by Renée Watson
I force a smile.
“Have a good evening,” he says.
I wonder if any of these boys ever sit in a room for boys’ talk night and discuss how to treat women. Who teaches them how to call out to a girl when she’s walking by, minding her own business? Who teaches them that girls are parts—butts, breasts, legs—not whole beings?
I was going to eat at Dairy Queen, but I don’t want to sit through the discussion of if I’m a five or not. I eat a few fries before I walk out.
“Hey, hold up. My boy wants to talk to you,” Green Hat says. He follows me, yelling into the dark night.
I keep walking. Don’t look back.
“Aw, so it’s like that? Forget you then. Don’t nobody want your fat ass anyway. Don’t know why you up in a Dairy Queen. Need to be on a diet.” He calls me every derogatory name a girl could ever be called.
I keep walking. Don’t look back.
When I get on the bus, it is fuller than I expected it to be. I want to eat, but I decide to wait. Who wants to see a big girl eating fries and a burger on a bus? By the time I am home, my fries are cold, but the burger is still good. I don’t throw the bag away. I’m going to use it tonight. Tear it up and make it into something. Maybe a dress for a girl more confident than I am, who doesn’t feel insecure about eating whatever she wants in public. Maybe I’ll morph it into a crown for the queen Dad says I am.
25
llamar
to name
The crown is in the center. It is not a princess crown. Not dainty and sweet. In the background, the names he could have called me emerge:
Hija
Amiga
Erudita
Artista
Soñador
. . .
Daughter
Friend
Scholar
Artist
Dreamer
26
el barrio
the neighborhood
“Okay, so tell me again: what stop do I get off at?” Sam asks.
I repeat the directions to her, part of me not believing she’s really coming. After the fuss her grandma gave, I never thought she’d go anywhere past Lombard and MLK.
“Can you meet me at the bus stop? I told my grandparents you’d meet me and walk me back.”
I want to say no. I want to say, If you don’t feel safe coming to my house, then don’t come. But instead I say, “Sure,” because I know Sam really wants to come and I know she wouldn’t be so scared if her grandma hadn’t polluted her mind with all those stories.
I time the ride and leave to meet Sam. I zip my jacket, pull my hood over my head. October is gone and November has settled in. Not a lot of rain this month, but cloudy, cold, and gray, always.
Sam is not on the first bus, and for one moment—just one—I think, What if something happened to her? The whole story plays out in my mind—she will be on the news every day because she is a white girl and white girls who go missing always make the news. I will volunteer and join the other searchers. We will search all the many places a body could be. Cathedral Park. Some hidden bush under the St. John’s bridge. For months people will tell girls and women to be careful and walk in pairs, but no one will tell boys and men not to rape women, not to kidnap us and toss us into rivers. And it will be a tragedy only because Sam died in a place she didn’t really belong to. No one will speak of the black and Latino girls who die here, who are from here.
A bus screeches to a stop. I swallow those thoughts, watch the passengers exit the bus, and then I see Sam getting off at the back, smiling her Sam-smile.
We walk to Frank’s. “Jade, my friend, where have you been?” Frank asks. He grabs the silver tongs and begins putting JoJos into a small white bag. I can tell he just made them. The potato wedges have that crisp, golden look that I like. He throws a few packets of ketchup in the bag.
“I’ve been busy with school,” I tell him. “By the time I come home, you’re closed.”
“That’s good, that’s good,” he says. He begins putting chicken wings into another white bag. “Four?”
“Yes, please.”
He nods and puts in a few extra.
Sam walks over to the aisle of chips.
Frank whispers, “How you liking it out there with all them white folks?”
“It’s all right,” I tell him.
“Good, good.”
Sam returns with a bag of Doritos. I hand them to Frank and give him money. He waves his hand in the air. “It’s on the house today,” he says. “Tell your mom I said hello. Haven’t seen her in a while either.”
