The Black Kids

by Christina Hammonds Reed

  “What about Umberto and Roberto? What do they think? Are they happy?”

  “Of course they’re happy! I’m their mother,” she says, and we both grow quiet. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  Before Lucia left Guatemala, a bunch of indigenous farmers and student activists barricaded themselves inside the Spanish Embassy to protest the kidnapping and murder of peasants by the army. Instead of negotiating with them, the government cut off the electricity and water. While the police were trying to smoke them out, the embassy caught fire and instead of fighting the fire, they actually prevented the firefighters from attempting to put out the blaze and purposefully left the peasants and their Spanish hostages to die. The Spanish ambassador escaped through a window, and one of the demonstrators survived but was badly burned. Twenty or so men took him from his hospital room, tortured him, and shot him dead. They dumped his body on the campus of the university Lucia was attending. There, she and the others saw what was left of the demonstrator and read the sign hung around his neck: BROUGHT TO JUSTICE FOR BEING A TERRORIST.

  She left school after that. Not too much later, she left the country itself.

  Lucia sings “Nothing Compares 2 U” softly along with Sinead, “ ‘I know that living with you, baby, was sometimes hard…’ ”

  I want to tell her about Michael. About what happened Friday, and last week, and before. I’d told Lucia everything I’d ever done until about a month ago. Harrison makes Jo feel like she can fly. I want that one day, I think. Somebody whose love is like wings. I don’t want to be somebody’s dirty little secret. I’m not even sure I’m that much. I might be nothing at all.

  Instead, I join in, and Lucia and I sing together, “ ‘Nothing compares, nothing compares to you.’ ”

  When Lucia gets really into a song, sometimes I wonder if she’s singing for a man, or for home. But sometimes a song is just a song.

  A coyote ambles past the pool toward Lucia’s window. It pauses, yellow-eyed and mangy, right in front of us.

  I shit you not: It sits down and listens.

  CHAPTER 4

  THE NEXT FEW days are a blur after Lucia’s announcement. After our run-in with the police officer, we don’t ditch, and instead of hanging out after school, I go home to spend time with Lucia—so all the days kinda blend together. Until the day of the crickets.

  When the first cricket hops past, it freezes and I freeze, and I swear, at that moment, it looks up at me like my own personal Jiminy Cricket.

  “Sistas! Niggas! Whities! Jews! Crackers! Don’t worry—if there’s hell below, we’re all gonna go.”

  The cricket doesn’t say that; Curtis Mayfield does.

  The song swells as I bend closer to look at him. I excavated the cassette, and a whole bunch of other stuff, from the rubble of Jo’s room last week after my parents went to bed. My sister has weirdo taste in music—like some shit by this group called Skinny Puppy I tried listening to—but some of it’s kinda good, like this. Before I can get any closer to Jiminy, a ratty Converse sneaker covered in doodles of aliens and tits steps within inches of him, scaring him off.

  “Watup, Ash?”

  Michael takes the headphones from my ears and puts them to his own.

  “You never told me how that dinner with your sister went.”

  Michael is the only one I tell anything real to these days. We sit in his car and talk shit and smoke pot and tell each other secrets that we would never tell anybody else. It’s easier to talk to him than to Kimberly, Courtney, and Heather sometimes. When you’ve known somebody too long, it’s like they’re talking to a version of you from years ago, even though you’ve updated all your software. You’re the same program, except also you’re not. It’s a little easier around somebody who doesn’t know you as well, who doesn’t remember that one bad haircut from fourth grade, or the first kid you had a crush on. Somebody who doesn’t feel comfortable calling your parents by their first names. Somebody who doesn’t know your parents’ names at all.

  When our friends ditch and we don’t, Michael and I hang out after school on days when Lucia’s running late to pick me up. A few times he’s even taken me home. Once, he asked if he could come inside and pee, but I told him I’d lied to Lucia about hanging out with Courtney, so he’d just have to hold it. I hadn’t, but I wasn’t sure I wanted him in my space. It felt too intimate, I guess. He’d been to my house before, but it’d be different with just the two of us alone. Well, the two of us and Lucia, anyway.

