Kimberly and Michael have been together since the end of ninth grade, before he shot up in height, so that for a while she was very tall and he was very short, but they were both beautiful, so nobody gave ’em too much shit. Kimberly has already picked out their children’s names—Christy, Linda, and Naomi, after the models. And if they pop out a boy, his name will be Georgi, after the Italian who gave us free cookies. I think Kimberly mostly likes Michael because he’s from New York and doesn’t give a fuck, and she spends her summers there with her father. He wooed her and all the rest of us with those gruff vowels that drag out around corners and stop abruptly against consonants. Later, we found out that his real accent isn’t nearly that thick and that he’d stolen those vowels from the outer boroughs. But by then it didn’t matter; Kimberly was hooked. Heather says it’s classic daddy issues.
We know Michael and Trevor about as well as you can know boys our age, by which I mean we laugh at their jokes and yell ugh when they annoy us and don’t rat them out when they do truly stupid shit, like light branches on fire and set them in the middle of the road just to see how passing cars respond. Honestly, sometimes being friends with boys our age is exhausting. It feels like it’s a lot of listening to a bunch of jibber jabber about everything they like and why what we like is silly. Just because sometimes our music comes wrapped in glitter doesn’t mean it’s empty.
Michael finally decides on Power 106. He raises his hands in the air and they become weapons, his thumb and index fingers cocked like two guns.
He drunkenly swaggers through the lyrics he doesn’t know. Like I said, Michael grew up partially in New York, so he likes to pretend he’s more street savvy than the rest of us, even though he grew up in Midtown and lives in Brentwood.
Trevor joins in at the chorus, “ ‘Here is something you can’t understand—how I could just kill a man! Here is something you can’t understand—how I could just kill a man!’ ”
They yell a few more verses and then run and cannonball into the pool.
Kimberly giggles at her boyfriend, and Courtney yells, “What the fuck?” because now she’s wet again.
A plane flies overhead. Trevor traces its path through the sky with his finger.
“God, I can’t get wait to get out of this shithole,” Trevor says. “Move somewhere with a little fucking culture.”
He just got his acceptance letter from NYU three days ago, and all of a sudden now everything about Los Angeles and California sucks. He also went to India with his parents last summer and now he’s oh so deep and a vegetarian. Kimberly and Michael make out across from me, which is awkward enough, but even more so after what happened last week. Normally I’d be talking, too, but the deeper she thrusts her tongue into his mouth, the more I feel like a dog with a mouthful of peanut butter.
“LA has plenty of culture,” Heather says.
“Yeah? Like what?”
“I mean, maybe if you actually ventured out of the Westside…”
“Dude, just ’cause you’ve gone to a taco stand or two doesn’t mean you know shit, either.”
Trevor and Heather are always fighting, mostly because both can be equally insufferable. They both act like they’re the only ones who watch CNN or read the newspaper and the rest of us know nothing about life just because we can’t quote Sonic Youth deep cuts. Heather says the rest of us are book smart but not life smart, that we’re sheltered from life’s realities. But, like, I’m black. I’m not that sheltered.
“You guys want to go somewhere else?” Michael says. On his left ear are three freckles and a sunburn that gets worse by the minute.
“Venice?”
“Mars.”
“The Beverly Center?”
“God, you guys are so lame sometimes.”
“Shut up and shave your pits.”
“Nobody’s ever home at the house down the street from mine. Some Saudi prince bought it and they’re doing major construction on it. They’re, like, never there. And they’ve got a bitchin’ pool.”
“Why do we need to go to another pool when we’re already at a pool?”
“ ’Cause it has a slide and a cave and shit?”
Michael lives several blocks over, and so we decide to walk. Days like this, the salt of the ocean sticks in your nostrils and on your skin. Gravel rolls underfoot. There are homes with ivy hedges like forts and homes like wacky sculptures or with windows made up of other tiny windows. Occasionally you’ll see a fading home fighting against being demolished for something in Technicolor.
The boys go barefoot, their wet feet leaving sloppy prints across the concrete.
As we walk, a red double-decker tour bus pulls up alongside us and stops in front of one of the houses. The voice inside it bellows, “This is where Tom Hanks lives.”
“No, he doesn’t!” we say.
Several ruddy-faced tourists stick their cameras out the windows. The dude who actually lives here is an accountant to the stars, according to Courtney. Maybe even to Tom Hanks. So perhaps the tour bus driver isn’t that far off after all. Heather flashes them as they pull away.
Trevor drapes his arm around my shoulder. Everyone thinks he looks a little like Jason Priestley, but I think that’s being generous. Trevor’s my prom date, but I’m not into him like that. Sometimes it’s nice just to be near another person, to feel their warmth and the blood coursing through their veins, and to feel the both of you alive.
“Oh shiiiit, love connection.” Kimberly makes kissing faces in our direction. Michael looks back at us and rolls his eyes.
“Our kids would be so hot,” Trevor says. “Mixed kids are the hottest.”
Then he pulls away from me and retches into Tom Hanks’s accountant’s petunias.