“I will,” I say. “Thanks for this.” I take the food and walk away. As I’m going out the door, Lee Lee is coming in. “I just left your house. E.J. said you should be back soon,” she says. She reaches out to hug me. I hug her back and smell the hair grease and the fruity lotion she uses all in one. “Feels like I haven’t seen you in forever,” Lee Lee says.
“I know. I came by the other night, but you weren’t home,” I tell her.
“Don’t even try to put this on me. You’re the one who has to take a canoe, a plane, and a bus to school. If you would be regular, I’d be seeing you every day.” Lee Lee barely gets her joke out, she’s laughing so hard. Then she finally notices that I am not alone, and she pulls her laugh in.
“This is Sam,” I tell her.
“Finally!” Lee Lee opens her arms wide like she’s known Sam forever. They hug. She’s good with anybody who’s good with me and vice versa.
“Nice to meet you,” Sam says.
“What are you two about to do?” Lee Lee asks.
“Nothing. Just going back to my house.”
Lee Lee walks the aisles and gets a candy bar and a soda. After she pays, we walk out together. “You want to go to Andrea’s? Kobe is there,” she says. Lee Lee and Andrea are cousins. They’ve lived together since we were in middle school, but Lee Lee always calls it Andrea’s house. Kobe is their cousin too. He might as well live there. Every time I go over, he’s there or on his way or just leaving.
Sam and I eat the JoJos on the way. Lee Lee gulps her soda. When we get to Andrea’s house, her mom points toward the door at the end of a long hallway. “They in there,” she says. Andrea and Kobe are in her bedroom, listening to music. When they see me, they start screaming like I’m some celebrity or something.
“Jade!” Andrea is the first one to hug me. She is wearing jeans and a shirt, but somehow she still looks stylish. Her makeup is flawless—foundation, eye shadow, mascara, lip gloss. Her weave is long. A mixture of blond and brown wavy hair. Andrea holds on to me, and when she lets go, she asks, “Where have you been?”
“She’s been handling her business!” Kobe says. He kisses me on both cheeks. “How’s my girl?” he asks.
“I’m good, Kobe. How are you?”
“Girl, you know me—I stay fabulous,” he says. “And who do we have here?” He looks Sam up and down.
“This is my friend Sam. She goes to my school.”
Kobe hugs her and then reaches for the plastic grocery bag in my hand. “What you got up in there?”
I take out one of the chicken wings and pass the bag. He takes one, grabs a napkin, and gives the bag to Andrea.
The five of us feast on corner store food.
Sam says, “So do you all go to the same school?”
Andrea, Kobe, and Lee Lee nod. Andrea says, “We go to Northside. I like it there. I mean, it’s not like St. Francis, you know.” She looks at me. “We’re not traveling the world and learning a million languages.”
Kobe laughs. “How many languages do you speak now, Jade?”
“Don’t do that,” I say. “I’m only learning one other language.”
Andrea swallows a handful of chips. “French?” she asks.
Lee Lee jumps in. “You know Jade is all about Spanish. Do you guys remember when we were in elementary school and Jade said she wanted to go to Sesame Street and speak Spanish with Maria and Luis and work in the
Fix-It Shop?”
They laugh at me and I laugh too.
“She was like, ‘I’m going to travel the world and be rich and buy my mom a big house.’ Remember that?” Lee Lee asks.
“That’s still the goal,” I tell them.
Lee Lee looks at Sam and says, “But for real, there’s not much to say about Northside. We don’t have all the electives you do at St. Francis. The only club worth mentioning is the after-school poetry club. It’s kind of DIY though.”
Sam says, “DIY?”
“Yeah, it’s not really an official club or anything. My English teacher, Mrs. Baker, lets us use her room after school to write poems. There’s no teacher; we just kind of meet up and write and then share.”
“That’s pretty cool,” Sam says.
Lee Lee reaches for a pillow and props it against her back. “Not as cool as having a garden on your rooftop, and cooking classes.”
“Well, yeah, but I don’t know many teachers at St. Francis who would let us stay in their classrooms and write poems. I mean, they’d make it so formal that they’d take the fun out of it. You know? It really would have to become a club or an after-school class with a staff adviser and blah, blah, blah. No freedom to just be, you know?”
