Friday Feature: Nora Hylton
Nora Hylton is a Jamaican American writer from San Francisco, California. She holds a B.A. in English Literature from Yale University and is the recipient of the Charles P. Howland Fellowship for her writing. Her fiction explores themes of young adulthood, focusing on experiences of love, loss, and grief in urban Black and West Indian communities.
The Path of Least Resistance
The bodies at the party were hot and timid; barely concealed desire quivered between them like gelatin. I couldn’t make out faces in the dark, but I looked anyway. Some swayed in circles, their feet moving independently from their bodies as if the room was melding into a swirl of colors and lights. Others looked nervously at everyone else and took small sips from their own cup. It was reassuring that no one wanted to seem as if they were having too much, or too little fun. It was everyone, not just me, who was pretending, molding themselves like stiff clay into the person they wanted to appear to be.
Letty saw James first, sitting on the couch against the opposite wall with his long legs crossed at the ankles.
“There’s your boy.” Letty pointed, and I grabbed her hand down. My stomach felt as though it was collapsing in on itself, and I fought to keep my breathing regular. A lanky girl wearing a red halter top got up and switched the radio station. The beat became jumpy, embellished with metallic synths and a loud thumping bassline. Letty pushed me up from the couch, and as if controlled by a remote, I was walking over.
“I’m Abigail,” I said once I was standing in front of him. I tucked a loose curl behind my ear and tried to smile without my bottom teeth, the way Letty and I had practiced. Up close, James was just as beautiful as from far away. His eyebrows were thick, and I felt an urge to run a finger against the grain of the hair and smooth it back down. “We took AP Literature together.”
“Abigail. From AP Lit. Sorry, I don’t remember.”
“That’s fine.”
“Do you smoke?” He gestured to a pair of French doors which led out to a dark backyard.
“Not usually.” I shrugged. My heart felt like it was beating triple time in my throat. “But, yeah. Let’s go.”
The first week of senior year, Letty and I decided we would become the best versions of ourselves. Letty was closer than I was. She was already detached and cool. She had lived in Southern California with her mother until seventh grade and had a certain kind of nonchalance which couldn’t be faked. She could make light-hearted jokes about her C-minus papers and sent pictures of her naked chest to boys from Mill Valley, kissing them without shame in the back of their mother’s minivans.
The first time I saw James, I was struck that I had never seen anyone like him before. He joined our class after our sophomore year summer—his father was a neurosurgeon who had been relocated to UCSF from a smaller hospital in New Hampshire. James was attractive—not like those billboards on Market Street where men were draped sensually over women in a way that made you want to buy the perfume they were wearing. He didn’t look like a model—the bump in his nose was too pronounced, and his cheeks were peppered with the beginnings of stubble and pockmarked by old acne scars. He was thin, but it wasn’t a curated thinness. It was a lankiness, the length of his limbs emphasized by the way he sat, one leg slung over the other, so casual you had to look away. He was the type of person who only existed in the far reaches of the northeast—I imagined he’d spent his summers at his grandparents’ eclectic country home where they picked blackberries and talked about electoral politics over dinner. I’d never wanted someone, or something, so much. He wore his pants too short, and his exposed ankle—just bigger than my wrist—made me aware of the burn in my thighs as they rubbed against my jeans.
The best version of myself went to parties thrown by girls she didn’t know. She laughed hard at jokes and woke up early to straighten her hair. She kissed boys because she could and didn’t feel weird about it the next morning.
Outside there was still a chill in the air—June was just barely awake, and the city didn’t get really warm until late August. James bent over me and put his rusty silver lighter to the end of the joint held delicately between my fingers.
“To your mouth. Bring it to your mouth and suck in.” The lighter ignited with a click, illuminating both of our faces. I could see colors in the flames, bright blue near the base and a muted orange at the tip. The first drag wasn’t so bad. Based on what I saw on television, I thought my first time smoking would make me cough or maybe throw up. I sucked on again, the orange tip glowing in time with my breath.
“It’s not bad for you. Weed.” James took the lit joint from my hand. My skin buzzed where his fingers touched mine. He took a slow drag, watching my face closely. “It’s just a plant. Tobacco, too—not as bad for you as everyone says.”
I didn’t know what to say. I just nodded. “That makes sense.”
When the joint was down to the butt, he showed me how to put it out. Lifting his foot, he mimed rubbing the lit end against the sole of his shoe. I copied his movements, the black ash clinging to the bottom of my Converse. Then, he leaned in and touched his mouth to mine. His lips felt harder than I expected, two muscly pieces of flesh moving rhythmically against my own. I closed my eyes and tried to let the moment sink deep inside me. This was kissing. I was being kissed.
The first time I drank, I stayed over at Letty’s house. Her parents were out at a gala, and we had the house to ourselves. She didn’t live in an apartment like I did; it was a proper house. We drank vodka from her parents’ liquor cabinet mixed with lemonade we bought from the deli a few blocks away. When we finished pouring the alcohol, we filled the empty bottle with water.
