The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth - Alexandra Robbins [61]
One Mexican student used to spit on the floor in front of Joy, to classmates’ laughter, whenever the teacher took attendance. When he had done this for a few days in a row, despite Joy’s requests that he stop, Joy said, “Why don’t you just fuck off?!” The boy tried to stare her down. “I’m not afraid of a coward like you,” Joy said to him. He didn’t spit at her again.
Joy only spoke to one Mexican in school because, she said, “She’s the only one who isn’t ignorant and small-minded. I’m not friends with the cholos and Asians because they don’t converse with blacks. I will say hi to Natalie, but I can see her discomfort.” Joy had one black acquaintance, Latrice, the cheerleader from her first English class. Latrice had been begging Joy to tutor her in biology, but the rest of the African-Americans at school still looked at her “weird.” As Joy put it, “Here they say, ‘You either white or ghetto.’ I’m not either, so I don’t see why I should be subjecting myself to any classifications.”
In the following weeks, Joy continued to talk to Xavier, who made sure to point out, “I dated a black and a Mexican girl, so how could I possibly be racist?”
JOY WOKE UP ONE Monday morning and knew she had hit rock bottom. Her depression had begun as stress and homesickness, but now, more than two months later, it was picking at her, biting away until she felt like she barely existed. She couldn’t bear the thought of getting up and going to school. She had been through so much worse than anything Citygrove could throw at her, and yet she was at her breaking point and didn’t know why.
Joy believed that some of her classmates were “green-eyed”—and unnecessarily so. She guessed that people perceived her as someone who was “pretty, smart, and has an excellent life, when in truth they don’t know the half of it.” Indeed there were things that Joy kept bottled up, things she had told no one in Citygrove and few people in Jamaica.
Joy’s parents had split up when she was two years old. Her Ukrainian mother—who had moved to Jamaica with Joy’s father without knowing a word of English—retained custody, but Jamaican courts forced Joy to visit her father every other weekend. On many occasions, he beat her.
Sometimes he beat her because he claimed she lied. Sometimes it was because she pronounced a word wrong. Sometimes it was because she cried too much. He would tell Joy or her younger half brother, “Go get the belt,” sending them to his bedroom, where he hung his belts from a hook on the wall. He would take them to the living room and force each sibling to watch while he beat the other. When it was Joy’s turn, her father would grab her by the arm and she’d try to run, but she could only pinwheel around him as he slapped her or hit her with the belt buckle. She could still remember her shrieks when she begged him to stop hurting her. “Daddy, please, I’m sorry!” she’d weep. “I won’t do it again. Oh God, oh God.” He never yelled when he beat her. When he was through, he’d smile and leave her crumpled and bruised on the floor. Her mother, distraught but powerless, once had to take her to a doctor to treat the open wounds that striped her back.
Usually, the next time he saw her, he would smugly say, “What happened to you? Who did this to you?”—mocking her pain. Then he hugged and kissed her as if nothing had happened. That was the scariest part.
The abuse wasn’t always physical. He verbally made her feel worthless, or taunted her by insulting her mother. Nearly every night, Joy had nightmares about him coming after her. She cried in her sleep. Joy endured the beatings because her father wasn’t always a monster. She kept going back because she hoped that eventually her father would change, that he would make her feel loved, or at least worthy of his time.
When Joy was nine, her father invited her to spend Christmas Eve at his mother’s house while