A Good Kind of Trouble Read online

  My English teacher, Ms. Jacobs, assigned a journal project on the first day of school. We’re supposed to write all our observations in it. She calls it our eyeball journal because Ralph Waldo Emerson—the person our school is named for—once said he wanted to be an eyeball. I think that sounds gross.

  One of the things I always write about is what I observed about Yolanda’s hair.

  Today she has one tiny braid on each side, and the rest in small curls. “Cute hair,” I tell her.

  Yolanda puts her hand over her mouth, but I can tell she’s got a big grin going. If she wasn’t so brown skinned, I bet I would see a blush steaming up her cheeks.

  I hear a loud whistle, and our PE teacher, Coach West, shouts, “Hustle on over!”

  We hustle and take our places on the hash marks on the ground so Coach West can take roll. My PE shorts rise up when I sit down. I pull at them as if I could make them magically grow longer.

  After roll call and stretches, Coach West yells, “Four laps, everybody!” and blows her whistle to get us going. (She really likes her whistle.)

  Four laps around the track equals a mile. In junior high, we run a mile every week and we’re supposed to get faster each time. Logically, there has to be a point when this is physically impossible, but Coach West doesn’t seem to think so.

  Our track is made out of recycled tires, so it’s easier to run on than asphalt. In the middle of the track is our field that should be green grass but is brown because of the drought. The air is heavy, pressing against me, trying to slow me down.

  Yolanda keeps up with me for the first two laps, but by the third one she just waves me ahead.

  “Go ahead,” she gasps, gripping her side.

  This is awkward.

  Should I slow down to stay with her? Would it be mean to leave her gasping alone? How would a friendship manual answer these types of questions?

  I’ve never had a Black friend before. My sister makes a huge issue out of that, like there’s something wrong with me, but I don’t get why it’s a big deal. There were hardly any other Black students at my elementary school, and besides, I had Isabella and Julia. Still, I like Yolanda, and even though we’re not quite friends yet, we are friendly and I don’t want to mess it up.

  Coach West blows her whistle again, and I for sure don’t want to get in trouble, so I give Yolanda a little wave and keep running.

  I’m surprised by how good it feels to run. It’s like whatever is circling around in my head bugging me just flies out in the wind and gets left behind on the track. Bye-bye, Bernard! So long, big forehead!

  Half a lap ahead of me, I can see this girl Carmetta. She’s faster than lightning, and all of a sudden I get this wild idea that maybe I can catch her, so I put on the jets and start running as fast as I can. My heart feels like it’s creeping up into my throat, and a pain kicks me right in my side, but I don’t stop running.

  I don’t even come close to catching Carmetta, but when I finish my mile, Coach West clicks her stopwatch and holds her hand up for me to give her a high five. Smacking my hand against hers makes me feel pretty good.

  Yolanda doesn’t get a high five from Coach. I really don’t think she likes running very much. We both head to the water fountain, and I’m wondering if putting deodorant on sweaty pits will keep me from being funky later, when Coach West walks over. “Shayla, you might not know this, but I’m the track coach. You have a nice form going. I think I could use you. Do you want to join the team?”

  I rub my hands together because my palms itch all over. “Track?” I ask.

  Coach West nods.

  “Me?” I glance over at Yolanda and she gives me a little shrug, but she also smiles, so I think she’s okay with Coach West not asking her to join the track team.

  “Yep!” Coach West grins at me, waiting for an answer.

  I want to say no. But Coach West’s smile glides over me like sweet syrup and makes my head go up and down. “Great!” she tells me, and blows her whistle. “All right, everybody, I’ll see you tomorrow!”

  Yolanda elbows me. “Cool,” she whispers, making little panting breaths into my ear.

  I am positive that track will be many things, but cool isn’t one of them.

  You know what it does sound like? A whole steaming plate of trouble.

  4

  Emerson

  Having English after PE is awful because Ms. Jacobs is tough and she hates tardies. So I have to change real quick back into my regular clothes, and I don’t even have a second to check a mirror to make sure I’m not looking a mess before flying to room 218. I’ve only been late once, and Ms. Jacobs gave me a big frown and said not to let it happen again. You bet I haven’t.

