by Renée Watson
I reach out my hand for the remote. When he gives it to me, I turn the volume down. “So you don’t like Hitchcock. Well, what kinds of movies do you like?” I wonder how it is that we’ve known each other our whole lives but don’t know what types of movies the other likes.
“Action,” he answers.
“What else?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“I’m just asking. Just trying to get to know you,” I say.
“You already know me,” Devin says.
“I don’t know everything,” I say. Which is true. I know things about him, but most of the time when we’re together, we’re in a group. I think maybe I can find out something new about him. I learned a lot about Tony playing that game of questions. There’s always something new to learn about someone, right? I clear my throat. “Okay. Answer the questions I ask you. First thing that comes to mind. No thinking,” I tell him. “Milkshake or ice cream sundae?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Devin, you’re not playing. Come on. Just answer the question.”
He sighs. “Milkshake, I guess.” He takes the control and turns the television to a sports channel. I think he’s going to switch stations again, but instead, he leans back on the sofa cushions and turns the volume up.
“Devin,” I whine. “Let’s talk. We haven’t seen each other all summer. We can’t just sit here and watch TV.”
I’m not even sure he hears me. His eyes are hypnotized by the screen.
Mom can stop worrying. There will be nothing going on in here at all. The magic of our kiss left just as fast as it came.
I fake a yawn.
I hear the front door open. Nikki is home. She comes into the family room, sees me and Devin sitting together. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t know you had company,” she says. She has the biggest grin stretched across her face. She turns around to leave.
“It’s okay,” I tell her. “It’s just Devin.”
Fall
Chapter 17
September.
Clouds drift in the sky like ghosts. Make you think you are seeing things and people: that one looks like Grandma’s rocking chair, and that one over there a smiling face. Then a shifting and disappearing and the sky becomes a forest of cotton, a wonderland for birds, a shawl for trees.
I’ve been trying to catch the moment when a leaf sheds its green and turns orange or red or yellow. Most times, it happens so fast that I don’t notice until the ground is covered with remnants of summer.
But this time, I am watching. Every morning, I check the tree outside my house. I want to see the process of change, not just the outcome. I want to know what it looks like when tree branches wave good-bye to summer.
Chapter 18
It is the first day of school.
There are news reporters at Richmond and a photographer is taking pictures of us as we enter the building. “Can I get some back-to-school smiles?” he says. A group of girls sit on the steps and pose for him.
Nikki, Essence, and I walk down senior hall on our way to our lockers. There’s a man standing in the hallway. “Good morning, good morning,” he shouts. “Welcome back, welcome back. We’re having an assembly before classes start. Everyone to the auditorium, please. Everyone to the auditorium, please.”
Nikki whispers to me, “Is that our new principal?”
I nod. “I think so.”
The man keeps grinning and waving us to the auditorium. “Welcome back,” he repeats. “Hello, hello.”
“He’s trying too hard,” Essence says.
I take a look at the man. He is short and a few pounds past skinny. He waddles when he walks and his cologne saturates the entire hallway. He is the first black principal Richmond has had since I’ve been a student here. “Well, I give him points for wanting to meet us. Remember Ms. Stone? She acted like we had some infectious virus. How many times did we see her in the hallways?”
Essence laughs. “Uh, never. Unless she was coming or leaving.”
Principal Stone quit last year right in the middle of the day. Just cursed her staff and walked out. She was the third principal Richmond had had in the four years I’ve been at this school. For the rest of the school year we had a temporary principal. Most adults come to this school like it’s some kind of experiment. Every year some know-it-all comes here and says he knows what will get us really caring about our education.
Every year the rules change, but nothing else.
Before we enter the auditorium, our new principal comes over to us. He looks at me and Nikki and says, “I’m seeing double.” He laughs as if this is an original joke, but we have heard it our entire lives.
I reach out my hand. “Hi, I’m Maya.”
“And I’m Nikki.”
Essence introduces herself, too.
“I’m Principal Green,” he tells us. “I’m looking forward to getting to know you.” Then he looks at Nikki and back at me. “I hear there are twin sisters here, and one of them is the student body president.”
Nikki points at me. “That would be her.”
“Well, nice to meet you. I’ve heard a lot of good things about you from the teachers and staff here.” Principal Green looks at me and changes his tone to a serious one, like what he has to say is really important. “I’m really looking forward to seeing how you’ll lead the school. You ready?”
I’ve been ready since freshman year. “Yes,” I tell him. “I really want student council to do something that matters this year, not just plan dances.”
“Good, very good.”
We say our good-byes, and Principal Green tries to tell Nikki and me apart. He gets it wrong.
Nikki laughs. “That’s Maya. The one with the twists.”
Principal Green looks at our hair. “Got it. You’re Nikki, you wear your hair straight. You’re Maya, you wear twists.”
“Right,” we tell him.
“I’ll get it, I promise.”
Nikki says, “You will. Once you get to know us, you’ll see how different we are.”
