High School

By Sarah Brady Stack

 

I look out the van window. “You have to be kidding me,” I think. My mother opens her van’s door and gets out, closing the door behind her. I hear the door, but I don’t move.

“This can’t be North Miami Senior High.”

***

We walk down the hall with the counselor; he’s way overweight. The walls are green and grey. I assume that at one point they were a green and white. The floor is encased in grey dirt and dust. This school is nothing like my old private school. I am still angry that they took away my scholarship, especially now that I know I’m stuck in this hell hole.

“I’m glad that you guys are getting to see the school now, this is the cleanest you’re ever going to get to see it,” the counselor says.

“But school hasn’t even started.” I realize a little late that he wasn’t kidding.

***

I have ten minutes to get to my first class, which I can’t find, and some boy from behind me shouts “Hey, white girl!” I turn around.

***

I walk down the halls. Dark, dark, dark. A flash of something light out of the corner of my eye. It’s my arm.

***

The ten foot chain link fence that encloses the school’s property is bent and looks like a saggy pregnant woman’s belly in multiple places on either side. Students tend to jump the fence in the morning to get to class because they have nowhere else to go. At least at school they can get free breakfast and lunch. The students have to jump the fence because the security guards don’t open it, and it’s not because they forget. Then after lunch some kids jump it to get out. They go home or go hang with friends. Some of them go to work so they can put food in their little sisters’ stomachs, because even though their parents are each working two jobs at minimum wage, it’s not enough. Most of them just sit around, right outside the fence. For the first time in my life I realize that at least I’ve always had somewhere to go.

***

It’s so crowded that I can’t move. I follow the current of the crowd. I’m so close to the person in front of me that I can’t tell who they are. It’s like looking at an image under the microscope, you can see the cells but you don’t know if they are from an onion or potato. I hate the traffic during class changing. The current in front of me suddenly stops but, the force behind me doesn’t. I’m pushed forward and my shoe just barely glances off the back of her shoe.

“Oh hell naw!” she says not turning around.

“Sorry,” I politely reply.

She turns around slowly, her arms crossed. “Who this white girl think she be?”

Her two friends glare at me with their hands on their hips. We’re all so close that I try to look at my shoes to avoid them, but the toes of their shoes are nearly touching the toes of mine.  

I’m finally going to get jumped. But the current picks up again and they’re carried away before anything else can happen.

***

Weave lies in a clump on the floor. At first I think it is a rat. It’s dirty, covered in grey grit. A feeling of nausea overwhelms me. How does someone just lose their hair?

***

People crowd around in a circle just outside the front door. They are all yelling, but I can’t make out what any of them are saying. And then I see something that looks like limp black fireworks against the blue sky, shooting out from the center of the circle.

A boy walks by and says “You can tell them bitches going at it cuz the weaves flying.”

***

I walk down the hall. A girl down the hall is whispering to her friends and looking at me from the safety of a door way into a class room. As I pass, she lunges at me and grabs my pony tail. She holds it and runs her fingers through it. She lets me go and smiles to her friends, “It feels different.”

***

I am trying out for the cheerleading squad. I figure that since my mom and all my cousins did it in high school, maybe I should too. The only problem is that the captain of the squad is telling me that you have to be able to do a split and a toe touch in order to make the team.

“I can’t do either of those,” I say.

“Sorry,” she says, “maybe next year.”

***

Sitting in the cafeteria, talking to Evelyn Rodriguez, and she’s talking about how much she misses Cuba. I’d miss it too. It’s her home. She says that it is beautiful there, the beaches and landscaping. She says that her father got them out legally through his connections in the government after her uncle got arrested for some bullshit charge. She didn’t have to swim or build a raft out of a car or bathtub to get to the States. She says, “There my father was a businessman and high standing government official, here he’s an electrician.” That sucks I think, but I like it here. This is my home. I was born and raised in South Florida.

***

We’re fifteen minutes into my Algebra II class when Herman runs across the room, right in front of the blackboard. Some of the other girls in the class squeal. I don’t know why, Herman has done the same thing every day for the past month. Herman is a mouse that our teacher named because he won’t go away.

