UNINVISIBLE
At Charles L. Sullivan Junior High School, the gifted kids and the regular kids converged like two prison populations let loose in the yard. It was fitting, then, that the school should sit at the top of a hill like a blocky fortress or a squat penitentiary. I had walked those same halls once or twice when I was just a toddler, following my mother to Michael’s classroom so we could deliver his forgotten lunch or pick him up for a doctor’s appointment. Those times, he’d knelt down with his arms spread wide and flashed his huge front teeth at me in a smile. No matter that he was just a gangly seventh grader; to me, he was a giant who’d scoop me up in his arms and spin me around or kneel down and let me climb up onto his back. Walking those same halls for the first few times as a seventh grader myself, I’d felt confident that I was indeed fulfilling some small but necessary bit of my destiny, taking my first steps along the path that my older siblings had mapped for me: junior high, then high school, and then, finally, the enchanted kingdom of college, where I’d find myself in a society of people just like the ones my brothers and sisters had brought home on weekends—the ones who were cultured yet kind; intellectual yet full of good humor. People who spoke with such knowledge and authority about the world that not only did it already seem to belong to them, but they also seemed to possess the ability to break off a piece and offer it to me.
Of course, the panorama of seventh- and eighth-grade boys and girls in my immediate vicinity was a far cry from all the young sophisticates my siblings had introduced me to. Mostly, we were the same piddling lot from last year, with the addition, in some cases, of a smattering of acne. Certain of the regular kids, under the onslaught of adolescent hormones, had become volatile; one or another was always willing, at the tiniest perceived insult, to step in close to the offender and whisper, “I call you out,” the junior high equivalent of throwing down a gauntlet. The park adjacent to campus was the theater for such showdowns. We called it the Bowl, since it looked like someone had spooned out the middle with an enormous ice-cream scoop. Some days, as soon as the dismissal bell rang, a wave of boys and girls could be seen running down the hill toward the action. The first time I set foot in the Bowl was during the archery unit in PE class. The brute strength it took to string up a bow and the primal savagery of shooting an arrow at a distant target (we’d learned from a series of gruesome photographs how much damage a single arrow could inflict) only amplified my sense of the Bowl as a place rife with danger.
From the middle of the playground—well, it wasn’t a playground, just a covered blacktop where we could congregate during lunchtime as an alternative to the cafeteria—it was impossible not to get drawn into people watching. Scanning the crowd, I’d try to gather a sense of what everyone was becoming and where the children we’d so recently been had gone. A lot of the girls had begun to style themselves as Like a Virgin-era Madonna wannabes, in tank dresses, fingerless lace gloves, and armfuls of black rubber bracelets. Some white boys had let their hair go long like fledgling rockers. The equivalent for the black and Asian Pacific Islander kids was to start dressing like B-boys in parachute pants and beanies and practice breaking and popping dance moves with names like windmill, moonwalk, and centipede upon big sheets of linoleum after school. All of these kids who had chosen to adopt a recognizable look or a style had also somehow taken on a different kind of know-how. I wouldn’t call it knowledge, precisely, since most of it was likely just for show, but they’d caught a glimpse of what they’d wanted to be—on TV or in magazines, or maybe they’d been someplace different and scoped it for themselves—and used that as a pattern for who to become and how to do it. At thirteen, I was still just a taller version of my elementary school self. And though I wasn’t alone, I wondered what it would feel like to be aligned with a movement, a group, a real sector of the wider world. It scared me, too, to think a kid could fashion herself into something she’d seen on TV, and be treated accordingly, and then, over time, start following that path toward wherever it led. My mother called things like that fads and told me they were fleeting. What would it mean to choose a path that was fleeting?
