The new boy glanced behind him. His face was not wary and guarded as Dee would have expected, but open and welcoming. His eyes were black, glistening coins that regarded her with curiosity. He raised his eyebrows, widening his eyes further, and Dee felt a jolt course through her, similar to what she experienced once when she touched an electric fence for a dare.
She did not speak to him, but nodded. He returned the nod, then turned back so that he was facing forward again. They stood in line, quiet, embarrassed. Dee looked around to see if anyone was still watching them. Everyone was watching them. She settled her eyes on a house across the street from the school—Casper’s house, in fact—hoping they would all assume she had her mind on important things out in the wider world rather than on the boy in front of her, who seemed to vibrate with electricity.
Then she noticed the black woman standing on the other side of the chain-link fence surrounding the playground, a hand entwined in the wire mesh. Though short, she was made taller by a red and yellow patterned scarf wrapped like a towering turban around her head. She had on a long dress made of the same bright fabric. Over it she wore a gray winter coat—even though it was early May and warm. She was watching them.
“My mother thinks that I do not know how to be the new boy.”
Dee turned, amazed that he had spoken. In his place she wouldn’t have said a word. “Have you been a new boy before?”
“Yes. Three times in six years. This will be my fourth school.”
Dee had always lived in the same house, gone to the same school and had the same friends, and was accustomed to a comfortable familiarity underpinning everything she did. She couldn’t imagine being a new girl and not knowing everyone else—though in a few months when she moved from elementary school to junior high, she would know only a quarter of the students in her grade. While in many ways Dee had outgrown her school and was ready to move on to a new one, the thought of being surrounded by strangers sometimes made her stomach ache.
Across from them in the line for the other sixth grade class, Mimi was watching this exchange, wide-eyed. Dee and Mimi had almost always been in the same class together, and it pained Dee that, this last year of elementary school, they had been assigned different teachers, so she couldn’t be with her best friend all day but had to settle for playground time. It also meant Blanca, who was in Dee’s class, could try to get closer—as she was now, literally hanging on Dee, a hand on her shoulder, staring at the new boy. Blanca was always physical, throwing her arms around people, playing with friends’ hair, rubbing up against boys she liked.
Dee shook her off now to focus on the boy. “Are you from Nigeria?” she asked, eager to show off her prior knowledge of him. You may be a different color, she thought, but I know you.
The boy shook his head. “I am from Ghana.”
“Oh.” Dee had no idea where Ghana was except that it must be in Africa. He still seemed friendly, but the expression had frozen onto his face and was becoming less sincere. Dee was determined to demonstrate that she did know something about African culture. She nodded at the woman by the fence. “Is your mom wearing a dashiki?” She knew the word because for Christmas her hippie aunt had given her pants with a dashiki pattern on them. To please her, Dee had worn them at Christmas dinner, and had to endure frowns from her mother and teasing from her older brother about wearing a tablecloth when they already had one on the table. Afterward she had shoved the pants to the back of her closet and not touched them since.
“Dashikis are shirts that African men wear,” the boy said. He could have been scornful or made fun of her, but instead he was matter-of-fact. “Or black Americans sometimes when they want to make a point.”
Dee nodded, though she wondered what that point was. “I think the Jackson Five wore them on Soul Train.”
The boy smiled. “I was thinking of Malcolm X—he wore a dashiki once.” Now it seemed he was teasing her a little. Dee found she didn’t mind if it meant the stiff, frozen look disappeared.
“My mother is wearing a dress made from kente cloth,” he continued. “It is fabric from my country.”
“Why is she wearing a winter coat?”
“Unless we are in Ghana, she feels the cold even when it is warm outside.”
“Are you cold too?”
“No, I am not cold.” The boy answered in full, formal sentences, the way Dee and her classmates did during French lessons once a week. His accent wasn’t American, though it contained some American phrases. There was a hint of English in it. Dee’s mother liked to watch Upstairs, Downstairs on TV; he sounded a bit like that, though not as clipped and expensive, and with more of a singsong cadence that must come from Africa. His full sentences and lack of contractions, the lilt in his speech, the rich exaggeration of his vowels, all made Dee want to smile, but she didn’t want to be impolite.
“Is she going to pick you up after school too?” she asked. Her own mother never came to school except for parent–teacher meetings. She didn’t like to leave the house.
The boy smiled again. “I have made her promise not to come. I know the way home.”
Dee smiled back. “Probably better. Only the kids on the younger playground have their parents bring them to school and pick them up.”
The second bell rang. The fourth grade teachers turned and led their lines of children through the entrance from the playground into school. Then fifth graders would go, and finally the sixth grade classes.
“Would you like me to carry the ropes for you?” the boy asked.
“Oh! No, thanks—they’re not heavy.” They were kind of heavy. No boy had ever offered to carry them for her.
“Please.” The boy held out his arms and she handed them to him.
“What’s your name?” she asked as their line began to move.
“Osei.”
“O…” The name was so foreign that Dee could not find a hook in it to hang on to. It was like trying to climb a smooth boulder.
He smiled at her confusion, clearly used to it. “It is easier to call me O,” he said, bringing his name into the familiar arena of letters. “I don’t mind. Even my sister calls me O sometimes.”
“No, I can say it. O-say-ee. Is it in your language?”
“Yes. It means ‘noble.’ What is your name, please?”
“Dee. Short for Daniela, but everybody calls me Dee.”
“Dee? Like the letter D?”
She nodded. They looked at each other, and this simple link of letters standing in for their names made them burst out laughing. O had beautiful straight teeth, a flash of light in his dark face that sparked something inside her.