The Black Kids(44)

But also, I realized LaShawn must’ve also had a Grandma Opal to sit him down, look at him, and say, “You have to be better.” And whatever it was, we both felt it in our bones and understood it to be in each other’s heads, this metric of our worth. Pivot. Better. Layup. Better. Three-pointer. Better. Lift up, raise your arms, aim. Be more.

I wonder if LaShawn remembers that.

Across from us, the school secretary keeps her eyes glued to the portable television. She watches, her pretty face in her delicate hands, as the fires spread across the screen, eerie in black and white like an old rerun of The Twilight Zone.

“Are you here to add a college?” She briefly turns her attention to us, noticing me in the room for the first time.

“Nope. Not a shining star,” I say.

She immediately goes back to the television.

“Look—you’re right under your star,” I say to LaShawn. His star is a little bigger than the others. I bet that’s Allison’s handiwork.

Allison looks like she’s playing a game of double-dutch, waiting for the right time to get back into the conversation, to not get smacked in the head by the jump ropes.

LaShawn twists his head around to look at his name posted up on the bulletin board and rolls his eyes.

“I’m so sick of this place,” he says. “I mean, I didn’t even want to go here, you know? I wanted to go to high school around the corner like all my friends. My real friends. Not these goddamn phonies.”

“Totally.” Allison finally sees her opening. “Me too.”

The secretary calls Allison away to stuff envelopes, and she reluctantly heads over.

“Sometimes I feel like I can’t even breathe here,” LaShawn says to me in a near whisper once she’s gone.

“Me too,” I say.

“It’s a fucking black hole,” he says.

I want to tell him that I started the rumor. That I’m sorry. That I didn’t mean for everything to get out of control like this. That I don’t even know why I did it. I want to sit next to him and lean my head back underneath these stars, to close my eyes for a minute and breathe.

“Well… I should probably get to class,” I say.

As I get up to leave, I hear the reporter’s high-pitched squeal as she thrusts her microphone into the face of a passing looter—same voice, same scene the channel keeps playing over and over: “Don’t you know that it’s wrong?”



* * *




Michael walks up behind me as I head toward my sixth-period class. He grabs me by the wrist and pulls me into the art room.

“What are you listening to?”

He leans in closer to my headphones, and we press our heads and arms and legs against each other. We lean into some poor freshman’s oil painting. I can feel his breath across my collarbone.

Out of the itty-bitty speakers, Bono sings about all the things you say you want and you’ll give. Jo used to love U2, but now she thinks Bono’s a twat.

“How’d this happen?” He runs his finger along the length of my new scar.

“My neighbors were going to shoot my uncle, so I had to jump off the roof to stop them,” I say.

“Fine, don’t tell me,” he says.

“Are you in love with Kimberly?” I ask.

“She’s my girlfriend.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

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

“You can’t just pretend like she doesn’t exist whenever it’s convenient.”

“Yeah, well, what about you?” he snaps.

“I’m leaving,” I say.

“Don’t go.” He grabs me by the wrist and pulls me closer to him. “Please.”

The lights go out. There have been large power outages throughout the city since the riots began.

“Everything’s falling apart.” He sighs. “What do you think is gonna happen to LaShawn?”

“I don’t know.”

“I kinda get what LaShawn did, you know?” He fiddles with the strap of my tank top.

“Because Dustin’s an asshole?”

“Just, sometimes it feels like I got all this love about to burst out of me,” Michael says. “But, like, also I hate everyone.”

Inside my headphones, the violins swell and the guitars began to wail. Bono’s voice pines and breaks at the crescendo. When the lights finally come back on, the back of my shirt is covered in damp bits of blue and pink and orange, like the sunset over the ocean on a clear day.



* * *




After school, the black kids stand in the quad, their fists raised, defiant like Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the ’68 Olympics.

Lil Ray Ray’s still absent. Mildred too. Fat Albert raises a pudgy brown fist to the sky. Candace too, though she temporarily brings her hand down to shift her pink backpack straps before raising her fist back up into the air. Her nails are like candy talons.

“What is that about?” I ask Heather.

“LaShawn’s been temporarily suspended,” she says gloomily.

“What? Whatshisface wasn’t even really hurt.”

“Zero tolerance.” She sighs.

The black kids are resolute, all eight of them in the quad together. They look like a rainbow of Negro, from the pale of Margie’s freckled half-breed arm to Candace’s blue-purple skin reflecting the sun.