That Girl Debbie by Sean Peters

Last Friday, I submitted a short story to a writing contest for publication for the first time in a decade.  This is a huge personal achievement, but it wouldn’t have been possible without a network of supportive friends and family.  The story I submitted was written in March while I was at a conference.  It’s called “That Girl Debbie”.  Per the guidelines of the contest, I am allowed to post it to my personal website.  However, it will only be available for a finite amount of time.   This story is definitely out of my comfort zone and represents a change in tone and genre for me.

 

That Girl Debbie

By Sean Peters

            Deborah Whittaker stepped off the shuttle into the humid, southern air.  Her hair shined reddish brown in the blazing sun.  She smelled of cocoa butter and hair grease, a walking stereotype but she didn’t mind.  She tugged on the strap around her shoulder, pressing her poster tube tight against her back.  Today, she was presenting her research and that’s all that mattered.  That, and as long as no one called her Debbie.  She’d hated that nickname since the boys in elementary school had teased her.  Heck, she still didn’t eat Little Debbie snacks.  But she was sure her nametag, which read in large, bold font DEBORAH WHITTAKER and dangled from her lanyard periodically poking its sharp plastic edge through her blouse, would prevent that.  She was here to present her preliminary results on a study of small shield volcanoes on Mars–a study that maybe ten people in the world cared about.  It was something she tried not to think too much about.  Something her advisor had announced with pride.  She glided into the conference center, which was adjacent to a shiny hotel.  The sparkling glass building looked new, but it wasn’t new to her.  She’d been here one year ago when she was a first year PhD student and had nothing to present and everything to gain.  When the big names in her field weren’t uncorrectable deities but normal people in khakis, Hawaiian shirts, and lanyards.  Like everyone else.  Regular flawed people.

She followed the crowd which funneled through a set number of doorways into the convention center.  The sea of people stagnated on the other side of the doors and partitioned:  they either rode the escalator upstairs or dawdled into the exhibition hall.  It was eight o’clock in the morning, so the only people entering the exhibition hall were those setting up exhibits, tacking up posters, or killing time before a talk.  She took a deep breath, savoring the smells of fresh brewed coffee, pungent cologne, fragrant perfume, and utter hotelness.  She marched through the doors of the exhibition hall and then stopped.  The poster tube slapped her on the butt.  248.  That was the location number of her poster.  But where was it?  She scanned up and around at the maze of freestanding bulletin boards, all demarcated with numbers indicating poster locations.  This might take some time, but she didn’t have a specific talk to get to.  That wasn’t until ten o’clock.  No early mornings for her.  Not since high school.

She travelled up and down the aisles of bulletin boards.  It reminded her of the times she would grocery shop with her mom.  She’d run off, but not on a quest to find candy or chips.  Instead, she’d pretend she was lost in New York like that Home Alone movie she loved with the screaming little white boy.  That was a movie that always brought her, her mother, and her father into the living room during the Christmas holidays.  They’d laugh as the little boy made a fool of the burglars–injuring them with every little contraption he built.  They still watched Home Alone occasionally, but not every Christmas.  She had more friends and more work now.  And the visits to the grocery store had become less about pretending and more about budgeting and browsing.  She hated grocery stores now.

Only a few ambitious people, probably young proto-scientists like her, had tacked their posters up.  The colorful sheets came in a narrow range of sizes, usually about 3.5 x 3 feet (or 1.1 x 0.9 meters, she was becoming a scientist so metric was the game).  The posters covered everything from lunar rocks, to volcanoes on Venus, to observations from the Martian rovers, to terrestrial field studies.  Right now, the aisles were empty.  The occasional go-getter with a cup of steaming brown liquid could always be spotted perusing.  However, by this evening, it would be on and popping!

