Ms. Rogers was my literature teacher. She was about thirty, with a short brown bob. Like the other teachers, she was usually casual, dressing in khakis and button-down shirts. On the rare days that she wore a dress with her flat shoes, students would ask why was she so fancy? Did she have a date that night? And she would smile and tuck a strand of hair behind an ear. Though she kept insisting I call her by her first name, I refused, and when I compromised and called her “Miss Angela,” she’d tease me and look behind her, as if I was talking to someone else. Her class was my favorite, though.
“What about these sonnets?” Ms. Rogers asked. “Let me know what’s up!”
In the front row, Sunshine Coleman raised her hand.
“In the Dark Lady poems, I’ve noticed Shakespeare draws a correlation between light as good and dark as evil.”
“So great! Really profound! Anyone else? Anyone?” Ms. Rogers gave me the encouraging teacher eyeball, and I scooted down in my chair. “So we’ve talked about theme and subject. But what about the way Shakespeare writes a poem? What about his rhythm and meter?”
Lizbet Welch raised her hand. Only twelve, she was the tenth-grade genius freak. She didn’t even have boobs yet. “The iambic pentameter is obvious. But when one scans the poem”—she looked around defensively—“um, the stresses tend to occur with his most vivid imagery.”
“Yes!” our teacher exclaimed. “That’s exactly right! Astounding!”
In the row in front of me, Amber Tuttlefield raised her hand. She and I were in another class together, American History, along with Chris Tate. He was the Black guy who acted like her boyfriend. Whenever he looked Amber’s way, his face was adoring as Amber raked her fingers through her blond hair. It fell to her tailbone, and sometimes she’d fling the hair back and it would land on my desk.
“I think this whole discussion is really mean and it makes me sad.”
“‘Mean’ how?” Ms. Rogers asked. “Expound, please.”
“Like, why does everything have to be about Black and white or whatever, when true love sees no color?”
“Amber, that is certainly some insightful food for thought. Thank you for sharing your profound feelings.” Ms. Rogers held her hand to her chest in the approximate location of her heart.
At the end of class, I stayed in my desk watching Chris whispering in Amber’s ear.
She laughed, pushing his arm. “You’re such a fucker!”
Ms. Rogers looked up from her desk, frowning. A few beats passed, and then she returned to the papers on her desk. The teachers at my new school were serious pushovers. They let these rich white kids call them by their first names and when a student cursed they didn’t even glance over their shoulder in case an adult overheard. At Toomer, if a teacher heard you cursing, it was an automatic suspension.
Amber rose. When she walked in front of Chris, he stepped in reverse a few paces. Between his fingers there was a piece of paper. He dropped it on my desk then ran after Amber.
There were no buses after school. Everybody waited for their rides home. Chris and a group of white boys kicked a cloth ball among them, bumping into the other kids waiting for their rides. A few of the kids looked annoyed, but most laughed. It was finally Friday. Being an asshole was for the beginning of the week. Chris almost fell backward, but Amber rushed over and grabbed hold of his upper arm. She shouted, “Up!” as she pushed. He located his balance, smiling into her eyes, and her cheeks turned dark pink. Watching them, a stitch formed in my side, but I arranged my face into a pleasant fa?ade. Mama had told me to exhibit my best behavior at this school. Don’t drop my guard and don’t lose my temper, because if anything bad happened those white kids would stick together, so I pretended joy at witnessing Chris and Amber opening their eyes wide, apparently shocked at the miracle of Friday afternoon.
Mama inched the station wagon forward in the queue of cars, honking the horn. Lydia opened the car door.
“Hey, baby,” she said. “Did you have a good day?”
On the grass, Chris and Amber were talking. A wind blew, and she flicked her blond hair out of her face. The other boys restarted the game without him.
*
I took a week, studying the paper Chris had slipped me. There was no name, but there was a phone number, and a handwritten message: You’re so fine and I want to get with you!
I looked for ciphers in those nine words. Was this simply an overture of friendship? And why, when Chris had behaved like the rest of the unfriendly Black kids in this school to my face? Monday morning, I took my time finding an outfit and decided on the one that I’d worn the previous fall, when Mama and I had visited the counselor. My kilt and special sweater with my penny loafers. When I walked into Ms. Rogers’s classroom, Chris’s expression didn’t register that I looked amazing, which was disappointing. But at the end of the lesson he gave me a quick wink and I decided that I would take a chance.