The Black Kids(32)

“Do you have to go to work today?” I ask.

“The office is closed.” Jo sighs.

“What about Harrison?”

“He’s usually off today anyway.”

“So why can’t you just come home?”

“Ash, I gotta go,” she says, and just like that she’s off.

“But where?” I say to nobody at all.



* * *




I’m about to head back to AP statistics when I feel hot words brush against my left ear: “Run away with me.”

My body shivers a bit.

“Where are we going? Paris, Bora Bora, the North Pole?” I say. I think actually traveling with Michael might drive me batshit crazy, but being anywhere but here sounds amazing right about now. Anywhere I could crawl out of my own head and skin and just be still. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind being a sentient blob at the moment.

“We could chill with the polar bears and scientists,” Michael says. He jumps up and grabs on to a wooden beam as we walk. He dangles from it by one arm before dropping back down again. Boys my age can’t seem to get enough of climbing and jumping on and over things, like their testicles are propellers commanding them always “Up!”

Michael’s skin is still red from the other day in the sun. It looks like it stings, and also like he might get cancer if he doesn’t start putting on sunscreen.

“What do you think the scientists do when they’re not doing science shit?” I say.

“Hang out with Eskimos.”

“You’re not supposed to call them that.”

“Did you know they kiss with their noses? ’Cause it’s so cold up there,” he says.

That’s not true, actually. I know this because my mother said something about Eskimo kisses last year, and Jo had taken one of her anthropology or sociology or whatever classes where they’d deconstructed Nanook of the North, so she was militant about the Inuit for, like, two weeks.

Instead of the North Pole, we go to his car. The parking lot is full of empty cars waiting for their owners, most of whom are still in class where they belong. We are flesh in a sea of metal.

“Kimberly thinks you’re being a weirdo,” I say.

“I don’t want to talk about her right now.”

For the last few months or so, after he’s done with homework or with talking to Kimberly, Michael usually calls me before bed, and we fall asleep unspooling our brains across the distance. Other times he’ll call me up and press the phone to his stereo and whisper, “Listen.”

He hasn’t called since the thing that happened last week. I would say it hurt my feelings, but I really hate that it made me feel anything at all.

Today, we get into his car, light up, and lean the seats way back like we’re looking up at stars and not shredded upholstery.

“We should talk about what happened,” he says after a long pause.

“No. We shouldn’t,” I say.

Instead of talking or listening to music, we listen to the people on the radio talking about the riots. Callers are on the verge of tears or explosions. We hear the fire in their bellies and the pain on their tongues.

Michael draws a new alien along the frayed white of his Converse.

“I mean, I get racism, but also I don’t. Like… it’s just skin, right?” he says.

I raise my eyebrows but say nothing. Easy for him to say.

Why the hell am I in this boy’s car again? I think.

I go back and forth on Michael’s depth as a person. Sometimes I think he’s a murky but sizable lake, and other times he’s a front-yard Kmart kiddie pool. Last week he was an ocean. Atlantic, not Pacific, though.

“You know they’re not really kisses. Eskimo kisses, I mean. It’s a greeting, more so; not so much a romantic thing. White people made that part up,” I say.

“Well… you know us white people.” Michael laughs and trails off.

He takes another puff, then reaches over and brushes my hair out of my face. He pushes his forehead into mine, then takes his freckled nose and rubs it back and forth against my skin. We stop moving and let our foreheads and noses linger, pressed together. Our eyelashes flutter like so many butterflies.

“Hi,” he says.

These are my high thoughts:

Everyone thinks the riots are only about Rodney, but they’re not. Jo was right about that. They’re also about Latasha Harlins. Latasha was a black girl my age in Los Angeles. Latasha was black. Latasha was a girl. Latasha was my age. She went into a liquor store to buy orange juice, and the Korean woman at the counter thought she was stealing. She wasn’t. They got into a fight, and as Latasha tried to walk away, the woman at the counter shot her in the back of the head.

Over orange juice.

Her killer got probation, community service, and a five hundred dollar fine. Five hundred dollars for a dead black girl. My mom’s got shoes that cost more than that. The judge said the killer was really the victim.

Rodney got brutally beaten on videotape. Nothing.

A few weeks after Latasha’s killer got nothing for her dead black body, a man got thirty days in jail for kicking and jumping on his puppy, felony animal cruelty.

No Justice. No Peace.

“I could’ve been Latasha. Or you,” Jo said.

Nobodies.