The Black Kids(50)

The Wednesday before last, Lucia asked for the evening off to go visit Damarís, who was going back to Guatemala for good, and I did something very stupid. I can’t tell you about it yet, but I will.

Now, instead of being out with Damarís, Lucia sits on the couch in the living room, watching television, alone. She has fewer weekends left here with me than I have fingers.

I drape myself over her and give her a kiss on the cheek. Morgan comes in from outside.

“You smell like a bar,” Morgan says.

I ignore her and turn to Lucia.

“I made a new friend. Like you told me to.”

“Does your new friend come in a bottle?” Morgan points to the television screen showing coverage of the riots. “You know, not all of us get to party and pretend like nothing’s happening.”

“I wasn’t partying,” I say. “I’m worried about Uncle Ronnie and the store and everything, same as you.”

“No. Not same as me. He’s my dad.”

“You’re right. I know,” I say, before belching pink wine.

Morgan gives me a dirty look. I know that she resents me and resents being here. She thinks I don’t care. But it’s not that; it’s that there’s so very much to care about, so much to feel, and instead of trying to sort out what’s in my head, sometimes I don’t want to feel any of it at all.

I’m sorry, I want to tell my cousin. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I don’t know where to begin.

It feels like a lifetime of biting my tongue has left my words flattened across the tops of my teeth.

Onscreen, they’re rebroadcasting bits and pieces of the peace rally that happened at Wilshire and Western earlier today. I pretend to focus very hard on peace.

“Do you miss Damarís?” I ask Lucia.

“It’s hard making new friends as you get older.” Lucia sighs.

“Who is Damarís?” Morgan asks.

“Her best friend,” I say.

When I was really little, Lucia would take me over to Damarís’s place and I would play with the neighbor girl in the building’s courtyard while the two of them gossiped in Spanish and exchanged news from home. Damarís lived not far from where Jo lives now, a little closer to the freeway. The neighbor girl was Chinese; her parents were recent immigrants who worked at a store down the street from the apartment complex. She didn’t speak much English, and I didn’t speak any Chinese, but somehow that didn’t stop us. Childhood is its own language, of sorts. The Chinese girl moved away years ago, somewhere off the 10. I bet her English is pretty good now. The only Chinese I remember is Ni hao, hello; Wo ai ni, I love you; and Nèi ge, that one or um in Mandarin. I remember it because it sounds like nigger.

Last year, there was that coup in Haiti, and now on the news they’ll show those strangers in the ocean floating and clinging to one another to keep from drowning. Once, while we were watching a boat of refugees being rescued, Lucia leaned in and asked if I wanted to know a secret. Sure, I said. She told me that Damarís came from rich people back in Guatemala, and that if it hadn’t been for the war and coming here, they would never have been friends, much less best friends. I think Lucia was trying to tell me that she knew what those black refugees felt like.

Morgan, our refugee, wanders around the room touching things.

“Why would your parents go out in this?” she says.

“They have date nights on Fridays,” I say.

They were supposed to go see Phantom of the Opera downtown, but it was canceled on account of the rioting, so instead they’re going out to dinner nearby. When I asked them this morning if they were still going out, my father looked at me and said, “Even when bad things are happening, we have to keep on living.”

“Your dad should be out there with my dad protecting the store,” Morgan says. “Not eating fucking fancy pasta or steak or whatever.”

I don’t know why she picked pasta and steak as the foods my parents might be eating. Given the area and their personal preferences, it’s more likely seafood, but now isn’t a good time to be too specific.



* * *




Later, when Lucia has fallen asleep in front of the television, Morgan turns to me and says, “How good are you at keeping secrets?”

I think about all the secrets I keep. I’m like a walking safe, my guts full of everybody else’s hidden parts. My friends’. Jo’s. My own, and now Lana’s, too. So many secrets.

“The best,” I say. “I’m the best at secrets.”

“Good. Come with me,” she says.

I follow her into our entryway, where she slides on her sneakers and nods at me to do the same. Then she grabs my father’s pellet gun.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s a secret,” she says. “Duh.”

Morgan raises the pellet gun at me like she kinda wants to shoot me.

“You’ll shoot my eye out,” I say.

“Good thing you’ve got two. Let’s go,” she says, and a gust of warm air hits us as we walk into the night.

The Parkers aren’t in front of their house anymore; on this third day of the riot, with no action, they’ve retired. I guess they’ve gotten bored of waiting.