Oftentimes, I’d find myself eating my lunch with friends and talking and laughing about whatever it was that we were used to talking and laughing about, but also watching and concentrating upon one girl in particular. Her name was Emmy. She was beautiful and delicate, like one of the dolls my father had brought back from Thailand when I was just a baby, with dark hair that flowed past her waist. She spent her time with one or two other girls, and though I could see for myself that they talked and gestured with one another just like my friends and I did, Emmy gave off the impression of silence. Silence and grace. When school first started, people whispered about her, but the whispering ceased once her body, so far along in pregnancy, began to corroborate all of their rumors. I never once spoke to her, but I remember watching her with a mix of awe and fear—the same feeling I got, on one of the first days of school, seeing my friend Eilene’s sister Leilani kissing a boy out on the edge of campus. It wasn’t just one kiss but many, or else it was a kiss in many stages, a long, hungry dance they were doing with their mouths and their bodies. Everything around them seemed to disappear into silence, swallowed up in that same commotion-obliterating air that followed Emmy around, though perhaps this time it was really just a matter of perspective: I was in my mother’s Volaré, watching through the rear window as the car filled up with knowledge.
Sex was real. It had gone from being something we learned about and recoiled from in disgust and horror to something people found ways of doing and talking about and flaunting. None of my friends was doing it, that I knew of, but I got the feeling that some of the kids who rushed to the Bowl after school weren’t just fighting. There were rumors that you could find empty packets of rubbers in the bushes there. Once, after school, I saw Junior Jackson, one of the Breakers, and LeKneitah Nixon, an eighth-grade girl with enormous breasts and hips that she stuffed into stretchy tops and stirrup pants, goofing around under an overhang outside the gym. They were with a few other kids I didn’t recognize. It was raining, so at first I didn’t think anything of them all huddled together trying not to get wet, but when LeKneitah pushed Junior off her in a way that suggested she was defending herself, I slowed down. I’d have to pass under the same overhang to get to where my mom was waiting in her car. When I got a few steps closer, Junior and LeKneitah were all over one another, laughing like whatever it was had just been a game. Then I watched him work his hand to the inside of her shirt. “Smell it,” she told him, laughing, throwing his hand back at him with her own, which had followed his under her top. My heart sped up. I didn’t know what exactly they were up to, but I could sense that whatever it was, I didn’t want to get myself mixed up in it. I worried about passing so close to them, but I was also aware of this: we were all of us black, and if I had chosen to shy away or show them I was afraid, wouldn’t that somehow be worse than whatever it was they might have thought to do?
When I was close enough for them to notice me, I put a smile on my face and decided just to walk past as casually as I could. If I smiled, they’d think I understood what they were playing at, that I got it and thought it funny or cute, but that I wasn’t going to get involved or let them deter me. “Hey.” I nodded, or at least intended to. But instead of nodding back, they zeroed in on me. The way lions will ignore all the other gazelles save for the one likely to be taken down with the least effort. Junior grabbed me by the shirt, still laughing. LeKneitah and the others were laughing, too. I didn’t discern malice in their laughter; it was just a pitch, a pulse, a rhythm that held them in step with their frenzy. They were so caught up I barely felt it was me they had their hands on. I could have been anything, a dog, a basketball, an empty coat. I was just an object that had come into their range of motion. I tried to pull away, tried to get out from Junior’s grasp, but it was happening so quickly. A hand—I couldn’t tell whom it belonged to—grabbed my breast and then, very quickly, let it go. Suddenly, I was pushed—by them or by my own will?—out of the axis of their commotion. I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to hurry away, not looking at any of them. What would my eyes have said, anyway, had they locked gazes with any of theirs? With their voices distinctly behind me, I heard one of the boys say, “Damn. Why do all the pretty girls have small chests?” I felt angry and violated, and foolish for what I’d managed to let happen. Why hadn’t I just walked around them altogether? Failing that, why hadn’t I stood up to them, manifested my own might? Why hadn’t I even tried to push Junior off, the way LeKneitah had done? Is this how my mother had been made to feel by Papa-san, the old man who’d handled her once in exactly the same way? Perhaps the most vexing of the many thoughts rampant inside my head was my confusion over which group the boy with the question had been lumping me into.
