The Black Kids(68)

“Ouch,” I say.

LaShawn’s dress shoes slip-slide against the wall as he climbs. He launches himself over the wall quickly.

“Are you okay?” he says.

“Yeah.”

I hobble down a quiet, tree-lined block. The street itself is dark. The streetlights are out.

“We’re almost there.”

LaShawn’s house is small and gray, with white siding, a metal gate, metal on the windows, and a metal security door. It looks like a face with braces. He opens the front gate and we walk up the concrete steps to the front door, past the fat planters with roses in bloom. It doesn’t look like anybody’s there to me, but he rings the doorbell, then knocks on the metal door, which rattles with a clang-a-lang.

“Are you sure somebody’s home?” I say.

“The power’s out, remember? They’re probably in the back of the house,” he says.

He pounds on the door louder. Clang-a-lang-a-lang. No answer.

“The front door’s lock is a little janky,” he explains. “Follow me.”

He heads toward the back, and I follow.

The back of LaShawn’s house looks as though whatever used to be there has been paved over in favor of a mini makeshift basketball court. A partially deflated ball sits in a plastic lawn chair off to the side next to an old grill. More potted plants line the area.

LaShawn pounds on the back door. No answer.

Then he takes out his keys and opens the door.

Inside, the house feels like a cave. Moonlight streams in small slivers across the tile floor.

He grabs my hand. “Careful.”

Along the wall, on the floor, there are candles melted down like in an abandoned haunted house.

“Mama!” he yells into the house. No response.

School photos of LaShawn, of his sister, Kaitlyn, with her hair like fire, and others line the wall. The photos fade as we go deeper into the house and farther into the past, like a photographic origin story that begins with what I assume are LaShawn’s grandparents, posing in front of a house—this house, before the metal was added—looking like they’re ready to start their young lives.

In the kitchen, LaShawn goes through a drawer looking for a flashlight, or matches. It smells ever so faintly like the trash that hasn’t been collected this week. There are plants everywhere, some invisible tenderness making things grow beautiful in unassuming corners.

“Maybe they left you a letter.”

There’s an intimacy in being in somebody else’s house. Sometimes when I’m in my friends’ houses, I think, Who would I be if I grew up here? Would I be me, or someone very different if I’d grown up in LaShawn’s neighborhood, and he mine?

There are so many sirens outside, coming, going. Wee-oooh-wee-oooh closer, beeep boop beep beep. And also there’s the whir of helicopters. Voices on bullhorns. We’re less than ten miles away from my house, but the sounds of this neighborhood are so different. The city vibrates around us. I close my eyes and hear the layers.

One of the windows in the living room is broken. A piece of cardboard covers it.

“What happened there?”

“Miss Violet’s grandkids next door were playing catch. Mama hasn’t been able to fix it yet.”

The kitchen wall by the telephone is covered in phone numbers etched into the faded paint in pencil. Plumbers’ numbers, handymen, friends, and relatives. Next to the numbers are childhood doodles, presumably made by LaShawn and his sister over the years. LaShawn runs his fingers along the wall like he’s searching for braille secrets.

“What are you looking for?”

“My aunt’s number. She’ll know where they are.”

My favorite of the drawings on the wall is of a princess wearing a poofy dress and a crown, holding a bloodied knife with somebody’s phone number impaled on it. Little kids are so weird.

LaShawn raises the receiver and dials the number. It rings and rings, but nobody picks up. He places it back down in the cradle.

“Fuck.”

He reaches into one of the drawers and takes out a pen, then snatches an envelope from the mail piled on the counter to write the number down. Then he opens the envelope, glances at its contents, and pins them to the refrigerator with a magnet. A slightly past-due electric bill. I look at the number on the bill. I never knew electricity costs so much. But I guess I’ve never had to know or worry about what anything costs, really.

Then LaShawn pockets the envelope with the scribbled number and walks toward the front of the house.

In the middle of their living room, a cardboard Nike shoebox sits, probably exactly where LaShawn left it. Partially open, tissue paper on the ground.

He picks it up off the floor, places it on the worn leather couch, and sits down next to it. I sit down on the other side of the shoebox.

Why did I say what I did about him and the shoes? Jealousy? Yes. I want to be this boy, but also, I think… I want this boy. To be in his skin, to wear my brown confident and easy, and to have the weight of his golden skin on mine.

He sinks his head into his hands and starts to cry. It’s kind of like seeing Mr. Holmes tear up in front of the whole class, or my father sobbing after his mother died all those years ago. He tries to twist himself from me, hiding his tears, because boys don’t cry—certainly not black boys. Except when they do. Then he does that awkward thing where your sad makes your whole body quake. I place my hand on his back, but he shrugs it away.