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January 22 - January 31, 2022
“Well, your father found a job at a university. He cleaned the bathrooms, swept the floors. He didn’t mind. He talked to the students, and after their final exams, they would give him their books and notebooks. Your father taught himself a college education when he was only a teenager. And he got paid! That is smart.”
I hadn’t known any of this. Questions were bruising my brain. “But hang on a sec. You didn’t answer my question. Are my parents indigenous?”
Tía Laura went on to explain more. There was a civil war in El Salvador, too—and the United States actually supplied weapons and money to the governments that wanted to basically wipe out all the people who disagreed with them. Isn’t that insane? Friggin’ insane. So that’s why my parents left, leaving everything, everyone behind.
Tía’s eyes went bright. “Ahh. You really are your father’s daughter.” My father’s daughter. Tía couldn’t possibly know how good those three words made me feel.
“What?! Whoa. Hold on a minute. This is not about me You told him about my father, Jade. Really?” She stepped closer. “See what I mean?” “See what?” “That. That right there. You have such a stank-ass attitude. You’re all sarcastic. Is that what your new best friend Heather or Holly or whatever-her-name-is talks like?” I narrowed my eyes. “Oh, so that’s what this is about. You’re jealous.” “Girl, please.”
“I know. I mean, I’m sorry. It’s just that yeah, I’m busy at my new school and all, but you’re still my best friend. I just feel like, I’m the one who goes to a school a million miles away, and yet you’re the one who’s never around. And you literally live next door.”
The closer we got to the apartment, the more cop cars we saw. More stop signs. More drunk dudes chillin’ on the corners. More tagged apartment buildings. A boy on a bike almost getting hit by a car. The man in the car yelling at the boy, “I could’ve fucking killed ya! Ya idiot!” I hadn’t really… noticed this stuff before. It was like the streetlamps had been changed to a different wattage, and now, even though everything was the same as it had been before, it was cast in a different light or something. The wind picked up. And it carried smells of sewage and such funkiness. I rolled up the
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Fifteen years old, and this was the first time I was bringing a friend home from school. (Jade didn’t count. She was like family.) But unlike Holly, Jade called my mother “señora,” and always said “excuse me” and “please” and “thank you” in every single sentence she directed toward her. It was like the law or something.
“What? Oh, no.… I must have run out.” I begged my mother with my eyes to leave, but now she was not only fixated on me, but her hands were on her hips. Not good.
I noticed that Holly had left her orange juice on the bureau in my room. Glass still full.
As I ran the faucet to wash the glass, I heard my mother sigh, then mutter, like it was an insult, “Americana.” The glass slipped from my hand. Yeah—Holly was American. But wasn’t I, too?
“Yeah, if you couldn’t tell, Westburg has a thing for basketball.” She pulled a notebook out of her backpack and dumped it in her locker. “I hadn’t noticed.” We laughed. “And I guess Chris Sweet is going to take us to the state semifinals, something that hasn’t happened in like, twenty-seven years or something. So—” “Cool?” Holly smirked. “Anyway, see you at lunch.”
Apparently, just before Friday’s game, to everyone’s shock, the coach had replaced Chris Sweet with Rayshawn as point guard. Best as I could figure it out, Chris hadn’t kept his grades up. Anyway, Chris—or some of his friends—didn’t agree with the
coach’s decision. So someone had drawn an X over Rayshawn’s face.
I dug in my jean pocket (like I had more than five bucks!) and pretended to be annoyed.
No big deal. What was I supposed to say to that? Fifty dollars was a big deal to some people.
Someone had posted a meme on Insta—with a noose made of basketball net around Rayshawn’s neck.
She sucked her teeth and added, “Gringa.” I gaped at her. I wanted to scream, But I’m in METCO too! I’m from Boston too! But that one word—“gringa”—sapped all the energy out of me. Gringa?
I blinked in surprise. Steve was in Environmental Club?
Brianna raised a finger into the air. “Yo. I already did the Big Sisters program. And I didn’t like it. All the lady did was take me to Chipotle twice, and for my birthday she gave me a boring-ass book and that was it. So can I leave now?”
“You betcha,” Mr. Rivera said, sounding overwhelmed.
“My sister’s in college, and she does this thing called work-study. And she gets paid. Why can’t we have something like that?”
Mr. Rivera made us partners in some activity called two truths and a lie. I learned that she played the violin and she had been in METCO since first grade.
