Tyler Johnson Was Here(6)

She parks in the drop-off section and has to get out of the car to open the doors for us, since the handles on the inside are all broken, except for the driver’s. “Have a blessed day, you two,” she says, strangely detached. Her tone is serious, but her words are sweet.

She kisses us both on the forehead and squeezes us real tight, like she has this feeling that at any given moment we’ll be taken away from her, sent into a black hole in outer space or something highly illogical like that. People don’t just get sucked away from the world. Or do they?

Tyler and I rush to A-Quad, where our lockers are. They’re next to each other because they’re assigned in alphabetical order. Bloodred with silver scratches from decades of badass kids keying them up, brushing up against them during hard-core make-out sessions with shanks in their back pockets. The air smells like recently lit weed.

I open my THUG LIFE backpack to put in the books I need for the day, and I notice Tyler frowning hard, shoving all the wrong books into his bag.

He slams his locker shut and turns his back to me.

“Wait, Tyler,” I say, catching his elbow. I pause, meeting his gaze. “You okay?”

He rolls his eyes and licks his lips, which Mama says makes him look like he’s been sucking on cherries since he was born. “I’m a’ight.” A damn lie. I know it.

In my mind, I flip through all the things it could be. I can tell something is on his chest.

“It’s about a girl, isn’t it?” I say, fake smiling.

He fake laughs, slings his backpack over his shoulder, and slips a hand in his right pocket. His gaze falls down to my feet.

There’s a short pause between us, people coming and going in the hallways, minding their own business for once.

“If it’s about last night, with the officer and that boy—”

“It’s not,” he says a bit too calmly, cutting me off.

I nod and take the hint. He doesn’t want to talk. And besides, I don’t really know what to say to make him, so I don’t press anything. Still, I can’t help but feel like he’s been more distant lately, and that kind of stings.

I watch him wiggle his foot.

“I’m heading to class now,” he says. “I’ve got a quiz later. Gotta get the answers from a friend before the bell rings.”

He leaves me standing there in the hallway, trying to figure things out. I look up at the ceiling for a moment, just at brown leak spots. Then I head to class, too.





Ms. Tanner’s high-ability English class is whack as shit. We don’t learn about anything worth knowing, and today’s been just the same old dead white people and white poems that she forces us to write on white pages. And now she tells me that Shakespeare was the world’s first rapper.

I know that’s just a load of BS. Ms. Tanner probably knows it, too.

Her class is one reading after another, one project after another—pointless shit that’s meant for the white kids. You see, this school—this classroom—wasn’t meant for me. It was meant for the white folks, as Mama always reminds me. Ms. Tanner’s class is for white folks, even though it’s an honors class and we’re supposed to do honors-level stuff, like learn about culture, learn about heritage, learn about truth, learn about the hate the world gives to people who look like me. Brown people. Black people. Some people, no matter what, will just hate forever.

I look back, and in the last row, Tyler is dead-ass asleep. That means he’s going to be asking me for homework help—no, more like for the answers. And that’s all right, because all this stuff is shit I already know anyway. Shakespeare invented iambic pentameter, and he wrote Sonnet 18 for a man, allegedly. A past participle is a verb, typically ending in ed. Ethos, pathos, and logos are the conjoined triplets of persuasion. Blah, blah, blah.

I’ve become a pro at daydreaming and pretend-listening, blocking out the white noise coming from Ms. Tanner’s mouth. And yes, sometimes it helps that I have memorized episodes of A Different World to replay in my drifting thoughts.

And suddenly, I hear G-mo’s voice. He whispers, “Yo. She’s talking to you, dude?” And then fingers poke me in the back.

I look up, wiping at my eyes. I shake my head. “YES?!” I nearly jump out of my seat, my hands clammy and warm, like a fuse just lit inside me.

“The expression draw a blank is an example of what, Mr. Johnson?” says an irritated Ms. Tanner.

She glares at me, and within seconds I’m having hot flashes.

“How to load a gun?” I answer her.

She stares harder, and the entire class combusts in laughter. “An idiom,” she shoots back at me. The class’s laughter gets louder, and I look back and see Tyler jolting awake.

I promise I’m actually sensible. I know what an idiom is. I promise. It’s just—I was caught off guard and so I didn’t really know how to answer her, and I stumbled over the words in my head.

As she turns her attention back toward the Smart Board, I float away again inside my mind, far, far away from this place.





Pretty much, if you’re in the hood, you’ve got a street name. No matter what. We nobodies don’t get AKAs that are threatening and dangerous, like Big Killa or Lil Death. They give us stupid names like Dawg, Fruitcup, or Squeaky if your voice is too high, or maybe straight-up Silent for extra dramatic effect.