I shake my head and smile, relaxed in the comfort of sitting next to my oldest friend, feeling her shoulder rub against mine. Just sitting next to her makes me feel safe. Until I remember the quiz.
“I’m nervous,” I admit to Amy, whose brown bangs fall over her eyes so that she has to keep brushing them back to see anything. She’s shivering too, rubbing her arms through her lime-green jacket, which looks way too thin. Amy is the only one of us who invariably does homework. Before, Fran was the smartest girl in our group. Everybody knew that, and I felt lucky that she, Jessica, and I hung out together nearly every day at lunch. After school we carpooled to our soccer and field hockey games or track meets. I couldn’t have imagined two better friends. We even babysat together when the parents would let all three of us sleep over, until some neighbors complained about our loud music. But now Fran’s gone—moved away to San Luis Obispo, which I still can’t believe—so Amy is our reliable scholar. There’s an empty spot where Fran used to huddle next to me, so I was sandwiched between her and Jessica. Funny how an absence can feel like a presence, like that space practically glows with her outline and makes me notice how she’s not here. Lucky I’ve got Amy though, to at least help me out.
“I just studied once this weekend for the Spanish quiz, is all, and it’s going to count as part of our grade. Do you get how the punctuation is different?” I ask her. “Like the question mark is at the beginning.” I’m listening for Amy’s answer when I overhear Claudette say quietly to Jessica, “Did you see the looters on TV?” Claudette lowers her voice, but it carries clearly. “I mean, with the fires and all, those black people were like—”
My fist squeezes the foil around my sandwich until a piece of avocado slips out.
“—animals.” Claudette brushes a leaf from the sleeve of her light blue sweater and flips her hair back. She’s new in Canyon Valley this fall; she’s tall like me, blonde like Jessica, and lives with her dad, like Fran does now since her mom flew to Italy to take care of her grandparents. Every day Claudette dresses to the max, and she’s so popular that most girls in my class would crawl on broken glass just to sit next to her. Right from the first day, she latched on to Jessica. Now she reaches up, her blue fingernails flashing, and waves her hand in the air as if she’s brushing looters away.
Jessica makes a face as if she smells something nasty. I know that look: disgust. “They were so—” Jessica grimaces, her tone an exact copy of Claudette’s. It’s amazing how she’s picked up the voice in only a month: a high squeak that drips importance. Now that I see them together, I get why Jessica’s not going out for track this year: it’s not glamorous enough. I peek at Amy to see her reaction, but she’s staring down at her gold leather Skechers like she never heard a thing.
“Wait—” I start to say, choking on a mouthful of whole wheat bread. Wasabi mayonnaise drips onto my lap; I wipe it with my napkin.
“Yeah,” Claudette interrupts, as if I hadn’t spoken at all. “It was gross. My dad says they should be shot.”
“Shot?” I repeat, once my mouth is clear. “Who?”
Claudette leans over and studies my face for a minute, as if she just noticed I’m here. Her look says she knows I have no sense, but she’ll deign to answer anyway. “The looters,” she answers, rolling her eyes.
“Wait a minute.” My mind goes blank in the face of Claudette’s certainty. “They didn’t have …” I stop, trying to remember what Dad said after dinner.
“What?”
“Any water or diapers or food—”
“Nina,” Claudette breaks in, exasperated. “The food was coming.”
“But they were hungry.”
“They were stealing,” Jessica butts in, glancing at Claudette from the side of her eyes. “I don’t think TVs are water,” she says. “The looters didn’t need TVs. Or clothes. The fires are an excuse.” She gazes directly at Claudette, who nods.
“They’re in gangs,” Claudette throws in. “Like the ones in this school. Shoplifting.”
“Yeah, thieves. Common thieves,” Jessica says, with so much vehemence that the top of my nose gets tight and tingles. It’s a warning: tears are about to come if I don’t concentrate, so I bite my cheek. I’ve never heard Jessica talk like this. Is the whole world going freaky? First my dad has a personality implant, and now Jessica? Am I suddenly on some parallel planet, where everybody looks the same but they’re strangers?
