by Mark Oshiro
* * *
Piedmont was to the northeast of their house, and it took just about twenty minutes for Moss to bike there. There were more cars out than he expected, so navigating around those that decided to sit in the bike lane on Broadway added a couple of minutes to his time. He cut a sharp right on Piedmont Avenue to head up to Fentons, and the neighborhood changed within a few blocks. The tall businesses of downtown Oakland morphed first into blocks of condos and apartment buildings, then into the quaint, small-town feel of Piedmont. Esperanza’s house wasn’t far from the main drag, but he was glad she’d chosen a neutral location for them to meet at.
Well, relatively neutral, he told himself. As he pulled up next to Fentons and saw the line stretching outside the shop, it was like he was in a different world. Piedmont was full of people who liked to tell outsiders that they lived in Oakland. A certain amount of street cred came with that, at least if you weren’t from here. But these people would probably never come to his neighborhood. Moss locked his bike up in front of a baby-clothes boutique, one of those shops where an afternoon’s shopping spree might be worth more than his mom paid in rent for a month. He stared at the clothes in the window. Who needs a fashion-forward baby? Wouldn’t they just throw up on the clothes anyway?
A white couple pushing a stroller gave Moss a wide berth, and he had to laugh at them. What else could he do? Whenever he came to this part of town, someone clutched their pearls so hard that it was impossible not to notice it. It gave him a little thrill, knowing that his very presence could upset someone’s walk or their afternoon searching for craft toilet paper holders and heirloom tomatoes.
He would make the best out of a terrible situation, and that included eating at Fentons. The first time Esperanza had taken him there, Moss gave them props. “White people know how to do ice cream,” he said. “I will give them that.”
“Ice cream and colonization,” she had added. “A winning combination.”
Now, Moss didn’t yet see Esperanza around, so he pulled his phone out. Nothing from her. And nothing from Javier, he realized. He looked up the street, then in the other direction, and didn’t see her. He wandered closer to Fentons, unsure whether or not to get in line. What if someone got all twisted because Esperanza joined him later? Could he risk that?
Thankfully, Moss heard Esperanza call his name out, and then he saw her approaching from the east side. He waved to her, and she pointed to the end of the line, so he quickly made his way there to join her.
“How ya doin’, Moss?” She shielded her eyes from the sun with her hand. “Everything okay?”
“As good as can be, I guess,” he said. “You?”
“Boring Sunday. Mom and Dad are arguing about some plant thing, so I was more than happy to get out of the house.”
“Seriously,” he said, “your parents have some of the strangest arguments.”
“Tell me about it,” she groaned. “Your mom doing all right?”
“Yep! Day off again, so she was reading in bed when I left her.”
The line inched up some, and Esperanza didn’t waste time. “So what’s up? Something I can help you with?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know about that, but I just started freaking out earlier. And you help calm me down so…” He spread his hands out. “Here I am.”
She reached out and rubbed his right shoulder. “Talk to me, Moss. What’s freaking you out? Is it about our meeting yesterday?”
“Kinda?” He sighed loudly. “I was getting my hair cut today, and Reg was there, and everything was fine. I guess I was distracted on my way home, and I didn’t realize I was right by the market and…”
Esperanza was already nodding her head. “This is a lot for you, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “It’s hard for me not to assume the worst once the police are involved with anything, so there’s a part of me that wants to run away from all this. To just wash my hands of it and not deal with it at all.”
The line moved forward again, and Esperanza looked a bit panicked. “I hope I haven’t been pressuring you to do this,” she said. “I know I kinda just took charge yesterday, but I was thinking that since I don’t go to your school, that might be a good thing.”
“Nah, you’re fine,” he said. “I think that’s why it feels so good to talk to you about this stuff sometimes. You’re not exactly connected to it, so I can get, like … I dunno. An outside perspective, I guess?”
