The Black Kids(42)
This is the exact wrong thing to say at the exact wrong time, ’cause this is what happens next: LaShawn, who never says anything mean to anyone; LaShawn, who remembers my Emily Dickinson poem; LaShawn, who is Stanford-bound—LaShawn reaches back and punches him. Hard. Dude crumples to the ground.
I think of what Jo said once during one of her fights with our parents, right after they found out that she’d dropped out of school.
She said, “We have to walk around being perfect all the time just to be seen as human. Don’t you ever get tired of being a symbol? Don’t you ever just want to be human?”
I guess LaShawn finally had enough.
“Omigod. Omigod,” some girl named Paula keeps repeating, even though, really, Dustin’s pride is hurt way more than his nose, which is barely bleeding a little bit. He staggers up and looks around at the crowd that’s gathered.
“You just got knocked the fuck out!” Anuj yells, and everyone starts to laugh.
LaShawn is frozen in place. He looks down at his fist as though it’s a foreign object, as though the very body that moves so effortlessly across the court, those very hands that almost never miss a shot, have now betrayed him. He looks up and out at the crowd, terrified, and over at Principal Jeffries as she hurries down the hallway toward us.
* * *
The rumors were one thing—easy enough to ignore, even if something happened, it wasn’t on school grounds—but now there’s been violence. Unsure of what to do with him, they park LaShawn in the front office near the school nurse. The front office is glass paneled so that you can see pretty clearly inside. The rest of us go from class to class and sneak quick peeks at the blackened golden boy behind the glass. At one point, he sips from a Styrofoam cup, and even this is news.
“I think he’s drinking coffee in there,” some girl says.
“I wish I were coffee,” her friend replies.
If anything, this has now made LaShawn that much more attractive to a certain faction of the girls at school. Now he’s even better than a golden boy—he’s a bad boy.
Between periods, I hear the girls passing and joking: “I suddenly don’t feel so well. I definitely need to go to the nurse.”
Or, as one girl says more bluntly, “Let’s punch each other so we get sent to the principal’s office.”
* * *
At lunch, the black kids huddle around. They’re not as open with their bodies, as free with their laughter. They sit and whisper with one another. Them. Us. Our. They. My father gets mad when I refer to black people as “they.”
“They are you. Those are your people,” he always tells me.
“The classrooms smell like ball sweat,” Heather says as we sit down to eat.
“God, I can’t wait to get out of this place,” Trevor says as he sits down at our table. “I mean, look at it right now.”
“High school?” Courtney says.
“Dude, Los Angeles is in the middle of a damn riot, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“Don’t be a dick. I thought you were talking about the broken air conditioners.”
“?‘A riot is the language of the unheard,’?” Trevor says. “Right, Ash?”
“That shit’s real deep, Trev,” Heather says before I can answer. “Where’d you steal it from?”
“Martin Luther King,” Trevor says, all proud of himself.
“Junior,” Heather says. “Martin Luther King, Junior.”
“Whatever,” he says. “Don’t be pedantic; it’s unattractive.” She pushes him and he pinches her and she squeals, and all the rest of us raise our eyebrows ’cause they’re definitely flirting, even if they’d never admit it.
Somehow, I’ve never noticed that Trevor has elf ears until now, or maybe they’re more Spock ears? Trevor talks so much that those big-ass ears of his hardly get any use. I used to think it was because most white boys are taught that when they open their mouths to speak, the rest of us will shut up and listen, but when we went to get our corsages last week, Trevor told me he was the middle kid of five, which I somehow never knew about him. Now I think maybe this is why he’s always so loud. He’s just trying to hear his own voice. Although maybe it’s a little bit of both. I’m beginning to think that’s kind of what being an adult is—learning that sometimes people are a little bit wrong, but not for the reasons that you think they are, and also a little bit right, and you try to take the good with the bad. Right now, we’re young and still figuring out how to be good.
“Did you know that in Manhattan alone—” Trevor starts.
“Shut the hell up about New York already,” Heather says.
“You guys, my parents are talking about moving away if this continues,” Courtney says. “They’re really scared. They think Los Angeles is getting too dangerous.”
“They’re rich white people,” I blurt out. “Who exactly do they think is coming after them?”
My friends all turn and look at me like I have five heads. Then Trevor bursts out laughing.
Before I have to answer for myself, Lana walks by and winks at me. Today she’s wearing a baggy flannel shirt, her bra partially exposed above her tank top, combat boots unlaced. Her hair is in a greasy bun atop her head. She looks like spilled wine coolers.