The Black Kids

by Christina Hammonds Reed

  Brad laughs. It’s a forced laugh. He kisses Pham gently on his temple.

  In middle school, I remember watching a TV movie on Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color about a Cambodian refugee who won a spelling bee. I don’t remember much about it other than that it was supposed to be inspirational, and also that they didn’t know how to pee in American toilets. I’d never thought that maybe different people might pee differently before that. I wonder if this is something Pham and his sister had to relearn.

  Pham looks up from his plate. “My sister doesn’t remember how I held her on my back when we ran. She spit at me when she found out about the two of us.”

  Brad sighs and grabs his hand.

  “She’ll come around,” Lana says, and pats Pham on the hand. “I mean, for god’s sake, it’s the nineties!”

  * * *

  After dinner, Brad and Pham retire into the house and Lana and I go back to jumping on the trampoline. I do a back tuck into a front tuck, and Lana claps and says, “Again!”

  We tucker ourselves out and sit in the ratty chairs in front of her guest house. She offers me a cigarette, and I inhale and hold it in my lungs. This is apparently the exact wrong thing to do. I’ve never actually smoked a cigarette before, only pot, and so I cough and cough and cough.

  Lana laughs. “This isn’t an after-school special. You don’t have to smoke, silly.”

  “Why don’t you tell them?” I say. “About your mom?”

  “It doesn’t happen that often. She gets frustrated. She’s lonely, I think.”

  She links her arm through mine.

  “Are you lonely?” I say.

  Instead of answering, she kisses my cheek.

  “Who did you used to hang out with?” I ask.

  “You remember Gloria Dowd?”

  “Yeah… kinda,” I say. “With the…”

  I feel bad when I realize that I don’t remember anything about Gloria Dowd at all.

  “Her father got transferred and her parents moved to somewhere in Orange County.”

  “It’s not like she moved to Colorado or somewhere.”

  “Fuck. It might as well be another country,” she says, and we laugh.

  The alcohol combined with the cigarette combined with the food is starting to catch up to me, I can feel it.

  “Are you a bisexual?” I feel myself losing control of my words.

  “Does that matter to you?” she says.

  “No.”

  “Yes,” she says. “I think so. Why?”

  “Do you like me?” I slur, and pucker my lips in her general direction. I think I could fall in love with somebody like Lana, even if she is a girl. Girl parts are way better looking than boy parts, anyway.

  “Not like that…” She laughs and dodges my mouth.

  “Why not?” I’m a little indignant.

  Before she can finish formulating her response to my stupidity, the world begins to spin, and I don’t feel anything. Then I feel everything.

  I run inside toward Lana’s bathroom while she chases after me laughing. “In the toilet! In the toilet!”

  While bent over the toilet, as Lana holds my hair away from my face, I tell her the second bad thing but not the first.

  “I kinda started the shit with LaShawn and the shoes. My friends spread the rumor.”

  “Your friends are twats,” she says. “Kimberly’s the worst.”

  I laugh and puke some more.

  “She’s had a rough couple of years,” I say.

  “So have all of us. That’s fucking high school, man,” she scoffs.

  I think of the girl Kimberly nicknamed Jabba, after Jabba the Hut, last year, and now nobody even knows the girl’s name. Everybody calls her Jabba. Kimberly’s bitchiness coils in words that she doesn’t even give a thought to beyond her own personal amusement. To everyone else, they’re a series of blows to the gut, even if Kimberly’s never once balled a fist.

  “Make it right,” Lana says as she pats my back. She doesn’t know how much of it is wrong.

  Back in the living room, we sprawl out on the couch, and Lana makes me drink a glass of water. After I gulp down the first, she goes back into the kitchen to get me another one.

  We don’t hear the door when it opens. Lana’s mother is feline and startled. Her green eyes flash with fear at the sight of me in her living room, alone. She looks like Lana, but pale and hard. She begins to reach for the nearest would-be weapon, which happens to be a copper Buddha statue. I think of poor Uncle Ronnie with his hands to the sky and two rifles pointed at his head.

