The Black Kids(30)

“I wasn’t ready for all that. Not yet. We Esses know what it’s like to have people look at you like you’re different,” she said. “I’ll tell them tomorrow.”

The overhead light bounced off the top of her scalp. I brushed away the few remaining stray hairs.

“My head’s not too lumpy, right?” she said.

I bent down and kissed the top of it, leaving a faint lipstick smudge in the middle of her pale scalp.

Heather reached up and grabbed me by the hand, and in the mirror we looked posed, like in an old-timey photograph. “Today, we are new people.”

I didn’t know what I’d done to be a new person, but maybe she was right. Like in Star Trek when they transport, maybe we assemble and dissemble particles and build ourselves anew in each place we travel, including right there in Heather’s pink bathroom with the Barbie tiles.

Several weeks later, the two of us rode our bikes along the boardwalk, past the musclemen and the pockets of piss, past the dreadlocked vendors with their incense, past the airbrushed shirts hanging like flags, past the gangsters, past the tourists and the bikini butts. Heather pedaled faster and faster still.

“How do you feel?” I said, afraid she was going to make herself sick. She had just had her first round of chemo several days before, and for most of the last few days she’d been too weak to do anything at all.

“Aerodynamic.” She laughed and threw her face into the wind.

They broke all her cells down, and Heather reassembled herself into some stronger, better version. This Heather says what she feels like saying. This Heather doesn’t apologize for taking up space. This Heather wears her curls wild and dark and her pits hairy, and doesn’t let Kimberly tell her who to be. When the boys call her Whorey Horowitz, this Heather flips them off and yells at them about the patriarchy. This Heather hears a rumor about LaShawn and says no.

By the time lunch ends, my friends are over talking about LaShawn, and we’ve decided by a vote of three to one that we’d rather be Ripley. Ripley kicks ass in space.

When Courtney reaches for the last of her fries, Heather says, “Stay away from her, you bitch!”

Sarah Connor doesn’t say anything nearly that cool.



* * *




LaShawn moves through the stacks with a cart piled high with books. He’s tall enough that the top of his head rises just above the labyrinth as he checks each spine. Normally, Michael has his free period when I have my free period, and usually that means we find each other and sit together somewhere and listen. Today, I don’t feel much like listening, or being found, which is why I’m in the library with its faded leather, Dewey decimals, and ceiling spit wads. I watch LaShawn until I lose him, then return to Emily.

My English teacher said Emily Dickinson never left her house, and yet somehow she was crazy prolific. She wrote a lot about being lonely, which makes sense. Somebody probably should’ve tried harder to force her out of her house, though. Sometimes I think I could be a hermit.

“Whatcha reading?” LaShawn startles me half out of my skin.

I show him the book cover.

“?‘I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you—Nobody—too?’?” LaShawn recites, and laughs.

“You’re a fan?”

“Remember when we had to memorize a poem for AP English? That’s the one you chose.”

“How do you remember that?”

He shrugs and blushes. “I have a good memory.”

I look down at the cart.

“Do you work here?” I say.

He laughs. “Nah. Well… sorta. I took out this book last year and lost it. Now I got this crazy-ass fine, and I got a letter the other day that said I can’t graduate until I pay it. But I talked to Ms. Hawley, and instead of making me pay, she’s letting me work in the library for a week. Ms. Hawley cool as hell.”

He throws up a peace sign to Ms. Hawley, who watches us from the front of the library hunched over a sad-looking ham-and-cheese sandwich. She’s a very stolid woman with a stentorian voice who wouldn’t be entirely out of place at a Russian work camp—certainly not anyone I would’ve thought of as “cool as hell.”

She returns his peace sign with one of her own.

“Her husband’s black,” LaShawn whispers. “She don’t look like she’d be down at all, but you never know, right?”

“Right,” I say. “What’s the book that got you here?”

“It was more of a graphic novel,” he says, “Watchmen. You heard of it?”

“I think so,” I say.

“It’s good. You’d like it,” he says. “I think. It’s about Reagan, but not.”

“I thought it was a comic book.”

“Graphic novel. And comic books are political as hell.”

“I always thought they were kinda like ‘Oh no! It’s a bad guy! BOOM! POW!’?”

“Nah. You should read it for real.”

“Except that you lost it.”

He starts to laugh and fiddles with one of the books on his cart. He seems almost nervous, though I don’t know why he would be. At least, not around me.

“Shit’s crazy right now, isn’t it?” I say.

I glance down at LaShawn’s new shoes. His feet are huge; he’s like a puppy when they’re all paws and ears and the rest still has to catch up.