The Black Kids(43)
“Omigod. What a lesbo!” Courtney says as Lana walks past.
“She probably had something in her eye,” Heather says, and raises her eyebrows at me.
Heather has always thought Courtney is a little bit in love with Kimberly. Normally, I’d chalk it up to too much Donahue, but I think she might be onto something. At Jenny Liu’s birthday party, we played Spin the Bottle, and Kimberly and Courtney wrapped their arms around each other’s necks and kissed with tongue. Even when everybody’d stopped cheering and laughing, they kept kissing, until finally Kimberly pulled away and Courtney burned incandescently. But also, not two years ago, we blasted “Freedom! ’90” and walked around in Kimberly’s mom’s clothes pretending to be supermodels, and Kimberly and Courtney got into an actual physical fight over who got to be Cindy Crawford, so who knows?
I want to follow Lana to wherever it is she eats, away from my friends. Maybe we could share cigarettes and oranges and talk about something that matters. Or even something that doesn’t. Courtney could be right—it’s possible that Lana is a lesbo. Or bisexual. I’ve never met any bisexuals that I know of; Lana would be my first. I know exactly three real-life lesbians.
The school loudspeaker comes on and the principal announces that the administration has decided to keep the prom on its scheduled date and time of tomorrow at 8:30 p.m. Everyone in the quad cheers. Courtney and Kimberly hug each other tight.
“Thank God!” Kimberly says.
Across the way, the black kids turn their attention only briefly to the loudspeaker, then return to their huddle. LaShawn is not among them.
* * *
Through the glass, I can see LaShawn’s legs stretched out before him. I pull open the heavy glass door and LaShawn looks up. The student office assistant, a blond girl named Allison, sits next to him, her knees tucked under her butt and her hand awkwardly patting his back like she’s trying to comfort him, but also like she’s a little bit afraid of him, too. Allison’s only a freshman, but the boys say she’s got a pair of senior tits.
“Hey, Cricket.” LaShawn looks up at me, and Allison glares at the intrusion.
Across the wall in the office are gold stars with everybody’s names and where they’re going to college. We’re supposed to tell the school secretary as soon as we decide where we’re going so our name can be displayed with the rest. “All our shining stars!” it says in gold glitter across the sheets of navy-blue bulletin-board paper meant to look like the night sky. People have been not-so-sneakily going into the office to check on where everybody else got in, to compare their good fortunes or to commiserate, but mostly to go back to their friends and say shit like, “How the hell did she get into Dartmouth?”
I pretend to scan the names.
“Got one to add to the wall?” LaShawn says.
“I’m not sure where I’m going yet.”
I wait for him to say something in response, but he doesn’t; he keeps staring out into the distance.
“So, what’s the verdict?” I say, and nod in the direction of Principal Jeffries’s office.
“They’re still deciding,” Allison chimes in, and LaShawn looks over at her like he’d forgotten she was even here.
“This school is fucking bullshit,” he says. He looks like he’s ready to burst out of himself, or out of the office, at least.
Once, freshman year, Lucia forgot to pick me up after cheer practice because she thought I was going to hang out with Kimberly afterward instead. I called the house and waited and waited for somebody to pick up, but nobody was around, so I left an appropriately pathetic message. It was in the fall, when the sun starts to go down entirely too early, and soon the lights came on in warm circles across the school grounds. All the other kids trickled out of their respective activities to their rides home as the air started to get nippy. Meanwhile, I was still in my short-ass cheer shorts and cold as hell. The wind began to lash at my skin, so I started to walk around the school while I waited, to keep warm. The basketball team finished practice and its little giants poured out of the gym and toward the parking lot, but LaShawn was still outside doing drills up and down the length of the court, even after spending all those hours at practice. Pivot. Pivot. Shoot. Fake. Two-pointer. Three-pointer. Layup. He wasn’t as filled out as he is now, not as tall. Lankier. He still looked more like a little kid, with his ears all stuck out like the kid on the MAD magazine covers. It was just him on the court, under the orange glow of the lights. And me standing at the fence, fingers around the metal, silently watching.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi,” I said.
“Why are you still here?” he said.
“My ride forgot me,” I said. “Why are you still here?”
“I gotta stay here to stay here,” he said, and laughed.
He stopped dribbling and walked over by the fence. It was like we were talking to each other through a cage.
“You think this school is worth it?”
I shrugged. “My parents seem to think so. I mean, I guess people get into good colleges from here.”
“Mija,” Lucia shouted at me from across the way. Her Corolla put-put-ed in the distance. I was briefly ashamed—not of Lucia or her car but of being the kind of person who had a Lucia to pick her up, who never even thought about the cost of the school I was in.