“It wasn’t stealing if they didn’t have any food!” I burst out, remembering what Dad said and unexpectedly agreeing. “When white people grab food, the news people say they’re ‘scavenging.’ Like it’s smart.” I’m surprised to find myself on Dad’s side, but this is so insulting I feel like protecting him. How can she say this, like being black automatically makes you dangerous? What does race have to do with anything?
“Nina, white people didn’t break into any stores. My dad and I watched all weekend.” Claudette has a funny look on her pointy face. Her eyebrows are arched way up over her blue eyes, and her nose is wrinkled. “We saw what happened.”
“My dad says—” I want to tell them what he said about him and Jimi, how they could’ve been shot if they happened to get caught up in the fires, trying to flee, trying to find food to eat, but I know they wouldn’t believe me.
“Nina! Your dad’s crazy anyway,” Jessica says, packing away the pasta-and-broccoli salad she didn’t finish, wiping her hands on her paper napkin. “He said stealing is right? Why would you listen to him?” That comfort I felt five minutes ago in her mere presence has melted away.
And what she said is especially annoying because her mom really is mentally challenged, but of course I can’t say so. Her mom has actually been in Contra Costa Regional Medical Center, after she stabbed herself all over her arms with a kitchen knife and Jessica had to wipe up blood from the floor. Another time her mom vomited from swallowing a whole bottle of sleeping pills, so Jessica had to stay at our house. At least once a week Jessica tells me about the scary things her mom is doing. And she calls my dad crazy?
I twist to look around at the other girls sitting near us on the steps. The preppy girls are all quiet, staring off in different directions. Were they listening? I glance over to the giant planters below us, where most of the black kids hang out. Some of them eat over by the science building too, except when it rains in the winter, I heard. Everybody else is inside at their own tables: the Asian kids, the Mexicans (at least that’s what kids call them even though they’re not all from Mexico—lots of them were born here, and some are from other countries too), the African Americans, the whites. I never thought about it that much before.
Jessica opens her bag of Milano cookies and pops a cookie into her mouth before she offers the open bag to each of us. She repeats, “Your dad’s crazy,” then she says to Amy, “How much does the Spanish test count for our grade?” as if nothing happened.
“I have to go,” I tell them and pick up my neon pink backpack, feeling like I’m in a movie where everybody’s working off a script I never received. Who is Jessica? We’ve been best friends since fourth grade, when we both fell in love, passionately in love, with soccer. Every afternoon we raced to the track and kicked a ball around. Jessica was so serious: she wore a red soccer jersey six sizes too big—Mia Hamm’s number nine, of course—and she’d run like the wind for hours, passing, dribbling, shooting. That bright red jersey finally faded until it fell off her, full of holes, last year. Jessica was so wild about Mia, she framed an autographed Olympic calendar my dad bought for her twelfth birthday. It was her prized possession.
As I walk down the steps, I see Lavonn standing in a group of kids. Her mom, Saundra, used to drive our carpool in elementary school. Saundra’s a fashion designer who creates awesome outfits, like the fancy black sweatshirt and hip-huggers Lavonn’s wearing now. Once she made me an outfit too, pants with a matching purple top that was totally cool. I wore that until the pants were so high-water they looked like capris. Lavonn waves, so I stop, shifting my ba
ckpack to one shoulder. We used to sit near each other all the time in grade school, but it seems like in middle school we kind of drifted apart, even though she plays field hockey too. Once Fran and Jessica and I became inseparable, I’d usually see Lavonn with the black kids, but I never thought anything about it. She and I still talk sometimes after school, and we’ve always been friendly. I’ve even been over to her house, though not that recently.
“Hi,” she says, smiling for a second before she spins back to this boy she’s talking to. Her eyes are deep brown and huge, lighting up her round face. My face is all angles. Sharper. I’m also thinner and taller, with long legs and long arms like Anansi the wise spider, as Dad likes to tease me—”a trickster”—and my eyes change from green to brown depending on what I’m wearing.