***

Evelyn and I are at the homecoming football game. Our team sucks but we heard that the band at halftime is really good. Evelyn notices the cheerleaders and is pointing out how bad they are. She comments on how they aren’t really cheering. They’re really just swinging their arms and hips a little and yelling. I notice that all eight of them are the darkest girls I’ve ever seen. 

***

I am joining the school’s drama troupe. It’s not a very good program, but at least they have a small space reserved and are willing to take anyone, including me. I am at the first meeting and a senior named Cleo is calling me up to the front of the room.

***

“I’m going to teach you how to dance,” she says.

 “Ok,” I say.

“First I want you to stand like this,” she says motioning to her stance. I copy here spreading my legs apart so they are further than shoulder width.

“Now lean forward a little and push your butt out,” says Cleo.

“Alright,” I say.

“Now pretend like your poonani is over a hole that’s between your legs and move your butt in a circle without moving out of the circle.”

“What?” I say.

***

Sitting in the cafeteria, eating my banana, I’m waiting for Evelyn to come back from the bathroom. Someone starts playing with my hair, probably because I left it down today. It feels good. Evelyn loves to play with my hair.

“Hey, Evelyn, you wanna eat first?” I say jokingly, putting the rest of my banana in my mouth. “Evelyn?” I ask again after she doesn’t respond. She probably just didn’t hear me, it’s loud in the cafeteria because of all the people yelling over each other and the groups in the corners sporadically laying down beats and dancing or fighting. Sometimes it’s hard to tell which. Evelyn still hasn’t replied. I turn around. It’s not Evelyn.

“Oh, sorry,” she says, “your hair just looked really soft. I just wanted to see if it was.”

“It’s ok,” I say.  

***

I really have to pee but the bathrooms here are disgusting. Luckily I’ve cosied up enough with my English teacher that she’s giving me the key to the staff and faculty bathrooms. Otherwise, I’d have to deal with the bathrooms that students use. Most of the stalls in those bathrooms haven’t been cleaned since the school was built in the ‘70s. Most of the stalls are missing their locks. There is never any toilet paper or soap, and recently the water stopped working. Evelyn says she washes her hands in the water fountain with soap she brings from home. The faculty and staff bathrooms aren’t much better. I think to myself, maybe that’s why whenever we have a fire drill people shit in the hallways. The bathrooms are certainly scary enough, and the hallway is cleaner. Otherwise there’s not much difference between the two.

***

I’m walking back from the bathroom when a security guard catches me wearing my flip-flops. He tells me that the school has a strict no open toed shoe policy and that I have to go home and change my shoes. He immediately escorts me out of the building. I walk about thirty paces before glancing over my shoulder to make sure he’s gone. He is. I jump the fence and go back to class.

***

I’m dating JacquesStephan. He’s big but sweet, real sweet, and smart. He’s Haitian. He’s pretty popular and dates only the really beautiful girls. His last girlfriend was half black, half Native American. She floated everywhere she went because her feet didn’t know the limitations of gravity. I think she’s a model now. I wonder why he picked me. He says that I have a big butt for a white girl.

***

I’m reading the cast list for a play I just tried out for. The good news is that I got a minor role. The bad news is that I am the only light skinned girl on the cast and it’s one of those complex one-acts where all the women are really the same person. I am a little worried that at rehearsal someone is going to notice that one of them doesn’t belong.

***

Walking down the main hallway going to my second class and I see a flash of something that catches my eye. I look over at an empty display and realize that it is my reflection in the glass. I hadn’t noticed it in a while but it caught me off guard this time. It’s probably because the stripes of whiteness on my scalp radiate from in between the tight braids.

***

Evelyn, Jack and I are sitting waiting for the bus and it’s the Thursday before Easter. Someone walks by and says something about me needing to get a tan.

“I like you like that,” Jack says, “you don’t need a tan.”

“But seriously,” says Evelyn, “you do.”

The three of us smile, and just keep on waiting as a ball of weave rolls by in the street with the wind.

 

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