The Black Kids(33)

“I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you—Nobody—too?” Emily Dickinson wrote.

There’s too much pain in the voices on the airwaves. I don’t want to hear it anymore. Not here. Not now. Make it stop, I think. Enough.

My heart is beating really fast. I tell Michael about my heart. I think it’s going to explode. He laughs and squeezes my hand and says, “Just breathe.”

“Turn off the radio,” I say.

Michael leans forward and fiddles with the voices until they’re nothing.

I start to cry a bit. Michael wipes a tear away from under my eyelid and licks it off his finger.

“Weirdo,” I say, and start to laugh.

“Guess Kimberly was right after all,” he says.

I shouldn’t be in this car alone with this boy.

I can’t tell if loneliness is being black, or being young, or being a girl, or if Lucia’s right and I need new friends. I don’t know.

“It might be lonelier / Without the loneliness,” Emily wrote.

And she was white as shit.



* * *




Lana Haskins sits down next to me again on the stairs at the front of the school where all of us losers without cars wait for our rides. Apparently, I’ve managed to make a new friend, four weeks before the end of our high school career. She pushes her hair back from around her face, pulls out a pack of American Spirits, and starts to light one. My world is doing that thing it does when you’ve smoked too much and it’s so big and bright and brilliant and you could touch your fingertips to everything and not feel enough.

“Smoking’s gonna fuck up your teeth,” I say. I should probably not be talking right now.

“Yeah.” She starts to laugh. “But my morning shits are beautiful.”

I’m not sure whether to be grossed out or to laugh. Ladies don’t talk about morning shits, but maybe we’re not ladies. I like her.

She digs into her backpack for something. An orange, bright and round like a setting sun in her hands.

“You want a piece?” she says.

“Sure.”

We eat together, the juice dripping down our chins. Each bite is a bitter, sweet, fleshy burst on my tongue. Each morsel is a forever. I’ve never chewed anything so long as I chew this orange. When we’re done, Lana licks her fingers, so I lick mine too.

“So why don’t you have a car?” she says.

“My parents are trying to teach me responsibility or some shit,” I tell her.

“Is it working?”

“Definitely not,” I say. “Why don’t you have a car?”

“Because I’m poor,” Lana says, and we both burst out laughing.

A freshman boy waks past and sings “?I Wanna Sex You Up?” to us, laughing with his friends. He’s no taller than five-foot-two, with a face like the surface of the moon.

His friends elbow him like he’s soooo badass.

“Which one of us?” Lana asks. “You gotta be more specific, little dude.”

He shrugs, laughs, and, with a half skip, runs over to his mother’s car.

Lana stretches her arms to her feet. Her entire body folds in half like a taco. I blurt out the next thing that comes into my head.

“What’d you do while you were expelled? Did you have to go to rehab?”

She looks over at me intently. Up close, her nose kinda looks like it was broken and never reset. It makes her face that much more interesting to look at, but maybe it’s also a little sinister.

“You’re the first person who’s actually asked me about it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I don’t mind. Usually I feel kinda invisible, even though I know people talk about me.”

Like one of the phone-booth kids.

“So what’d you do?”

“I stayed at home, watched a lot of Oprah, and drank,” she says.

We both start laughing. She even snorts a bit. Lana’s super-duper tan with a big-ass mouth, lips like a life raft, and teeth that rise to the task of filling the whole thing up.

“I don’t have a drinking problem. I just have problems,” she says.

LaShawn passes by and waves.

Lana leans in closer until her breath is hot on my ear. “Did you hear the rumors that he stole those Jordans?”

“Who told you that?”

“Somebody said they heard him talking about going out looting last night,” she says.

Lana’s not a mean girl, as far as I can tell. She doesn’t have a reputation for being a liar or a gossipmonger. If it’s trickled down to her, then it means it’s only a matter of time before my words make their way to LaShawn, or, worse yet, to any of the adults.

“He wouldn’t do that, though.” She exhales in a ring and with her fingertips whisks it away. “Right?”

My fingers smell like orange juice.





CHAPTER 8


THERE ARE LOOTERS in South Central and K-Town, in Hollywood and Mid-Wilshire, in Watts and Westwood, in Beverly Hills and Compton, in Culver City and Hawthorne, and even all the way out in Long Beach and Norwalk and Pomona. There are fires in rich areas and poor areas and the spaces between. For once it’s not only those of us on uneasy hillsides who are afraid. Lucia and I pass a condemned home that’s dangling by its fingertips on the hillside. The riot didn’t get to it, just California itself.