by G. Neri
She already had her class divided into groups. I quickly found myself standing alone. Three white kids huddled in one corner around their art supplies. I walked over, but they closed ranks and made sure to ignore me. The black kids made up the rest of the groups and I knew I wasn’t joining them.
That one black girl from my homeroom, Destiny Jones, had untied her hair and it kind of frizzed out. I couldn’t help but gawk. She gave me all kinds of attitude just because I was looking at her. “You got something to say?”
“No.”
“Well maybe you should take a picture. It’ll last longer.”
They busted up like that was the first time someone ever said that. I felt I needed to say something back, so I chose “Why don’t you?” as my official awesome comeback.
She gave me the stink eye and when Mrs. Lee wasn’t looking, pulled out her phone and snapped a picture of me. “That’s going on my Facebook page,” she said all snarky, posting it right there. “There’s a red giant in my class . . .” she said as she typed.
I looked to Mrs. Lee, who finally caught on and followed my eyes back to Destiny and her phone. “You know the rules: no phones in class. Give it.”
She confiscated the phone and took it back to her desk.
Destiny shook her head at me. “You are so dead.”
And it was like that for the next couple weeks. Nobody talked to me unless they were talking at me. Seemed as if everyone had grown up together in the Tower Grove area and as the official outsider, I was pretty much a target.
The only blond-haired boy in school saw me eating alone one day and stopped to talk. It was only when I saw his friends cracking up behind him that I understood he wasn’t really asking me out to the upcoming Halloween dance.
Keep your eyes on the ground and don’t talk to anyone became my new motto.
Mrs. Lee noticed I wasn’t drawing in art class. She dropped a book on my desk. “Maybe your thing isn’t drawing but some other medium.”
The book was called Video Art. On the cover was a huge lens with an eye on it staring straight at me.
“So if you aren’t going to make art today, at least you can read about some other forms. Maybe it’ll inspire you.” She tapped her finger on the cover of the book.
She headed back to the others and I put my head on my desk to close my eyes. I used to draw all the time. I’d spend days drawing these humongous Where’s Waldo-like murals—you know, the ones so packed with people and places that you could just disappear into it. I even won a school art contest once. But then my family started to crash. One day, I just stared at that paper and nothing came out. It’s been like that ever since.
I cracked open the book. The first picture I saw was of John Lennon. There was a picture of him and next to it was a picture of his butt! I shut the book quick. Mrs. Lee gave me a sly look.
After a minute, I opened it up again. I noticed a DVD inside the book cover. I don’t know why but when Mrs. Lee turned away, I shoved the book into my backpack.
After school, Mom and I barely saw each other because the only shift she could get in her new job was the night shift. I felt like I was basically living alone and she was just dropping by for visits. To make up for it, she made me keep the Skype connection open on my computer so she could check in on me, and I could see her in the lab where she worked. That was the only way she’d do it. And even though I was fifteen, she made me connect at 10 p.m. when I was supposed to go to bed, just so she could watch me brush my teeth and hit the lights. I’d fall asleep to the glow of the computer, my mom staring into a microscope in an empty room on the other side.
My face time with Mom every day was a quick breakfast when she came home and before I caught the bus to school. And then an early dinner, around 4:30, when the reverse happened. We tried to have normal conversations but it always started with So what’s going on at school today? or ended with How was school today? And when she caught on that school was a nightmare, she stopped asking, which left nothing for us to talk about.
I knew she felt the same way about her job, so I tried to be good. She worked for a genetics lab, mostly staring through a microscope all night, searching for faulty chromosomes (so couples would know who was coming up short in the baby making department, I guess). She dreamed of doing cancer research, but this is what she got stuck with for now.
The night I watched the DVD I took from art class changed everything. The John Lennon stuff was something he did with his wife Yoko. One video was an hour of him just smiling. It seemed stupid at first, but something about having John gaze at you for so long got under my skin. Another film, they shot over three hundred people’s butts and that film was shown in museums! I didn’t know you could do that kind of thing.
The DVD had all kinds of video pieces from the seventies and eighties up until YouTube. Then I got it. Capturing everyday life and showing it in unusual ways—that was performance art.
I dug my video camera out of a box but I wasn’t sure what to shoot. I liked holding it, though. It was all shiny and new and empty—a virgin waiting for something to happen. OK, maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but I could picture the empty flash card in there, inviting me to put something on it. I remembered having that feeling every time I grabbed a blank piece of paper and how happy it made me after I covered every inch of that whiteness with something I’d created. It was a record of what I saw and how I saw it.
Now I just needed something to shoot.
4
I was sitting on the back stoop after a bad day at school, when I spotted a huge anthill in the dirt next to the stairs. Something about them made me angry all of a sudden. There were hundreds of them going about their business, day in and day out, doing their jobs, back and forth, back and forth. They never complained, never fell out of line. I wanted to step on them for it. I don’t know why; it was just some primal thing, I guess. Put them out of their misery.
I stomped on a few and watched the panic set in. Suddenly, it was each ant for itself, struggling to flee the pandemonium. I’d upset the natural order.
