Chapter 1: The Weight of Air

Richmond, Virginia – First Week of September

The humidity in Richmond doesn’t ask permission. It wraps around you like a wet wool blanket, even at seven in the morning, even when you’re standing barefoot on the cracked sidewalk outside your grandmother’s row house on Leigh Street. I don’t feel it the way others do—not on my arms, not on my chest, not on the backs of my thighs. After two years of this, my skin has stopped translating weather into shame. It translates it into information. Today’s information: it’s going to rain by third period, and the auditorium will smell like mildew and old dust.

I shift my backpack strap—it crosses diagonally from my right shoulder to my left hip, the only thing I wear besides my silver necklace with my father’s wedding ring on it. The ring rests between my breasts, warm from my body heat. My mother hates that I wear it there. She says it’s “indecent proximity.” I say it’s the closest I can get to his heartbeat.

The front door opens behind me. My grandmother, Nana Ruth, steps out onto the porch in her housecoat—pink, floral, buttoned to the throat. She’s seventy-two, diabetic, and the only adult in my life who never flinched the first time I walked downstairs naked for breakfast two years ago.

“Ellie-girl,” she says, handing me a brown paper bag. “Peanut butter sandwich and an apple. Don’t let that principal bully you into covering up. You remember what your daddy said.”

I take the bag. “He said the body is the first instrument.”

“He said the body is the first truth.” She corrects me with a soft smile. “Now go. And if that Morrison man gives you lip, you tell him I’ll come down there with my cane.”

I kiss her cheek. She smells like Jean Naté and coffee. Then I turn and walk the six blocks to the bus stop, my bare soles slapping the concrete in a rhythm that matches the metronome in my head. Andante. Allegro. Presto. I’m practicing Rachmaninoff in my skull before I’ve even had my apple.

The bus arrives at 7:24. I climb aboard, and the driver—Mr. Delaney, a heavyset white man with a handlebar mustache—nods at me without looking below my chin. He’s been driving this route for three years. He knows my face. That’s all he looks at.

I find a seat near the back. Two freshmen, girls in oversized hoodies, whisper and giggle. A boy with acne and earbuds stares at my thigh for a beat too long, then looks away, reddening. I don’t cover. I don’t cross my legs. I learned that crossing my legs reads as modesty, and modesty implies that there’s something to be modest about. There isn’t. There’s just skin, bone, sweat, and the faint tan line from my childhood swimsuit that never quite faded—a ghost of the girl I used to be.

I pull out my sheet music—Rach 3, the ossia cadenza—and trace the runs with my fingertip. The bus lurches through downtown, past the Capitol building, past the statue of Robert E. Lee that they finally took down last summer. Richmond is a city of ghosts. I am one of them, walking around without a costume.

Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School is a fortress of red brick and ambition. It sits on Lombardy Street, swallowing the brightest kids from every corner of the city. I’ve been here since freshman year, and I’ve been naked since the first day of eighth grade, but I still remember the terror of that first morning—the way the fluorescent lights made my brown skin look gray, the way my armpits sweated even though I had nothing to sweat through.

Now it’s routine. I swipe my ID badge at the side entrance—the metal detector doesn’t beep because I have no metal except the necklace—and walk into the main hallway. Lockers slam. Kids shout. Someone’s vape pen sets off the smoke alarm for the third time this week. And there, at the end of the hall, stands Principal Morrison.

He’s new this year. Hired from a conservative district in Chesterfield County. He’s tall, bald, with wire-rimmed glasses that make him look like a disappointed owl. Today he’s wearing a navy blazer and a tie with little anchors on it. He spots me immediately—I’m hard to miss—and he strides over with the kind of purposeful walk that says I have been waiting for this moment.

“Miss Washington,” he says, stopping two feet away. His eyes stay fixed on my face. I give him credit for that; most adults’ eyes wander, even when they’re trying not to. “May I have a word?”

“Sure.” I shift my backpack to my other shoulder. “I have AP US History in seven minutes, though.”

“This won’t take long.” He gestures to an empty classroom on our left. I follow him inside. He closes the door. The room smells like chalk and hand sanitizer. He doesn’t sit; he stands behind the teacher’s desk, as if the furniture can shield him from my bareness.

“Miss Washington,” he begins, “I’ve reviewed your file. I see that you’ve been ... unclothed ... since the spring of your eighth-grade year. I also see that your mother has filed three complaints against the previous administration for trying to enforce a dress code.”

“I know. She lost. Because the Supreme Court—”

“Yes, I’m aware of Freedman v. State.” He says the name like it’s a curse. “However, that ruling pertains to indecency. It does not pertain to health, safety, or educational environment. I’ve spoken with the school board, and we are considering a new policy requiring students to wear ‘minimum base coverage’ in laboratory settings, during physical education, and—”