  I’m so busy worrying that I might stink from PE, and thinking about the potential awfulness of being on the track team, that I don’t even hear Ms. Jacobs ask her question the first time.

  Ms. Jacobs uncaps a blue dry-erase marker, presses the tip to the whiteboard, and looks at the class over her shoulder. “I asked, what did everyone find out about Ralph Waldo Emerson last night?”

  No one raises their hand, and Ms. Jacobs snaps the top back onto the marker and faces us. Uh-oh. I start rolling my pencil back and forth between my hands to get them to stop itching.

  “Isn’t there anyone who can tell me something about him?” Her exasperated voice has become full-on irritated. She beats her hand with the marker, and each tap hits one of her rings. Tap, tap, tap. It’s like the ticking of a bomb.

  I don’t want to see Ms. Jacobs explode. That tight bun of hers would just fly right off her head. “He lived over a hundred years ago,” I say. “And he wrote a whole bunch of essays that are hard to understand.” I try to think of what else. “Oh, and our school is named after him.” I always do my homework, but I don’t want to be one of those know-it-all kids who wave their hands around like they’re trying to put out a fire whenever a teacher asks a question.

  Ms. Jacobs writes my three things on the board and then looks around the class. No one says anything, but there’s a lot of feet shuffling and readjusting in seats. “Anyone else?”

  When no one else raises their hand, I wish I hadn’t said anything.

  Ms. Jacobs raps the end of the marker on the whiteboard. “Wake up, people! This is your life you’re living. You can’t sleep through it.” Ms. Jacobs says stuff like this a lot. She frowns at us and then gives a little sigh. “Shayla is right. He lived in the eighteen hundreds and he did quite a bit of writing.” She gives me a tiny smile. “It can be a bit dense. But I’m surprised you didn’t learn he was a passionate abolitionist, Shayla.”

  I slump in my seat and start picking at a tiny blob of ink stuck on my desk. I hate when a teacher assumes that just because I’m Black, I’ll know all about slavery and civil rights and stuff like that. I’m the only Black student in the class, so I know everyone’s staring at me, trying to see if I have bat wings or hairy armpits. Like being Black is a whole different species.

  Living in West Los Angeles means there aren’t a whole lot of people who look like me. It was worse in elementary school. At least at Emerson, there are a lot more Black kids. There’s a lot more of everything in junior high. But you wouldn’t know it in my English class. I sink even lower in my seat.

  Ms. Jacobs gives another little sigh and then asks us, “How are everyone’s eyeball journals coming along?”

  I look down and hope someone will volunteer to talk about how wonderful their journal is. My journal is still a whole lot of blank pages and some random observations that don’t seem all that interesting.

  The front doors of the school are silver.

  My sandwich was yummy.

  Yolanda had TEN braids on each side today.

  I need better underwear.

  When no one answers her, Ms. Jacobs says, “If you don’t have anything to write about, watch the news. There have been a lot of stories lately that are important. Race factoring into police activity is something you should pay attention
to.”

  It feels like Ms. Jacobs is just talking to me again, and it makes my whole face get hot. Momma and Daddy were talking last night about how a police officer is going to go on trial because she shot a Black man when he was walking to his car. The video of him getting shot got played over and over online. I sure don’t want to observe that anymore.

  “You know, Emerson had a strong belief in the power of the individual. He believed all people were important. No matter their race.”

  I don’t think I can get any lower in my seat. If Ms. Jacobs was a television, I’d change the channel.

  “It was a pretty radical belief for his time. That type of thinking wasn’t popular or well respected by many people back then. Emerson had to be fairly brave to be an abolitionist.”

  I would like to abolish this conversation.

  5

  Lockers & Lunch

  As soon as Ms. Jacobs releases us, I shove my way down the crowded hallway to my locker.

