Now Dee glanced at the clock in the hall, pushed something into a pencil case—the pink one she had described to Mimi earlier—and stuffed it in her backpack. She spoke to O, looked around, then kissed him briefly before running off. Mimi should have been shocked by the kiss, especially since they would’ve gotten into trouble if a teacher had seen them; but after their flagrant touching on the playground it seemed anticlimactic. Mimi could still picture their arms, black and white, reaching for each other. It was the sexiest thing she’d ever seen, even more powerful than Romeo and Juliet making out during the balcony scene.
As Dee ran, the pink case fell from her open backpack, which she had been in too much of a hurry to zip shut. Mimi called out, but her friend was gone. O had already walked away toward the cafeteria, so she went over to pick it up. Running her fingers over the embossed strawberries, she thought the case was indeed sweet, as Dee had said, though it was not to Mimi’s taste. She would give it back after lunch. Tucking it into her own backpack, she headed for the cafeteria.
Blanca waved at her from a table and pointed to the seat she was saving—not easy in the crowded room. “Where’ve you been?” she shouted. “Everybody wants this seat!”
“I’ll be right there,” Mimi called back. “Anything you want?”
“More tater tots!”
Blanca loved food, as she loved any sort of sensory experience, and Mimi often passed French fries, or cherries from fruit cocktail, or cartons of chocolate milk on to her. Now, although empty, her stomach was sore and all she wanted was Kool-Aid. However, she forced herself to take a tray, where the lunch ladies would serve up Salisbury steak and tater tots and a quivering slice of lemon meringue pie. Blanca and the others would happily eat anything Mimi didn’t want.
As she waited in line she watched O, one student ahead of her. The lunch ladies were all black too, and Mimi thought they might smile a special smile at him, as a signal that he was one of them. Instead, when she saw him, the lady serving the Salisbury steak froze, her spoon suspended, the tomato sauce dripping down the gristly piece of meat and onto O’s tray. The lady next to her chuckled. “C’mon, Jeanette, give the boy his steak!” she said as she gave O two spoonfuls of tater tots.
When he had moved on, Mimi heard the Salisbury steak lady say to the others, “That poor boy.”
“What do you mean, ‘poor boy’?” the tater tots lady demanded. “This is a good school. He’s lucky to go here.”
“Don’t tell me you don’t know what I mean. Do you want your son walking onto a playground where he’s different from everybody else?”
“If he’s gonna get a good education, sure. ’Sides, he’s a new boy. New boys always have it hard at first. He’ll get used to it.”
“Are you a fool or what? It’s not him who has to get used to it. It’s white people got to get used to it! And do you think they will? They’ll give him hell out there—and in the classroom too, I bet. Teachers are as bad as the kids. Worse, ’cause they oughta know better.”
Mimi stood still with her tray, listening. Although she had been served by the lunch ladies for years, she had rarely heard them say anything other than “one scoop or two?” when doling out mashed potatoes. Certainly they had never said anything about one of the students; and nothing like this.
The lady serving tater tots suddenly became aware of Mimi and nudged the other two. “You want tater tots, honey? We got extra here.” She gave her three spoonfuls before Mimi could say anything. “Denise, go on and give her a big slice of pie. The biggest. She’s looking peaky.”
Mimi could not stop them from heaping her tray with far too much food. “There,” the tater tots lady said. “You all right now? You got everything you need?” She held Mimi’s eyes for a beat longer than necessary.
Mimi nodded and pulled away, confused.
Ahead of her, Osei was motionless with his tray, looking around at the full tables. Mimi wondered if he’d heard any of what the lunch ladies had said. She felt sorry for him, standing there wondering where to sit. At least no one was staring at him, and the room didn’t go silent as the playground had before school. Students were always louder when there was food.
For a moment she considered asking him to sit with her and Blanca and the others; they could squeeze him in if the girls crowded together. She suspected that Dee would do that if she were here. But Mimi wouldn’t: she was more pragmatic than Dee. It was an unwritten rule that boys and girls didn’t sit together in the cafeteria; it would cause almost as much uproar as his skin color.
