by Angie Thomas
I can’t stand myself for doing it, but I do it anyway.
I sling my backpack over my shoulder. As usual it matches my J’s, the blue-and-black Elevens like Jordan wore in Space Jam. I worked at the store a month to buy them. I hate dressing like everybody else, but The Fresh Prince taught me something. See, Will always wore his school uniform jacket inside out so he could be different. I can’t wear my uniform inside out, but I can make sure my sneakers are always dope and my backpack always matches them.
I go inside and scan the atrium for Maya, Hailey, or Chris. I don’t see them, but I see that half the kids have tans from spring break. Luckily I was born with one. Someone covers my eyes.
“Maya, I know that’s you.”
She snickers and moves her hands. I’m not tall at all, but Maya has to stand on her tiptoes to cover my eyes. And the chick actually wants to play center on the varsity basketball team. She wears her hair in a high bun because she probably thinks it makes her look taller, but nope.
“What’s up, Ms. I Can’t Text Anyone Back?” she says, and we do our little handshake. It’s not complicated like Daddy and King’s, but it works for us. “I was starting to wonder if you were abducted by aliens.”
“Huh?”
She holds up her phone. The screen has a brand-new crack stretching from corner to corner. Maya’s always dropping it. “You haven’t texted me in two days, Starr,” she says. “Not cool.”
“Oh.” I’ve barely looked at my phone since Khalil got . . . since the incident. “Sorry. I was working at the store. You know how crazy that can get. How was your spring break?”
“Okay, I guess.” She munches on some Sour Patch Kids. “We visited my great-grandparents in Taipei. I ended up taking a bunch of snapbacks and basketball shorts, so all week long I heard, ‘Why do you dress like a boy?’ ‘Why do you play a boy sport?’ Blah, blah, blah. And it was awful when they saw a picture of Ryan. They asked if he was a rapper!”
I laugh and steal some of her candy. Maya’s boyfriend, Ryan, happens to be the only other black kid in eleventh grade, and everybody expects us to be together. Because apparently when it’s two of us, we have to be on some Noah’s Ark type shit and pair up to preserve the blackness of our grade. Lately I’m super aware of BS like that.
We head for the cafeteria. Our table near the vending machines is almost full. There’s Hailey, sitting on top of it, having a heated discussion with curly-haired, dimpled Luke. I think that’s foreplay for them. They’ve liked each other since sixth grade, and if your feelings can survive the awkwardness of middle school you should stop playing around and go out.
Some of the other girls from the team are there too: Jess the co-captain and Britt the center who makes Maya look like an ant. It’s kinda stereotypical that we all sit together, but it worked out that way. I mean, who else will listen to us bitch about swollen knees and understand inside jokes born on the bus after a game?
Chris’s boys from the basketball team are at the table next to ours, egging Hailey and Luke on. Chris isn’t there yet. Unfortunately and fortunately.
Luke sees me and Maya and reaches his arms toward us. “Thank you! Two sensible people who can end this discussion.”
I slide onto the bench beside Jess. She rests her head on my shoulder. “They’ve been at it for fifteen minutes.”
Poor girl. I pat her hair. I have a secret crush on Jess’s pixie cut. My neck’s not long enough for one, but her hair is perfect. Every strand is where it should be. If I were into girls, I would totally date her for her hair, and she would date me for my shoulder.
“What’s it about this time?” I ask.
“Pop Tarts,” Britt says.
Hailey turns to us and points at Luke. “This jerk actually said they’re better warmed up in the microwave.”
“Eww,” I say, instead of my usual “Ill,” and Maya goes, “Are you serious?”
“I know, right?” says Hailey.
“Jesus Christ!” Luke says. “I only asked for a dollar to buy one from the machine!”
“You’re not wasting my money to destroy a perfectly good Pop Tart in a microwave.”
“They’re supposed to be heated up!” he argues.
“I actually agree with Luke,” Jess says. “Pop Tarts are ten times better heated up.”
I move my shoulder so her head isn’t resting on it. “We can’t be friends anymore.”