  Lockers are one thing I love about junior high. It might sound funny to say I love a scratched-up piece of bright yellow, clanky metal, but I do. I love spinning the little dial, pretending I’m an international jewel thief. And once I get my stuff out, or put my stuff in, giving the door a big slam is so satisfying.

  After I fish out my lunch, I slam the door closed. All up and down the hallway the sound of locker doors slamming rings out. I head outside and meet up with Julia by the water machines. They used to be soda machines when my sister went here, but the school district got on a big antisugar kick since then.

  “Where do you think Isabella went?” I ask. With best friends, you always know what they are up to, but until break today, Isabella didn’t breathe one word about leaving early.

  “Probably a doctor’s appointment,” Julia says. “Come on. Let’s go eat!” She whips my arm, making me spin off the walkway, cracking us both up. Julia gives great roller whips.

  We grab each other’s arms and race-walk to the lunch area.

  Outside the gym, a shiny solar overhang shields a bunch of steel-blue tables in tidy rows. It’s where kids sit who brought lunch; if you buy, then you go sit in the cafeteria. Isabella, Julia, and I always bring, so we sit in the overhang area. I like eating outside. Cafeterias stink. Too many food smells blending together. Fish-stick burritos? Yuck!

  It’s weird for it to be just me and Julia at lunch, and it’s even weirder when, instead of heading to our normal lunch table, Julia stops at a table with a bunch of girls she knows from her Asian basketball league and her church.

  She had wanted to sit there on the first day of school, but I told her I wanted it to be just us—the United Nations. What I didn’t say was that I felt awkward with Isabella and me being the only girls there who weren’t Asian, because it seemed like the wrong thing to say even if it was true. I just walked us over to an empty table, and that’s where we’ve been sitting ever since.

  I don’t know why Julia thinks we should change where we sit today just because Isabella isn’t here, but it makes my hands itch all over to keep standing there when the girls are already squeezing over to make room for Julia and me.

  One of the girls at the table is Stacy Chin. Everybody knows Stacy. She’s really popular. She has a loud laugh and an even louder voice. Stacy always wears a lot of glittery eye makeup, and her black hair is streaked with bright magenta highlights. With her spaghetti-strap top and low-cut short shorts, she is basically a walking violation of Emerson’s dress code.

  The dress code is printed right in the handbook they mail out over the summer. It’s hard to wear spaghetti-strap tops with a bra, so I don’t mind there being a rule against them, and no way would my parents let me wear short shorts—to school or anywhere. But making sure skirts go past your fingertips seems dumb, because there’s nothing cute about skirts that long, and not being able to wear solid red or solid blue is a pain. It’s supposed to be a gang-violence thing, but since blue is one of our school’s colors, not being able to wear it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

  Obviously, Stacy isn’t worried one bit about getting in trouble for what she’s wearing.

  And the girl can talk. Like the seagulls that fly around the lunch tables, trying to steal someone’s sandwich. Stacy is all squawk, squawk, squawk.

  “Bruuhh,” she says to Julia. “Can you believe Mr. Milton got all loud at me in history? I was about to go off on him!” She laughs and grabs a bunch of Cheetos from the girl next to her and shoves them into her mouth. Then she makes gagging noises. “Gross, Lynn! Your Cheetos are stale!” Stacy throws a Cheeto at Lynn, and Lynn bats it back at her. “These teachers need to know what’s up, know what I’m sayin’?”

  Lynn rolls her eyes, and I try really hard not to roll mine. Julia gives me a look like she’s trying to warn me not to say anything. At least now I know better than to say, No, I don’t know what you’re saying.

  “So my moms said I already had blue Vans, but these were totally different,” Stacy says, sticking her legs out to show off her shoes. “Like I had to have these kicks, right? I totally got Pops to get ’em. You know how pops are.”

  It’s hard to keep up with Stacy. I wonder if she just opens her mouth and waits to see what random thing will fly out of it.

  All of a sudden, a girl at the next table over shouts, “Command!” and we all turn to see who got caught.

  Almost everyone at Emerson is playing this game called Command. The rules are, you have to keep something crossed all the time, like your fingers or legs. If someone catches you uncrossed, they can command you to do whatever they want, and if you don’t do it, they pound you.

