New Boy Read online

  Ian had tolerated Rod for a long time but would not classify him as a friend—though he had heard Rod refer to him as his best friend, which was something only a girl would say. To Ian, Rod was merely a prop who helped him retain his playground standing, who looked out for teachers when Ian was taking bets or extracting lunch money or tormenting kids for fun. It was the plight of a sidekick to be despised by his master almost as much as by others. Rod was weak, and whiny, and desperate. He was whining now. “Look at that—she’s talking to him. I’m never gonna get to go with her!”

  Mimi’s friend Dee had joined the line behind the black boy and was now talking to him. Ian watched them, almost impressed by Dee’s boldness. When she handed the jump ropes to the boy and they began to laugh, however, Ian frowned. “Don’t like that,” he muttered. He would have to do something about it.

  Mimi was rhythmically turning the Double-Dutch ropes so that they smacked evenly on the ground. She could feel the playground around her pulsing with activity. Nearby, two girls were arguing over a hopscotch square drawn crookedly. Three boys raced the length of the playground, one of them surging past the others at the end. A girl sat on a low wall, reading a book. A line of boys, backs to the school and out of sight of the teachers, were seeing who could pee the farthest through the chain-link fence onto the sidewalk. Three girls laughed together over an Archie comic book. A boy kicked sand from the sandpit under the trees.

  Two areas of activity on the playground snagged at her, two so different they balanced each other out. There was Ian on the merry-go-round, tormenting the fourth graders. Mimi already knew how this would end. She herself was on a kind of merry-go-round with him, but she did not know how that would end. While swinging around the flagpole three days before, she had been exhilarated and terrified at the same time, like going very high in a swing and then leaning backward and keeping your eyes open so that you can see as well as feel the sickening plunge as you fall backward. Since then she had felt bound to Ian, and was not sure whether or not she wanted to free herself from him.

  The opposite of the rapid spin of the merry-go-round, with its riders always on the verge of being flung off, was the new boy. The new black boy—there was no ignoring the color of his skin—was standing absolutely still, and bringing attention to himself with his stillness. If she were a new girl Mimi would be walking all around the playground, making herself less of a target by moving among the others, trying not to linger and be noticed. Though Mimi had never been a new girl, she had never entirely belonged either. Best friend of Dee, and now girlfriend of Ian: you would think these concrete relationships would tether her, but they did not. She felt as if she were floating through the playground world.

  The spinning and the stillness. The motion and the motionless. The white and the black. If ever the playground had been imbalanced, with its new addition it now had a disorienting equilibrium. Mimi shook her head to clear it.

  That movement caused her arm to shake, and one of the jump ropes wobbled and caught the jumper—a fifth grader, who began to complain until Mimi stopped her with a look. She knew it was her fault the girl had been tripped up, but she did not show it, could not apologize or explain, or her reputation as the steadiest turner would suffer. The steady turner, and the girl who sensed things. She must hold on to these different gifts, for they were all she had. They, and now Ian, who was not exactly a gift.

  The fifth grader skulked off, and Mimi regretted it, for Blanca took her place. Blanca, the cutest girl in the sixth grade, who lessened her looks by wearing clothes just this side of vulgar: a tight pink top that showed off every strap and outline of her training bra, a short denim skirt, beige platform sandals, red barrettes in her black hair with glittering pink jewels pasted on, half a dozen gold bangles that clinked on her arm as she jumped. And jumped, and jumped. Blanca was as steady a jumper as Mimi was a turner. They bored each other in their parts.

  Mimi let her jump, kept the rhythm, and with that background thumping, watched the playground gradually turn its attention to the stranger. No one stopped what they were doing, exactly, or not for more than a startled moment, a pause during tag, a hesitation between catching a ball at jacks and throwing it up again, a silence in the midst of chatter. Then they went back to tag, to jacks, to talking, but with one eye or ear now focused on this boy. Mimi sensed the playground and its players as strings randomly crisscrossing all over it, now starting to align so that the strings led to one point. How does he stand such attention? she thought.

  Rippling over all of those strings came Dee, with her blond hair pulled into tight pigtails braided by her mother, who believed girls should be buckled in for as long as possible. Dee was coming over to tell Mimi to stop, then would take away the ropes and go stand in line next to the new boy. She was going to focus entirely on him. Mimi already knew this was going to happen. She often knew.

  She was right: Dee paid Mimi and Blanca only cursory attention before going to stand next to the new boy. Mimi went to her own line, where she couldn’t help watching Dee and the boy. Everyone was watching them. The relentless curiosity made the two seem surrounded by a shimmering aura like the one Mimi sometimes saw behind her eyes when a headache was coming on. In fact, even now her head had that buzzing, attentive feeling that preceded one, like the tension in the air when a thunderstorm is brewing.

  Then Dee gave the boy the precious class jump ropes, and they began to laugh, throwing their heads back as if there were no audience but the two of them, performing for each other. It was so unexpected—what student would laugh five minutes into his first day at a new school?—that Mimi found herself laughing too, in surprise, in sympathy, in imitation. She was not the only one—others were also infected, smiling and laughing because they could not help it.

