O almost gave her the finger, but the thought of what his mother would say if she saw the rude American gesture, especially using it at a girl, stopped him.
With the next girl—Pam—he got a little further. He found out that she had two sisters and that her favorite color was yellow. They walked around the playground and even held hands. When he went to kiss her, though, she pushed him away. “You smell,” she said. “I knew you would.”
“Fine,” Osei answered. “I didn’t want to go with you anyway.” It seemed important to get that in first, to be the dumper rather than the one getting dumped.
Pam ran to her friends at the far end of the playground, where shrieks of indignation flew up from the other girls, making them sound like a flock of angry seagulls. They stayed away from him as if he were toxic for the rest of the months Osei was at that school, glaring at him every chance they got, and making a show of talking about him and laughing. Whenever he joined a line they ostentatiously moved away from him. Girls could be a lot meaner than boys, and hold on to grudges for longer, rather than fight them out of their systems the way boys did. Their treatment of him was harder to cope with than he’d expected, and for that reason alone it was a relief to move to Washington to change schools and get away from them.
Toni and Pam felt like rehearsals for a play he would be in later, with other people—a read-through of lines without any feeling behind them, except for the occasional jolt of pleasure from physical contact, or even just the thought of it.
With Dee it was completely different: a seductive blend of physical attraction, curiosity, and acceptance that he had never had from anyone before. She asked him a lot of questions, and really listened to the answers, her maple-syrup eyes unwavering on his, nodding and leaning toward him. Dee would never giggle with her friends at him, or say he smelled, or stare at him in a funny way. She managed to balance curiosity about the things that made O different from her with an acceptance of him that was flattering and made him want to put his arms around her and hold her, feeling the warmth of her body and blotting out the rest of the school, the rest of the world.
Now, without her, he stood with a tray full of congealed food he would have to force himself to eat, served to him by lunch ladies who he suspected were talking about him behind his back, and looked out over the noisy tables full of students shouting and laughing, blowing through straws to make bubbles in their milk cartons, throwing tater tots in the air and trying to catch them in their mouths. It was hot and noisy and smelled meaty, and there were no seats free except at the table reserved for the losers. There were three of them. One had been the weak player on Osei’s team during kickball and looked like he might be the source of the meaty smell, one had squinty eyes, and the third seemed permanently sad. They were staring fearfully at O. They might have been scared of a black boy sitting with them, but he had a feeling it was not just that. No, they were scared of a successful boy sitting with them. A boy who had kicked a ball farther than they could ever dream of doing. A boy who was going with Dee and was now being offered two places to sit, and not with them. O saw the relief in their eyes as Casper waved him over, nodding at the boy next to him to move. At the same time, Ian was getting to his feet. O was going to have to choose between them.
There was no choice, really. Is there ever between the darkness and the light? You walk toward the smile rather than the frown. O pretended not to see Ian, nodded at Casper, and went over to sit down by him. Even as he did it he knew he had made a tricky choice that could backfire. Ian was the kind of boy who didn’t like to be ignored or rejected.
“Hey,” Casper said.
“Hey,” O repeated, conscious that he should imitate to fit in. In New York people said “Hi”; here they said “Hey.” He hunched over his food, picked up a fork and pushed the grim steak around in its sauce, thinking of the can of Coke and the sandwich his mother had made for him and that he’d left in his desk. He resorted to a tater tot. They at least nominally resembled what they were supposed to be, though Osei thought of his mother’s roast potatoes and sighed.
“It’s pretty terrible,” Casper said with a chuckle. “The only day the food’s any good is Friday when they serve pizza.”
There was a Casper in every school, popular enough that he could afford to be genuinely nice to people. He was probably nice even to the three losers at the other table, because he could be. Casper had entitlement. Osei’s father liked to say it was always better to befriend a man whose family has been wealthy for generations than a poor man who has worked his way up and will be nasty to those who remain where he has come from. The latter would be Ian.
“I am very sorry about your parents’ car,” he said, to get that out of the way.
Casper looked puzzled. “What about it?”
“I hit it with my kick earlier.”
“Oh.” Casper waved a hand. “No big deal.”
“But the roof might be dented.”
“Nah. Oldsmobiles are indestructible.”
For a while Casper and the boys around him talked among themselves and Osei was able to eat peacefully. Then, during a lull, Casper threw out a question to draw him in naturally to the group. “When you lived in New York, were you a Jets or a Giants fan?”
Osei didn’t have to think about that one. “Giants,” he answered immediately. “I will never support a team whose quarterback wears pantyhose!”
The table exploded. The Jets’ quarterback, Joe Namath, had recently worn pantyhose in a commercial, and every boy at the table had something to say about it.
“Faggot!”
“I saw that commercial with my mother in the room. I was so embarrassed!”
“He must’ve been paid a whole lot of money to do that.”
“He shaved his legs for that commercial! You can see his legs are smooth, and not from the pantyhose. He shaved!”
“You wouldn’t catch me doing that to my legs, not for any amount of money.”
“Faggot!”
“No he’s not—a girl kisses him at the end.”
“He’s still a faggot!”
In the midst of it all, Casper grinned at O. “Besides, Namath threw too many interceptions,” he said. “Give me Sonny Jurgensen any day. Even old and on a bad day, he throws better than Namath.”