* * *
The sky is an orange haze, that eerie glow that creeps over the entire city whenever there’s a big fire. Yesterday, some of the protestors even walked up on the 101 and set the palm trees that line the freeway on fire. Palm trees! That’s like a declaration of war against Los Angeles itself. Anyway, LAX has temporarily suspended flights on account of all the smoke. For now, by plane anyway, nobody can come into Los Angeles International. Nobody can leave. Lucia isn’t supposed to leave for another month or so; still, some small piece of me hopes the airport remains closed indefinitely so she can stay. Then I feel like shit, ’cause that’s easy to say when it’s not your neighborhood on fire.
* * *
LaShawn comes to school by bus. I know this because when he’s late, he tells the teachers the bus was running behind schedule, and they eat that shit up and smile at him apologetically because he’s poor, and this embarrasses them all a bit. Bus service has been suspended in large portions of the city; that’s probably why he’s late.
When LaShawn finally enters class, it’s ten minutes before the end of first period. The first things I notice are his feet. LaShawn is rocking a pristine, fresh-out-the-box, newest-edition pair of Air Jordans. They’re white, silver, red, and navy blue, with metallic gold accents in honor of the upcoming Olympics. Instead of having Jordan’s usual number, 23, they feature his Olympic number, 9, on the triangle. The boys elbow each other.
“Daaaaaaamn, homie,” they say.
All the sneakerheads at school try to outdo each other with who can get the newest ones the fastest.
Mrs. Brooks pauses her lesson as LaShawn walks down the aisle to his desk. We stop taking notes to look at him. She leans down to talk to him, and her freckled breasts spill over the top of her silk shirt. He whispers to her and she turns a little red. LaShawn has this effect on students and teachers alike. This isn’t the first time we’ve watched grown women turn into schoolgirls in his presence.
“Are you okay?” she says as she returns to the chalkboard.
“Yeah,” he says.
“Good. If there’s anything you need, you let me know.”
LaShawn is always getting away with things like this. It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that he’s in at Stanford, and I’m on the wait list. I know I shouldn’t be jealous of him, but I am.
What must it be like to have the world in a leather ball at your fingertips? Despite what Kimberly said, LaShawn didn’t get into Stanford just because he’s poor. Everybody knows that. Academically, he’s one of the top-ranked kids in our class. LaShawn is handsome and smart and talented and funny and will probably be worth millions one day. What must it be like to know at eighteen that, as long as you don’t screw it up, everything is yours for the taking?
I stare down at LaShawn’s new shoes and think about the crush of people moving from store to store, taking and playing with fire. Then I think about that looter on TV this morning, the sneaker boxes in his arms spilling over like a bouquet.
* * *
Mr. Holmes starts to work on our review of rotational kinematics formulas, then stops. He turns around slowly to face the class, and when he does, it’s like the reveal in a comic book, his raw side turned to the light.
He hoists himself up onto his desk like a teacher in an inspirational movie about troubled youths. We’re only mildly troubled at best, but I appreciate the effort.
“We had a store off Avalon. It was a small convenience store with a deli in the back. My mother was from Syria and a single mom. She had to work late at the store a lot, since it was just her, so the next-door neighbors would take me in and feed me dinner; I’m talking black-eyed peas, gumbo, greens. Catfish! Half the neighborhood was from the South.… I’m getting hungry just thinking about it. Anyway, our store didn’t get looted during the riots in 1965, but my mom moved out of Watts after that, from a nice little two-bedroom house on a street where I could bike around to a cramped apartment in Sherman Oaks. I went from having lots of black neighbors to having none.”
Mr. Holmes is lost in his own memories, like a person telling you about a really vivid dream.
“My best friend’s name was Tanya Jefferson. Like the street. Or George, I guess. The other kids used to make fun of me because of my face, but not Tanya. Anyway, I never saw her after we moved to the Valley. I feel bad that I never called. I should’ve called. I tried looking her up in the phone book a few days ago, but she’s probably gotten married and changed her name. That’s the trouble with women.”