  Not Ian. Her boyfriend—for that was what everyone called them now, boyfriend and girlfriend—was standing off to one side, staring at Dee and the boy, a snarl pressed into his face that punctured Mimi’s joy.

  I can’t go with him anymore, she thought. I can’t go with a boy who responds like that to laughter. For a moment Mimi thought of the feeling of flying around the flagpole, and of Ian pushing into her with his tongue and hips, which she thought she would not like but did, surprised to find her body responding like a light being switched on. But she could not have someone like Ian turning on that light.

  She pondered when to tell him she was breaking up with him. Maybe at the end of the day when she could run home afterward, and pretend to have one of her really bad headaches the next day so she wouldn’t have to go to school. Tomorrow was Friday, after that the weekend, and she hoped Ian’s anger might have burned itself out after three days. Then there would be only a month of school to get through before a summer away from him, and then a new school to lose herself in.

  Now that she had a plan she felt better—apart from the stab of jealousy as she watched Dee and the new boy walk through the school entrance, their strides already matched the way friends and couples walk together at the same pace.

  Yes, she felt better. And yet there lurked a flicker behind Mimi’s eyes, and the slow grip of a vice at her temples. That would not go away until her head was taken over and she submitted to the pain, like a test she had to pass before she could be light and free again.

  Osei surveyed the playground with a practiced eye. He had looked over new playgrounds three times before, and knew how to read them. Every playground had the same elements: swings, slide, merry-go-round, monkey bars, jungle gym. Lines and bases painted on the asphalt for softball and kickball. A basketball hoop at one end. Space for hopscotch and jump rope. This one had two unusual features: a pirate ship with poles and rigging that could be climbed; and a sandpit edged by a clump of trees.

  Then there were the kids you always saw doing the same things: the boys, running chaotically, burning up the energy that otherwise made them restless in class; or playing with a ball, always something with a ball. The girls, playing hopscotch or jacks or jump rope. The lon
ers, reading or sitting on top of the monkey bars or tucked away in a corner or standing close to the teachers where it was safe. The bullies, patrolling and dominating. And himself, the new boy, standing still in the midst of these well-worn grooves, playing his part too.

  Looking over the kids, he was also hoping to spy something else: an ally. Specifically, one of his own. Another black face or, if that wasn’t available, a brown face, or a yellow face. Puerto Rican. Chinese. Middle Eastern. Anything different from the parade of pink-and-cream suburban Americans. But there was none. There rarely was. And when there was, they weren’t always any help. In his London school there had been one other black student—a girl with Jamaican parents, who never once met his eyes, who stayed as far from him as she could, as if they were two magnets pushing away from each other. She had found her own precarious perch and did not want to get pulled into his struggle to find a safe place. In his New York school there had been twin Chinese brothers who when goaded would use kung fu moves in fights, which hurt their opponents but delighted the onlookers. They also kept their distance from Osei.

  He had learned over time to hide what he was thinking as the new boy. His father might be the diplomat in the family, but Osei too was a diplomat of sorts, displaying his skills at each new school. Whenever his father came home from his new job and at dinner told his wife and children about all the new people he worked with and how he didn’t know where to park his car or where the bathroom was, Osei could have said, “That is my day too.” When his father said he forgot the name of his new secretary each time and so called them all “Miss,” O could have said he’d learned that in Victorian England people called all of their female servants “Abigail” no matter what their names were, so that they didn’t have to remember new ones. That he too had to rummage through all the names of adults he had stored in his head and pick out the right one for the teacher standing at the front of the class, since the formality of calling them “Sir” or “Miss” would make them raise their eyebrows and the other students laugh, and set him apart even more. That he too had a new job, which was to be the new boy and try to fit in—or not. But he didn’t say any of these things. He had been taught to respect his elders—which meant not questioning or defying them. If his father wanted to know any specifics about his son’s day, he would ask. And since he never did, O kept quiet.

  Today he was facing yet another playground full of white kids staring at him, another bunch of boys sizing him up, another bell ringing the same pitch heard all over the world, another teacher at the head of the line eyeing him uneasily. He had been through all of this before, and it was all familiar. Except for her.

  Osei felt her presence behind him like a fire at his back. He turned, and she started, casting her eyes down. She had been looking at his head. O had caught others looking at it before. It seemed his best quality was the shape of his skull, round and symmetrical, with no points or bulges. His mother liked to remind him that she gave birth to him by cesarean and so his soft skull was not squashed coming out. “Stop!” he always cried, not wanting to picture it.

  When Dee—how perfect that she should be called a letter too—raised her eyes, the fire leaped and spread through him. Her eyes were brown: the clear liquid brown of maple syrup. Not the blue he’d seen on so many playgrounds, the blue of the English, the Scottish, the Irish ancestors. The blue of Germany and Scandinavia. The blue of Northern Europeans who came over to North America to settle, and conquered the brown eyes of the Indians and brought the black eyes from Africa to do their work. O looked at her with his black eyes and she answered him with brown—the brown of the Mediterranean, perhaps, of Spain or Italy or Greece.

