Josh was baffled. “Tell me you’re kidding,” he said. I said nothing.
Akilah sucked her teeth. “I’ve been telling her that forever but she never believes me.”
“Okay, but don’t say I didn’t tell her so.” He let it drop and turned back to me. “Tell me about your school.”
“Well,” I said, “I do boring stuff. English, Spanish, social studies, integrated science, geography. It’s coed. The boys do electrical stuff and woodwork and the girls do sewing and cooking. We could do it vice versa but nobody really encourages you to do that, so we stick with tradition. It’s not considered a good school but it’s okay. I mean, it’s kind of rough.”
“Kind of?” Akilah jumped in. “With some guys selling weed behind the technical block, and some girls getting into fights…they stab each other over boyfriends and stuff.”
“Fights…like with knives?” he asked.
“Yeah. It’s rough. But it could be worse: they could have guns,” Akilah said, deadpan.
“It’s okay, it’s not that bad,” I said, desperate to stop talking about it.
“Wow. Why don’t your parents transfer you to a different school?”
“Parent,” I corrected. “My mom’s a single parent. Never had a dad.” He nodded but didn’t say anything, waiting for me to continue. “And with school, well, it’s not that easy to move kids around from school to school,” I said. “There’s this assessment exam you have to do to get into a high school and I failed.”
“You didn’t fail!” Akilah squawked.
“Okay, true, I didn’t fail. I just didn’t do well enough to go to a great school. My mom thinks I should live with the consequences of my actions.” I did a good imitation of my mother’s serious voice as I put bunny ears around the words she had so often said. Bitter much, kiddo? I asked myself.
“So she’d rather you went to a school you didn’t like, where there are drug dealers and violent gangs, so you could live with the consequence of your actions? Sounds crazy,” he said.
When he said it like that, I had to agree with him. But I had to stick up for my mom. “She means well.”
“Besides,” said Akilah, “those schools are where the majority of kids end up in our country. It’s normal.”
“Uh-huh.” He didn’t sound convinced.
“It’s not that serious,” I said, trying to be casual. “Can we talk about what you heard from your dad? That I might be here permanently?”
Akilah gasped. “Oh no! You have to come home!”
“Yuck,” I said, gagging dramatically. “I hate that place.”
“No, you don’t,” she rejoined.
“What is there to like?” I said. “Oh yeah, I can’t wait to get back to my tropical paradise. All we ever hear about is how many murders and kidnappings we have every year.”
“Really?” Josh was shocked.
“Yeah,” Akilah reluctantly agreed. “Crime is terrible. As a girl nobody wants you out at night by yourself. They say you could get kidnapped, sold into the sex trade.”
“For real?” His widened eyes were joined by a gaping mouth.
“Or how about the truly loveable public utilities?” I grumbled. “We get power outages…how often, Ki-ki?”
“Once a month, maybe,” she allowed.
“Wow. When the lights go out in New York it makes the news,” Josh said.
“And let’s not talk about water.”
“What do you mean, water?” Josh asked.
Akilah fielded that one. “You know how you open the tap and water comes out when you pay your bill? Well, where we come from, most of the country doesn’t get water when it opens its taps. Not every day, anyway. It’s rationed.”
“Tuesdays and Saturdays,” I added. “That’s when we get water. All the rest of the week we have to use water from our tanks.”
“And what if your tanks are empty?” Josh asked.
“Salt,” Akilah said.
“ ‘Salt’?”
“Yeah. Salt. Nothing, zip, zilch, nada,” Akilah said. “You can use the toilet at the mall.”
He shuddered. “It isn’t that bad; you’re exaggerating.”
“I wish,” Akilah replied. “It can be really awful here, compared to some places. But it’s beautiful, too,” she chided me. “Come on, admit it!”
“Well,” I said, “the hills are kind of spectacular. And the people are great. Sometimes.”
“When they’re not trying to beat up gay people?” Josh asked sardonically. “Your country sounds lovely. I can’t imagine why you’d ever leave.”
“But it’s home, you know?” Akilah said. “Your home isn’t perfect either. I mean New York is the most dangerous city in the world!”
“No it isn’t,” I muttered.
“Whatever,” she said with a sigh of exasperation. “My point is that whatever is wrong with it, it’s my home. I won’t leave. This is where I belong.”
I thought about that for a second. Was it where I belonged?
Josh changed the topic. “My mom sounds like the opposite of your mom. She’s really overprotective of me. I had to go to the best school—it’s public but a charter school, which is like a private public school….It’s hard to explain,” he ended, looking at my befuddled expression. “Whatever. It’s a good school, no knives—or guns. But like I said, I really want to spend some time with my dad before I start college.”
“Have you ever lived with him before?” I asked.
“Yeah, when I was a baby, I guess,” Josh said, picking at imaginary lint on his jeans. “But I don’t remember much about that. I mostly know him from spending summers in Canada. I see him every year. It’s hard because I live in the States and he lives all the way up here. This place is like the boonies, man. And it’s sooooo white!”
“For reals!” I chimed in. For a few minutes he and I traded tales about Trinidad and Brooklyn. At home we’d be just faces in the crowd—in Josh’s case a gorgeous face in the crowd. We of the brown skin stuck out in Edmonton.
“It’s nice to get a break from my mom, too.” He bit his lip, hesitating, before he spoke again. “She’s depressed and it’s like, every day is a drama just getting her to eat breakfast and take a shower. Sometimes.” He quickly added, as if he didn’t want to be disloyal to her even in her absence, “I love her a lot, you know? But it’s kind of tough to be around her twenty-four-seven.”