The Black Kids(39)

The concrete was hot and our fingertips Cheeto-stained when she announced, “Now, we’re going to play mermaids. Except Ashley. Because black people can’t be mermaids!”

Then she giggled.

It hadn’t even occurred to me yet that there was anything I couldn’t be, and the shame of the moment dug itself into my chest so deep that I couldn’t breathe. And while I was standing there unable to breathe, all the other girls were doing cannonballs into the water. I don’t remember how it happened exactly, but I know I grabbed her shoulders, wrapped my legs around her waist, and pulled us both down beneath the surface.

For a few seconds while I held us underwater, our bodies tangled up in each other, I could’ve sworn I saw the rainbow shimmer of scales and fins.

“Look!” I said to her in big bubbles.

“Help!” she bubbled back, unable to breathe.

I don’t know why I did that. I’m not trying to excuse my behavior at all. But maybe I wanted her to know what it felt like.

When we got out and her mother started to yell at me, I looked down, and they weren’t fins at all—just little brown legs with wet sunscreen leaking down.

Needless to say, they kicked me out of the party.

When we got home, my mother quietly walked inside the house to take an aspirin and lie down. Jo sat by our pool reading a tattered copy of The Phantom Tollbooth. I sat down on the broken pool chair next to her.

“Can black people be mermaids?” I asked.

She peered down from her book. “Why?”

“Courtney Two said no.”

Jo placed her book on the chair next to her. She leaned toward me, stared into my face, and said very somberly, “Courtney Two is a Demon of Insincerity.”

“Huh?” I said.

“Don’t let her keep you from your castle.”

“What are you even talking about?” Like I said, I was six.

Jo gestured with her index finger to come close, then even closer still. When I was good and close to her chair, she raised her foot and pushed it into my stomach, launching me into the water.

“Why’d you do that?” I sputtered when I popped up for air.

“Mermaids die if they’re out of the water for too long.” Jo looked at me over the top of her book. “You should say thank you. I just saved your life.”





PART II: Earlier This Year


In January, Kimberly and I volunteered to deliver meals to the elderly as a service project. We would go to the volunteer center and pick up a bunch of meals to deliver to seniors after school. Kimberly is slightly afraid of old people, but I like them more than I like people my own age. Our favorite person was Doris. Her skin was delicate, like a butterfly’s wing in my hand, and her hair was dyed a shade of blue like a cloud before the rain. She had a seemingly endless wardrobe of pastel tracksuits.

We were only supposed to be bringing her meals, but sometimes she insisted that we take her out into the world itself before she’d eat. This wasn’t part of our duties, but Kimberly and I did it anyway.

We helped Miss Doris take out all her curlers, which weren’t so much curlers as shredded bits of paper bag tied around her hair that did the trick. Then, Miss Doris had me pass her a lipstick that was coral and a shade too bright for her thin lips, but it made her happy, so even Kimberly didn’t say anything.

Right before we headed outside, Miss Doris would say “Tweet, tweet” to a little bird about the size of a balled fist, before tapping its cage with her nails.

She turned her face toward the sky to drink it up.

“Any boyfriends?” she said.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Same as before,” Kimberly said.

“When I was your age, I was wild. I tarted it up all over town. Why, there was this boy who lived down by the marina who had the most beautiful car. He loved my ankles.”

She lifted one of her ankles up out of the wheelchair for inspection.

“They’re still beauties, aren’t they, dolls? If you ignore all the spider veins.”

Kimberly and I would take Miss Doris home, and Miss Doris would keep finding reasons for us to stay—something that needed to be fixed, or cookies she’d made that needed to be eaten. Finally, we’d have to pry ourselves away. Sometimes literally. Then afterward, Kimberly and I would talk about how getting old and being unable to do things for yourself must suck. Being an old person is a lot like being a kid, before you get your driver’s license and the whole world splits wide open.

“You wanna drive us home?” she asked after one of these conversations.

“I don’t have my license yet,” I said.

“No shit, Sherlock. I know.” She threw me the keys.

Kimberly started up where Jo left off. Jo taught me the basics, but Kimberly helped me practice each week as we drove back and forth to Miss Doris’s and the others. She was a surprisingly patient teacher.

“Don’t forget to use your blinker, Ash,” she’d say through a mouthful of gum.

“You’re jackrabbiting. Just slowly apply more pressure to the gas,” she’d say as a light turned green.

Every so often, while driving from old person to old person, “I Touch Myself” came on the radio, and we would roll down the windows, all giddy and shit, and sing at the top of our lungs to random strangers on the street.