codes to their phones through her peripheral vision, and plotting revenge were just five parts of what made Ella Staywoke the most gifted new teenager in Jackson.
That was, until last week.
Last week, DeVante got jumped by two old 16-year-old MAGA-hat-wearing jokers from Pearl.
It all started when DeVante went out of his way to embarrass this snake-lipped kid who was also named DeVante. We called him Mean-White-Ass DeVante, or Mean-Ass DeVante for short. Mean-Ass DeVante called Our DeVante “a bowlegged transgender activist” in the parking lot of church. It hurt for a lot of reasons, mostly because DeVante actually was a 14-year-old bowlegged transgender activist, but also because no one had ever dissed someone by calling them any kind of activist before where we stayed. DeVante was pissed, but he appreciated how fresh Mean-Ass DeVante was with his disses for a white boy from Pearl.
When everyone looked his way, DeVante said out loud that he never knew that a white boy could smell like nut sack, urine, dookie, and rotten rutabagas through his MAGA drawers. I didn’t even know they made MAGA drawers. Then, as loud as he could, in front of the whole church parking lot and the one white person who went to church, DeVante called Mean-Ass DeVante an “ol’ mean catching-yo-dookie-in-a-MAGA-hat-then-wiping-yo-MAGA-ass-with-the-same-MAGA-hat-when-you-need-to-be-scrubbing-yo-stank-MAGA-ass-ass nigga.”
It wasn’t the most dynamic diss DeVante has ever slung, even though “ass” was used three times, but it did its job.
Even Mean-Ass DeVante’s own cousin started laughing. And when the Mean-Ass DeVante got in DeVante’s face, DeVante apparently slapped Mean-Ass DeVante across his mouth twice with both hands.
That’s four slaps right in the middle of the church parking lot.
Then he ran to tell Ella Staywoke and me what he did. The sad thing is that when he ran up on Ella Staywoke and me, I had on that new Axe and I was just starting to finally spit my game I’d been practicing for months. “You loud,” Ella Staywoke kept saying. “You real loud.”
Ella Staywoke said she wanted me to stop spitting game. But she only said it once, and she squeezed my hand when she said it. So.
I did not stop.
Anyway, when DeVante found Ella Staywoke and me in the woods, he told us what happened. Ella Staywoke did this strange thing where she grabbed his hand, thanked him, and then started crying. DeVante grabbed her other hand and he started crying. I wanted to cry too, but I didn’t know what we were supposed to be crying about.
That’s when DeVante told us that his mama and grandmama were most definitely going to beat his ass for saying the word “nigga” in front of white people, even if those white people were MAGA white people.
Ella Staywoke and I told DeVante we had to leave him in the woods because Uncle Robert said we could play this old Nintendo game called Duck Hunt in his old callus-smelling room at four that afternoon. Uncle Robert was in the top 30 singers in Jackson who still used Auto-Tune.
Uncle Robert never allowed DeVante in his room, because he said DeVante was “too girlish and too confused sexually” to be around his expensive clothes.
We hated Uncle Robert for that.
Before we left, DeVante hugged me for the first time in our lives. “Don’t ever be mean to folk who would never be mean to you,” he whispered in my ear. “It’s okay to be scared of hurting niggas.”
Then he hugged Ella Staywoke and whispered something in her ear too.
Ella Staywoke and me waited for an hour in Uncle Robert’s room, but Uncle Robert never showed. While Ella Staywoke was playing Call of Duty, I was going through Uncle Robert’s diary. He kept the turquoise diary at the bottom of a box of shotgun shells. The diary was covered in duct tape, and it had a lock on it. I’d asked Ella Staywoke if we should read his diary.
Ella Staywoke had helped me take the duct tape off the diary and let me use her pocketknife to break the lock.
“What you gone say if Robert finds out you broke in?” Ella Staywoke asked me.
“I’m gone lie,” I told her. “Shid. Listen to this sentence. Uncle Robert think he so smooth.”
“When she talked with me about sad memories, I would ask her why she rested her head in sad places. We could get rid of sad memories. She said I was becoming a sad memory …”
After I finished reading the entry, Ella Staywoke’s eyes started leaking but the rest of her face didn’t make a sound. I told her again that kissing me might feel better than she thought. Ella Staywoke fake-laughed and started biting the nail bed of her left thumb. When she got a nail sliver off, she used it to clean the dirt out of the nails on her right hand.
“Your uncle,” she said, “him and his friend, they was real mean to me and DeVante two months ago.”
“Mean how?”
“They just, you know, wrapped themselves up in some mean,” she said. “All of us. Now we gotta unwrap it.”
“Huh?”
“They made me and DeVante be mean to each other. That’s all.”
I asked Ella Staywoke if “wrapped themselves up in mean” was a new phrase she and DeVante had made up without telling me.
“Naw,” she said. “It ain’t new. I don’t really want to be in this room no more. Can we leave?”
“How come?”
“It’s too familiar.”
“Too what?”
Later that evening, Mean-Ass DeVante, the white boy who got slapped four times in the church parking lot, and another one of his friends dragged DeVante back into the woods. Our DeVante slapped, punched, kicked, and bit the best he could, but they ended up beating DeVante down with T-ball bats. They didn’t ever hit him directly in the head, but they crushed his larynx. DeVante’s body stayed spread out in those woods all night before we found him. We only found him because one of the boys put a video of the beating up on Instagram Live.
I told Ella Staywoke about my plan to kill Mean-Ass DeVante and his friends for what they’d done to DeVante. Ella Staywoke described the smell of sap oozing from a tree as “golden frozen time” and then said she wasn’t interested in killing anyone this year.
“They did what all y’all do sooner or later,” she said.
“Who is ‘y’all’?” I asked her.
“Y’all mean,” she said. And Ella Staywoke starting biting on the fingernail of her right thumb for what felt like two whole minutes.
I tried to hold her hand.
Ella Staywoke jerked back.
I tried again. Ella Staywoke slapped the taste out of my mouth. “Ask, nigga.”
“Ask?”
“Stop being so fucking mean,” she said. “And ask. Please. I don’t want y’all to touch me the way y’all want to touch me. It’s too familiar. I just want to go home.”
“Okay,” I told her. “Pick you up at seven tomorrow for the trip up north. You got the directions?”
“Yeah,” Ella Staywoke said. “I got the directions.”
“Wonder what the doctor’s office gone smell like up north?” Ella ignored my question and started walking home.
“Bleach,” I heard her say down the road a little. “Probably bleach.”
That night, the night of Our DeVante’s funeral, I walked home knowing I’d lost DeVante, Ella Staywoke, and myself to a mean we were all too young to name. And even though none of us were even 17 yet, that same mean—whose hard belly we giggled, wondered, and wiggled in—felt so familiar, so blank-blank-blank-ass-Mississippi.