“Since when do you listen to so much black shit?”
“I’m black,” I say.
“Yeah, but you’re not, like, blackity black,” she says.
I don’t know what to say to this, but Kimberly doesn’t seem to expect an actual answer. She applies another layer of lipstick, gets a paper towel, and blots. We just got to school; I can’t imagine she needs a touch-up already, but sometimes more lipstick is extra armor for the day ahead.
“You and Michael talk a lot, right?”
Her mouth is the color of guts. I can’t tell if it’s an accusation.
“I mean, not a lot,” I say.
She knows me well enough to know when I’m lying.
“What do you talk about?” she asks. “I feel like we’ve been together for years and we hang out and make out, but he doesn’t, like, open up or whatever.”
“Um… we talk about you,” I say. “He’s crazy about you.”
She narrows her eyes. We stand awkwardly looking at each other in the mirror. What she says next is not what I expect from her at that moment.
“I miss us,” she says finally.
“I’m right here,” I say.
CHAPTER 10
LASHAWN IS DRESSED in a Brooks Brothers polo and old-white-man khakis that crease in uncool places. He looks tired. He’s on time for school because instead of taking the bus, he spent the night at White Brian’s house, and now he’s wearing White Brian’s white dad’s clothes. White Brian is Goofy come to life—long limbs, awkward gait, and a laugh that sounds like an infectious hiccup. They’ve been best friends since freshman year, when nobody knew how good LaShawn was, back when they both rocked anemic mustaches and video game T-shirts. They’re an odd pairing, but somehow they make sense. Also, there’s no Black Brian.
“I’m so sorry,” I say to LaShawn as he takes his seat.
“What? You didn’t do anything.” He smiles wanly.
Mr. Holmes stands at the board, patchwork side of his face to us. He hasn’t brought up any more about Watts or the riots. Instead, we came in and he got straight to work, like he was embarrassed that he’d shared so much of himself with us yesterday. The AC in the classroom isn’t working, so sweat drips down our bodies in tiny rivers. Behind me, Phillip Murkowski is starting to smell. Teenage boys already smell bad enough without being slowly roasted in their own juices. While the city burns, even our rich-kid school is coming undone. Meanwhile, my cousin gets to stay at home. She’s probably going through my stuff.
We’re in the middle of reviewing gravitational orbit energy when the principal comes to the classroom door. Principal Jeffries looks like a former hippie who enjoys hiking and drinking on the weekends. She’s got that leather to her skin, and even here at work, she wears Tevas as though at any time she might be called upon to climb a mountain of unruly teenagers.
“LaShawn, can you come with me, please?” she says.
LaShawn stands up, confused. White Brian’s dad’s khakis stop just above his ankles.
“I bet you it’s about those shoes,” Anuj Patel whispers behind me.
“Don’t talk to me,” I say.
When the bell rings, LaShawn still has not returned to class. White Brian places LaShawn’s books, pens, and notebook into his abandoned backpack, zips it up, and carries it with his own out the door.
* * *
I see LaShawn between second and third periods. He kicks at his locker hard, scuffing his Jordans, leaving a dent like a metal wound.
As we pour out of our classrooms, LaShawn turns as if to address the entire student body. “Man, fuck this place. This is what y’all really think of me? This all I am to you?”
Anuj was right: They must’ve taken him aside to ask him about the shoes.
“Yo, I woulda been out there, too, if I could. Cop me some kicks. Fight the power and all that shit, right?” The white kids call Dustin Cavanaugh a wigger because he wears his clothes baggy and listens to gangsta rap and tries to talk like he came from the hood. He’s like our school’s very own version of Al Jolson. He doesn’t actually talk to the black kids. Or, I guess, maybe it’s more like they don’t talk to him. If he’s a wigger for “acting black,” what does that make them? Or me?
“Yo, you’re an asshole,” LaShawn says.