Sex was everywhere. When we were watching TV and the topic of sex came up, my mom would complain that the world was “obsessed” with it. There were after-school specials and TV miniseries about it, and more and more, it turned up in the news. Sex could kill you, everyone was saying, and if it didn’t kill you, it could ruin your life. Look at all the girls out there like Emmy. “Babies having babies,” they called them, teenage girls pushing strollers or waddling pregnant through the mall. There was even new language for describing where they came from, these girls and boys getting into trouble or causing it: Urban Youth, though from what I could discern, the phrase seemed mostly intended as a euphemism for black kids and the occasional brown ones. We had Urban Youth in Fairfield, and we were a whole hour from the city. LeKneitah and Junior fit the profile, and so did plenty of the kids fighting in the park. To someone not paying very close attention, didn’t I fit the profile of an Urban Youth?
Mom picked me up nearly every day after school. When I walked in the door, I dropped my things under the stairs and fell into the rhythm of home. My only real sense of the outside world was what came filtered to me through Phil Donahue or the breaking news. Within a few hours, Jean would arrive home from work. If it was Friday, Dad wouldn’t be long behind her, and the four of us would sit down to eat and to rehash the details of our week.
Whenever I talked about school, I felt like I was describing a place in which I saw myself as an interloper, a not-quite-neutral observer whose ongoing commentary was honed and rehearsed for maximum effect. I thought that watching and reporting was safer than getting too close to the center of some things. Telling my family about what the other kids were doing, particularly the kids least like me, was a way of keeping a little crawl space between myself and the chaos that reached out its hands waiting to snatch up anyone who got close. I’d brushed up against it that time with Junior and LeKneitah, and I spotted evidence of it all around me—in glances passed back and forth, in the boys and girls whose bodies glued themselves to one another any chance they got, not caring who watched—but I wasn’t ready to let it have me.
The kids I only peripherally knew made for the best stories, anyway. And being able to tell a good story over dinner, a story that brought everyone to the point of laughter, was currency in my family. Like the one about Career Day, when Harold, an overgrown eighth grader with a baritone voice and full beard, had cross-examined a local lawyer who’d come to tell us about the ins and outs of his job.
“How much do you make?” Harold had asked, when he was finally called upon.
“Excuse me?” stuttered the lawyer.
“How much do you make?”
“Well, that varies somewhat, depending on—” the lawyer had stammered back, looking to our teacher for help.
“How much do you clear?” Harold wouldn’t let up. He had a question and he wanted to know the answer.
It took a moment for our teacher to catch on to what was happening, during which time Harold continued to press the lawyer. He’d have been happy with just a ballpark figure, but after a couple of rounds of their back-and-forth, the lawyer, who was probably someone’s father, finally admitted that he didn’t feel comfortable sharing his salary with the class. After the bell, Harold had stomped down the hall toward his locker, angry at what he must have perceived as agents of the “real world” trying to keep him in the dark.
I’d felt pity for the lawyer. Wasn’t he just trying to do a nice thing by coming and talking to a bunch of thirteen-year-olds? Maybe he’d also needed the bolstering that should have come from standing in front of our desks telling us what success in his career looked and felt like (once he began to buckle, I noticed that his suit had a sheen to it, a detail I knew would amuse my mother). But Harold was the real protagonist of my story. Big Harold, who looked and sounded like he’d probably been held back a grade or two at some point. Harold, who’d sit sullen and quiet all period long and then, incongruously, announce to everyone and no one in particular, “I’m handlin’ my business!” Harold, whose curiosity on Career Day must at least in part have been rooted in the fact that he wanted to imagine himself as a lawyer, that he’d wanted to weigh that option against whatever else he’d been told was possible. Was it right to laugh? Maybe, but was I laughing at Harold’s crassness or his ambition, or at the lawyer who didn’t know what to do with this big Urban Youth grilling him about his finances?
I wasn’t friends with Harold. I said “hi” to him in the hall, just like I said “hey” to Junior and LeKneitah, even after that upsetting encounter in the rain. The same way I looked back at any black face even if neither of us was going to stop and talk. The way my parents greeted every other black person they saw in the grocery store and the bank. Just a simple acknowledgment that said, You are there. I see you. And I am here, and you see me. We are not invisible, are we? Hadn’t my story about Harold also been a way of saying that not only did I see him, but one way or another I even saw him as my own distant kin, the kind that might make you cringe but that you know you’d better go ahead and claim?