  The first secret I told him was about Jo. It was the day after the second time she’d taken me to practice driving, and I could feel her secret hanging from my skin like a weight. On our way home, Jo drove while I rested my head against the passenger window. She sang along softly to this song by this old group she likes called the Hollies.

  “ ‘All I need is the air that I breathe, and to love you,’ ” she sang until her breath ran out.

  I had the worst thought as her breath failed her. I looked at Jo and thought, I hate you.

  “My sister got married and I’m somehow supposed to not tell my parents. It’s so fucked up, and I hate lying to them,” I said to Michael.

  Michael cocked his head to the side and cranked his seat up a bit. “My mother used to get really drunk in the morning, like before she would drive me to school. We crashed into my neighbor’s car once. My mom told them she was distracted. Anyway, I’m pretty sure that’s why she made me take driving lessons as soon as I turned fifteen—so she could stay in the house and drink and not crash. My dad knows, and he doesn’t do anything about it.”

  Sometimes giving somebody the words in your head makes you both feel naked. Maybe that’s why Michael reached for my hand and took it. That’s how it started, anyway.

  “Don’t tell Kimberly. Please. I don’t think she’d…”

  “I won’t.”

  I didn’t. And here we are.

  “The dinner was awful. They’re crazy. I can’t wait to go to college and get away from it all.”

  “Did you hear back from Stanford?”

  Stanford is my dream school. My mother’s sister, Carol, went there and is the current president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Alumni Association. Last year, she took me and my cousin Reggie on a campus tour during the weekend of this thing called the Big Game. We hung out in a tent with a bunch of really successful middle-aged black folks in their Cardinal sweatshirts, and Auntie Carol had a little too much to drink while jamming out to the Spinners, reminiscing about the olden days and screaming “Beat Cal!” into the fog.

  Before the end of the day, Reggie and I had also taken to screaming “Beat Cal!” over the sea of people and the tall trees. That kinda thing gets into you and burns in your chest like the whiskey we sipped from her red cup when Auntie Carol wasn’t looking. Reggie got his acceptance letter already. Almost everybody I know has gotten theirs already, except me.

  “Not yet,” I say to Michael.

  “You’ll get in. You’re smart.”

  “You’re sweet.”

  “Am I?”

  He places his elbows atop my shoulders, and the full weight of him rests on the weight of me.

  Our school is nestled into the hills. With its manicured hedges and rose gardens and hummingbirds, it looks more like a college than a high school. The parking lot is lined with European cars, but also a handful of Civics. Those mostly belong to the teachers, though. We have courses in movie production and an award-winning Science Olympiad team. We have the children of celebrities and child celebrities. It’s very peaceful, except every so often, a trio of women stands at the entrance with huge pictures of aborted fetuses. Then, for hours, three grown women yell at passing rich kids about the unborn.

  Two more crickets hop past, bringing with them Kimberly, Courtney, and Heather.

  “You two look awfully cozy,” Heather says.

  “It’s Curtis Mayfield.” We pull apart. Michael turns beet red.

  “Didn’t his dad, like, shoo
t him in the face?”

  “You’re thinking of Marvin Gaye.” Heather sighs.

  “She’s not thinking at all.” Michael wraps his arm around Kimberly and squeezes her butt. He does this to her sometimes, like he’s trying to put her in her place.

  But sometimes, like last night, he does shit like calling in to the radio station, even though he thinks pop is cheesy and lame, and dedicating “Emotions” by Mariah Carey to “um… my girlfriend, Kimberly… I can’t wait to go to prom with you.”

  Kimberly recorded it onto a cassette tape that she presses into a Walkman the color of sunshine. “Listen! Isn’t he the sweetest?”

  “Yeah,” Heather mocks, “listen.”

  * * *

  Crickets rub their legs together to sing because they’re lonely, or horny, or maybe both, like people. They do this mostly at night, though. In the day, they move quietly around and do whatever crickets do, which is why at first nobody notices them as Mr. Holmes reviews impulse and momentum for the AP exam.

