The Black Kids: Chapters 13–19

My pellet hits one of their potted plants and it shatters, the dirt tumbling out like entrails.

He embezzled from his old company.

In the car with Michael, I thought of that parade of beleaguered teenage girls and their pudgy babies.

“That’s the whole reason for the rebellion. That’s the whole reason for taking one of my stands. Protesting isn’t supposed to be easy. Revolution isn’t easy. Not when you’re trying to dismantle an entire system.”

“Worrying about being safe is what’s dangerous, what deters progress. We get treated like some crazy fringe group—”

It’s not like they tell us anything about themselves. They’re so damned secretive, even about the stuff we should know. It’s like we materialized out of thin air, according to them.

You can’t treat people like collateral damage...

The canals and the pier in Venice were dreamed up by a developer and tobacco mogul named Abbot Kinney, who envisioned it as kind of a Coney Island West.

Blacks were able to move in because the Japanese who’d previously lived there had been sent to internment camps.

“I could’ve been bigger than Dorothy Dandridge, or even Hazel Scott! I was lighter than Hazel, you know? My nose was keener...,” Grandma Opal would say on occasion, whenever somebody brought it up.

I imagine it would be hard to grow up with a mother like that—a mother who loved you hard and then retreated, like the flow and crash and ebb of a wave, so you never quite knew whether you were floating or drowning.

They’d bring home the day’s catch in a cooler, fish guts and scales stinking up the tiny kitchen with its homemade curtains, Grandma Shirley humming as she brined.

Outside feels like a heavy comforter I want to kick off. But inside feels oppressive in its own way too, with Morgan’s sad wafting through and filling up every room.

Usually, I’m more afraid of the mountain lions or rabid coyotes than people.

Morgan sits next to him on the couch, looking dutiful and forlorn.

It’s the first time the military’s been sent to a city to quell disorder since the 1968 MLK assassination riots.

I’ve charted their growth alongside my own, something adult metastatic in us—the ripening of our bodies, the ever deepening of their voices when they call the house phone: “Hello, Miss Ashley. May I speak to Lucia, please?”

My mother looks askance at Lucia, and Lucia abruptly stops dancing.

She’d taken me to somebody’s abuela on Santee Street who had gnarled hands that made exquisite things.

We went to the Neiman Marcus near Rodeo Drive, which was full of crusty old farts with big fat baubles dripping from their ears and necks and fingers like candy tumors.

I twirled around the living room feeling the tulle in my hands. Tulle is a wonder, scratchy and dense, yet somehow managing to look like clouds.

While Fresh Kid Ice raps, together we flutter our new lashes, revel in our new faces, and will tonight to be magical.

Trevor and Michael arrive in Trevor’s dad’s vintage Rolls-Royce. It’s impeccable and sleek, a haughty glossy white with off-white tire rims.

She started going to meetings earlier this year, and at lunch she sometimes tells us stories of international orphans rescued from abject misery and brought all the way across the world to live in, like, Chatsworth.

She’s shown us pictures; he looks very handsome, lithe with thick, dark hair down to his shoulders.

Heather spent weeks telling anybody who’d listen how lame prom was and how it was the ritualized subjugation of young American women. Then at the last minute, when she decided she wanted to be subjugated after all, there was nobody left to ask her.

On the lawn, Kimberly stabs Michael with the boutonniere pin, and a tiny pearl of blood erupts.

We think she’s going to chastise us or drag us to our elders to face punishment, but instead she washes her hands and gives us a knowing wink in the mirror.

The photographer corrals each group and poses the girls with their right hands on their hips, heads tilted to the left, one leg ever so slightly extended forward.

Courtney and Rusty dance tentatively, an arm’s length between them, the way people dance when they don’t quite know each other’s bodies yet.

“I’m sorry,” he says as we dance under a gilded chandelier.

Then she pushes me into the pool.
My dress billows up around me as I sink to the bottom.

He keeps repeating it so that it’s like a chant or a mantra.

He takes off his tuxedo jacket and neatly drapes it across the chair. His cummerbund is the color of a robin’s egg.

Be smart, but never smarter than; or they’ll think you’re uppity.

In front of us, the firemen in their yellow unfurl their hoses and spray.

It came to town and they took us on a field trip to see it, but some of the parents protested and started a petition arguing that the school was encouraging deviant behavior.

The bruise her mother gave her has transitioned from angry plum to subdued mauve.

The bruise her mother gave her has transitioned from angry plum to subdued mauve.

Lana stirs, and I gently extricate myself from her grip.