The Black Kids(61)
I never knew this about Uncle Ronnie. How many other things don’t I know? I realize I’d kinda rather stay here and find out. It feels wrong to leave my family right now, in our hour of need, or mourning, or whatever it is.
“Anyway, let me leave you kids to it.” He starts to stand, and Michael and Trevor rush over to help him up.
Before he hobbles out of the room, Uncle Ronnie leans over to me and whispers, “They don’t got any black kids at your school?”
I think of the black kids yesterday with their fists raised in protest and how I should’ve joined them. Or like how I shouldn’t have even started this shit in the first place. And how, once it started, I should’ve done something to stop it. Last year, LaShawn was prom king. Today, I wonder if he’ll even be allowed at prom. As if he can read my thoughts, before I can say anything, Uncle Ronnie shakes his head and walks away.
With the adult out of the way, Trevor and Michael start whipping their heads around to the block of Pearl Jam videos. When Pearl Jam stops jamming, Trevor loses control of his head banging and flails into the coffee table, sending Heather’s glass of water flying in an ill-fated splash so it looks like she peed her pretty dress.
“Jackass!” Heather screams.
“Can we all just get along?” I hear Rodney King stammer on the MTV News bulletin as I walk down the hall toward the bathroom.
* * *
Rusty looks like a skater or a surfer, like even in his dressy tux, his body wants to be balanced on a board somewhere, moving. He greets everybody with, “Hey, dudes!”
His face seems to be built around his broad stoner smile, as though everything else is an afterthought. Yesterday, a Korean kid only a year older than us was shot to death in front of a pizza parlor in K-Town, his shirt so bloodstained that it looked like it had a big black hole in the middle, an empty space in the image where his heart and guts should’ve been. I wonder if Rusty saw that and thought, Maybe, in some other version of my life, that could’ve been me. I wonder if he looked at that kid laid out and saw himself with a bloom of blood across his chest, a victim, the way I look at dead black kids sometimes.
In Koreatown, seven thousand people attend a clean-up rally on a baseball field.
“We will not retaliate. We will wait with patience. We will forgive with love.”
These are their prayers.
* * *
Outside, Morgan floats in the pool on a flamingo, tracing her finger along the surface of the water in lazy circles. She wears dark glasses and one of Jo’s old bikinis like she thinks she’s in a different movie from the one we’re in.
Michael sits down next to her. He’s rolled his pants up so that his bare feet dangle in the water. He leans over and says something to her and my cousin says something to him, throws back her head, and laughs so you can see her one gold crown.
“It’s time for pictures, Michael!” Kimberly calls across the backyard. Michael scrambles to throw his shoes and socks back on before jogging over to the grass, where everyone is getting ready to pose.
I walk over to where Morgan floats, close to the pool’s edge.
“I never knew your dad could sing like that,” I say.
Morgan peers at me over Jo’s sunglasses. “We’re a family of many talents.”
“Apparently.”
I think of how easily Morgan hit the Parkers’ tires last night. I’m afraid to ask her where she even learned to do a thing like that. “What were you and Michael talking about?” I say.
“A Tribe Called Quest,” she says. “He was asking if I liked them. Then I was like, ‘Why didn’t you ask me if I liked R.E.M. or Nirvana or whatever? Is it ’cause I’m black?’ and he got silent and awkward, and then I started laughing.”
“But do you?”
“Hell yeah.” She swirls her hand in the water around her. “But I also like R.E.M. and Nirvana. He was too easy to fuck with.”
And we both laugh so hard that Morgan belly laughs herself right out the floatie and into the pool.
“Ashley, come on!” Kimberly yells over to me.
“You smoke with them?” Morgan says.
I shrug. “Sometimes.”
“Just be careful. You think they’ll have your back if y’all get caught?”
She lets the question hang in the air.
“I guess I should get over there,” I say.
“Yeah… good luck with that.” Morgan wipes her curls away from her face and rests her freckled elbows on the concrete.
* * *
On the lawn, Kimberly stabs Michael with the boutonniere pin, and a tiny pearl of blood erupts. She wipes it away with her finger and licks it like a teenage vampire.
“Ouch!” Michael says as she does it again.
Kimberly continues to prove herself untrustworthy around pointy things, so instead I take over.
“Here, I’ll do it,” I say.
I pin the cornflower-blue flowers onto his suit for him. For a minute, the two of us belong to each other, until Trevor throws his arm around Michael’s shoulder.
We line up according to height. Lucia, my mother, and my father snap photos so that one day, years from now, we can look back and laugh at the heft of our dresses and the bright of our eyeshadow. First is Heather, then Michael and Kimberly. Courtney and Rusty line up next to me and Trevor. Trevor wraps his arms a little too comfortably around my lower waist, and my father stares him down until he moves his hands up a bit higher.