Robert E. Lee Is Dead
For making honor roll you got these stupid Mylar balloons. They were silver on the back and red or blue or pink on the front, with CONGRATULATIONS written in big clashing letters. The balloons were supplied by the army recruiters who had an office across the street from our football field, and they always stuck a green and white U.S. Army sticker on the back. If you lived in Lakewood, then when you got a balloon your parents picked you up, or you drove yourself home with it in the backseat. Either way, when you got it home, you waited for your balloon to deflate slowly; and when it finally did, your mother smoothed out the wrinkles and put it on a wall, or in an album, or in a storage box somewhere, if you already had so many that another would be redundant. If you lived in Eastdale, then the stupid balloon got in your way the whole time you were walking home.
Geena Johnson and I lived in Eastdale. I knew her name already—everybody did—but Geena was a girl like sunlight: if you were a girl like I was back then, you didn’t look at her directly. Usually there were girls following Geena’s lead, often literally, wobbling behind her in platform boots they had just barely learned to walk in, but she was alone the first day she actually spoke to me. From the top of the hill where our high school began, I had seen her walking ahead of me, briskly and by herself. When she got to the chain-link fence encircling the water dam at the bottom of the hill, Geena threw her backpack over the top of the fence, balanced the heel of her boot against its wobbly surface, and expertly hoisted herself over, barely breaking stride. When I hopped the fence a few moments later, I took my time. Even in sneakers I was not as slick as Geena, and plus, the balloon kept hitting the side of my face and trying to pop itself on the top of the fence. I was less awkward crossing the high, rickety bridge that was probably the reason the water dam shortcut was closed off to begin with. I took some perverse pleasure in knowing that a fall at the right angle could have killed me, one slip, and no more Crystal.
On the other side of the dam, home surprised me. I always took a minute to recognize my own neighborhood. It seemed like every day a new apartment building was being built or an older store or house torn down. Things changed quickly in those years: Eastdale pushed into the suburb of Lakewood from one side, while white flight created suburbs of the suburbs on the other. This was the new New South: same rules, new languages. The people who could afford to leave Lakewood left; the ones who couldn’t put up better fences. The rest of us were left in Eastdale: old houses, garden apartments, signs in Spanish and Vietnamese. We adapted well enough; we could all curse in Spanish and we’d skip school for noodle soup as soon as we’d skip for McDonald’s. The handful of white kids who still lived in Eastdale adopted linguistic affectations with varying degrees of success and would have nothing to do with the Lakewood kids. Eastdale kids and Lakewood kids walked on opposite sides of the hallway and ate on opposite sides of the cafeteria and probably would have worn opposite-colored clothes if they could have coordinated it without communicating. The neighborhood in the immediate vicinity of our high school was called The Crossroads; don’t ever let anyone tell you that the South is big on subtlety.
Geena and I weren’t big on subtlety, either—not then, anyway. We were fourteen; she was flashy, I was brave the way you are when you don’t know what you have to lose. When I emerged on the other side of the dam and walked the wrong way down the side of the park-way just because I could, I was not surprised to see her ahead of me, doing the same. My balloon mirrored our walk in a hazy silver film: ELENA’SCHICKENARROZCONPOLLO29.99MANICUREANDPEDICUREPAWNSHOPKIM’SMARKETCALLHOMECHEAPPHONECARDS!
A block from my apartment building, I stopped at the 7-Eleven to waste the few minutes my shortcut across the bridge had saved. I spent five minutes debating the merits of blue raspberry versus cherry limeade Slurpee, before blending them into a disgusting purple slush. Geena was strolling around the store like she owned it and was taking inventory, and when she finally made it to the Slurpee machine, she picked grape and was quick about it. We waited in line at the same time, but not together. The man behind the counter grinned as I laid my change on the counter with one hand and tried to balance my Slurpee and balloon in the other. He pointed upward at the bobbing surface, and read: Congratulations. He smiled and looked me over.
“You had a baby?”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head.
“Someone in your family had a baby?”
I stared at him stupidly. His face looked open, like he was waiting for an answer so he knew the right expression to make. I wanted to hit him or I wanted to say something clever or I wanted to leave, with or without my stupid Slurpee. I was waiting to be a different person when Geena stepped around from behind me. I thought for a minute she was getting in my face to laugh at me, but she grabbed my arm, hard, making little indentations for each of her violet fingernails, and dragged me toward the door, calling over her shoulder, “Nah, mister, she ain’t pregnant, at our school they give you a balloon for giving all the teachers blow jobs. It don’t really mean shit.”
Outside, I walked faster and hoped his English wasn’t good enough that he knew what blow job meant. Geena laughed.
“You didn’t pay for that,” I said, pointing at her Slurpee.
“No,” she said. “Didn’t pay for the cigarettes, either.”
I waited for shouts or sirens but none came, so I followed her lead, matching her stride and imagining my steps clicked like hers. Our bravado peeled a little as we crossed the parking lot and avoided looking up at the men who hung out in front of the store all day, looking for work, or drinking, or both. It was after three, so the hope of day work had mostly faded and the drinking was in full swing. They grunted appreciatively at the bodies we hadn’t quite figured out what to do with yet, and we shrank into ourselves at their cat-calls, as if blushing would make our breasts and behinds less prominent. On the next block we were cool again, walked tall and touched mailboxes and fence posts and other things that weren’t ours. Geena lit a cigarette and I watched her smoke.
