The Black Kids(29)

“Where’s Michael?” Heather asks Kimberly.

“Speaking of weirdos…” She shrugs. “He’s been weird as hell recently.”

“Maybe he’s just nervous about prom night.” Heather humps the table next to Kimberly.

“Don’t be gross,” Courtney says. She reaches over to grab one of Heather’s fries, then a few more, and Heather slaps her hand away.

“Mine!” Heather says.

“So if the world were ending and you had to choose between Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley to protect you, who would you choose?” Courtney says.

“The world is ending.” Kimberly sighs.

“Not everything’s about your cooch!” Heather throws a carrot at Kimberly, who catches it and puts it in her mouth.

Alien 3 is coming out in several weeks. When we were going to see Aliens, Kimberly said it looked like a boy movie, so Heather, Courtney, and I went to the movies without her. Then after everyone at school was talking about it, she felt all dumb and left out. Now, every once in a while, she’ll say she wants to see something and one of us will mock her and say, “I don’t know. That looks like a boy movie.”

“Ripley’s more badass,” I say.

“Sarah Connor’s hotter,” Courtney says.

“They’re both kinda butch,” Kimberly says.

“So?” Heather says.

I turn my attention to the black kids. There aren’t as many of them at school today. Lil Ray Ray with the flattop is missing. So are old lady Mildred and one or two others. The rest of them huddle around a boom box, listening intently. Where are the rest of them? I wonder. The metallic parts of LaShawn’s Jordans glimmer in the sunlight. On his big-ass feet, they look like astronaut boots.

“LaShawn’s shoes are, like, really expensive for somebody who’s supposed to be poor,” I blurt out.

I know as soon as I say it that I shouldn’t have.

Their eyes grow wide and they glance over at LaShawn. He sits on the ledge with the other black kids—the remaining ones, anyway.

Courtney and Kimberly continue to look over at LaShawn’s Jordans, and I feel like I might vomit. During freshman year, Heather and Kimberly went through a shoplifting phase, which meant that Courtney and I went through an accomplice phase. Now we’re older and wiser, and so we’re mostly reformed teenage thieves.

“Omigod, what if he stole them?” Kimberly says. “Doesn’t he live, like, right where all that shit’s going down?”

Why did I just do that?

“He could go to jail,” Courtney says.

“He’d lose his scholarship,” Kimberly says.

“LaShawn wouldn’t do that. He just wouldn’t,” Heather says.

I look over at her with relief. She returns to perusing the latest issue of Sassy. Heather speaks with more authority than any other teenager I know. She shuts things down.

She wasn’t always that way, though.

The night she started to change, Heather called, and Jo drove me over to her house. I knocked softly on her door.

Mrs. Horowitz flung the door open wide and pressed me deep into her bosom. Mrs. Horowitz is short and sturdy—“peasant stock,” Heather says. She’s not beautiful like my mother, but she wears her hair curly and wild and bites her lip like a girl who’s forgotten herself. Heather’s bubbe rested on the couch in the background, her hair like a pink-tinted cotton ball that shook as she threw her head back and laughed at some kid running into something on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Sometimes her bubbe refers to me as the Schvartze, even though I’m right there and she knows my name, but I try not to get too offended because of the numbers tattooed across her arm.

Mrs. Horowitz kept rocking me and cradling my head, but I think in that moment I was Heather for her, or maybe she was rocking herself.

“She’s upstairs.”

I walked up the staircase toward Heather’s room and knocked on the door.

“Heather?”

“Come in!”

I walked into the room and looked around, but she wasn’t there. She poked her head out from the bathroom. Heather’s bathroom is covered in pink and black. It’s from the 1950s and vintage and so ugly that it comes out the other side toward beauty. Heather stood in the center of the bathroom in her bra and orange granny panties, the wings of a thick pad peeking out from either side. This was back when she was still reading Cosmo, shaving her pits, and dyeing her hair blond and frying it to look like the Courtneys.

“I’m so sorry.”

I went over to hug her, but before I could get there, she tossed the razor to me. It seemed like some shit people do in the movies, but I guess also in real life, because there we were.

When we were done, Heather looked at herself, newly bald, in the mirror.

“It’s kinda punk rock, right?”

“Definitely.”

Heather’s grandfather owns a recording studio, and sometimes after school, instead of hanging out with us, she’ll hang out with bony boys who think they’ll be rock gods and leather men who already are. I think Heather sits around all those controls waiting for the rush of drum and bass, eager to listen and love. Anyway, she didn’t want cancer to cramp her style.

“Why did you just call me?” I asked her. “Why not Courtney and Kimberly, too?”