“My best friend’s name is Lillith,” I said. It was the first thing that popped into my head.
“I can tie a cherry stem into a knot with my tongue.”
I laughed. I liked her. We still had forty seconds. I sneaked a look at Jack; his female partner was gazing up at him as if he’d just stepped down from Mount Olympus.
“Do you know that guy?” I asked Nikki, cocking my head toward Jack.
She shot me a look. “That’s a joke, right?”
“Why, who is he?”
“Royalty,” she said.
“Translation?”
“That’s Jack—”
Miss Bright summoned us back to our seats, and started asking people to tell the class about their partner in the exercise. Nikki was one of her victims, so everyone heard about me. She called on Jack. It turned out his partner was new, too. Her name was Pansy Clifford. She’d just moved to Redford from Memphis, where she’d been cotillion queen at her old school and competed in equestrian events with her horse, Belle.
After that, we did a few basic theater games, stuff I’d done years earlier in my first playwriting class. “Great first day, people!” Miss Bright sang out when the bell rang, clapping her hands as if we’d just given a performance. Jack left without a backward glance. I was disappointed.
“So, what’s the school play going to be?” I asked Nikki as we joined the teeming masses in the hall.
“Whatever it is, Miss Bright wrote it.”
I was surprised. “She’s a playwright?”
Nikki hesitated. “In the sense that she writes the school play every year.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Let’s just say that requiring her students to work on it boosts the participation level. Catch you later.”
As Nikki took off down the stairs, I was already working out a plan. Maybe Miss Bright would let me write a play instead of working on hers. I’d do what I loved to do and get credit for it at the same time.
Chemistry was next. I found the lab on my map—it was clear on the other side of the building. I wondered why Jack hadn’t even looked at me before he’d left class. I wondered if he’d be in any more of my classes. I wondered why I couldn’t stop wondering about him.
Lunch. I sat at the top of the football stadium bleachers, dining alfresco on M&Ms and taking in the local color.
This part of Redford High was familiar: Every group had its own turf. On the football field, jocks did wind sprints. Nearby, Jack’s girlfriend, Sara, and a perfectly groomed raven-haired beauty were talking earnestly to four or five girls who looked like freshmen. Beyond the north end zone was the multipierced crowd; near the south goalposts were the Hacky-Sackers, Ultimate Frisbee types, and guitar players. The geek contingent sat on the home bench, drinking slushies from Mapco, which, I quickly learned, was the nearby gas station slash junk food emporium. I glanced directly downward. Under the bleachers, the bad bleached-blond brigade sucked their lunchtime cancer sticks.
One thing about the setting, though, was definitely not familiar: The football stadium was built directly against one of the rolling hills that characterize the topography of middle Tennessee. You could see the summit from anywhere in the stands. It was barren, save for an enormous rock slab. Painted on the slab, in huge letters, was GO REBELS! and an enormous Confederate flag. The same phrase and flag were stenciled on the gridiron.
My eyes slid back to Jack’s significant other. She and her friend were now leading the younger girls across the football field. As I watched, they tore sheets of notebook paper into tiny scraps and tossed them into the air. Then they turned back to the underclass girls.
“Don’t you see that litter?” I heard Sara ask. “Have some respect for your school. Don’t just stand there. Pick it up!”
Immediately, the younger girls scattered and dropped to their knees in a vain effort to gather up Sara’s handiwork as it flew around in the breeze.
“Hey.” It was Nikki Roberts. She sat next to me. “How’s it going?”
“Are you watching the Sara show?”
She pulled a PowerBar out of her backpack. “Hard to miss.”
“So why are those girls picking up her garbage?”
“Sara Fife is president of Crimson Maidens.”
“Which are?”
“In theory, a girls’ service club,” Nikki said, biting into her PowerBar. “In practice, a sorority.”
“Pardon me while I barf up my sleeve.”
“A rich, white sorority,” she added.