“Thank you,” I said to Geena, once we’d reached my building. I hoped she wouldn’t make me explain what I was thanking her for.
“Don’t be embarrassed ’cause other people are dumb,” said Geena.
Geena Johnson was my friend. Maybe not right away, but things could happen quick like that back then. Geena came by the day after the Slurpee incident. Geena taught me how to dance and how to steal. Geena dragged me to cheerleading tryouts and threw her arms around me when we both made the JV squad. Geena also told me I’d have to do her homework sometimes so she wouldn’t get put on academic probation. Old Crystal would have had something to say about this, but I was suddenly a girl with lip liner and red and blue pom-poms. I’d just nodded.
Out of respect for Geena, or maybe it was fear, nobody from Eastdale really messed with me, but nobody talked to me, either. They looked at me curiously, the way they might have looked at a one-eyed kitten or baby bird Geena had picked up one day and begun to carry everywhere. I carried books everywhere and, without really meaning to, ignored everyone but Geena. On the bus to away games I sat in the back reading while the rest of the squad acted like girls were supposed to: Geena traded raunchy insults with the football players, Violeta and April gave each other makeovers, Tien stared into space, and Jesse perched seductively on somebody’s lap until one of the coaches made her get up and saunter poutily to her own seat.
Football season was almost over by the first time I made myself noticed. Things had been louder than usual, and I stopped reading The Souls of Black Folk for long enough to hear what everyone was complaining about. We were on our way to our second-to-last game of the season—one we were probably going to lose—but all anyone could talk about was next week’s rivalry game. The county had structured the football league so that every school had a major rival and the season ended with games between rivals, which were played for a prize. Our rival school was Stonewall Jackson, a new school in the middle of the new gated community of Hillcrest, the place where people in Lakewood kept threatening to move. Its newness made the whole concept of Rivalry Week stupid. There hadn’t been time for any history of rivalry between Lee and Jackson High Schools, and there wouldn’t have been any rivalry in the present if the school board hadn’t set it up that way. Next week’s varsity game was known as the Rebel Yell. The winner got to display an old sword that was said to be a Confederate relic, though its exact circumstances were unknown and any history we were given for it usually turned out to be invented.
“I can’t believe that lady,” Jason Simmons called from a few seats ahead of us. “Like she don’t know that ’s the whole f*cking point of Rivalry Week.”
“Whatever,” Eric Manns called back. “I don’t give a f*ck what Mrs. Peterson says, eggs and toilet paper is some bitch-ass white-boy shit, anyway. You would not catch me up in Hillcrest trying to outrun the popo over a damn football game.”
Jason shook his head. Mrs. Peterson, Lee’s head guidance counselor, had made an announcement about Rivalry Week during morning assembly. Traditionally, the week before the end-of-season games was marked by a chain of vandalisms, but apparently the school board was exasperated by the annual cleanup efforts. If any act of vandalism is traced to a high school in this county, Mrs. Peterson had declared, the cost of cleanup will be taken out of that school’s activity budget.
I hadn’t been paying attention at the time and assumed that the chorus of boos was just a general reaction to Mrs. Peterson’s voice. The woman was thoroughly disliked; hatred of her was one of the few things upon which everyone at Robert E. Lee High School agreed. The Eastdale kids hated her because she had a habit of hanging up on people’s parents when they didn’t speak English instead of getting a translator, as was county policy, and she was known for suspending people based on their zip codes rather than their behavior. At a school assembly last year, she’d blamed the dropping standardized test scores on immigrant kids who, before arriving in Eastdale, had been “living in jungles.”
I hated her because she’d tried to talk me out of honors classes and only signed off on my schedule because I’d threatened to go to the principal. I was an accident; I’d slipped through our school’s de facto segregation and she wasn’t happy about it. I had been dealing with people like her since the third grade, when I’d been shipped off to a “gifted” school as a reward for outsmarting standardized tests. The magnet elementary and middle schools were the Lake County School District’s last line of defense against the evaporation of its upwardly mobile white people. The Lakewood PTA had tried to get a new magnet high school built, smack in the middle of Lakewood, and, when that failed, tried to have Eastdale students rezoned to a high school five miles farther away, but the county comptroller wasn’t having it. They settled for an honors wing, which housed everyone whose standardized test scores placed them into honors classes, or everyone whose parents knew that you could pay a private psychologist to declare your child a genius even if the school’s official test thought otherwise. Essentially, the honors wing housed all of Lakewood, and me.
I wasn’t sure why my Lakewood classmates hated Mrs. Peterson. She seemed to view herself as their principal guardian and defender, but they called her “the evil chipmunk” and did bucktoothed impersonations of her behind her back. She did have buckteeth, along with a dumpy figure and a wardrobe of seasonally themed sweatshirts. Sometimes I almost felt sorry for her, the way kids laughed.
“What the f*ck are they going to take out of our budget, anyway?” Jason went on. “We ain’t got shit to begin with.”
That was true: much to the chagrin of our Lakewood classmates, we’d had the lowest budget in the county for years. Jason’s real problem was that Rivalry Week was usually a rite of passage from JV to varsity. By the look on his face I could tell Jason was comparing the Hillcrest Police Department to whatever alternative initiation scheme the varsity players would come up with, and thinking he’d rather take his chances with the cops.
“Look, I ain’t even worried about the game,” Eric announced. “F*ck the game, f*ck Rivalry Week, I ain’t worried about anything but the fine-ass girl I’m taking to the party afterward.”