  I am not playing. Who wants to play a game where you can be commanded to do anything? Just call that game Itchy Hands. It feels like I’m the only person in our whole school who doesn’t want to play, and that’s cool with me.

  It’s easy to tell who got caught, because a few tables over, a girl’s face is getting redder and redder while her friend whispers in her ear. Daddy talks a lot about what he calls white privilege, but if you ask me, getting so red that everyone can tell when you’re embarrassed is no kind of privilege. Her blush makes it look like someone scribbled over her face with a red marker.

  Blush girl slowly walks over to a table full of boys and stands in front of one of them. “I . . . I think you’re really cute,” she says, in a trembly voice.

  The whole table of boys starts cracking up, and blush girl runs back to her friends and buries her face in her hands.

  “That’s all kinds of wrong,” I mutter.

  “That’s all kinds of hilarious, you mean,” Stacy says, clapping her hands like it was a great show. “We should totally command someone to do something crazy.” She nudges Julia’s arm.

  “It’s not going to be me,” Julia says. “I’ll always have something crossed.” She holds up her hands and all her fingers are crossed over each other. It looks like someone broke her fingers.

  “I didn’t say it was going to be you,” Stacy says, raising her eyebrows. “But I’m going to get somebody.”

  I shrug. “Well, I’m not even playing.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Stacy asks like she’s daring me to something, and I get a bad feeling. A bad itchy-hand feeling.

  “You’re so mean, Stace,” Lynn says. “You need to quit.” Her long black hair is so shiny and pretty, it’s like she polished it with Windex. When she gives me a big smile, I smile right back like we’re sharing a joke.

  Stacy ignores us and starts talking about how boring her computer elective is, and then everyone starts talking about their electives and how fun or awful they are. Electives are probably the thing I was looking forward to the most about junior high. In elementary school, you don’t get to pick a class just because you like it. You don’t really get to pick anything in elementary school. Julia is in chorus and Isabella is in art. I’m pretty sure Julia’s mom made her take chorus, but Isabella loves anything creative.

  “What’s your elective?” Lynn asks me.


  “Shop,” I say.

  Julia grins at me and I know what’s coming. “But you don’t even like shopping,” she says.

  Ha ha. Stacy cracks up like that’s the best joke ever. I thought it was funny too, the first time Julia said it.

  My elective is actually called Industrial Arts, and of course it has nothing to do with shopping.

  “At least you get to be around Tyler,” Julia says.

  That’s not funny; that’s mean. “Quit it, Julia,” I say. Tyler is a boy in shop with me, and Julia knows how irritating I think he is.

  “Ooo,” Stacy says. “Who’s this Tyler?”

  “Nobody,” I say, giving Julia a warning look.

  Julia looks at me like, Oops. I know she’s just trying to be funny, but I’m going to have to tell her later to save that for when it’s just us.

  A few of the girls start talking about their last basketball game and how tough practice is going to be tonight. Usually when people talk about sports, I don’t have anything to say. But now I realize I actually do.

  “I think I might join the track team,” I offer.

  “Really?” Julia sounds shocked. She knows I’m not very coordinated, but come on. I can run, at least.

  “Yes” is all I say.

  Not only am I going to do track, I’m going to be awesome at it.

  After lunch, Julia and I walk together to our next classes.

  She turns to me and touches my arm. “Hey, it’s cool you’re going to be all athletic now. Maybe next you’ll start playing basketball!” Then she cracks up.

  “Yeah, I’ll sign right up to play on the Tigers,” I joke.

  When Julia first told me you had to be Asian to play in her basketball league, it hurt my feelings. It seemed like the people who made the league were saying they didn’t want me to play with them. But Daddy told me it wasn’t about keeping me out; it was about lifting up the kids who played in the league. He made me watch some basketball games with him and count all the Asian players. The day we watched, I didn’t see one, so I got it after that. Isabella and I have gone to watch Julia’s team play a few times. Julia’s really quick and makes a bunch of three-pointers. I think she’s their best player.