The Black Kids(23)

“I’m coming, Ma!” she yells in the direction of the car. “Jesus Christ. Later,” she says to Lana.

Lana looks over at me as though deciding whether to engage, and to my utter surprise, she does.

“Did you hear about the Rodney King verdict?”

Lana’s never said a word to me before today, but she never talks to anyone, as far as I can tell.

“Only as much as I heard you tell Monica,” I say. “That sucks.”

“Yeah,” she says, “Totally. Shit’s about to go down.”

I shrug. She takes out a cigarette and lights it. She spreads her legs and drags on it slowly, like she’s in a Calvin Klein commercial or something. We’re not supposed to smoke on campus, but Lana doesn’t seem to care about any of that. If the rules don’t apply to you, why bother?

LaShawn walks past with two girls and waves over at me.

“Want one?” Lana says, and reaches out to me.

A cricket hops past. But I think maybe this time it’s not a cricket at all.





CHAPTER 5


LUCIA AND I stand in line at Western Union behind a balding Russian man with really long ear hair like my old piano teacher. Save for the television in the corner, it’s quiet, eerily so, and I try to keep my feet perfectly still so my sneakers won’t squeak on the linoleum. Sometimes when I have to pee really badly or when I can’t make a sound, I pretend that I’m a runaway slave and I have to be very still, or else I’ll be discovered. It’s fucked up, but it works. Usually this place is a swirl of tongues and transactions, like waiting at the airport, but without any of the excitement of going somewhere. There’s always some baby fussing while some mom screams “Get down from there” at some kid, which sounds pretty much the same in any language. Today, it’s just me, Lucia, and the bald man.

Together, we watch as a crowd pulls a white man from his truck and begins to beat the shit out of him. His long blond hair swings from side to side as he staggers, disoriented, with each blow. In a different world, he’d be a lead guitarist rocking out, not a broken construction worker tumbling. A man flashes gang signs at the helicopters hovering above. They’re not even ten miles away, but it might as well be a whole different country. There are my fancy school and my fancy neighborhood, and then there’s this. The television flickers in fragments across the Russian’s head as he shakes it. He turns to look at me angrily.

“See?” he says.

Lucia places her body between the two of us.

“No hablar con el,” she says.

The man returns to the screen.

Lucia speaks to me in Spanish when she doesn’t want white people to easily understand what we’re talking about. She taught me when I was younger, and then as soon as we got the chance to study languages in school, I chose Spanish. And anyway, it’s LA; if you even half pay attention to the city around you, you’ll learn it by osmosis. It’s not like it’s a secret language, but it’s easier for her and easy enough for me. I’m sure to everyone looking at us we’re an odd pair, a lanky black teenager and a tiny Guatemalan, always together. Lucia’s favorite cashier is Jose. If he’s working, everything goes smoothly, and they joke and laugh in Spanish about how he’s going to marry her.

When she’s done, she kisses her fingertips and places them on the envelope before sliding it across the counter, where Jose converts it to a textbook for Umberto, guitar lessons for Roberto.

Today, Jose isn’t in a joking mood.

“El mundo en que vivimos.” Jose sighs. His eyes are fixed on the television screen, where the news shows images of a man slamming a slab of concrete down on the truck driver’s head.

“Sí,” Lucia says.

Jose’s hair is the dark of an oil slick at night. He’s younger than Lucia, and Mexican, not Guatemalan. He lives with his cousin and abuelita in a small house in Highland Park with three bedrooms and a bathroom, and if you climb up on his roof, you can see the city on a clear day. He sounded like a real estate agent when he told this to Lucia.

“I’m going to own my own business,” he said last week, a declaration of intent.

“Doing what?” she said.

He wants to own one of those places downtown where they sell cobijas San Marcos and clothing and key chains and Coca-Cola in glass bottles.

The San Marcos blankets are super plush and have different designs on them like cute kittens and majestic lions and Strawberry Shortcake and the Dodgers. A few weeks ago, Lucia took me downtown and had me pick one out. The air downtown is always the color of a nasty loogie, but I like the buildings because they’ve got character. Which is why I also love the blankets.

The one I chose had a white tiger on it, lounging like a queen.

“You take it with you when you go to college,” Lucia said, and it was like she was preparing us both for goodbye.

“I wish I could take you with me to college,” I joked, and we laughed, but then I felt kinda bad ’cause it made it seem like Lucia was my personal servant.

When I was younger and had a nightmare, I would walk downstairs to Lucia’s room and crawl into bed with her, and she would tell me stories about her boys, and her country, and the handsome but very bad man-devil she divorced before she ran to the United States. He did unforgivable things, she said, for what he thought were the right reasons. She used to think so too, until she didn’t. And so he became the villain in my bedtime stories. “Tell me about Arturo, who lives in the house by the bridge,” I’d say.