“Graphic novel. And comic books are political as hell.”
“I always thought they were kinda like ‘Oh no! It’s a bad guy! BOOM! POW!’ ”
“Nah. You should read it for real.”
“Except that you lost it.”
He starts to laugh and fiddles with one of the books on his cart. He seems almost nervous, though I don’t know why he would be. At least, not around me.
“Shit’s crazy right now, isn’t it?” I say.
I glance down at LaShawn’s new shoes. His feet are huge; he’s like a puppy when they’re all paws and ears and the rest still has to catch up.
“Yeah. But shit’s been crazy, too,” he says softly.
Ms. Hawley continues to watch us from afar. She finishes her sandwich and wipes the remaining crumbs on her pants. Then down-ass Ms. Hawley wipes a spot of mustard from her chin.
“I should get back to work.” LaShawn sighs.
“Hey, when you were little, did you go take pictures with Black Santa or White Santa?”
He starts to laugh. “That’s hella random.”
“I know.”
“Neither. My mom told me Santa wasn’t real. She didn’t want me believing that no white man came into our house in the middle of the night and gave me things for no reason. ‘Everything you got, I buy or you earn,’ she said.”
“I sat on Black Santa,” I say awkwardly as he starts to roll away. LaShawn turns around to look at me but keeps pushing the book cart forward.
“Did he give you what you wanted?”
“Except the pony.”
“How was the nigga supposed to fit that down the chimney, though?”
LaShawn disappears once more around the corner, still laughing. He’s got a great laugh, a little high and a little low, with a hint of nerd snort thrown in.
I shouldn’t have said what I did at lunch about him and the shoes. LaShawn has never once said or done anything unkind to me, or to anyone else for that matter, far as I know. It’s not his fault everybody loves him and he’s beautiful and he’s in at my dream school while I wait. Forgive me, I think, even though he knows not what I’ve done.
CHAPTER 7
THROUGH THE GLASS window of the front office, I can see the school secretary watching the rioters run into and out of buildings on a little black-and-white portable television. They fuzz out of focus, and she bangs on them to make them clearer.
The school pay phone smells like spit and hormones. There are a lot of penises etched into it. Two boobs. One very detailed dragon. Many pronouncements of eternal love, like “LOY+KGF 4 ever” and “N+T BFFs!” I personally wouldn’t declare myself anyone’s soul mate next to a pay phone dick. But I guess love does make you do crazy things.
Sometimes I’ll see kids sitting and eating lunch alone inside the phone booth, as though the act of being there renders them as invisible as they feel, until some asshole kicks the glass and yells at the poor loser, “I gotta call my mom, dipshit.”
Jo actually picks up the phone. She sounds like a person underwater.
“Were you sleeping?”
“I was out late last night.”
“What? Why? You said you were going to stay home.”
“I never said that. We went out to hand out flyers and protest at the Parker Center.”
I think back to last night, the images of the protestors turning over the parking kiosk in front of the Parker Center, standing on it, fists raised in the air, and lighting it on fire, like those photos you see of coups in faraway countries. The Parker Center isn’t that far from Jo—less than ten miles—but it’s not that close, either. Not when the city’s hemorrhaging left and right.
“How did you even get there?”
“Our friend drove us. It was kinda crazy, but we made it.”
“You guys could’ve been hurt, or killed, even.”
“We were fine. Besides, you can’t let fear keep you from doing what’s right, what you believe in. Harrison and I are communists, Ashley. Communism gets a bad rap, but that’s only because there’s never been a truly communist state. This isn’t just a race riot; it’s also about class. It’s a rebellion of the poor and disenfranchised. The communist party has a long history of supporting the rights of black people, you know? Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and W. E. B. Du Bois were communists. Lena Horne was blacklisted. Angela Davis was a communist.”
“The Afro lady?”