At one table she saw Ian start to get to his feet, but then, closer to O, Casper gestured him over and made someone next to him move and give the new boy his seat. O slid into place and was suddenly locked in with all the other boys like a chess piece on a board. Ian remained half-standing, his eyes shifting from side to side to see if anyone had noticed that he’d been cut off, like when someone speaks but others don’t hear them and carry on their conversation, leaving the speaker hanging. The boys with Ian must have had a sixth sense around him and were carefully engaged in eating or joking or looking the other way. Only Mimi was caught with her eyes on him. He glared at her, and she turned away to hurry to her seat.
“Ooh, you got lucky,” Blanca cooed, popping a tater tot in her mouth. “Look how many you got! You gonna eat that pie?”
Mimi shook her head and pushed the tray into the middle of the table, holding back only a cup of Kool-Aid. Blanca and the others fell on the extra food, even the tough steak. It made her feel ill to watch, and she was afraid to look up and see Ian again, so she kept her eyes on her backpack under the table. Inside was Dee’s strawberry pencil case. It wasn’t zipped shut, and there was a scrap of paper sticking out of the gap. Mimi knew she should leave it; it wasn’t hers to read. But she couldn’t help it: seeing Dee and O with their heads touching over the case made her want a little bit of whatever it was they had, even if it meant looking through her friend’s things. Mimi glanced up: the girls across from her were arguing over how to divide up the lemon meringue pie. She pulled out the piece of paper.
There was a name and address and phone number written on it:
Osei Kokote
4501 Nicosia Boulevard, Apt. 511
652-3970
She thought for a moment. This was the suburbs; most people lived in houses. Mimi knew only one girl who lived in an apartment rather than a house, and that was a girl with a single mother, whose father had left when she was little. Her apartment had been on the poorer side of town. But Nicosia Boulevard was a big road, with offices and fancy stores and new apartment buildings that had marble entrances and valet parking like at hotels. She had heard some of the apartments even had elevators that opened straight into the rooms. If they lived there, O’s family wasn’t poor like the girl with the single mother; clearly they were rich.
She could only imagine Dee had the address written down so that they could meet outside of school. They would never go to Dee’s house—her mother would kill her for meeting any boy, much less a black one. O’s family must not be so concerned. Mimi would have to get ready with an alibi for her—the first of many, she expected. She sighed.
“We’re gonna go jump Double Dutch,” Blanca announced, standing and stretching, her pink top riding up so that her midriff showed—a display that was not an accident. “You coming?”
“Yeah.” Mimi stuffed the slip of paper back in the pencil case, then hesitated over whether or not to zip it shut. Would Dee notice it had been changed? She’d better leave it.
“What are you doing?” For once Blanca was taking an interest in someone else.
“Nothing—I just spilled juice in my lap.” Mimi rubbed vigorously at her bag, at the same time pushing the pencil case deep inside.
“Come on!” Blanca ran over to the table where Casper was sitting with other boys, put her hands on his shoulders, and rested her chin on his head so that her long curls tumbled over his face. “Casss-perrr,” she sang, drawing out the syllables, “ar
e you coming?”
“Um.” Casper pushed her hair aside, looking embarrassed. “Where am I going, Blanca?”
“Don’t you remember? You promised to watch me jump Double Dutch!”
“I did?”
“Casper!” Blanca straightened up and swatted his arm. “You told me you would this morning! You’ll get to see me dance.” She began to sing, snapping her fingers in time as she pretended to jump Double Dutch to invisible ropes:
One day when I was walking
A-walking to the fair
I met a señorita
With flowers in her hair
“Oh Lord,” Mimi murmured. She caught Osei’s eye; he was trying not to laugh. “Blanca, stop it!”
But Blanca didn’t stop. Turning her back to Casper and pouting over her shoulder, she began to swish her hips back and forth as she jumped:
Oh, shake it, señorita
Shake it if you can
Shake it like a milkshake
And shake it once again
“OK, OK!” Casper protested. Getting to his feet and saving them all from even more embarrassment, he allowed Blanca to pull him away. He was smiling, though. Whatever it was about Blanca that appealed to him—her spirited energy, her attention, her blossoming sexiness—he was into her.
