The Black Kids(69)

“I’m really sorry,” I say.

The smell of him is so familiar, cocoa butter and something else I can’t place, but he smells like home.

“We could stay here and wait for them,” I whisper.

I don’t know why I’m whispering all of a sudden.

He looks up at me from under his huge wet lashes.

“No.” He awkwardly lifts his head up and wipes his eyes with the backs of his hands. “Maybe Miss Violet knows where they went.”



* * *




We exit out the front door. LaShawn has already pulled the door behind us, we’ve already walked through the metal gate, it has already clicked into place, when he realizes that he left his keys in the back door.

“Aww shit,” he says. “Stay here.”

He’s about to hoist himself back over the metal gate to go get the keys when a flashlight shines on us.

“Are you trying to break into that house?” a female voice says.

Like we would say yes if we were?

The policewoman approaches us with her hand by her hip. She’s smaller than we are, her dirty-blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Her eyes dart around as though at any moment more of us might come, a roving gang of wayward black kids in expensive formalwear.

“No ma’am… uh… officer. I live here,” LaShawn says.

“We were trying to see if…” I walk toward her, but she draws her gun and I freeze.

“Don’t come any closer!”

The barrel is the size of a girl’s index finger.

I think of Uncle Ronnie and the Parkers. What he must have felt standing across from two barrels who saw only his black in the wrong place and not Ronnie, son of Shirley, brother of Craig, father of Tonya and Morgan, a good and fair store owner, an above-average ex-husband. I think about my friends and what they’re doing right now, still bouncing around on hormones and expectations, awkwardly gyrating to “It Takes Two” or something like it. I wonder if they’ve noticed I’ve gone, or if they even care. I think about my two mothers, Mom and Lucia, and how if this woman shoots me, the bullets would probably rip through the dress my mother chose, but not the one I liked best. I think about Daddy and Morgan floating around the house in mourning for Grandma Shirley’s looted dream. Mostly, I think about Jo, somewhere out there. She needs me and I need her. If I die here, they’ll probably all be wondering why I was so far from home.

“This city is our home. All of it,” Jo said.

People will probably think LaShawn and I came here to bone. I imagine our bodies in awkward angles, bleeding out on a fading front lawn. I think of all the things I’d never get to do, the people I’d never get to meet, the places I’d never get to go, the things I’d never get to be. I’ve never been in love. I don’t want to die, not yet. I’m think I’m only starting to figure out who I am.

Then I think of those three little black boys who belonged to each other, afraid outside the 7-Eleven near Jo’s, that cop’s knee in the baby’s back. “But we didn’t do nothing.”

My mother and I should’ve done something.

“Down! Now!” the cop screams.



* * *




We sink down to our knees. Chemical smoke from the burning insulation and rubber sticks to our lungs whenever we inhale. Our knees grind into the gravel.

Little bits of ash fall around us like snow and land on our clothes like polka dots. We’re so close, we can almost feel the fire on our faces.





CHAPTER 18


ON THE NEWS, they showed the arrested rioters laid out across bits of lawn and parking lots with plastic zip ties around their wrists, their bodies lined up like one of those drawings of slaves crammed into slave ships.

LaShawn and I are down in the grass, spread like stars, the police officer’s flashlight bright in our faces. To anyone walking by, we look like criminals.

I’m very afraid, and also very angry. Both of these feelings dig their knees into my heart and slam against my lungs so I can barely breathe. Whenever a black or brown person gets shot or hurt by police, people say, “Well, but what did they do to deserve it?” The assumption is that it’s always deserved, somehow. Or “They should’ve listened.” We don’t get the benefit of the doubt—we, they, you, even me, with my fancy school and my fancy house and my fancy clothes.

Here I am, to quote Kimberly, “blackity black.”

This is what Jo meant when she said, “It’s not just about Rodney. It’s about all of us.”

I get it now. I get it.

I want to live. I’m not even a whole-ass person yet. I want to be.

If I get to be an adult, I already know that I will carry this with me, a barely scabbed-over wound of being facedown, black, and helpless at the hands of a white cop, my gray matter inches from the barrel of a gun.

“Where is your driver’s license?” the woman asks LaShawn. He begins to reach toward his pocket to retrieve it when she yells at him not to move again.

LaShawn doesn’t have a driver’s license. Because he doesn’t drive. Before he can finish telling her that he has his school ID on him, in his left front pocket, a very elderly woman in a faded yellow duster eases her way down her front steps. “What are you doing to them kids?”