The Black Kids(20)

He grows silent. Michael stares at the two of us from across the field. Trevor sits down in the grass next to him and leans against his backpack. He picks a blade of grass and begins to chew. I wonder if Trevor knows about Michael’s mother. How much of himself does Michael give to Trevor, and to Kimberly, and to me? How much do any of us give one another? Maybe Michael is jealous, but he has no right to be.

LaShawn and I are the only two black kids in AP physics. This is the most we’ve said to each other all semester. I’m sure the rumors are starting already about the two of us being together. It wouldn’t be so bad, though, everyone thinking we’re together. LaShawn is handsome and popular and girls fall all over themselves to talk to him. Not me, though. I don’t fall. I make it a point to stay firmly on my feet as we speak.

When you’re one of only a few black people in a class, it’s almost inevitable that everyone will assume that you like one another. Like when I was in fifth grade and everybody said that Jamie Thomas and I were dating. Jamie Thomas was more interested in space than girls, and I was more interested in space than Jamie. Jamie’s father was a literal rocket scientist, and Jamie went to space camp in Florida every summer. Jamie and I were both near the top of the class, and so everything we did was in competition with each other, like we were vying for the title of Best Black Kid.

“I’m going to go to the moon,” Jamie would say while we were doing normal things like playing handball.

“Black people don’t do that,” Steve Chun said matter-of-factly. Steve Chun sucked.

“I will,” Jamie said.

I asked my parents to send me to space camp so I could be an astronaut. If Jamie was going to the moon, then I would go to the goddamned moon, too.

My father said, “I’m not going to watch my baby girl blow up on national television.”

Months earlier, we’d watched as the Challenger fell down in pieces around Cape Canaveral, and the whole nation went silent when moments before we’d been dreaming of the stars and beyond. So I suppose my timing wasn’t the best. Anyway, I hated Jamie Thomas after that. I hated the assumption that we belonged together, that somehow because we were both black, we were a bonded pair. But I guess maybe in some ways we were, because when he left, I missed him more than I’d thought I would. I felt his absence as a slight ache; stupid Jamie and stupid space, we two little best black kids dreaming of flight.

Around LaShawn, crickets jump.

“Did you know that crickets are considered good luck in native folklore?” he says.

“Which natives?”

He shrugs his shoulders.

“In some places they even keep them in cages as pets.”

“I know why the caged cricket sings.”

It’s a dumb joke, but he laughs and stretches his fingertips to the sun, ready for liftoff.



* * *




At lunch, the theater kids line up along the steps in the quad. They’re loud and weird, and always singing or shouting lines from their plays at one another across the halls. The theater teacher, Mrs. Lesdoux, has frizzy red hair that reaches great heights and veins that crisscross like rivers across her pale skin. Her words are so crisp they’re fried, each vowel and consonant perfectly enunciated and projected like we’re at the Met instead of some rich-kid school in Los Angeles. Kimberly, Courtney, and Heather dig through Kimberly’s makeup bag to primp. I don’t, because the pinks that make them pretty make me grotesque.

“It’s such a stupid senior prank,” Heather says.

“We got out of class at least,” I say.

“They’re gonna kill those poor crickets for no reason,” she says. Already the exterminators have begun to roam the halls like Ghostbusters, looking and spraying.

“Can I copy your calc homework?” Courtney asks me.

“I thought you did it last night.”

I take out my lunch bag and start to rummage around inside. They’re primping; meanwhile, I’m starving.

“I couldn’t get through the rest of it. Fuck calc. I’m never going to use this shit again anyway.”

“You never know…”

“Let’s be real. Courtney’s not doing jack shit with calc or anything else,” Kimberly says.

“I’m not stupid! I don’t test well.”

“It’s okay, babe, you’ll marry rich,” Kimberly says.

“You’re a real bitch these days.”

“She’s not wrong,” Heather says.

“Which one of us?”

“Both.” Heather reaches over and grabs a forkful of the leftovers Lucia’s packed me.

Kimberly’s mother dressed her up like one of those creepy porcelain collectors’ dolls and made her perform in pageants. We went to watch one once, at a Radisson somewhere in Pasadena, when we were in eighth grade. We piled into her mom’s car and held all her dresses across our laps. The hotel ballroom was full of girls of all ages in various degrees of frippery. One girl briefly caught fire when her mother smoked too close to her Aqua Net updo and we screamed, but the girl’s mom just extinguished it with her fingers like a candle. Courtney, Heather, and I sat on the hard chairs and watched as, one by one, the girls played piano or sang or twirled a baton. Kimberly sang something from Les Misérables, which she’d just seen on Broadway with her dad.