Who Put This Song On? Read online

  BOOKS BY MORGAN PARKER

  Magical Negro

  There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé

  Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Morgan Parker

  Cover art copyright © 2019 by Adriana Bellet

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! GetUnderlined.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Parker, Morgan, author.

  Title: Who put this song on? / Morgan Parker.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, [2019] | Summary: “17-year-old Morgan is a black teen triumphantly figuring out her identity when her conservative town deems depression as a lack of faith, and blackness as something to be politely ignored” —Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018051979 (print) | LCCN 2018056566 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-525-70752-3 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-525-70751-6 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-525-70753-0 (glb)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Depression, Mental—Fiction. | Identity—Fiction. | African Americans—Fiction. | Community life—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.P365 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.1.P365 Who 2019 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780525707523

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Books by Morgan Parker

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Susan

  This Is a Story About Me

  The Blue Album

  Black Emo: How to Be a Walking Sad-White-Woman-for-Dummies by Morgan Parker

  Still Life with Anxiety Attack

  Marissa

  Morgan Parker Not Otherwise Specified

  Another Sunny Day I Hate

  Part Where I Do Nothing Suggested

  Jesus, Etc.

  The Difference Between Me and Them

  The Promise Ring

  Tim

  The Yellow Notebook

  Make a List of Things You Hate About Yourself

  Strange, Fruit

  The Exorcism of Morgan Parker

  How to Be Black and Mild

  Make a List of All Your Sins

  “Is America Really Ready for an African American President?”

  Part Where I Am Totally Casual, I Swear

  Something Like a Phenomenon

  Obviously I Am Still Me at the Party

  Notes on the Sartorial and Sexual Proclivities of Morgan Parker, Flamboyant and Otherwise

  Make a List of Things You Know About Yourself

  Having a Fit

  Black Black Dog

  The Fake Rapture

  Mystic Morgan

  Every Artist Needs a Tragedy

  What Do You Call a Female Black Black Dog?

  Now Is the Best Time in History for Me to Be Alive

  The Velvet Underground Railroad

  The Road to Freedom

  Yeah, but Not Really Black, Though

  Make a List of Things Worth Fighting For

  Harriet Tubman Comes to Me in a Dream

  (No Subject Line)

  Do You Know How Many Ways You Can Feel Yourself Exploding?

  Madness and Civilization

  No Rom-Coms

  Manic Panic

  Correspondence Both Digital and Origamied

  The Black Notebook

  Causing a Scene

  A Fit, a Scene, a Riot, a Prayer

  Holiday for Hell-Raisers

  Cliché Road Trip Montage

  Exit Music for a Film

  If You Don’t Have a Map, Make a Map of Yourself

  Author’s Note: The Other Part of the Joke

  One More Thing: Don’t Wait Too Long to Say What Hurts

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  for my brother

  & for Nick

  & for Actual Morgan Parker, age 15

  & in memory of Aunt Teri after a Cadillac margarita

  SUSAN

  This is a story about Susan. Draped permanently on the back of Susan’s chair is a sweater embroidered with birds—that type of lady. She has this thing I hate, where she’s just always medium, room temperature. Susan looks like a preschool teacher with no emotions. She smiles, she nods, but she almost never laughs or speaks. That might be the number one thing I hate about coming here. She won’t even laugh at my jokes! I know that life with me is a ridiculous hamster wheel of agony, but I’m kind of hilarious, and I’m just trying to make this whole situation less awkward.

  I’m the one who begged for my first session, but I was desperate, and it was almost my only choice. Now that I’m actually doing this, I hate it. I just want Susan to buy my usual pitch: I am okay. I am smart and good. I am regular, and I believe in God, and that means I am happy.

  By the way, of course my therapist’s name is Susan. It seems like everyone I meet, everyone telling me how to be, is a Susan.

  I don’t trust a Susan, and I don’t think they trust me either.

  I don’t like Susan, but I want to impress her—I’m usually so good at it.

  But this is what I mean about the bird sweater. I know the bird sweater is awful, and just uncool and unappealing in every way—it doesn’t even look comfortable. But other Susans like it, and generally all Susans do. It is a sensible piece of clothing; it is normal, and it makes sense. Wouldn’t it be so much easier if I liked the sweater, if I just wore the fucking sweater and didn’t make such a big deal out of everything?

  THIS IS A STORY ABOUT ME

  This is a story about me, and I am the hero of it. It opens with a super-emo shot of a five-foot-nothing seventeen-year-old black girl—me—in the waiting room at my therapist’s office, a place that I hate. It’s so bright outside it’s neon, and of course the soundtrack is Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco, because I have more feelings than anyone knows what to do with.

