Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

closet. I remember thinking the shooter was following Derek and would find us. This fear diminished when the red lights of the fire truck crept into our room, and Dad came home stunned by the blood in the foyer and the tears in our eyes.
    I don’t remember hearing gunfire that night, a common occurrence in our neighborhood, one that startled me the first few times I heard it until I wrote it off as a car backfiring, another common sound. Derek survived three gunshots, an apparent case of mistaken identity, according to Dad, who said the gunman—one of the guys who stood outside the corner store—told Derek, “Sorry, man, you ain’t the one,” then ran off into the streetlamp-lit night.
    Those streetlamps are the last things I remember about the yellow house on the hill, the one shrouded by trees, the one Dad, Chad, and I ran away from a few months after Derek returned home on crutches. In early 1994, in the middle of the night, we boarded a Greyhound bus to Dallas, Texas, Dad’s hometown. He refused to let us say good-bye to Janine, fearful that she’d guilt him into staying. Dad cut people off quickly, moving on from relationships with little care or accountability. I don’t know what became of Derek or the kids on my block like Junior, and I was sad to hear from my father only a few years ago that Janine passed “a while back” from kidney complications after years of dialysis. Dad didn’t make the three-hour drive to attend her funeral in Houston, where she had relocated a few years after we left Oakland.
    He later told me that running away was the only way he felt he’d get out of Oakland alive. He was running away from the violence that was so close to home and the pipe that was his constant companion. Dad called our bus ride “an adventure,” one where he played spades with Chad and we ate all the barbecue-flavor Corn Nuts we wanted, stinking up the bus.
    Sitting on my knees, I followed the lines on the highway as we rode for thirty-six hours from Oakland to Los Angeles and Phoenix to El Paso and finally Dallas, where the city was in a joyous uproar over the Cowboys’ back-to-back Super Bowl wins in 1993 and 1994.
    Sunday dinner at my grandparents’ home in a suburb of Dallas, the same neighborhood where Dad and his four younger siblings came of age, was a day of food, family, and football. Grandma Shellie ruled the ranch-style house. She had dark, reflective skin, constantly glowing alongside sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes and full red lips. Her most defining feature was her elegant, slender hands, which she put to work as a seamstress for fashion designer Todd Oldham. I remember sitting quietly in her garage as she worked among racks of garments in plastic bags. The only sounds were the needle and thread meeting the fabrics and the machine’s humming motor, a steady music of labor. Grandpa Charlie was also constantly at work, spending his nights on the highways as a cross-country truck driver.
    Despite Grandpa’s absence, Grandma’s house was filled with family. I played hide-and-seek and tag with a gaggle of cousins, all a few years apart from one another. Each of Dad’s four siblings had one or two kids, except for my perpetually single Uncle Bernard, who was Dad’s shadow and even lived with my parents for a bit when they were in Long Beach.
    There were too many Mocks in Dallas for me to ever feel alone. Even when the sound of questions regarding my identity began ringing louder in my head, I rarely had room to reflect because the sound of family was overwhelming. Grandma’s metal pots and pans clacking; Dad and Uncle Bernard and Uncle Ricky’s cheers for the Cowboys; Auntie Linda Gail’s mouth-smacking gossip and Auntie Joyce’s soothing mhmm s; my cousins’ yelps from the backyard; Sadie, the family’s slate-gray pit bull, barking at the applause from the house as her chain collar rubbed against the metal back gate; the white-noise gurgling of the crawfish pond outside Grandma’s property