“She’s right,” I tell them, just to be sure Lee Lee, Kobe, and Andrea know Sam isn’t trying to make them feel better about Northside. “Lee Lee’s poems are so good, she could probably teach the class,” I tell Sam.
Lee Lee smiles. Big, like she needed to hear that.
Andrea turns the music up a little and says, “This is my song!” and that gets us all singing and listening to music for the rest of the afternoon.
When it’s time for Sam to go home, she takes her cell phone out and calls her grandfather to let him know she’s on her way.
Lee Lee gives me a look and says, “You’re walking her to the bus stop? I’ll go too.”
We say our good-byes to Andrea and Kobe, and leave.
As we walk to the bus stop, Lee Lee says to Sam, “So, did you just move to Portland?”
“Me? Oh, no. I was born at Emanuel Hospital. I’ve lived in Portland my whole life.”
“Oh,” Lee Lee says, her brows scrunched in a fit of confusion. “So why— So where do you live?”
“Northeast Portland. Not too far from Peninsula Park.”
Lee Lee doesn’t ask any more questions. She keeps walking. We make it to the bus stop just as the bus is pulling up.
“See you,” Sam says.
We wave and say good-bye.
On the way home, I tell Lee Lee what Sam’s grandma said about North Portland. “That’s why I walked her to the bus stop,” I say. “To make her grandparents comfortable.”
Lee Lee laughs. She says, “White people are a trip.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t believe her grandparents are scared to let her come over here. There are a lot of white people who live over here. Don’t they know that?” she asks. “And maybe they don’t know—but Northeast has its sketchy streets still. It hasn’t changed over there that much.” Lee Lee shakes her head. “How you gonna live in a ’hood but be afraid to come to another ’hood?” she asks.
We laugh about that the whole way home.
27
agradecido
thankful
For Thanksgiving, Mom and I do our annual tradition. This time E.J. and Lee Lee join us. We go downtown and volunteer at the Portland Rescue Mission. “We don’t have much, but we have more than a lot of other people,” Mom says.
I hope one day my family gets to a place where we can be thankful just to be thankful and not because we’ve compared ourselves to someone who has less than we do.
After we’re done dishing out turkey dinners with all the holiday fixings, we eat dinner at my house. Mom made ham with her not-so-secret ingredient of brown sugar, and all the traditional sides are spread across the table. Everything looks so good, you’d never know this wasn’t some fancy dining room table holding it all up.
As we eat, Lee Lee says, “My teacher Mrs. Phillips doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Can you believe that?”
Mom puts her fork down. “Why not? She doesn’t have anything to be thankful for?”
E.J. swallows and says, “Oh, Mrs. Phillips—I remember her. She’s that revolutionary-activist-fight-the-power teacher at Northside. I loved her class,” he says. “I remember her telling us that Thanksgiving should actually be a national day of mourning or something like that.”
Lee Lee nods. “That’s exactly what she says.”
“What does that even mean?” Mom asks.
E.J. answers, “Basically, we’re sitting here feasting and celebrating that our nation was stolen from indigenous people. Columbus didn’t discover nothing.”
All of a sudden my food doesn’t taste as good as before.
Mom wipes her mouth with her napkin. “I’ve never thought about it like that. Thanksgiving has always been a day for getting together with family, a day to thank God for my personal blessings. But, well, I guess your teacher has a point.” Mom takes another bite of food.
Lee Lee says, “Yeah, Mrs. Phillips is always asking us to think about other perspectives. Next week we’re having a cultural exchange with teens who attend a program at the Native American Youth and Family Center.”
“I think we went there, too.” E.J. says. “And they came over to the rec.”
