How to Make a Friend by Zilla Jones

Zilla Jones has madethe2024 CBC Short Story Prize shortlistfor How to Make a Friend.

She will receive $1,000 from theCanada Council for the Artsand her work has been published onCBC Books.

The winner of the 2024CBC Short Story Prizewill be announced April 25. They willreceive $6,000 from theCanada Council for the Arts, have their work published onCBC Booksand attend a two-week writing residency atBanff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

If you're interested in theCBC Literary Prizes, the2024 CBC Poetry Prizeis open for submissions until June 1. The2025 CBC Short Story Prizewill open in September and the2025 CBC Nonfiction Prizewill open in January.

• The 2024 CBC Poetry Prize is now open to Canadian poets

Zilla Jones is an African-Canadian woman writing on Treaty 1 territory (Winnipeg). Her stories appear in Prairie Fire, The Malahat Review, Prism International, The Fiddlehead, FreeFall Magazine, the Ex-Puritan, Room Magazine, Bayou Magazineand The Journey Prize Stories. In 2023, she was a Journey Prize winner and a finalist in the Writers' Trust RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. She has also won the Malahat Review Open Season Award, the Jacob Zilber Prize for Short Fiction, the FreeFall short fiction award and placed second in the Prairie Fire and Austin Clarke contests. Her debut novel, The World So Wide, and a short fiction collection, So Much To Tell, are forthcoming with Cormorant Books in 2025 and 2026.

Jones previously made the 2020 CBC Short Story Prize longlist for Our Father and has longlisted twice for earlier versions of How to Make a Friend, in 2022 and 2023.

Jones toldCBC Booksthat her inspiration for writing How To Make A Friend came from a lived experience: "The story is loosely based on my time as a scholarship student in an exclusive girls' private school. It came out of the Black Lives Matter reckoning, where I was looking at incidents of racism from my past and asking what we can learn from them. This story teaches Black people how to build community with one another as an act of resistance.

"I have always been led to share stories! This is the third time this particular story has been long listed in theCBC Short Story Prize. I kept submitting it elsewhere and I always got very complimentary rejections, so when it came time to enter the CBC contest again and I looked at my available stories, this one kept calling out to me. I continued to believe in it despite the rejections it received, so here it is again. I guess this little story has now become a symbol of hope and resilience and self-belief."

You can read How To Make A Friend below.

For starters, don't do what I did. Begin planning during the summer, well before your first day at Spruce Lane School for Girls. Vacation somewhere the other girls do, such as a cottage in Victoria Beach. When you're back in Winnipeg, take tennis or swimming lessons at the Winter Club. Ignore the fact that those are places that didn't admit Jews fifty years ago, let alone visible minorities. Whatever you do, don't spend your summer in Trinidad with Grandma and Grandpa Ramkissoon. Though I did love surging with the waves at Maracas Bay, or sitting on the hot sand with a plate of shark and bake, or lying on Grandma Ramkissoon's bed in the heat-heavy afternoons to rub her legs with cocoa butter, none of this was helpful to my social standing.

Don't listen to your family when they tell you that the most important thing about going to school is to achieve academic excellence. When Grandma Ramkissoon says, "You are going to be a doctor, and that means you have to be top of the class," know that at Spruce Lane, no one will care about your grades, and you will be called on to declare your allegiance to the New Kids on the Block or Bon Jovi, Tiffany or Debbie Gibson. For you, maybe it's Lil Nas X and Nicki Minaj or Jay-Z and Drake; white kids' musical taste has darkened since I was in school.

Also, don't take fashion and beauty advice from your family. When Grandma Ramkissoon says you have good hair and brushes it until she says it looks straight, that means it's kind of frizzy and shapeless. Realize that all the other girls in your class will have sleek ponytails except for Tia, but you haven't met her yet.

On the first day of school, be in the here and now, and not still mesmerized by the serrated edges of the palm leaves, the hills of pink poui and the tiny lamps of the stars winking through the quiet of the silver-streaked dusk. Pay attention when your mother drives through the school gates in her battered little Neon. Those other cars you see streaming past you are luxury cars BMWs and Porsches and Benzs. Ignore your mother when she parks in the lot, turns to you and says, "Remember, Samantha, you're here because it's a good school. You have an opportunity, because you won a scholarship." The scholarship has marked you as academically gifted, but this is something that it is best you forget. At this school, superiority comes through ostentatious displays of wealth, and beauty. Blond, blue-eyed beauty. Even if you're living in the 2020s and not the 1980s, this will still be true.

When you go to homeroom for the first time, look around the room, and note the groups of girls. The ones with their hair yanked punishingly into buns with bobby pins and a sheen of hairspray are aspiring ballerinas from across the country, who live in the Spruce Lane residence. Some of them may be nice to you, but soon enough, they will be absorbed in a whole universe of pointe class, gossip and competition that you can never penetrate.