As she followed the couple, Mimi could feel Ian’s presence at the next table, his eyes seeming to bore into her head to penetrate her thoughts. The feeling made her hurry to get out to the playground.
One of the hardest moments in a new student’s day is finding a place to eat in the cafeteria. It’s rushed and chaotic, and there are no assigned seats, so everyone sits with their friends. But a new student doesn’t have friends yet, so there is nowhere obvious to sit. Osei had been through this before, and knew there were two ways to do it. You could go in first and sit at an empty table and let them come to you. That way you didn’t make the mistake of sitting with potential enemies, or of trying too hard to push yourself onto a group. They got to choose you, which they preferred. On the other hand, there was also the risk that no one would sit with you, that you’d end up alone, a ring of empty seats around you like a no-man’s-land surrounding a radioactive dump.
Or you could hold back, stand at the end of the line so people were already sitting and you chose where to slot yourself in. If it was crowded there were usually only a couple places left, and the people sitting there didn’t have the option to get up and move and leave you stranded. But a lot of times the only vacant seats were with the unpopular kids: the weak, the stupid, the smelly, or those who are disliked for some mysterious reason that no one understands. It wasn’t a great idea to start out your school life sitting with them, because whatever it was that was stuck on them got stuck on you too.
Osei had tried both options, and usually went for the second. He preferred to have some control over what happened, or at least be able to predict it. If he was going to end up with the outcasts, he could at least choose his fate.
Today he didn’t have much choice anyway, as Dee had held him back to get his address and phone number so that she could call him about doing something, and maybe come over after school one day. She hadn’t offered hers, he noticed. He didn’t ask why he couldn’t go to her house, because he knew why: he was not a parent pleaser. His experiences going home with other boys to play had not been successes. There was the shock at his skin color, the silence, and then the over-politeness from the parents. O was never asked to stay for supper.
He and Dee had remained behind, talking, until she saw the time and cried, “Mom’ll kill me for being so late!”
His own mother would chide him for being late but not much more; she saved her shouts and tears for more important things. But Dee’s mother seemed to have a hold on her. Grabbing her bag, she had been about to race off, but then looked around and kissed him before hurrying away. Though brief, the gesture made him grin. He couldn’t believe his luck that a girl like Dee wanted to kiss him.
The moment she disappeared, the world flattened and darkened. Dee had made Osei’s morning bearable. More than that, she had given it color. Now, without her, things shifted back to black and white.
Osei had been friends with girls before. Not in America, but in Ghana: when he visited each summer there were girls in his grandfather’s village he’d played with since he was little. It was easy with them—he didn’t feel like an outsider, or have to explain things, or not say things. They shared a familiarity, similar to how he was with his sister, Sisi, that made it easy to be together.
He had even gone further with girls, at school in New York. There was a time earlier that year when everybody began experimenting in the playground, when boys and girls got together at lunchtime and broke up by the end of the day. They never did much. It was like tagging someone and then running away. Sometimes they held hands, or kissed, fast and sloppy. One boy touched a girl’s chest, even though there was not much there, and got slapped and suspended. It was talked about for weeks.
O was amazed that he got attention from any girls at all, since he was barely tolerated by anyone. But one day when it seemed everyone was pairing off—like a flu that had descended on the playground and infected all the students—a girl named Toni came up to him and said, “Do you like me?” She had never spoken to him before.
“You’re all right,” he said, trying to sound casual and American. She looked so disappointed and embarrassed—a combination O recognized could be potentially dangerous—that he forced himself to look at her more carefully. She was wearing plaid bell bottoms and a green turtleneck sweater tight enough that he could see the outline of her new bust. “I like your sweater,” he added, and she smiled and looked so expectant that he knew he was supposed to say more. And he knew what he had to say, for he’d heard others use the words many times that week. “Will you go with me?” he asked.
Toni looked around, as if for support from her friends. They were off to the side, whispering and laughing, and O almost said, “Never mind, please forget that I asked you.” But then she said yes, and so he went with her, which involved standing around together while others pointed and giggled. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?” he tried asking finally, just to be polite. But that made Toni giggle too, and Osei got fed up and walked away. “I’m breaking up with you!” she shouted after him. “You’re dumped!”
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.