“Sure,” she said. “I try to understand what’s going on with you. And it seems perfectly reasonable to me that this would cause you a lot of anxiety.”
“To be perfectly cured with some dope ice cream,” he added, raising himself up on his tiptoes to see how many more people were in front of him.
“Exactly,” she said. They dropped into silence for a few seconds, and then Esperanza said, “Sometimes, I wish I just went to your school.”
He balked at her. “Really? Isn’t your school like, all high-tech and stuff?”
“I suppose,” she said.
“You suppose? Y’all got like Wi-Fi and stuff, right?”
“Yeahhh,” she said cautiously, turning her body away from Moss.
“And you were telling me about your college fair, and that was definitely better,” he said, building a momentum. “Plus, y’all get catered lunch, and you have off-site dances, and you have real-ass textbooks and…”
He stopped. Maybe that was shame on her face, but Esperanza did not seem all that interested in committing to the point she’d tried to make. “What is it?” Moss said.
“I just meant that it would be nice to go to the same school as everyone else,” she said, bashful. “It’s kinda lonely over here in Piedmont. I can’t relate to this.” She swept her hand in a grand gesture. “This is not where I would choose to live if I had the choice. But I never got a choice in all this.”
Something nagged at him, poked his heart, but he pushed it aside for the moment. “Oh, yeah, of course,” he said. “Yeah, that would be cool if we were all together.”
He let the moment pass, and Esperanza seemed satisfied that they’d smoothed things over. Yet as she began to talk about her newest attempt to chat up some cute girl in her gym class, the thought Moss had shoved away came back to haunt him.
She doesn’t understand how good she has it, Moss thought. I don’t think she’d last a week at our school.
He loved Esperanza. She had been there for him during some of the most difficult years of his life, right when Moss first became a teenager. They’d been attached at the hip by the end of seventh grade, partially because Esperanza was preternaturally talented at dealing with Moss whenever a panic attack hit him, whenever he was on the brink of a breakdown. Esperanza’s parents were well-meaning, but occasionally clueless, certainly unprepared for the complications of adopting a brown girl and raising her in a white home. Moss was often a sounding board for her as she worked through her issues. He had even helped her during her first breakup, at the end of summer the year before, and it felt like they’d cemented a mutual bond that couldn’t be broken by anything.
Yet every once in a while, Moss was reminded that her adoptive parents came from money. That they’d raised Esperanza in a world very different from his own. Perhaps right now, Moss was more sensitive than usual and that was why her comment hit so hard. But as the two of them ordered their cones and Esperanza paid for it, Moss knew he needed to get away, take some space. He ate his chocolate-chip cone and told Esperanza that he had more to think about. By himself. Moss was on his bike and flying back to West Oakland a few minutes later. When he biked past Lowell Park, saw the men playing chess at the park benches, saw the complicated graffiti on the side of one of the apartment buildings, he began to relax.
He had just needed to get back home.
13
The four of them—Moss, Njemile, Kaisha, and Reg—stood entirely motionless, staring in horror at the nightmare before them.
They couldn’t even see the steps of W
est Oakland High, nor could they see a shred of the concrete path that led to the stairs at the front of the school. There was a persistent din in the air, a combination of excited and angry voices clashing with one another. Every so often, someone in the rear of the group would shout toward the front, but it was a futile act. You couldn’t make out a single voice in that hive. Moss watched as a few balls of paper were launched forward out of the surging mass.
And at the top of the steps, just in front of the group of students, sat the two metal detectors.
They were a slate gray, shiny, intimidating. They stood nearly eight feet high, locked together with a set of cables that crisscrossed from one machine to the other, making it impossible to move between them. They were placed perfectly within the doorways, as if the school had been built around them.
Mr. Elliot was nowhere to be seen, which surprised Moss. He figured that the man responsible for signing the school up for this would want to be there on the first day of implementation, but that didn’t seem to be the case. Was he in hiding, desperate to avoid this disaster? I wish I could do the same, Moss thought.
