“All done.” Pham grabs his boa back from LaShawn’s neck. “Allons, les enfants! Aujourd’hui la vie est belle…”
LaShawn and I get back into Trevor’s car and follow them to Lana’s house, driving slowly so we all stay together.
* * *
Pham tells us to sit down in their living room, so we do. He asks us if we want tea, then rushes to the kitchen to put a pot on the stove before we can answer.
“Get up, Brad, we’ve got company!” I hear him yell from the kitchen into the house.
“So you guys were at a party?” I say.
“Well… kinda,” Lana says.
One of their friends is dying. An artist Brad’s exhibited at the gallery. Not old—only thirty-one, which is a real grown-up, but not, like, grandpa age or anything.
I don’t know anybody who’s died of AIDS, but I’ve seen the AIDS quilt, with its patchwork of grief and love and protest. It came to town and they took us on a field trip to see it, but some of the parents protested and started a petition arguing that the school was encouraging deviant behavior.
Kimberly’s mom tried to get my mom to sign the petition when she came to pick Kimberly up from my house one day. Lucia answered the door. My mother paused Jane Fonda mid leg-lift; walked over to our front door glistening in her pink leotard, purple leg warmers, and white Reeboks; and told Ms. McGregor to her face that the petition was “ludicrous and hateful.” Then she turned around and went back to her video while Kimberly and I said a muted goodbye. I thought that was pretty ballsy of my mother. Every so often, I think maybe my parents are kinda cool.
Anyway, Brad and Pham’s friend is dying, and instead of waiting until he’s gone to have a funeral, he asked his friends to come to his home for a party. As Lana tells us about their friend, Brad stumbles out of the hallway smelling of wine and cigarettes, a streak of Pham’s glitter across his cheek.
“He was in a lot of pain, but he looked happy, don’t you think?” Brad plops down on the couch across from me.
“Yes.” Pham nods. He places two teacups on coasters on their sculptural coffee table.
“So many of my friends died alone because everyone was so afraid.” Brad sighs. He starts to tear up, and Pham grabs his hand.
“It was almost canceled because of the uprising. You know, a lot of our friends protested the verdict in West Hollywood. But we don’t know how much longer Danny has,” Brad says. “We didn’t want him to feel like he’d been abandoned.”
There’s a riot going on, and it’s consumed all of us for days, but you forget that in the middle of it there are people in other parts of the city just quietly living and dying, and other people who love them.
“The nurses wheeled his hospital bed out to the living room, and we sang his favorite songs and danced,” Lana says. “It was sad, but also kinda fun in the saddest way, because… I don’t really know how to explain it.”
“Y’all had a homegoing, kinda,” LaShawn says.
“What’s this?” Pham says.
LaShawn explains that to our ancestors, death wasn’t a thing to be feared. It was freedom—slaves no more, they would return to God, or Africa, or whatever. And funerals weren’t somber affairs, they were celebrations of life.
“Yes!” Brad smiles and wipes his face with his boa. “A homegoing. He would’ve liked that.”
* * *
We talk about everything and nothing, and the evening stretches into the hours when everything outside is still. Brad and Pham gather up pillows and blankets for us before excusing themselves to their chambers.
“This is the part of the evening when we old folks retire. Can’t party like we used to,” Brad says with a wink.
LaShawn sits in a pretzel on the living-room floor. Lana and I lean against each other on the couch.
“You know, you two are the first people I’ve had over in four years of high school,” she says.
“How is that possible?” I say.
“I don’t know. I didn’t want anybody coming over and judging me. You guys live in these ridiculously fancy homes, and I live in a guest house on somebody else’s property. I’m not embarrassed, I just…”
“I get it,” LaShawn says.
“Nobody invites me over, either,” she says.
“You can come over to mine,” I say.
“I don’t think your friends will like that much,” she says.
“I don’t know if they’re my friends anymore,” I say. “Not after tonight.”