“Nigga, who the f*ck wants to go with you?”
Eric surveyed the back of the bus as if looking for a comeback.
“Antisocial back there might be all right if she’d put that book down for a second.”
I looked up. It was the first time all season I’d been addressed directly and I wasn’t prepared with a clever retort.
“Aww, leave her alone. She probably got homework,” Jason called.
“That book ain’t homework.”
“How the f*ck you know what homework they got in honors English? You barely know what homework you got in plain old regular English.”
“Negro, I go to Robert E. Lee High School, I know damn well ain’t no Souls of Black Folk required reading. Maybe Black Folk Ain’t Got No Souls, Who the Hell Told ’Em to Stop Picking Cotton, Anyway?”
The people around us laughed; hearing that he had an audience, Eric lifted himself onto his knees and kept going.
“Don’t know why the f*ck you laughing, Garcia. The next book they read is Mexicans Ain’t Got No Souls, Either, and Them Mothaf*ckas Don’t Even Speak English.”
He turned back to me. “Or do I got it all wrong, Antisocial? Go ’head, drop some knowledge on me.”
I stared back and started to open my mouth, but Geena was quicker.
“Look, she’s reading ’cause you idiots ain’t worth her time. Now sit the f*ck down before I beat your black ass and then call your mama so she can do it again.”
“Ooh,” said Eric, throwing up his hands in an exaggerated gesture of defeat. “I don’t want Geena to beat my ass and call my mama.”
He sat down, though, and I had a sudden sense of the next four years passing something like this.
“I know what to do about the new vandalism policy.”
Even Geena whirled her head around in shock. The whole back of the bus looked at me expectantly. I could feel my heart racing and wondered when it had started mattering what they thought of me.
“Later,” I said, nodding toward the coaches. “After the varsity game, so the varsity team can hear too.”
Geena hardly spoke to me all afternoon. If I f*cked this up I was on my own, that much was clear. Geena had helped me out, but she wasn’t about to go down with me.
We met outside school after the varsity game. The varsity players had in fact waited around to see what I had to say. I took deep breaths and played with the zipper on my cheerleading jacket, feeling something like the leader of an underground crime syndicate. My jacket said ROBERT E. LEE CHEERLEADING on the back, but it was the front that I stared down at: Crystal 2000. Crystal, 2000. Crystal 2000! I liked to think of it that way, like a brand-new kind of Crystal: Crystal 2000! Cheerleading Goddess, Criminal Extraordinaire. While I was mentally branding myself, Tyrone Holmes, the senior quarterback, interrupted and prompted me to speak.
“So, umm, I was thinking, like . . .”
I could hear the varsity cheerleaders giggling at my speech and began again, flexing my newly credible Eastdale voice.
“I mean, I’m saying, though, we f*ck with Stonewall, we get in trouble. First there’s the cops, and then there’s the school board, and we don’t need all that. But if they f*ck with us, it’s them that gets in trouble.”
“You think they’re dumb enough to do that?”
“They don’t have to be.” I shook my head. “If we do the school but we use their colors and make it look like it was them, they get fined and we get the money.”
“You think we should f*ck up our own school?” Jason asked.
“Why not?” I asked. “Anybody care about this place?”
Tyrone nodded and grinned at me. “You know, Antisocial, you might be all right.”
“Told you,” said Geena.
A week later, we met in the parking lot of Walgreens, supplies in hand. A few seniors with old, beat-up cars carted about twenty of us to the parking lot in the middle of the night, where we split up to carry out our duties. Tyrone and Eric spray-painted the main entrance blue and silver—Stonewall Jackson’s colors—while their teammates Rafael and Delos broke a few of the back windows. (“Don’t do the downstairs classrooms: the heat doesn’t work right and it will get too cold,” Geena reminded them.) Some of the JV players TP’d the fence, while most of the cheerleaders chalked the track and the main sidewalk. We were not especially creative. F*ck was the worst word most of us could think of: F*ck Robert E. Lee, F*ck you broke Gooks, Spics and Niggers, F*ck this Ghetto Ass School, Stonewall Rules, Go Generals! Geena and I had the honor of vandalizing the school statue. We dumped a bucket of blue paint over Robert E. Lee’s head and painted long, thick stripes of silver paint over the plaque at the bottom. A final Go Stonewall! spray-painted on the outside fence, while Tien stood sentry and watched for passing cars, would be enough to get us off the hook completely.
Afterward we were not so careful. A bunch of us piled into Rafael’s van and drove screaming and swerving up and down Lees-burg Pike. We smelled strongly of paint fumes and opened all the windows in order to stick our heads out and gulp down fresh air. It was November, but there were too many of us in the van to be cold, we were packed in tight and squeezed against each other. I could vaguely feel Tyrone’s hand creeping up my thigh, but the dizzying combination of paint fumes and the wine cooler Geena had given me earlier kept me from being sure I should do something about it. Rafael swerved into Lakewood and we drove up their hills, tearing past their mammoth brick houses, circling the private beaches built around their man-made lake, where small groups of our classmates gathered for parties on weekends. Eric rode shotgun and blasted the radio while Geena and I screamed out the windows, and the cold air and the hot van and the beat—because there was always a beat—became their own universe. It was shattered by the screech of sirens in the distance, and it was over that quickly. Rafael made a sharp left and took the back roads into Eastdale, but not before Geena stuck her head out of the window a final time and screamed to the empty echo behind us, “F*ck you, too, f*cking cops!” and then collapsed giggling in my lap. We had driven all through Lakewood, but when I got back to my apartment and sleepily collapsed on the living room sofa that doubled as my bed, I was not a bit jealous, not at all. They had houses, they had money, they damn near ran the school, but they still had nothing that was half as exciting as Geena.