“Yeah. I’m going to be Uncle Dustin. Anyway, I’m not just the youngest. I’m also the smartest. And the coolest.” I laughed. “It’s a good thing you don’t lack confidence or anything.”
“My parents are… getting divorced.” Oh. Ohhhhh. I reached for his hand. “That must be so hard.” Dustin flopped onto the couch, patting it for me to join him. “Yeah. Kev comes over all the time with these totally random excuses, to check on me like I’m a little kid or something.” “That’s actually kinda sweet.”
was like the latitude and longitude of your birthplace can ultimately determine your life’s borders. I know—heavy. My head literally began to hurt. I squeezed Dustin’s hand tighter. And I didn’t care who drove by. I held his hand the whole way back to school. Hood down.
Brianna went off. “Sixty years later, and the fact is, white kids still go to white schools and Black kids go to Black schools. I mean, except us. But like, there has to be a program for it.”
“At this school, I mean?” he asked. “Yes,” Marquis said, his voice all defiant. “I know why they want some of us here, and that’s
to win basketball games. Don’t even pretend it’s not like that either.”
“I got one,” Biodu said. “White boys using the word ‘nigga.’ Like, that ain’t your word, yo.” More moans.
Some people laughed. But not Mr. Rivera. “You bring up a great point, Patricia. Many Latinos speak Spanish, but that doesn’t mean we are Spanish.” Now a bunch of us looked all kinds of puzzled, me included.
“And another thing—the term ‘Latinx.’ Use it more. It’s meant to be inclusive.”
He was kidding, right? An assembly? Like that was going to do anything. Plus, can you spell “dorky”?
“Okay, focus, guys, focus. This is a great opportunity. People can’t know things they don’t know. So, you may call it ‘schooling,’ but I call it a great opportunity. Let’s own it. And discuss what it is you all could do.”
“Preservation of one’s own culture does not require contempt or disrespect for other cultures.”
At Jade’s school you couldn’t exactly borrow paint supplies.
And—whoa—I’d just thought of my old school as Jade’s… not mine.
“Well…” I refocused. “I’m sick of people asking me where I am from. No—where I am ‘from-from.’ I am sick of people assuming I wasn’t born in this country or that I don’t speak English or that I eat rice and beans every night for dinner.”
This girl named Sarah chimed in. She had gorgeous hair, like down to her butt. I think she was growing it out to donate to cancer or something. “You know, Erin has a point. When my family and I went on safari in Zimbabwe and Kenya last year, we had to learn like ten words in Shona and another ten in Swahili.” “Oh my God,” a guy in the back muttered. “That must have been exhausting.” I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Mistake. Phelps pounced.
I cleared my throat. “Yeah, so, are you all even aware that, I mean, the word ‘Florida’ means ‘flowery’ in Spanish? And that ‘Colorado’ means ‘red’ or ‘red-colored’? These words are in Spanish because the Spanish were actually here before the English. I’m just saying.” The last part I had read about in our textbook, so I kind of thought I deserved extra credit, no lie.
“Well,” I jumped on this (with a capital A attitude, I’ll admit). “I’m just saying that yeah, you may feel annoyed having to press one for English or whatever. But imagine how annoyed you’d be if someone came and kicked you off your own land and told you that your language, food, culture, everything, was wrong. And you had to change it. Or die. That’s messed up, right? That’s annoying, right?” The class blew up.
“Lili? What exactly did you say to Erin?”
The smug stayed, because she went on. “You. You think you’re the first girl Dustin’s brought down there? Correction—the first METCO girl he’s brought down there? Pa-lease.”
She fake laughed, and that was it. I shoved her so hard that she fell back on her butt, her books landing everywhere.
I gaped at him. “What does that mean? ‘Not really’?”
Truth, I felt like I’d been sucker punched. Yet I was weirdly relieved, too.
My stomach hurt. The worst part was that he hadn’t stuck up for me. Cuz truth, I really liked him. But truth, I wasn’t worth sticking up for. I hugged my knees, trying not to cry. I felt like total crap. And I knew what I needed to do next.
“So… see you around, then,” Dustin said crazy-fast, and hung up.
At lunch I sat with the METCO kids. Yep. It took a mad racist meme, but they waved me over to sit with them at last.
I couldn’t even figure out how I felt about anything because it was like I was feeling everything. Confused, pissed, relieved, embarrassed, sad.