“So they’re the cool white chick clique, is that it?”
Nikki nodded. “Anyone can go to their meetings at school, but that’s basically a front. It’s the whole out-of-school social thing that really makes you a Crimson Maiden. For that, you have to be asked.” She nodded toward the girls on the field still attempting to gather up Sara and her friend’s confetti. “What you see down there is part of the unofficial hazing. Trust me. What they do off-campus to new pledges is a whole lot worse.”
I popped another M&M into my mouth. “Scary.” My gaze wandered up toward Redford Hill and the big flag painted there. “But that’s even scarier.”
“Welcome to the South,” she said.
“My friends back home will not believe this.”
Nikki shrugged and took a last bite of her PowerBar. “There are just as many racists up North, you know.”
“Wait. Are you defending that thing?”
“Hardly. Check it out.” She handed me a flyer from her backpack about a meeting she had organized to change the school team name and emblem to something that better represented the entire community. “You should come. It’s tonight at my church.”
“Maybe I will.” I stuck the flyer in the back pocket of my jeans. Two African American girls passing by the base of the stands scowled at us. “What’s up with that?” I asked her.
“What do you think?” Nikki rezipped her backpack.
“Let me take a wild guess: Our skin colors don’t match.”
Nikki shrugged. “Some of my friends have a thing about it.”
“Why would you want to be friends with them, then?”
She gave me a frosty look. “Who are you to question who my friends are? I grew up with them. I’ve known you for five minutes.”
That what she said was true didn’t make it sting any less. “Fine.” I got up and started down the bleacher stairs. “Whatever.”
“Look, you just have to know how it is,” she said, following me. “At this school, mostly kids hang with their own.”
“Then why were you just hanging with me?”
“I said mostly.”
We walked together to the building, where Nikki gently touched my arm. “Kate, listen. You’re new. I’m trying to do you a favor. This school can be…” She hesitated. “Let’s just say I suggest you watch your step.”
I laughed. “I studied playwriting in a New York neighborhood with more drug addicts than there are people in this whole town. So pardon me if I’m not quaking in my new-girl boots.”
Two white guys in varsity jackets glared at us. What fun; equal opportunity racism. Near them, I saw Jack. He was taking some books from his locker. Just a simple glance at him caused a seismic disturbance. But Jack had a girlfriend, albeit a bitchy one. And I’d had cute boyfriends before. So what was it about this boy that took my breath away?
“Gotta run, late for sociology,” Nikki said, pivoting away.
“Wait one sec.” I edged closer. “You were going to tell me about him.” I indicated Jack, who was now slamming his locker. Sara had materialized to take possessive hold of his arm. “What did you mean about him being royalty?”
“That’s Jack Redford,” she explained. “As in Redford, Tennessee.” She let that sink in for a moment. “Welcome to his world, baby.”
6
consisted of my parents’ asking Portia and me about our respective first days of school, and our monosyllabic answers. Clearly, my sister was now as unenthused about
Redford as I was. But things picked up when I reported on the high school’s team name and emblem.
“The team is called the Rebels, and a Confederate flag is the emblem?” The loathing in my mom’s voice was visceral. “Did you know about this, Pete?”
“Sure didn’t,” my father said, reaching for the green beans.
I told them about Nikki’s meeting later that night. My mom was completely supportive of my attending. “And Pete? You shouldn’t take this so casually,” she added pointedly.
I winced. It was painful to hear her reprimand him. You’d think that after eighteen years of marriage she’d realize my father was not the human dynamo she wanted him to be.
After dinner, I did some homework, then called Lillith. But all I got was voice mail. Nikki’s meeting didn’t start for another hour. I couldn’t motivate myself to read a play, much less write one, so I puttered around my room for a while and then went downstairs. Portia was watching TV in the family room. I settled in on the couch next to her.
“God, look how thin that girl is.” My sister sighed at the blond female lead dressing for a date on some insipid sitcom. “I’m a pig compared to her.”
