Wing Jones(10)

And then when nothing was wrong, if I just smiled and said, “Oh, I just thought I’d join y’all for lunch,” Marcus would frown, not in an upset way, but in a confused way, because why would I want to sit with the seniors for lunch? It isn’t that he doesn’t care that I don’t have friends, he just doesn’t really know what to do about it. Because even though he’s my brother, it would be weird for me to sit at the football table with a bunch of seniors. But he’d tell Trey to scoot down and say, “Of course, come sit,” and then I would sit and the table would be silent except maybe for Trey snapping Dionne’s bra strap or something, and I would try to smile but the smoke would be stinging my eyes and I wouldn’t be able to stop them from watering, not crying, never crying, from all the poisonous fumes.

It isn’t that everybody hates me. I just don’t really fit in anywhere. It might be 1995, but at my school the white kids sit with the white kids, the black kids sit with the black kids. Only exception being Marcus and Monica, but Marcus is the exception to everything. There isn’t a table for half-Chinese, half-black kids. There aren’t even any other Asian kids at my school except for my brother, and the school hierarchy rules don’t apply to him.

It wasn’t always like this. I used to have a best friend.

April Tova Roth. Only Jewish girl I’ve ever met.

April and I met in the seventh grade, at the mandatory seventh-grade cotillion. We were both hiding in the bathroom from Heather Parker. Sure, I’d had some friends before that, but no one who got me. It was like all the friends I’d had before were polyester and April Roth was imported silk. Neither of us belonged with anyone else, so we belonged together. There wasn’t room in my life for any other friends, not with April around. Between her, Marcus, and Aaron (always Aaron, he was always there, I can’t remember him not being in my heart), my heart was always full to bursting.

Other than Heather, April wasn’t scared of anybody. She was born in New York but moved to Atlanta when she was ten, and said that the hobos in Atlanta have got nothing on the hobos in New York. She would talk back to teachers and tell them that they were wrong and she knew because her mother was a professor and her father was a banker and didn’t those professions require more brains than it took to be a seventh-grade science teacher?

And freshman year, when Ryan Cork asked our biology teacher how someone like me could possibly have come into the world, using nasty names for both my mom and my daddy, April threw a textbook at him.

Ryan Cork was suspended for two weeks for saying what he did. And April was suspended for four and nearly expelled.

April didn’t come back to our high school after that. Her mother quit her job at Georgia Tech and took her old position at NYU. They said they didn’t want to live in a place like this. And it wasn’t like there was a line of people jumping at the chance to become my new best friend. We write letters sometimes, and April says she wants me to visit, but we both know I don’t have the money for something like that.

The week after April left, I sat down at Alicia Howard’s table. Her brother sometimes hung out with Marcus and Aaron, so I thought that might be enough for us to get along.

“Girl,” she said, looking me up and down, “we didn’t invite you to sit with us.” As I walked away, keeping my head down so they couldn’t see my expression, I heard one of the other girls say, “Isn’t she from China?” and someone else said, “Nah, I think it’s Japan.” “I thought Japanese girls were supposed to be all little? Wing’s ass is bigger than mine.” Their laughter chased me across the cafeteria.

Lunch really isn’t my favorite time of day.



After lunch, I have ceramics. I’m not very good at it, but I’ve got to take something to get an art credit, and there was no way I was going to take drama or chorus or dance or anything where someone has to look at me. And I don’t mind ceramics. There’s something relaxing about molding the clay, even if everything I make comes out ugly. And it’s better than gym, which was my other option for this year. I’ll have to take it eventually – my school requires two years of some kind of athletic activity – but I want to postpone it for as long as possible. I don’t want to have to deal with Heather Parker in the locker room.

The ceramics studio is down past the track, away from the main campus. As I walk, I hear loud laughter and instinctively freeze, sure that it’s directed at me. But when I look toward the sound, I relax. It’s Eliza Thompson, striding out onto the track like she’s strutting on a catwalk. Three girls flank her.

Eliza Thompson is so fast and so fine that sometimes I think maybe she should be with Marcus instead of Monica. She’s not just the fastest girl at our school but in our whole county. She’s all long brown limbs and slender neck and sleek short hair, and I can hear her laugh bubbling up from the track as she stretches, leaning this way and that. All grace and power.

She bends down and touches her toes, the movement so smooth it is like watching a river bend down over a cliff and make a waterfall, then she snaps back up, so quick it makes me blink. She takes off running in a burst of speed, and my own feet tingle.

I watch and I wonder what it feels like. To be so fast you can get away whenever you want and to be so sure of yourself that you don’t care who is watching.





CHAPTER 6