Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (23 page)

“You had a baby?”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head.

“Someone in your family had a baby?”

I stared at him stupidly. His face looked open, like he was waiting for an answer so he knew the right expression to make. I wanted to hit him or I wanted to say something clever or I wanted to leave, with or without my stupid Slurpee. I was waiting to be a different person when Geena stepped around from behind me. I thought for a minute she was getting in my face to laugh at me, but she grabbed my arm, hard, making little indentations for each of her violet fingernails, and dragged me toward the door, calling over her shoulder, “Nah, mister, she ain’t pregnant, at our school they give you a balloon for giving all the teachers blow jobs. It don’t really mean shit.”

Outside, I walked faster and hoped his English wasn’t good enough that he knew what
blow job
meant. Geena laughed.

“You didn’t pay for that,” I said, pointing at her Slurpee.

“No,” she said. “Didn’t pay for the cigarettes, either.”

I waited for shouts or sirens but none came, so I followed her lead, matching her stride and imagining my steps clicked like hers. Our bravado peeled a little as we crossed the parking lot and avoided looking up at the men who hung out in front of the store all day, looking for work, or drinking, or both. It was after three, so the hope of day work had mostly faded and the drinking was in full swing. They grunted appreciatively at the bodies we hadn’t quite figured out what to do with yet, and we shrank into ourselves at their cat-calls, as if blushing would make our breasts and behinds less prominent. On the next block we were cool again, walked tall and touched mailboxes and fence posts and other things that weren’t ours. Geena lit a cigarette and I watched her smoke.

“Thank you,” I said to Geena, once we’d reached my building. I hoped she wouldn’t make me explain what I was thanking her for.

“Don’t be embarrassed ’cause other people are dumb,” said Geena.

 

 

Geena Johnson was
my friend. Maybe not right away, but things could happen quick like that back then. Geena came by the day after the Slurpee incident. Geena taught me how to dance and how to steal. Geena dragged me to cheerleading tryouts and threw her arms around me when we both made the JV squad. Geena also told me I’d have to do her homework sometimes so she wouldn’t get put on academic probation. Old Crystal would have had something to say about this, but I was suddenly a girl with lip liner and red and blue pom-poms. I’d just nodded.

Out of respect for Geena, or maybe it was fear, nobody from Eastdale really messed with me, but nobody talked to me, either. They looked at me curiously, the way they might have looked at a one-eyed kitten or baby bird Geena had picked up one day and begun to carry everywhere. I carried books everywhere and, without really meaning to, ignored everyone but Geena. On the bus to away games I sat in the back reading while the rest of the squad acted like girls were supposed to: Geena traded raunchy insults with the football players, Violeta and April gave each other makeovers, Tien stared into space, and Jesse perched seductively on somebody’s lap until one of the coaches made her get up and saunter poutily to her own seat.

Football season was almost over by the first time I made myself noticed. Things had been louder than usual, and I stopped reading
The Souls of Black Folk
for long enough to hear what everyone was complaining about. We were on our way to our second-to-last game of the season—one we were probably going to lose—but all anyone could talk about was next week’s rivalry game. The county had structured the football league so that every school had a major rival and the season ended with games between rivals, which were played for a prize. Our rival school was Stonewall Jackson, a new school in the middle of the new gated community of Hillcrest, the place where people in Lakewood kept threatening to move. Its newness made the whole concept of Rivalry Week stupid. There hadn’t been time for any history of rivalry between Lee and Jackson High Schools, and there wouldn’t have been any rivalry in the present if the school board hadn’t set it up that way. Next week’s varsity game was known as the Rebel Yell. The winner got to display an old sword that was said to be a Confederate relic, though its exact circumstances were unknown and any history we were given for it usually turned out to be invented.

“I can’t believe
that lady,” Jason Simmons called from a few seats ahead of us. “Like she don’t know that ’s the whole fucking point of Rivalry Week.”

“Whatever,” Eric Manns called back. “I don’t give a fuck what Mrs. Peterson says, eggs and toilet paper is some bitch-ass white-boy shit, anyway. You would not catch me up in Hillcrest trying to outrun the popo over a damn football game.”

Jason shook his head. Mrs. Peterson, Lee’s head guidance counselor, had made an announcement about Rivalry Week during morning assembly. Traditionally, the week before the end-of-season games was marked by a chain of vandalisms, but apparently the school board was exasperated by the annual cleanup efforts.
If any act of vandalism is traced to a high school in this county,
Mrs. Peterson had declared,
the cost of cleanup will be taken out of that school’s activity budget
.

I hadn’t been paying attention at the time and assumed that the chorus of boos was just a general reaction to Mrs. Peterson’s voice. The woman was thoroughly disliked; hatred of her was one of the few things upon which everyone at Robert E. Lee High School agreed. The Eastdale kids hated her because she had a habit of hanging up on people’s parents when they didn’t speak English instead of getting a translator, as was county policy, and she was known for suspending people based on their zip codes rather than their behavior. At a school assembly last year, she’d blamed the dropping standardized test scores on immigrant kids who, before arriving in Eastdale, had been “living in jungles.”

I hated her because she’d tried to talk me out of honors classes and only signed off on my schedule because I’d threatened to go to the principal. I was an accident; I’d slipped through our school’s de facto segregation and she wasn’t happy about it. I had been dealing with people like her since the third grade, when I’d been shipped off to a “gifted” school as a reward for outsmarting standardized tests. The magnet elementary and middle schools were the Lake County School District’s last line of defense against the evaporation of its upwardly mobile white people. The Lakewood PTA had tried to get a new magnet high school built, smack in the middle of Lakewood, and, when that failed, tried to have Eastdale students rezoned to a high school five miles farther away, but the county comptroller wasn’t having it. They settled for an honors wing, which housed everyone whose standardized test scores placed them into honors classes, or everyone whose parents knew that you could pay a private psychologist to declare your child a genius even if the school’s official test thought otherwise. Essentially, the honors wing housed all of Lakewood, and me.