They stared at the throbbing mass ahead of them, and Moss realized it was the closest thing to a school-wide riot that he’d ever seen. It made the incident with Shawna pale in comparison. When Moss turned to look at his friends, they all had their mouths wide open.
“I’m glad I didn’t bring my wheelchair today,” Reg said. “Something tells me I’d never get to class if I had.”
“You sure your leg feels okay?” Kaisha asked, her face full of concern.
Reg took a few tentative steps forward. “Yeah, it’s not so sore today,” he said.
“This is so much worse than I thought,” Njemile said.
“Well, it’ll work in our favor, won’t it?” Moss said.
She looked at him, impressed. “Look at you! Seeing the positive side of things.”
He grinned. “Well, I have to admit. This looks like a disaster. I guess I couldn’t imagine how bad it would truly be.”
Kaisha had her phone out and was snapping photos from multiple angles. “Oh, this’ll be perfect for Instagram,” she muttered. “Quick, what’s a good hashtag?”
“What?” Moss said.
“You know, something catchy I can tag all these photos with.” She paused, thinking, her hand twisting one of the knots on her head. “‘WestOaklandTrafficJam’? Nah, too long.”
“‘SpaceJam’?” Reg said.
She cocked her head at him. “I’m giving you bonus points for a Space Jam reference, but no, that’s too weird.”
As she continued to type, the four of them inched forward. In the minutes they’d been there, the crowd didn’t seem to have moved at all or in any particular direction. Some students were crowding around the edges, hoping to slip in on the side and get in before anyone else.
Rawiya joined them a couple of minutes later, and in that time, they hadn’t budged at all. She then whistled before saying, “Well, we’re missing homeroom.” She looked at her watch. “In three, two, one.…”
The school bell rang loudly over the courtyard, and the students’ voices rose to drown it out in frustration. “Come on!” Moss heard someone yell near to him, and a bunch of people began to shove forward. They didn’t move with them; Reg turned around, his limping more pronounced. “Would y’all mind waiting until this calms down?” he said, worry in his voice. “I don’t have the strength to fight through this.”
“Yeah, I’m with Reg,” Kaisha said. Moss nodded his head and the six of them sat down in the yellowed, dying grass of the courtyard. Soon after, Bits wandered over their way, nodding their head at Moss before sitting next to him. They all sat there for nearly forty minutes, spending the majority of that time silent in awe of the unreal situation unfolding in front of them. More students arrived to school on foot, and Moss noticed a group of them collecting across the street, their voices loud and exuberant, but not more so than the pulsing, formless entity outside the school. The students pushed against one another, scrambling to fill any available space. It was at least twenty minutes before the people a few feet in front of them appeared to have moved forward at all. By the time Reg felt safe enough to stand and join the remaining stragglers, Njemile had managed to finish a piece of homework left from the night before, and Rawiya had gotten forty pages ahead in one of her books for Senior Lit.
Is it always going to be like this? Moss wondered.
“You’re worried,” Njemile said, standing at Moss’s side. “And I don’t really blame you.”
“I don’t like this,” Reg said, and Moss noticed that his right arm was shaking. Was he nervous? In pain?
“None of us do,” Moss said, still staring at Reg’s arm.
Reg used his other hand to stop himself. “I’m okay, I promise. Just a little on edge, that’s all.”
“You know,” said Rawiya, “if everyone’s late to homeroom tomorrow, how long will it be before they start writing us up for being tardy?”
Bits stood and swore. They walked away from the group for a second, then returned, shaking their head.
But Moss stood. “Nah, I think we’re fine,” he insisted. “How can anyone blame us for that?”
“Moss makes a good point,” said Kaisha. “Does Mr. Elliot think that he can ask students to be here over an hour before school starts every day?”
“He probably would do something like that,” said Rawiya bitterly.