“You’re not a pig.”
Portia wrapped her arms around her knees. “No one even talked to me all day, Kate. No one here likes me.”
“They can’t not like you, they don’t even know you.”
“Studies have shown that first impressions are lasting impressions.”
Where did she get these things? “Studies?” I echoed.
“I read it in Psychology Today. This article said there’s an invisible line between the cool kids and the dorks, and even though you can’t see it, everyone knows it’s there. Well, the coolest girl in my grade, Madison, decided that I’m on the wrong side of the line.”
I was still marveling that a sixth grader was reading Psychology Today. As for this so-called cool girl, Madison, I felt like smacking her. Who was she to judge my wonderful, original, quirky little sister?
A commercial came on, and I channel-surfed—a televangelist, a former-someone-now-a-no-one hawking weight-loss products, country music videos.
“Go back to the weight-loss thingie,” Portia demanded.
“It’s a scam, Porsche.”
“Easy for you to say.” She bit at her lower lip. “Today, I answered a lot of questions in class. Everyone saw that I’m smart.”
“That’s good.”
“No, that’s bad. Madison mouthed ‘Shut up’ at me, and then her friends all laughed.” She squeezed a pillow to her chest. “If only I could lose ten pounds. And get invisible braces. And new clothes. Cool girls here don’t wear jeans to school.”
Her litany of woe was getting irritating. “Go wild,” I said. “Start a trend.”
“You can’t start a trend when you’re the dork and you know it. Oh, never mind.” She leaned back despondently on the couch.
I checked my watch. If I wanted to go to Nikki’s meeting, I had to leave. But Portia looked like she was about to cry. “Listen, Porsche, how about if we go to the mall this weekend, and I’ll help you find some cute things, okay?”
“What mall?”
“I don’t know. There’s got to be one around here somewhere.”
“′Kay.” She looked up at me. “Thanks.”
Sometimes it was great being the big sister. “You’re welcome.”
Columbia Pike Baptist Church was on the state highway between Redford and Franklin. A white, wood-framed structure, it was tiny compared to the huge Unitarian church we’d attended in Englecliff.
Not wanting to arrive too early, I ended up arriving late; the meeting had already started. I slipped into a back pew. About twenty kids sat scattered around the church. Only a handful were white. Jack Redford wasn’t one of them.
Nikki stood on the raised pulpit, addressing the group. “This town is changing, and the powers that be can’t stop that.”
“They’re sure as hell gonna try,” a handsome guy down front said.
“Then we’ll just try harder,” Nikki insisted. “I met with McSorley after school today—”
Derisive comments and laughter rippled through the group. Paul McSorley was the high school’s principal. I’d seen him in action at a brief end-of-the-first-day assembly. He wore a short-sleeve dress shirt with a tie, had an unfortunate comb-over, and used words like “swell” and “super” a lot.
Nikki waved her hand to quiet the group down. “McSorley told me that if two-thirds of the student body signs a petition, we can vote on whether to change the team name and emblem.”
“How’re y’all gonna get that many signatures?” a white girl with jet-black hair and a pierced eyebrow called out. Her name was Savy I recognized her from my American history class.
“We hit the fairness issue,” was Nikki’s comeback. “Tell people that signing doesn’t necessarily mean they want to change things. It just means they agree that it’s fair to have a vote on it.”
There were murmurs around the chapel as people discussed this. Nikki waited for everyone to quiet down before she started again. “There is one more thing. McSorley gave us a deadline. Six weeks.”
Everyone began talking at once. A skinny guy’s angry drawl rose above the cacophony. “I’ll tell y’all what this is really about. McSorley’s fixing to run for town council, and he’s afraid to piss off the black voters. This way he can say he gave us a chance to get up a petition and still make sure it fails.”
“What did you think, he’d roll out the red carpet and invite y’all down it?” a deep voice boomed from behind me. Everyone turned; a portly, middle-aged black man in a white shirt and dark tie stood in the back of the church.