  “So, if impulse is the area of a force versus time graph—” he says.

  “—I’m so screwed,” Joanie Wang says.

  Steve Ruggles looks up from making out with his arm to blurt, “Mr. Holmes, cockroach!”

  Tyler Phillips leans over his desk to get a closer look, but then the thing hops and Brittany shrieks.

  “Cockroaches don’t hop,” Tyler says, and throws his textbook at it.

  You can buy crickets at a pet store to feed to snakes. In honors bio freshman year, Nathan draped the class snake across my shoulders, and I thought it would squeeze around my neck, but it stayed there looking at me, darting its tongue back and forth like a warning, or a greeting; I’m not sure which. Still, I couldn’t breathe.

  The next cricket passes right by me.

  LaShawn Johnson leans down and scoops it up gently in his hand. Then he stands and walks toward the classroom window.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Crickets don’t hurt nobody,” LaShawn says as he opens the window and drops the cricket outside.

  If it had been anybody else, Mr. Holmes would’ve yelled at them to sit back down, but not LaShawn.

  The self-inflicted hickeys on Steve’s arms run the gamut from deep red to practically purple. His pale arm is the color of a makeup palette. Steve lifts a pudgy fist to LaShawn as he passes, and LaShawn fist-bumps him right back. LaShawn can afford to be kind to a weirdo like Steve.

  LaShawn and most of the other black guys who go to our school are on scholarship, usually for basketball or football. They run fast and jump high and catch and pass in the right ways. The other girls drool over the scholarship players with their brown skin and their flattops, all of them wanting to “Be Like Mike.” They tell me how dreamy they think black boys are, as if this is supposed to mean something to me. Just like they tell me how cute they think Will Smith is, or how I kinda look like Janet, depending on how I wear my hair.

  This last one I’m okay with. It’s way better than the time I got braids in seventh grade and they called me Medusa for a week straight until I came home crying and made Lucia take them out, even though we’d driven all the way to bumfuck Rialto and it’d taken six hours and cost three hundred dollars.

  “Medusa was powerful, mija,” Lucia said. But she took them out anyway.

  LaShawn’s eyes are green and huge, with lashes straight out of a mascara commercial. He’s built like an Oscar statuette. Allen Greenberg’s dad cast him in a drug PSA, and after it aired, all anybody could talk about was how sultry LaShawn looked when he said no to crack. For a while he had his ear pierced like Jordan, with a small diamond stud, but then it got infected and he took it out. He’s our school golden boy; even his skin is the color of karats. LaShawn Johnson can stop time to save a cricket.

  We think that’s it for crickets, until the next few come. Molly Denison gets on top of her desk, but I guess she doesn’t balance quite right, ’cause the desk falls over and she goes with it. The crickets jump around her as she alternately screams “My wrist!” and “Get them off me!”

  “Alright, let’s go outside for now,” Mr. Holmes says.

  Outside, the field is green and the morning sun bears down on us. We stand the way we do for earthquake or fire drills, waiting for disaster, but it’s just a bit of plague.

  Molly bitches about her wrist, and Mr. Holmes sends her off to the nurse.

  I place my headphones back on my ears, and the cassette picks back up where it left off. “They say don’t worry, they say don’t worry .”

  “What are you listening to?” I hardly see LaShawn as he approaches me. I know many things about LaShawn Johnson. I’ve spent a great deal of time looking at him. He’s the star basketball player, and I’m a mediocre varsity cheerleader. I know that he’s being heavily recruited by UCLA, Stanford, Duke, USC, Syracuse, and UNC. I know that his mama attends every game, wears wigs that look like they came from a Halloween store, and acts like a madwoman anytime he does anything. I know this and more. Other than everything I know, I don’t know anything about him at all. I especially don’t know why he’s decided to talk to me, or why today.

  I take my headphones off and hand them over to him.

  “Poor Curtis,” he says.

  “Why?” I say. I know nothing about Curtis. LaShawn’s on a first-name basis with him.

