“Both.” Heather reaches over and grabs a forkful of the leftovers Lucia’s packed me.
Kimberly’s mother dressed her up like one of those creepy porcelain collectors’ dolls and made her perform in pageants. We went to watch one once, at a Radisson somewhere in Pasadena, when we were in eighth grade. We piled into her mom’s car and held all her dresses across our laps. The hotel ballroom was full of girls of all ages in various degrees of frippery. One girl briefly caught fire when her mother smoked too close to her Aqua Net updo and we screamed, but the girl’s mom just extinguished it with her fingers like a candle. Courtney, Heather, and I sat on the hard chairs and watched as, one by one, the girls played piano or sang or twirled a baton. Kimberly sang something from Les Misérables, which she’d just seen on Broadway with her dad.
“He’s trying to buy my love back,” she complained, but she wore her Original Broadway Cast cassette down until all those Frenchies sounded like they were singing underwater.
Kimberly’s voice is good enough—very technically proficient but without the fire that makes you feel like you could cry, like when Whitney in her tracksuit hit that high note in the national anthem and you felt it crawling up your spine. Even without the fire, Kimberly took second place. Heather, Courtney, and I all stood up and clapped and woo-hooed, but her mother glowered and stormed over to the judges’ panel to talk to the head judge about scoring.
This was when Kimberly was still Big Courtney and the other girls were cuter and not in the middle of a growth spurt, but her mom didn’t see that. Kimberly’s mother is severe, thin, and long, with a general sharpness that seems to have been passed down through generations. She yelled at Kimberly for not standing up straight. She didn’t get that Kimberly was trying to make herself smaller, more like the other girls, a roly-poly curling into herself to find safety. In the car on the way home, Heather grabbed Kimberly’s hand and patted it while Kimberly’s mother yelled, “You can’t do anything right!”
All of that must do one hell of a number on a person, ’cause now Kimberly will notice your uneven eyebrows, the pimple you’re hiding with your bangs, and whether you’ve gained a few pounds. Sometimes I feel like I’m on Star Search when I walk past her and she sucks in her breath and clicks her tongue, and in my head I hear, Two and a half stars!
“Whatever. Did you hear LaShawn got into Stanford?” Kimberly says.
I feel a twinge of jealousy, even though I know I shouldn’t. My life has been easier than LaShawn’s… I think. Probably. He works hard, but I do too. I wonder why he didn’t mention it while we were talking earlier.
“God, I wish I were poor,” Courtney says.
“You don’t go to class,” Heather says.
“Or do your own homework,” I say.
“Or play a sport,” Heather says.
“Seriously. You’ve got it made, Ash,” Kimberly says.
“She’s not poor,” Courtney says. Courtney’s going to a good school because both her parents went there and have donated a lot of money to it, so nobody looks too carefully at the fact that she got less than 1000 on her SATs.
“No, but she is black,” Kimberly says, and laughs.
Heather looks at me and rolls her eyes.
Across the quad, I gaze over at the black kids, all twelve of them, mostly athletes. There’s an easiness to the way they interact with one another, a familiarity. They bring one another in for elaborate handshakes and greet each other with “What’s up, my nigga?” But only when the teachers aren’t around.
The first week of high school, before they found me out, they would smile at me like we shared a secret and say, “What’s up, lil mama?”
I would smile politely and reply, “Hi!” and continue down the hall.
In gym that first week, as Ms. Boone explained flag football, Tarrell and Julia somehow got to joking about eating off-brand cereal and government cheese. They started laughing, and I was teamed up with them, so I did too.
“You know ain’t none of these white kids had that shit.” Tarrell playfully punched my arm and snorted, “Girl, I know you know what I’m talking about!”
I didn’t, but it was nice feeling like I belonged, so I laughed even harder.
After school, I found myself in front of a mirror practicing: “Nigga, please.” “Ay, you know I ain’t tryna hear that.” “I’m finna…” But out of my mouth the words sounded clumsy and awkward and nonnative, like when my mother speaks Spanish to Lucia.