I run my hand along a crisp, yellowed houseplant. Part of it crumbles and falls. Sometimes awful things happen to you that you can’t tell anybody about. Sometimes you’re the awful thing.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I say. “I think maybe I’m kinda this like really selfish, awful person.”
Maybe Jo and I are more alike than not, just broken in different places. I miss my sister in the present tense. Lana takes my face into her hands and looks at me intently.
“You just want to be loved. That’s what’s wrong with most of us,” she says.
The bruise her mother gave her has transitioned from angry plum to subdued mauve. It’s faded, but it’s still there. I lightly press my fingertips to it and feel the heat of her skin and the blood moving under her pain. It’s the most intimate thing I’ve ever done with anyone. Lana exhales. I didn’t even realize she was holding her breath.
We fall asleep together in Brad and Pham’s living room, LaShawn buried in blankets on the floor, Lana and I curled up in each other and the couch cushions. Lana wraps her arms around my waist, and I can feel her heartbeat at my back as I start to dream.
* * *
Around four o’clock in the morning, I wake up, even though I’ve only been asleep for an hour. I open my eyes to see LaShawn sitting up, staring into the darkness.
“It’s too quiet here,” he whispers. “I’m not used to this.”
“I don’t sleep well in other people’s houses,” I say. Lana stirs, and I gently extricate myself from her grip.
“You wanna go outside?”
“Do they have a house alarm?”
“I don’t think so.”
We step barefoot onto the early morning dew. A few lonely birds chirp across the trees.
“Listen,” LaShawn whispers.
Crickets.
We laugh. LaShawn laughs loudly, and I put my hand to LaShawn’s mouth. His lips are soft under my fingertips.
He moves closer to me, and I lower my hand from his mouth.
“You’re not an asshole,” he says. “I’m sorry I said that earlier.”
“Maybe I am a little bit. But I’m trying not to be…”
Instead of responding, he pulls me toward him, we lean in, our mouths press against each other, and my whole body feels in bloom. It’s so stupid.
Before he can say it was a mistake, or anything at all, I quickly pull away and rush up onto the trampoline, bend my knees, and start to jump. He climbs up after me, and then we’re both jumping.
Sometimes real assholes like to joke and say that in the dark the only thing you can see of a black person is eyes and teeth. It’s meant to be an insult, but at the moment, with LaShawn smiling at me, I can think of no better thing to be distilled into. We’re two smiles in the night, together.
Under the stars, in our fits of flight, we’re astronauts, weightless. Then gravity yanks us by our legs back down, and we have to relaunch ourselves. It’s exhilarating, though, the fight. We bend our knees and reach up our fingertips to get just a little bit more. We mean to fly, and for a time, we do.
AFTER
CHAPTER 20
A FAMILY OF EARLY-RISER lizards scurries across our path, and LaShawn bends down to let one of the babies crawl across his hand. The valet raises his eyebrows at the scratches along Trevor’s dad’s car as I hand him the keys.
Bleary-eyed girls in velvet and bare feet fill the hotel entrance. Their boys cluster in circles, tuxes askance. Everyone’s a little hungover, drunk off alc
ohol or excitement. A maid in a rumpled white apron, a pretty girl who looks no older than fifteen, cracks a smile at Nicola Anderson with her arms around the planter like she’s hugging a toilet bowl. I would feel bad for her, but Nicola acts like she’s so much worldlier than the rest of us just because her parents are Australian and speak in drunk vowels. Anuj Patel walks by and yells right into Nicola’s ear, all Crocodile Dundee–like, “G’day, mate!”
The thought of going into the hotel suite with Kimberly and Michael makes me feel nauseous, but it could also be the not-too-distant smell of Nicola’s puke. As if he knows what I’m thinking, LaShawn grabs my hand.
Early this morning, we fell asleep on the trampoline looking at the stars, holding hands, and when the sun came up, Lana came outside and said woo-woo, and I told her to shut up.