  The smell in here is unlike any other smell in the world, some rare concoction of pumpkin pie–scented candles and every single perfume sample from the first floor of Macy’s. I bet Susan Brady LCSW decorates her house with Thomas Kinkade paintings and those little figurines, cherubs dressed up for various occupations, I don’t know. The other thing I hate about coming here is the random framed photo of, I believe, Bon Jovi on the coffee table, which also features a wide assortment of the corniest magazines of all time.

  (White people love Bon Jovi. When Marissa and I went to Lake Havasu with Kelly Kline, because that’s what white people do here in the summer, Bon Jovi was the only thing her
family listened to—that freaking scratched-up CD was actually stuck inside the thing on their boat. I had a moderate time at “the Lake,” except for when I had to explain my summer braids to Kelly and Marissa, for probably the eight hundredth time, to justify why I didn’t have a hairbrush to sing into. They made me sing into a chicken leg because of course. I was also shamed for not knowing any Bon Jovi lyrics. That was around this time last summer, but it feels like a past life.)

  (Another thing I hate about coming here is how I have to think about everything I’ve lost, everything I’ve done wrong, and everything I hate about being alive.)

  The thing I like about it here is that there’s Werther’s.

  Susan opens the door and spreads her arms to me in a weird Jesus way, the sleeves of her flowy paisley peasant top billowing at her sides. She has kind of a White Auntie thing going on, or a lady-who-sells-birdhouses-at-the-church-craft-fair thing: a sad squinty smile, a dull brown bob, a gentle cadence to her voice. I can tell she’s used to talking to children—probably rich white children—and as I stiffly arrange myself on the couch in her office, I’m suddenly self-conscious about my largeness, my badness. I just feel so obvious all the time.

  It’s like that song “Too Alive” by the Breeders. I feel every little thing, way more than regular people do.

  “So, how are you doing today?” Susan asks too cheerily, like a hostess at Olive Garden or something. “Where are you on the scale we’ve been using?”

  (I feel so deeply it agonizes me.)

  “I’m okay. I guess on the scale I’m probably ‘pretty dang bad,’ but better than yesterday and still not ‘scary bad.’ ”

  (Now, probably to the soundtrack of Belle and Sebastian’s “Get Me Away from Here, I’m Dying,” there’s a longish montage of me zoning out, imagining the lives of everyone I know. Even in my dreams, it’s so easy and fun for them to exist.)

  “Are you still taking the art class?”

  “Yeah. Every Tuesday.”

  “That’s wonderful. And how are you liking it?”

  “It’s fine. Sort of boring, but…I guess it takes my mind off things.”

  “Do you want to talk about what’s on your mind the other times?”

  “Um, not really,” I chuckle, in my best joking-with-adults voice. The AC churns menacingly, like it always does, taunting me. Susan, with her wrinkled white cleavage, unmoving and unrelenting. Susan doesn’t play.

  I think about grabbing a Werther’s from the crystal bowl but don’t, even though I want one. (Will Susan write Loudly sucks on Werther’s in my file as soon as I leave, right next to Is probably fine; just being dramatic?)

  “I guess just people at school. Why I’m so different.”

  “Can you say a little more about that? What are the things that make you feel so different?”

  “I don’t know.” My chest is welling up with everything I’ve been trying to stuff into my mind’s closet. “I can’t get happy.”

  It happened only three weeks ago, but since my “episode,” no one in my family has uttered the word suicidal. It’s easier not to.

  I glance down at my Chucks, trying to divert my eyes from Susan. Stare at a lamp, the books stacked on her shelves. I spot a spine that reads Healing, Recovery, and Growth, and immediately feel ridiculous. Sweat pools in my bra. This isn’t gonna work.

  “Morgan, why are you so angry with yourself?”

  I clench my jaw. “I’m not!” This is a lie, but it hasn’t always been. “I’m annoyed,” I admit, sighing, “and embarrassed.”

  “Why are you embarrassed?”

  “Just—I don’t know…,” I whine. Words begin to spill and spew from my lungs like a power ballad. “Like, why am I the only one I know who has to go to a shrink? How did I become the crazy one? I have to be the first one in the history of our family and our school to go to therapy?” I bristle. “I’m pissed I can’t just get over stuff the way everyone else seems to.”

  I purse my lips resolutely and fold my arms tight against my boobs. Your ball, Susan. She just nods and squints like she has no clue what to do with me.