“Me?” Dustin walks back toward him. He seems shocked that LaShawn didn’t laugh or throw up signs in response.
“That shit ain’t fucking funny,” LaShawn yells.
Everyone around us grows silent. This is not the LaShawn to whom we’re accustomed. The gentle boy who smiles at everyone and lets crickets out the window. The boy we watched scouts salivate over for several games in a row. The boy with the loud-ass mama who’s never loud himself. The boy who always keeps his cool on the court, even during championship games when the referees are dead wrong. The boy our school paper actually described in earnest as “one of the brightest shining stars to ever grace these hallowed halls.”
Our school paper is full of purple prose written by B-student drama queens. But they weren’t wrong. Not about LaShawn.
We go quiet, and then we wait for Dustin’s response.
“Yeah, well… Least I ain’t no thief,” he says.
This is the exact wrong thing to say at the exact wrong time, ’cause this is what happens next: LaShawn, who never says anything mean to anyone; LaShawn, who remembers my Emily Dickinson poem; LaShawn, who is Stanford-bound—LaShawn reaches back and punches him. Hard. Dude crumples to the ground.
I think of what Jo said once during one of her fights with our parents, right after they found out that she’d dropped out of school.
She said, “We have to walk around being perfect all the time just to be seen as human. Don’t you ever get tired of being a symbol? Don’t you ever just want to be human?”
I guess LaShawn finally had enough.
“Omigod. Omigod,” some girl named Paula keeps repeating, even though, really, Dustin’s pride is hurt way more than his nose, which is barely bleeding a little bit. He staggers up and looks around at the crowd that’s gathered.
“You just got knocked the fuck out!” Anuj yells, and everyone starts to laugh.
LaShawn is frozen in place. He looks down at his fist as though it’s a foreign object, as though the very body that moves so effortlessly across the court, those very hands that almost never miss a shot, have now betrayed him. He looks up and out at the crowd, terrified, and over at Principal Jeffries as she hurries down the hallway toward us.
* * *
The rumors were one thing—easy enough to ignore, even if something happened, it wasn’t on school grounds—but now there’s been violence. Unsure of what to do with him, they park LaShawn in the front office near the school nurse. The front office is glass paneled so that you can see pretty clearly inside. The rest of us go from class to class and sneak quick peeks at the blackened golden boy behind the glass. At one point, he sips from a Styrofoam cup, and even this is news.
“I think he’s drinking coffee in there,” some girl says.
“I wish I were coffee,” her friend replies.
If anything, this has now made LaShawn that much more attractive to a certain faction of the girls at school. Now he’s even better than a golden boy—he’s a bad boy.
Between periods, I hear the girls passing and joking: “I suddenly don’t feel so well. I definitely need to go to the nurse.”
Or, as one girl says more bluntly, “Let’s punch each other so we get sent to the principal’s office.”
* * *
At lunch, the black kids huddle around. They’re not as open with their bodies, as free with their laughter. They sit and whisper with one another. Them. Us. Our. They. My father gets mad when I refer to black people as “they.”
“They are you. Those are your people.”
“I am he as you are he as you are me as we are all together,” I say back.
“The classrooms smell like ball sweat,” Heather says as we sit down to eat.
“High school?” Courtney says.
“Dude, Los Angeles is in the middle of a damn riot, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“Don’t be a dick. I thought you were talking about the broken air conditioners.”
“ ‘A riot is the language of the unheard,’ ” Trevor says. “Right, Ash?”
“That shit’s real deep, Trev,” Heather says before I can answer. “Where’d you steal it from?”
“Martin Luther King,” Trevor says, all proud of himself.
“Junior,” Heather says. “Martin Luther King, Junior.”
“Whatever,” he says. “Don’t be pedantic; it’s unattractive.” She pushes him and he pinches her and she squeals, and all the rest of us raise our eyebrows ’cause they’re definitely flirting, even if they’d never admit it.
