Watch Us Rise(11)

“Damn.” James leans back in his chair. “Why you and Chelsea always gotta be so deep?”

“What’s deep about me saying I’m a black girl who likes theater and who cares about our world?”

James doesn’t have time to answer—not that he’d have an answer—because Mrs. Curtis calls our attention back to her and says, “I want you to look at each other’s lists and tell one another what you notice,” she says. Then she adds, “And no judgments, just noticings.”

We swap lists. I go first this time. “I notice that you didn’t describe your ethnicity or gender,” I say.

He jumps in with, “I notice that you did. You definitely did.”

“No judging,” I remind him.

“I’m not. I’m noticing that you almost always bring up race and gender no matter what the topic is.”

“Well, the topic is to describe myself. So I did.”

James says, “If our yearbook has a category for Most Likely to Start a Revolution, you and Chelsea will be tied.”

I start laughing.

“What’s so funny?” James asks.

“Oh, nothing. I’m just noticing how you keep mentioning Chelsea. Any chance you get, you bring her up.”

Mrs. Curtis stands and calls our attention back to her. “Okay, so how many of you used adjectives that describe your personality?”

Hands go up.

Mrs. Curtis calls on a few students and writes their words on the board: loyal, funny, generous. Then she asks, “Anyone use words that spoke to a talent you have?”

More hands go up.

She writes athletic, musician, poet, singer on the board.

Then she asks if any of us wrote down words that describe our ethnicity. Not as many hands go up, and the ones that do are all people of color.

Mrs. Curtis puts the cap on the dry-erase marker, sets it down, and sits back in the circle. She gives us another handout. The top says “Science’s Role in the Social Construction of Race.” Mrs. Curtis says, “Even though race—especially in North America—is how humans get categorized, even though it’s what divided our country and sometimes still does, race is a social construct. It’s really true that on the inside we’re not that different, and in this unit we’re going to talk about that.”

When the bell rings, James and I walk out together. He says to me, “I wasn’t talking about Chelsea a lot.”

“And there you go again,” I say.

James laughs. “Okay, you’ve got a point.”

“I get it. She’s an awesome, smart, beautiful person. What’s not to love?”

“Love? Whoa—who said anything about love? Anyway, I’m with Meg.”

“What? Since when?”

“Last week.”

I hope Chelsea meant it when she said she doesn’t like James.





Ladies and gentlemen, let’s go! I want to see you push yourselves to the limit here,” Coach Williams yells in our general direction. I say that, because we are all scattered around the sweaty gym floor. It smells like a combination of BO and hairspray, and every time I breathe too deeply, I gag.

“Why would he want us to push ourselves to the limit? I don’t even know what that means,” I whisper to Nadine, who was forced to switch from band class to gym, since she’d already taken all her music credits. She was totally pissed, but it’s currently making my life much easier, since I have someone to talk to when my obsession over James becomes too much for one woman to handle. I’m beginning to think that I am too much to handle, and besides the fact that he looks good and knows that we’re in the same class, I have no real reason to even like him—I guess lately, it’s giving me something to take my mind off missing poetry club, or clubs in general.

What I definitely don’t miss is Jacob Rizer. Every time he sees me in the hallway, he asks me if I miss him, and the other day he called out: “You’ll be back.” No, I won’t. After I quit, Ms. Hawkins told me that I had until the middle of October to choose a different club, and that it would have to be approved by her. She also let me know how disappointed she was, and how much she’d miss my “spunky personality.” She actually said those words, which confirmed that Ms. Hawkins doesn’t really know me at all, and made me feel way better about quitting. That is, until I realized I had nothing to do after school. So I’ve mostly been hanging out at Word Up and writing in my journal. It’s like my thoughts and ideas have nowhere to go, and no one to listen to them.

“Just lean forward and pretend you’re stretching your hamstrings,” Nadine whispers back, actually stretching her impossibly long limbs toward me. She is wearing workout clothes, the kind that make you look both athletic and cute, and she definitely looks both.

“Gym is the worst,” I say.

“Get ready for the best afternoon of your lives,” Coach Williams shouts. He’s always speaking in exclamation marks. “We are becoming road warriors this afternoon and turning our cross-country running into cross-city running. We’re gonna be taking over Washington Heights today! So I need you all to get laced up and get ready to take to the streets.”

“What? No!” I say, a little too loud. A few people look over in my direction.