“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“None of it ever did,” Grandma Opal said, and shooed us off so she could nap.
This land is your land. This land is my land. This beach is your beach. This beach is my beach. Today this beach is ours. For now, anyway.
* * *
LaShawn wears socks with Adidas slides, and I don’t know why he’s wearing socks to the beach, but I’ve noticed it’s a thing a lot of black dudes do, like they’re afraid of their toes.
The skateboarder’s hair is sun-bleached, shaggy, and almost as long as Lana’s. His lips look chapped. If we were in the Natural History Museum, this would be his natural habitat behind the glass.
“Sorry, dudes!” he says as he skates past an overflowing trash can.
Gutter punks lean against each other on a small grassy knoll, faces tattooed so that they look like lizards, with their one-legged pit bull and a sign that says, NEED FOOD FOR THE DOG… AND ALCOHOL.
I place a dollar in their empty open guitar case.
“Thanks, sis!” the scariest-looking one replies.
We march past the gutter punks with their mangy dog and the skateboarders who nearly run us over and the families with entirely too much shit to stake our claim. LaShawn’s slides fling sand all over everything with each step until finally he takes them off, socks too, and I see his toes, which aren’t scary at all.
When we decide on our spot, LaShawn plants the umbrella in the sand like he’s Neil Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin.
Aldrin’s first words on the moon were, “Beautiful view.”
Then Armstrong replied, “Isn’t that somethin’? Magnificent sight out here.”
Which is exactly how I feel right now.
Lana and I drop our stuff in the sand, peel off our land selves, and trudge toward the water’s edge. We squeal at the cold and push in farther, LaShawn tentative steps behind us.
“I… I can’t swim, you guys,” he says.
“We won’t go too far,” Lana says.
Lana and I close our eyes and dive into handstands, only to get pushed and pulled by the tide. LaShawn stands awkwardly at the water’s edge.
“We won’t let you drown,” Lana says. “Promise.”
LaShawn comes closer and closer to us until finally he submerges himself for a one-two count and then pops back up with a primal scream. The three of us splash around in the water until Lana leaves to go use the restroom—number two, so she can’t just pee in the water, she makes sure to tell us. Then it’s the two of us amid the seaweed and the salt. The waves push LaShawn farther out, until it’s harder for our toes to reach the ocean floor.
“Maybe we should go back,” he says.
“Not yet,” I say. “Try this.”
I show him a basic breaststroke. It’s simple enough, I tell him, like making a heart with your arms and then breaking it, over and over, but the heart is what keeps you afloat, keeps you going. He starts to do it, his hearts getting stronger and stronger still, until he dips his head briefly underwater and comes back up sputtering, but with a big grin.
“I got you,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I say.
He turns around and faces the city. “It’s so different from here, isn’t it? Somehow, out here, it’s like nothing happened at all.”
A big wave knocks against both of us, and we push our limbs and chests and hips against its force.
I think about the dried-out husks of buildings I saw when we were volunteering with Tarrell and Julia. What’s gonna happen to all the vacant lots like weeping wounds when everybody’s moved on to the next thing? What’s gonna happen to the people who live among them? You can already feel it in the air—the rest of the city beginning to forget.
“It’s kinda like the riptide or current or whatever they’re always warning you about on the weather reports. Everyone around you can be playing, having fun, all oblivious and shit; meanwhile, you’re getting swept out to sea,” he says.
* * *
To our right, two little blond kids in bright-orange floaties swim by with their mother, who wears one of those water skirts that some women wear when they start being ashamed of the puckers and dimples like little hiding spots in their thighs. One of her kids splashes me in the face as he swims past, and the salt water burns up my nose.
“Sorry,” she says. “Tommy, pay attention to other people.”
* * *
Heather appears, and with her, Courtney. Apparently, Lana told them about our little gathering without me knowing.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to talk to me,” I say.
“I wouldn’t miss your eighteenth birthday!” Courtney says. “Besides, I’m my own person.”
There’s a series of wriggles in her beach blanket, and then finally out pops a head, small and vaguely mangy.
“The shelter gave me a graduation puppy!” Courtney squeals. “I named her Pepper, ’cause she’s a little spicy. Isn’t she the cutest?”
“You better watch out. Bitch pees everywhere,” Heather says, and kisses me on the top of my head.
“Don’t talk about Pepper like that,” Courtney says, and squeezes Pepper closer.
“It was a joke.” Heather shakes her head at Courtney.
