Anger Is a Gift Sneak Peek

by Mark Oshiro

  And then Moss realized that was probably by design.

  Kaisha angrily grabbed her bag without saying a word, and she stood a few feet behind the line of cops, waiting for everyone else. Njemile went through next, and one of the cops asked her to take off her wig to show him what was underneath. When she refused, they tried to cuff her, too, at least until Kaisha angrily shouted at them. “It’s not a wig, you pigs! Don’t y’all know anything about hair?”

  The same one who had searched Kaisha released Njemile, turning to look at Kaisha, and for a moment, Moss thought that there might be an escalation. But he said nothing and resumed patting down the next student.

  Moss sucked in his breath, relieved, but still miserable. He finally approached the detector, put his backpack down on the small table, and then passed through the machine uneventfully. The cop stopped Moss and gestured for him to put his arms up. He raised his hands and the cop ran his hands over his body. A memory dragged up in his mind: the Alameda County Fair. Moss was eight, and his father took him to watch the judging of the animals, and Moss remembered crying because they were all too rough with the pigs and the sheep. He hadn’t thought of this memory in a while, and he wasn’t thrilled that this was the time his mind decided to turn to that page in its mental Rolodex.

  Moss felt the gloved hands run over his chest, down his sides, and then his shirt was lifted up, exposing his stomach to everyone, and he felt shame and terror rush through him anew. His own hands instinctively bolted up to pull his shirt down, but Moss stopped halfway, raising them again. Don’t draw attention to yourself, he thought fiercely.

  His eyes watered as the cop ran a finger around him, inside Moss’s waistband, rubbing against the part of his stomach that stuck out over the belt. The cop pulled Moss’s shirt down and then knelt next to him, running hands down each of his legs, starting at the top, just inches from his crotch, and squeezing every so often.

  “Take your shoes off.”

  When he spoke, Moss thought he was imagining it. The man spoke again, this time more forcefully. “I said, take off your shoes. You deaf or something?”

  The anger conquered everything else in that instant. It pushed the anxiety and fear away, and it pumped through his veins. “No,” Moss said.

  The cop stood and moved in front of Moss. “What did you say?”

  “No,” Moss repeated, his eyes locked on the tinted visor of the guard. He focused on it, hoping he could see something behind it. “You don’t need me to do that.”

  The man reached out quicker than Moss expected and wrapped the front of Moss’s shirt inside a fist, and he lifted. Moss was not a small guy, a fact he had frequently lamented to himself, but he was shocked when his own feet began to dangle, unable to reach the floor. He brought his right hand up to his neck to free himself, and the guard swatted the hand away. Moss was aware of his own breath—struggling to escape, then struggling to enter—and the yelling around him. Was that Njemile? Kaisha? He couldn’t make it out enough, and it scared him, fear surging into his heart. Who was yelling? What were they saying?

  He was lowered slowly back to the concrete, and the pressure around his neck was gone. He gasped for air, and Rawiya’s face appeared in front of his, blurry at first, then in focus. She had her hands on either side of his face, caressing him, and then she pulled him into a hug. “Just breathe, Moss,” she said. “You’re okay.”

  “What do you think you’re doing?” The voice was loud, above Moss and to his left. He and Rawiya turned together to see Mr. Jacobs standing toe-to-toe with the cop, his own nose just inches away from the helmet. His eyes were red with rage as he continued shouting at the man. “You are not to assault my students! We don’t need them to take their shoes off unless we have a reason to suspect there is something in their shoes.” He paused, and Moss saw his chest heave up and down as he breathed in and out forcefully. “Did the screening tell you that this student had something suspicious there?”

  There was a long silence. “I’ll ask you again: Was there a reason to ask this gentleman to remove his shoes?”

  Another pause. The cop didn’t move at all; he stood statue still. “No, there wasn’t.”

  Mr. Jacobs turned to Moss, laying a hand upon his shoulder. His eyes changed, communicating warmth and concern. “Are you okay? Do you need anything? Would you like to see the nurse?”