She found her poster location, between 247 and 249.  Both of which were devoid of a poster.  She found a cup of tacks itself tacked to the bulletin board.  She slid her plastic black poster tube and its strap off her shoulder letting it slide to the floor.  She unscrewed the cap and let it dangle and flounder against the tube.  She placed the tube between her thighs, squeezed them together, grabbed the edge of her coiled poster by creating a seal around it with her thumbs and middle fingers, and pulled it out in a series of gentle tugs.  She could feel her heart beating a little faster.  She stood the coiled poster on its edge, dropped the tube to the floor, and unfurled her 2-D presentation.  She smiled, but just a little.  The glossy paper caught the light, which emphasized the rich colors of red, green, yellow, and blue that dominated her figures and filled in spaces between her neatly organized text boxes.  Even if only ten people cared about this, she’d make sure it was the prettiest poster those ten people had seen.

Carefully, she grabbed a tack and raised the poster up as flat as possible against the bulletin board.  It fought back, anxious to return to its coiled shape.  She really could use a hand, but there was no one around and sistah girl didn’t need no man.  She smirked.  The poster shifted a few times–sometimes down to the left, sometimes down to the right.  She wanted it closer to the top of the board, so people wouldn’t have to look too far down to read the text.  While she held the poster flush against the bulletin board with both hands, she used her left thumb and index finger to insert one of the tacks into the upper left corner of the poster.  First hurdle.  She grabbed another tack.  Now she had to make sure the poster was an equal distance from the top of the board or her OCD would worry her all day.  Medication might’ve helped, but her mom hadn’t believed it necessary.  Once she was certain it was even, she plunged a tack into the upper right corner.  Second hurdle.  The challenging part was over.  She added two more tacks to the bottom left and right corners.  She took a couple of steps back into the center of the aisle, placed her hands on her hips, and marveled at her work.  Aesthetic.  Interesting.  Not bad for the first poster by D. Whittaker.  She screwed the cap back on her tube and left it under the bulletin board.  People always did that.

She marched out of the exhibition hall and hooked a right onto the crowded escalator.  People, in their dangling blue lanyards carrying coffee, laptops, and cell phones, rode it up to the third floor which hosted the conference.  Hardly anyone was coming down.  That would change at lunch.  The ride up wasn’t slow, but slow enough to build up just a little bit of apprehension.  She took a deep breath.  Whatever.  This wasn’t her first time at the rodeo.  She got this.  The river of people from the escalator emptied into a standing crowd of people engaged in countless conversations.  The third floor wrapped around the escalators and spread out before her, curving with the shape of the conference center.  And it was packed.  Everyone who wasn’t seated in a chair or on the floor or listening to talks in one of the ballrooms congregated in the space.  The focus was a table stacked with fresh coffee, tea, pastries, cups, and napkins.  On the other side of the corridor, a wall of windows allowed in a sheet of natural light that made everything shinier and more surreal.

She avoided eye contact.  She didn’t know most of these people, but she saw some familiar faces.  There were only so many people in the world studying planets and rocks in space.  But she wasn’t like her other colleagues.  Nerdy, poorly dressed, awkward.  And white.  She wasn’t a Trekkie or a Whovian.  She wore a cream colored blouse, black slacks, long-sleeved black jacket, and cream colored 5-inch stilettos.  And she was a social butterfly.  And she was brown, well, light brown, because she had added ingredients like those being poured into the coffee and tea of some of the attendees.  Mama had a white great grandparent and daddy has some Native American in him.  She’d explained that all through secondary school and a little into college, every time someone had the nerve to ask “So what are you?”.  As if black only came in one form.  But that wasn’t an issue here.  If anything her color made her unique.  And there were no little black boys on tricycles to call her Debbie Cakes.  This was strictly science.

She weaved through the crowd to Ballroom 5–the room that contained the session she wanted to attend.  A few people from her school recognized her (not hard in this crowd) and waved or smiled.  She returned the gestures, but kept it pushing.  She managed to slide into Ballroom 5 on the coattails of someone else who’d just opened the door to enter and briefly allowed the obtrusive light and noise into the dark and quiet room.  That person received a few annoyed glances.  A speaker was wrapping up a talk on lava tubes.  She scurried down the center aisle which parted the audience.  She decided to sit a two-thirds of the way back, choosing not to approach the first of two microphones which stood halfway between the stage and the entrance.  It wasn’t standing room only, but the audience was about 75% full.  She slid into a row and sat two seats from the aisle.  The speaker finished.  Everyone erupted into applause, half congratulatory, half out of habit.  Deborah joined in half-heartedly.  When the applause died out, a few gray hairs rushed to the microphones to ask questions or plug their own studies.  She liked the questions but not the shameless plugs.  Just then, an acquaintance from her institution slid into the seat to her left.  Her mouth tightened.  She edged ever so slightly to the right.

