The Black Kids(21)

“He’s trying to buy my love back,” she complained, but she wore her Original Broadway Cast cassette down until all those Frenchies sounded like they were singing underwater.

Kimberly’s voice is good enough—very technically proficient but without the fire that makes you feel like you could cry, like when Whitney in her tracksuit hit that high note in the national anthem and you felt it crawling up your spine. Even without the fire, Kimberly took second place. Heather, Courtney, and I all stood up and clapped and woo-hooed, but her mother glowered and stormed over to the judges’ panel to talk to the head judge about scoring.

This was when Kimberly was still Big Courtney and the other girls were cuter and not in the middle of a growth spurt, but her mom didn’t see that. Kimberly’s mother is severe, thin, and long, with a general sharpness that seems to have been passed down through generations. She yelled at Kimberly for not standing up straight. She didn’t get that Kimberly was trying to make herself smaller, more like the other girls, a roly-poly curling into herself to find safety. In the car on the way home, Heather grabbed Kimberly’s hand and patted it while Kimberly’s mother yelled, “You can’t do anything right!”

All of that must do one hell of a number on a person, ’cause now Kimberly will notice your uneven eyebrows, the pimple you’re hiding with your bangs, and whether you’ve gained a few pounds. Sometimes I feel like I’m on Star Search when I walk past her and she sucks in her breath and clicks her tongue, and in my head I hear, Two and a half stars!

“Whatever. Did you hear LaShawn got into Stanford?” Kimberly says.

I feel a twinge of jealousy, even though I know I shouldn’t. My life has been easier than LaShawn’s… I think. Probably. He works hard, but I do too. I wonder why he didn’t mention it while we were talking earlier.

“God, I wish I were poor,” Courtney says.

“You don’t go to class,” Heather says.

“Or do your own homework,” I say.

“Or play a sport,” Heather says.

“Seriously. You’ve got it made, Ash,” Kimberly says.

“She’s not poor,” Courtney says. Courtney’s going to a good school because both her parents went there and have donated a lot of money to it, so nobody looks too carefully at the fact that she got less than 1000 on her SATs.

“No, but she is black,” Kimberly says, and laughs.

Heather looks at me and rolls her eyes.

Across the quad, I gaze over at the black kids, all twelve of them, mostly athletes. There’s an easiness to the way they interact with one another, a familiarity. They bring one another in for elaborate handshakes and greet each other with “What’s up, my nigga?” But only when the teachers aren’t around.

The first week of high school, before they found me out, they would smile at me like we shared a secret and say, “What’s up, lil mama?”

I would smile politely and reply, “Hi!” and continue down the hall.

In gym that first week, as Ms. Boone explained flag football, Tarrell and Julia somehow got to joking about eating off-brand cereal and government cheese. They started laughing, and I was teamed up with them, so I did too.

“You know ain’t none of these white kids had that shit.” Tarrell playfully punched my arm and snorted, “Girl, I know you know what I’m talking about!”

I didn’t, but it was nice feeling like I belonged, so I laughed even harder.

After school, I found myself in front of a mirror practicing: “Nigga, please.” “Ay, you know I ain’t tryna hear that.” “I’m finna…” But out of my mouth the words sounded clumsy and awkward and nonnative, like when my mother speaks Spanish to Lucia.

Fat Albert, whose real name I honestly don’t know, stands up on the tables and announces, “This little nigga just got into Stanford!”

LaShawn reaches up on his tiptoes and tries to wrap his hand around Fat Albert’s mouth. “Man, shut up.”

But he’s laughing.

As if in celebration for LaShawn Johnson himself, with a great flourish, Mrs. Lesdoux raises her wrists to the theater kids. “Nowww beeeeeginn!”

The song is from a Sondheim play, which I know mostly because of the banners around campus inviting us to their spring play, A Little Night Music. Far as I can gather it’s all a bunch of people bitching about having to go hang out with people they don’t like all that much for a whole weekend.

“?‘Fuck me gently with a chain saw,’?” Heather says.

I think the song is actually pretty funny.

“Make it stop,” Courtney says.

Mark Grossman, who is a known asshole, throws an open water bottle in the theater kids’ general direction. Luke Scott and Anuj Patel join him. They, too, are known assholes.

“Go, Tisha!” Fat Albert yells. Tisha is a person in miniature, no more than five feet tall, with Coke-bottle glasses and a Coke-can build.

The theater kids awkwardly bob up and down to the music as they sing.

“This is the longest song ever,” Kimberly says.

Then something magical happens. One of the basketball players grabs one of the track stars and they start to waltz, which, for some unknown reason, we were forced to learn in PE in ninth grade between volleyball and badminton in the curriculum. LaShawn twirls Candace, this Amazonian Nigerian girl, and they sweep across the quad to join them. Lil Ray Ray has a flattop half as tall as he is. Mildred is six feet tall and has an old white lady’s name. Together they dance, with her in the lead. The black kids waltz as the theater kids sing Sondheim, and nobody throws any more water bottles at all.