Today, with her hood pulled up, Lavonn looks as if she’s all eyes. At first, even though she’s not talking to me, it feels okay standing here. The kids are pushing and poking each other, and nobody’s noticing me. “Shut up, I do not like him. He is fine, though!” one of the girls says, laughing. After a few minutes I start to feel strange, with everybody ignoring me. I shift from one foot to another, trying to look casual, like I fit in, when I hear the boy Lavonn’s talking to say something about “white girls” with a sideways glance at me and what sounds like a snicker. Maybe I’m making it up, but it looks that way. I start to sweat. The more I replay “white girls” and how he said the words, sneering, the lonelier I feel, standing on the edge of the crowd. I want to say something to Lavonn, anything, to get her to speak to me, but she can’t take her eyes off that stupid boy. Then, before I can catch her eye, the bell rings. Everybody starts moving together like a pack, and we all herd inside, squeezing through the doorway. Cops block the doors. They’ve been slowing everything down since a gang of boys fought at lunchtime last week. This cop is a woman; huge, stone-faced, arms folded, with a black gun hanging from her belt.
The battle was more than your average fight; we heard a couple of kids had knives. All we knew for sure is that at lunchtime last Monday, two squad cars squealed onto the park by the school, where the skateboarders were doing flippy tricks. A knot of police jumped out with their clubs flailing, the word spread, and everybody rushed over to see the riot. By the time Jessica and I got there, the cops had pushed the boys together in a bunch, forcing their hands behind their backs and cuffing them. From the sidewalk I only recognized one of the kids, a boy in a hoodie named Dwight Jackson, who’s funny and sharp. He’s built like a beanpole, so he twists himself into silly Gumby shapes, and even though he only came to our school this fall, everybody likes him. Especially me, although I don’t think he notices that I’m alive. I was surprised to see him in the midst of a brawl, and wondered how he got involved. You can tell he’s not the kind of kid who’d fight unless he had to. In class he’s a big compromiser, the student who summarizes discussions by weaving different comments together so they all make sense. The biggest shock came when another boy turned toward us, and I saw his face: he looked exactly like Dwight’s ugly twin, with a scowl that could cut diamonds. Even Dwight’s dimples were like slashes on this kid’s cheeks. And whereas Dwight has kind of a ruddy complexion, this kid was so deathly pale he looked like a ghost. His washed-out blue eyes were dull, and the snake tattoo that wound up his neck around his ear added to the ghoulish impression. “Oooh, who’s that?” someone had asked.
“Dwight’s twin brother,” Jessica said with a shudder. “Tyrone. He went to that school for truants.” Later we heard that Dwight and Tyrone, along with a bunch of other guys, were suspended for three weeks, and Tommie Kennedy, one of the hills kids—some people call them preppies—got a week’s suspension. Tommie claims he’s related to President Kennedy, but I doubt it; he always lies. Anyway, they’re all gone.
Soon I’m in Language Arts, trying to focus. I wonder about Dad and Jessica, what happened to make them change so fast. I’m kind of in a trance, half asleep, when a shadowy image flashes, just below consciousness, of Jimi being chased. It’s a movie running just out of sight, one I barely see, but a feeling of dread creeps into me. That’s how I stumble through the afternoon, in a daze, until I finally come alive last period. We call Ms. Pirtle, the Music Appreciation teacher, the Turtle, ‘cause she’s so slow, but on Mondays she plays CDs we can rap to. Some kids are really good. Not me. I’m a beginner at rap, even though I like it. Today I rap to myself, Fire’s coming, better get to shelter, everything’s goin’ helter-skelter. When I shake my head and snap my fingers to get a groove going, I begin to feel better.
Usually I text Jessica first thing when I get home, even if we just ran around the track together. Or Fran, to find out if things are better in San Luis Obispo this fall than when she first got there, or I ask about her classes and how she did that day in field hockey. She’s a star. But today I don’t feel like texting. Instead, I run up to my room and stare at a sketch Jessica doodled last year of Jimi, with his braces and skinny legs, riding his skateboard, and me hanging on to him while we zoomed downhill. I peer into Jimi’s room, where I picture him packing the day before school started. I sat on his bed then, but his eyes stayed on the floor while he picked up his million baseball cards. He pulled down his Harry Potter poster with the flying owl and Hogwarts in the background. He still didn’t look at me when he ripped his red Jimi Hendrix picture off the wall and rolled it up, or when he jammed his clothes into black garbage bags and pushed them near the door. Then he was gone.