I feel so embarrassed that I’ve never even thought about any of this. Never realized that there was a community center for Native American youth here in Portland. Mom, E.J., and Lee Lee keep on talking, comparing the experience of African Americans and Native Americans in the United States. I don’t even know what was said to make E.J. get all fired up. He’s talking like he’s in a debate. “I mean, I get all of that—the US has done some messed-up things. But I’d rather live here than any other country. Real talk. I feel what Mrs. Phillips is saying and everything, but at the end of the day, we still got a lot to be thankful for living here.”
Mom takes a bite of food, then says, “Jade, you’re mighty quiet over there. What do you think?”
“Me?” I take a moment to get my thoughts together. “I guess, well, you’re all right. I think the US has a lot to be thankful for and a lot to apologize for.”
The rest of dinner is more somber than usual. The mood doesn’t lighten up until Mom brings out the peach cobbler that Lee Lee and I made. It’s the first time we’ve ever baked anything from scratch. Mom dishes out cobbler for each of us. I watch her as she takes her first bite. “You like it?” I ask.
“Mmm-hmm,” she says, even though the look on her face says she wants to spit it out.
E.J. gets a spoon and scoops out a bite. “Let me taste,” he says. He blows on the spoon, all dramatic like it’s burning hot, and then he puts it into his mouth. He swallows and looks at Mom, who gives him her don’t-start-nothing look, and then he says, “No comment.”
Lee Lee hits him on the arm. “Forget you. Next time you make dessert.”
“Next time let’s just get ice cream from Safeway.”
We all end up laughing, and the night ends with card games and Scrabble, and I go to bed, full in so many, many ways.
28
las diferencias
differences
It’s the first weekend of December. The rain is steady and the air is cold. Maxine honks her horn for me to come out. I get into her car and am greeted by the blowing heat. It feels like a sauna in here.
We drive downtown, to the Portland Art Museum. “Have you been to a museum before?” Maxine asks.
“Does OMSI count?”
“Kind of. Well, not really. I mean, OMSI is interactive, so it’s not the same as traditional museums. That’s what makes it so unique. Where we’re going today is, like, well, I don’t know. It might be different than what you’ve experienced. Like, you can’t touch the art and you won’t be able to take photos, and it’s a really quiet space, so we’ll have to talk so
ftly.”
I feel like she thinks I don’t know how to act in public or something. “Okay, got it,” I say. I look out the window. The weeping clouds drench the ground. Maxine turns her windshield wipers to a faster speed.
When we get to the museum, we meet up with the rest of the group. Sabrina repeats some of the same rules Maxine told me in the car. She gives us a time to meet back at this spot. “Have fun,” she says.
As we enter the first exhibit, Maxine’s phone rings. “Give me a sec,” she says. She walks away from me and answers her phone. “Jon?”
I stand to the side of the entrance. Ten minutes pass. I go to find Maxine. She is outside, standing in front of the building.
When she sees me, she mouths, I’m so sorry. This is important. She shoos me off with her hand. “Go ahead. Go in without me.”
I stand there for a moment. “Are you sure?”
She nods.
I walk away. I wonder what they have to talk about. I mean, when you break up with someone, it’s over. That’s it. What’s left to discuss over and over? And why do these conversations have to happen when Maxine is with me? For all the things about Maxine that I respect and admire, there are things like this that make me feel like she can’t really tell me anything about loving myself and taking care of myself because here she is, doing the opposite.
I walk around the museum and bump into another mentee-mentor pair who are taking photos even though there’s a sign that says no photographs are allowed.
“Hey, Miss Jade,” Brenda calls out. “Where’s Maxine?”
“On the phone. Outside.” I don’t try to hide my frustration.
Brenda makes a confused face but doesn’t say anything. “You can join us,” she says.
We walk through the museum, but I can’t even really enjoy it. I feel like I’m intruding on their time, and I can’t stop thinking how rude it was for Maxine to take that phone call—especially from Jon.
I stray from Brenda and Jasmine and walk through the photograph collection. I have walked through most of the exhibits when I see Sabrina, who tells me it’s time to meet up at the front so we can reflect. We’re all supposed to say one thing we enjoyed and one question we have. I skip out on the closing to go to the bathroom.