“Deborah,” he leaned over and whispered into her ear, “how’s the conference going?”

“It’s only day two, but fine.”

“Have you put up your poster?”

“Yup.”

“Are you going to the diversity seminar tomorrow evening?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

She wanted to say, No, I got tired of talking about my race growing up.  I got sick of people asking me about my complexion and my hair.  I got sick of always being accepted only by the black cliques who always derided my “white folks” interests.  And now I’m sick of little dweeby white liberals who have the social skills of a dead pine tree trying to elevate me just because of a chemical in my skin that originally protected my ancestors against UV rays.  But she knew it was more complicated than that.  And she knew his pretentious little heart (Evan was his name) was in the right place.  But she came here for science.  Data.  Experiments.  Results.

“This isn’t the place for that,” she replied.

Evan pressed his lips together–that face white people usually make in the South when a black person they don’t know speaks to them in public.  Deborah almost snickered.  She paid Evan no mind after that.  The 10:00 AM talk was about new volcanic features observed on Mars.  Deborah leaned forward, perched at the edge of her seat.  She could feel her heart racing, thumping to every high resolution image of Mars that flashed up on the screen.  When the talk concluded, she was one of the louder applauders.  She made a mental note of the speaker’s name.  The session ended a quarter to noon.  Evan had disappeared halfway through.  After the session, she went to lunch with acquaintances from her department who accosted her in the crowded corridor after the session.  Thankfully Evan wasn’t among them.  Although being invited to lunch was nice, she would’ve loved it if she were staying in the conference hotel, so she could take an elevator up to her room and listen to Drake or Trey Songz while stretched across the bed.

Lunch was simple but tasty–a chicken quesadilla from a local taco shop.  The taco shop staff had been overwhelmed by the influx of conference attendees and now the line ran out the door and wrapped around the patio, and continued down the sidewalk.  Deborah and her cohort had been lucky enough to find a round table outside on the patio.  Now, they could watch their fellow attendees wait around in the spring sun.  The conversation around the lunch table was superficial and boring, which was standard for graduate school.  Most people weren’t friends, but felt pressured to act like it.  She nodded and smiled at the right places, but said very little, lest things turn awkward fast.

“I wish I was staying at the conference center,” one of the women, a pretty faced, red haired second year PhD student said.  Lilly was her name.  “It would be nice to go up to your room, especially if there’s a long gap between talks you want to see.”

“Agreed,” Deborah said, nodding.

“You guys got work to do or something?” one of the guys, a bearded third year PhD student who liked hikes and beer, asked.  Brian was his name.

“I need to answer some emails and maybe catch an episode of Dr. Who,” Lilly replied.

Lilly and the other two graduate students who hadn’t participated in the conversation laughed.  Brian smiled and nodded at the reference.  All four glanced at Deborah expectantly.  Internally, she sighed.  Externally, she said, “I just wanted to listen to Trey Songz and maybe catch an episode of Love and Hip Hop.”

What followed was the standard awkward silence that follows the ignorance of sub-cultural references.  Even though she didn’t give two shits about Dr. Who, she at least knew the gist of the series–weird ass time travelling alien in a British telephone booth.  Names like Dr. Who, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Frasier she knew.  She’d learned them based off the references from her mostly white peers in secondary school.  But words like Jodeci, Love and Hip Hop, and 227 were utterly foreign to her peers.  She suspected that they’d already filed it, probably subconsciously, into a black folk’s folder.

“Oh, I’m not familiar with that,” Lilly said.

“I think I’ve heard of Trey,” Brian added.

Deborah stuffed her mouth with a quesadilla slice before she could say something slick.

One of the other two people, a girl Deborah didn’t know too well, asked, “You guys going to the diversity thing tomorrow?  Seems like it should be pretty good.”

“Yeah, I’m looking forward to it,” Lilly said.

“I think I’ll pop in,” Brian said, taking a bite into a hard shell taco.

