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 father. 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.