Before we left the house, LaShawn called his aunt’s number again and finally got through. From the living room, Lana and I could hear him whisper like a little boy, “I’m fine, Mommy… I love you guys.”
“You can hang with us in Brian’s suite until you can catch a ride home,” LaShawn says. “I’ll give Trevor his keys for you and explain everything.”
Before I can respond, Heather bolts toward the two of us. “Ashley, we’ve been looking all over for you!”
She grabs me by the wrist and drags me toward the hotel lobby.
“Can we do this later?” I say.
“Dude, hurry up,” she says.
I see Jose before I see Lucia. I’m so tired after last night and so I’m confused; at first I think maybe he’s taken her to this exact same hotel for their date. He looks nice, but he also looks very tired.
I don’t see Lucia until she’s right in front of me.
“We have to go, mija,” she says. “Now.”
“What’s wrong?”
Then Lucia tells me that my dumbass sister is in jail.
“Where are Mom and Dad? Why aren’t they getting her? Do they know?”
“They went over to your uncle Ronnie’s.”
“To do what?”
“Help him with the store.”
“And Morgan?”
“She’s with them.”
“What did they say?”
“I can’t get ahold of them, mija.”
Until now, to the best of my knowledge, nobody in our family has ever been arrested, unless you count Reggie getting busted at that party in the Palisades. We’re not dealers, or pimps, or criminals, or even speeders. We’re the “good kind” of black people. The best. We smile and pose slightly off to the side in the company photos, in the private-school brochures. We earn awards and own businesses and go to college and donate to our inner-city brethren and do our part to uplift the race. We definitely do not walk into riots with Molotov cocktails and get arrested for arson.
“What are we going to do about her bail?”
“That’s why I came and got you, babygirl,” Lucia says quietly. “I have some, but not all of it. It’s better if we pay in cash. Speeds things up sometimes. Your sister said you’d have the rest.”
I wonder how Lucia knows so much about these things, but then I remember Arturo.
Jo needs my car fund, my Grandma Opal money. Grandma Opal would be pissed at how we’re about to use it. This is definitely not what she meant when she said, “You have to be better.”
Grandma Opal might even haunt me; although, Grandma Opal was the kind of person other people call “a riot!” so I don’t know that I’d mind being haunted by her, much. It’d be nice to see her again.
“Why don’t we wait and let my parents take care of it?” I say, but then I remember what my dad said to me after Reggie’s arrest last year: “If you get arrested trying to keep up with the white kids, I will not bail you out. I will not pull any strings, you hear?”
“Mija, sometimes when somebody goes to jail, they have a funny way of not coming back.”
“It’s not like that here,” I say. But I’m not so sure.
* * *
The car fund is hidden inside my mattress, which makes me feel like a gangster, or somebody during the Great Depression. It isn’t a really original place to put it, but the only person who ever looks under there is Lucia. Jose waits for us in the driveway, his car put-putting, even though Lucia told him he didn’t have to. I don’t know if he’s being macho or chivalrous, or maybe he likes her a whole lot and wants a little more time with her. So instead of leaving, he stays in his Hyundai, windows down, waiting and unabashedly humming along with “Achy Breaky Heart” on the radio.
We pull up to the detention center, which towers ten stories into the skyline like a big middle finger. The streets are a little less abandoned, though it’s a Sunday and Downtown, so they’re still abandoned enough. The riots have waxed and waned. A few loose newspaper pages blow down the street. Broken glass from blown-out windows is still underfoot. There are men in uniforms with long guns pacing, joking.
“Stay in the car, mija,” Lucia says. “I don’t want you going inside.”
“I’m a grown-up,” I say.
“No,” she says. “You’re not.”
Jose and I park the car.
“You had breakfast yet?” he asks.
“No.”
“You need breakfast.”
We walk over to a nearby stand. The vendor hunches over her cart, swaddling the hot dogs quickly but tenderly in bacon and grilling a few onions and peppers on the side.
“Buenos días,” I say.