One day, for no reason other than that they were idle or maybe curious, LeKneitah and two of her sisters walked over to our house to pay me a visit after school. I didn’t know LeKneitah had even one sister; she’d always just seemed to exist alone. But she came from a big family, like mine. She and her siblings were close in age, not like me, the straggler, practically an only child by the time everyone else had grown up. At first, I wasn’t sure if they were making fun of me. Probably everyone in junior high has to grapple with such a fear, whenever anyone reaches out in what appears to be friendly interest. But the girls came in and met my mom and Jean. They were nice. Did we eat slices of my mother’s pound cake? Did I take them upstairs to my room? All I remember is the initial shock of their arrival, and then a feeling of bemused gratitude that they’d bothered to come, and surprise at how innocent the three of them seemed, away from school and all the horsing around. For whatever reason, talking back and forth excitedly all together, the girls seemed to have a faintly rural accent, and so my mother had called them “those little country girls” after they’d left, which she’d meant fondly, nostalgically. After all, she and her sisters had once been little country girls, too.
Once or twice afterward, when I complained of having nothing to do, my mother suggested I go visit LeKneitah and her sisters, but I never did. I felt more comfortable keeping their visit as just the briefest of brief stories in my head: “Remember the day LeKneitah and her sisters came to visit? It was like that year when it snowed out of the blue on Christmas morning. They only ever stopped by that one time, and they vanished before we could really make sense of them.”
One place where I felt truly at ease—certain of why I was there, comfortable in the community that contained me, and impervious to the snares and pitfalls I had begun to recognize as part and parcel of adolescence—was in band. I’d kept up playing the clarinet since third grade, carrying the instrument back and forth with me to school and practicing in my room most days. Plenty of the kids I counted as my friends were doing the same thing with instruments of their own. We’d convene every day during sixth period in a double-sized trailer outfitted with risers. So many of my friends from GATE were there that it seemed our insular world hadn’t been fully dispersed. But there was also the pleasure of being reunited with some of the kids from my first school, kids I’d lost track of after first and second grades: Benji and Bryan were in the horn section, and Kerry and Donna were fellow woodwinds.
It felt like a coming together in other ways, too. Playing, we blurred out of the categories that held fast to us at other times. We were white, black, and Asian kids—oddballs and nerds, as far as the kids who weren’t in band were concerned—but when we touched our instruments and gave ourselves over to what vibrated out of them, we were in control, beholden to a power each of us housed. Music indulged our need to excel, but it taught us how to go about losing ourselves, too. Not to the kinds of risks or dangers that other kids had chosen to court but to sound and collective feeling. And we were good. In our black tuxedo jackets or green-and-white polyester marching uniforms, we swept most of our competitions. There was a high shelf of trophies lining the perimeter of the band room, and when he got worked up or angry, our teacher Mr. Taylor would jab in their direction with his baton. “That’s why you’re here,” he’d remind us. “Now, straighten up!”
I wondered if Mr. Taylor was right. He certainly loved competition, and it was clear that he liked to win, but sometimes I suspected that our victories were compromises we made with him: let us hide here in this space between childhood and whatever sits just beyond it, and we will bring you a roomful of trophies. I certainly didn’t relish afternoon practice, which had us marching through the surrounding neighborhood, serenading the residents with “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” I don’t even think I much enjoyed the band meets themselves, those competitions in hot truck-stop towns like Ukiah or Marysville, where we suited up in our green-and-white uniforms and our hats like ornamental buckets, where I took every step with a measure of anxiety, hoping the judges would see me as worthy or not see me at all. One of the drummers—one of the best drummers in the region but not someone who seemed to take it all very seriously—started calling us Taylor’s Army, a moniker that never failed to coax a mutinous laughter. But it was true. Every day during sixth period and during plenty of weekends when other kids were doing whatever it was they did outside of school, we fell into step and obeyed Mr. Taylor’s commands, nine deep, eight wide, minds erased of all but the music and our teacher’s pride. And so we marched, obedient as troops, into the sun or with it searing into our backs, outsmarting our own fatigue, bolstered by the belonging that came with such a compromise. We marched, rank and file, heel-toe, heel-toe, backs straight, sweat dripping into our eyes.