Then there is a group of girls whose hair is just that little bit more shiny and blond than everyone else's, who manage to look fashion-forward even in school uniform. They have gemstone earrings, pink lip gloss and scrunchies in school colours securing their hair little trendy accents just this side of the dress code. They hike their school kilts up at the waist to show more leg than permitted and will tug them down in mock apology when a teacher makes them. These are the Popular Girls.

There is yet another group of girls who are a bit less polished. They wear the school uniform as directed. Some of them wear glasses. They are grouped around a magazine looking at pictures of Christian Slater and Keanu Reeves. They are the artsy ones.

The final group have their hair teased and fluffed and sprayed into towering concoctions. Under their school blazers, they have drawn fake tattoos on their arms with black ink. They are the headbangers. You will avoid them, and gravitate to the Popular Girls, because the air seems lighter and more golden where they are. This is your first mistake.

You will say "Hi," and that part is okay, because you can't really go wrong with hi. One of them asks you your name. You tell her, Samantha.

When she asks, "Where are you from?" don't do what I did and ask back,

"What do you mean?"

She will roll her eyes and say, "Like, what are you? What country are you from?"

She doesn't mean Canada. She will roll her eyes again until you say, "My mom is from Trinidad." Then she'll ask you where that is. And when she understands it's near Jamaica near being relative, as the two nations are nearly two thousand kilometres apart - she'll say with dawning understanding, "Oh! So your mom's Black."

But you say, "No, her mom, my grandmother, is Black, but her dad, my grandfather, is Indian." When she wrinkles her nose and says, "Indian? Like, native?" you say,

"No, East Indian."

"You're East Indian?" she asks.

"No, I'm half white, one quarter Black, and one quarter Indian." This is all too complicated, and you are interrupted by another student coming through the door. She is dark, darker even than Grandma Ramkissoon, and she has lots of long black braids and she walks with the swagger you lack, and if you were smart, you'd go and talk to her. But you watch as she looks around the room and sits down with the girls around the magazine. That's what you should have done, but you didn't.

Later, you hear the Popular Girls ask her, "What's your name?" and she says,

"Tia," and when asked where she is from, she says simply, "Jamaica."

When school gets out for the day, you have already learned to be embarrassed about your mother's car, to slink towards it with your shoulders slumped. But you should be like Tia. Her mother drives a Ford Taurus with a broken mirror. She strides over to it, winds down the window and blasts some rap music.

"Cool," say the Popular Girls as they get into their luxury vehicles.

When your mother asks, "Who is that girl?" and you say "Tia," and your mother follows that up with, "Where is she from?" and you say "Jamaica," you should ignore your mother when she says,

"Well, that's someone to avoid. Jamaicans are very loud, as you can see. She looks like trouble."

***

When you are left without a group of friends, don't panic. Don't despair. Expect the snide remarks. Your hair is frizzy. You think you're so smart. You're a nerd. You're a loser. Your mom doesn't let you do anything fun. Why doesn't your family belong to any sport clubs? Why is your book bag so ugly? Don't get upset when one day at lunch, Penny, one of the Popular Girls, leans over and wrinkles her nose at your lunch. "P.U!" she will exclaim. "What is that?"

You should say, "Mind your own business, Penny," with a casual laugh, but instead your mother's directive to always be the smartest kicks in, and you say,

"It's dhal and rice."

"What do you mean, a doll?" she giggles, and now you know something else she doesn't, and you say triumphantly,

"Curried lentils."

But she giggles again, "They stink, and that's why your hair stinks too." Everyone else laughs too. Except Tia, who is sitting with her head down.

Don't allow the rage pulsing through you to take over and cause you to lunge over the table at Penny, to knock her to the ground and scratch her face, to whip her stupid velvet scrunchie out of her blond hair and try to yank the sleek strands from her head. It is the last vestige of childhood, to physically attack your tormentors instead of developing an adult repertoire of bitchy remarks. Penny will scream with pain and outrage, and that temporarily puts you ahead, but it won't last.

Two teachers will come and yank you off Penny. When you are finally standing up, panting, your own hair growing frizzy at the temples from your exertions, you shouldn't cry, but you do, as the weight of your actions settles upon you and you realize you have disgraced yourself in front of your entire class, and you will be in big trouble with your mother, too.
When one of the teachers asks what this is all about, you will say nothing, but when Penny sobs, "She attacked me for no reason," Tia will speak up.

"Penny was being racist," she'll say. You shouldn't be surprised by this, because Penny was in fact being racist. You should know what "racist" means, rather than being dumbfounded at the word. "Racist" means that Penny was being mean to you because you don't look like her, because even though the girls in your class aren't quite sure what you are, it is clear you are not like them. It is clear you are some kind of brown. And the word "racist" scares the two teachers. They stare at Tia and one of them asks you, "Samantha, is that true?"

Say yes. Say yes, she is being racist. Now the teachers are worried. They whisper to each other, "Don't phone the parents. You know how their parents can be overly sensitive-"

"But those people are so violent. We can't condone violence -- "

"Give them both detention and leave it at that."