We lost the football game. A couple of the Lakewood kids seemed sad about this: they’d genuinely wanted that sword. “Probably to cut our heads off with,” Jason said. On our part, the loss was overshadowed by the enthusiastic response to the news that Stonewall Jackson was going to have to reschedule their prom. We knew they’d get the money back, but it was a victory nonetheless. The school held an assembly to address the vandalism. The senior class adviser chided Jackson for “not only committing such a childish act but refusing to take responsibility for it even after the fact.” The Jackson football team had claimed over and over again that they’d had nothing to do with it, that we’d probably done it ourselves to get them in trouble. Apparently it didn’t occur to anyone to believe them. In the school board’s mind, we still had loyalties. Mrs. Peterson gave a long speech about embracing diversity—rather like a wolf giving a speech on embracing sheep—and said it was mystifying that anyone would even make such a charge against us. Geena and I sat straight-faced and said nothing. It had been our experience that white people were very easily mystified.
After that, my nickname went from Antisocial to CeeCee, and Geena and I got permanent seats at the Eastdale senior lunch table. My classmates in honors weren’t sure what to make of my sudden transformation. After being harassed for most of elementary school, I’d realized that the more invisible I was, the more likely it was they’d reserve their cruelty for each other. In middle school, I’d been the girl sitting quietly in the back of the class, taking copious notes and wearing shapeless sweaters. It worked. They’d all started hating each other instead of me. For the first time in my life, I was the only person who never cried in the bathroom during lunchtime. My new high visibility violated the unspoken terms of our détente. I was suddenly a girl who wore stilettos and hip-huggers, who ran into class just before the bell rang, shouting good-byes all the way down to the end of the hallway. I was still a girl who knew more right answers than they did, which was the real source of the trouble—I’d gone from being an anomaly to being an impossibility.
Walking out of World History one afternoon, I heard Caitlyn Murphy say loudly, “How in the hell can she walk in those jeans?”
“How in the hell can she walk with that ass, more like,” Libby Carlisle joined in.
“Well,” said Anna James, “I’m glad she’s turning into a crack whore. Now I don’t have to worry about her messing up my class rank.”
I told Geena about this conversation after lunch, then thought no more of it until I went looking for her after school. Vi finally told me she was cornering Libby and Anna in the parking lot. To this day, I don’t know the exact terms of that confrontation: Geena wasn’t talking and it was a full year before Libby and Anna got up the nerve to even look at me again, let alone speak to me. Whatever the case, Geena got suspended for two days and no one f*cked with me after that. I perfected the art of smiling cruelly, then ran out of school to Geena, and the football field, and the city late at night, to everything that was bright and noisy and newly beautiful.
We were not always laughing. When Geena’s mom was hospitalized with a tumor that turned out to be benign, I cut school for three days to hold Geena’s hand in the hospital waiting room. Later, when the attendance woman said the unexcused absences meant we would both automatically fail for the semester, I got a sympathetic young ER resident to write doctor’s notes for both of us. When my dad lost his job and I couldn’t stand to be in the house and hear my parents budgeting money in terse voices, Geena invented reasons why I had to sleep over at her place every night. When Geena had her abortion, I went with her and covered for her with everyone who wanted to know why she wasn’t laughing like usual. When I swallowed a bottle of Tylenol for no real reason I could think of, Geena stuck her fingers down my throat until I vomited, and through my vomit and her tears screamed until I promised never to do it again. These were the things we never talked about, but they were our things nonetheless.
In the spring of my junior year, Mrs. Peterson sent an office aid to pull me out of class right before lunch. A chorus of oohs greeted the announcement that Mrs. Peterson wanted to see me. In the waiting area, I smiled weakly at Mrs. Sanchez, the receptionist, hoping she might give me a heads-up on what I was here for. She only smiled back at me. Inside her office, Mrs. Peterson grinned at me with her big chipmunk teeth. I had never been so scared to be smiled at.
“Crystal,” she started, and I fought the urge to tell her that was not my name anymore and hadn’t been for quite some time.
“We’re very proud of the work you’ve done since coming to Robert E. Lee. Your record here has been truly impressive.”
I was afraid she was going to expel me. I thought of the worst things I’d done in recent history and prepared myself to explain to her why going to Taco Bell during lunch, hooking up with Jason in his basement, and loaning my fake ID to a freshman cheerleader were not offenses for which she could legitimately kick me out of school.
“Every year,” she continued, “we send one student to the state summer academy. I am pleased to tell you that this year you are our nominee.”
I was so shocked that my reflexive thank-you got caught in my throat. She babbled on about the state summer academy and how good it would look on my college applications. I sat back catching bits and pieces. The seminar was on government and philosophy, which meant I’d get to read more of the stuff everyone thought I was a freak for actually enjoying, but if it had been a seminar on decorating kitchens, I still would have said yes. Being nominated by the school meant that I’d get free room and board at the university where the program was held. I was thinking it was amazing that anyone would pay for me to get away from my life for a few weeks. I was thinking also that I was not stupid. I read the papers: I knew the governor had just started a state commission on the achievement gap between white and minority students. I could picture Mrs. Peterson pouring the state investigator a cup of tea and shrugging and saying, “Crystal has done beautifully, and has been rewarded for it. If her friends showed the same motivation . . .”