I don’t know how to argue with my sister because I don’t know much about communists other than that we’re supposed to hate them, but honestly that never quite seemed right to me, either. The Wall’s down. The USSR’s dead. The Gulf War’s done. Several months ago, Bush said that we won the Cold War.
“What good are flyers gonna do in the middle of all of this, anyway? Everybody’s gonna dump them in the trash,” I say.
Jo ignores me and continues, “It’s not just about Rodney. It’s about all of us. About all our black and brown brothers and sisters struggling to make ends meet in a system set up for them to fail. We have to change the system.”
Now she sounds awake, like she’s revved up, a person about to start. Start what? I don’t know.
“Our parents aren’t failing.” I know exactly what she’s trying to say, but her dumb ass doesn’t need to be out in the streets saying it. Not now. It’s too dangerous.
“Don’t be willfully obtuse, Ashley. I could’ve been Latasha. Or you. If there’s not justice for one of us, there’s no justice for any of us.”
“Is that from one of your flyers?”
She grows silent on the line.
“Please, Jo…”
I let my sentence dangle. I don’t know what to say or how to say it, exactly. I hate you I love you I miss you come home everything’s on fire and our parents are scared I’m scared, but we aren’t sisters like that. If we were brothers, instead of our silence, maybe we might punch each other in the teeth or in the gut. We would use our bodies to say what we couldn’t. We would feel bone against bone and tendon against tendon, and, bruised, be reminded of the shared DNA in our black and her blue. Or perhaps we would be like Mr. Holmes’s asshole brother and lob firecrackers at each other without any regard for where they might land. So maybe it’s better that we’re sisters after all. We hurt, but at least we still have our pretty faces.
“Do you have to go to work today?” I ask.
“The office is closed.” Jo sighs.
“What about Harrison?”
“He’s usually off today anyway.”
“So why can’t you just come home?”
“Ash, I gotta go,” she says, and just like that she’s off.
“But where?” I say to nobody at all.
* * *
I’m about to head back to AP statistics when I feel hot words brush against my left ear: “Run away with me.”
My body shivers a bit.
“Where are we going? Paris, Bora Bora, the North Pole?” I say. I think actually traveling with Michael might drive me batshit crazy, but being anywhere but here sounds amazing right about now. Anywhere I could crawl out of my own head and skin and just be still. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind being a sentient blob at the moment.
“We could chill with the polar bears and scientists,” Michael says. He jumps up and grabs on to a wooden beam as we walk. He dangles from it by one arm before dropping back down again. Boys my age can’t seem to get enough of climbing and jumping on and over things, like their testicles are propellers commanding them always “Up!”
Michael’s skin is still red from the other day in the sun. It looks like it stings, and also like he might get cancer if he doesn’t start putting on sunscreen.
“What do you think the scientists do when they’re not doing science shit?” I say.
“Hang out with Eskimos.”
“You’re not supposed to call them that.”
“Did you know they kiss with their noses? ’Cause it’s so cold up there,” he says.
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That’s not true, actually. I know this because my mother said something about Eskimo kisses last year, and Jo had taken one of her anthropology or sociology or whatever classes where they’d deconstructed Nanook of the North, so she was militant about the Inuit for, like, two weeks.
Instead of the North Pole, we go to his car. The parking lot is full of empty cars waiting for their owners, most of whom are still in class where they belong. We are flesh in a sea of metal.
“Kimberly thinks you’re being a weirdo,” I say.
“I don’t want to talk about her right now.”
For the last few months or so, after he’s done with homework or with talking to Kimberly, Michael usually calls me before bed, and we fall asleep unspooling our brains across the distance. Other times he’ll call me up and press the phone to his stereo and whisper, “Listen.”
He hasn’t called since the thing that happened last week. I would say it hurt my feelings, but I really hate that it made me feel anything at all.
Today, we get into his car, light up, and lean the seats way back like we’re looking up at stars and not shredded upholstery.
“We should talk about what happened,” he says after a long pause.
“No. We shouldn’t,” I say.
