Bells kept ringing. I did not understand what they referred to. I walked to my locker and observed other students flipping their little knobs clockwise and counterclockwise with rapid hand movements. I tried to do the same but failed, and since I didn’t want anybody to notice, I decided to carry the books in my backpack instead. The slip of paper with my schedule was confusing, the campus map far too complex. I couldn’t decipher how to get to the phantom building D where my math class was, and according to the schedule, it was time for something called “Nutrition” soon. Perhaps I should go and feed myself somewhere, but where? The cafeteria was crowded with rowdy kids throwing grapes and scraps of pancakes at each other. I looked at them wondering if I should get in line, but another bell rang and everyone scuttled away.
Mr. Douglas and an overweight police officer in Bermuda shorts circled the campus on a golf cart with a megaphone, screaming at everyone to get out of the way and hurry to class. “Let’s go, let’s go! Tardy sweep-up!”
I didn’t know what that meant, but since I was lost and meandering, I was mistaken for someone who wanted to ditch class. I was loaded, alongside other roaming teenagers, onto Douglas’s golf cart. On board, two Persian kids improvised a rap song, pretending like they were riding a Bentley in a hip-hop video. I looked at them and did not say a word. I preferred my schoolmates to think of me as a thug rather than an idiot who could not figure out how to get to class.
We got dropped off in front of the “tardy hall,” a storage room for students who were late for class. A twenty-year-old New Age teacher in tie-dye sweatpants watched over students and gave them speeches about how to avoid gang confrontations. There were about fifteen of us—mostly African American, Persian, and Hispanic students. The tardy hall was also known as the “gang prevention room,” but the correlation between being late to class and wanting to shoot people eluded me.
“You start off tardy and you end up dead on a sidewalk,” the teacher explained right away. The new post-riot theory was that teenagers who resisted getting to class on time were more likely to drop out of high school and fall into violent patterns. If you were “swept” more than three times in a year, you were profiled and eventually suspended or expelled.
The teacher gave us a handout of gang signs we should know and never imitate.
Another laugh. Nobody needed an instruction manual about these gestures. The Persian guys from the golf cart gathered in the back of the room. They hugged each other and laughed, looking at photos of their summers, commenting on the girls they’d been with.
One of them with a baseball cap and deep brown eyes sat next to me.
“Where you from?”
“West side,” I replied, referencing the gang handout.
“You smoke weed?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s your accent from? You Mexican?”
The Hispanic girls in class huffed at me and shook their heads.
“She ain’t no freaking Latina. Look at what she’s wearing.”
“You Persian?” he asked.
“I’m Italian.”
“I’m Arash.” He shook my hand, looking confused. “Italian? For real?”
“No, that bitch is Sicilian!” a girl named Ajane screamed from the back of the class.
“Duh,” said the first Latina girl. “Why you think she’s wearing Reebok Pumps? They are way behind with fashion there. They got that dictator there, what’s his name? The bald guy who got rid of all the Jews along with the German hater?”
“Mussolini?” I asked.
“Yeah. If I had that fool for president I wouldn’t be thinking about what shoes to wear, I’d just be thinking of getting the fuck out of that country…”
Everyone started laughing.
I stayed in my seat listening to Tupac Shakur airing from an eighties boom box on the teacher’s desk. The deal was that she’d play music as long as we let her lecture us about its lyrical contents.
“When Tupac says ‘I bail and spray with my AK,’ what he really is trying to say is: The fact that you are racist really hurts my feelings and now I want to hurt your feelings back.”
She had a degree in teen psychology with a focus on decoding gang semiotics, but it didn’t seem to help much.
“Tupac speaks out of fear,” she explained expertly. “Does anybody have any examples of when we act out of fear?”
“I know I ain’t afraid of that Sicilian bitch!” Ajane snickered, pointing at me. Everybody laughed.
Arash raised his hand to interrupt the laughter.
“Yeah, miss, sometimes people think we’re haters ’cause we’re Persian and have Persian pride. They think it’s a gang, while actually we just love our people—”
“Hairy wannabe rappers with big egos and small dicks!” Ajane sneered, causing another stir.
“Shut the fuck up,” one of Arash’s friends intervened.
“Gold-chain-wearing cheap asses driving old-ass beamers, trying to distract everybody from your nasty monobrows,” Ajane’s neighbor pitched in, laughing.
A chorus of “ooohs” and giggles rose from the desks.
“What did you say, bitch?” Arash and his friends got up from their seats and moved to the other side of the room where the girls were. “You wish we drove old-ass BMWs. Our shit is brand-new. And it’s ours. You just ride a bus!”
A rumble of desks and chairs. Ajane and her friends met the Persians halfway. Ajane elbowed me and swiped my books from the desk to the floor.
“Hey!” I complained.
She turned to me. “What, you want to get your ass kicked too?”
The New Age teacher in sweatpants tried to intervene, but Ajane resisted her. She leaned over and stared at me, bobbing her head.
“You wanna fight? I got my sneakers in my bag, you wanna fight?”
“Not really.” I looked down at my own shoes. How ugly they seemed to me now.
“Fight! Fight! Fight!” Arash’s Iranian friends began to cheer.
Arash glanced at me. If I got into a fight, I kept thinking, I would have to update my list of bad omens. The teacher tried again to keep everyone on their own side of the room, but the groups spilled over, waiting to combust, and I was stuck in the middle. That’s when I saw Arash suddenly retreat. He lifted his hands as a sign of truce.
“Leave it alone, y’all.”
His friends started teasing him. They screamed, “Kuni! Kuni!”—the Farsi word for “faggot”—at him for backing off.
I shrank in my desk and kept looking ahead, avoiding eye contact with anyone. Alone in the front row of the room a beautiful girl with auburn hair was putting lipstick on in front of a compact mirror, deliberately not participating in anything. She was full of freckles that made a striking contrast with her bright green eyes. She was the only thing I could look at—a haven to rest my eyes on as my breathing went back to normal. She giggled to herself listening to everyone’s bragging and when the teacher wasn’t looking, she packed her backpack in haste, got up from her seat, and snuck out of the classroom. The door swung shut behind her. From the small glass window I saw her ponytail bounce down the hallway, then she disappeared.
The bell rang. I was headed to Health Class, my paper said, but I didn’t know what that meant and I wondered if I’d learn about prescription medications. I was bound to get lost again in the crowded hallways so I turned instinctively to the one person who seemed less threatening: Arash.
“Do you know how I can get to building H?” I asked in a rush, terrified of getting swept up again.
His friends clustered around him throwing up signs. They created Ps with their hands facing each other. “Persian pride!”
Arash looked at me with sweet eyes and pointed in the direction of a military-looking barrack at the edge of a barren baseball field. I thanked him and started walking.
“Hey Sicily!” he called after me.