  She was beautiful—not a word anyone usually used to describe an eleven-year-old girl. “Cute” was more common, or “pretty.” “Beautiful” dug deeper than a girl that age could normally stand up to. But Dee was beautiful. She had a cat-like face shaped by her bones—her cheeks, her temple, her jaw—angular as origami where most girls were pillow-soft. Her blond hair was French-braided into two plaits that ran down her back like ropes. O caught a whiff of her shampoo, floral with a sharp sprig of rosemary. It was Herbal Essence, a shampoo his sister, Sisi, loved but couldn’t use because it didn’t contain enough oil for African hair. She complained about that, and about the label with its drawing of a white woman with long blond hair, surrounded by pink flowers and green leaves. But she bought a bottle anyway, just to smell it.

  The beauty of this girl standing behind him was not just physical, though. It seemed to O that she was lit from within by something most kids either did not have or hid deep inside: soul. He thought no one could ever hate her, and that was rare in this world. She was there to make things better. And she was already making things better for him: talking to him, laughing with him, responsible for him. It didn’t matter that other students were staring and making fun of them. O kept his eyes on Dee and ignored the rest.

  As they headed toward his new classroom, Osei knew he could ask her for help with the one small thing that was bothering him—small and concrete as opposed to the large and unfixable issue of his being the only black student at an all-white school. “Please, do you have a pencil case?” he asked.

  Dee looked puzzled. “Yes, in my desk. Why? Don’t you?”

  “I do, but…” He tucked the jump ropes under one arm and unbuckled his book bag, a blessedly unremarkable dark green satchel that had seen him through three schools without drawing attention to itself. The same could not be said of the pencil case he showed Dee, pulling out just part of it so that others wouldn’t see. It was a pink plastic rectangle, studded with red knobbly strawberries that protruded from the smooth surface like giant braille. O had not been able to find his own pencil case—buried in one of the boxes that had not yet been unpacked after the latest move—and his mother insisted he take the strawberry case, which had belonged to Sisi until she became too grown up for it. When O asked his mother why she thought a boy would use a pink strawberry case, she blinked and said, “Osei, a student needs a case for his pencils. I am not sending my son to school without his pencils.”

  He could not argue with his mother, and could not stop her from packing the case in his school bag herself, along with a handkerchief that he would never use, a sandwich he didn’t know if he would need, and a can of Coke he suspected the school wouldn’t allow him to drink. There was nothing useful in the bag, and yet he slung it over his shoulder and took it to school. He couldn’t hide the pencil case somewhere as he’d hoped, however, for his mother accompanied him almost to the gate, even after he pleaded with her to let him go on alone. At least she didn’t come onto the playground with him, though she remained by the fence, watching until he had gone inside. No one else’s parents did that—not in the sixth grade.

  Dee’s eyes widened when she saw the strawberry case. She did not pull it out and hold it up and embarrass him in front of everyone else. Instead she reached over and touched one of the strawberries, running her finger over its pimpled surface and around its outline, just as Sisi used to do, absently fingering a strawberry while she did her homework at the kitchen table. That was before she began taking homework to her room, keeping her radio on and the door closed. Now Osei was not sure where she did her homework—or if she did it.

  “It belongs to my sister,” he explained, “but she no longer uses it. She is in high school. Tenth grade. They do not use pencil cases. I could not find mine and so I had to bring hers.”

  He fell silent, thinking about his sister. Sisi had always had his back when they were younger, defending him when they were at the same school, listening to his complaints about how his classmates treated him, reassuring him that it would get easier as he got older. They had tacitly agreed not to tell their parents, backing each other up on the lies they told to cover for stolen school bags, shirts splattered with ink, bloody lips, and, once, a hank of hair chopped from the end of one of Sisi’s cornrows. (Osei had to take the blame for that, and be spanked by his fa
ther. He didn’t complain.)

  Once Sisi went on to junior high, though, and they were in different schools, she began to pull away from her brother and her parents. Instead of hanging out with Osei after school, she shut herself up in her room and stayed on the phone for hours, having inane conversations with friends she had just spent the whole day with. O knew they were inane because he sometimes listened in on the extension phone until he grew bored with talk about TV shows and kids in her school and crushes they had on boys and clothes they wanted to buy. At dinner Sisi talked back to her parents as much as she dared, or stuck to sullen silence—possibly a safer option around their father.

  Sisi treated Osei with the condescending distance a teenage girl is so expert at. It hurt. Osei stopped telling her things that happened at school, keeping to himself his ripped shirts in Rome and knees scuffed from being tripped up in New York. Nor did he share the good things: the goals saved, the girl who talked to him, the surprised praise from a teacher for a book report on Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. He figured she was no longer interested. She was not reading The Egypt Game or The Wind in the Willows or A Wrinkle in Time, but teenage books like Go Ask Alice, or books about black people: The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou.

  Their mother was sanguine about Sisi’s transformation. “Osei, your sister is growing up,” she soothed her son. “She does not want to have her little brother around her now. But you know that she still loves you. It will be easier for her to show it when she is older. You must be patient with her and she will come back.”