Instead of talking or listening to music, we listen to the people on the radio talking about the riots. Callers are on the verge of tears or explosions. We hear the fire in their bellies and the pain on their tongues.
Michael draws a new alien along the frayed white of his Converse.
“I mean, I get racism, but also I don’t. Like… it’s just skin, right?” he says.
I raise my eyebrows but say nothing. Easy for him to say.
Why the hell am I in this boy’s car again? I think.
I go back and forth on Michael’s depth as a person. Sometimes I think he’s a murky but sizable lake, and other times he’s a front-yard Kmart kiddie pool. Last week he was an ocean. Atlantic, not Pacific, though.
“You know they’re not really kisses. Eskimo kisses, I mean. It’s a greeting, more so; not so much a romantic thing. White people made that part up,” I say.
“Well… you know us white people.” Michael laughs and trails off.
He takes another puff, then reaches over and brushes my hair out of my face. He pushes his forehead into mine, then takes his freckled nose and rubs it back and forth against my skin. We stop moving and let our foreheads and noses linger, pressed together. Our eyelashes flutter like so many butterflies.
“Hi,” he says.
These are my high thoughts:
Everyone thinks the riots are only about Rodney, but they’re not. Jo was right about that. They’re also about Latasha Harlins. Latasha was a black girl my age in Los Angeles. Latasha was black. Latasha was a girl. Latasha was my age. She went into a liquor store to buy orange juice, and the Korean woman at the counter thought she was stealing. She wasn’t. They got into a fight, and as Latasha tried to walk away, the woman at the counter shot her in the back of the head.
Over orange juice.
Her killer got probation, community service, and a five hundred dollar fine. Five hundred dollars for a dead black girl. My mom’s got shoes that cost more than that. The judge said the killer was really the victim.
Rodney got brutally beaten on videotape. Nothing.
A few weeks after Latasha’s killer got nothing for her dead black body, a man got thirty days in jail for kicking and jumping on his puppy, felony animal cruelty.
No Justice. No Peace.
“I could’ve been Latasha. Or you,” Jo said.
Nobodies.
“I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you—Nobody—too?” Emily Dickinson wrote.
There’s too much pain in the voices on the airwaves. I don’t want to hear it anymore. Not here. Not now. Make it stop, I think. Enough.
My heart is beating really fast. I tell Michael about my heart. I think it’s going to explode. He laughs and squeezes my hand and says, “Just breathe.”
“Turn off the radio,” I say.
Michael leans forward and fiddles with the voices until they’re nothing.
I start to cry a bit. Michael wipes a tear away from under my eyelid and licks it off his finger.
“Weirdo,” I say, and start to laugh.
“Guess Kimberly was right after all,” he says.
I shouldn’t be in this car alone with this boy.
I can’t tell if loneliness is being black, or being young, or being a girl, or if Lucia’s right and I need new friends. I don’t know.
“It might be lonelier / Without the loneliness,” Emily wrote.
And she was white as shit.
* * *
Lana Haskins sits down next to me again on the stairs at the front of the school where all of us losers without cars wait for our rides. Apparently, I’ve managed to make a new friend, four weeks before the end of our high school career. She pushes her hair back from around her face, pulls out a pack of American Spirits, and starts to light one. My world is doing that thing it does when you’ve smoked too much and it’s so big and bright and brilliant and you could touch your fingertips to everything and not feel enough.
“Smoking’s gonna fuck up your teeth,” I say. I should probably not be talking right now.
“Yeah.” She starts to laugh. “But my morning shits are beautiful.”
I’m not sure whether to be grossed out or to laugh. Ladies don’t talk about morning shits, but maybe we’re not ladies. I like her.
She digs into her backpack for something. An orange, bright and round like a setting sun in her hands.
“You want a piece?” she says.
“Sure.”
We eat together, the juice dripping down our chins. Each bite is a bitter, sweet, fleshy burst on my tongue. Each morsel is a forever. I’ve never chewed anything so long as I chew this orange. When we’re done, Lana licks her fingers, so I lick mine too.
