March Madness

2024

It was my first day at my second and final summer at Artists for Humanity, the nonprofit employing local high schoolers in the creative arts that made me fall in love with painting and the city of Boston. During those sweltering summers, I learned to concoct chromatic blacks from a mixture of cadmium red and phthalo green. I learned to gesso and sand and gesso and sand. I learned that Salem is renowned not only for its witch trials, but for its vibrant street art. I learned the keypad code to unlock the bathroom at the Starbucks right next to the Broadway T stop. (It's 5-8-9-6.) I learned that the money I thought I would be making was not the money I actually would be making, because Uncle Sam is a greedy ass motherfucker. 

After we received our materials and set up our stations, a boy with deep mocha skin and a well-picked afro dyed tomato red, silver studs adorning his earlobes and black Chuck Taylors adorning his feet, approached my easel.

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“Hi,” he said shyly. “Um, I wanted to tell you this earlier, but – I – I think you’re really beautiful.” 

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“W-what?” I stammered, incredulous.

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“I said, um, I think you’re really beautiful.”

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I awkwardly mumbled a thank you, a furrow of confusion creasing my forehead, and he shuffled away.

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Later at lunch break, I asked some other kids in the cohort, who had worked at AFH for a while and already knew Zion, if he was gay. Uh, I don’t know, I don’t think so, was the general consensus.

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I couldn’t wrap my brain around it, so accustomed was I to the alabaster-pale white boys adorned in Vineyard Vines and Nike Elite socks who saw right through me in school hallways. I was an apparition, transparent, not even an afterthought.

Earlier that year, a scandal had rocked my sophomore class: the leak of Lyle Fortimer’s infamous March Madness bracket. The scrawny, freckled, mousy-haired boy with terrible posture had fastidiously ranked the girls in our grade according to hotness, arranging them in their designated slots on a blank bracket template. He then disseminated his ingenious creation via private Snapchat, inviting other boys to “play” the girls against each other – à la NCAA basketball – to determine The Hottest of Them All. Mysteriously, the lowest seeds had been reserved almost exclusively for the girls of color.

Some valiant whistleblower extracted the bracket photo from the covert sphere of the social media groupchat and released it to the public domain of the high school classroom. An uproar ensued.

Out of 16 seeds, I had been deemed an 11. In the history of March Madness, the lowest seed to ever win the tournament was 8. Villanova, in 1985. A miraculous upset. Once-in-a-lifetime.

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Hence, my perplexity at Zion. What boy in his right mind would find an 11-seed beautiful?