by Myriam Gurba
“I’m leaving!” Lydia yelled.
“Hold up, bitch!”
‘Bitch’ drove La Shrieker over the edge. “So that’s how it is?” she yelled. “Then let the Long Beach Public Transit system be yo’ fuckin’ chariot to school!”
I heard the front door slam shut so I pulled up my pants, ran out of the bathroom, grabbed my backpack off my floor, and the flan out of the fridge. I booked it out of our apartment, down the stairwell and through the lobby door just in time to see Satan’s white Jetta making a right down 43rd.
At times like these, all you can say is fuck it. So I said, “Fuck it.” I straightened my glasses and fixed my backpack straps and my necklace and ran my hand across the foil covering the flan. Luckily, it was unharmed.
I hiked the two blocks to the bus stop and sat on the uncomfortable, homeless-proof bench and waited and waited. The 90S finally pulled up and I climbed aboard thinking, “Now we’re jammin’!” and jinxed myself big time. I heard the beep of the wheelchair ramp being lowered. Gazing over my left shoulder, I saw an old white dude with sausage stumps for legs being lifted parallel to the floor. Flush with it, he pushed a red button on his electric chair and whizzed over to the front seats with the blue handicapped sticker above them.
The bus driver came and collapsed them and folded them flat and I sat down and watched her strap the guy in so he wouldn’t jostle like crapshooter’s dice. The lady used fingers tipped by the longest acrylics I’ve ever seen to adjust the cords and buckles and belts and these nails were gold with diamonds set into crescent shapes at the ends. Decorations like that should be against public transit rules. Those claws have got to make it hard to grip the wheel and them gemstones could accidentally catch the light and blind oncoming traffic. Dazzle… Screeeeech…Ka-Boom!
With the legless wonder secured nice and tight, the hawk-woman got back behind the wheel and got the show on the road, rolling us up Sands Boulevard, toward the ocean. I swear, a passenger dinged the bell to get off at each and every stop: St. Luke’s Hospital, the Salvation Army, McDonald’s, this pinche5 ride was taking forever, and I yanked the string two blocks up from Delightful Donut, my palms slippery with sweat cause it was hot and I was positive I was late.
I stood to peer out the window to check who was hanging out at the donut shop. White and Mexican straightedge nerds crowd the outdoor tables around seven, plot vegetarian takeovers of the cafeteria, and leave by seven forty-five. Old Cambodian men with coffee and dominoes replace them at eight and if their game’s hot, it means you’re late for school.
At a pink table, I saw an old Asian guy with his legs crossed like a chick. Another guy sat across from him and he held a black domino in the air above a tile configuration that formed a T-shape. He set his tile down, making the tail slightly longer, but the domino T still seemed real short. Maybe it wasn’t eight yet.
The bus stopped and I staggered to the front and grabbed a pole for balance. “S’cuse me, miss,” I said to the driver. “Do you know what time it is?”
She flipped her skinny purple braids, tapped her nails against the wheel, and looked at the fake Roley on her wrist. “Eight oh five,” she answered. “Time to get yo’ ass to school. Bell already rung at Willmore.”
“Oh, shit! Thanks!”
Gripping my flan, I flew down the bus stairs, landed on the corner, and almost got hit by a car sprinting through the crosswalk against red. A horn honked at me and I ran past the 98¢-and-Up store, across a little two-lane street, hopping onto the curb and dashing across the lawn in front of the auditorium. I darted into a pine tree cluster and peeked around a trunk to check the scrolling marquee left of Will’s main entrance. It looks like a gigantic cell phone broadcasting text messages to everyone driving down Sands.
70°. 8:08.
Shit.
I looked to my right, at the thick chains wrapping around the white gate. They confirmed my lateness. I weighed my options. I could walk back around the auditorium, past the music building and the overflow bungalows to the track. There, I could hop the chainlink fence, sneak in, and play it cool. However, this production would put the flan in serious jeopardy. It probably wouldn’t survive the climb, and I absolutely couldn’t afford to leave it behind.
I picked to play it safe and go in through the side door. Sighing, I hung my head and plodded across the dewy grass, to the cafeteria, around the corner, up the narrow sidewalk along Buffalo Drive. It’s a tiny street that leads into the teachers’ lot and cuts past the Industrial Arts wing, dead-ending at the baseball diamond. The Buffalo Drive door is the only legal way of getting onto campus late and approaching it, I fronted like I was more of a bad ass than I really am.