“So why don’t you have a car?” she says.
“My parents are trying to teach me responsibility or some shit,” I tell her.
“Is it working?”
“Definitely not,” I say. “Why don’t you have a car?”
“Because I’m poor,” Lana says, and we both burst out laughing.
“ ‘I wanna sex you up!’ ” a freshman boy sings as he walks past us with his friends. He’s no taller than five-foot-two, with a face like the surface of the moon.
His friends elbow him like he’s soooo badass.
“Which one of us?” Lana asks. “You gotta be more specific, little dude.”
He shrugs, laughs, and, with a half skip, runs over to his mother’s car.
Lana stretches her arms to her feet. Her entire body folds in half like a taco. I blurt out the next thing that comes into my head.
“What’d you do while you were expelled? Did you have to go to rehab?”
She looks over at me intently. Up close, her nose kinda looks like it was broken and never reset. It makes her face that much more interesting to look at, but maybe it’s also a little sinister.
“You’re the first person who’s actually asked me about it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I don’t mind. Usually I feel kinda invisible, even though I know people talk about me.”
Like one of the phone-booth kids.
“So what’d you do?”
“I stayed at home, watched a lot of Oprah, and drank,” she says.
We both start laughing. She even snorts a bit. Lana’s super-duper tan with a big-ass mouth, lips like a life raft, and teeth that rise to the task of filling the whole thing up.
“I don’t have a drinking problem. I just have problems,” she says.
LaShawn passes by and waves.
Lana leans in closer until her breath is hot on my ear. “Did you hear the rumors that he stole those Jordans?”
“Who told you that?”
“Somebody said they heard him talking about
going out looting last night,” she says.
Lana’s not a mean girl, as far as I can tell. She doesn’t have a reputation for being a liar or a gossipmonger. If it’s trickled down to her, then it means it’s only a matter of time before my words make their way to LaShawn, or, worse yet, to any of the adults.
“He wouldn’t do that, though.” She exhales in a ring and with her fingertips whisks it away. “Right?”
My fingers smell like orange juice.
CHAPTER 8
THERE ARE LOOTERS in South Central and K-Town, in Hollywood and Mid-Wilshire, in Watts and Westwood, in Beverly Hills and Compton, in Culver City and Hawthorne, and even all the way out in Long Beach and Norwalk and Pomona. There are fires in rich areas and poor areas and the spaces between. For once it’s not only those of us on uneasy hillsides who are afraid. Lucia and I pass a condemned home that’s dangling by its fingertips on the hillside. The riot didn’t get to it, just California itself.
“ ‘Don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the eddddge, I’m trying not to lose my head,’ ” I rap to the house.
“What?” Lucia says.
“ ‘It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under,’ ” I say.
“You better change clothes when we get home, before your parents smell that stuff on you,” she says.
But before I can get respectable, we have to stop at the store.
The tiny corner store looks as though it’s been cleared like in Supermarket Sweep, except it’s a really sad version where there’s no prize at the end. Inside, it feels like one long blinking fluorescent bulb. The two sun-bleached cashiers, Brittany and Marla, are around my age and usually look a little high, but not today. Today, they dart their eyes at every customer who enters. They’re either fearless, stupid, or just really need the money for a car, or prom, or new shoes.
“Welcome,” Brittany says as we enter, and her greeting sounds like an SOS.
These are things that we need that are missing: milk, eggs, firewood, chicken, and paper towels. There are plenty of vegetables left. Lucia and I talk to each other in Spanish while we wait in the longer-than-usual line. The lady in front of us turns around to glare, and I think she’s gonna tells us to speak English or something, or maybe she can smell the pot on my T-shirt, but I glare harder, so she goes back to minding her own business. Everyone around us has their shopping carts piled high with what remains. We look like people preparing for a war.
The Black Kids Page 10