Mrs. Peterson was still talking in the present. I snapped back into the conversation when I heard Geena’s name, followed by:
“—nearly on academic probation again. I hope you take note of this. Be careful about the company you keep.”
I wondered what kind of company she kept. I opened my mouth to defend Geena, but knew that right then I couldn’t afford to make Mrs. Peterson angry. Besides, what was keeping Geena off academic probation was me doing her homework, and Mrs. Peterson didn’t need to know that. I shut my mouth and left her office.
I knew Geena would be mad; I just didn’t know how mad, or how soon. After school she asked me why I had missed lunch, and I told her I’d been in Mrs. Peterson’s office for our lunch period and she’d given me a pass to eat during B lunch instead.
“What the f*ck did she want?” Geena asked.
I swallowed. Geena and I were supposed to work at the Baskin-Robbins again this summer in order to save money for a week of cheerleading camp and an end-of-the-summer beach trip that we planned to take together. I told her all at once, letting the words tumble together and repeating over and over again that the program was free.
She was quiet for a minute after I finished.
“So, Mrs. Peterson is, like, your friend now?”
“Not my friend. I mean, I’m sure she’s just doing it because it looks good, and besides, I have the best grades. If she didn’t pick me, she’d have had to explain why. But whatever, you know? It’s not like she really likes me.”
“Yeah, OK.”
Geena started walking down the hallway and I followed her.
“Geena, what do you want me to do?” I called. I didn’t mean for it to come out like a question, but it did, anyway.
She kept walking. I walked home alone, and I took the long way.
I let the promise of summer comfort me while Geena avoided me. Violeta and April became Geena’s new best girlfriends. I was somewhat consoled by the fact that it took two people to replace me. Vi made a point of telling everyone that she’d gone to middle school with me and I’d been a bougie bitch then too. I started to eat lunch in the library again. If Geena thought she could make me lonely enough to change my mind about summer school, she’d vastly underestimated my capacity for loneliness. I’d perfected lonely in the third grade.
The summer passed quickly. I spent most of my time in my dorm room reading. It was quieter than my life had ever been and I didn’t mind it. Geena and her anger were a million miles away from the college campus. I thought occasionally of the parties I was missing, of varsity practice and what I’d do with all my free time when I wasn’t on the squad next fall. Geena wouldn’t be on the squad, either: without me to do her homework, she’d failed two classes and wasn’t eligible to cheer. Mostly I didn’t think of high school at all. I read Plato and Aristotle and the Constitution, and in those moments I felt tremendously insignificant.
I walked around alone often, but my roommate for the summer didn’t find my quietness strange at all. Occasionally we’d look up from reading and smile shyly. I’d always thought the whole world was just a bigger version of Lee High School—a line running down the middle of it and people on either side telling me that I didn’t really belong there. There were still people like that at the summer academy, but I also met a handful of people who seemed to understand me on my own terms. A girl with a long black ponytail offered to be my roommate if we both got into the university. I thanked her, but in my mind I thought I’d like to go much, much farther away.
By the time school started again, I had almost forgotten what I was missing. I wasn’t lonely anymore; I was just alone. That was the luxury I had then: Geena had already made me possible. Her boldness, which I’d always thought I’d been borrowing from her, had become mine in ways I didn’t realize until she was gone. I didn’t flinch around people who didn’t like me; I didn’t feel anymore like being myself was something for which I owed the world an apology. Then again, if you believed the rumors, everyone was past the point of apology: they were busy trying to find a way to impose themselves on the world. I heard that Eric had replaced the engine in his car and gotten it to go 140 down the Pike, but it sounded like empty boasting; and as much as Vi was enjoying her rise in status, I had trouble believing that she’d actually make the freshmen cheerleaders carve player’s names into their thighs with a penknife. It was senior year, and the world as I knew it was undoing itself. The more adult everyone got on paper, the dumber they got in real life. Libby Carlisle celebrated her early admission to Stanford by nearly OD’ing on coke; the senior class president got drunk one night and crashed his car into the side of a church.
We were not so much tempting fate as bargaining with it. With the sincere fatalism only teenagers can manage, we assumed that what happened before the year was out would determine what our lives would be forever after, and no one seemed thrilled about their prospects. Life became an insistent preoccupation with what happened next. The military recruitment office was full of people I’d known since elementary school and never pegged as particularly violent or patriotic. They weren’t, most of them, but the general attitude was that the military beat working at McDonald’s—at least you got to go somewhere. I started noticing how very few people actually went anywhere; the parties I used to go to with Geena had always been frequented by people who had graduated years earlier but were still around, working, or at Bailey, the local community college. Seniors started to amuse themselves by noting how fat people had gotten or how many kids they had or what kind of piece of junk they were driving; they knew it was their last chance to feel superior to anybody.
The New Year came and went; I drank sparkling apple cider with my parents and watched the ball drop on television. It was the end of January before Geena spoke to me again. She appeared at my locker after school, shifting nervously, which was strange, because I hardly ever saw Geena look nervous.
“Look,” she said, “this is bullshit. You wanna go to the mall after school?”
I neglected to point out that the bullshit was mostly her doing. I nodded, grabbed my purse out of my locker, and followed her to the beat-up old blue Tercel she’d bought with the money she’d saved that summer, the money we hadn’t used for our beach trip. It was as if the light came on and I suddenly noticed it had been dark for months.
