The Black Kids(48)

* * *




After dinner, Brad and Pham retire into the house and Lana and I go back to jumping on the trampoline. I do a back tuck into a front tuck, and Lana claps and says, “Again!”

We tucker ourselves out and sit in the ratty chairs in front of her guest house. She offers me a cigarette, and I inhale and hold it in my lungs. This is apparently the exact wrong thing to do. I’ve never actually smoked a cigarette before, only pot, and so I cough and cough and cough.

Lana laughs. “This isn’t an after-school special. You don’t have to smoke, silly.”

“Why don’t you tell them?” I say. “About your mom?”

“It doesn’t happen that often. She gets frustrated. She’s lonely, I think.”

She links her arm through mine.

“Are you lonely?” I say.

Instead of answering, she kisses my cheek.

“Who did you used to hang out with?” I ask.

“You remember Gloria Dowd?”

“Yeah… kinda,” I say. “With the…”

I feel bad when I realize that I don’t remember anything about Gloria Dowd at all.

“Her father got transferred and her parents moved to somewhere in Orange County.”

“It’s not like she moved to Colorado or somewhere.”

“Fuck. It might as well be another country,” she says, and we laugh.

The alcohol combined with the cigarette combined with the food is starting to catch up to me, I can feel it.

“Are you a bisexual?” I feel myself losing control of my words.

“Does that matter to you?” she says.

“No.”

“Yes,” she says. “I think so. Why?”

“Do you like me?” I slur, and pucker my lips in her general direction. I think I could fall in love with somebody like Lana, even if she is a girl. Girl parts are way better looking than boy parts, anyway.

“Not like that…” She laughs and dodges my mouth.

“Why not?” I’m a little indignant.

Before she can finish formulating her response to my stupidity, the world begins to spin, and I don’t feel anything. Then I feel everything.

I run inside toward Lana’s bathroom while she chases after me laughing. “In the toilet! In the toilet!”

While bent over the toilet, as Lana holds my hair away from my face, I tell her the second bad thing but not the first.

“I kinda started the shit with LaShawn and the shoes. My friends spread the rumor.”

“Your friends are twats,” she says. “Kimberly’s the worst.”

I laugh and puke some more.

“She’s had a rough couple of years,” I say.

“So have all of us. That’s fucking high school, man,” she scoffs.

I think of the girl Kimberly nicknamed Jabba, after Jabba the Hut, last year, and now nobody even knows the girl’s name. Everybody calls her Jabba. Kimberly’s bitchiness coils in words that she doesn’t even give a thought to beyond her own personal amusement. To everyone else, they’re a series of blows to the gut, even if Kimberly’s never once balled a fist.

“Make it right,” Lana says as she pats my back. She doesn’t know how much of it is wrong.

Back in the living room, we sprawl out on the couch, and Lana makes me drink a glass of water. After I gulp down the first, she goes back into the kitchen to get me another one.

We don’t hear the door when it opens. Lana’s mother is feline and startled. Her green eyes flash with fear at the sight of me in her living room, alone. She looks like Lana, but pale and hard. She begins to reach for the nearest would-be weapon, which happens to be a copper Buddha statue. I think of poor Uncle Ronnie with his hands to the sky and two rifles pointed at his head.

I stand and raise my hands to the ceiling.

“Don’t worry, I’m not here to rob your house. Mine’s nicer,” I’m drunk enough to say.

Behind me, Lana bursts out laughing.

Her mother does not.



* * *




Pham drives me home. Lana sits in the back seat behind me. We sit silently, but it’s a comfortable silence. After a bit, Lana squeezes her head up front between the two seats. “I’m sorry my mom’s an asshole.”

Lana’s mother tried to blame her response to me on the riots, like I was a single solitary teenage looter who decided to break in and chill on her couch.

“You know how everyone’s so on edge right now.” Lana’s mother sighed.

“It’s okay,” I said.

Like I said before, I’m always saying things are okay when maybe they’re not.

“Sometimes people, they see your skin, and all they know of you is war,” Pham says to me as we round a corner.

“I hate it,” I say.

“Me too,” he says. “You must come visit us again.”

We’re almost to my house when Lana starts to sing “Home” from The Wiz. Her voice cracks a little when she gets to the part about home being a place where there’s overflowing love. Her arm dangles just a bit out of the window, and every so often the wind lifts her flannel shirt and you can see the purple of her bruises across her skin.

Pham and I join in for as long as we can remember the words.