“What?!”
“You probably already were before today. Probably everybody knows and thinks it is so funny how you are lying to the black boy.” He looked around the playground, which had turned into a battleground, with many enemies.
“Osei, no!”
“Ian is the only one with the decency to be honest with me. At least he told me what is really happening.”
“Ian? What’s he—” Dee’s face shifted from incredulity to a sudden understanding. She shook her head. “You know you shouldn’t always believe what Ian says. He says what he does for his own gain.”
“Do not try to defend yourself by putting down others.”
“But…” Dee made a visible effort to gather herself together. “Osei, I have never gone with Casper,” she said carefully. “I’ve known him all my life, but I don’t feel like that about him the way I do—I did—do about you. And look”—she gestured toward Casper and Blanca—“you can see for yourself he’s with Blanca.”
O listened to her stumble over her tenses and left a silence before he spoke. “Why did you keep talking about him to me so much?”
“Because he could be a good friend to you. He could help you. Ian said—” She stopped.
“Ian said what?”
But Dee was staring over at the pirate ship, where Ian and Rod were casually tossing pebbles at the boys playing marbles.
The rage surged in Osei again, so angry her attention was straying from what was important that he wanted to shake her. He began to reach across to grab her arm, but Dee was already stepping down to the lower rung so that she was just out of reach. “Dee,” he said.
She kept climbing down, and when she reached the ground she began striding toward Ian on the ship.
“Do not walk away from me, Dee!” he shouted.
His tone made the boys look up from their marbles and the girls stop jumping Double Dutch. He had all of their attention, though he had not asked for it. But now that he had it, he could use it to punish her.
“Do not walk away,” he repeated, raising his voice. Then he added a word he had heard before but never imagined he would ever use, or know how to use: “Whore!”
The word cracked across the playground like thunder. Anyone who hadn’t been listening did now. Even Blanca and Casper surfaced from making out to look around.
Dee stopped, one foot frozen behind her, her single braid an emphatic line down her back. Rod jumped up from the ship deck, but Ian restrained him.
Across the playground Miss Lode dropped her book. “Did I hear—” She looked puzzled, and embarrassed too, as the children turned to stare at her. She gulped, bowed her head, and picked up the book.
“You know that this girl is a whore?” O hissed, directing his words at his audience: the boys with their marbles, the jump-rope girls, Casper and Blanca, Ian and Rod. It felt powerful, having the right kind of attention at last. He smiled, exposing his side teeth; he looked like a wolf growling. “You know she said she would go all the way with me,” he continued, his voice rising again, “the way she already has with Casper!”
There was a gasp from Blanca, who jumped up from Casper’s lap as he began shaking his head.
Dee turned around slowly, eyes huge, mouth open and trembling, and stared up at Osei at the top of the jungle gym. She held her hands out, palms up. “Why are you saying that?” she cried.
Guilt flicked through him, but the power of speaking and being heard at last was stronger, and took him over so that O hardly understood what he said now. “She has even touched my dick, that is how much she wants it. How much all white girls want it.”
The marble boys shouted, then burst into nervous laughter. There was a collective gasp from the jump-rope girls, and Dee’s eyes darted to them, her tribe. They were clearly shocked, some putting their hands over their mouths, others turning to whisper to their neighbors. Then they began to titter—apart from Mimi, who was shaking her head as if to shoo away a persistent bee.
That was when Dee crumbled. With a shriek she turned and ran, faster than O could have imagined, her feet slapping across the asphalt. Fumbling with the gate that opened onto the street, she got it open at last, ran through, and slammed it behind her. As she disappeared around the corner, Rod jumped off the ship and stumbled after her, though Dee had too much of a head start for him to catch up, and he soon turned back.
When she was gone the playground changed, as if the sun were cloaked by a cloud. The children on the playground began talking at once.
“Jesus H. Christ. First Casper, then Dee. What’s going on today?”
“Can you believe he said that?”
“I can believe it.”
“No!”
“I wouldn’t mind if she touched my dick.”
“Shut up!”
“No, you shut up.”
“Poor Dee!”
“Dee wouldn’t do such a thing. Would she?”
“I don’t know. She had her hands all over him this morning.”
“And she kissed him at lunch—did you see?”
“What were they doing over there in the sandpit, anyway?”
“She’s kind of slutty. I’ve always thought so.”
“Yeah.”
Mimi was standing among the jump-rope girls, glaring at Osei. Blanca had crossed her arms over her chest and was shouting at Casper. Miss Lode was no longer reading, but standing uncertainly. In the midst of the tumult, Ian continued to lounge on the ship, smiling.
How am I ever going to explain this to Sisi? Osei thought. She would know what to say to all these white people. “Black is beautiful,” he murmured. Never had he wanted to believe it more.
He wished he could put his head on his sister’s shoulder now and cry.
As she stared at Osei, Mimi experienced déjà vu, that curious feeling of having already lived through something. The sensation was more the feeling of familiarity, as well as a disconnection from the flow of reality. Sometimes Mimi got déjà vu several times a day, and it began to seem as if she were juddering through dreams interspersed with shafts of reality. Now she felt she had already experienced Dee’s humiliation and the new boy’s misplaced triumph on top of the jungle gym—though of course she hadn’t. Dee had never been humiliated before, Osei never triumphant.
She rubbed her face to clear it of the scene she had just witnessed, then walked over to the jungle gym. From the corner of her eye she registered Ian scrambling down from the ship, and knew she didn’t have long.
“Osei, why did you lie?” she called up to him. “You know it’s not true.”
O gazed down at her from his perch as newly crowned king of the jungle gym. “I know what I know,” he answered. “I have proof.”
“What proof? It better be good for you to say that about Dee.”