  “You didn’t hear about what happened? A bunch of lighting equipment fell on him and paralyzed him during a concert a couple of years ago.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Yeah.”

  He grows silent. Michael stares at the two of us from across the field. Trevor sits down in the grass next to him and leans against his backpack. He picks a blade of grass and begins to chew. I wonder if Trevor knows about Michael’s mother. How much of himself does Michael give to Trevor, and to Kimberly, and to me? How much do any of us give one another? Maybe Michael is jealous, but he has no right to be.

  LaShawn and I are the only two black kids in AP physics. This is the most we’ve said to each other all semester. I’m sure the rumors are starting already about the two of us being together. It wouldn’t be so bad, though, everyone thinking we’re together. LaShawn is handsome and popular and girls fall all over themselves to talk to him. Not me, though. I don’t fall. I make it a point to stay firmly on my feet as we speak.

  When you’re one of only a few black people in a class, it’s almost inevitable that everyone will assume that you like one another. Like when I was in fifth grade and everybody said that Jamie Thomas and I were dating. Jamie Thomas was more interested in space than girls, and I was more interested in space than Jamie. Jamie’s father was a literal rocket scientist, and Jamie went to space camp in Florida every summer. Jamie and I were both near the top of the class, and so everything we did was in competition with each other, like we were vying for the title of Best Black Kid.

  “I’m going to go to the moon,” Jamie would say while we were doing normal things like playing handball.

  “Black people don’t do that,” Steve Chun said matter-of-factly. Steve Chun sucked.

  “I will,” Jamie said.

  I asked my parents to send me to space camp so I could be an astronaut. If Jamie was going to the moon, then I would go to the goddamned moon, too.

  My father said, “I’m not going to watch my baby girl blow up on national television.”

  Months earlier, we’d watched as the Challenger fell down in pieces around Cape Canaveral, and the whole nation went silent when moments before we’d been dreaming of the stars and beyond. So I suppose my timing wasn’t the best. Anyway, I hated Jamie Thomas after that. I hated the assumption that we belonged together, that somehow because we were both black, we were a bonded pair. But I guess maybe in some ways we were, because when he left, I missed him more than I’d thought I would. I felt his absence as a slight ache; stupid Jamie and stupid space, we two little best black kids dreaming of flight.

  Around LaShawn, crickets jump.

/>   “Did you know that crickets are considered good luck in native folklore?” he says.

  “Which natives?”

  He shrugs his shoulders.

  “In some places they even keep them in cages as pets.”

  “I know why the caged cricket sings.”

  It’s a dumb joke, but he laughs and stretches his fingertips to the sun, ready for liftoff.

  * * *

  At lunch, the theater kids line up along the steps in the quad. They’re loud and weird, and always singing or shouting lines from their plays at one another across the halls. The theater teacher, Mrs. Lesdoux, has frizzy red hair that reaches great heights and veins that crisscross like rivers across her pale skin. Her words are so crisp they’re fried, each vowel and consonant perfectly enunciated and projected like we’re at the Met instead of some rich-kid school in Los Angeles. Kimberly, Courtney, and Heather dig through Kimberly’s makeup bag to primp. I don’t, because the pinks that make them pretty make me grotesque.

  “It’s such a stupid senior prank,” Heather says.

  “We got out of class at least,” I say.

  “They’re gonna kill those poor crickets for no reason,” she says. Already the exterminators have begun to roam the halls like Ghostbusters, looking and spraying.

  “Can I copy your calc homework?” Courtney asks me.

  “I thought you did it last night.”

  I take out my lunch bag and start to rummage around inside. They’re primping; meanwhile, I’m starving.

  “I couldn’t get through the rest of it. Fuck calc. I’m never going to use this shit again anyway.”

  “You never know…”

  “Let’s be real. Courtney’s not doing jack shit with calc or anything else,” Kimberly says.

  “I’m not stupid! I don’t test well.”

  “It’s okay, babe, you’ll marry rich,” Kimberly says.

  “You’re a real bitch these days.”

  “She’s not wrong,” Heather says.

  “Which one of us?”