The Black Kids(52)

I remember the way the leather of his varsity jacket squeaked as he moved. He grabbed me by my waist and pulled me in closer. The stick shift dug into my side as he tried to pull my leg over toward him. He placed his hand on my boob and moved it around like he was trying to open a doorknob.

“Do you wanna move to the back seat?” he whispered.

No scratched at the back of my throat, but he kissed it away before it could come out.

Anyway, neither of us knew what we were doing.

Now I think maybe we were holding on to each other to keep from drowning.

It hurt a little bit, but not as much as I thought it would, and afterward we laid back and held hands.

Morgan was the first person who taught me about sex. Well, technically, she taught me how to put my Barbies’ perfect plastic bodies together, rub them a bit, and close the curtain to their canopy bed. A canopy bed would’ve been a much more romantic place to rub bodies than Michael’s shitbox of a Chevy Nova.

“First, they kiss,” Morgan said.

“And then?” I said.

Morgan didn’t know the specifics, just the rubbing.

“Good girls keep their legs together,” my mother told me offhandedly sophomore year as we were watching a talk-show special on teen moms. No specifics.

In the car with Michael, I thought of that parade of beleaguered teenage girls and their pudgy babies. Were they bad girls, then? Was I now a bad girl?

I thought I was going to vomit.

“Wait…,” he said as I climbed over him and pushed and pulled against the car door, willing it to open.

“You can’t go out in that. It’s pouring.” He tried to pull my arm back. “You’ll get sick.”

“Rain doesn’t make you sick.”

We struggled in an awkward push and pull. Finally, he let me go.

It wasn’t supposed to rain that day. The water soaked through my thin dress as I ran across the parking lot until I was some heavy, waterlogged version of myself.

“Ash!” Michael called after me, but only just the once.





CHAPTER 14


THE WORLD OUTSIDE is still. A singular insomniac bird chirps off and on. My head is pounding. I shouldn’t have had so much to drink at Lana’s. Sometimes when I drink too much, I wake up way earlier than I normally would and can’t get back to sleep. Before I woke up, I was dreaming of falling, and when I opened my eyes, my stomach felt like it was in my throat. After staring at the ceiling for a while, thinking about all the things I shouldn’t have done in the entirety of my seventeen years on earth and all the things I should do, I decide to call Jo.

“Hello?” Harrison says into the phone like he’s still in the middle of a dream.

“Hi. May I speak to my sister?” I say. “It’s Ashley. Ashley Bennett.”

After some rustling and muttering, Jo answers, “What’s wrong, Ash?”

“Nothing. Everything.”

“Are you okay? Are Mom and Dad okay?”

“They’re fine. It’s not that.… Everyone’s all right. I wanted to know you’re all right. You haven’t been answering any of their calls.… They’re worried about you.”

She sighs. “I’m as well as can be expected.”

“What does that mean?”

“The rebellion. It’s dying. They’re militarizing the streets.”

“Jo, this isn’t something for you to take one of your stands on,” I say.

“People have been dying,” she says. “That’s the whole reason for the rebellion. That’s the whole reason for taking one of my stands. Protesting isn’t supposed to be easy. Revolution isn’t easy. Not when you’re trying to dismantle an entire system.”

“You’re a revolutionary now?”

“You sound like Valerie,” she exhales with a deep sigh.

“Mom just wants you to be safe.”

“Worrying about being safe is what’s dangerous, what deters progress. We get treated like some crazy fringe group—”

“Who’s we?” I interrupt.

“The Revolutionary Communist Party, Ashley,” Jo says, like I’m supposed to know who the hell she’s talking about. “But what’s so crazy about wanting people to be equal? Capitalism doesn’t work, Ash. This country isn’t taking care of all its people—just the ones with the right skin color, the right genitals, the highest bank accounts. You don’t have to be crazy to acknowledge that. If we don’t do something now, then when?” She pauses for a moment. “Can you keep a secret?”

Not this again.

“I thought about what you said. You’re right. Flyers aren’t enough. People throw them away. You gotta do something more permanent.”

“I definitely didn’t say that part,” I say.

“I’ve been writing on the walls with spray paint. Slogans here and there.”

“Why can’t you collect clothes and cans of food or whatever like a normal person? They can arrest you for graffitiing. Doing graffiti? Whatever.”

“It’s not graffiti. It’s a movement,” she says defensively. “Hold on a second.”

I hear soft static, then a bit of rustling and movement.

“Where are you?”