“Buenos días.” She smiles.
“You’re out here today?” I say. Things are a little bit more under control now, but everyone is still walking around like flies that have been half-swatted: not dead, just too stunned to move. Still fearful.
“You gotta eat. I gotta eat.” She smiles and slaps a hot dog into a bun.
These could definitely make us sick, but at least for a few bites it’ll be heaven, before the bubbleguts.
“Breakfast of champions,” Jose says after taking a bite. “Does your sister get into trouble a lot?”
“Not like this. This is different, even for her,” I say.
“These are different times,” he says.
“I don’t understand what’s wrong with her sometimes. It’s like she does this stuff to herself on purpose,” I say. Jo’s own pain never seems to be enough for her. It’s like she has to take on the weight of everyone hurting everywhere.
“For some people, a little bit of trouble makes life interesting,” he says.
Jose and I stuff our faces together quietly on the sidewalk. When we’re finished, we walk around, and he tells me a little about his days playing semipro baseball in Mexico before he came here. “Are you still good at baseball?” I ask.
“Nah. I got both my arms broken once, and after that I wasn’t nearly as good as I used to be. But that’s a whole other story.”
How do you get both your arms broken? I’m afraid to ask.
Nearby, smoke rises above the city.
“How long do these things take?” I ask.
Jose shrugs.
We stand across from City Hall, which is historic and architecturally impressive, but also kinda looks like a penis made out of Lego pieces. There are a ton of police cars and police officers guarding it, watching. I feel my heart start to quicken at the sight of them, so I take a few deep breaths. There’s a slight haze, but even so, I lift my face to the muted sun, close my eyes, and let it bear down in squiggles under my eyelids.
Before we head back over to the jail, Jose gets fruit from a cart near the hot dog vendor. Jose selects the fruit—watermelon, cantaloupe, pineapple—and the vendor chops it up right in front of us before he places the slices in two plastic baggies and douses them with a healthy sprinkle of Tajín.
“Here,” Jose says, and passes me a fork.
The juice dribbles down my chin as the chili hits the roof of my mouth. Together we eat fruit out of a baggie on a dirty Downtown sidewalk while somebody’s boom box blasts “No Vaseline.” I ma
rvel at the beauty of the city in my mouth, a little sweet, a little bitter.
* * *
Lucia and Jo emerge from the jail when the haze has burned off and our street fruit’s well into our bellies. We’ve seen a number of people enter and leave the place by now, the world a blur of human law and disorder. Jose helps me to my feet. The tips of his fingers are guitar calloused. I add this to the list of qualities I like about him for Lucia. Lucia loves music. This is perfect. Unless, of course, he’s shit at it; then she’s gonna have to pretend to like a lot of bad guitar playing. When I finally get a good look at my sister, Jo looks a little feral. Her hair is mussed in escaped curls; the front teeth that were in braces up until two years ago are chipped into opposing triangles. When she sees me, she starts to cry.
Jo wraps her arms around mine and buries her face into my shoulder. She smells so bad that I nearly gag.
“Did they hurt you?” I say.
She shakes her head no. Then yes. Then no again.
“Where does it hurt?” I say.
“Everywhere,” she whispers.
When I was little and we would join hands and sing “Ring around the rosie,” Jo changed the lyrics so I thought the song was just for me: “Ashley, Ashley, we all fall down.”
* * *
Jose pulls into our driveway, and Lucia grabs him by the face. She kisses his mouth like they’ve successfully robbed a bank or fled an assassin together. I wonder if this is how she used to kiss Arturo. For some people, a little bit of trouble makes life interesting, Jose said. But when does it become too much? When are you a good person who did a few bad things? When are you a bad person?
“Thank you,” Lucia says. “Let’s do this again sometime.”
When we get inside the house, Jo runs upstairs to her room.
“Wait!” Lucia says, but it’s too late.
Jo walks back down the stairs and sits on the top step. “They’re getting rid of me?”
The Black Kids Page 22