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Every day my boyfriend and I would choose a new cafe to write in -- I was diligent, and disciplined, and hopeful. I believed that if I kept writing, if I just sat down to write something, anything, every day, something would come of it. And after 3 months of daily free associating, just a few weeks before I was to return to California, something did.The earliest version of the story was a set of instructions along the lines of "how to be stereotypically black." It was a list of the rules that I had absorbed over the years, whether or not I had chosen to follow them or not. They were racial imperatives from a time in my life when I, like the kids I went to middle school and high school with, understood Blackness as something monolithic, a clearly defined, unchangeable thing. I knew Blackness only looked like that, and that Blackness would always sound like this. I knew what Blackness ate, and what it didn't eat. I knew what car Blackness drove, I knew where it lived. I knew what Blackness named its kids. I was acutely, at times painfully aware of the many ways I fell short of these standards, a feeling which sometimes made me defensive, but which mostly filled me with shame. "How To Hear Music" is my most autobiographical story, and it was painful and difficult and cathartic to write. I often use my fiction to explore alternate realities, alternate versions of myself. Alternate decisions, and alternate outcomes. I sometimes say that my characters are encouraged to act out their worst impulses with no fear of the consequences, and this story is no different. Whereas I only laughed at my would-be combatants -- black girls who (I now know) looked at me and simply didn't understand what they saw -- this character fights, giving physical expression to the memory of my angst. Whereas I chose to remain unapologetically myself, the only black girl on the soccer team or at the punk rock show, this character changes, this character assimilates, this character gains something (a connection to her community that I still struggle to build), even if she loses a part of herself in the process. If this story is my own alternate history, I wonder which one of us made the better choice. When the story was published and I posted it on Facebook, a lot of people who are not black shared their stories. Many of my friends and acquaintances recalled feeling similarly alienated -- for being the only Jewish kid, or the wrong kind of Latina. For some reason this surprised me. I had been afraid to post the story -- it was the first time I felt that I was exposing a very private part of myself to a whole lot of people via my fiction. It actually didn't occur to me that other people had felt how I felt, or that a variety of people would see themselves in the character. To borrow from Toni Morrison: I wrote this story because I wanted to read it. Before a character like Lionel in Dear White People, before the music and short shorts of Donald Glover, before the rad audacity of Willow Smith, I never saw myself in movies, or on TV, I never read about myself in books, or heard my own thoughts on identity set to music. And so this story, of all my stories, is the most true. And this story, especially, is for all the black weirdos.

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