  The questions poured out of Mr. Jacobs rapidly, and Moss struggled to find his voice to answer them. “I think I’m okay,” he croaked, standing up. His friends and a huge crowd of students stood behind the assistant principal, their faces a mix of shock and worry. “I’ll be okay,” he said, quieter this time, and his eyes drifted from one student to another. How many were there watching him? A hundred? More? They were crowded in the hallway, some trying to climb up on others to get a better view, some of them on tiptoes. Phones were raised up high, too, poking up above the crowd, their owners desperate to get a good shot.

  “Do you need to see the nurse?” Mr. Jacobs repeated, and he tried to direct Moss toward the main office by the shoulder. Rawiya, who had ahold of Moss’s other arm, jerked him back, and Mr. Jacobs threw his hands up in concession. “Please, if you need anything, you can come to me.”

  Rawiya guided Moss forward to their friends, and as she did so, Moss turned his head around to see Mr. Jacobs speaking to the cop, who remained as still and passive as before. He could not hear a word coming from the man’s mouth, but Moss could tell he wasn’t pleased. But it was little comfort to him. He swallowed, his throat still raw and sore, and it reminded him that he wouldn’t be the only student roughed up that day. How could they have known? How long had they had to prepare for this? Would anyone even be able to leave the campus that afternoon?

  Kaisha darted forward then and hugged him, hard. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah. We have to do this,” he announced, rubbing the side of his neck. “We have to walk out of class.”

  “I’m there,” Kaisha affirmed. “Ain’t no way I’m letting them get away with this.” She held up her phone. “I’m sorry I didn’t get video or anything. My phone is acting weird. I was trying to post it to Snapchat, but I can’t seem to open any apps.” She shook her head. “It’s just weird.”

  Njemile moved in next to him. “Mine’s the same way,” she said. “It just seems to have turned off and won’t come back on.” She sighed. “I’m in regardless, though. They can’t stop me.”

  “Same here,” Bits offered.

  He gave Rawiya’s hand a squeeze. “Thanks for that,” he said. “My ride-or-die chick,” he added, and they shared a laugh, a nervous reaction as much as an act of desperation.

  Moss looked about the group gathered. He didn’t recognize most of the faces. Some were younger, some older. He heard a number of them say the same thing: They’d be leaving at 2:00 P.M., too. Others confirmed with nods and pats on the shoulder. He still had a nervous fire running through him from his confrontation, but he couldn’t process it. It was almost as if the incident had happened to someone else. But it had happened to him, these people had witnessed it, and they still wanted to risk their own safety, all for some idea. And what would they accomplish today? Moss wasn’t sure; fear struck him as his brain told him that this would be worthless, that they’d never get anything done.

  “I have to do this,” he said out loud. “I can’t let them stop me.”

  The group walked to their morning classes, splintering as they broke off to find their homerooms. Some of them bid Moss goodbye and reminded him of their commitment to the walkout, while others just quietly departed. As they came to the hallway where Rawiya and Moss would have to separate, she grabbed his arm again. “This is about you now, too,” she said.

  “It shouldn’t have to be,” he said, hanging his head.

  “But it is. We’re doing this for Reg and Shawna and for you and for anyone else who’s going to have to deal with this bullshit here. For all of us.”

  He smiled at her, grateful for
her support. “Thank you.”

  “We’ll make you proud,” she said, and then she walked off to class. Moss stood there for a few seconds, his mind swimming with thoughts and anxieties. The bell rang loudly above him, and he bolted down the hall to Mrs. Torrance’s homeroom. I hope this works, he thought, his neck still sore and his heart still racing.

  22

  It was 1:46 P.M.

  Moss sat in his biology class, not far from Rawiya, who glanced at the clock every so often while taking notes. He didn’t understand how she could concentrate for as long as she was. His mind swung between panic and hope, fear and exhilaration. He stared out the window, his attention on the students jogging and walking around the track beyond the baseball field. Moss didn’t envy them as he wiped at a drop of sweat that ran slowly down his right temple. In every class he’d had that day, the air had not been running. None of the teachers knew why. By the time he got to Mrs. Torrance’s English class, she had turned her small desk fan out toward the classroom. It didn’t help much. The heat stuck to his skin and now made it too hard for him to listen to Mr. Roberts’s lecture.