I worried that my nervousness showed as I joined the thrashing blob of latecomers. I glanced at the doorway. It was a human toilet clogged by fuck-ups and retards waiting to be processed by Will’s finest: the racially ambiguous bald security guard everyone calls Vin Diesel; Amanda, the girl security guard who everyone says is Rosie O‘Donnell’s Samoan cousin; and Mr. Reyes, the Hispanic vice principal who looks like Mr. Clean.
I stood casually between some members of the A-Team, this gang of vicious Asian skate punks, and the E-Z Writers, a crew of Latino taggers. I thought, “I’m chill, I’m chill. I’m inconspicuous.”
“Wassup, Cassidy?” this girl tagger, Pixel, asked me.
“Oh, you know,” I said. “I’m late. Huh, huh, huh.”
“Listen up!” Vin Diesel shouted. Everyone quieted down. “Let’s make this easier on ourselves, people! Those with a note from Mom or Dad clearing them and who’ve got school ID, step forward.”
A short black girl and a short white girl stepped up.
“Shaneeka Martin and…”
“Kimberly Krantz.”
“Come on through,” Vin ushered. Mr. Reyes handed the two girls pink hall passes. “The rest of the ladies, follow Amanda. Gentlemen, Mr. Reyes!”
A runt-sized tagger whined, “Man, this shit is whack!”
“It’s bound to get more whack if you don’t shut your mouth,” Mr. Reyes told him.
The tiny graffiti artist clammed up.
Mr. Reyes marched us in through Buffalo Drive’s puke-colored doors, leading us through a dim hallway that emptied into the sunlight. We followed him across the asphalt past a snack bar, the boys’ gym, the girls’ gym, the pool, the nurse’s office, and the overflow classrooms. That’s where I should’ve been, in a stuffy bungalow with my last fancy class, Honors English. Instead, I was being herded with a bunch of miscreants up a flight of stairs to the second story of the 900 building.
Mr. Reyes unlocked a dented brown door with “OCTS” stenciled on it. He held it open. “On-campus Tardy Suspension, gentlemen. Have a seat.”
Kids poured in ahead of me and staked out all the good seats in the back. I walked to a leftover desk in the third row and slid into the plastic chair. Mr. Reyes entered last and walked over to the beat-up wood-paneled desk at the front of the room.
“You all know the drill,” he said. “Three of these,” he pointed at the blackboard, where “OCTS” was written in chalk, “and you get real suspensions. Looking at your faces, I know this is some of your thirds.”
Mr. Reyes smoothed his pink tie. He sat at the desk and produced an expensive ink pen from his shirt pocket. His silver hoop earrings jiggled. “Isidore Washington…,” he started and he confirmed our names and grades and who our guidance counselors are and he wrote everything down on a pad of legal paper attached to his clipboard. After he called my name, Roberto Cassidy Moran, I twiddled my thumbs in silence for, like, ten minutes. Then, I remembered the flan.
I raised my hand. Mr. Reyes didn’t notice. He was busy reading the LA Times travel section. Maybe he was planning a vacation.
“Mr. Reyes?” I said.
He lowered his paper and looked at me. “Yes?”
“I brought this special flan, and it has to be refrigerated. Can I take it somewhere to be refrigerated? Please?”
The black walkie-talkie clipped to Mr. Reyes’ waist crackled. Everyone leaned forward to listen. Sometimes, you can hear the longshoremen down at the docks cussing up a storm on certain frequencies.
“I’ll take it,” Mr. Reyes said. He held out his hand and I picked up the plate and brought it to him.
“Now, it’s really good flan, Mr. Reyes,” I joked. “Try to resist the temptation. Okay?”
He looked at me and didn’t say anything. I could tell from his eyes, though, that his brain was taking my name and repeating it silently as an insult: Moron. God, I hate being a Moran!
I shoved my hands in my sweatshirt pockets and spun around and walked back to my chair. Mr. Reyes left and locked the door behind him, trapping us like Jack and Rose in Titanic. The only way out was through the windows. In the event of a disaster, we could die.
I put my head on my desk and looked at everyone’s feet. I counted and did the math. Of the twenty pairs of feet in the room, 75% were wearing Vans. Some had on Authentics, the super-traditional kind that the O.G. skaters from Dogtown made famous. Other kids had on Old Skools with stripes going down the sides. All the rest had on slip-ons. Camo slip-ons. Jolly Roger slip-ons. Checked slip-ons. Pink hippopotami slip-ons. So on and so forth. Since everyone at this dang school’s a conformist with their Vans, I wear Etnies.
