The Black Kids(62)
“Say cheese!” Lucia yells, and we smile.
My mother starts to tear up.
Before we get into the car, Lucia squeezes me tight.
“Don’t have sex, mija,” she whispers, and laughs.
On the car ride over, Trevor blabs about meditation and Cobain. I glance at Michael and Kimberly in the back seat. Every so often, they both drink out of a flask that Kimberly keeps in her pink satin purse. She rests her head on Michael’s shoulder, which is entirely unlike her. Normally she’d be too concerned with messing up her hair to do a thing like that, but tonight, she’s punch-drunk on love and vodka. Michael catches me looking at them in the mirror. I look away and stare at PCH as it unwinds, dangerous, before us.
* * *
When we first walk in, past the hotel lobby to the grand ballroom, Kris Kross is telling us to jump.
Kimberly screams, “I love this song!” and does. For a moment, all I can see are blond curls and pink-and-purple taffeta.
The hotel is all marble and ornate columns. Old, rich Italians sit like sun-drenched leather on a velvet couch in the lobby. We shriek and rush past them to Heather and Courtney, even though we saw them not twenty minutes ago.
Heather and Courtney hug us and drag us by our wrists to the girls’ bathroom, where I watch as they do E and pass around a bedazzled flask of vodka.
A woman wrapped in a mink stole, with wrinkles so deep you want to stick your fingers in, her gray strands in an elaborate updo, emerges from her bathroom stall. Courtney scrambles to hide the vodka behind the poof of her dress, but the lady definitely sees it. We think she’s going to chastise us or drag us to our elders to face punishment, but instead she washes her hands and gives us a knowing wink in the mirror.
“Have fun, my pets!” She laughs and totters out the door.
I don’t do drugs. Not the real ones, anyway. My friends all do, but if there’s one thing my father has taught me, it’s that black people do not get a pass with these things.
Last year, my cousin Reggie went to jail. Reggie’s kind of a superior asshole; like at Thanksgiving the rest of us will be talking about some shit like Coming to America and he’ll start in trying to compare grades and SAT scores while we’re eating boring Great-Auntie Delilah’s amazing mac and cheese. I think that’s him trying to make his mom pay attention, though. Sometimes the right numbers are better than the right words when you’re trying to get your parents to love you. Mostly he’s a good kid. Anyway, he got caught with coke at some party the police busted in the Palisades. My aunt Carol is a judge and she pulled some strings to get her son out, but my father made it clear he will do no such thing.
“If you get arrested trying to keep up with the white kids, I will not bail you out. I will not pull any strings, you hear?”
I sip from Kimberly’s flask and let the alcohol burn down my throat. That’ll have to be enough for me.
Soon, I’ll be the only one who isn’t rolling.
* * *
Trevor holds me by the elbow, which is an awkward place to hold somebody, but it’s better than holding hands, which I don’t want to do. Trevor is actually a very considerate date. He holds doors and walks slowly to make sure I can keep up in my heels. He only talks a little bit about things I don’t give a shit about.
Michael and Kimberly hold hands. She keeps kissing Michael’s cheek. His parents have paid for a hotel suite for us tonight. Everybody knows what that means. Kimberly thinks something major is going to happen, something that will cement things and seal the distance between USC and Rutgers and keep them together forever, but she doesn’t even know about Michael’s finding his dad’s near-lifeless body, or the fact that his mother gets drunk before ten every morning. I’ve held both their hands. I know where Michael’s fingertips are guitar calloused, where the weird mole is on Kimberly’s index finger. I’ve held both their secrets.
I’m not sure that I’m jealous, exactly, but maybe I am kinda sad. Even after all these years together, I’m not sure either of them really knows the other. Plus, Kimberly thinks something magical is about to happen, when as of last week Michael didn’t even know how to properly fondle a boob.
We stand in line to get our pictures taken by a professional before our faces melt and we stink of questionable decisions. The photographer corrals each group and poses the girls with their right hands on their hips, heads tilted to the left, one leg ever so slightly extended forward. The boys are adjusted into and out of varying stages of doofy.
When the photographer gets to us, he starts to snap at me, “Where’s your date?”
He repeats it again with increasing frustration. I’m confused until I realize that he thinks Heather is with Trevor and I’m the odd one out. I point at Trevor.
“Oh…,” he says, and moves over to Heather to physically adjust her.
* * *
They aren’t allowing LaShawn into prom, on account of his suspension. Several of the chaperones stand around him and the other black kids like confused security guards.
“C’mon, it’s prom,” Tarrell says.
“You guys can go in,” somebody’s dad says. The sleeves of his once-crisp white shirt are already rolled up, and the sweat pools at his temples and under his armpits. “LaShawn’s the only one who’s been suspended.”