Part One: The Long Road Home
Roy is thirty-seven now, he had known Chiquita for thirty years. Let’s go back to how and where they met.
It was in tenth grade, they were ghosts to each other. They walked the same hallways at Clark High, ate in the same cafeteria, maybe even passed each other a hundred times without a word. She was just another face in a crowded high school, and he was just another body moving through space.
There was no moment of recognition, no spark, no sign that their lives would eventually become intertwined in ways neither could have predicted.
It wasn’t until a year later eleventh grade that everything changed.
Roy still could remember when he asked her for her phone number. In history class and he remembered putting her number in his pocket. The details had blurred over time, lost in the haze of years. What he remembered with absolute clarity was the conversation itself—how it stretched from ten o’clock at night until nearly three in the morning, how his ear went numb from pressing the phone against it, how his mother had yelled at him the next day about being on the phone all night and not wanting to get up for school.
They talked about everything. School and teachers they hated. Music and which rappers were real and which were fake.
Family drama and neighborhood politics. Goals they set for themselves that they were afraid to say out loud. There was something sacred about those late-night conversations, something that made vulnerability feel less dangerous.
It became their routine. Every night, the phone would ring, and they would disappear into their private world of words and comfortable silences.
They built something in those hours—a foundation that neither of them fully understood but both instinctively trusted.
By twelfth grade, the phone calls weren’t enough for them.
They started meeting in person, spending hours outside each other’s houses. They would sit in chairs in front of their houses, talking until the streetlights came on and parents started calling them inside. They were careful to keep certain things from out in the open.
Roy would lean against parked cars, and Chiquita would stand close enough to him that he could smell her perfume mixing with the city air. They talked about college plans and jobs and all the ways they wanted their lives to be different from their parents’ lives. They watched their neighborhood move around them—older men playing dominoes on folding tables, young mothers pushing strollers, corner boys conducting business they all pretended not to see.
It was enough, until it wasn’t.
Roy could remember the first time Chiquita came to his house, Roy knew something was different. He saw her walking up driveway, with her shoulder length hair swinging from side to side with each step, and instead of meeting her halfway like he always did, he stood in front of the house and waited for her to walk up.
When she reached him, he opened the door.
Roy: “You coming in?”
She looked at him for a short moment, shocked and understanding that crossing that threshold meant crossing into something new.
Chiquita: “Yeah, I’m coming in.”
His parent’s house was small and crowded with the evidence of family. The television was on in the living room, playing a basketball game his uncle was half-watching. His mother was in the kitchen, the smell of her cooking had the whole house smelling good. His little sister was doing homework at the dining table, surrounded by textbooks and papers.
Roy felt suddenly self-conscious, seeing his world through Chiquita’s eyes.
Roy: “Ma, this is Chiquita.”
His voice steady despite the nervousness in his chest.
His mother looked up from the stove, wiping her hands on a dish towel. She looked at Chiquita with that look only mothers can give—taking in everything from her clothes to her posture to the way when someone talking to her she doesn’t look away.
Ms. Joyce: “Nice to meet you, baby”
He introduced her to his uncle and his sister, who barely looked up from her math homework, and then he led her down the narrow hallway toward his room.
His bedroom was small and personal in a way that made him feel exposed. Posters covered the walls—Tupac, Jordan, Malcolm X. His closet door was half-open, revealing a collection of sneakers he had been accumulating since high school. His desk was cluttered with notebooks and CDs and the kinds of small objects that accumulate when you have lived in the same room your entire life.
He closed the door behind them, leaving it open just a crack—a compromise between privacy and respect.
Chiquita sat on the edge of his bed, and Roy sat beside her, close enough that their legs touched. They had spent countless hours talking, but now, in this intimate space, words felt insufficient.
Chiquita: “We’ve known each other for a long time”.
Roy: “Yeah since tenth grade. Even though we didn’t really know each other then.”
Chiquita: “We know each other now.”
Roy: “Yeah, We do.”
To be continued……