Ian took the car back out of his pocket and let it drop, then stamped on it. The wheels snapped off, the doors popped open, the roof caved partway in, and red paint flaked off the hood. “Oops,” Ian said, and left it there. A moment later he chided himself for letting his anger get the better of him and wasting a good Hot Wheels, when he had been called far worse things before than “chump.” But it was satisfying to see the expression on the boy’s face, looking even sicker than he had on the merry-go-round.
During this whole exchange Ian had kept an eye on the new arrival hovering at the edge of the playground. Now he changed direction and headed over to the new boy. To the black boy. For he was very black. Ian had picked up the information during one of his fact-finding missions that a new boy was joining the sixth grade, but he’d missed the crucial bit about his skin color. He winced inwardly as he got close and took in the dark skin, the black eyes, the sweat glistening in the hair cut close to his skull. Take charge, he thought. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer. His father liked to quote that. “You have to line up when the bell rings,” he said. “Over there. You’re in Mr. Brabant’s class.”
The boy nodded. “Thank you.” Just those two words and the way he said it—straightforward, confident even, with his foreign intonation—and his subsequent walk over to the line as if he already knew the playground, and owned it, struck a match of fury in Ian’s gut.
“Damn.” Rod had sidled up like an uncertain dog. Small and wiry, he had dark shaggy hair to his shoulders and cheeks that reddened easily when he was upset. They were red now. “What the hell has happened to this shithole?” Ian’s sidekick swore a lot around him, clearly thinking it made him sound tough. Ian himself never swore. His father had taken his belt to him early on to make clear that swearing was his domain, not his son’s.
Ian had tolerated Rod for a long time but would not classify him as a friend—though he had heard Rod refer to him as his best friend, which was something only a girl would say. To Ian, Rod was merely a prop who helped him retain his playground standing, who looked out for teachers when Ian was taking bets or extracting lunch money or tormenting kids for fun. It was the plight of a sidekick to be despised by his master almost as much as by others. Rod was weak, and whiny, and desperate. He was whining now. “Look at that—she’s talking to him. I’m never gonna get to go with her!”
Mimi’s friend Dee had joined the line behind the black boy and was now talking to him. Ian watched them, almost impressed by Dee’s boldness. When she handed the jump ropes to the boy and they began to laugh, however, Ian frowned. “Don’t like that,” he muttered. He would have to do something about it.
Mimi was rhythmically turning the Double-Dutch ropes so that they smacked evenly on the ground. She could feel the playground around her pulsing with activity. Nearby, two girls were arguing over a hopscotch square drawn crookedly. Three boys raced the length of the playground, one of them surging past the others at the end. A girl sat on a low wall, reading a book. A line of boys, backs to the school and out of sight of the teachers, were seeing who could pee the farthest through the chain-link fence onto the sidewalk. Three girls laughed together over an Archie comic book. A boy kicked sand from the sandpit under the trees.
Two areas of activity on the playground snagged at her, two so different they balanced each other out. There was Ian on the merry-go-round, tormenting the fourth graders. Mimi already knew how this would end. She herself was on a kind of merry-go-round with him, but she did not know how that would end. While swinging around the flagpole three days before, she had been exhilarated and terrified at the same time, like going very high in a swing and then leaning backward and keeping your eyes open so that you can see as well as feel the sickening plunge as you fall backward. Since then she had felt bound to Ian, and was not sure whether or not she wanted to free herself from him.
The opposite of the rapid spin of the merry-go-round, with its riders always on the verge of being flung off, was the new boy. The new black boy—there was no ignoring the color of his skin—was standing absolutely still, and bringing attention to himself with his stillness. If she were a new girl Mimi would be walking all around the playground, making herself less of a target by moving among the others, trying not to linger and be noticed. Though Mimi had never been a new girl, she had never entirely belonged either. Best friend of Dee, and now girlfriend of Ian: you would think these concrete relationships would tether her, but they did not. She felt as if she were floating through the playground world.
The spinning and the stillness. The motion and the motionless. The white and the black. If ever the playground had been imbalanced, with its new addition it now had a disorienting equilibrium. Mimi shook her head to clear it.
That movement caused her arm to shake, and one of the jump ropes wobbled and caught the jumper—a fifth grader, who began to complain until Mimi stopped her with a look. She knew it was her fault the girl had been tripped up, but she did not show it, could not apologize or explain, or her reputation as the steadiest turner would suffer. The steady turner, and the girl who sensed things. She must hold on to these different gifts, for they were all she had. They, and now Ian, who was not exactly a gift.
The fifth grader skulked off, and Mimi regretted it, for Blanca took her place. Blanca, the cutest girl in the sixth grade, who lessened her looks by wearing clothes just this side of vulgar: a tight pink top that showed off every strap and outline of her training bra, a short denim skirt, beige platform sandals, red barrettes in her black hair with glittering pink jewels pasted on, half a dozen gold bangles that clinked on her arm as she jumped. And jumped, and jumped. Blanca was as steady a jumper as Mimi was a turner. They bored each other in their parts.
Mimi let her jump, kept the rhythm, and with that background thumping, watched the playground gradually turn its attention to the stranger. No one stopped what they were doing, exactly, or not for more than a startled moment, a pause during tag, a hesitation between catching a ball at jacks and throwing it up again, a silence in the midst of chatter. Then they went back to tag, to jacks, to talking, but with one eye or ear now focused on this boy. Mimi sensed the playground and its players as strings randomly crisscrossing all over it, now starting to align so that the strings led to one point. How does he stand such attention? she thought.