The Black Kids(6)

“Polo!” I yell.



* * *




Kimberly and Courtney get into an argument over the rules of Marco Polo—Kimberly thinks you can get out of the pool to avoid being tagged, but Courtney insists that’s cheating, since we didn’t agree upon “fish out of water” rules beforehand. To broker peace, I suggest we stop swimming and start drinking.

We pass the bottle around like a communion cup. I roll the bitter of the beer around on my tongue. I don’t like beer, but we’re underage, so we can’t be choosy.

“What the hell?”

A crew of burly men in neon reflective vests and white hard hats enters, their faces red and sun chapped.

We scramble out of the pool and run through wood and glass and nails and trash. Pain hits my left foot, deep and searing. A piece of glass, part of a shattered beer bottle, is the culprit. The blood trickles in dark red lines down my foot.

I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be in AP physics right now, reviewing momentum and impulse. Right now, Mr. Holmes would be going into and out of focus.

“I’m calling the cops!” another hard hat yells after us.

“Fuck the police.” Trevor channels N.W.A., laughs, then punctuates it with a belch.

Across town, the trial lets out for the day. The members of the jury step out into the open air and lift their faces to the sky, glad that after a long, dark day, there’s a bit of sunshine left.

No, I don’t care about any of it now. But I will.





CHAPTER 2


THE SQUAD CAR pulls up alongside us as we approach Courtney’s house.

“We received a complaint,” the officer inside says.

“Hi, Officer… Bradford,” Kimberly says, looking at his name tag. She puts on that voice she uses to get boys to do what she wants. Unbothered, she twirls her hair into a rope and wrings it out so the water drips onto the concrete. He watches the water as it falls.

The rest of us stand silently behind her.

“Trespassing’s a serious offense.” The officer isn’t too much older than we are. About twenty or so, brown haired with a whisper of a jawline. Officer Bradford squeaks and then overcorrects with too much bass. We’re not that close, but we’re also not that far from where the Rodney King beating occurred. I wonder if this officer knows those officers. Maybe he works out with them, plays basketball or does community fund-raisers with men who laughed afterward about beating a man until they fractured his skull, damaged his kidneys, and scrambled his brains.

“I think there’s been some confusion,” Kimberly says. “My dad’s totally friends with the owner, and he said it was okay if we used the pool while he’s away.”

He doesn’t buy it, but Kimberly’s leaned over the window and all her beauty is spilling into his car. He pulls his eyes away and looks past her at the rest of us. Grandma Opal used to say that white kids wear their youth like body armor. Bradford’s eyes land on me, and he squints as though he’s found the root of our hooliganism.

“You could call him if you like,” Kimberly offers.

Instead, he makes us sit in a row on the curb. Michael’s legs are hairy and pale next to mine. The burn above his ears is getting worse. He crosses his eyes and sticks his tongue out at me. A Mercedes speeds around the corner.

“That guy was definitely speeding,” Heather says. “That’s a real danger to the neighborhood, officer.”

Officer Bradford ignores her.

“You’ve been drinking?” He sniffs the air around us.

“No,” we say in chorus.

“You’ve been smoking?”

“No.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” he says.

“We’re seniors.”

“Truancy is against the law,” he says.

It is?

“Driver’s licenses and school IDs,” he says. “Now.”

He reaches for Michael’s first.

“I don’t have any ID on me.” Michael shrugs. He’s definitely lying, and Bradford definitely knows it.

Bradford asks Heather, and she gestures at her bikini top. “Doesn’t exactly go with the outfit.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass.” Officer Bradford points to me and reaches his hand out. “You.”

My black ass is not going to risk lying to a police officer. I pass my ID and license over to him with a slight tremble in my hand. I still had braces in my school ID photo. I used alternate colors on each tooth so my smile was a rainbow.

“Oh fuck,” Kimberly whispers.

“I’m calling your school,” he says.



* * *




And he does.

“Everything would’ve been fine if Ash wasn’t with us,” Kimberly says, laughing, as we walk back to her place. “Otherwise we’d totally have gotten away with it.

“?’Cause you’re black,” she says by way of explanation.

Sometimes she says “black” like it’s this really funny dirty word.

“Yeah, I got it,” I say.



* * *




The first time I remember one of my parents being pulled over by a cop, I was eight. The day before, my mother had brought home a brand-new convertible, white with a tan interior, like a pair of buttery leather gloves against your skin. We had a girls’ day, just the two of us, and she put the top down so that the wind blew about our faces, and I reached up and out and tried to catch the sky in my fingertips. It felt a little like flying. My fingernails had been painted the pink of the inside of a seashell at the spa, same as my mother’s, and the two Vietnamese spa owners had laughed and shouted across the squeaky leather chairs at each other as they pushed back our cuticles. My mother and I were laughing, our hair undone in the wind, when we saw the flashing lights in our rearview mirror. The officer was younger than my mother, with the same wispy blond goatee he must’ve had in high school. He looked like a bullied kid turned bully, the kind of kid who’d been too big, too poor, or too dumb and was now more than happy to pull over anybody he deemed too anything. In our case, too black.