Again, their glances turned to Deborah.  Again, she sighed internally.

“I don’t think so,” Deborah said.

All the white folks looked perplexed.  Deborah wondered if that’s how she’d looked when the ashy kneed little black boys had first taunted her and her name in first grade.  Or when the middle school bullies started to tease her about her hair.  Or perhaps that’s how she’d looked when her advisor had first used the term decorrelation stretch in their weekly group meeting.

“Why not?” Lilly begged.

“This is a science conference.” Deborah stuffed the last triangle of her quesadilla into her mouth.

“A perfect place to address an issue within science,” Lilly said.

Uh oh.  Deborah had run out of quesadilla.  That meant her tongue was free.  Luckily, she still had water.  She grabbed the glass, its exterior damp with condensation.

“I really can’t worry about that, since I have my poster,” Deborah said, taking a gulp of water with a little too much enthusiasm.

Lilly leaned forward to say more, but didn’t.  Maybe it was Brian’s expression, a half-hearted look of understanding and a glance off into the distance.  The other two socially inept grad students had started talking about one of the talks that morning.  Deborah was just fine with that.  She needed to be thinking about the people who might come to her poster, the people whose abstracts she’d read and reread just in case, the people who would see the glossy, colorful paper and justified text and neatly organized text boxes, and smile.  People like Lois Harvey, who studied volcanoes and worked at NASA and whose name frequently appeared in her literature reviews.  Deborah had read a couple of her papers and seen her name cited in textbooks.  The last thing she wanted was to draw attention to her skin and her hair, like the prepubescent boys in middle school who’d flicked scraps of balled up paper into her “nappy weave”.  Those idiots, she’d never worn a weave in middle school.

After they finished their lunch, they returned to the conference center.  Deborah broke away from the group after they stepped off the elevator.  She wanted to hear about the volcanic eruptions on the moon, not the social ramifications of her decisions on Earth.  The talks had not resumed yet, although the speaker was already at the podium.  There were plenty of empty seats, since people were still returning from lunch.  This room, Ballroom 1, was a smidge brighter than Ballroom 5 and a little warmer.  She sat farther in the back this time and slid in several more seats.  She crossed her legs and puffed out her chest.  Only 4.5 more hours until the poster session.

Evan slid into the row in front of her.  Her shoulders slumped like the walls of a lunar impact crater.  She pursed her lips.  Maybe he wouldn’t notice her.  Too late.

He turned around and said a little too loudly, “Looking forward to your poster, madame.”

“Thanks, me too.”

“Have you thought anymore about–?”

“Shh, it’s starting,” she said, just as the speaker started to announce a talk on lava flow thicknesses on the moon.

Evan left half way through the session again, which should’ve given Deborah peace, but instead she was annoyed.  Annoyed at Evan and Lilly.  Annoyed at all the white people who’d one way or another insisted they got her back.  Annoyed that she was even annoyed.  Today should’ve been about her science and her poster.  In theory, this was the first of many conferences and many posters.  Eventually, she would apply for (and receive) talks.  And she’d chair sessions and rub elbows with the big names and make her parents proud and make herself proud.  She’d get a postdoctoral fellowship at a NASA center or the US Geological Survey or one of the big planetary science universities.  And then, well, then she could write her ticket.  She could do it all without the help of well-intentioned, but horribly annoying, white liberals.  They were just like the ashy kneed black boys on tricycles and the graphic tee wearing shitheads in middle school.

And then it was six o’clock p.m.  She stood up from one of the plush seats in the open hotel lobby and took a deep breath.  She’d been sitting there since the end of the lunar session.  There had been no time to take a shuttle back to her hotel.  She’d spent the last hour munching on snack bars she’d purchased at the hotel’s tiny convenience store.  That would hold her over until dinner.  She felt a little like she was going to a college party.  She couldn’t be too early.  Fashionably late would’ve been better, but she didn’t have the clout to do that just yet.  So she settled on showing up five minutes late.  She stopped over in the restroom to check her make-up and her outfit.  She adjusted her blouse and her pants.  She rubbed her hand over her straightened hair, which fell down to her shoulders.  Same hazel eyes.  Same supple lips.  Once she was satisfied, she left the restroom and strolled toward the exhibition hall.