Somehow, I’ve never noticed that Trevor has elf ears until now, or maybe they’re more Spock ears? Trevor talks so much that those big-ass ears of his hardly get any use. I used to think it was because most white boys are taught that when they open their mouths to speak, the rest of us will shut up and listen, but when we went to get our corsages last week, Trevor told me he was the middle kid of five, which I somehow never knew about him. Now I think maybe this is why he’s always so loud. He’s just trying to hear his own voice. Although maybe it’s a little bit of both. I’m beginning to think that’s kind of what being an adult is—learning that sometimes people are a little bit wrong, but not for the reasons that you think they are, and also a little bit right, and you try to take the good with the bad. Right now, we’re young and still figuring out how to be good.
“Did you know that in Manhattan alone—” Trevor starts.
“Shut the hell up about New York already,” Heather says.
“You guys, my parents are talking about moving away if this continues,” Courtney says. “They’re really scared. They think Los Angeles is getting too dangerous.”
“They’re rich white people,” I blurt out. “Who exactly do they think is coming after them?”
My friends all turn and look at me like I have five heads. Then Trevor bursts out laughing.
Before I have to answer for myself, Lana walks by and winks at me. Today she’s wearing a baggy flannel shirt, her bra partially exposed above her tank top, combat boots unlaced. Her hair is in a greasy bun atop her head. She looks like spilled wine coolers.
“Omigod. What a lesbo!” Courtney says as Lana walks past.
“She probably had something in her eye,” Heather says, and raises her eyebrows at me.
Heather has always thought Courtney is a little bit in love with Kimberly. Normally, I’d chalk it up to too much Donahue, but I think she might be onto something. At Jenny Liu’s birthday party, we played Spin the Bottle, and Kimberly and Courtney wrapped their arms around each other’s necks and kissed with tongue. Even when everybody’d stopped cheering and laughing, they kept kissing, until finally Kimberly pulled away and Courtney burned incandescently. But also, not two years ago, we blasted “Freedom! ’90” and walked around in Kimberly’s mom’s clothes pretending to be supermodels, and Kimberly and Courtney got into an actual physical fight over who got to be Cindy Crawford, so who knows?
I want to follow Lana to wherever it is she eats, away from my friends. Maybe we could share cigarettes and oranges and talk about something that matters. Or even something that doesn’t. Courtney could be right—it’s possible that Lana is a lesbo. Or bisexual. I’ve never met any bisexuals that I know of; Lana would be my first. I know exactly three real-life lesbians.
The school loudspeaker comes on and the principal announces that the administration has decided to keep the prom on its scheduled date and time of tomorrow at 8:30 p.m. Everyone in the quad cheers. Courtney and Kimberly hug each other tight.
“Thank God!” Kimberly says.
Across the way, the black kids turn their attention only briefly to the loudspeaker, then return to their huddle. LaShawn is not among them.
* * *
Through the glass, I can see LaShawn’s legs stretched out before him. I pull open the heavy glass door and LaShawn looks up. The student office assistant, a blond girl named Allison, sits next to him, her knees tucked under her butt and her hand awkwardly patting his back like she’s trying to comfort him, but also like she’s a little bit afraid of him, too. Allison’s only a freshman, but the boys say she’s got a pair of senior tits.
“Hey, Cricket.” LaShawn looks up at me, and Allison glares at the intrusion.
Across the wall in the office are gold stars with everybody’s names and where they’re going to college. We’re supposed to tell the school secretary as soon as we decide where we’re going so our name can be displayed with the rest. “All our shining stars!” it says in gold glitter across the sheets of navy-blue bulletin-board paper meant to look like the night sky. People have been not-so-sneakily going into the office to check on where everybody else got in, to compare their good fortunes or to commiserate, but mostly to go back to their friends and say shit like, “How the hell did she get into Dartmouth?”
I pretend to scan the names.
“Got one to add to the wall?” LaShawn says.
“I’m not sure where I’m going yet.”