It felt good.
It reminded me of one of those old monster movies. Only I was Godzilla.
I got out my camera again, and this time, I knew what to do. Watching those art vids on the DVD gave me ideas. So I began shooting a monster movie with me as Godzilla and the ants as the ones who got in the way. Godzilla stomped out all the ants, even the ones trying to escape. It was horrific and because my macro mode made it look cool, in super slo-mo, it was also kind of poetic.
I cut it together on my computer to some Japanese soundtrack remix I downloaded. It came out good. So I wanted to do some more. I started shooting a lot of weird stuff I saw around the neighborhood, just wandering around the overgrown lots and abandoned houses. I’d record them and make up stories about who lived there and what happened to them: Lost his job and life savings. Robbed a bank and is on the run. Drug dealer/crack house raided by the cops. Family one day mysteriously disappeared . . . dead and buried? More likely is they just moved to the burbs like everyone else and nobody ever replaced them. It was as if somebody stomped on a few St. Louis ants, so the rest scattered.
During lunch break one day at school, I noticed that people behaved a lot like ants too—they were just bigger and wore clothes. We stood in line for food, shuffled back and forth to class, accepted our place in the clique order of things.
Every once in a while, someone broke free—dressed differently, skipped class, acted out against the Queen Bees. They’d get stomped for it—by teachers, school cops, bullies. And for those few moments, chaos broke free—students stopped what they were doing and refused to look away. They couldn’t help it.
My camera had a good optical zoom, so I just started filming all this—especially the ones breaking the rules. Hiding behind my camera, I’d see all kinds of things. A couple making out by their lockers. A girl being hassled by Mr. Jamison for dressing too racy. The white kids trying to act black. Black kids crunking in the parki
ng lot. Gay boys and goths getting in each other’s faces. Nerds texting when they weren’t supposed to. Staff cruising the halls looking for trouble. . . .
“What do you think you’re doing?”
I panned my camera to the oversized head of Mr. Jamison, who was staring me down. His one crooked eye was checking out my camera.
“I’m just . . . filming.”
“You can’t just go around filming people here without their knowledge.”
I blinked. “It’s just . . . a class project. For Mrs. Lee. I’m not going to upload it or anything. I can stop. If you want.”
He eyed me suspiciously. At least I think he did.
“If I see that camera again, I’ll take it.”
I nodded, put it away in my backpack.
Ant. Get back in line.
That Destiny Jones watched this go down and saw a way to get even for her phone. When she caught me filming one of her friends at lunch, she walked by and just snatched the camera out of my hands. She turned the camera on me.
“You know the rules: no cameras in school!” she said.
“Give it back.” I tried to act calm.
“Hey, it took me three days to get my phone back,” she said. “I think I can make some videos of my own for a few days.”
“Give it back,” I said again.
“Or what? You can’t tell Mrs. Lee; she’ll keep it.”
“I said—”
She cut me off. “Uh, oh, she getting mad. She gonna turn into a one hitter-quitter!”
Her friends all thought that was funny. One of them piped in. “I wouldn’t fight her if I was you. D here’s a real boxer. She even took out one of them female cops in the ring at the Rec Center last week.”
I didn’t want to fight. I never hit anybody and I wasn’t about to start now. I just wanted my camera back.
Destiny stepped up for a close-up. “Oh, I can see your veins popping with this zoom—”
I grabbed at the camera before she could finish her sentence. Next thing I knew, we were rolling on the ground, holding onto that thing like it was made of gold. Students came running, yelling “Fight!” and suddenly it was a scene from some jailhouse movie. I grabbed at her hair; she was trying to rip off my shirt. The kids loved it, but I didn’t care. That camera was mine—
A pair of hands suddenly reached down and grabbed us both by the shoulder and pulled us up like we were dolls. Both hands belonged to Mr. Jamison.
Shit.
“You were warned,” he said.
5
Destiny sat there glaring at me. I kept my eyes on Mr. Jamison, who was checking out my camera. “Erica, didn’t we just talk about filming at school?” Destiny made a little satisfied sound.
“I . . .” I didn’t want to see my camera taken away. “My dad gave that to me after we moved away. Then she took it from me.” I didn’t go into details, but I gave him a look that said it was my last memory of home.
He saw the inscription on the bottom and I saw a flicker of recognition in his eyes. Maybe he was a dad too. He turned his attention to Destiny. “I believe I was quite clear with you the last time you were here. You are now at level six. You know what that means?”
My eyes glanced up at the Matrix on the wall. LEVEL 6: EXPULSION.
Her face kind of dropped. I could see she hadn’t thought it through. “But—”
Mr. Jamison was having none of it. “You had plenty of warnings. You had a copy of the discipline matrix. I had discussed it with you and your mother. What part of that wasn’t clear?”
She was speechless. Her toughness vanished. I could see she didn’t want to go.
“But—” she had no words.
