The Black Kids(19)

Kimberly recorded it onto a cassette tape that she presses into a Walkman the color of sunshine. “Listen! Isn’t he the sweetest?”

“Yeah,” Heather mocks, “listen.”



* * *




Crickets rub their legs together to sing because they’re lonely, or horny, or maybe both, like people. They do this mostly at night, though. In the day, they move quietly around and do whatever crickets do, which is why at first nobody notices them as Mr. Holmes reviews impulse and momentum for the AP exam.

“So, if impulse is the area of a force versus time graph—” he says.

“—I’m so screwed,” Joanie Wang says.

Steve Ruggles looks up from making out with his arm to blurt, “Mr. Holmes, cockroach!”

Tyler Phillips leans over his desk to get a closer look, but then the thing hops and Brittany shrieks.

“Cockroaches don’t hop,” Tyler says, and throws his textbook at it.

You can buy crickets at a pet store to feed to snakes. In honors bio freshman year, Nathan draped the class snake across my shoulders, and I thought it would squeeze around my neck, but it stayed there looking at me, darting its tongue back and forth like a warning, or a greeting; I’m not sure which. Still, I couldn’t breathe.

The next cricket passes right by me.

LaShawn Johnson leans down and scoops it up gently in his hand. Then he stands and walks toward the classroom window.

“What are you doing?”

“Crickets don’t hurt nobody,” LaShawn says as he opens the window and drops the cricket outside.

If it had been anybody else, Mr. Holmes would’ve yelled at them to sit back down, but not LaShawn.

The self-inflicted hickeys on Steve’s arms run the gamut from deep red to practically purple. His pale arm is the color of a makeup palette. Steve lifts a pudgy fist to LaShawn as he passes, and LaShawn fist-bumps him right back. LaShawn can afford to be kind to a weirdo like Steve.

LaShawn and most of the other black guys who go to our school are on scholarship, usually for basketball or football. They run fast and jump high and catch and pass in the right ways. The other girls drool over the scholarship players with their brown skin and their flattops, all of them wanting to “Be Like Mike.” They tell me how dreamy they think black boys are, as if this is supposed to mean something to me. Just like they tell me how cute they think Will Smith is, or how I kinda look like Janet, depending on how I wear my hair.

This last one I’m okay with. It’s way better than the time I got braids in seventh grade and they called me Medusa for a week straight until I came home crying and made Lucia take them out, even though we’d driven all the way to bumfuck Rialto and it’d taken six hours and cost three hundred dollars.

“Medusa was powerful, mija,” Lucia said. But she took them out anyway.

LaShawn’s eyes are green and huge, with lashes straight out of a mascara commercial. He’s built like an Oscar statuette. Allen Greenberg’s dad cast him in a drug PSA, and after it aired, all anybody could talk about was how sultry LaShawn looked when he said no to crack. For a while he had his ear pierced like Jordan, with a small diamond stud, but then it got infected and he took it out. He’s our school golden boy; even his skin is the color of karats. LaShawn Johnson can stop time to save a cricket.

We think that’s it for crickets, until the next few come. Molly Denison gets on top of her desk, but I guess she doesn’t balance quite right, ’cause the desk falls over and she goes with it. The crickets jump around her as she alternately screams “My wrist!” and “Get them off me!”

“Alright, let’s go outside for now,” Mr. Holmes says.

Outside, the field is green and the morning sun bears down on us. We stand the way we do for earthquake or fire drills, waiting for disaster, but it’s just a bit of plague.

Molly bitches about her wrist, and Mr. Holmes sends her off to the nurse.

I place my headphones back on my ears, and pick up with Curtis where I left him. He’s telling me not to worry. Or actually maybe he’s telling me that the politicians are saying don’t worry. Or maybe he’s saying how white people think they don’t have to worry about the problems black people face, about the inner city, about any of it at all. I’m not sure.

“What are you listening to?” I hardly see LaShawn as he approaches me. I know many things about LaShawn Johnson. I’ve spent a great deal of time looking at him. He’s the star basketball player, and I’m a mediocre varsity cheerleader. I know that he’s being heavily recruited by UCLA, Stanford, Duke, USC, Syracuse, and UNC. I know that his mama attends every game, wears wigs that look like they came from a Halloween store, and acts like a madwoman anytime he does anything. I know this and more. Other than everything I know, I don’t know anything about him at all. I especially don’t know why he’s decided to talk to me, or why today.

I take my headphones off and hand them over to him.

“Poor Curtis,” he says.

“Why?” I say. I know nothing about Curtis. LaShawn’s on a first-name basis with him.

“You didn’t hear about what happened? A bunch of lighting equipment fell on him and paralyzed him during a concert a couple of years ago.”

“That’s horrible.”

“Yeah.”