He laughs and shifts his weight around the desk a bit more.
“Something’s gotta give, you guys. I hope when you guys get to be my age, the world is better for you.”
Mr. Holmes looks to be on the verge of tears. I can feel the room tense up; we aren’t used to grown men’s tears.
I look down at LaShawn’s new Jordans. Two years ago, this high school kid in Philadelphia was killed over his Jordans. Two dudes tried to rob him and he struggled with them, and then they shot him in the heart.
“How did you get that way?” Steve Ruggles asks Mr. Holmes.
Joanie Wang gasps audibly.
Anuj Patel says to nobody in particular, “Oh shiiiiiit.”
If it were anybody other than Steve Ruggles asking, on any other day, I don’t think Mr. Holmes would answer. He pauses for a long while, deciding how much of himself to give to us today.
“My brother and his friend were playing with fireworks one Fourth of July. I think they meant to startle me. We don’t talk anymore… but that’s not why.”
“Did it hurt really bad?” Steve says.
“It took several surgeries to put me back together again,” Mr. Holmes says. He breathes in deeply and exhales. Then he turns back to the chalkboard.
“So… instead of displacement there’s angular displacement…”
And just like that, we’re back to physics. Physics isn’t my favorite science, though Mr. Holmes is my favorite science teacher. I loved AP bio best because I loved reading about the secret worlds under our skin.
After class, I linger while Mr. Holmes stands at the chalkboard wiping everything away. The white of the erased chalk fills the board in little clouds.
“I’m sorry about your face, Mr. Holmes,” I say.
Mr. Holmes turns to look at me. He closes one eye, then opens it and closes the other, like I’ve done to him so many times. Then he laughs.
* * *
“Did you hear they’re thinking of canceling prom?” Courtney says as we cram into the restroom to look at Kimberly’s new hoo-ha. We peer down at it, raw and pink like uncooked chicken skin. “It doesn’t even make sense. It’s not like anybody’s rioting here.”
“I had to put ice on my vagina for hours last night. They are so not canceling this prom.”
“You put ice on your vulva. Dude, we’re practically grown-ups. You guys really need to stop being ashamed of your own bodies and start saying the right words for these things.” Heather crunches her words. She’s already started to snack on some baby carrots.
“Don’t eat in the bathroom,” Courtney says.
We sit at our usual lunch table. Kimberly and Courtney eat matching salads. Heather eats a cafeteria burger and fries. Lucia has packed me a sandwich. I almost always get sandwiches, except for when I get leftovers. I guess I’m old enough to pack my own lunches now, but Lucia usually draws little doodles on my napkins for me—like today, she’s drawn a little cartoon puppy with his tongue hanging out and a speech bubble that says “¡Comer! ”
I take the bread off my sandwich. It’s messy, but at least it saves me some calories. Without its top, my sandwich is vulnerable and unsteady, guts exposed; kinda like our city right now.
“Seriously, Ash, you do that, like, every time. Why don’t you just ask Lucia to skip the bread?” Kimberly asks. I never knew she noticed what I did and didn’t eat.
“I nibble at it.” I’m only a little bit defensive.
“You’re such a
weirdo sometimes,” she says.
“Where’s Michael?” Heather asks Kimberly.
“Speaking of weirdos…” She shrugs. “He’s been weird as hell recently.”
“Maybe he’s just nervous about prom night.” Heather humps the table next to Kimberly.
“Don’t be gross,” Courtney says. She reaches over to grab one of Heather’s fries, then a few more, and Heather slaps her hand away.
“Mine!” Heather says.
“So if the world were ending and you had to choose between Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley to protect you, who would you choose?” Courtney says.
“The world is ending.” Kimberly sighs.
“Not everything’s about your cooch!” Heather throws a carrot at Kimberly, who catches it and puts it in her mouth.