“Cht, cht,” I heard. That’s a sound nacos, ghetto Mexicans, make to get someone’s attention. “Cht, cht. Coconut. Hey you. Brown on the outside, white on the inside.”
I looked up. Two dumb cholos, the Mexican Laurel and Hardy, were sitting in the fourth row, grinning at me. The fat one had on blue Authentics. The skinny one wore Chucks. Both pendejos6 were styling it old school, like a couple of throwbacks to American Me in starched khakis and buttoned up plaid shirts.
“I ain’t no coconut, foo’,” I said to Humpty.
“You ain’t? Check it out. Little faggot haircut. Thick black glasses. A fuckin’ shell on your necklace. Tight sweatshirt with an eagle on it from like the Gap or some shit like that. Your get-up be lookin’ pretty white and gay to me.”
“I think the Twinkies have gone to your head,” I told him. His skinny friend laughed.
“You bangin’ on me, homes?”
“Tsk, whatever.”
“Shee-yit. You best shut yo’ mouth right now cause you bangin’ on a Loco!” Fattie threw the gang sign for E.S.L., Earth Shattering Locos.
“English as a Second Language?”
The thin friend giggled more and fatso’s nostrils flared and his jaw clenched. “Better watch it, coconut, cause I’m-a be lookin’ for you. And when I find you, I’m jackin’ yo’ flan!” He high-fived his anorexic friend.
Losers.
I put my head back down, ignored them, and shut my eyes, letting my imagination do what it usually does during downtime: become my personal car factory. I zoned out of OCTS as my head built and customized me a winner’s drift machine, a shiny candy-cane Nissan Silvia S15, manual transmission all the way, baby, shocking red bucket seats to fall into. When they were done, my crack team of Japanese engineers dressed in white lab coats pushed my ride out onto the wet streets of Tokyo at midnight. Dr. Fukuyama held the door open and I slid behind the wheel. I gripped the clutch and reached out to touch the windshield made of glass so shiny and crystal clear, I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I hadn’t touched it.
Fans, mostly Harajuku girls, packed the city sidewalks and Sokhun stood with them, dressed in a red kimono, looking like a geisha. I revved my engine for her and she waved, and I rolled down my window and some hoochie-mama with bleached hair and short shorts screamed, “Ichi, ni, san, shi, GOOOOOO!” and I gunned it, leaving my competition–a vicious yakuza boss and Japan’s prime minister–in the dust. I entered a blind turn full throttle, oversteering big time cause that’s drifting, doing too much, too fast, too soon to lose traction, riding up on two wheels but still managing to make the rear of your vehicle follow your…
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!
Nope, that wasn’t my horn or the yakuza’s or Junichiro Koizumi’s. None of us, like, died in my imaginary car race or whatever. The interruption was real. The shutdown bell. It sounds during emergencies and when teachers hear it, for our protection, they’re supposed to lock us into our classrooms and not let us leave and close all the windows and blinds.
Last year, we had a shutdown during World History. We were studying the Battle of Britain and our teacher, Mr. Schwarz, had us pretend we were in an air raid, hiding in a London subway station while Nazis and R.A.F. did aerial battle above our city. Really, what happened was some white kid freaked out during a random bag search in the main quad, where the rose garden and flagpole are. The kid was acting suspicious, and instead of giving himself up, which would’ve been the easy thing to do, the stupid white boy took off waving a handgun in the air. The staff and police found him under the bleachers in the football field after, like, two hours of looking, and they bragged to the local paper that they averted a mini-Columbine.
Liars. I think that white boy was probably really like that nerd on The Breakfast Club who got an F in Woodshop cause when he pulled the trunk or tail or whatever on his elephant lamp, the light wouldn’t turn on. The lame ass was probably planning on taking his gun into the bathroom and shooting himself in order to make a big scene and be remembered when nobody knew his frickin’ name anyways.
I sighed and sat up and opened my eyes and unzipped my backpack to get my phone out. I wanted to text Sokhun about being trapped in OCTS and ask her if she knew what was up. Reaching inside my JanSport, I felt around. No phone. I peered inside. It was all shadows but I clearly saw the outline of my hairbrush and a pack of gum. I took them out. I lifted my backpack and turned it upside down and shook it slow and watched my junior thesis, a copy of Super Street magazine, my iPod, and a pair of tangled-up earphones slide out. No phone.
