Free Loving Day by Mat Johnson Page A

her when I pull up. Tal pretends she doesn’t hear me over the motor so I yell it again.
    “It’s okay, isn’t it? I mean, now that it turns out I’m a black? I get a pass on ‘the streets’ now, right?” There are a lot of bags. Four big ones, a human-size duffel bag, and a portfolio case. There’s a hamster cage, sitting right on the pavement. There’s a hamster inside it, running along the sides manically as if some of the local rats might try to jump it.
    “Tal, what’s going on here?” I ask her, but I know.
    “Irv kicked me out.” She shrugs. “I told him I wasn’t going back to Kadima. And about my GED plan. And he said if I didn’t go back to school I couldn’t stay there. So here I am.” I keep staring at the hamster. But I don’t say anything. I’m waiting till the right words come, but my tongue gets no offers. After a few seconds, Tal steps closer, puts her hand to my chin and aims my face back at her own. “I’m moving in.
Dad
.”
    When she uses the
d
-word, with such palpable derision, my first thought is: I’m not old enough to be your father. The next thought is that not only am I old enough, but that I literally am her father. I look at her face. The neck, the cheekbones, the eyes, I recognize. Family. But the whole face, her face, I barely recognize it from the day before. This is a stranger. I feel some love there, or feel the need to want to love her, but I don’t know this person. The clearest emotion I can identify is a sense of responsibility. I will meet that responsibility. Or try. I will try to make sure she graduates high school. Then after, when I burn the place down, I will use the money to take care of her. I will make sure she gets out of this town. Hell, we could run together. Someplace nice, with temperate weather and a low crime rate. And then I feel the Umoja flier Tosha printed for me scratching at the inside of my coat pocket and the impulse is given physical form.
    “Here’s the deal: you come with me, then you have to finish up at another school. You have to graduate, then you can do what you want.”
    “Fine. You get me in a school, you find somewhere I can still graduate on time, let me stay here, then we can make a deal.”
    “A school with black folks in it. Trust me, it’s important. You need to know who you are. Who we are. I’m not going to have a daughter of mine who goes around saying things like ‘the blacks’ all the time. Agreed?”
    Tal sighs, rolls her eyes a little, but says, “Fine,” at the end of her performance.
    “And no smoking. And you have to keep calling me ‘Dad.’ But in a non-sarcastic manner,” I throw in, feeling momentarily sure of myself.
    “I’ll call you ‘Pops,’ ” she says, and that feels okay. “ ‘Cocoa Pops,’ ” she adds, and I get uncomfortable again.
    —
    Tal unpacks, and I try to make the house more livable. The painting equipment, the strewn tools, I pick them up, put them in the closet behind the stairs. In there, I find three poster-sized pencil sketches of Germantown. One of the long-vacant pool beside the Boys’ Club. One of Chelten Station, from the perspective of the street, looking down to the tracks. The last, a façade of the Whosoever Gospel Mission. They’re mine, or at least I created them.
    They’re the ones that didn’t sell, the ones that weren’t purchased out of mercy by Becks’s coworkers at the gallery show she arranged. My father had them framed. He actually spent money on that. With his hammer and nails, I hang them in the living room.
    As it gets dark, I wait for the crackheads to show back up. All the doors are checked, all the windows are locked, but crackheads have special piper powers and can probably flatten their skulls like mice and squeeze through the smallest cracks. Perhaps this is how they got their name. I have something to protect now, so I electric tape a steak knife to the paint roller stick.
    “If you don’t want people to say racist things,