As quickly as they’d forgotten me, the crowd took me back. Geena let me know who’d been talking the most shit about me and we made a point of ostracizing them. We made up for lost time with a few long talks and a lot of off-campus lunches. We never exactly talked about the fight, and if anyone was rude enough to bring it up, they met both of our icy stares and shut up quickly.
By the end of March, I was on edge, waiting to find out where I’d gotten into college and whether I’d have the money to go. Geena was in danger of not graduating, but didn’t seem particularly concerned about it. AP exams were over and the final grades that would be used for class ranking were out. The teachers knew they couldn’t really keep us in school. I spent a lot of time driving around with Geena in the middle of the day. Some sophomore girls claimed a section of our lunch table and we didn’t even bother putting them in their place. We could already feel our world slipping away from us.
I think it was them that finally got to Geena, them and the four fat college acceptance letters I got in April. Walking past the senior lockers one day, we saw one of the new girls making out with her senior boyfriend. Geena shook her head and rolled her eyes in my direction, like At least we don’t have to f*ck people to be popular. I nodded back, and mouthed, Amateurs.
Geena came up with the prank idea after that. She showed up at my locker after school with a sour apple lollipop in her mouth.
“Hey,” she started, “we should do something. Like a senior prank.”
“Geena. White kids do senior pranks. When we try it, they’re called felonies.”
“I thought you were practically one of them, anyway.”
I shot Geena a warning look and she dropped the subject. Still, I could see her getting more and more upset by the little things. She made a point of making Sophomore Slut Girl change lunch tables one day, coming this close to physically removing her. She talked with increasing frequency about the fact that she wasn’t getting a diploma. She was of two minds on the matter. One moment she’d shrug and say, “What the f*ck do I want a stupid piece of paper for anyway?” The next, she’d shake her head and say, “They ought to at least give me something. Much time as I spent in this dumb-ass school.”
I got used to her mood swings and went along with them. It was easier than arguing, and I didn’t object much anyway. When Libby Carlisle got named prom queen, Geena launched into a ten-minute tirade on how she was the ugliest, bitchiest, dishwater-blondest excuse for a prom queen she’d ever heard of.
“Don’t worry about Libby Carlisle,” I said. “Libby Carlisle is about to encounter the unpleasant reality that the world does not revolve around her ass, and when she finally accepts that reality she’ll need Valium and an exotic lover to get through her boring and frustrated life.”
Geena laughed. “That’s why I love you, CeeCee. You’re so full of shit.”
Geena stopped coming to school altogether. She wasn’t going to graduate anyway, so there wasn’t much point. I went to the obligatory senior class events and showed up for the final exams that teachers administered halfheartedly. The rest of my time was spent camped out on Geena’s living room floor, watching bad talk shows and soap operas. Geena was getting animated again by the prospect of end-of-year parties. Prom was too expensive, but April was having a semiformal in her backyard the same night, and we were excited enough about it. Geena and I went dress shopping at what everyone called the Ghetto Mall, though you knew by who was talking whether or not they meant it affectionately. I liked the dress shop, its awning unpretentiously proclaiming DRESSES, its owner a chatty Vietnamese woman who was good at eyeballing women and knowing what size they needed, even if they argued with her about it. I spent an hour eyeing the intricate beadwork of the Quincea?era dresses, lined up in the window like cakes with brightly colored icing, before settling on something slinky and black. The day of the party, Geena curled my hair and put red lipstick on me, sashaying around the room in her own deep-purple strapless sheath.
“Damn, CeeCee. Remember what a geek you were when I found you?”
“I’m not a puppy.” I pouted. “You didn’t find me. And anyway, I’m still a geek. So there.”
I stuck my tongue out and fell back on her bed.
“Well, you’re a hundred percent better than you were,” she snapped back, curling her eyelashes in the cracked full-length mirror on her wall. “And sit the hell up before you smash the curls I just put in your head.”
I don’t know what we were expecting the party to be like, but it was just like every other party we’d been to since freshman year, except nobody was wearing jeans. The music echoed all the way down the block and the lawn smelled like a weak mixture of beer, weed, and vomit. The smell and the heat clung to everyone there, but all we could hear was laughter. On the back porch lay a pile of abandoned heels, shawls, jackets and ties: girls had realized how uncomfortable it was to be beautiful, and the few boys who’d bothered to take the semiformal status of the party seriously had found themselves outnumbered and done a quick ruffling of their appearances.
On the front lawn, Vi was trying to teach two freshmen how to dance cumbia, the beat from Jay-Z blaring inside the house throwing off the rhythm she was counting out. Inside, people danced on beat, some pressed so close together it was hard to tell one body from another. Others skipped the dancing all together; all of the bedroom doors were locked and April was more than happy to tell us who was in each of them. She was also slightly tipsy, and melodramatically complained about the red stain spreading across her living room carpet: someone had spilled a punch bowl full of Alizé. It smelled sickly-sweet and looked like blood.
Geena and I ended up in the garage. We could only stand around and look superior for so long before we just looked stupid.
“So,” said Geena, taking a sip of her wine cooler, “you going to graduation tomorrow?”
“I have to go,” I said, taking a bigger swallow of mine than I intended. Stray drops of pink liquid trickled down the front of my dress.