  I stand and raise my hands to the ceiling.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not here to rob your house. Mine’s nicer,” I’m drunk enough to say.

  Behind me, Lana bursts out laughing.

  Her mother does not.

  * * *

  Pham drives me home. Lana sits in the back seat behind me. We sit silently, but it’s a comfortable silence. After a bit, Lana squeezes her head up front between the two seats. “I’m sorry my mom’s an asshole.”

  Lana’s mother tried to blame her response to me on the riots, like I was a single solitary teenage looter who decided to break in and chill on her couch.

  “You know how everyone’s so on edge right now.” Lana’s mother sighed.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  Like I said before, I’m always saying things are okay when maybe they’re not.

  “Sometimes people, they see your skin, and all they know of you is war,” Pham says to me as we round a corner.

  “I hate it,” I say.

  “Me too,” he says. “You must come visit us again.”

  We’re almost to my house when Lana starts to sing, “ ‘When I think of home I think of a place where there’s love overflowing…’ ”

  Her voice cracks a little. Pham and I join in for as long as we can remember the words.

  CHAPTER 12

  IF I COULD preserve my friends, as we were, in amber, this is the yellow day I would choose. Maybe it’s a specific day, or maybe it’s a composite of days. Maybe my memory has taken the arms from one day and an eyebrow from another and a few strands of hair from yet another day still. But this is it.

  Kimberly is the first to befriend me. She is small and blond and already imperious, with her natural curls and chocolate-covered fingers. She walks up to me on the playground, the new girl, and, with a compliment, anoints me: “I like the way your lips are two different colors.”

  I’d never thought about the color of my lips at all until that moment. But right then I thought they were beautiful. A little brown, a little pink, with white teeth, like Neapolitan ice cream. Heather was pudgier than the rest of us, and her shirt rode up when we ran over to the swings. Her legs were covered in dirt from digging in the sandbox. I don’t remember if she built any castles. Courtney had a frizzy bowl cut and carried around a little Ziploc baggie that had previously contained her peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich with the crusts cut off. She walked around gently plucking ladybugs from leaves and zipping them inside with the others. She didn’t know that they’d die later.

  “Look,” she said, and held out her baggie to me.

  “This is Courtney, we have the same name, and this is Heather,” Kimberly said, and Heather and Courtney both waved at me. Courtney wiped her nose with her arm, and the spotted ladies fluttered.

  “I’m Ashley.”

  “We’re friends now,” Kimberly said, and we all spit into our hands and shook on it.

  First, we pretended to be unicorns. We stuck our hands on our heads and pointed our index fingers like magic.

  We hung upside down on the monkey bars, not old enough to care that our days-of-the-week undies were showing, and the boys were too young to notice.

  We agreed that Ms. Glasgow was the most beautiful teacher in the school, but maybe that’s because she had a stash of dinosaur cookies that she handed out like gold stars when we were good. Ben Gordon tried to kick us off the swings because we were gir
ls, but together we fought back, strong.

  By the end of lunch, we had a favorite song, “Flashdance… What a Feeling” by Irene Cara. We skipped around the playground and swayed our hips to the beat, pretending to be welder-stripper-dancers with hearts of gold.

  After school, we went to the auditorium for Brownies. Nobody joked about my being a brownie in Brownies. Not yet. We learned a song: “Make new friends, but keep the old, one is silver, the other is gold. A circle’s round, it has no end, that’s how long I will be your friend.”

  We sang it in a circle and held hands, and afterward we let go only for chocolate-chip cookies that didn’t melt in our mouths and juice boxes we squeezed to their deaths.

  * * *

  Courtney, Kimberly, and Heather are my first friends, my gold. So maybe that’s why I make excuses for them even when I know I shouldn’t. Why I keep my real feelings just under my tongue. Even as we’re starting to feel less like magic and more like four mismatched socks all rolled up in a single ball and stuck in the back of a drawer together. I felt more like myself with Lana tonight than I have with my friends in ages. I’m not sure what that means, exactly. What do you do when the people you love no longer feel like home?

