Chapter Six
 

Jamal Barnes eased over to the side of his chair, but a paper football still landed in his hair. The pointy end got caught like a fish in a net. The laughter erupted behind him, but he didn’t even consider turning around and staring down Denise and her crew. It was an anomaly how one person could hold so much sway over the school. It was even stranger the way she was always looking at him.

In the last four years at Central, he’d developed a kind of inner radar for uncalled-for attacks. He did his best to lay low and not look anyone in the eye, but sometimes that tactic made things worse. As much as the white kids were stupid and obnoxious, they were almost a welcomed relief to the utter disgust he received from the black kids who didn’t understand him. “Why he think he better than us?” their faces seemed to say.

He didn’t think that. He didn’t think much of anything other than how much he missed his mother. But he never said that out loud—not to Franklin, not even to Whitney whom he loved, but more importantly, needed to protect. She was carrying his baby now, which meant he had to step up and be a man.

He imagined it was something his mother would have wanted.

When she had died, he was in the eighth grade and oblivious to how death could be nowhere near the equation and then suddenly enter it like an errant fraction. He wondered if it would have been easier if she had had cancer, a slow demise maybe where he could have made more sense of things. But he figured where death was concerned, nothing made sense.

She was killed at a crosswalk. Some bozo pummeled her and just kept going—out of fear or hatred Jamal wasn’t sure. It depended on the day, but sometimes he imagined it was some sanctimonious white guy who cared so much for his guns and religion that he’d forgotten what it meant to love human beings. Other times, it was a kid just like him, someone whose heart told him to slow down and stop but whose head kept propelling him forward.

Anette Fisher filled his brain space. He hadn’t been there when she was hit or when his father was tracked down at the Timex factory and rushed to see her at the hospital. She was dead by then, a formality really. Jamal realized now how moments like those—seeing someone peacefully gone in a strange bed or beneath the weighty lid of a closed casket—were more for the living than the dead. And that’s why he figured it was okay he carried his secret notebook with him, an ode to the different ways his mother must have looked, dead and alone without him. 

Where was he the exact moment his mother died? Art class, he remembered now, studying the pointed football with his fingertips. Still art, a sad bowl of fruit Mr. Alberston had paid for with his own money on his desk was multiplied with paper and watercolor across the floor. They had all been sitting at their desks—the kind that you could lift the tops to store or hide things inside—that formed a horseshoe shape. He had been so enamored with what was coming to life on his paper, he hardly had time to notice Denise McGovern—the softer thirteen-year-old version of herself—watching him work his soul out in color, not for one second aware of that day’s darkness.

Mr. Kramer walked into fourth period Precalculus, and the class settled down; even the animals behind Jamal had taken their seats. He wanted to turn his head and look Denise in the eye and challenge her. Leave me alone. There’s nothing for you here anymore. But instead, he worked his fingers until the paper football unfolded, and there, neatly trapped inside the horizontal lines, was Denise’s handwriting. You keep ignoring me, it said. The words weren’t written flowery like he expected they’d be. They were sharp and biting and felt like they were shouting at him even though they were crammed in such a small space. He was sure she was looking at him. It made his stomach hurt.

On the first day last fall, he wanted to switch math classes when he saw her sitting there. Mr. Kramer’s Precalculus was an honors class, but Denise was as smart as she was evil. When Jamal had asked Mrs. Manderini, his guidance counselor, she told him tough cookies. This was the last math credit he needed to graduate.

He didn’t know what it was about Denise. She was popular, and well-dressed, and lived snugly in a house her orthopedist father could afford, which most certainly didn’t rub shoulders with a trailer park like Jamal’s did. But she wasn’t particularly pretty. Some people said she looked like that girl from that movie, but Jamal wasn’t easily fooled. An ugly heart wasn’t as deceptive as it thought it was.

But still. Everyone else loved her. Everyone except Whitney.

Whitney was like looking into a sea of faces and finding the only other set of eyes that were open. The rest were all closed, their minds asleep. They had no clue that life was so much more than sex, their next meal, making money, and harboring grudges that grew like tumors. Whitney understood the way high school ravaged a body with its manufactured lies. And soon, neither of them would have to be forced to believe them anymore.

His brief flame of hope was extinguished when the bell rang. He prayed Denise would stay with her toxic cluster at the back of the class, but soon, she was at his elbow. He caught her perfume that smelled like baby powder, a contrived innocence that didn’t match the state of her soul.

“You read it and still you ignore me.”

“Not here,” he said. He knew Whitney was on the second floor, and their paths rarely met between classes. But he still looked for her and her best friend, Stacey, who upheld their best friend code with diligent acuity.

“Where then?”

“Outside. Four-thirty,” he said. He had art club every day after school. It was a small group of them who had been given license to hang out in the art room, drawing and painting until things didn’t feel so numb. 

Denise smiled like the cat who knew the mouse better than it knew itself. 

“I don’t know why you feel the need to play this whole charade with that poor white trash girl, but you’re going to break her heart, Jamal, when she knows what kind of web you’ve been weaving. It would be a whole lot easier if you were honest with her. Don’t they say it’s the best policy or something?” They came to his locker, so he turned to look at her, afraid his eyes would boil as if they were scanning the sun. She was all eyeshadow and lip gloss and wore a new white jean jacket that hardly anyone else could pull off. She stood too close, and his heart was in a panic, not wanting others to see what he didn’t want to admit.

“I’m surprised you know anything about honesty.”

“I know about a lot of things, Jamal. I could teach you,” said those lips, shiny with too much gunk. He rolled his eyes as she laughed at what he assumed was a joke, and she kissed the air twice before turning to leave. He didn’t look around to see who was watching. He pretended it hadn’t even happened for a moment. But the truth wasn’t easily swayed, and there it was, frank and dangling in front of his face. He forced his eyes shut just like everybody else.