The Black Kids(88)

“You told,” Lana says.

“I did.”

“Asshole.”

The cat slithers through the small space in the doorway. Her tail thwaps me as she passes, and I can’t tell whether it’s a deliberate hit. It could’ve been a friendly “hello,” or an “ugh,” or maybe She-Ra doesn’t even care that I’m here at all. Cats are a lot like teenage girls, I think.

“I was afraid for you,” I say.

“It was only a few more months.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know. I would’ve moved out. Or away. Something.”

“Can we talk? Please.”

“I don’t want to talk to you, Ashley.”

“Please? I can’t lose any more friends. Please.”

I guess I must sound really pathetic, because Lana cracks the door open wider and looks me up and down.

“Who said we were friends?” she says as she lets me in. She wears a pair of ratty jeans and a men’s V-neck undershirt, with a red handkerchief wrapped around her tousled hair so she looks a bit like Axl Rose. I follow her through Pham and Brad’s house to the backyard. Outside, cardboard boxes strain to hold their Sharpie-designated loads.

“You’re moving?”

“To my dad’s.” Lana explains that the court gave emergency temporary custody to her father.

“Isn’t he down the street?”

“Might as well be another country,” she says.

The trampoline lies in pieces in the grass. It strikes me how delicate it is, a bunch of metal poles and fabric stretched over a circle, like a little world. That’s all it takes to make a person fly.

“My mother might go to jail,” Lana says. “Maybe she deserves to, but she’s still my mother, you know?”

“My sister might go to jail too.” I bite my tongue to hold back my tears.

“For what?” she says.

The tears well up. I haven’t had a full night’s sleep since Jo’s arrest.

“She’s so stupid,” I say as the tears come down. “I hate her.”

“No, you don’t,” Lana says. “Just like I don’t hate my mom. Even though maybe I should.”

She pauses for a moment before she grabs me by the hand. Then she sits down on the ground beneath us.

“Sit,” she says.

We stretch our bodies on the grass like stars. Little-bitty bugs crawl around on our fingertips. A roly-poly makes its way from Lana’s hand to mine. I can feel the tiny green blades along my cheeks.

“You know how if you close your eyes, it feels like you can feel the earth spinning under you?” she says.

“Yeah.”

“It startles you at first. And then you remember we’re so little and the world is so big.”

I’m not sure I 100 percent get what that has to do with Jo, but I also think I get it. We lie there quietly until the cat pounces on Lana and starts to hump her leg.

“Stop it, She-Ra.” She pushes her off.

“Your cat’s a real horndog.” I laugh.

“That was so dumb,” she says, but then she snorts.

“I’m going to help clean up South Central with Julia’s church group later. Wanna come with?”

“Look at you, being civic-minded! Wish I could, but I gotta keep moving.”

A man I assume must be Lana’s father peers over the backyard fence. He’s desert brown, with bright green eyes. His hair is closely cropped to his head in the beginnings of tight curls. If she mostly looks like her mother, her mouth is definitely his, big and warm with teeth like Chiclets. He calls out to her in a language that sounds like a million grains of sand. She stands up and responds to him in English.

“I thought you were white,” I say.

“?Sorry to disappoint you?” she says and laughs.

Then, Lana pulls me to my feet as she sings “Black or White” doing her best Michael Jackson impression, which is really pretty terrible.

She-Ra purrs an assent.



* * *




The black kids are supernice to me, but they have years of history with one another, the kind I used to have with my friends, so I feel like an interloper. Kimberly and Courtney and Heather and I have years of inside jokes, years of knowing what the slightest eyebrow raise means, what a twitch of the face tells. I don’t know any of this stuff about my new friends, or if they even consider me a new friend at all.

“Man, I need a motherfucking car,” Fat Albert says. He wheezes as we walk. I really should be calling him Percy now.

“You and me both,” Tarrell says.

Candace invited everybody to her house after we finished volunteering with Julia and Tarrell’s youth group, because she lives just a few blocks away. Julia, Tarrell, Percy, LaShawn, and I walk toward Candace’s house. Our hands are sweaty from plastic gloves and calloused from shovel handles. The Timberlands I borrowed from Jo are giving me nasty-ass blisters, so each step feels like a potential land mine of blood and gross. I’ve done more manual labor today than I think I’ve done in my entire life. Still, there’s something about searching for the beauty under the wreckage that has me pumped—hopeful, even.

Or maybe it’s because LaShawn and I kinda hang behind the rest of them with each other, and every so often our hands graze each other and we don’t pull away. He should hate me; I honestly don’t understand why he doesn’t, but I’m grateful. Sometimes we love the people we should hate, and we hate the people we love, and we’re topsy-turvy, but it’s like the song my dad likes to put on the record player when he’s had a little too much to drink, “Thin Line Between Love and Hate.”