* * *
There’s a hole in the construction fence where you can just raise the green tarp and enter. I pause in front of it. “Guys, maybe we shouldn’t go in there.”
“Are you afraid?” Kimberly says.
Yes. Breaking and entering isn’t exactly something someone who looks like me should do all willy-nilly. Or at all. But I don’t want to call attention to myself. Not like that.
“No,” I say. “It’s just that…”
“You don’t have to come, Ash. Nobody’s making you do anything,” Kimberly says. She says it all sweet and shit, but we all know it’s a challenge.
“Dude, I promise you it’s worth it.” Michael winks.
Inside, the addition to the house is a skeleton, all bones and no meat, not yet. The dust sticks to our bodies as we walk through wood and nails and concrete slabs, but also beer bottles and cigarette butts. A tractor presides over all these building blocks like a promise. The pool remains untouched, an oasis, as though the owners decided that it—and only it—was perfect, which it is.
A few dead flies float on the water’s surface. Trevor bends over to scoop them up with his hand.
Courtney, Heather, Kimberly, and I hold hands and jump. There’s the rush of water, the cold, the velocity of our bodies. We sink, and then back up we pop.
“Marco…,” Courtney yells.
“Polo…” Trevor belly flops in. Just like that, it’s on.
We continue our call-and-response across the length of the pool. Courtney finds Heather first, and then Heather finds Kimberly. Kimberly finds Trevor, and Trevor finds Michael, until the only person left to be discovered is me. I’ve gotten good at being invisible. I swim under the water to the grotto. There, my friends are echoes. Dampened, they sound far away.
Inside, the walls are made of fake rock that’s slightly slimy to the touch. There’s a plastic opening where a light source should be, but the bulb’s broken. Obscured from view, everything in the grotto feels like a secret.
“Marco!” Michael yells. He reaches his hands out and runs his fingertips across my shoulders, my face, my hair.
I don’t say anything back. He splashes the water around us in mini waves.
You should know right now that I’m mostly a good person. I
think.
I don’t talk back to my parents, much. I would help an elderly person across the street, if there were any around. I get mostly As, with a few Bs in the subjects I don’t care about. I even listen when Heather drones on about how plastic bags and aerosol hair spray make the planet hotter. All this is to say that I’m a good daughter. A good student. A good friend. A good sister. I don’t have a choice.
“When you go out there in the world, you’re not just you, Ashley,” my grandma Opal said one summer while she braided my hair into four long strands that she embellished with yellow ribbons, “you’re all of us, your family, black folks. You have to be better than those white kids around you. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it is.”
“I’m good, Grandma,” I said.
And I still am. Mostly.
“I found you…,” Michael whispers into the dark.
You should also know that I wasn’t entirely honest about Michael. Yes, he’s a douche. But he’s also really funny in a New Yorky way, smart and a little overconfident, but also somehow self-deprecating and insecure, and he can be really sweet and a great listener, and he’s got these beautiful curls like the ribbon on your favorite present.
Beneath the surface, he wraps his legs around mine and I wrap my arms around his shoulders until we’re intertwined and our heartbeats pound in tandem. He smells like sunscreen. Water pours in sheets around us like rain. The last time we were alone together it was raining, but instead of some fancy-ass pool, the two of us were in Michael’s crappy car. His lips graze my collarbone, and even though he’s Kimberly’s, together we’re electric.
“Polo!” I yell.
* * *
Kimberly and Courtney get into an argument over the rules of Marco Polo—Kimberly thinks you can get out of the pool to avoid being tagged, but Courtney insists that’s cheating, since we didn’t agree upon “fish out of water” rules beforehand. To broker peace, I suggest we stop swimming and start drinking.
We pass the bottle around like a communion cup. I roll the bitter of the beer around on my tongue. I don’t like beer, but we’re underage, so we can’t be choosy.
“What the hell?”
A crew of burly men in neon reflective vests and white hard hats enters, their faces red and sun chapped.
We scramble out of the pool and run through wood and glass and nails and trash. Pain hits my left foot, deep and searing. A piece of glass, part of a shattered beer bottle, is the culprit. The blood trickles in dark red lines down my foot.
I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be in AP physics right now, reviewing momentum and impulse. Right now, Mr. Holmes would be going into and out of focus.
“I’m calling the cops!” another hard hat yells after us.
“ ‘Fuck tha police, fuck fuck fuck tha police.’ ” Trevor laughs, then punctuates it with a belch.
Across town, the trial lets out for the day. The members of the jury step out into the open air and lift their faces to the sky, glad that after a long, dark day, there’s a bit of sunshine left.
No, I don’t care about any of it now. But I will.
CHAPTER 2
THE SQUAD CAR pulls up alongside us as we approach Courtney’s house.
“We received a complaint,” the officer inside says.
“Hi, Officer… Bradford,” Kimberly says, looking at his name tag. She puts on that voice she uses to get boys to do what she wants. Unbothered, she twirls her hair into a rope and wrings it out so the water drips onto the concrete. He watches the water as it falls.
The rest of us stand silently behind her.