“Oh yeah. Duh.” Courtney laughs.
Heather runs her hands along my braids. “You look so different. It suits you.”
I’m about to tear up, but I push my tears back down. Heather, Courtney, Kimberly, and I have celebrated every birthday together since we were six.
Kimberly and I were girls together, but we won’t be women together, and maybe that’s okay. In a few weeks we’ll graduate, and then we’ll go to college and make new friends, and after that maybe grad school and then out into the world, where we’ll accumulate more people to hold on to. We’ll float into each other’s heads and remember how we belonged to each other only once in a while, and eventually maybe not at all.
As we’re hugging, Pepper pees across her tanned leg, and Courtney shrieks, “Bad girl!”
She only means it a little bit.
* * *
A helicopter flies by with a floating ad for beer.
“If you kiss me, then I’ll kiss you back,” plays on somebody’s boom box. Heather puckers her lips in my direction and laughs. She’s splayed out reading some sort of zine. I thought Lana and Heather would hit it off the fastest, but Lana and Courtney did, surprisingly enough. They giggle a lot, and Lana gives Courtney’s mangy new puppy lots of kisses as naughty Pepper jumps around the beach blanket between them. You’re not supposed to have dogs on the beach, but if anybody notices, they don’t say anything. At some point, Courtney laughs really heartily and puts her hand on Lana’s arm. Then Lana says, “I need more sunblock; can you help me?” While Courtney massages it into Lana’s shoulders, Heather looks up from her zine and raises an eyebrow my way. Heather has dyed her hair and armpit hair bright purple. It suits her, although apparently her mom’s pissed that she didn’t wait until after graduation. I wouldn’t have even thought to dye my armpit hair, if I kept any.
There’s not quite enough space on our beach blanket, so part of my body rests in the sand, which sticks to my wet skin, but I don’t mind. LaShawn’s hand brushes mine, and in his fingertips I can feel the entire summer before us. He turns to look at me and smiles, his skin golden in the sunlight. I’m pretty positive I see the faint outline of a boner in his swim trunks. As if he can read my mind, he flips over onto his stomach.
Candace and Julia trudge through the sand toward us.
“You made it!” I say.
My new friends awkwardly greet my old friends.
“Candace did my hair,” I tell Heather and Courtney.
“Dude! How long did that take you to do?” Heather says.
“About four hours,” Candace says, and plops down next to them in the sand.
“I got my hair braided when I went to Mexico once,” Courtney says.
Candace, Ju
lia, and I start to laugh. Courtney doesn’t know why we’re laughing, and I feel a little bad, but not really. Sometimes there is an us, sometimes there is a them, and sometimes it’s okay to be a we.
We girls do lazy cartwheels in the sand. Maybe next year we’ll be too old for these, but not now. Not yet.
I think outside of myself and look down at us in this moment—our skin browning in the sun, bodies leavening, planes flying overhead. What’s next for all of us? It doesn’t matter. In this moment, there’s ocean in our hair, and we’re awash in the glitter of possibility. We’re girls in neon bikinis laughing. Soon, the world will crack wide open before us, and we will be women. Here we are.
Around us, seagulls squawk. Beach umbrellas sway. On the radio, the DJs are discussing how the cops in Rodney King’s beating are getting a new federal trial. This new federal case will go the right way, though. Those cops will get convicted. The evidence is right there on video for anyone to see. Because things have to get better, don’t they? Or maybe they don’t. But we do.
The DJs banter for a bit, and then they open the lines to callers.
“What you think, fam?” the DJ says, like every one of us in this city is family.
LaShawn and I wring water from our hair and bathing suits into the sand, which we scoop into several dense mounds piled toward the sky that almost immediately start to crumble and slide. Then Heather and Lana run down to the water and come back giggling with handfuls that they pour over what we’ve started, while Courtney tries to keep Pepper from smashing it all. All of us work together, adding more water, more earth, digging our fingers in, building and rebuilding, until slowly it starts to look like something real.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
David Doerrer, my incredible agent, thank you for your tireless and painstaking work at getting this to be what it could be, and for seeing the potential in it and me. You are my favorite person that I never actually get to see in person. And thank you, Abrams Artists Agency, for having the good sense to employ him.
Zareen Jaffery, my story doula, I knew minutes into our first call that you got me and you got this. Thank you for your thoughtfulness and for pushing every single page of this to be better.
Kendra Levin, thank you for holding my hand and helping me push through the last of it. You are the loveliest.