“Maybe, but imagine how many parents he’s gonna piss off,” Moss said. “Look, I know I’m negative all the time, but I really think he’s shot himself in the foot with this.” He sat back down. “I say we wait it out.”
And so they did. Moss pulled out Things Fall Apart and laughed to himself at the new irony that the title represented. He thumbed through the book for a few minutes before stashing it back in his bag and just watching. The blob of students became a twisted version of a line after ten minutes, and not long after that, there were only a handful of people left waiting to get into school.
Which had started forty minutes prior.
Kaisha put her phone in her pocket and sighed loudly. “Shall we try this?” she said, moving ahead of them. The crowd had thinned down to less than twenty students, and the courtyard was far quieter than it had been an hour before. They all nodded at Kaisha and let Reg set the pace for them. He took his time, making sure each crutch was placed properly before continuing. As they made their way closer to the machines, Moss got his first glimpse of the cops that had been sent to work what arguably must have been their worst assignment ever. A tall officer was on the right side, in front of one of the metal detectors, telling each student what process they were to follow. His sandy blond hair was drenched in sweat; it could not have been pleasant to stand on those steps for as long as he had with no promise of shade.
On the far side of the detector on the left, another officer—brown, dark hair, angular features—was monitoring a screen of some sort, gesturing every so often for the next student to come through it. If the machine did not beep, the student continued on. But one of the cheerleaders set it off, and the blond cop roughly pulled her to the side. A third cop gathered the stuff left behind and gestured for the cheerleader to enter the main office. The girl was quick to show emotion, her tears springing out in a matter of seconds, and Moss didn’t blame her. But the source of the disastrous line to get into school now made sense: They only had one of the machines running. If this weren’t such a dire scenario, Moss would have broken out into laughter.
They finally made it to the stairs. Reg struggled with the first few steps, his forehead gleaming with a new sheen of sweat. Kaisha had a hand on his back, her bulging backpack slung on the opposite shoulder. Moss took one side of Reg while Kaisha stood on the other; their friends were behind them. As Reg struggled up the steps, Moss’s heart raced in his chest. This felt wrong. That was the only thing he could think, over and over. This isn’t what school is supposed to feel like.
They
reached the top step, and a couple of students ahead of them prepared to pass through the machines. Moss watched them empty their pockets and place the contents of them into small, round plastic containers. Their backpacks and the bowls went on a faded portable table and were slid across so the guards on the other side could have them ready in case of a possible search. While Moss watched this process unfold a couple of times, he became aware of a distinct hum from the devices, low and subtle. It made his skin crawl.
Reg moved up to the table and placed a single crutch on top of it. He used his now-empty right hand to clutch the table, and put the other crutch on the table. He placed his wallet and a ring of keys in one of the bowls, which he then slid across to the guard on the other side. The cop rolled his eyes at Reg, a sign of his impatience, and began to question him.
“Do you have any weapons on you?”
Reg glared at him. “No,” he said, out of breath. “No, I don’t.”
“Have you emptied your pockets?”
“You just watched me do that.”
Moss heard Njemile snicker behind them. The cop didn’t find it amusing, though, and his scowl deepened. “Look, man, I gotta ask these questions. To everyone.”
“Sorry,” Reg said, his hand still on the table. He stared at the device, and Moss watched him inspect it, tracing the edge of it with his gaze. He looked back at his friends, but Moss wasn’t sure what he wanted.
Moss stepped forward. “What’s up, man?”
Reg shook his head, subtly at first, then much more furiously. “No,” he said. “I can’t do this.”
“Hurry up, dickwad!” someone shouted behind them, and Kaisha turned to give them a murderous stare.
“This is wrong,” said Reg. “And I don’t trust this thing, y’all.” He backed away from the devices. “You guys got some pat-down lane or something? Because I am not walking through this.”
“Yes, you are,” said the blond cop, and he took a few steps forward, his hands at his hips, a scowl on his clean-shaven face. “No exceptions.”