  I miss us.

  CHAPTER 13

  MORGAN SITS ON the front steps of my house talking on the cordless phone with Auntie Eudora in Vegas. I don’t think I’d want to still talk to my mom if she left me to chase after her new lover, but the riot seems to be pushing people together and pulling them apart in funny ways, and maybe that’s sort of what being a family’s like, anyway.

  “What am I supposed do, baby?” Auntie Eudora says to my cousin over the phone.

  “He’s not picking up the phone,” Morgan whines.

  I hear Auntie Eudora tell Morgan that Guadalupe and her husband have gone home, so it’s just Uncle Ronnie trying to keep the looters and arsonists away.

  “You gotta wait until this whole thing blows over,” Auntie Eudora says. “Just be patient.”

  Morgan side-eyes me as I stumble past.

  “You’re drunk,” she covers the phone and says to me.

  I shrug.

  “I don’t care. Tell him I wanna come home,” I hear her say as I enter mine.

  * * *

  On Friday nights, before I got old enough to make bad decisions at other people’s houses, I used to sit with Lucia as she got ready to make hers. I would watch as she shimmied into tight dresses, spread glitter across her face, and used Aqua Net to make a fortress of her hair. On the edge of her bed, I’d play DJ and watch her transform. She would strap on her gold heels and twirl me around like a disco ball to “Quimbara.” While Celia sang, we sparkled.

  Lucia has the weekends off, which means that she’s able to stay out as late as she wants on Fridays and Saturdays. On the nights when she didn’t come home, I knew that she’d either decided to stay over at her friend Damarís’s or she was with a man. Damarís had a European hatchback like a spoiling tangerine, with a bumper that was half peeled off. She and Lucia would peel out of our driveway like they were in a race against time, like they had to get to the clubs and back before her car rotted away for good.

  The Wednesday before last, Lucia asked for the evening off to go visit Damarís, who was going back to Guatemala for good, and I did something very stupid. I can’t tell you about it yet, but I will.

  Now, instead of being out with Damarís, Lucia sits on the couch in the living room, watching television, alone. She has fewer weekends left here with me than I have fingers.

  I drape myself over her and give her a kiss on the cheek. Morgan comes in from outside.

  “You smell like a bar,” Morgan says.

  I ignore her and turn to Lucia.

  “I made a new friend. Like you told me to.”

  “Does your new friend come in a bottle?” Morgan points to the television screen showing coverage of the riots. “You know, not all of us get to party and pretend like nothing’s happening.”

  “I wasn’t partying,” I say. “I’m worried about Uncle Ronnie and the store and everything, same as you.”

  “No. Not same as me. He’s my dad.”

  “You’re right. I know,” I say, before belching pink wine.

  Morgan gives me a dirty look. I know that she resents me and resents being here. She thinks I don’t care. But it’s not that; it’s that there’s so very much to care about, so much to feel, and instead of trying to sort out what’s in my head, sometimes I don’t want to feel any of it at all.

  I’m sorry, I want to tell my cousin. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I don’t know where to begin.

  It feels like a lifetime of biting my tongue has left my words flattened across the tops of my teeth.

  Onscreen, they’re rebroadcasting bits and pieces of the peace rally that happened at Wilshire and Western earlier today. I pretend to focus very hard on peace.

  “Do you miss Damarís?” I ask Lucia.

  “It’s hard making new friends as you get older.” Lucia sighs.

  “Who is Damarís?” Morgan asks.

  “Her best friend,” I say.