We follow the crowd to the auditorium. Essence spots Malachi, who is sitting in the middle of the fifth row. “Let’s sit there.”
I search the crowd, trying to find Devin and Ronnie so they can come sit with us. But instead of finding them, my eyes land on Tony. He’s sitting two rows behind me, next to a girl who is stomping and chanting, “Sen-ior Pow-er! Sen-ior Pow-er!” The rest of the senior class joins in, and soon the juniors, sophomores, and freshmen are all chanting for their class.
Principal Green comes onstage and takes the microphone off the stand. He shouts, “Are the Richmond Warriors in the house?”
We all cheer and applaud.
“All right, all right. Let’s settle down.” He waits until the auditorium is silent. “First off, I’d like to welcome you back to school. I am honored to be your new principal. I truly believe this is going to be a great year. We are going to prove to ourselves and to this community that the Richmond Warriors value learning and are committed to excellence.”
We all clap.
He continues, “That means showing up not just for games and dances but for classes and tutoring sessions.”
There are not as many cheers when he says this.
“In order to do this, we have to take care of each other. If one of us fails, we all fail. We are only as strong as our weakest link,” Principal Green says. “And we can do it! We are in this together, Richmond. Each one of you needs the person beside you in order for this school to be everything it can be. Now I want you to try something with me.” He clears his throat and says, “We’re going to do a call-and-response chant. When I say, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ you’re going to shout back, ‘Yes, I am!’ Okay?” Principal Green is definitely more excited about this than we are. He puts the microphone close to his mouth and yells, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” He points the mic to the audience.
A few of us respond. “Yes, I am.”
“Am I my brother’s keeper?”
“Yes
, I am.”
“Come on, Richmond,” he says. “You can do better than that.”
“Am I my brother’s keeper?”
“Yes, I am!”
“That’s right, that’s right! Now remember, when you see one of your peers making a bad decision, encourage them to do the right thing. We all need each other.”
Principal Green gets serious when he says, “Now, seniors, I especially want you to think about this. This is your last year. What will your legacy be?”
I look around the auditorium. Some of us are asleep, some are whispering, others have headphones in their ears. Essence has her cell phone out. She quickly types a message and slips her phone back in her pocket.
Principal Green makes a few general announcements about the new lunch schedule and introduces new staff. Then he says, “Now, I want my juniors and seniors to listen closely,” and he reminds us about registering for the SAT. “Before I let you go, I want you to look at the person to your left and look at the person to your right.”
There’s laughing and talking.
“Seriously, seriously. Take a good look. A real good look,” Principal Green says. “The person sitting to your left might not walk across the stage on graduation day. The person to your right might end up in jail, or on drugs, or dead before the age of twenty-five. That’s the statistic.”
The auditorium is silent except for two boys sitting behind me who keep saying to each other, “He talkin’ ’bout you. He talkin’ ’bout you.”
“It’s up to you to decide that you will not be the statistic,” Principal Green says. “You all have a responsibility to continue a great legacy. People want to give Richmond a bad name, and it’s up to you to change that. Young people, make us proud. Make yourself proud,” he says. “Let’s have a good, safe, productive year. You’re dismissed.”
We stand and slowly move out of the auditorium. I see Tony walking out, and I wonder if St. Francis ever had an assembly like this. Wonder if he ever had to look to his left or right and think, “This person may not make it.”
And I wonder why Principal Green told us what we might not be instead of telling us the possibility of what good we could become. He just lost all the points I gave him this morning.
As we walk out, Essence asks, “Do you need an SAT score to get into community college?”
We squeeze through the crowd and make our way to our lockers. “Uh, I don’t know. But you need it to get into Spelman,” I say.
Essence doesn’t say anything.
“Spelman is still the plan, isn’t it? That’s always been our plan,” I remind her.
Essence says, “I have to be realistic, Maya. Portland Community College is cheaper than Spelman. Way cheaper.” She takes her phone out of her pocket again. She looks at the name, sucks her teeth, then sends the call to voice mail. “If I even go to college at all.”
“What do you mean ‘if’?” I ask.
Essence opens her locker, hangs her bag on a hook, and closes it.
The three of us have planned out every detail of our college years. Nikki, Essence, and I will be roommates in the dorm our freshman year and go off-campus on weekends to stay with my grandma so we can do laundry at her place and get some good home cooking. We’ve talked about moving out of the dorms and getting our own apartment our sophomore year, and by junior and senior year we’ll be interning and thinking about where we’ll go to get our masters’. Essence and Malachi will most likely be engaged by then, and Nikki and I will be her maids of honor at the wedding.
That’s the plan.
That’s always been the plan.
“We’ve been talking about going to college since we were in middle school,” I say.
Essence walks away, pulling her phone out again. “Plans change.”
Chapter 19
So far, the first day of school has been full of icebreaker activities and free writes about what we did over summer break. It’s lunch now, and sitting here in the cafeteria, I notice there are more white and Latino students here than last year. My freshman year, Richmond was mostly black, but in the past two years our student body has changed.