  Moss suspected that this was intentional, too. The other kids in the class fidgeted, and even Mr. Roberts stopped every so often to dab at his forehead with an off-white handkerchief before continuing to lecture the disinterested, overheated students about biodiversity. There was sweat glistening off his bald head, too. His dark beard was cropped close, and Moss often felt brief bursts of desire when he spent too long staring at the man’s face. In last year’s astronomy course, girls would often giggle and ask Mr. Roberts any asinine question they could just so he’d speak to them. But Moss wasn’t daydreaming about this handsome teacher today. Instead, his eyes were constantly jumping up to the clock out of the hope that more time had passed than Moss was conscious of.

  It was 1:48 P.M.

  He looked over at Rawiya again and she shot a quick smirk at him before writing down something else. He didn’t have any other friends in this class, but Moss still let his attention wander, desperate to get out of this room. He watched as Carmela passed a note to one of her friends, a light-skinned girl whose name Moss didn’t know. They both caught him looking at them, but didn’t break the eye contact. Both of them nodded while smiling, and the message felt clear. We got your back. How did they know? he wondered. Had Kaisha reached them? Was it just word of mouth?

  A folded piece of paper—it looked like the same one Carmela had—was slid onto his desk, and Moss quickly tucked it under the edge and out of view of Mr. Roberts, who droned on about the Amazon rain forest. He unfolded it as quietly as he could and read:

  Are you okay? We saw that guy hurt you. We’re leaving class at 2.

  Moss looked back toward the two girls and nodded his head. Thank you, he mouthed at them.

  It was 1:50 P.M.

  He shifted in his seat and examined his fingernails, then ran a hand over the welt that had formed around his neck. He couldn’t stop touching it, the skin raised and tender. It hurt to swallow, but he found it hard to stop himself. He had wanted to text his mother about it, to warn her so she wasn’t surprised when she saw him at two. His phone, however, had no service whatsoever. If he tried to open any of the apps, it would freeze, and he’d have to restart it. He had repeated this process over and over again without any success. Had they done something to all their phones?

  Moss hated the thought. His mouth was drying out quickly, and whenever he glanced up at the clock, it made him nervous. Don’t look at it again, he told himself. You’ll only make it worse. So he tried to focus on his teacher, but the words sounded wrong. They were all hard angles and harsh tones, and he soon felt his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth, everything dry once more. Why didn’t he bring any water with him? He stole another glance at the clock.

  It was 1:52 P.M.

  It was the scuffling outside in the hallway that pulled his attention away from the sluggish journey of the second hand. Moss heard the squeak of sneakers on tile, then voices raised in alarm, incoherent and high-pitched. Then the entire class heard a large thump, and Mr. Roberts stopped talking, all their eyes now locked on the classroom door. Through the glass, they could see bodies passing by quickly, just blurs of color and shadow.

  “What in God’s name…” Mr. Roberts said. His exclamation died as he moved to the door. When he pulled it open, they could see students streaming past, many of them shouting at one another. “Move! Move!” a young man called, and Moss and many of the others in the classroom got out of their seats. But no one made a move to leave.

  “What’s going on?” their teacher shouted into the hallway, his own body positioned to keep the door open. Moss was unsure who he was yelling at, since the students passed by so quickly that it was impossible to get anyone’s attention. “Is this that walkout thing?”

  “You know about that?” a kid in the front of the class said with alarm.

  “Well … yeah,” Mr. Roberts said, shuffling away from the door, which shut loudly. There was more shouting from the hallway, but their teacher ignored it. He grabbed a messy stack of papers on his desk until he found the yellow memo. “They sent us this thing this morning, dropped it in all our mailboxes,” he explained. He held it up and read, “‘Please be aware that many students are planning a walkout at two P.M. You are not to let students out of your class unless it is an emergency.’”

