“Are you ready?” my mom asks. She and Miss Patty have been busy unloading the latest gossip from town.
I swallow and nod, and they leave me to join the other ladies under the swirling fan on the porch.
I lay my faded flower-print towel on a chair, pull my swimsuit from my butt, and walk toward the poolside.
The first girl I meet is called Andrea, and she is best friends with Lori. The next one I meet looks old enough to be a dental hygienist; she is best friends with Traci, who used to be best friends with a girl named Amy, who wasn’t even invited to this party. The entire yard is filled with pairs, chosen sisters who will display their firmly cemented alliances in the new hallways come August. I think about my sweet Christian school where everybody was invited to everything, where everyone got to belong. My chest starts to ache as they gab about French-tip nails and crushes. I’ve been special plenty of times but never “different,” and I’m surprised by how empty it feels. I stick my feet into the bathwater of the pool and wait for the day to be over and then for the school year to begin.
* * *
I am one of the youngest students at West Feliciana High, and though there is no uniform, I wear Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt on my first day because that’s what I’ve always worn to school. My daddy kisses me on the head before I go in. He is wearing his uniform too: a bow tie, a tweed jacket, a sturdy Swiss army watch, and a little bit of breakfast on his shirt.
“You’re going to do great. Everyone will love you.”
He says this to both of us with complete confidence and I try my best to believe in me the way that he does. I push open the big doors and prepare myself to feel the feeling I had at Miss Patty’s, my differentness.
A few lockers down from mine, a pregnant girl balances a brown-bagged lunch on her belly and boys disguised as men walk around in clouds of ashtray smell. There are girls with coasters stuck into their earlobes and hair as shockingly blue as the lunch trays. It is the busiest place I have ever been. The first week, I bob along in the fast-moving stream of students, electrically charged from listening to sixteen conversations at once, from walking into whooshes of drugstore cologne. There is differentness everywhere and nobody seems to care much about it, or to notice, really. Just in case my differentness starts to feel heavy again, I go to the place where I know I belong, where all girls above six feet tall are welcome: the basketball team.
Different isn’t bad, but different can be complicated, it can be painful, it can even be scary. When I walk into the gym, shorts sliding down the knobs of my hips, sniffing desperately for the familiar smells of new shoes and the floor wax that makes everything so shiny, I realize that I’m the only white girl on the team. At the time, there were only a handful of black kids at my old school. WCCA began as a segregation academy in the late 1960s, and even when the doors were open to everyone back then, not many students of color seemed to want to walk through them, understandably. Most of the black people I’ve ever met have been in service.
In St. Francisville, the white people live in the nice neighborhoods and many of the black people live in Hardwood: This is how it has always been. Hardwood is an area stuck right in the middle of town, with clusters of low apartment buildings and parched brown grass. It’s a bit of an island, nothing but highway and straw-colored fields on either side. The streets are called A, B, C, D, like they couldn’t decide on proper names and just gave up. White people don’t hang out there. We drove through only one time, to drop up off a man my daddy picked up on the side of the road. Sleek shorthaired dogs with dangly nipples belonging to no one and everyone at the same time trot along the sidewalk, music heartbeats out of open windows, and children play in the rippling, corduroy heat without the cover of trees to shade them. I don’t know why there is separateness, only that it’s existed much longer than I have, before this town had a name. Even my daddy, a champion of all people, stays politely behind the invisible lines that history drew.
Today, the gym is cold. The air-conditioning is working overtime to catch up with the end-of-summer heat. Goose bumps rise all at once on my skin. The girls stop bouncing their balls, smacking rubber against parquet, when they see me coming toward them. I walk, chalky, straw-shaped legs; clumsy, skinny hips; differentness on full display. I wonder if this is how they feel at the good grocery store or at the wrong church. I keep walking toward the center circle in my too-big shorts.
“Hi! I’m Ruthie!”
Before I can say anything else, they wrap my plywood-stiff body into the biggest, warmest hug, and I wonder if maybe differentness doesn’t have to be complicated at all. Maybe it never had to be?
Five nights a week under the fire-bright lights, I come alive. My basketball girls, Frannie, the two Pams, and Jamise, love me without hesitation, without judgment, and without the slightest bit of disdain for me never asking the questions that my parents never asked either. I become the closest with Frannie; she is an entire foot too short to play, so she takes statistics for the team instead. We have nothing in common besides the freckles on our noses, but we love each other completely. She likes Cat Stevens and I like Snoop Dogg; she’s quiet and serene and I’m too loud nearly everywhere we go. The grown-ups look at us a little funny when we’re out together, but we don’t care. Frannie welcomes me into her world fully and fearlessly, even though she has never truly been welcomed in mine. I visit her church, where the service seems to last all day long, and I sit out in the sun and smoke of Hardwood, drinking in the sweetness of neighbors who pass out paper plates of food so full that they buckle at the middle. After we eat, we lie on the dead grass with Frannie’s little cousins cuddled up next to us looking up at the fluffy plumes of grill smoke rising to the sky. I think about the girls who were supposed to become my friends sprawled out on lounge chairs at the pool party. None of them were black. At those kinds of parties, they never are.
My time in high school melts fast, like butter in a microwave. I sit at a different table every day in the cafeteria and make friends with anyone who will let me set my lunch tray beside theirs, no matter what they look like. I stop pining for the smallness and sameness of my little Christian school in Mississippi. I like the way the borders of my world have dissolved. The kids at West Feliciana, kids of all colors studying together and playing ball together, seem to have figured something out that no one else has yet beyond the brown-brick campus. As I drive home every afternoon to the smallness and sameness of St. Francisville, I begin to ask myself the questions that nobody asks out loud:
Why don’t you let your daughters date black boys?
Why aren’t we supposed to be friends outside of school?
Why are you looking at my friend that way when she shops at your store?
Why does different have to be so complicated here?
I begin to want answers.
* * *
It is senior year and we are still in the hot, sticky part of fall just before October. There is a white dance at Grace Episcopal and I invite my black friends to come with me. White dances have been happening in St. Francisville since before I was born. No one would ever call them “white dances” of course, but the black kids are never invited, they are never missed. The dances are organized by the Ladies in Pearls, an informal mishmash guild of big-haired and breathy-voiced white women who are always walking quickly and dressed for brunch. I’ve been taught to respect my elders, it’s one of the most important rules in our house, so I work hard to impress them. They organize everything in St. Francisville, from the Mardi Gras parade to the monthly bingo game at the senior center. They do lots of good, spending days before Christmas mashing potatoes and basting big bronze turkeys to feed the homeless, praying for anyone who will let them, and working tirelessly to keep the smell of fresh honeysuckle pumping through town like casino oxygen. But most of them don’t even know where Hardwood is.