The room still feels empty, even though plenty of his things are left. He’s supposed to come over later this afternoon, and I can’t wait. Maybe he’s the one person who’s stayed normal through this whole insane time. Even though neither of us had any say over where we went—and why did they split us up this way?—the other day at Dad’s he seemed like the same old Jimi to me: sweet, clueless, with eyes that gaze at me like I’m the best thing since hot chocolate was invented.
CHAPTER 3
When Dad and Jimi stride through the front door, I see they have a new way of walking together, swaggering in rhythm. Jimi’s growing his hair out too, so he’s even closer to the spitting image of Dad. They’re like Dad and Little Dad. Jimi always did take after him—those full lips and jet-black hair—while I favored Mom’s redheaded family. We used to joke about it, and it never seemed like a big deal before, when we were all mixed up: two kids, two parents, jumbled any which way. Dad would roll outside and we’d toss a ball against the back of the house, or he’d play a computer game with Jimi while Mom unraveled a badminton net with me. But now Jimi and Dad have this circle surrounding them. I can see it in the air, as if somebody took a brown crayon and drew a line around the two of them.
With Mom and me, it’s complicated. Even though our friends say we’re “light version, dark version,” lots of people can’t even figure out we’re related. Once I heard Mom tell her mom, Granny Leigh, “On the ferry to Angel Island, a woman came right up and asked if they were adopted.” Mom’s face flushed and I could tell how angry she was. I thought it was strange that she was so mad, since the woman said how cute we were too, “like sweet little caramel candies.” Instinctively, I walk over and put my arms around Mom from the back. She squeezes me. “Help with dinner?”
“Okay.” I stare down at my arm next to her hands. Darker. How could that boy with Lavonn imagine I was white? I don’t look like anybody in this family.
“Just give me a minute,” Mom says. While I’m waiting, I sprawl in the living room chair, with its stuffed arms facing the bay, and watch the lights below sparkle like bright confetti. Jimi jumps onto one arm, squirming and leaning into me. I’m glad he’s here for dinner; still, out of habit, I push him off and slap his hand when it touches me. Dad wasn’t supposed to stay, just drop Jimi off, but since he’s hanging around in the living room, I tell him, “Dad, at school—”
“Nina, I’ve got a lot on my mind right now. Later, okay?”
So I head into the kitchen where I pour water into a pot for spagh
etti. The kitchen’s so small that Mom and I bump into each other. We start butting our behinds on purpose, and all of a sudden we’re giggling. When Dad comes in sniffing around the food, as if he’d like some too, Mom hands him a glass of red wine. But she doesn’t say anything. They stand there drinking, neither one saying a word. They’re not even looking at each other. “You won’t believe what Jessica said—” I start.
“Look, Maggie, I’m sorry,” Dad interrupts and kind of pitches forward.
“This new girl, Claudette—” I try again.
But Dad ignores me. “Here’s to a good future, Maggie,” he says and raises his glass.
I give up, jiggle the frying pan, and add a few leaves of oregano from the farmers’ market.
“For all of us,” he says.
Mom doesn’t answer. Instead she lifts the pot of boiling spaghetti with two hands and pours the water into a sieve I hold over the sink while the steam rises over my face. Then she slams the empty pot back onto the stove. Loud. And she starts to curse.
Dad leans against the wall of the kitchen, pours himself another full glass, but a few seconds later he bangs his glass on the counter so hard, half his wine sloshes out, staining the counter red. “It isn’t only me.”
Mom makes a lot more noise with cabinet doors. “Not now!” she says, real sharp, and my insides clench tight as a rock. “Later.” She nods her head in my direction.
“Look, I’ve had it with that martyr look.” He tips up his glass. “The white-woman special,” he mutters.
“I said, not now!” Mom turns her back. But I hear her muttering curses and see her shoulders shake while she stirs the spaghetti with a big wooden spoon. It looks like she’s going to whip it into mashed noodles, she’s beating it so hard.
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