“Right.” Geena nodded. “I ain’t going. They’re just gonna gimme a fake piece of paper that says I didn’t graduate and would I like information about some damn GED programs.”
I swallowed again. “I have to go,” I repeated. “I’m the valedictorian.”
Geena laughed. “Like you haven’t been waiting your whole life for this shit.”
“I’ve been killing myself my whole life for this shit. They don’t have to expect me to be all happy about it.”
“Oh, right,” said Geena, smirking. “Poor you.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You always mean it like that.”
“Look,” I said. “I don’t even wanna go tomorrow. I have to. That’s all. No one will listen anyway. Half the parents don’t care at all about any part of graduation except when their kid’s name gets called. And the half of the ones that do care are going to be so pissed it’s me speaking and not their gifted child that they’ll spend the whole speech bitching. The only two people listening will be my parents, which means I can’t say anything I actually want to say, which is f*ck you all very much for making me miserable since the third grade, I’m out.”
“If it were me, I’d say that.”
“Yeah, well. I can’t. Anyway, Mrs. Peterson already approved my real speech. It’s about success and obstacles and respect and bullshit.”
“Well,” said Geena, “I guess Mrs. Peterson’s opinion counts more than anyone else’s.”
I started to laugh, but she wasn’t kidding.
“You really don’t want to do this, I can get you out of it,” Geena said. “We can tell every-damn-body how you really feel. You and me.”
It was enough that I didn’t say no. Geena picked her shoes up off the garage floor where she’d kicked them aside and was already on her way out the door.
“You coming?” she called, dangling her car keys.
With a halfhearted last look at Tien throwing up on April’s front lawn, I followed Geena to her car. A few minutes later we were parked in front of her cousin Ray’s house a few blocks away. He ran a kind of automotive/construction business, in that there were usually broken-down cars parked on the front lawn, and occasionally he fixed something, and occasionally someone actually paid him for it. I didn’t ask what we were doing there. The lights were off, but Geena had a house key, and for a few minutes she walked back and forth between the car and the garage, putting things in the trunk: paint, a toolbox, a six-pack she’d stolen from the garage refrigerator.
“You aiight, CeeCee?” she asked when she got back in the car.
“Yeah, I’m good.” I stared out of the window and tried to look disinterested.
“You want to go home, I’ll take you home.”
“I’m not going home,” I said.
Geena didn’t respond, and I stayed quiet. The roads were all familiar. Within minutes I was looking at my high school in the dark. Geena pulled over in the back parking lot, right beside the football field. The field had been done over for graduation. A wooden stage had been erected in the middle of it, red, white, and blue circular banners were draped across the bottoms of the stage and the bleachers. A gold banner, stretched between two posts beside the stage, read: CONGRATULATIONS, ROBERT E. LEE CLASS OF 2000. In front of the stage, rows and rows of white plastic chairs had been set up for the senior class.
Geena got the six-pack out of the trunk and we sat in the car for a while, drinking and talking. I didn’t even like beer, but it gave me something to do besides look at Geena, who seemed sadder than I’d ever seen her, or the football field, all done up and ready for me to be a person I had never wanted to be.
“Remember freshman year?” Geena asked.
“Yeah.”
“It was like we ran things.”
“We didn’t, though. It just felt that way because we were kids.”
She made circles on the dashboard with her pointer finger. “I’m going to miss you.”
“I’m not going that far. It’s a three-hour train ride,” I answered, deliberately avoiding the reality that our lives were to be measured in a different kind of distance.
“So, you really don’t want to do this tomorrow?” Geena asked.
“No,” I said quickly.
“Bet you they won’t have a ceremony if the stage is all f*cked up,” said Geena.
We got out of the car and I followed Geena to the stage, carrying the things she’d gotten from Ray’s. When we got to the field, Geena put down what she was carrying and walked the rest of the way to the stage. She climbed the stairs and walked around for a minute, pausing for a moment behind the podium. She spoke as if speaking into a microphone, but there was no mic, and from the other end of the field, I couldn’t hear a word she said. When she was done, she hopped off the stage, forgoing the stairs, and handed me a can of spray paint.
“You serious about this?” she asked.
By way of answering, I uncapped the can and pointed it at her for a second, grinning. Then I walked to the far end of the football field, by the opposing team’s goalposts. I wanted to say the one thing that would make everybody see themselves for what they really were, but I had no special insight into the human condition. I had only one thing to say, the thing I’d been swallowing every day since I had first been confronted with the entitled faces of my “gifted” Lakewood classmates, since I’d first heard the taunts of the Eastdale neighborhood kids, who would have ignored me my whole life if it hadn’t been for Geena, who would have never understood that I was angry on their behalf as much as on mine. YOU ARE NOT AS SPECIAL AS YOU THINK YOU ARE, I sprayed in huge letters on the grass. I shook the paint can when I’d finished, but it was empty.
“Geena,” I called, “I’m not done. Bring me another paint can.”
But she didn’t answer me, and when I turned around, she wasn’t doing anything herself, just leaning against the stage, smoking a Newport and looking at me with some mix of concern and confusion. She walked over to where I was standing.
“Come on,” she said, dropping her cigarette and taking my hand. “Let’s go. I shouldn’t have talked you into this.”
“No,” I said, “I’m not finished. And you didn’t talk me into it.”
I wanted to sign my name—my real one. I wanted, for the first time in my life, the world to see my real self, my whole one. I walked over to where Geena had left the paint cans and went back to my work of art. F*ck YOU, I wrote. LOVE, CRYSTAL.
