“Nothing—I just spilled juice in my lap.” Mimi rubbed vigorously at her bag, at the same time pushing the pencil case deep inside.
“Come on!” Blanca ran over to the table where Casper was sitting with other boys, put her hands on his shoulders, and rested her chin on his head so that her long curls tumbled over his face. “Casss-perrr,” she sang, drawing out the syllables, “are you coming?”
“Um.” Casper pushed her hair aside, looking embarrassed. “Where am I going, Blanca?”
“Don’t you remember? You promised to watch me jump Double Dutch!”
“I did?”
“Casper!” Blanca straightened up and swatted his arm. “You told me you would this morning! You’ll get to see me dance.” She began to sing, snapping her fingers in time as she pretended to jump Double Dutch to invisible ropes:
One day when I was walking
A-walking to the fair
I met a se?orita
With flowers in her hair
“Oh Lord,” Mimi murmured. She caught Osei’s eye; he was trying not to laugh. “Blanca, stop it!”
But Blanca didn’t stop. Turning her back to Casper and pouting over her shoulder, she began to swish her hips back and forth as she jumped:
Oh, shake it, se?orita
Shake it if you can
Shake it like a milkshake
And shake it once again
“OK, OK!” Casper protested. Getting to his feet and saving them all from even more embarrassment, he allowed Blanca to pull him away. He was smiling, though. Whatever it was about Blanca that appealed to him—her spirited energy, her attention, her blossoming sexiness—he was into her.
As she followed the couple, Mimi could feel Ian’s presence at the next table, his eyes seeming to bore into her head to penetrate her thoughts. The feeling made her hurry to get out to the playground.
One of the hardest moments in a new student’s day is finding a place to eat in the cafeteria. It’s rushed and chaotic, and there are no assigned seats, so everyone sits with their friends. But a new student doesn’t have friends yet, so there is nowhere obvious to sit. Osei had been through this before, and knew there were two ways to do it. You could go in first and sit at an empty table and let them come to you. That way you didn’t make the mistake of sitting with potential enemies, or of trying too hard to push yourself onto a group. They got to choose you, which they preferred. On the other hand, there was also the risk that no one would sit with you, that you’d end up alone, a ring of empty seats around you like a no-man’s-land surrounding a radioactive dump.
Or you could hold back, stand at the end of the line so people were already sitting and you chose where to slot yourself in. If it was crowded there were usually only a couple places left, and the people sitting there didn’t have the option to get up and move and leave you stranded. But a lot of times the only vacant seats were with the unpopular kids: the weak, the stupid, the smelly, or those who are disliked for some mysterious reason that no one understands. It wasn’t a great idea to start out your school life sitting with them, because whatever it was that was stuck on them got stuck on you too.
Osei had tried both options, and usually went for the second. He preferred to have some control over what happened, or at least be able to predict it. If he was going to end up with the outcasts, he could at least choose his fate.
Today he didn’t have much choice anyway, as Dee had held him back to get his address and phone number so that she could call him about doing something, and maybe come over after school one day. She hadn’t offered hers, he noticed. He didn’t ask why he couldn’t go to her house, because he knew why: he was not a parent pleaser. His experiences going home with other boys to play had not been successes. There was the shock at his skin color, the silence, and then the over-politeness from the parents. O was never asked to stay for supper.
He and Dee had remained behind, talking, until she saw the time and cried, “Mom’ll kill me for being so late!”
His own mother would chide him for being late but not much more; she saved her shouts and tears for more important things. But Dee’s mother seemed to have a hold on her. Grabbing her bag, she had been about to race off, but then looked around and kissed him before hurrying away. Though brief, the gesture made him grin. He couldn’t believe his luck that a girl like Dee wanted to kiss him.
The moment she disappeared, the world flattened and darkened. Dee had made Osei’s morning bearable. More than that, she had given it color. Now, without her, things shifted back to black and white.
Osei had been friends with girls before. Not in America, but in Ghana: when he visited each summer there were girls in his grandfather’s village he’d played with since he was little. It was easy with them—he didn’t feel like an outsider, or have to explain things, or not say things. They shared a familiarity, similar to how he was with his sister, Sisi, that made it easy to be together.
He had even gone further with girls, at school in New York. There was a time earlier that year when everybody began experimenting in the playground, when boys and girls got together at lunchtime and broke up by the end of the day. They never did much. It was like tagging someone and then running away. Sometimes they held hands, or kissed, fast and sloppy. One boy touched a girl’s chest, even though there was not much there, and got slapped and suspended. It was talked about for weeks.
O was amazed that he got attention from any girls at all, since he was barely tolerated by anyone. But one day when it seemed everyone was pairing off—like a flu that had descended on the playground and infected all the students—a girl named Toni came up to him and said, “Do you like me?” She had never spoken to him before.
“You’re all right,” he said, trying to sound casual and American. She looked so disappointed and embarrassed—a combination O recognized could be potentially dangerous—that he forced himself to look at her more carefully. She was wearing plaid bell bottoms and a green turtleneck sweater tight enough that he could see the outline of her new bust. “I like your sweater,” he added, and she smiled and looked so expectant that he knew he was supposed to say more. And he knew what he had to say, for he’d heard others use the words many times that week. “Will you go with me?” he asked.
Toni looked around, as if for support from her friends. They were off to the side, whispering and laughing, and O almost said, “Never mind, please forget that I asked you.” But then she said yes, and so he went with her, which involved standing around together while others pointed and giggled. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” he tried asking finally, just to be polite. But that made Toni giggle too, and Osei got fed up and walked away. “I’m breaking up with you!” she shouted after him. “You’re dumped!”