After an hour of drinking, the world around me was spinning. I was sure it was the movement of the earth I was feeling. If I lay on the carpet with my eyes closed, I swore I could feel the twenty-three-degree tilt.
“You need to throw up.” Letty told me matter-of-factly, as if at sixteen years old the world was so obvious to her as to be boring.
We’d leaned over the toilet together in the guest bathroom. I put two fingers into my own mouth, which felt soft and warm, and then further back. I could feel the ridges of my throat contracting and pulsing. It felt unnatural, as if I was a machine receiving a factory reset before being recycled into something new.
“Hold still.” Letty’s fingers joined mine. We fought for dominance, fingers slick with spit and bile before Letty said, ‘stop,’ and I relented. She was fair and efficient; she prodded the back of my throat only a few times before my stomach contracted and the toilet was full of vomit. My mouth tasted sour and felt hot. I thought I might cry. My knees ached from being pressed against the tile floor, and when I sat back against the bathroom door, they were covered in thin red lines where the skin pinched.
“You’ll be okay now.” Letty’s smile was intended to be reassuring, but I still felt the burning from my stomach up to my throat. I couldn’t meet her eyes.
That night, I called home. It was late, and I hoped for a second my mother wouldn’t be up. The line rang and then crackled.
“Abigail? What you doing callin’ this late? Is everything okay?”
“Yes, Mummy. I just wanted to call to see that you were alright,” I lied. “I just miss you, that’s all. You and Daddy.”
She paused. In my mind, I could see my mother sitting alone in our small kitchen, weighing her next words. I cradled the phone next to my face.
“Do you need to come ’ome? You sound funny, Abigail.”
“No, Mummy. It’s okay. I just wanted to call.”
“Alright, then. Goodnight, baby.”
“Goodnight.”
After that, I started throwing up after every meal. I pictured my stomach as a vat of acid, which in some ways it was. Corrosive, defective, bubbling inside of me and threatening to make itself known.
“You have great tits,” Letty told me one night. It had been unusually hot all day, but a cool breeze had come in from the Pacific as the sun went down, providing a reprieve and the occasional whiff of salty seawater. We were sitting with our feet up on her parents’ balcony, the skyline glowing in the distance. It felt like the whole city was stretching out to meet us, each building lit up for our benefit. She wiggled her red-painted toes in my direction. “They’re big but perky. That’s real luck.”
Her compliment made me feel a rush of pride. I’d never thought about my body like that before, as something that belonged to me that other people might envy. Before, it didn’t seem to matter that much. But, looking in the mirror that evening, I found myself agreeing with Letty. It did matter that I had great tits, and my stomach muscles were taut, hidden under a layer of fat and skin. I could tell I was almost there, even if I didn’t know where there was.
My mother always told me that I looked like my brother. She didn’t mean it as either an insult or a compliment. It was just true. We had the same flat nose, the same big eyes. They came from our grandmother. My mother said she brought them all the way over from Jamaica, just to remind her of home.
The week before graduation, James asked me if I wanted to get coffee with him. It seemed so mature, asking someone out for coffee. I said yes. It was the part of the year at school when no one could get any serious work done. The teachers don’t even try anymore, and everyone just wants out. We had nearly done it; high school was almost over. Our weekends were full of pre-graduation parties and the jitters of knowing that in a few months, our lives would be completely different.
Letty helped me get ready. She blew out my hair with a hairdryer and pinned it to keep the loose curls intact. I shivered each time her comb scraped my scalp, parting my hair into precise sections, which she held against the mouth of the hairdryer, fighting to make my curls straight. It was raining, and Letty gave me a scarf to wear around my head, which felt silky cool against my skin. I felt Audrey Hepburn glamorous.
When I arrived at the coffee shop, James was already sitting by the window. I ordered a hot chocolate, and he paid. I ignored my mother’s voice, which echoed too loudly in my head, don't take nothing for free from these people dem, dem come back for it someday.
Four years at St. Andrew’s had taught me a lot about rich kids. When they mentioned “family friends,” they were often talking about important people like CEOs of companies or well-known artists who made political art pieces out of recycled packing peanuts. Rich kids ate at expensive restaurants, described items on the menu as ‘pricey’ with near-authentic concern, and then paid for the meal with their parents’ metal credit card.
Between sips of coffee, James told me about his family. The youngest of three, his older brother was a financial analyst who lived in North Beach, and his sister was about to graduate college. I told him I lived with just my mom, which was true. I didn’t elaborate and hoped he would fill in the gaps of what I didn’t say with romantic ideas of what my life was like.
When we’d both finished our drinks, he invited me back to his apartment. The building had a doorman. James signed me in at the front desk, and we rode up in the elevator holding hands.
The window in James’ room was open, and the rain had formed a puddle on the hardwood.
He started to take his clothes off, starting with his jeans. This is the man I’ll marry. We’ll have three kids; we’ll name them things like Olivia and take them to sushi restaurants in Pacifica for their birthdays. He bent to take off his shoes, and his back became a pale arch in the fading afternoon light. I reached out to touch his skin, and it struck me how dark my hand looked against his body.