Though he wasn’t very tall, his commanding presence made him seem so.
“Hey, Daddy,” Nikki called. Seeing Reverend Lucas Roberts for the first time made me realize that Nikki’s twin brother wasn’t there.
Reverend Roberts came down the aisle. “I don’t want to steal my daughter’s thunder,” he told us, flashing a smile that looked just like Nikki’s. “So I’ll say my piece and get gone. Your school principal is only the first obstacle you’ll face. Victory won’t be handed to you just because you’re right.”
“Then we’ll take it!” a boy shouted, his fist raised. There were shouts of agreement.
“Wiser men than you have trod that path, son,” Reverend Roberts advised. “And failed. Your fists will not bring them down. But if you stay strong, you can prevail. I’ll let y’all get on with your meeting now.”
Her father departed, and Nikki laid out a plan. She’d already created a petition. Each of us would be responsible for getting a certain number of signatures. We’d have to work at it hard. But if everyone pitched in, we could make McSorley’s deadline.
There was a surge of energy in the room. That was the first time I saw Nikki in action, and she was inspirational. I felt good about myself in a way I hadn’t since I’d learned we were moving to Tennessee.
That’s when the idea jumped into my head. I knew I couldn’t lead people like Nikki could, but maybe I could move them in another way. What if I wrote a play about Redford High School and the Confederate flag? It would be serious, important. I’d send it to Marcus; he’d see how deep my writing could be. Plus, I’d get Miss Bright to give me credit for doing it.
Perfect.
As soon as I got home, I sat down at my computer. I got the title immediately—Black and White and Redford All Over— and started writing like a demon.
BLACK AND WHITE AND REDFORD ALL OVER
A new play by Kate Pride
Act I, Scene 1
AT RISE: A school dance. The students wear masks that are painted half white, half black, divided down the middle. Half the kids wear American flag T-shirts; half wear Confederate flag T-shirts.
STUDENTS
(to the audience) It’s only a school dance. A dance held under our two flags.
TANYA crosses to SCOTT.
TANYA
/>
Hi, Scott.
SCOTT
Hi, Tanya.
TANYA
Would you like to dance?
SCOTT
My parents told me that I have to do three things: get good grades, go to college and marry a white girl.
TANYA
That’s a terrible thing to say! They probably fly that Confederate flag, too!
SCOTT
Hey, that flag is the symbol of our school.
TANYA
Well, that flag doesn’t represent me or a lot of other people.
SCOTT
Listen, nothing personal, but what color are you, anyway?
TANYA
What difference does it make? You don’t have to be like your parents, Scott. Or are you some kind of racist, too?
SCOTT
No. Yes. Maybe. I don’t know!
STUDENTS
(to audience) Is it racial? Am I that kind of a person? It’s only a school dance!
ALEX crosses to AMY.
ALEX
Hi, Amy. Would you like to dance?
AMY
I would, but I heard Tanya likes you.
ALEX
I don’t like her. She’s bi.
AMY
Oh my gosh! Who told you?
ALEX
No one told me. I’ve seen her parents. Her mom is black and her dad is white.
AMY
(to audience) What if he knew that I’m just as mixed as Tanya? Mixed up, I mean. About the flag.
STUDENTS
(to audience) What’s so important about a flag that divides us? I just want to belong. But I keep hiding behind this mask!
After five nonstop hours, I went back to consider my brilliance.
For once, a serious play of mine didn’t read like a bad version of some other writer. Instead, it was worse; trite, pedantic, and strident, with not one honest emotion.
Marcus was right; I couldn’t write what I didn’t know. And when it came to how people in Redford really felt about the Confederate flag, I definitely did not know. With two keystrokes I highlighted everything I’d written; with a third I deleted it. The empty screen seemed fitting: as blank as me.
A Heart Divided Page 4