“I’ll be calling your mother to pick you up. You are to report to Grant Remedial after a six-day suspension. I’m going to have one of the secretaries clean out your locker and you’ll wait here until you’re picked up.”
Destiny looked helpless as she fought back her tears. She was all talk and bluff before. Now she just seemed lost.
“It was my fault, Mr. Jamison,” I found myself saying. I don’t know why. I should have been happy to see her crash and burn, but there was something about her . . .
“What?” asked Jamison. He smelled a rat and turned to Destiny. “Is that true?”
Destiny looked at me and her eyes softened. “Yeah. What she said.”
Jamison leaned back in his chair, staring at us both at the same time, one eye on each of us. “Do tell.”
I swallowed. “Well, I guess I was filming her and—”
“No,” Jamison interrupted. “I want to her tell it.”
A fraction of a second of panic flashed in Destiny’s eyes before I could see the actor in her take over. There’s was a little shrug that said sorry, this was your idea before she launched into her story.
“Yeah . . . she was filming me and making all kinds of cracks about us, trying to get me all riled up on camera. She got in my face and I asked her to stop, but she wouldn’t. I been trying to be nice to her with her being new and all, but she didn’t want to be hanging with us none.”
Mr. Jamison seemed amused by this. “And why do you think that was?”
She glared at me for a split second. “Maybe ‘cause I’m black?” I rolled my eyes. “What?”
“She may of called me the N-word, I’m not sure—”
I jumped up. “That’s a lie!”
Destiny kind of cowered. “See? She’s trying to hit me again—”
“Alright, alright, that’s enough! Sit down, Erica,” he said.
“But—”
His eye drilled into my head. “Sit. Down.”
I sat.
He shook his head. “I don’t even want to deal with you two right now. I’m calling both of your mothers—”
“What?” I protested. “It wasn’t my fault!”
He cocked his head. “I thought you said it was?”
I stared at Destiny and shot her a message: You owe me. “I guess,” I said.
“Detention, after school, for the next two days. The janitors are going to take a break. I hope you two like mopping.”
“Is that even . . . legal?” I asked.
He rose up; he’d had enough. “Maybe you’d like to call your lawyer.”
I backed off. “No, mopping sounds good.”
Jamison was going to hold on to my camera for three days. Me and Destiny sat on the benches in the hallway waiting for our moms to pick us up. Mine would be pissed being woken up halfway through her sleep. I was trying to think of what to say when I saw Destiny staring at me.
“Why you do that for me?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Felt sorry for you, I guess.”
She kind of laughed. “You? Felt sorry for me?”
Did I really have to say it? “You were about to cry—”
“I was not,” she said, defiantly.
I rolled my eyes. Maybe I should’ve let her take the fall and have one less person making fun of me. But she quickly changed her tune.
“Thanks,” she said quietly, surprising me for a second time.
I glanced up at her and her defiance was gone.
“I guess I owe you,” she said.
“You think?”
Now she smiled. “I will try not to take your camera anymore.”
“Wow. Thanks,” I said, trying not to be too sarcastic. Then I thought some more about the session we just came out of. “Really? The N-word?”
She shrugged. “I figured it’d get a rise out of you. That was the only way to make it real. Sorry.”
I didn’t like being accused of being racist, but she was right. It had been my idea, and she sold it.
“Maybe we should take our act on the road,” I said. She kind of smirked, but that was it. We sat there in silence till our moms came to get us. When my mom saw me in my ripped shirt and then saw Destiny with her defenses up again, I think she felt more sorry for me than mad.
The next day after school, we were mopping. It s
ucked. A lot. Destiny seemed to know what she was doing, and she gave me a few tips like I should wring all the water out first then it wouldn’t be so damn heavy. I asked her how she knew that and she said her mom did custodial work, and she helped out on weekends.
She showed me the best way to cover a long hallway, and we split up. Every time we passed each other, I gave her a look, expecting her to say something, but she never did.
The afternoon after the mop marathon, Destiny seemed kind of down in the dumps and still not saying much. We were vacuuming in the library where the computers were. Mr. Jamison was in his office and there hadn’t been a librarian in this room for two years. Destiny was watching me moving furniture around.
“I don’t like your name,” she said.
Did she want a fight? “What?”
She shrugged. “I mean, no offense, but Erica don’t feel right for you.”
“Like Destiny’s a real name.”
“Hey, mine fits my personality. Erica . . . don’t match you,” she said, matter-of-factly. “You need a nickname.”
I warned her. “Don’t even think about calling me Red.”
“Too obvious.” Something caught her eye behind me and she suddenly grinned. “Think I’m gonna call you Fish from now on.”
I turned around and saw a giant poster of Nemo staring out from a fish tank.
Gee, thanks.
“I been watching you ever since you came to Truman. All you do is sit there and look at people, filming them and what not. It’s like that camera’s your tank and you just watching everyone pass you by. And with that hair, you the same color as Nemo. Fish. Yeah, that’s what you are.”
“Wow. That’s . . . deep . . .” I looked behind her and saw Oprah in one of those READ posters. “. . . Oprah.”