  When I was really little, Lucia would take me over to Damarís’s place and I would play with the neighbor girl in the building’s courtyard while the two of them gossiped in Spanish and exchanged news from home. Damarís lived not far from where Jo lives now, a little closer to the freeway. The neighbor girl was Chinese; her parents were recent immigrants who worked at a store down the street from the apartment complex. She didn’t speak much English, and I didn’t speak any Chinese, but somehow that didn’t stop us. Childhood is its own language, of sorts. The Chinese girl moved away years ago, somewhere off the 10. I bet her English is pretty good now. The only Chinese I remember is Ni hao, hello; Wo ai ni, I love you; and Nèi ge, that one or um in Mandarin. I remember it because it sounds like nigger.

  Last year, there was that coup in Haiti, and now on the news they’ll show those strangers in the ocean floating and clinging to one another to keep from drowning. Once, while we were watching a boat of refugees being rescued, Lucia leaned in and asked if I wanted to know a secret. Sure, I said. She told me that Damarís came from rich people back in Guatemala, and that if it hadn’t been for the war and coming here, they would never have been friends, much less best friends. I think Lucia was trying to tell me that she knew what those black refugees felt like.

  Morgan, our refugee, wanders around the room touching things.

  “Why would your parents go out in this?” she says.

  “They have date nights on Fridays,” I say.

  They were supposed to go see Phantom of the Opera downtown, but it was canceled on account of the rioting, so instead they’re going out to dinner nearby. When I asked them this morning if they were still going out, my father looked at me and said, “Even when bad things are happening, we have to keep on living.”

  “Your dad should be out there with my dad protecting the store,” Morgan says. “Not eating fucking fancy pasta or steak or whatever.”

  I don’t know why she picked pasta and steak as the foods my parents might be eating. Given the area and their personal preferences, it’s more likely seafood, but now isn’t a good time to be too specific.

  * * *

  Later, when Lucia has fallen asleep in front of the television, Morgan turns to me and says, “How good are you at keeping secrets?”

  I think about all the secrets I keep. I’m like a walking safe, my guts full of everybody else’s hidden parts. My friends’. Jo’s. My own, and now Lana’s, too. So many secrets.

  “The best,” I say. “I’m the best at secrets.”

  “Good. Come with me,” she says.

  I follow her into our entryway, where she slides on her sneakers and nods at me to do the same. Then she grabs my father’s pellet gun.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s a secret,” she says. “Duh.”

  Morgan raises the pellet gun at me like she kinda w
ants to shoot me.

  “You’ll shoot my eye out,” I say.

  “Good thing you’ve got two. Let’s go,” she says, and a gust of warm air hits us as we walk into the night.

  The Parkers aren’t in front of their house anymore; on this third day of the riot, with no action, they’ve retired. I guess they’ve gotten bored of waiting.

  “What are we doing?” I whisper to Morgan.

  “Shhh,” she says. “You’re the lookout. So… look.”

  She raises the gun like she’s got experience shooting at things and actually hitting them. The shot cracks through the night as the first pellet goes into the first tire. Then the next pellet into the next tire. Apparently, her expert marksmanship isn’t limited to pelting people with lemons.

  “They’re gonna come out any minute,” I say.

  “Your turn,” she says.

  “Me?” I say. “No!”

  “Hurry up. Don’t be a little bitch.” She practically tosses the gun at me.

  I feel the weight of it in my hands, against my shoulder. It’s exhilarating. It’s power. I reach back and cock it. My pellet hits one of their plotted plants and it shatters, the dirt tumbling out like entrails. It’s no tire, but still I’m a little high on destruction.

  “That’s for my dad,” Morgan says. “Assholes.”

  A light turns on in the Parkers’ house.

  “Oh shit!” Morgan says, and we run back quickly into my house. Out of breath and laughing, we collapse on the sofa next to Lucia, who startles and awakens with a “¿Que?”

  We have to be better. We have to turn the other cheek. We have to counter hate with love. Except when we don’t.

  It’s like my sister said: “We have to walk around being perfect all the time just to be seen as human. Don’t you ever get tired of being a symbol? Don’t you ever just want to be human?”

  * * *

  So how good am I at keeping secrets, really? The best. Or maybe, depending on your perspective, the worst.