I could feel a shift in the crowd.
“Others?” Mr. Rivera asked.
Another girl onstage raised her hand. “We’re not all rich.”
Then another guy added, “And some of us actually want to learn about, you know, other cultures, but it’s not always easy to like, just ask someone, ‘Hey, tell me about your culture.’ ” A few people laughed, but it was a laugh of like, support. Agreement. And yeah, I could see his point.
Then Mr. Rivera called out, “Okay, okay. And the final question. How can we be allies and assist you?”
One kid was totally ready for this one. He said, “Well, like Steve said earlier, it’s not our fault we’re Caucasian. So why do we have to stand back and let… other kids… get scholarships and full rides to college when our parents and families have worked wicked hard to get us here too? How is that fair?”
This provoked an actual cheer. I looked around uneasily. This was… not going the way I’d imagined.
Mr. Rivera pressed him further. “Yes, but how can we be allies then, and assist you?”
“Well,” Steve said. “There could be scholarships for white kids too.”
Brianna and Rayshawn yelled simultaneously, “There are!”
That’s when someone in the audience yelled out, “White lives matter! White lives matter!” And someone jumped in with “Build the wall! Build the wall!” Then—no way, but yeah—others joined in, and it became a chant. “White lives matter! Build the wall!”
Teachers were pointing at students, telling them to quiet down. When they didn’t, the teachers began telling them they were getting detention. But it seemed to only make everyone more amped.
And then, a pencil flew past my head, just missing my eye. I was too shocked to move. A pen followed it, clattering onto the stage, then another pencil, an eraser, and then other objects I couldn’t make out because now I was moving, covering my head and ducking behind the podium, almost bumping into Rayshawn, who was doing the same thing. Students were bolting up from their seats, crowding the aisles. The teachers and administrators were shouting “Stay seated” and “Stop that right now or else.” No one was listening. Next thing I knew, people were being spit on. Insults were flying faster than the pencils and crumpled papers. Someone actually chucked a textbook at the stage!
Now the METCO kids were shouting back. More textbooks came flying. One hit Rayshawn on the side of his head, and he went wild, jumping off the stage. I peeked out from behind the podium. The whole student body was just going cray-cray. Kids shouting, “Black lives matter!” and “White lives matter! and “All lives matter!” They were throwing punches, dodging punches, screaming, crying. The auditorium was total chaos. The teachers, shouting and threatening, were being totally ignored.
And Mr. Rivera looked like he was about to have an aneurysm.
Finally, the principal’s voice boomed over the PA system. He ordered us to report to our homerooms. Immediately. And immediately everyone paused—students and teachers. Then, like we’d all been trained, everyone, reluctantly, started filing out of the auditorium. The principal told us to remain in our homerooms until the final bell. Then he canceled all after-school sports and clubs. I already knew that a bunch of resident students would tell their parents that the METCO kids had started all of this, which would be a lie. Still, if our presentation was supposed to have turned down the dial on racism at Westburg, I would say it was an epic fail. Like, 100 percent.
32
Numb. That’s how I felt. The weather turned lousy, gray, sleeting, matching the entire day. On the way home I watched as the suburbs morphed into the packed concrete and the traffic of the city. My city. As we approached Forest Hills, I watched another pocket of Boston trickle by—even the snowbanks looked different here. In Westburg they looked clean and were piled up in neat little mountains, whereas here they looked like blobs of concrete midpour. A scrawny-looking older man scurried into the intersection at a stoplight to beg for change. His tattered cardboard sign read: haven’t eaten for two days. god bless you. A Black driver (female) argued with a white biker (male) about who was in the wrong lane. Finally the biker gave the lady the finger and rode away.
At my stop, instead of walking home, I shivered all the way to the park. It was empty except for one lone dude on a skateboard. An empty Fritos bag skittered past my feet. I didn’t feel like going home, even though, while it had stopped sleeting, the cold was beginning to creep into my bones in that way that takes forever to get rid of. Still, I sat down on a bench all tagged with graffiti and pulled out my purple notebook. Come to think of it, Dad’s the one who’d bought me the notebook, at Walgreens. It hadn’t even been on sale.
Where was he? At this exact moment. Thinking about me? My brothers? Mom? What if… What if he never saw us again? I thought about how he might never see these streets again. How who we are on paper apparently matters just as much as—no, who am I kidding? more than—who we are in person. And, as much as the presentation was a bomb with a capital B, we did it. We did it because we know we matter. So there was that, right? We did something. We tried.
And all of a sudden I was crying and writing, and my parents were always trying and would never give up, and I was crying and writing even when a couple more dudes on skateboards showed up. They started bumping their boards down the concrete steps, doing tricks and flips. The temperature seemed to drop minute by minute. My hands tingled with cold—I couldn’t write anymore. The dudes lasted awhile, but eventually even they left. The bench across from me was tagged up big-time, but for once I actually started reading it. Boston Strong and Mas Poesía, Menos Policía. Cool play on words, that last one. More poetry, less police. I liked it. It was like its own line of poetry, about poetry. Dad would have pointed that out—he always noticed things like that. Deep down I knew what he would say about the situation at school, as messed up as it was. He’d say, Try to make it better. Try harder.
* * *
Back at home, I couldn’t focus on my homework, so I started final-final touches for Sylvia’s Salon, which I’d put aside for a minute. I got kind of obsessed cutting little paper flowers and gluing them onto toothpicks, then sticking them into pots I’d made from shampoo caps. I wanted to finish the flowerpots before Mom came home with the boys. I should have been prepping dinner. But I couldn’t help it. I had to finish. And I did. Yes! Then my phone buzzed. Jade, asking me to come over.
* * *
“Dang, girl. This is dope,” I said, gazing around her bedroom.
The mural she had started weeks before was now complete. It was. She had painted an underwater scene, but it was also a city. Like, fish were swimming around skyscrapers, and seaweed spiraled around bus stop signs. How did her brain work like that?
“Thanks, Liliana.”
“No. Really. This is…”
Jade sat on her bed and hugged a pillow, a big grin on her face. Yeah, my girl had skills. “Anyway, what’s good with you?”
“Nothing. It’s just that this is so great. You are so talented, you know? But, well, things at school have gone to shit.”