Her mouth drops open, and she pouts.
“Fine, fine,” I say, and she rests her head on my shoulder with a wide grin. Total weirdo. I don’t know how she’ll survive without my shoulder when she graduates in a few months.
“Anyone who heats up a Pop Tart should be charged,” Hailey says.
“And imprisoned,” I say.
“And forced to eat uncooked Pop Tarts until they accept how good they are,” Maya adds.
“It is law,” Hailey finishes, smacking the table like that settles it.
“You guys have issues,” Luke says, hopping off the table. He picks at Hailey’s hair. “I think all that dye seeped into your brain.”
She swats at him as he leaves. She’s added blue streaks to her honey-blond hair and cut it shoulder-length. In fifth grade, she trimmed it with some scissors during a math test because she felt like it. That was the moment I knew she didn’t give a shit.
“I like the blue, Hails,” I say. “And the cut.”
“Yeah.” Maya grins. “It’s very Joe Jonas of you.”
Hailey whips her head around so fast, her eyes flashing. Maya and I snicker.
So there’s a video deep in the depths of YouTube of the three of us lip-syncing to the Jonas Brothers and pretending to play guitars and drums in Hailey’s bedroom. She decided she was Joe, I was Nick, and Maya was Kevin. I really wanted to be Joe—I secretly loved him the most, but Hailey said she should have him, so I let her.
I let her have her way a lot. Still do. That’s part of being Williamson Starr, I guess.
“I so have to find that video,” Jess says.
“Nooo,” Hailey goes, sliding off the tabletop. “It must never be found.” She sits across from us. “Never. Ne-ver. If I remembered that account’s password, I’d delete it.”
“Ooh, what was the account’s name?” Jess asks. “JoBro Lover or something? Wait, no, JoBro Lova. Everybody liked to misspell shit in middle school.”
I smirk and mumble, “Close.”
Hailey looks at me. “Starr!”
Maya and Britt crack up.
It’s moments like this that I feel normal at Williamson. Despite the guidelines I put on myself, I’ve still found my group, my table.
“Okay then,” Hailey says. “I see how it is, Maya Jonas and Nick’s Starry Girl 2000—”
“So, Hails,” I say before she can finish my old screen name. She grins. “How was your spring break?”
Hailey loses her grin and rolls her eyes. “Oh, it was wonderful. Dad and Stepmother Dearest dragged me and Remy to the house in the Bahamas for ‘family bonding.’”
And bam. That normal feeling? Gone. I suddenly remember how different I am from most of the kids here. Nobody would have to drag me or my brothers to the Bahamas—we’d swim there if we could. For us, a family vacation is staying at a local hotel with a swimming pool for a weekend.
“Sounds like my parents,” says Britt. “Took us to fucking Harry Potter World for the third year in a row. I’m sick of Butter Beer and corny family photos with wands.”
Holy shit. Who the fuck complains about going to Harry Potter World? Or Butter Beer? Or wands?
I hope none of them ask about my spring break. They went to Taipei, the Bahamas, Harry Potter World. I stayed in the hood and saw a cop kill my friend.
“I guess the Bahamas wasn’t so bad,” Hailey says. “They wanted us to do family stuff, but we ended up doing our own thing the entire time.”
“You mean you texted me the entire time,” Maya says.
“It was still my own thing.”
“All day,
every day,” Maya adds. “Ignoring the time difference.”
“Whatever, Shorty. You know you liked talking to me.”
“Oh,” I say. “That’s cool.”
Really though, it’s not. Hailey never texted me during spring break. She barely texts me at all lately. Maybe once a week now, and it used to be every day. Something’s changed between us, and neither one of us acknowledges it. We’re normal when we’re at Williamson, like now. Beyond here though, we’re no longer best friends, just . . . I don’t know.
Plus she unfollowed my Tumblr.
She has no clue that I know. I once posted a picture of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy who was murdered for whistling at a white woman in 1955. His mutilated body didn’t look human. Hailey texted me immediately after, freaking out. I thought it was because she couldn’t believe someone would do that to a kid. No. She couldn’t believe I would reblog such an awful picture.