“Gosh dangit!”
The cholos started to laugh.
“Shut up, fuckers!”
They got quiet. Pussies. They must not have been real gangsters.
A Black kid got out his Nextel. “Monique,” he chirped. “This C’Love. Why we under lockdown?”
“My teacher say they found a big-ass puddle of blood in the bathroom at the girls’ gym but no body,” her soft voice answered.
“Ugh,” C-Love moaned, grossed out. “Thanks. I’ll chirp ya later.”
With the mystery solved and no way of making contact with my girl and my drifting fantasy dead, I started untangling my earphones. I picked out the knots and slipped the phones in my ears and stuck the plug in my iPod. Turning it on, I hit “shuffle” and rested my head on the desk. I listened to Echo and the Bunnymen, Depeche Mode, The Smiths, Joy Division. Some new stuff came on, too, like The Editors, The Postal Service, and Tegan and Sara, but the retro tunes were really predominating the mix.
After about seventeen songs, I looked up at the clock. 9:30, time for Nutrition, our fifteen-minute break. We weren’t getting it today. Sighing, I dug a marker out of my backpack and lifted my head back up. Graffiti covered my desk. I read it and thought about what to add to it, what would go well with the rest of the stuff. There were Crip tags, a little E-Z Writer mural, a cross-out of ESL and the word “killa” written beside it, a random “Live to die, dying to live.” I uncapped my marker and chewed on the end, thinking. Then I wrote, “Dream as if you’ll live forever… drift as though you’ll die today.” The edges of the desk were clean, virgin, so I tagged “Kuchi, kuchi, kuchi, kuchi, kuchi…” all around. “Kuchi” means “mouth” in Japanese.
I noticed a flurry of activity so I looked up and everyone was putting away their sidekicks and PSPs and Nextels so I ripped out my earphones and shoved everything into my backpack. Someone had heard the key in the lock and warned everyone. Sure enough, the door opened and Mr. Reyes walked in, holding a bullhorn. He posed in front of us like a boot camp sergeant.
“I’m sure all of you know what’s up by now,” he said. “If any of you gentlem
en know who the source of all that blood in the girls’ gymnasium restroom is, come forward and tell someone. Think of someone you trust and let them know what’s going on. Someone’s badly hurt and needs medical attention. Now, the bell’s gonna ring in a second. Remember, today’s an odd day so go directly to your third period block. Cassidy, come by my office at lunch so you can pick up your flan.”
“Yessir.”
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!
Everyone bolted outta there like jackrabbits hearing a shotgun blast.
In the hall, I looked around to see if I couldn’t locate any of Sokhun’s friends. Her first period class is on the other side of campus but I wanted to give one of them the message that I didn’t have my phone with me. I stood in the same spot for a couple of minutes but didn’t see anyone. I turned and headed back down the stairs, through the bungalows, into the main building where the principal’s office is. I took a shortcut through the attendance office and came out in the quad.
Mr. Reyes was standing by the yellow roses, shouting through his bullhorn, “Move it, move it, move it! You’ve got three minutes left to get to class on time!”
Like a V.C. navigating the jungle, I moved through the sloppy throng of kids, past the flowerbeds and the dying lawn, making it to the 400 building, walking in through the heavy side doors on my way to Mrs. Kiku’s. She’s my Japanese teacher, pardon me, my sensei, and I’m in her Level Two class.
Right now, Mrs. Kiku’s walls give me a headache. She’s got layers of our work stretching all the way back to September covering every inch of space, bright menus we made for a food project called “Arigato Cafe,” posters we did for “Profile: Japan” and “Tokyo at Night,” origami cranes, boxes and bats and lotuses we made with wild paper all hung from what look like laundry lines crisscrossing the room a few inches above our heads. It’s enough to make a kid epileptic but in spite of the anarchy, I really do like her class. It’s cool learning Katakana and Hiragana and about Japanese culture. My favorite’s when we get to play with the plastic sushi Mrs. Kiku keeps in her file cabinets. I pretend to eat unagi and throw my voice like the eel is saying its final goodbye and sounding like Elmo from Sesame Street, it goes, “Sayonara, guys!”