Fat Albert, whose real name I honestly don’t know, stands up on the tables and announces, “This little nigga just got into Stanford!”
LaShawn reaches up on his tiptoes and tries to wrap his hand around Fat Albert’s mouth. “Man, shut up.”
But he’s laughing.
As if in celebration for LaShawn Johnson himself, with a great flourish, Mrs. Lesdoux raises her wrists to the theater kids. “Nowww beeeeeginn!”
“ ‘A weekend in the country / We’re invited? / What a horrible plot!’ ”
The song is from a Sondheim play, which I know mostly because of the banners around campus inviting us to their spring play, A Little Night Music.
“ ‘Fuck me gently with a chain saw,’ ” Heather says.
I think the song is actually pretty funny.
“Make it stop,” Courtney says.
Mark Grossman, who is a known asshole, throws an open water bottle in the theater kids’ general direction. Luke Scott and Anuj Patel join him. They, too, are known assholes.
“Go, Tisha!” Fat Albert yells. Tisha is a person in miniature, no more than five feet tall, with Coke-bottle glasses and a Coke-can build.
The theater kids awkwardly bob up and down to the music as they sing.
“This is the longest song ever,” Kimberly says.
Then something magical happens. One of the basketball players grabs one of the track stars and they start to waltz, which, for some unknown reason, we were forced to learn in PE in ninth grade between volleyball and badminton in the curriculum. LaShawn twirls Candace, this Amazonian Nigerian girl, and they sweep across the quad to join them. Lil Ray Ray has a flattop half as tall as he is. Mildred is six feet tall and has an old white lady’s name. Together they dance, with her in the lead. The black kids waltz as the theater kids sing Sondheim, and nobody throws any more water bottles at all.
Mrs. Lesdoux looks confused, but even she begins to laugh.
After the song finishes, the bell rings, and everybody walks through the dying crickets back to class.
Michael pulls up next to me as I head toward AP econ. “What were you and LaShawn talking about earlier?”
“Why do you care?”
“Don’t be like that.” He puts his hand on my shoulder. I pull away.
“I’d, um, like to dedicate this song to my girlfriend, Kimberly.… I can’t wait to go to prom with you,” I mock.
“Whatever.” He walks down the hallway and gets swept up with the crowd.
A month ago, he kidnapped me. He tied a kerchief around my eyes while I was standing at my locker and threw me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. He carried me through the parking lot like that. It’s a good thing he wasn’t a stranger, because nobody did anything to stop him.
Most of the other kids have BMWs or Jags or Mercedes, but Michael has a shit-green Nova that smells like pot and cigarettes. It’s so old it has an eight-track player. The only music to listen to is some shitty Bruce Springsteen that the previous owner left, which Michael loves. His car drives like you’re touching the ground with your very hands themselves, every bump and pothole a shock through the body. Blindfolded, it was like being on Space Mountain.
As soon as we got to our destination, I knew where we were because of the salt and waves, the faint smell of sewage, and the bright lights shining like spotlights all around. I could tell that much even through the handkerchief around my eyes.
“Wanna smoke?”
“Okay, I guess,” I said.
“You have to k
eep the handkerchief on,” he said.
He reached across me and grabbed a joint from his glove compartment. As he did so, his arm brushed against my chest. I could smell his funky-ass wrestling clothes in the back seat of his car, feel the slight tear in the leather under my fingertips, hear him breathing deeper and deeper still, until for a second, he stopped.
“Are you trying to get frisky with me?”
He put the joint in my mouth. “Inhale.”
I couldn’t see anything, but I knew where we were by heart. As we walked the boardwalk, I could feel its rot underfoot. I think, to throw me off, he took me through the arcade. The arcade is full of painted wood in primary colors and the beeps and boops of mirth. It’s sensory overload, even while blindfolded. If I reached out my hands, I would touch small children riding small horses in a small circle. Arcades are like nightmares or dreams, depending on what kind of trip you’re on. Skee-Ball is my favorite, because in my hands the wooden balls feel like planets.