  Moss felt his heart freeze, and then it leapt up into his sore throat. Oh god, they’re really going to stop us, he thought.

  “Are you not going to let us leave, Mr. Roberts?” Rawiya asked, her own raised hand shaking.

  Mr. Roberts looked over to her, his dark eyes shining. He ran a hand over the top of his head, a tic of his that meant a student’s question had stumped him more than usual. He surveyed his classroom after sitting on the edge of his desk, holding the memo. He glanced down at it, then crumpled it within his hands. He dropped it in the wastebasket next to his desk before returning to his desk. “I didn’t receive any memo about anything happening today,” he announced. “So there is no reason to stop you from doing as you choose.”

  In an instant, the class began to move about, but not out of the room. Moss realized that they’d all turned to him, as if he was meant to lead them on. “Moss?” Carmela said. “What do we do?”

  “I don’t know,” he said sharply. “I didn’t organize this.”

  “You helped,” Rawiya said quietly.

  “And we’re doing this for you and Reg and Shawna,” someone else said, a black kid behind him whose name Moss did not know but whom he recognized upon the invocation of Reg’s name. Weren’t they cousins? James? Jerome? Moss wasn’t sure, but he felt a responsibility regardless. He thought of his friend, who had been so close to his rehabilitation goals, and he stood up.

  “Let’s go now,” he said. “At least we might catch them by surprise.”

  The mood changed then; students scrambled to collect their gear and bolt out of the classroom. Mr. Roberts shouted a warning to them all to be careful, but it was drowned out as the remaining students all joined the flow of people heading toward the main entrance of the building. Some people passed by and patted Moss on the back, while others cursed the very existence of the school. “We gettin’ a day off from this!” someone shouted as they pushed on by, and Moss frowned at him. It was inevitable that some people would just look for an opportunity to ditch class, but he supposed it didn’t really matter in the long run. Weren’t they all walking out of class together? Wasn’t that the whole point?

  Rawiya locked arms with him as they paraded down the hallway, passing more classrooms, students emptying into the stream like the loosing of a dam. Someone whooped and jumped on Moss’s back, and he carried them for a few feet before they jumped off. “We’re really doing this!” Moss didn’t recognize the student who exclaimed this, and then he jolted forward, lost in the surge. Rawiya and Moss found Reg when they turned right into the hallway leading to the main door. He was at the thresh
old of one of the English classrooms, his eyes wide with shock, and Kaisha stood behind his chair, a smile on her face.

  Moss patted him on the back. “This is for you,” he said, pride in his voice.

  “And you, too, I hear,” Reg said, his lip curling up in a goofy grin. “Apparently these jerks can’t keep their hands off people.”

  Moss’s hand went up to his neck. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “And I guess it means we converted more people to our cause today anyway.” He gazed up to Kaisha. “I meant to thank you most. Honestly. We couldn’t have done this without you.”

  “You know you can count on me,” she replied. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Y’all ready?”

  Reg leaned back in his chair. He placed his right hand on Kaisha’s left, running it down her skin and looping his own fingers in hers. “As long as she is.”

  Kaisha smiled and gripped his hand. “Let’s go,” she said.

  The four of them walked out into the hallway together, Kaisha and Reg in front, Rawiya and Moss in sync behind them. Reg wheeled himself smoothly toward the front of the school, and Moss realized that most of their peers had left class already. Some of the doorways were occupied by fascinated teachers in their empty classrooms. The group of friends passed by Mrs. Torrance’s room, and she said nothing to them. She offered them her pride instead. Her hand was clutched to her chest, and her face beamed.

  But then Moss’s heart dropped—a thick band of students clogged up just feet from the entrance that contained the metal detectors. People were pushing or scrambling to get a better view, so the four of them stopped where they were.

  “Oh god, what’s going on now?” said Rawiya.

  “A bottleneck?” Kaisha observed. “Maybe they can’t all exit the school at once.”

  “A traffic jam,” Reg added, grinning. “Cool.”