I wasn’t sure why my Lakewood classmates hated Mrs. Peterson. She seemed to view herself as their principal guardian and defender, but they called her “the evil chipmunk” and did bucktoothed impersonations of her behind her back. She did have buckteeth, along with a dumpy figure and a wardrobe of seasonally themed sweatshirts. Sometimes I almost felt sorry for her, the way kids laughed.

“What the fuck are they going to take out of our budget, anyway?” Jason went on. “We ain’t got shit to begin with.”

That was true: much to the chagrin of our Lakewood classmates, we’d had the lowest budget in the county for years. Jason’s real problem was that Rivalry Week was usually a rite of passage from JV to varsity. By the look on his face I could tell Jason was comparing the Hillcrest Police Department to whatever alternative initiation scheme the varsity players would come up with, and thinking he’d rather take his chances with the cops.

“Look, I ain’t even worried about the game,” Eric announced. “Fuck the game, fuck Rivalry Week, I ain’t worried about anything but the fine-ass girl I’m taking to the party afterward.”

“Nigga, who the fuck wants to go with you?”

Eric surveyed the back of the bus as if looking for a comeback.

“Antisocial back there might be all right if she’d put that book down for a second.”

I looked up. It was the first time all season I’d been addressed directly and I wasn’t prepared with a clever retort.

“Aww, leave her alone. She probably got homework,” Jason called.

“That book ain’t homework.”

“How the fuck you know what homework they got in honors English? You barely know what homework you got in plain old regular English.”

“Ne
gro,
I go to Robert E. Lee High School, I know damn well ain’t no
Souls of Black Folk
required reading. Maybe
Black Folk Ain’t Got No Souls, Who the Hell Told ’Em to Stop Picking Cotton, Anyway?
”

The people around us laughed; hearing that he had an audience, Eric lifted himself onto his knees and kept going.

“Don’t know why the fuck you laughing, Garcia. The next book they read is
Mexicans Ain’t Got No Souls, Either, and Them Mothafuckas Don’t Even Speak English
.”

He turned back to me. “Or do I got it all wrong, Antisocial? Go ’head, drop some knowledge on me.”

I stared back and started to open my mouth, but Geena was quicker.

“Look, she’s reading ’cause you idiots ain’t worth her time. Now sit the fuck down before I beat your black ass and then call your mama so she can do it again.”

“Ooh,” said Eric, throwing up his hands in an exaggerated gesture of defeat. “I don’t want Geena to beat my ass and call my mama.”

He sat down, though, and I had a sudden sense of the next four years passing something like this.

“I know what to do about the new vandalism policy.”

Even Geena whirled her head around in shock. The whole back of the bus looked at me expectantly. I could feel my heart racing and wondered when it had started mattering what they thought of me.

“Later,” I said, nodding toward the coaches. “After the varsity game, so the varsity team can hear too.”

Geena hardly spoke to me all afternoon. If I fucked this up I was on my own, that much was clear. Geena had helped me out, but she wasn’t about to go down with me.

We met outside school after the varsity game. The varsity players had in fact waited around to see what I had to say. I took deep breaths and played with the zipper on my cheerleading jacket, feeling something like the leader of an underground crime syndicate. My jacket said ROBERT E. LEE CHEERLEADING on the back, but it was the front that I stared down at:
Crystal 2000
.
Crystal, 2000
.
Crystal 2000!
I liked to think of it that way, like a brand-new kind of Crystal:
Crystal 2000! Cheerleading Goddess, Criminal Extraordinaire
. While I was mentally branding myself, Tyrone Holmes, the senior quarterback, interrupted and prompted me to speak.

“So, umm, I was thinking, like . . .”

I could hear the varsity cheerleaders giggling at my speech and began again, flexing my newly credible Eastdale voice.

“I mean, I’m saying, though, we fuck with Stonewall, we get in trouble. First there’s the cops, and then there’s the school board, and we don’t need all that. But if they fuck with us, it’s them that gets in trouble.”

“You think they’re dumb enough to do that?”

“They don’t have to be.” I shook my head. “If we do the school but we use their colors and make it look like it was them, they get fined and we get the money.”

“You think we should fuck up our own school?” Jason asked.

“Why not?” I asked. “Anybody care about this place?”

Tyrone nodded and grinned at me. “You know, Antisocial, you might be all right.”

“Told you,” said Geena.

A week later, we met in the parking lot of Walgreens, supplies in hand. A few seniors with old, beat-up cars carted about twenty of us to the parking lot in the middle of the night, where we split up to carry out our duties. Tyrone and Eric spray-painted the main entrance blue and silver—Stonewall Jackson’s colors—while their teammates Rafael and Delos broke a few of the back windows. (“Don’t do the downstairs classrooms: the heat doesn’t work right and it will get too cold,” Geena reminded them.) Some of the JV players TP’d the fence, while most of the cheerleaders chalked the track and the main sidewalk. We were not especially creative.
Fuck
was the worst word most of us could think of:
Fuck Robert E. Lee
,
Fuck you broke Gooks
,
Spics and Niggers
,
Fuck this Ghetto Ass School
,
Stonewall Rules
,
Go Generals!
Geena and I had the honor of vandalizing the school statue. We dumped a bucket of blue paint over Robert E. Lee’s head and painted long, thick stripes of silver paint over the plaque at the bottom. A final
Go Stonewall!
spray-painted on the outside fence, while Tien stood sentry and watched for passing cars, would be enough to get us off the hook completely.