The Black Kids(51)

“What are we doing?” I whisper to Morgan.

“Shhh,” she says. “You’re the lookout. So… look.”

She raises the gun like she’s got experience shooting at things and actually hitting them. The shot cracks through the night as the first pellet goes into the first tire. Then the next pellet into the next tire. Apparently, her expert marksmanship isn’t limited to pelting people with lemons.

“They’re gonna come out any minute,” I say.

“Your turn,” she says.

“Me?” I say. “No!”

“Hurry up. Don’t be a little bitch.” She practically tosses the gun at me.

I feel the weight of it in my hands, against my shoulder. It’s exhilarating. It’s power. I reach back and cock it. My pellet hits one of their plotted plants and it shatters, the dirt tumbling out like entrails. It’s no tire, but still I’m a little high on destruction.

“That’s for my dad,” Morgan says. “Assholes.”

A light turns on in the Parkers’ house.

“Oh shit!” Morgan says, and we run back quickly into my house. Out of breath and laughing, we collapse on the sofa next to Lucia, who startles and awakens with a “?Que?”

We have to be better. We have to turn the other cheek. We have to counter hate with love. Except when we don’t.

It’s like my sister said: “We have to walk around being perfect all the time just to be seen as human. Don’t you ever get tired of being a symbol? Don’t you ever just want to be human?”



* * *




So how good am I at keeping secrets, really? The best. Or maybe, depending on your perspective, the worst.

The Wednesday before last, I should’ve gone with Lucia to say goodbye to Damarís. Damarís put Band-Aids on my boo-boos and fed me ice cream and let the Chinese girl and me make forts out of her couch cushions. Instead, I did something awful. Or, I guess, I did something human.

Okay. Here goes. Like I said earlier, I’m mostly a good person. Or I used to think so, but now I’m not so sure.

Kimberly thinks she and Michael are going to lose their virginity to each other, but that won’t happen, because I had sex with Michael while Lucia sat in Damarís’s tiny kitchen among the boxes, saying goodbye.

This is how it happened:

Courtney and Kimberly and Heather and I sat on the front steps. Trevor and Michael joined us. Trevor kept sliding down the banister and walking back up to the top and sliding down again. Heather drew stick figures across Courtney’s thigh with a ballpoint pen. Kimberly rested her chin against Michael’s knees while he stroked her hair, and I tried not to feel anything at all.

The rain started to fall in big fat droplets, and we were bored. Eventually, Courtney and Kimberly decided they’d rather be bored and dry at the mall. Heather left to check out this new band recording their demo at her grandfather’s studio. Trevor lingered for a bit, until he too decided there was somewhere else he’d rather be. Then it was just the two of us.

“Wanna chill in my car?” Michael said.

“Okay.”



* * *




Normally, we would’ve been listening to something. We’re always listening to something. But that day there was only the drill of rain against Michael’s tinny car roof, loud like we were inside a drum.

“Inhale,” he said. I breathed in.

“You know my dad tried to kill himself when I was a kid?” he said.

“That’s fucked up.”

“I was the one who found him.”

I wonder what it would be like to walk in on my dad, blue and belted around his neck. It’s weird to think of a real body hanging right in front of you, like it does in one of those lynching photographs with the white kids eating cotton candy and pointing.

“What’s he like?”

“I don’t know him well. He works, and when he’s not working, he’s golfing or whatever. He embezzled from his old company. That’s why he tried to kill himself.”

My secrets came out in a rush through my guts. Jo’s failure to fly, and a few others that had wrapped themselves around my organs and often tried to slither up my throat. I wanted to give them to Michael in his shit-green tin can of a car, but also I was a little afraid. Sometimes when we talk, I feel like he’s just trying to stare right into my brain itself, but more often than that I get the impression he’s not actually hearing me at all.

Then I thought, Maybe it’s okay to tell everything to somebody who doesn’t really hear you. Your secrets still stay yours, somehow.

“My sister fell off the roof when we were younger. I think she did it on purpose—like, to hurt herself. But after it happened, we all just pretended it was an accident. It feels like we’re always pretending things are okay when they’re not. Like we’re the goddamn Huxtables or whatever. But we’re not. Nobody is. It makes me feel like I’m the fucking crazy one, somehow.”

Michael held my face in his hands. He didn’t say anything, and I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me at all, but I didn’t care. Then he leaned in and kissed me, and I kissed him back. It was the first time we’d ever actually kissed, though a few weeks before we’d come dangerously close. The kissing would’ve been bad enough, but we didn’t stop there.