The Black Kids(49)

CHAPTER 12


IF I COULD preserve my friends, as we were, in amber, this is the yellow day I would choose. Maybe it’s a specific day, or maybe it’s a composite of days. Maybe my memory has taken the arms from one day and an eyebrow from another and a few strands of hair from yet another day still. But this is it.

Kimberly is the first to befriend me. She is small and blond and already imperious, with her natural curls and chocolate-covered fingers. She walks up to me on the playground, the new girl, and, with a compliment, anoints me: “I like the way your lips are two different colors.”

I’d never thought about the color of my lips at all until that moment. But right then I thought they were beautiful. A little brown, a little pink, with white teeth, like Neapolitan ice cream. Heather was pudgier than the rest of us, and her shirt rode up when we ran over to the swings. Her legs were covered in dirt from digging in the sandbox. I don’t remember if she built any castles. Courtney had a frizzy bowl cut and carried around a little Ziploc baggie that had previously contained her peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich with the crusts cut off. She walked around gently plucking ladybugs from leaves and zipping them inside with the others. She didn’t know that they’d die later.

“Look,” she said, and held out her baggie to me.

“This is Courtney, we have the same name, and this is Heather,” Kimberly said, and Heather and Courtney both waved at me. Courtney wiped her nose with her arm, and the spotted ladies fluttered.

“I’m Ashley.”

“We’re friends now,” Kimberly said, and we all spit into our hands and shook on it.

First, we pretended to be unicorns. We stuck our hands on our heads and pointed our index fingers like magic.

We hung upside down on the monkey bars, not old enough to care that our days-of-the-week undies were showing, and the boys were too young to notice.

We agreed that Ms. Glasgow was the most beautiful teacher in the school, but maybe that’s because she had a stash of dinosaur cookies that she handed out like gold stars when we were good. Ben Gordon tried to kick us off the swings because we were girls, but together we fought back, strong.

By the end of lunch, we had a favorite song, “Flashdance… What a Feeling” by Irene Cara. We skipped around the playground and swayed our hips to the beat, pretending to be welder-stripper-dancers with hearts of gold.

After school, we went to the auditorium for Brownies. Nobody joked about my being a brownie in Brownies. Not yet. We learned a song about new friends and old friends and how new friends are great and all, but old friends are even better.

We sang it in a circle and held hands, and afterward we let go only for chocolate-chip cookies that didn’t melt in our mouths and juice boxes we squeezed to their deaths.



* * *




Courtney, Kimberly, and Heather are my first friends, my gold. So maybe that’s why I make excuses for them even when I know I shouldn’t. Why I keep my real feelings just under my tongue. Even as we’re starting to feel less like magic and more like four mismatched socks all rolled up in a single ball and stuck in the back of a drawer together. I felt more like myself with Lana tonight than I have with my friends in ages. I’m not sure what that means, exactly. What do you do when the people you love no longer feel like home?

I miss us.





CHAPTER 13


MORGAN SITS ON the front steps of my house talking on the cordless phone with Auntie Eudora in Vegas. I don’t think I’d want to still talk to my mom if she left me to chase after her new lover, but the riot seems to be pushing people together and pulling them apart in funny ways, and maybe that’s sort of what being a family’s like, anyway.

“What am I supposed do, baby?” Auntie Eudora says to my cousin over the phone.

“He’s not picking up the phone,” Morgan whines.

I hear Auntie Eudora tell Morgan that Guadalupe and her husband have gone home, so it’s just Uncle Ronnie trying to keep the looters and arsonists away.

“You gotta wait until this whole thing blows over,” Auntie Eudora says. “Just be patient.”

Morgan side-eyes me as I stumble past.

“You’re drunk,” she covers the phone and says to me.

I shrug.

“I don’t care. Tell him I wanna come home,” I hear her say as I enter mine.



* * *




On Friday nights, before I got old enough to make bad decisions at other people’s houses, I used to sit with Lucia as she got ready to make hers. I would watch as she shimmied into tight dresses, spread glitter across her face, and used Aqua Net to make a fortress of her hair. On the edge of her bed, I’d play DJ and watch her transform. She would strap on her gold heels and twirl me around like a disco ball to “Quimbara.” While Celia sang, we sparkled.

Lucia has the weekends off, which means that she’s able to stay out as late as she wants on Fridays and Saturdays. On the nights when she didn’t come home, I knew that she’d either decided to stay over at her friend Damarís’s or she was with a man. Damarís had a European hatchback like a spoiling tangerine, with a bumper that was half peeled off. She and Lucia would peel out of our driveway like they were in a race against time, like they had to get to the clubs and back before her car rotted away for good.