She wandered into the exhibition hall with her hands stuffed in her pockets.  She paid no attention to the people hurrying towards their posters, the hor d’oerves, the free booze, or the exhibits.  She slowed her pace as she approached 248.  She had imagined, and half expected, to find a semi-circle of scientists clustered around her preliminary results.  Gray hairs, gray beards, blonde buns, and red lipstick nodding at each other in delightful agreement.  Instead, she found no one.  Yet.  The aisles were still filling up and eventually the room would become a rolling boil of scientific conversation.  She took her place beside her poster, pulled her hands from her pockets, and clasped them in front of her.  247 and 249 now hung on either side of her, but their presenters had not arrived yet.  Neither one was as eye-catching as hers.  247 had a white background with black text and colorful photos.  249 had a black background with white text and grayscale photos.  Cool science, but not as aesthetic as 248.

People entered the exhibition hall in greater numbers now.  247 and 249 finally appeared.  247 was a black guy, or a brotha as her father would say.  She thought she may have seen him around earlier.  There weren’t many milk duds at the conference.  249 was a lanky, bearded white guy.  There were too many of them at the conference.  The three of them greeted each other with a nod and a smile.  She suspected they would’ve struck up conversation about each other’s’ work, but then they spotted a group of curious faces closing in from the right.  Three people, two dark-haired men and one blonde woman, had entered the aisle with cold beers in their hands.  She couldn’t make out their names.  Their lanyards bounced around too much.  But the upper case letters of NASA were briefly visible on all three.  Deborah puffed out her chest and straightened her posture.  They stopped at 250 first, an overzealous and overconfident plain jane white girl.  Deborah knew it could be awhile before they got to her.  No matter.  They were still headed this way.  Just then she got a tap on her left shoulder.  She spun around, a great grin on her face.  It crumbled the moment she saw her cohort:  Lilly, Evan, and Brian.  247 watched them from the sidelines, hands in his pockets.

“It looks nice!” Lilly said.

“I was skimming it earlier,” Brian said, “Good work.”

“Got some NASA folks headed your way,” Evan said.

Deborah bobbled her head up and down, her smile restored.  She said, “Thanks, guys.  And, yeah, I saw them a moment ago.”

“The woman is Lois Harvey.  She does similar stuff to you,” Brian said.  “You should chat.”

“I will!” Deborah’s eyes shined at the realization.  She’d never actually seen Lois before.  She pointed to her references.  “I cited her!”

The NASA trio were now at 249.  249 extended his thin long arm and pointed at one of the figures on his poster.  Deborah could feel her heart hammering inside her chest.

“Do you mind if I take a picture of you and your poster?” Lilly asked.

“Sure!” Deborah squealed.

Lilly took out her iPhone and snapped two pictures:  one vertical and one horizontal.  She smiled, then showed them to Deborah who smiled doubly hard.

“Send them to me,” Deborah demanded.

“Will do,” Lilly said. “And is it okay if I show them tomorrow?”

“Show them?”

“At the diversity workshop.”

Deborah could’ve kicked her in the crouch.  Instead she unclasped her hands and reunited them behind her back.  She felt it rising, a subdued anger she’d inherited from her ancestors.  A centuries old anger rooted in oppression, injustice, countless misunderstandings, and annoying interactions.  She tilted her chin up just a bit and pursed her lips.

“No.”

“It’s a great picture,” Lilly said.

“You and your work look great,” Evan said.

Brian, hands in his pockets, said nothing.

“No, just send them to me.”

“It’s inspiring,” Lilly said.

The NASA trio had left 249.

“I’m not here to inspire li’l nigglets on bikes!  I’m here to do science!”