Adriana Bellet, thank you for the absolutely perfect piece of cover art. I shed the happiest of happy tears the first time I saw it.
To Justin Chanda, and everyone at Simon & Schuster, thank you for championing this story from the very start. I’m truly so lucky to have you. Dainese, Audrey, Shivani, Lisa, I appreciate you.
Jane Griffiths at Simon & Schuster UK, thank you from the bottom of my heart for immediately recognizing the universality in Ashley’s story. Anna Carmichael at Abner Stein, thank you for getting my words across the pond.
Lucy Ruth Cummins, many thanks for this bomb-ass super-dope totally tubular cover.
To my copyeditor, Benjamin Holmes, thank you for helping me not look like an idiot. For real.
Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Joe Vogelsang, thank you so much for your friendship and for being such champions of this book.
To the late Adina Talve-Goodman, Patrick Ryan, and the team at One Teen Story—thank you for seeing the beauty in this story and being the first to put it out in the world. I’m so eternally grateful to you for starting me on this journey.
To the Santa Monica Review—thank you for being the first to give me a chance.
I would like to give a shout-out to all my English teachers, for the refuge and joy my awkward ass found in their classrooms—especially Mr. Einstein, Ms. Tracy, the late and lovely Mrs. Madrid, Ms. Cheney, Mr. Sawaya, and Mr. Platt (even if you weren’t technically my English teacher).
Aimee Bender, thank you for your encouragement, for your recommendations, for being both an amazing writer and teacher, and for telling me not to go to law school if I was only going to do it because it was practical.
Mrs. View—to this day you are my favorite librarian.
Cal State Long Beach’s Young Writers’ Camp—you were my first little taste of heaven on earth.
Elizabeth, thank you for allowing me to foist my stories on you before I’d even figured out what to say or how, for being one of my first and most encouraging readers, and for being one of the bestest bffls a girl could ask for.
Hyemee, my cheerleader before you’d ever even read a word I’d written, my other bffl, I’m so grateful to you for your friendship. Should I ever have a guesthouse, it’s yours. Don’t tell Bizzle.
Justyn, my twinface, I’m so glad the universe threw the two of us kindred blerds in that dumb box together. This 100 percent wouldn’t exist without you. Thank you to Mama Rose and Uncle E. and your mama for welcoming me into your home and your lives.
Liz, my oldest friend, I’m so grateful we’re still in each other’s lives.
Carmen Samayoa—for being an inspiration.
Jimmy Cabrera—for sharing the beauty of your homeland with me.
To my fellow Angelenos, I love you even when you suck.
To my fellow black kids, fragile and strong, nerdy and cool, weird and well-adjusted, ugly and beautiful, rich and poor, and everything in between—“we gon’ be alright.”
Derek, thank you for never letting me quit on myself, for holding me through my blue and basking with me in my yellow. There’s no way I could even remotely communicate what you mean to me. May our future be full of dolphins.
To the Smiths and the Kings, thank you for your kindness and encouragement and for bringing him into being.
Daddy, Mommy, Alicia, and Reza—I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you. Everything I do is to make you proud. I hope you are.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© ELIZABETH T. NGUYEN
CHRISTINA HAMMONDS REED holds an MFA from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. Christina is a native of the Los Angeles area, and her work has previously appeared in the Santa Monica Review and One Teen Story. THE BLACK KIDS is her first novel.
Visit us at simonandschuster.com/teen
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Christina-Hammonds-Reed
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2020 by Christina Hammonds Reed
Jacket illustration copyright © 2020 by Adriana Bellet
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hammonds Reed, Christina, author.
Title: The black kids / Christina Hammonds Reed.
Description: First edition. | New York : Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, [2020] | Audience: Ages 14 up. | Audience: Grades 10–12. | Summary: With the Rodney King riots closing in on high school senior Ashley and her family, the privileged bubble she has enjoyed, protecting her from the difficult realities most black people face, begins to crumble.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019035025 (print) | LCCN 2019035026 (eBook) | ISBN 9781534462724 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781534462748 (eBook)
Subjects: CYAC: Race relations—Fiction. | African Americans—Fiction. | Rodney King Riots, Los Angeles, Calif., 1992—Fiction. | Family life—California—Los Angeles—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | Los Angeles (Calif.)—
History—20th century—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.1.R4277 Bl 2020 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.R4277 (eBook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019035025
LC eBook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019035026
The Black Kids Page 29