It was my first time having sex. He whispered, it doesn’t matter, in my ear, and I agreed, it didn’t matter. It felt good, and it felt good to feel good. If I had to describe it, I’d say it felt like cracking the shells of sunflower seeds between your teeth—that same anticipation. James groaned quietly, his hard body pushing me into the mattress. When he pulled me on top of him, I thought about ecstasy. Was this it? Was I touching it right now?
Afterwards, he asked me about growing up in San Francisco. People were interested in what it was like to grow up somewhere, instead of nowhere. I told him about the public swimming pool a block from our house where I learned to swim, and the ice cream trucks swarmed by young children spending their allowances on popsicles shaped like cartoon characters. I told him about my elementary school, stuck between two city blocks, and how from the playground we could see blue and red blurs of cars speeding past the chain-link fence.
His hand lazily brushed my bare side, stroking up and down in small circles. The feeling of his fingertips made my skin prickle.
“You’re going to Middlebury, right? My sister’s a senior there.”
“Yep, in a few months.” I glowed with happiness, nodding. “I’ll say ‘Hi’ if I meet her.”
“You don’t have any siblings, right?”
“I did. I do.” I began. The words tumbled out of me, my mouth moving without my permission. “Just one brother. But he’s in jail.”
James paused. He turned towards me, as if waiting for me to acknowledge a poorly timed joke. Then, he blinked rapidly and turned away.
“What did he do?” His tone was hushed, like I was telling a ghost story.
“Killed someone.” I shrugged like it didn’t matter to me. Like I didn’t know how else to say it.
“Oh,” he said. The ‘Oh’ hung in the air, hollow and floating. Not like the sound, but the letter. O.
He looked over at me, the left half of his face illuminated in a warm, yellow glow of his table lamp. From his expression, I knew I made a mistake. I could see that the sympathy ended at his eyes, which appeared unfocused in the harsh light. I tucked my toes under myself and buried my face in the sheets, cooling down from the shame. James lifted his chin up towards the ceiling once more, staring at the headboard above us.
“Fuck. That’s intense.”
“I don’t talk to him much.” I was backtracking, giggling anxiously. The room had grown colder, and I scooted closer to his warm, naked body. “It’s not a big deal.”
I watched the wrinkles around his eyes until he closed them. He nodded, as if he understood.
I never thought about Linton. I didn’t know what made me say it. The memories I had of him were clouded by childhood, and by a sense that the brother I’d grown up with wasn’t real. It was a lie; a person he created to trick me into loving him. I’d gone on visiting days with my mother, but seeing him sitting in the jumpsuit, his face worked into a permanent guilty grimace, was too much. My mother still visited him every week, but I hadn’t been in years.
“Oh fuck,” James said. He’d pulled the sheet back to get out of the bed and was staring at the mattress between my legs. I looked down to where James was looking. The sheets on his bed below me were stained red. It was a small puddle, no bigger than a Post-it note. But it was there.
He looked at me then with terror, so much so that for a second, I thought he must’ve seen something else, a ghost or his parents coming home. His eyes were wide and his breathing so heavy that I thought he might faint. My heart was beating very fast, and I closed my legs to hide the stain. He asked me if I was okay, if he had hurt me.
“I’m fine, I’m fine.” I started laughing then, a laugh closer to a bark. I didn’t know exactly where it was coming from, but it was somewhere deep in me. I didn’t even know what was funny. I felt crazy. I wondered if he thought I was crazy, too.
He told me where the bathroom was, and I got up to clean off. My body felt full and heavy with each step. A rivulet of blood dripped down my thigh. I locked myself in the bathroom off his room and leaned over the toilet. The toilet seat felt cool against my pounding head. My fingers tasted chalky, and it only took a moment before I was spitting the contents of my stomach into the toilet bowl. With the flush, it was all gone. I felt lighter for a second, and then heavy again.
“Are you throwing up in there?” James called from his room.
“No,” I called back. “I’m almost finished.”
I wiped my mouth on the back of my sleeve and left the bathroom. James was in the hallway, pretending not to listen to me. He looked young in the darkness, like a child. We both were, I guess. Children.
“Thanks for having me. I had a great time.”
He walked me to the front door, and I cried on the train ride home.
My mother met me at the door of the apartment. She didn’t mention that I was an hour past curfew. If she could see that I’d been crying, she didn’t say anything. She just held me and rocked back and forth. I thought in that moment she might say something—something wise and knowledgeable about the way the world worked. My mother tended to turn these rare moments of intimacy into pronouncements about the world and our place in it. Usually, they had to do with Jesus or white people or America. But she didn’t say anything. She just held me and rocked, stroking the top of my head with her open palm.
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Torch Literary Arts is a 501(c)3 nonprofit established to publish and promote creative writing by Black women. We publish contemporary writing by experienced and emerging writers alike. Programs include the Wildfire Reading Series, writing workshops, and retreats.