Alien 3 is coming out in several weeks. When we were going to see Aliens, Kimberly said it looked like a boy movie, so Heather, Courtney, and I went to the movies without her. Then after everyone at school was talking about it, she felt all dumb and left out. Now, every once in a while, she’ll say she wants to see something and one of us will mock her and say, “I don’t know. That looks like a boy movie.”
“Ripley’s more badass,” I say.
“Sarah Connor’s hotter,” Courtney says.
“They’re both kinda butch,” Kimberly says.
“So?” Heather says.
I turn my attention to the black kids. There aren’t as many of them at school today. Lil Ray Ray with the flattop is missing. So are old lady Mildred and one or two others. The rest of them huddle around a boom box, listening intently. Where are the rest of them? I wonder. The metallic parts of LaShawn’s Jordans glimmer in the sunlight. On his big-ass feet, they look like astronaut boots.
“LaShawn’s shoes are, like, really expensive for somebody who’s supposed to be poor,” I blurt out.
I know as soon as I say it that I shouldn’t have.
Their eyes grow wide and they glance over at LaShawn. He sits on the ledge with the other black kids—the remaining ones, anyway.
Courtney and Kimberly continue to look over at LaShawn’s Jordans, and I feel like I might vomit. During freshman year, Heather and Kimberly went through a shoplifting phase, which meant that Courtney and I went through an accomplice phase. Now we’re older and wiser, and so we’re mostly reformed teenage thieves.
“Omigod, what if he stole them?” Kimberly says. “Doesn’t he live, like, right where all that shit’s going down?”
Why did I just do that?
“He could go to jail,” Courtney says.
“He’d lose his scholarship,” Kimberly says.
“LaShawn wouldn’t do that. He just wouldn’t,” Heather says.
I look over at her with relief. She returns to perusing the latest issue of Sassy. Heather speaks with more authority than any other teenager I know. She shuts things down.
She wasn’t always that way, though.
The night she started to change, Heather called, and Jo drove me over to her house. I knocked softly on her door.
Mrs. Horowitz flung the door open wide and pressed me deep into her bosom. Mrs. Horowitz is short and sturdy—“peasant stock,” Heather says. She’s not beautiful like my mother, but she wears her hair curly and wild and bites her lip like a girl who’s forgotten herself. Heather’s bubbe rested on the couch in the background, her hair like a pink-tinted cotton ball that shook as she threw her head back and laughed at some kid running into something on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Sometimes her bubbe refers to me as the Schvartze, even though I’m right there and she knows my name, but I try not to get too offended because of the numbers tattooed across her arm.
Mrs. Horowitz kept rocking me and cradling my head, but I think in that moment I was Heather for her, or maybe she was rocking herself.
“She’s upstairs.”
I walked up the staircase toward Heather’s room and knocked on the door.
“Heather?”
“Come in!”
I walked into the room and looked around, but she wasn’t there. She poked her head out from the bathroom. Heather’s bathroom is covered in pink and black. It’s from the 1950s and vintage and so ugly that it comes out the other side toward beauty. Heather stood in the center of the bathroom in her bra and orange granny panties, the wings of a thick pad peeking out from either side. This was back when she was still reading Cosmo, shaving her pits, and dyeing her hair blond and frying it to look like the Courtneys.
“I’m so sorry.”
I went over to hug her, but before I could get there, she tossed the razor to me. It seemed like some shit people do in the movies, but I guess also in real life, because there we were.
When we were done, Heather looked at herself, newly bald, in the mirror.
“It’s kinda punk rock, right?”
“Definitely.”
Heather’s grandfather owns a recording studio, and sometimes after school, instead of hanging out with us, she’ll hang out with bony boys who think they’ll be rock gods and leather men who already are. I think Heather sits around all those controls waiting for the rush of drum and bass, eager to listen and love. Anyway, she didn’t want cancer to cramp her style.
“Why did you just call me?” I asked her. “Why not Courtney and Kimberly, too?”
“I wasn’t ready for all that. Not yet. We Esses know what it’s like to have people look at you like you’re different,” she said. “I’ll tell them tomorrow.”