“Trespassing’s a serious offense.” The officer isn’t too much older than we are. About twenty or so, brown haired with a whisper of a jawline. Officer Bradford squeaks and then overcorrects with too much bass. We’re not that close, but we’re also not that far from where the Rodney King beating occurred. I wonder if this officer knows those officers. Maybe he works out with them, plays basketball or does community fund-raisers with men who laughed afterward about beating a man until they fractured his skull, damaged his kidneys, and scrambled his brains.
“I think there’s been some confusion,” Kimberly says. “My dad’s totally friends with the owner, and he said it was okay if we used the pool while he’s away.”
He doesn’t buy it, but Kimberly’s leaned over the window and all her beauty is spilling into his car. He pulls his eyes away and looks past her at the rest of us. Grandma Opal used to say that white kids wear their youth like body armor. Bradford’s eyes land on me, and he squints as though he’s found the root of our hooliganism.
“You could call him if you like,” Kimberly offers.
Instead, he makes us sit in a row on the curb. Michael’s legs are hairy and pale next to mine. The burn above his ears is getting worse. He crosses his eyes and sticks his tongue out at me. A Mercedes speeds around the corner.
“That guy was definitely speeding,” Heather says. “That’s a real danger to the neighborhood, officer.”
Officer Bradford ignores her.
“You’ve been drinking?” He sniffs the air around us.
“No,” we say in chorus.
“You’ve been smoking?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” he says.
“We’re seniors.”
“Truancy is against the law,” he says.
It is?
“Driver’s licenses and school IDs,” he says. “Now.”
He reaches for Michael’s first.
“I don’t have any ID on me.” Michael shrugs. He’s definitely lying, and Bradford definitely knows it.
Bradford asks Heather, and she gestures at her bikini top. “Doesn’t exactly go with the outfit.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass.” Officer Bradford points to me and reaches his hand out. “You.”
My black ass is not going to risk lying to a police officer. I pass my ID and license over to him with a slight tremble in my hand. I still had braces in my school ID photo. I used alternate colors on each tooth so my smile was a rainbow.
“Oh fuck,” Kimberly whispers.
“I’m calling your school,” he says.
* * *
And he does.
“Everything would’ve been fine if Ash wasn’t with us,” Kimberly says, laughing, as we walk back to her place. “Otherwise we’d totally have gotten away with it.
“ ’Cause you’re black,” she says by way of explanation.
Sometimes she says “black” like it’s this really funny dirty word.
“Yeah, I got it,” I say.
* * *
The first time I remember one of my parents being pulled over by a cop, I was eight. The day before, my mother had brought home a brand-new convertible, white with a tan interior, like a pair of buttery leather gloves against your skin. We had a girls’ day, just the two of us, and she put the top down so that the wind blew about our faces, and I reached up and out and tried to catch the sky in my fingertips. It felt a little like flying. My fingernails had been painted the pink of the inside of a seashell at the spa, same as my mother’s, and the two Vietnamese spa owners had laughed and shouted across the squeaky leather chairs at each other as they pushed back our cuticles. My mother and I were laughing, our hair undone in the wind, when we saw the flashing lights in our rearview mirror. The officer was younger than my mother, with the same wispy blond goatee he must’ve had in high school. He looked like a bullied kid turned bully, the kind of kid who’d been too big, too poor, or too dumb and was now more than happy to pull over anybody he deemed too anything. In our case, too black.
“Why are you pulling me over?” my mother asked. Her hair looked a little crazy, and she smoothed it down quickly.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“I live here. Just a few miles up the road.” She recited the address.
“What apartment number?”
“None. It’s a house. Is all this necess
ary?” she said.
“There’s no plates on your car.”
“That’s because it’s brand-new. I just bought it.”
“License and registration, please.”
She slowly and carefully reached into the glove compartment for the little folder with her new-car paperwork and insurance, announcing everything she was doing as she did it, and then she passed it over to him along with her license. He made a big show of radio-ing everything in, hand resting on his gun, which hung right by my mother’s head. Instead of staring over at her, I kept staring down at my new pink nails, afraid to look up.
When the voice on the other end finally confirmed ownership, he looked disappointed, then quickly discarded us like a Christmas toy come New Year’s.
“Have a good day, ma’am,” he said.
“You too, officer,” my mother said, smiling.
But when she went to turn the key in the ignition, her hands were trembling. She rolled up the windows and pulled the convertible top up so the car grew small and dark and our heads no longer touched the open sky.
“Asshole,” she muttered.
* * *
When Lucia pulls up to Kimberly’s house, I’m already waiting outside. Inside, Kimberly’s mom is yelling at Kimberly, so rather than watch a preview of our own inevitable parental verbal ass whuppings, the rest of us wait on her front steps. I wave to Heather and Courtney before I make the perp walk to the car. I’ve hardly even opened the car door before Lucia starts yelling at me, her pretty mouth an AK-47 shooting Spanish bullets. Her nails and mouth are always red, like a gash or a rose, and she says this reminds her that she’s still a woman, even when covered in somebody else’s dirt. The words keep coming out in a rat-a-tat-tat until finally she pauses and sighs. “I won’t always be around, mija.”
The Black Kids Page 2
