Boy, Snow, Bird(47)
Okay, so Kenneth Young was bound to feel some type of way about people who deny that there’s any duty for them to do. And “Shut up, Fat Kenneth” wasn’t the most mature or persuasive response I could’ve made to him, but I had a feeling that Connie, Ruth, and Paula would’ve studied their fingernails and failed to back me up no matter what I’d said. The others went on and on. They sounded like they were kidding around, but the things they said—Colored folks are so angry these days, lose their rag over nothing at all, rawwwrrrr, like wild animals. My dad says those Black Panthers are Vietcongs just waiting to happen. Give ’em an inch and they’ll take a mile, gun us all down in broad daylight.
I skipped detention. I was first out of my history class and met Louis at the school gates; it was easy to spot him because he was on his own, exposed, down on one knee tying his shoelace. I put my foot down next to his.
“Hi.”
He didn’t look up, took his time getting the bow to droop just right. “Hi.”
“Let’s go.”
“You’re not involved.”
“The hell I’m not. You need me. If it turns out to be a girl we’re up against, I’ll punch her for you. Hurry, before Miss Fairfax comes.”
The other kids went quiet when we walked past them, but we didn’t look behind us to see if we were being followed. He said he’d told his other friends not to come. That shouldn’t have stopped them, but there was no point in saying so. He didn’t seem worried at all, but I was shaking. I don’t like real fights because people get so caught up in them, even watching them you get all caught up in them, and if that’s what it’s like watching them, how do the people who are right in the middle of the fight know how to find their way to the end of it alive? A few years ago one boxer killed another in the ring, just kept hitting him and hitting him, didn’t realize the other guy was dead, didn’t mean to kill him, just wanted to win. I won’t let Louis take up that sport professionally. He’s going to have to find something else to do. Louis’s arm brushed mine and for a moment I thought he was going to try to hold my hand. “Don’t even think about it,” I said. We’d never have lived it down if anyone saw.
“You’re really pretty, Bird,” he said, looking straight ahead of us. We were walking up Ivorydown, and the wind was blowing leaf scraps into our eyes.
“You don’t have to say that.”
I’d have liked for him to say my name again, though. You know how it is when someone says your name really well, like it means something that makes the world a better place. In Louis Chen’s case, he sometimes says my name as if it were a lesser-known word for bacon.
“I wanted to say it,” he said. “Don’t get bigheaded, but I think you’re the prettiest girl in school.”
I pretended not to hear. We reached the corner of Pierce Road and Ivorydown and waited with our backs up against the rough bark of a tree trunk. After ten minutes we decided, with a mixture of disgust and relief, that Yellow Chalk Guy (or Girl) wasn’t going to show, and we were ready to leave when three hefty boys from the eleventh grade turned up. These three didn’t take lunch money; they were less predictable than that. They might stop you and give you a stash of comic books, or they might rip up your homework. We knew their names, but never said them in case it made them appear. One of them was directly descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne who wrote The Scarlet Letter; that one’s mother had mentioned it at one of Grammy Olivia’s coffee hours. Mom says everybody immediately began to feel oppressed by their humble backgrounds because they’d forgotten (or didn’t know) that anyone who’s descended from Nathaniel Hawthorne is also a descendant of John Hathorne, the Salem judge who put just about as many innocent people to death as he could, so was it any wonder that Hawthorne was so good at describing what it felt like to be racked with guilt day and night.
“Did we miss it? Did he show up yet?” one of the eleventh graders asked.
“Who?” I asked, since Louis was taking too long to reply.
“The guy who called your friend here a Vietcong.”
“Do you think we’d still be standing here if he had shown up? What do you think we’d be doing here?” I asked. I got away with it because I put the question as if I were curious rather than just giving sass. But one of the boys told Louis: “I guess your girlfriend likes to talk.”
More kids showed up, in threes and fours and fives. They stood at a distance from us, filling the newcomers in on what was happening. “They’re waiting for the guy who called that boy there a Vietcong. Boy got sore about it, says he’s going to bust this other guy’s head.” Within half an hour we were surrounded, Louis and me, caught in a circle of snickering kids, without a single one of our lousy so-called friends in sight. Louis checked his watch and took a couple of steps forward, trying to look purposeful, I guess, trying to look like a boy who didn’t know about everybody else but he was going home. Nobody said we couldn’t leave, but the circle got tighter and people stood shoulder to shoulder.
“He’ll be here soon enough,” someone said. It sounded like Fat Kenneth Young.
“Yeah, he probably just had detention.”
“Patience, my friends, patience,” said the eleventh grader with the witch-hunter’s blood.
It was around then that I began to be sure that the person who’d started the whole thing was right there in the circle, hidden like a worm in an apple, and I hated him or her like I hate all sneaks.