Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self - By Danielle Evans Page 0,74
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 fuck 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. “Fuck the game, fuck Rivalry Week, I ain’t worried about anything but the fine-ass girl I’m taking to the party afterward.”
“Nigga, who the fuck 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 fuck 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