I wait for him to say something in response, but he doesn’t; he keeps staring out into the distance.
“So, what’s the verdict?” I say, and nod in the direction of Principal Jeffries’s office.
“They’re still deciding,” Allison chimes in, and LaShawn looks over at her like he’d forgotten she was even here.
“This school is fucking bullshit,” he says. He looks like he’s ready to burst out of himself, or out of the office, at least.
Once, freshman year, Lucia forgot to pick me up after cheer practice because she thought I was going to hang out with Kimberly afterward instead. I called the house and waited and waited for somebody to pick up, but nobody was around, so I left an appropriately pathetic message. It was in the fall, when the sun starts to go down entirely too early, and soon the lights came on in warm circles across the school grounds. All the other kids trickled out of their respective activities to their rides home as the air started to get nippy. Meanwhile, I was still in my short-ass cheer shorts and cold as hell. The wind began to lash at my skin, so I started to walk around the school while I waited, to keep warm. The basketball team finished practice and its little giants poured out of the gym and toward the parking lot, but LaShawn was still outside doing drills up and down the length of the court, even after spending all those hours at practice. Pivot. Pivot. Shoot. Fake. Two-pointer. Three-pointer. Layup. He wasn’t as filled out as he is now, not as tall. Lankier. He still looked more like a little kid, with his ears all stuck out like the kid on the MAD magazine covers. It was just him on the court, under the orange glow of the lights. And me standing at the fence, fingers around the metal, silently watching.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi,” I said.
“Why are you still here?” he said.
“My ride forgot me,” I said. “Why are you still here?”
“I gotta stay here to stay here,” he said, and laughed.
He stopped dribbling and walked over by the fence. It was like we were talking to each other through a cage.
“You think this school is worth it?”
I shrugged. “My parents seem to think so. I mean, I guess people get into good colleges from here.”
“Mija,” Lucia shouted at me from across the way. Her Corolla put-put-ed in the distance. I was briefly ashamed—not of Lucia or her car but of being the kind of person who had a Lucia to pick her up, who never even thought about the cost of the school I was in.
But also, I realized LaShawn must’ve also had a Grandma Opal to sit him down, look at him, and say, “You have to be better.” And whatever it was, we both felt it in our b
ones and understood it to be in each other’s heads, this metric of our worth. Pivot. Better. Layup. Better. Three-pointer. Better. Lift up, raise your arms, aim. Be more.
I wonder if LaShawn remembers that.
Across from us, the school secretary keeps her eyes glued to the portable television. She watches, her pretty face in her delicate hands, as the fires spread across the screen, eerie in black and white like an old rerun of The Twilight Zone.
“Are you here to add a college?” She briefly turns her attention to us, noticing me in the room for the first time.
“Nope. Not a shining star,” I say.
She immediately goes back to the television.
“Look—you’re right under your star,” I say to LaShawn. His star is a little bigger than the others. I bet that’s Allison’s handiwork.
Allison looks like she’s playing a game of double-dutch, waiting for the right time to get back into the conversation, to not get smacked in the head by the jump ropes.
LaShawn twists his head around to look at his name posted up on the bulletin board and rolls his eyes.
“I’m so sick of this place,” he says. “I mean, I didn’t even want to go here, you know? I wanted to go to high school around the corner like all my friends. My real friends. Not these goddamn phonies.”
“Totally.” Allison finally sees her opening. “Me too.”
The secretary calls Allison away to stuff envelopes, and she reluctantly heads over.
“Sometimes I feel like I can’t even breathe here,” LaShawn says to me in a near whisper once she’s gone.
“Me too,” I say.
“It’s a fucking black hole,” he says.
I want to tell him that I started the rumor. That I’m sorry. That I didn’t mean for everything to get out of control like this. That I don’t even know why I did it. I want to sit next to him and lean my head back underneath these stars, to close my eyes for a minute and breathe.
The Black Kids Page 13