Lilly and Evan’s faces deflated.  Brian backed away, eventually disappearing.  The ambient noise of the exhibition hall died.  Deborah, her chest heaving up and down, caught sight of Lois Harvey out the corner of her eye, standing to her right–eye brows hiked, green eyes wide, and lips taut.  One of her colleagues had engaged with a kid across the aisle at another poster.  The other, upon making eye contact with Deborah, patted Lois on the shoulder, and shuffled past 248 and stuck out a hand to greet 247.  Deborah could hear the blood pounding in her ears.  Her heart beat so hard she could feel it in her back.  She tried to regain her composure.  She looked down at her feet and fumbled with her nametag.  There went next year’s poster.  No session chairing or elbow rubbing.  No postdoc position at a NASA center or the US Geological Survey.  There would be no ticket writing.  Evan and Lilly, their faces still pink, walked off.  They would go on to get postdoc positions at a NASA center and a well-renowned university, respectively.  They would write their tickets.  As their parents and their parents’ parents had before them.

“So you’re Deborah Whitaker!” Lois said, shoving a well-manicured hand forward.  Her surprised expression had been replaced with a genial smile.

“Y-yes, ma’am.”

“I was browsing posters earlier and I saw yours and I knew I just had to talk to you,” she said.  She glanced at Deborah’s retreating cohort.  “But maybe I caught you at a bad time?”

The tears were welling, but they hadn’t fallen yet.  Deborah said, “O-oh!  N-no, of course n-not.  Well, l-let me give you my…”

Lois placed a hand on Deborah’s right shoulder.  She asked, “Is this your first conference?”

“No, ma’am.”

“First poster?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It can be a lot of pressure.”

Delores nodded, still keeping the tears from falling.  “I was so excited to present my work.”

Lois rubbed her arm.  “You still can.  But is the science on your beautiful poster your entire story?  Are you just a scientist?”

Deborah wrinkled her brow and frowned with confusion.

Lois smiled.  She said, “I have a colleague, a black man, who told me that grad school was a very lonely experience for him.”

“I can relate,” she said, speaking for herself.

“Don’t you think other people should hear that too?”

“They don’t want to hear my story,” she said, speaking for her race.

Lois pulled her hand away, narrowed her eyes, and tapped a finger to her lips.  She said, “Hmm.  Well, regardless, let’s hit the reset button.  I’ll go grab you a beer and you can tell me all about your work.  Then, maybe tomorrow you could meet my colleague at the diversity seminar.  And he can share his experiences with you and, if you want, you can do the same.”

Deborah nodded, a single tear escaped her right eye.  Lois patted Deborah’s right arm affectionately–a look of sympathy, worry, and understanding written across her face.  Once Lois walked away, Deborah threw her face into her hands.  The rest of the tears charged forward and raced down her cheeks.  She could taste her own salty tears as they slid down her lips and into her palms.  She dwelled in the darkness of her cupped hands for a full minute before removing them from her face and wiping the tears with her left arm.

“You okay?” 247 asked.  The NASA guy had left his poster.

“Yeah….” she sniffled, “thanks.”

“Saying nigga at your first poster probably isn’t wise, huh?” He asked, with a crooked smile.

The relaxed tone of his voice put her at ease.  He wasn’t trying to be funny.  Deborah nodded sheepishly and said, “Technically, I said nigglet.”

“Like a piglet?”

“Yeah.”

“At least you said it,” he said, “so it’s okay.”

“Is it?”

247 looked stumped.  That was a conversation for another day.  He asked, “So you go by Deborah or Debbie?”

She managed to smile and said, “I hate Debbie.  And Deborah just made an ass of herself.”

“So who does that make you then?”

“I think that makes me Deb.  Deb Whittaker.”

247 smiled and stuck out his hand.  He said, “Nice to meet you, Deb.  I’m Jackson.  But everyone calls me Jay.”

They chatted until Lois returned.  The conversation made her feel surprisingly good.  Jackson was planning to attend the seminar.  Deborah wouldn’t dare.  But Deb would.  Then, maybe Deb would start the long process of making peace with Debbie.  And the little boys on bikes.  And the bullies in middle school.  Maybe Deb wouldn’t deny herself because others had done it for her.  One day, maybe she’d have the courage to address the anger handed down from her parents and their parents and their parents’ parents.  And maybe, just maybe, when the dust settled and she forgave and she grew and she cried more and thought more and resented less, she’d forgive Deborah who had steered the ship since the days of Debbie.  Maybe then Deb would write herself a new ticket.  She would be anxious to present those results to the world.