When they leave, you will try to meet Tia's eyes, to thank her, but she looks away and does the impression of Oprah Winfrey that always makes everyone laugh. No one talks to you. Have the presence of mind to call your mother from the pay phone in the school lobby now it would be your cell phone and lie to her that you are staying at school late to work on a project. Your mother would go ballistic if she knew you had detention. She would scream that your future is ruined, that you are shaming her, sending her to an early grave.

Later that night, ask your mother not to give you curry for lunch anymore. Penny had a sandwich. Tia had pizza pops. Remember your mother's expression, half-proud because she thinks you are fitting in, half-sad because she sees you are learning shame.

***

After your attack on Penny, your classmates will be wary around you, will avoid you, will refuse to partner with you whenever partners are required, but they will stop the name-calling and verbal jabs, in your presence at least. Occasionally, when you come across them, you'll hear their remarks tailing off "psychopath," "should have gotten arrested." You will become quieter in class too, answering less questions. You will prop your head on your hands, look out through the windows and instead of maple trees with their leaves spotted with orange that slowly blazes to red under the weak fall sun, you will imagine Grandma Ramkissoon's windows with their wooden shutters painted white and outside them, broad flat banana leaves spattered with rain or curling up to the sun.

Your mother will show little interest in your social status, and this is because to her, your academic standing is far more important. She expects you to be first in the class, always. But you are not first. You are distracted by your loneliness, by your feelings of inadequacy. You think of yourself as ugly. Your mish-mash of features and your hair, neither straight nor curly, prevent you from being able to play the role of Cool Black Girl that Tia plays. You're not sure you want that part, anyway. You want to be a Pretty Popular Girl Who Fits In. When you are supposed to be doing your homework, you stare into your bedroom mirror, pulling your hair taut with one hand, imagining yourself with a different face, a different life. You keep trying to get good grades, but it is so hard to focus on schoolwork.

Then one day in Social Studies class, Miss Branson will announce a new assignment: a presentation with a partner on an important event in Canadian history. You will groan, anticipating another humiliation when no one wants to work with you. You will only half listen as Miss Branson lists the possibilities: the war of 1812, Confederation, World War I, World War II. Then Tia raises her hand. This is unusual: Tia only speaks up in class when called upon or when she is clowning around, mocking a teacher or making some pop culture reference. So Miss Branson is guarded as she says, "Yes, Tia?"

"Why can't we study something from Black history?" Tia says, and Miss Branson blinks and stutters and asks her,

"What do you mean?"

Tia says, "I mean like slavery or something like that."

Pay full attention to Tia now. You know from Grandma Ramkissoon that Trinidad had slavery, and indentured servitude. That's how people got to the island from Africa and India. You don't know much more than that; you wanted to learn, but your mother said to Grandma Ramkissoon, "Don't tell the child such things. You'll give her a chip on her shoulder."

Listen as Miss Branson says, "That's not on the curriculum."

"Well, you can put it on, can't you?" The student educating the teacher.

Miss Branson crosses her arms. "If anyone here wants to study a " she gives a delicate cough "Black history topic with you, you may."

Everyone looks down at their desks. Tia's demand is not in keeping with a Cool Black Girl. Cool Black Girls don't care about school. They rap, dance and clown. Look over at Tia now and notice how a look of dismay crosses her face. For once, she has miscalculated. Then, catch her meeting your gaze. Her expression isn't exactly welcoming, but it isn't hostile. It isn't disgusted. Your mother said not to befriend Tia, but at this moment, you will realize what you should have figured out a long time ago: that some of your mother's advice is good, but a lot of it should be disregarded.

Now, raise your hand. Say, "I'm interested." You want to know more about your history. If your ancestors could endure the humiliation and despair they faced when they left Africa and India for a new place that they did not know would become grafted onto their souls, then you can survive this school.

You will hear Miss Branson sniff and the other girls titter, but Tia will give you a half-smile and motion with her head toward your desk. And then you will push it over just a little, just until your island meets hers, and your shoulders almost touch.

Read the other finalists

• Old Bonesby Kate Gunn (Vancouver)
• Lamentationsby Miriam Ho Nga Wai (Toronto)
• The Babyby Kailash Srinivasan (North Vancouver, B.C.)
• Permission to Pauseby Carley Thorne (Toronto)

About the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize

The winner of the 2024CBC Short Story Prizewill receive $6,000 from theCanada Council for the Arts, have their work published onCBC Booksand attend a two-week writing residency atBanff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from theCanada Council for the Artsand have their work published onCBC Books.

If you're interested in theCBC Literary Prizes, the2024 CBC Poetry Prizeis currently open until June 1, 2024 at 4:59 p.m. ET. The 2025CBC Short Story Prizewill open in September and the 2025CBC Nonfiction Prizewill open in January 2025.