The overhead light bounced off the top of her scalp. I brushed away the few remaining stray hairs.
“My head’s not too lumpy, right?” she said.
I bent down and kissed the top of it, leaving a faint lipstick smudge in the middle of her pale scalp.
Heather reached up and grabbed me by the hand, and in the mirror we looked posed, like in an old-timey photograph. “Today, we are new people.”
I didn’t know what I’d done to be a new person, but maybe she was right. Like in Star Trek when they transport, maybe we assemble and dissemble particles and build ourselves anew in each place we travel, including right there in Heather’s pink bathroom with the Barbie tiles.
Several weeks later, the two of us rode our bikes along the boardwalk, past the musclemen and the pockets of piss, past the dreadlocked vendors with their incense, past the airbrushed shirts hanging like flags, past the gangsters, past the tourists and the bikini butts. Heather pedaled faster and faster still.
“How do you feel?” I said, afraid she was going to make herself sick. She had just had her first round of chemo several days before, and for most of the last few days she’d been too weak to do anything at all.
“Aerodynamic.” She laughed and threw her face into the wind.
They broke all her cells down, and Heather reassembled herself into some stronger, better version. This Heather says what she feels like saying. This Heather doesn’t apologize for taking up space. This Heather wears her curls wild and dark and her pits hairy, and doesn’t let Kimberly tell her who to be. When the boys call her Whorey Horowitz, this Heather flips them off and yells at them about the patriarchy. This Heather hears a rumor about LaShawn and says no.
By the time lunch ends, my friends are over talking about LaShawn, and we’ve decided by a vote of three to one that we’d rather be Ripley. Ripley kicks ass in space.
When Courtney reaches for the last of her fries, Heather says, “Stay away from her, you bitch!”
Sarah Connor doesn’t say anything nearly that cool.
* * *
LaShawn moves through the stacks with a cart piled high with books. He’s tall enough that the top of his head rises just above the labyrinth as he checks each spine. Normally, Michael has his free period when I have my free period, and usually that means we find each other and sit together somewhere and listen. Today, I don’t feel much like listening, or being found, which is why I’m in the library with its faded leather, Dewey decimals, and ceiling spit wads. I watch LaShawn until I l
ose him, then return to Emily.
My English teacher said Emily Dickinson never left her house, and yet somehow she was crazy prolific. She wrote a lot about being lonely, which makes sense. Somebody probably should’ve tried harder to force her out of her house, though. Sometimes I think I could be a hermit.
“Whatcha reading?” LaShawn startles me half out of my skin.
I show him the book cover.
“ ‘I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you—Nobody—too?’ ” LaShawn recites, and laughs.
“You’re a fan?”
“Remember when we had to memorize a poem for AP English? That’s the one you chose.”
“How do you remember that?”
He shrugs and blushes. “I have a good memory.”
I look down at the cart.
“Do you work here?” I say.
He laughs. “Nah. Well… sorta. I took out this book last year and lost it. Now I got this crazy-ass fine, and I got a letter the other day that said I can’t graduate until I pay it. But I talked to Ms. Hawley, and instead of making me pay, she’s letting me work in the library for a week. Ms. Hawley cool as hell.”
He throws up a peace sign to Ms. Hawley, who watches us from the front of the library hunched over a sad-looking ham-and-cheese sandwich. She’s a very stolid woman with a stentorian voice who wouldn’t be entirely out of place at a Russian work camp—certainly not anyone I would’ve thought of as “cool as hell.”
She returns his peace sign with one of her own.
“Her husband’s black,” LaShawn whispers. “She don’t look like she’d be down at all, but you never know, right?”
“Right,” I say. “What’s the book that got you here?”
“It was more of a graphic novel,” he says, “Watchmen. You heard of it?”
“I think so,” I say.
“It’s good. You’d like it,” he says. “I think. It’s about Reagan, but not.”
“I thought it was a comic book.”
The Black Kids Page 9