Not long after that, she stopped liking and reblogging my other posts. I looked through my followers list. Aww, Hails was no longer following me. With me living forty-five minutes away, Tumblr is supposed to be sacred ground where our friendship is cemented. Unfollowing me is the same as saying “I don’t like you anymore.”
Maybe I’m being sensitive. Or maybe things have changed, maybe I’ve changed. For now I guess we’ll keep pretending everything is fine.
The first bell rings. On Mondays AP English is first for me, Hailey, and Maya. On the way they get into this big discussion-turned-argument about NCAA brackets and the Final Four. Hailey was born a Notre Dame fan. Maya hates them almost unhealthily. I stay out that discussion. The NBA is more my thing anyway.
We turn down the hall, and Chris is standing in the doorway of our class, his hands stuffed in pockets and a pair of headphones draped around his neck. He looks straight at me and stretches his arm across the doorway.
Hailey glances from him to me. Back and forth, back and forth. “Did something happen with you guys?”
My pursed lips probably give me away. “Yeah. Sort of.”
“That douche,” Hailey says, reminding me why we’re friends—she doesn’t need details. If someone hurts me in any way, they’re automatically on her shit list. It started in fifth grade, two years before Maya came along. We were those “crybaby” kids who bust out crying at the smallest shit. Me because of Natasha, and Hailey because she lost her mom to cancer. We rode the waves of grief together.
That’s why this weirdness between us doesn’t make sense. “What do you want to do, Starr?” she asks.
I don’t know. Before Khalil, I planned to cold-shoulder Chris with a sting more powerful than a nineties R&B breakup song. But after Khalil I’m more like a Taylor Swift song. (No shade, I fucks with Tay-Tay, but she doesn’t serve like nineties R&B on the angry-girlfriend scale.) I’m not happy with Chris, yet I miss him. I miss us. I need him so much that I’m willing to forget what he did. That’s scary as fuck too. Someone I’ve only been with for a year means that much to me? But Chris . . . he’s different.
You know what? I’ll Beyoncé him. Not as powerful as a nineties R&B breakup song, but stronger than a Taylor Swift. Yeah. That’ll work. I tell Hailey and Maya, “I’ll handle him.”
They move so I’m between them like they’re my bodyguards, and we go to the door together.
Chris bows to us. “Ladies.”
“Move!” Maya orders. Funny considering how much Chris towers over her.
He looks at me with those baby blues. He got a tan over break. I used to tell him he was so pale he looked like a marshmallow. He hated that I compared him to food. I told him that’s what he got for calling me caramel. It shut him up.
Dammit though. He’s wearing the Space Jam Elevens too. I forgot we decided to wear them the first day back. They look good on him. Jordans are my weakness. Can’t help it.
“I just wanna talk to my girl,” he claims.
“I don’t know who that is,” I say, Beyoncé’ing him like a pro.
He sighs through his nose. “Please, Starr? Can we at least talk about it?”
I’m back to Taylor Swift because the please does it. I nod at Hailey and Maya.
“You hurt her, and I’ll kill you,” Hailey warns, and she and Maya go in to class without me.
Chris and I move away from the door. I lean against a locker and fold my arms. “I’m listening,” I say.
A bass-heavy instrumental plays in his headphones. Probably one of his beats. “I’m sorry for what happened. I should’ve talked to you first.”
I cock my head. “We did talk about it. A week before. Remember?”
“I know, I know. And I heard you. I just wanted to be prepared in case—”
“You could push the right buttons and convince me to change my mind?”
“No!” His hands go up in surrender. “Starr, you know I wouldn’t—that’s not—I’m sorry, okay? I took it too far.”
Understatement. The day before Big D’s party, Chris and I were in Chris’s ridiculously large room. The third floor of his parents’ mansion is a suite for him, a perk of being the last born to empty-nesters. I try to forget that he has an entire floor as big as my house and hired help that looks like me.
