which said to write your initials on the back and sit quietly until she called time. Paying attention was worthless if you didn’t start out right to begin with.

Polly would be a new beginning for me. The day I brought the tape in, I felt powerful, like when you know a secret that other people don’t realize that they should know. I had a G14-classified VHS in my JanSport and was waiting for the perfect moment to slam it down on someone’s desk. Oh, you thought you knew what a black girl was? Well, take. A Look. At this! Minds would be blown. After two hours, everyone would know what me was: well, me if I was a singing orphan in 1950s Alabama. Whatever. It was a start.

Someone from the AV club rolled in a two-hundred-pound twenty-inch. Mrs. Paul called my name, and I got to walk all the way from table no. 12 to the front of the room to pop in the tape and press play. The whole way back, I couldn’t stop smiling. Once we got rolling, even Johnny Leonardi laughed, and I was pretty sure he was plotting to kill me one day, or at least trip me en route to sharpening a pencil. Everybody liked it. They ooooohed when the old white doctor who looked like the Kentucky Colonel calls Polly a “pickaninny,” having the faint intuition that it meant something bad (Frances had to explain it to me). We all cheered at the end when Polly cuts the ribbon, christening the newly built bridge that joins the white part of town to the black part.

I thought my life might change after that. I thought I might be invited to more sleepovers with Barbies and less Bible studies. I thought someone might pick me first for something. Anything.

Not so much. But I did score points for getting us out of reading hour, which I’d personally hated since Mrs. Paul read the word “nigger” out loud. Sure, I told her it was fine, but I didn’t think she’d actually do it:

Little Man bit his lower lip, and I knew that he was not going to pick up the book. Rapidly, I turned to the inside cover of my own book and saw immediately what had made Little Man so furious. Stamped on the inside cover was a chart which read:

CHRONOLOGICAL ISSUANCE: […] 12

DATE OF ISSUANCE: September 1933

CONDITION OF BOOK: Very Poor

RACE OF STUDENT: nigra

Then the main character goes, “S-see what they called us.” Then Mrs. Paul with all her ancient oratory skills goes, (evil redneck old teacher voice) “That’s what you are” (normal nonracist voice) “she said coldly” (racist voice) “Now go sit down.”

Sixty-six tiny eyeballs stuck to the back of my head for the rest of the hour.

Thankfully, they couldn’t actually see in there. Otherwise they’d know the secrets I was too afraid to say out loud, even when I was alone. To my limited knowledge, none of my friends knew that Frances was a gay. I carried around our status as lesbians—her by choice, me by association—like a bedazzled scarlet A. Someone might notice while Frances helped the normal mothers pass out Rice Krispies Treats or when she bared her unshaven legs at one of my Little League games.

One time, a girl I knew from Awanas, LeAnne, had to go for one week with a King James Bible handcuffed to her arm with tight string. She’d been bad or something. It hung from her wrist ball-and-chain-style for a few days before Frances made her cut it off. LeAnne cried. “If your dad has a problem with it, tell him to call me.” Those were the days that I never wished her different.

Then there were the times when I danced with a towel on my head. My other favorite Cosby episodes were any with Cliff and Clair dancing. The lights had been dimmed in their mansion, and both were wearing silk pajamas. Someone would put a record on the player they kept on the desk near the front door in the living room, and jazz would come purring out. The ideal ’80s ebony egalitarians. I learned the steps in our one-room apartment with the shared bathroom down the hall.

The cheek to cheek, feet to feet. When I was alone, which was increasingly always, I’d carefully fix a white towel along my hairline and practice. Bath towels were best because they were longer. You could twist them counterclockwise at the nape of your neck and flip