Tyler Johnson Was Here(7)

They call G-mo, Ivy, and me Oatmeal Creme Pies. Brown on the outside, white in the middle. We’ve embraced the name. Oatmeal Creme Pies are delicious—by far the most delicious Little Debbie snack—so we’re proudly the Oatmeal Creme Pie Squad.

After third-period trigonometry with Mrs. Bradford, I head to the cafeteria, also known as the Lion’s Den. It’s supposed to resemble a mall food court, but the architect did a very shitty job, and if anything it looks like an old, run-down, hole-in-the-wall food joint in a bowling alley. It has a bunch of tables tossed in, scattered throughout.

I meet up with G-mo and Ivy at our usual shabby lunch table. We’re a group of high-ability geeks who love science and A Different World as much as life itself, sitting amid a pool of jocks, preppies, tomboys, cheerleaders, gamers, hipsters, wannabe gangsters, and, you know, just the punks who are always getting in trouble. Our world is the tiniest of them all, but that’s okay, because—as I read in some book—we don’t have the power to choose where we come from. We can’t choose between if we come from the bottom or top or from a tiny world of poverty or not.

“I told that chick I was messing around with to fuck off,” Ivy says.

G-mo’s light brown eyes get wide. “Word?”

Ivy says, “I found out she was straight,” and she puts air quotes around the word straight. “I told her I ain’t ever putting my mouth on hers again until they make condoms for kissing. Online dating’s a real bitch.”

The two of them keep going back and forth, making each other laugh. It’s only three of us at a table for ten. We’re as diverse as any single lunch table gets. We’ve got G-mo, AKA a young and improved Carlos Vives, my best friend since grade school, who’s from Colombia; Ivy, who’s mixed and a lesbian (which I think is dope because she gets all the superfly-looking girls); and then there’s me, a slender, Southern Baptist black boy—not as black as skin gets but close—and geekier than most.

G-mo and I are eating chicken quesadillas topped with lettuce and tomatoes, but they look more like extra-flattened grilled cheese sandwiches. Ivy’s smart and got an actual grilled cheese and chunky tomato soup. The three of us talk about what happened last night.

“I’ve been checking Twitter,” G-mo says. “I haven’t seen anything. Like, nothing. It’s pretty crazy that no one’s talking about it.”

“I thought about starting a Tumblr for the guy who got killed. He went here, didn’t he?” Ivy asks. Ivy’s not only wise beyond her age but also really caring. I love that about her.

“That’s what I heard,” I reply. “It’s scary and sad as shit.” All my life I’ve heard about people getting killed by police, but I never really prepared myself for it to happen so close to my neighborhood. I mean, I figure if I stay out of trouble, and if I convince Ivy and G-mo and Tyler to do the same, and if I always do as I’m told by the law, I’ll be okay.

Security guards stand around the perimeter of the cafeteria because lunch is the place where most of the fights happen. We’ve yet to go a single week in our school’s history without a fight. Out of all the schools in all the counties within a twenty-mile radius of Sojo High, our school is known to have the most expulsions. Most of which come from fights. And since our sports teams aren’t that good, we pride ourselves on being recognized for something, even if it is the highest number of physical altercations.

I turn around and catch a look at Tyler sitting with Johntae’s crew, laughing and cracking jokes with one another. Tyler’s never sat with Johntae and his crew before. He stopped sitting with us to sit with the jocks last year. Why the hell is he sitting there now? Johntae is a notorious drug dealer in Sterling Point, a Sojo High bully, a gang member, and yep—he’s known to love weed like Kanye loves Kanye, or like G-mo loves masturbating. Defying all odds, Johntae has managed to stay in school, hanging on to a 1.9 GPA by paying geeks like me to do the work for him.

He’s midsentence when he looks over at me, stopping his conversation with Tyler, who’s sitting directly across from him. I get the feeling that Tyler’s purposely not turning around, purposely not trying to catch me watching him. Johntae gives me the coldest look, and I find my eyes quickly shooting away, back to my tray.

“You know what I hate?” I ask.

“Yo. Mrs. Bradford? Don’t we all,” G-mo shouts a little too loudly.

“No, no,” I say, sighing. “I hate how I feel trapped. I feel, like, boxed in. I feel like I’m the mouse from Flowers for Algernon, like I’m destined to be this geeky black boy with no sense of direction for the rest of my life. Man, I wanna live. Man, I just wanna be like them sometimes. I wanna fit in. I hate not fitting the part.” And then my eyes wander back over to Johntae and his posse.

“Those guys?” G-mo goes. “Wangsters? You want to be a wangster? Who are you and what have you done with my best friend, Marvin Darren Johnson? Because the Marvin I know would never think about being one of them. Do you not remember that we almost lost our lives because we were mistaken for some of them? Fuck that.”

“I don’t want to be a gangster,” I say. “I just want to… fit in with them. You know?”

“I get you,” Ivy replies, and it’s kind of nice, because Ivy is also always the understanding one. She just gets things, gets my way of thinking, like she’s the girl doppelganger of me. “It’d be nice to fit in with the cheerleaders.”