Fooling around isn’t new for us, and when Chris slipped his hand in my shorts, I didn’t think anything of it. Then he got me going, and I really wasn’t thinking. At all. For real, my thought process went out the door. And right as I was at that moment, he stopped, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a condom. He raised his eyebrows at me, silently asking for an invitation to go all the way.
All I could think about was those girls I see walking around Garden Heights, babies propped on their hips. Condom or no condom, shit happens.
I went off on Chris. He knew I wasn’t ready for that, we already talked about it, and yet he had a condom? He said he wanted to be responsible, but if I said I’m not ready, I’m not ready.
I left his house pissed and horny, the absolute worst way to leave.
My mom may have been right though. She once said that after you go there with a guy, it activates all these feelings, and you wanna do it all the time. Chris and I went far enough that I notice every single detail about his body now. His cute nostrils that flare when he sighs. His soft brown hair that my fingers love to explore. His gentle lips, and his tongue that wets them every so often. The five freckles on his neck that are in the perfect spots for kissing.
More than that, I remember the guy who spends almost every night on the phone with me talking about nothing and everything. The one who loves to make me smile. Yeah, he pisses me off sometimes, and I’m sure I piss him off, but we mean something. We actually mean a lot.
Fuckity fuck, fuck, fuck. I’m crumbling. “Chris . . .”
He goes for a low blow and beatboxes an all-too-familiar, “Boomp . . . boomp, boomp, boomp.”
I point at him. “Don’t you dare!”
“‘Now, this is a story all about how, my life got flipped—turned upside down. And I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there, I’ll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel-Air.’”
He beat-boxes the instrumental and pops his chest and booty to the rhythm. People pass by us, laughing. A guy whistles suggestively. Someone shouts, “Shake that ass, Bryant!”
My smile grows before I can stop it.
The Fresh Prince isn’t just my show, it’s our show. Sophomore year he followed my Tumblr, and I followed him back. We knew of each other from school, but we didn’t know each other. One Saturday, I reblogged a bunch of Fresh Prince GIFs and clips. He liked and reblogged every single one. That Monday morning in the cafeteria, he paid for my Pop Tarts and grape juice and said, “The first Aunt Viv was the best Aunt Viv.”
It was the beginning of us.
Chris gets The Fresh Prince, which helps him get me. We once talked about how cool it was that Will remained himself in his new world. I slipped up and said I wish I could be like that at school. Chris said, “Why can�
��t you, Fresh Princess?”
Ever since, I don’t have to decide which Starr I have to be with him. He likes both. Well, the parts I’ve shown him. Some things I can’t reveal, like Natasha. Once you’ve seen how broken someone is it’s like seeing them naked—you can’t look at them the same anymore.
I like the way he looks at me now, as if I’m one of the best things in his life. He’s one of the best things in mine too.
I can’t lie, we get the “why is he dating her” stare that usually comes from rich white girls. Sometimes I wonder the same thing. Chris acts like those looks don’t exist. When he does stuff like this, rapping and beatboxing in the middle of a busy hall just to make me smile, I forget about those looks too.
He starts the second verse, swaying his shoulders and looking at me. The worst part? His silly butt knows it’s working. “‘In West Philadelphia, born and raised’—c’mon, babe. Join in.”
He grabs my hands.
One-Fifteen follows Khalil’s hands with the flashlight.
He orders Khalil to get out with his hands up.
He barks at me to put my hands on the dashboard.
I kneel beside my dead friend in the middle of the street with my hands raised. A cop as white as Chris points a gun at me.
As white as Chris.
I flinch and snatch away.
Chris frowns. “Starr, you okay?”
Khalil opens the door. “You okay, Starr—”
Pow!
There’s blood. Too much blood.
The second bell rings, jolting me back to normal Williamson, where I’m not normal Starr.
Chris leans down, his face in front of mine. My tears blur him. “Starr?”
It’s a few tears, yeah, but I feel exposed. I turn to go to class, and Chris grabs my arm. I yank away and whirl on him.