“Crystal,” Geena yelled when I was halfway done, “are you drunk or are you stupid? You can’t put your real goddamn name! Put mine!”
But I wasn’t drunk or stupid, just tipsy and angry, and it wasn’t about Geena anymore, or even about tomorrow. I saw Geena coming over with a small brush and paint can in her hand, watched her dump it over the C in my name. I expected it to be swallowed up in fresh paint, but it remained clear, like Geena had just splashed it with water, and something sharp hit my nostrils.
“Shit!” Geena shrieked. “That was paint thinner. F*cking Ray.”
For a second we started to laugh together at Ray’s ineptitude, but then I saw the faintest shimmer of orange a few feet from where she’d spilled it, remembered the cigarette she’d dropped earlier. I grabbed her hand and we raced breathlessly down to the other end of the field. I was still thinking it wasn’t a big deal, that we could grab the water hose attached to the back of the school and put it out before it got any bigger, but by the time we turned around, the fire had scorched the whole spot where the letter C had been, and was starting to spread from there. It was almost summer, and the grass on the football field was dry and brown. I had heard once that our football field was a Civil War graveyard; watching the fire slither outward from one blade of glass to the next, I believed it. The fire was still small in area and low to the ground, but if nothing stopped it, it would reach the wooden stage, and then perhaps the wooden bleachers, and eventually the trees behind them, then finally the houses behind it. I looked at the fifty-yard line, where the grass no longer said CRYSTAL, and above it, where it still said YOU ARE NOT AS SPECIAL AS YOU THINK YOU ARE but wouldn’t for long. I ran for the pay phone in the school’s front parking lot, Geena behind me. I had just picked up the phone when Geena reached past me and pressed down the receiver, her nails glittering purple against the metal.
“Go,” she said, her face so close to mine I could see my eyes reflected in hers. Her mascara had pooled into black smudges under her eyes; I knew I couldn’t look much better. “This isn’t little-kid shit anymore. They’re gonna find out who called. They’re gonna look.”
I understood her but I didn’t move at first, not until I imagined myself answering questions at a police station, the look on my parents’ faces when they got the phone call, the look on Libby Carlisle’s face when she got to give my speech tomorrow, when she got to tell everyone she’d been right about me all along. I started to back away slowly.
“You wanna let the f*cking school burn down, stay,” said Geena. She wouldn’t take her hand off of the receiver.
I stared at Geena for a long second. Then I took off running, stopping in the middle of the parking lot to take off my heels. I kept running, the asphalt stinging my feet through my panty hose. Halfway up the hill behind the school, I stopped to look back, vaguely recalling Sunday school and Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt. Already I could hear sirens in the distance. I watched Geena sitting on the curb beside the pay phone, fists curled backward into cushions for her chin. She looked small and still and ready. I turned then, shut my eyes, and ran breathlessly toward the dam. I didn’t stop again until I had crossed the bridge and hopped the fence that took me back to Eastdale. On the other side, I stopped to catch my breath, and then kept running, knowing even then that a better person would have turned around.
a cognizant original v5 release november 24 2010
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Throughout the writing process I’ve had the support of my immediate and extended family and stepfamilies, who have lent me their homes, their money, and occasionally the details of their lives, which are better than any I could invent. There are too many people and favors for me to list all of them, but consider me eternally grateful. Many thanks to my mother, who taught me to be honest; my grandmother, who taught me the value of a good story; and my father, who taught me how much you can say without words.
This book would not have been possible had I not been so lucky in my friends, who let me show up on their doorsteps and sleep on their sofas, helped me move back and forth across the country, made me feel at home in new cities, answered their phones in the middle of the night, and told me when to hang up and get back to work. Among them: Jeanne Elone, Miriam Aguila, Dana Renee Thompson, Lailan Huen, Teresa Hernandez, Ileana Mendez-Pe?ate, Reina Gossett, Nell Geiser, Rachel McPherson, Laleh Khadivi, Sean Hill, April Wilder, Jennifer Key, Joel Creswell, Elizabeth Snipes, Sarah Wiggin, and Tiara Izquierdo. Thank you. Special thanks to Alexis Pauline Gumbs, for so often being my first and favorite reader. I am thankful for the support, financial and otherwise, that I’ve received from numerous institutions. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop gave me time, money, and, most important, faith that my writing mattered to an audience—all rare and valuable for emerging writers. Special thanks to Connie Brothers, Jim McPherson, and Adam Haslett. The Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing is one of the best places a writer could ever call home. I’m grateful to the entire UW-Madison creative writing faculty, and the late Carol Houck Smith, for making my fellowship year possible. Special thanks to Jesse Lee Kercheval for being a constant source of sound advice. Thank you to Columbia University, especially the Kluge and Mellon scholars programs, for giving me the room to try these stories in their earliest forms and to Missouri State University and American University, for giving me homes while I finished them.
I’m indebted to my amazing agent, Ayesha Pande, who is a fantastic supporter and advocate and fielder of frantic phone calls and emails; my editor, Sarah McGrath, who gave the book so much of her time, energy, and attention; and her editorial assistant, Sarah Stein. Thank you to all the editors and journals who have published stories I’ve written, and to those who took the time to send encouraging or instructive rejections. Special thanks to Phoebe, which took a chance on my first short story, and The Paris Review, which has been so supportive of my work. Many, many thanks to Radhika Jones for her work on the story Virgins.