He led me by my waist toward the Ferris wheel. A ditzy-sounding operator took his money and helped me into the car. It bucked in the wind, and I braced myself against his body.
“Why are we here?” I asked.
He took the handkerchief from my eyes. “Stop asking questions. It’s a surprise.”
Across from us, a tourist family in a yellow car took a picture. The father’s hat went flying into the waves, and they all started to laugh.
On our second rotation back down to earth, there stood Trevor and Kimberly, struggling against the wind like sailors with a banner that read, ASHLEY, WILL YOU GO TO PROM WITH ME?
Trevor held a bouquet of yellow roses. I knew Kimberly had picked them out because she randomly thinks red roses are tacky, just like she randomly thinks weed is tacky but coke’s okay.
“Wait, what? Are you asking me to prom?”
“No. Trevor is. Shit. I told that dumbass I should hold the sign and he should come up with you.”
Michael pressed his thigh against me and curled his pinkie around mine.
“He thinks you’re cool,” he whispered. “Say yes.”
So I’m going to prom with Trevor.
* * *
After school, I sit and wait for Lucia by the front steps, where the freshmen wait to be picked up. I know how to drive, but after Jo totaled two cars in high school, I guess my parents have decided not to let me have a car yet, though everyone else I know has one. Even if I did have a car, my Wednesdays belong to Lucia, though my friends give me shit for it. Every Wednesday after school, we go to Western Union and then get ice cream at the Thrifty’s across the street. I’d rather do that than go with Kimberly to get her muff waxed, anyway.
I feel a presence behind me and think, Michael! But it’s not. Lana Haskins is skinny and tall with fragile limbs like the branches on a freshly planted tree. She got kicked out of school a few months ago for drinking vodka out of a water bottle, but then her parents caused a ruckus and contributed to the new library upgrade, and the school quietly let her back in. Lana always looks hungry, like she could devour the world and it wouldn’t be enough.
“They acquitted the officers in the Rodney King thing.” She sits down on the steps next to Monica Thompson, whose whole being is like a smudged charcoal drawing. She’s wearing all black everything, with dark hair that looks dipped in ink. Her roots are Benedict Arnold, though—a downright treasonous light brown.
“Whoa, that’s crazy,” Monica says to Lana. I can’t tell if she’s stoned or just doesn’t have anything else to say. Monica’s half-Asian, and as her tiny mother pulls up, she honks several times at her from behind the wheel of their huge car.
“I’m coming, Ma!” she yells in the direction of the car. “Jesus Christ. Later,” she says to Lana.
Lana looks over at me as though deciding whether to engage, and to my utter surprise, she does.
“Did you hear about the Rodney King verdict?”
Lana’s never said a word to me before today, but she never talks to anyone, as far as I can tell.
“Only as much as I heard you tell Monica,” I say. “That sucks.”
“Yeah,” she says, “Totally. Shit’s about to go down.”
I shrug. She takes out a cigarette and lights it. She spreads her legs and drags on it slowly, like she’s in a Calvin Klein commercial or something. We’re not supposed to smoke on campus, but Lana doesn’t seem to care about any of that. If the rules don’t apply to you, why bother?
LaShawn walks past with two girls and waves over at me.
“Want one?” Lana says, and reaches out to me.
A cricket hops past. But I think maybe this time it’s not a cricket at all.
CHAPTER 5
LUCIA AND I stand in line at Western Union behind a balding Russian man with really long ear hair like my old piano teacher. Save for the television in the corner, it’s quiet, eerily so, and I try to keep my feet perfectly still so my sneakers won’t squeak on the linoleum. Sometimes when I have to pee really badly or when I can’t make a sound, I pretend that I’m a runaway slave and I have to be very still, or else I’ll be discovered. It’s fucked up, but it works. Usually this place is a swirl of tongues and transactions, like waiting at the airport, but without any of the excitement of going somewhere. There’s always some baby fussing while some mom screams “Get down from there” at some kid, which sounds pretty much the same in any language. Today, it’s just me, Lucia, and the bald man.