  I’ve asked God and Jesus and all their other relatives to “wash away my sins,” but it doesn’t feel like Jesus is living inside me—I can’t even imagine what that would feel like. I’m so full up with me, me, stupid me.

  “Mmm…,” she finally grunts. “I see.”

  Fighting the near-constant urge to roll my eyes all the way to the back of my skull, I snatch up and devour a Werther’s.

  A little buzzer goes off on Susan’s desk, and she clears her throat. Time for her little closing statement, usually some sentimental crap that clears up nothing for me.

  “I know you’re worried about school”—I lean forward to disagree, but Susan puts up a stubby hand and continues—“but maybe you’ll be surprised. In the next few weeks, I’d like you to write everything down, exactly as you see and experience it.”

  Only Susan could make writing in a journal sound so boring and corny. I roll my eyes on the inside, but I nod dutifully.

  “Well, we have to stop,” Susan sighs, and I feel every atom in my body exhale.

  Before I leave, she gives me a book by someone named SARK on how to “free the creative spirit” and instructs me to practice my breathing and meditation every day. I am heavy with dread just hearing the words. I thank her (for what?) and shuffle to the parking lot of the office park, where my mom is waiting in her black Mercedes.

  She grins theatrically when she sees me. Much too peppy for my mood, she tosses her James Patterson novel into the backseat and turns on the engine. “How was it?”

  The afternoon sun is offensive. As usual. Too damn bright. I lean my forehead against the car window and survey the place where I live: tan stucco as far as the eye can see; dirty cars parked in front of a Denny’s; a Stater Bros. parking lot bustling with Susans; a billboard asking Where Will You Spend Eternity? I don’t know why, but it feels significant.

  “It was okay,” I say wearily.

  And nothing else the entire ride home.

  The Diaries of Morgan Parker

  August 10, 2008

  I am in THERAPY. And in honor of such an occasion, I am starting a new journal. And, yes, I am writing in crayon because I still like crayons, so there.

  Summer is gone. I’ve spent it fighting with everyone around me and crying in bed all day. I’m so pathetic. I keep thinking, I wish I didn’t do this. But it’s like I can’t help it. Because of my depression.

  I have this same dream over and over, that I’m driving on the 10. I recognize landmarks: the theme park where I flipped out and ruined Marissa’s birthday, the strip club billboard with that senior cheerleader who supposedly overdosed on pills in the girls’ bathroom and then got kicked out right before graduation. I’m driving up on the side of a mountain, but I can’t turn the wheel, I can’t slow down, and I’m just about to crash, but instead, in the next dream, I’m in the orange groves. They’re on fire. Suddenly a storm cloud covers everything. I hear thunder, but no rain ever comes.

  As soon as I wake up I have a bad attitude. It’s how I know I’m alive, again.

  THE BLUE ALBUM

  At an hour that is completely unholy, my mom bursts into my room—my precious hideaway—carrying the force of a hundred black moms, all armed with inexplicable Saturday-morning energy, gospel music, and cleaning supplies.

  I’m barely awake and already steeping in despair. (There isn’t anything worse than the moment, the Ughhh, shortly after waking up, when you realize everything is where you left it.) I roll over and groan.

  “I know you don’t want to go, Morgan,” my mom speaks down to the me-shaped floral sheets. She clears yesterday’s untouched coffee from my nightstand and replaces it with a hot one, then sets off scooting around in her UGGs, humming to Kirk Franklin and coating everything in
Pledge or Windex.

  “You need to get out of the house. I’m not doing this with you today, Morgan.” She pauses at the foot of my bed and huffs loudly until I peel the sheet from my top half.

  “Mom, I won’t be any good out there. I just can’t handle it.”

  My whole summer vacation has basically been a bad performance-art loop of me “causing a scene” or “having a fit” at barbecues all over town. Even my birthday dinner in June, at our family’s favorite Newport Beach pizza place, ended in tears and screaming and folded arms: me in the backseat on the drive home, invisible to my parents and my brother, stewing in shame and OK Computer. Everywhere I go, I am an embarrassment.

  Balancing the coffee cup and an empty ice cream pint in one arm, my mom raises the blinds, letting in the brightness. I squint and grimace; I hate how the sun exposes my darkness.

  “I’m trying, Morgan.” It always seems to be about someone else—what I’m doing to other people, instead of what’s happening to me. “I’m trying!”

  “Trying to do what?” I shriek.

  “To deal with this.” Because of an overactive thyroid, my mom’s eyes bulge when she talks. It pisses me off.

  “Then stop yelling at me! Mom, I can’t control this.”

  I know that I can make it, Kirk Franklin and his gospel choir sing. I know that I can stand.