Kate and Tony are sitting with Nikki, and the rest of our crew is at a table across from the Goth girls who swear they’re not Goth. Essence and I walk past their table, and I smile at one of the girls—the one with the tattoo of a star on her neck.
Essence says, “I really wish she’d let me do her makeup. That black lipstick and dark eye shadow is doing nothing for her complexion. She has such a pretty face. And her hair—the things I could do with her hair!”
As we walk up to our table, I hear Nikki saying, “Things at Richmond are never going to change. That assembly was a waste of time.” She sips her flavored water. She’s bringing her lunch to school now because she believes the food in the cafeteria is oppressive and damaging our bodies with each bite.
“It wasn’t a waste,” I say. “Well, we could have done without Principal Green’s fake pep talk at the end. But he kind of had a good point about being one another’s keeper.”
“I don’t have time to worry about nobody else,” Essence says. “I got enough problems of my own.” She eats a handful of fries.
Nikki says, “If people don’t want to change, you can’t make them. I’m here to get my education.” Her eyes survey the room. She sighs. “If they don’t want to get theirs, that’s on them.”
Every day Nikki becomes a different person.
Kate wipes her lips with her napkin. “What do you think the problem is?” she asks.
Something inside me begins to crumble when everyone at the table starts listing everything that’s wrong with Richmond and nothing that is right—as if a place can’t be bad and good at the same time.
Kate joins in on what’s wrong with Richmond (feeling comfortable, I guess, since everyone else is complaining). And I am wondering how it can be that a girl who has spent one day in a place can all of a sudden be an expert. “St. Francis has a multimedia literacy room with iPads and laptops that we could check out. We had a garden on our rooftop that our school lunches were made from. I don’t understand why Richmond can’t have those things,” she says. “My math teacher told me today that I couldn’t take my book home because she needed it for her other classes. I—”
“We know how bad it is,” I say.
Kate’s shoulders shrink. “I know you do, I just, I think—”
“Do you know why St. Francis is able to have all those things? Do you have any suggestions on how to make things better here?” I ask.
Nikki kicks me under the table, soft. I kick back, hard.
“Well, no. I, well, my, the organization my mom works for is partnering with Richmond, trying to help get more, uh, get more resources for the school.”
I don’t say anything, because I know nothing I say will come out right. Instead, I am looking at Devin, wondering why he is not debating with her, why he is just sitting silently. He usually gets fired up in these kinds of discussions. I follow his eyes. They are fixed on a group of girls sitting across the cafeteria. I try to see which one he is looking at, but I can’t tell. I feel ridiculous right now, so I look away and try to focus on the conversation.
Then Devin turns his head, and I see him watch one of the girls get up from the table and realize that one of the new girls has caught his attention. Her name is Cynthia. She is a brown girl, but not black. She is thick in the hips with a thin waist.
Devin is so obvious.
I look away before he realizes I am watching him. I don’t know where to put my eyes, so I just look right in front of me, where Tony is sitting. Our eyes lock into each other’s, and I realize that while I was watching Devin, Tony was watching me.
Chapter 20
Cynthia.
She won’t tell us where she’s from. It is the last period of the day and for the sixth time today, I am playing a getting-to-know-you game. When Cynthia is introduced as a new student and is asked where she is from, she just smiles and says
, “I’m from many places.”
And then the guessing game starts: Is she Mexican? Indian? Hawaiian? She is a shade of brown I have never seen before. Cynthia, whose hair is the kind of curly that isn’t kinky or nappy, who’s thicker than skinny but not at all fat. Cynthia, who loves the attention she is getting from her guess-my-identity game. I have seen girls like her before. Back when Nikki and I modeled. Back when we were called beautiful.
We modeled when we were seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, and twelve. Nothing major, mostly in catalogs for Fred Meyer and other local companies.
But at thirteen we found out we were just ordinary black girls. “You are not commercial enough,” the agency said. Nothing exotic added to our blackness to give us unique tones, curly hair. Nothing added to our blackness to make a just-right complexion.
I haven’t modeled since. Haven’t felt like a nothing black girl since. But now, with Cynthia whose black is beautiful and new and different, I am thirteen again and jealous of a girl I don’t even know.
Chapter 21
We have been in school for a month, and student council is having its first official meeting. Student council officers were voted on last school year. The official positions are:
Me
President
Charles Hampton
Vice President
Tasha Walker
Secretary
Joey Matthews
Historian
Rachel Martin
Treasurer
So when Vince and Bags walk into the student council meeting, Charles turns to me and says, “Are they serious?” He shakes his head in disapproval—and maybe disgust.
Principal Green begins our meeting, saying, “I’ve opened it up to other students to join our student council meetings. Even though they don’t have official titles, they will help plan events this year and support our officers. I thought it would be nice to add some diversity to the group.” Principal Green writes the agenda on chart paper and says, “We’ll get started shortly.”