Together, we watch as a crowd pulls a white man from his truck and begins to beat the shit out of him. His long blond hair swings from side to side as he staggers, disoriented, with each blow. In a different world, he’d be a lead guitarist rocking out, not a broken construction worker tumbling. A man flashes gang signs at the helicopters hovering above. They’re not even ten miles away, but it might as well be a whole different country. There are my fancy school and my fancy neighborhood, and then there’s this. The television flickers in fragments across the Russian’s head as he shakes it. He turns to look at me angrily.
“See?” he says.
Lucia places her body between the two of us.
“No hablar con el,” she says.
The man returns to the screen.
Lucia speaks to me in Spanish when she doesn’t want white people to easily understand what we’re talking about. She taught me when I was younger, and then as soon as we got the chance to study languages in school, I chose Spanish. And anyway, it’s LA; if you even half pay attention to the city around you, you’ll learn it by osmosis. It’s not like it’s a secret language, but it’s easier for her and easy enough for me. I’m sure to everyone looking at us we’re an odd pair, a lanky black teenager and a tiny Guatemalan, always together. Lucia’s favorite cashier is Jose. If he’s working, everything goes smoothly, and they joke and laugh in Spanish about how he’s going to marry her.
When she’s done, she kisses her fingertips and places them on the envelope before sliding it across the counter, where Jose converts it to a textbook for Umberto, guitar lessons for Roberto.
Today, Jose isn’t in a joking mood.
“El mundo en que vivimos.” Jose sighs. His eyes are fixed on the television screen, where the news shows images of a man slamming a slab of concrete down on the truck driver’s head.
“Sí,” Lucia says.
Jose’s hair is the dark of an oil slick at night. He’s younger than Lucia, and Mexican, not Guatemalan. He lives with his cousin and abuelita in a small house in Highland Park with three bedrooms and a bathroom, and if you climb up on his roof, you can see the city on a clear day. He sounded like a real estate agent when he told this to Lucia.
“I’m going to own my own business,” he said last week, a declaration of intent.
“Doing what?” she said.
He wants to own one of those places downtown where they sell cobijas San Marcos and clothing and key chains and Coca-Cola in glass bottles.
The San Marcos blankets are super plush and have different de
signs on them like cute kittens and majestic lions and Strawberry Shortcake and the Dodgers. A few weeks ago, Lucia took me downtown and had me pick one out. The air downtown is always the color of a nasty loogie, but I like the buildings because they’ve got character. Which is why I also love the blankets.
The one I chose had a white tiger on it, lounging like a queen.
“You take it with you when you go to college,” Lucia said, and it was like she was preparing us both for goodbye.
“I wish I could take you with me to college,” I joked, and we laughed, but then I felt kinda bad ’cause it made it seem like Lucia was my personal servant.
When I was younger and had a nightmare, I would walk downstairs to Lucia’s room and crawl into bed with her, and she would tell me stories about her boys, and her country, and the handsome but very bad man-devil she divorced before she ran to the United States. He did unforgivable things, she said, for what he thought were the right reasons. She used to think so too, until she didn’t. And so he became the villain in my bedtime stories. “Tell me about Arturo, who lives in the house by the bridge,” I’d say.
Jose is not like Arturo, I say to Lucia. Jose is a good man.
“What’s a good man?” Lucia sighs. “They’re all good, until they’re not.”
But I see the way she looks at Jose, like maybe she’d like to sell cobijas and clothing and knickknacks and Coke in glass bottles with him. Like maybe she could sit up on his roof, cuddle up in a blanket, and watch the fireworks over Dodger Stadium. I can see her dreaming up their life together and deciding maybe they could be good. I wonder if she’s going to tell him today that she’s leaving soon.
Although I try not to watch, my gaze finds its way back to the television screen. The truck driver lies on the ground in a halo of his own blood and hair. Nobody goes to help him. The police are nowhere to be found. Some man walks up, takes the wallet right from the truck driver’s pocket, and runs off. Finally, the truck driver gets to his knees, and another man comes up almost out of nowhere and appears to kick him in the head. I feel myself wince.
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