Behind You by Jacqueline Woodson Page A

on the ground—a young boy. A black boy. They know this is not the man they’d been looking for. They know they’ve made a mistake. Your soul looks at the boy and knows his friends called him Miah but his full name was Jeremiah Roselind. Tall. Dark. He has locks and the locks are spread over the ground. His eyes are opened wide. Greenish gray lifeless eyes. Your soul thinks—somebody loved that boy once. Thinks—once that boy was me. The wind blows the snow left, right and up. You are so light, you move with the wind and the snow. Let the weather take you. And it lifts you up—over a world of sadness and anger and fear. Over a world of first kisses and hands touching and someone you’re falling in love with. She’s there now. Right there. Look closely. Yeah. That’s her. That’s my Ellie.

The Hurting

Ellie
    FOR A LONG TIME AFTER MIAH DIED, SO MANY PEOPLE DIDN’T sleep. At night, we lay in bed with our eyes wide open and watched the way night settled down over wherever we were. I was in a room on the Upper West Side, in a house my parents moved to a long time ago. Not a house —a duplex apartment in a fancy building with a doorman. My dad’s a doctor. My mother stays at home. I go to Percy Academy. Some people look at me and see a white girl in a uniform—burgundy jacket and gray skirt—and think, She has all the privilege in the world. I look back at them, thinking, If only you knew.
    If only they knew how we were sprinkled all over the city—me in my big room, Nelia in her Fort Greene brownstone, Norman in his girlfriend’s apartment, aunts and uncles and cousins, even strangers—all over New York City—none of us slept. We lay there staring up at our ceilings or out into the darkness. Or some days we stopped in the middle of doing something and forgot what it was we were doing. We thought, Jeremiah’s dead. We whispered, Jeremiah’s dead. As if the whispering and the thinking could help us to understand. We didn’t eat enough. We peed only when the need to pee got so big, we thought we’d wet our pants. We pulled the covers off ourselves in the mornings then sat on the edge of our beds, not knowing what to do next. If those strangers looked, really looked into my privileged white girl face, they would have seen the place where I wasn’t even there. Where a part of me died too.
    Miah died on a Saturday afternoon. That evening, the calls started coming. First his mom, Nelia, asking if Miah was still with me. Then his dad, Norman. Then the cops. Then silence. Silence that lasted into the night and into the next dawn. Then the phone ringing one more time and Nelia saying, Ellie, Miah’s been shot. . . .
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    I don’t remember much more than that. There was a funeral. There were tears. There were days and days spent in my bed. A fever maybe.
    There was no more Miah.
    No more Miah.
    No more Miah and me.

Nelia
    I USED TO BE A WRITER. IDEAS AND PEOPLE AND PLACES WOULD come to me and I’d write it all down. There was such a clarity to the world then. When I sat down at my desk and began to write, I felt like I understood everything. I felt brilliant and whole and good. But who understands everything. Who understands anything. I mean really . People getting awards for being geniuses and brilliant writers and world shakers. Do they understand. Do they have any idea what it feels like to wake up some days not even sure of your own name. What is my name? . . . Nelia. It’s Nelia. My whole name? Cornelia Elizabeth Roselind. But before it was Roselind, it was something else. This morning, I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter anyway. Who I was. Who I am. Who I’ll be one day. You see, the whole world has changed for me. It’s filled with people saying things I don’t understand. Faces on the television screen talk at me—lips moving with no sound. There’s a war somewhere. And somewhere else,