CHAPTER ONE
2008, Brooklyn Center, Minnesota
KOLLIE FLOMO WAS DONE. All he wanted was a moment’s peace and quiet.
“Fucking motherfuckers. No fucking culture-menh.” He echoed his mother’s words under his breath as he wiped the spit from the back of his neck. He searched the hallway for the spitter—probably the same person who’d cough-shouted, “Jungle nigger.” When he saw no obvious culprit, he gave up, walked into geometry, and found his place beside Abraham. His younger sister, Angel, sat in the back of the room, her textbook already open to the appropriate chapter, her pencil resting on a blank notebook page. Kollie grimaced. It was annoying to be in the same class, but they had a tacit agreement to ignore each other. So far, she was holding up her end of the bargain, scanning the room with a bored look on her face, pretending not to see him.
“Ya hello,” he said to Abraham absently.
“Good morning, Comrade,” Abraham replied, far too brightly. “You exactly seven minutes late-oh.”
The two of them had lived three houses down from each other since the sixth grade. Some days, though, Kollie wondered if he even liked Abraham.
“Six. I had to urinate-oh,” Kollie said. He took out his phone. No new texts. He threw his book on the table and then slouched down in his chair.
At the front of the room, Mrs. Walker turned around from the blackboard, startled by the noise. Kollie knew that she wouldn’t do anything. She smiled at him nervously. Kollie nodded at her, then pulled his ball cap down over his eyes, how he liked it. She faced the blackboard again and continued writing some theorem that was basically illegible to him and probably made perfect sense to Fake-Ass Angel. He didn’t know why he even bothered with this class. His daddy was buying him a basement club in Crystal, where he and his friends could spin the latest tracks for their friends and relatives, and make plenty of cash. He could almost hear Big Boi’s dope lyrics skipping over the beat like a stone across cracked sidewalk.
“Sonja say she finished with Clark now,” whispered Abraham, his pencil diligently moving across the paper.
Kollie pretended not to care, but his palms began to sweat. “Eh?”
Sonja was the flyest girl in school, and she was into both black and African guys, which was pretty rare for a black girl. Kollie had heard that her father was Kenyan.
“Definitely,” whispered Abraham.
There was something about Sonja—maybe the way she smelled like clean soap, or the way her medium-sized, perky breasts peeked out of her T-shirts, or maybe even her loud laugh—but Kollie had a huge crush on her. He had been trying to get up the nerve to talk to her for weeks, but she always seemed to be surrounded by so many people. His own girlfriend, Lovie, was always around, too.
“Yes,” said Abraham. “You should get her-oh. That big jue not be free for long now.”
“Just like that?”
Abraham looked at him sideways. “Just like that, Comrade. Why not?”
Kollie thought about it for a moment: Why not? He grimaced. For starters, Clark, Sonja’s now ex-boyfriend, had recently beat the shit out of Hassan Mohammed, who had four inches and thirty pounds on Kollie.
Why y’all jungle animals here, anyway? (Hassan wiped the blood from his nose with the back of his hand while Clark stared down at him.) Minnesota’s too cold for y’all. Can’t run around here butt naked, like, Owwwwoooo! (Accompanied by monkey-like gestures and noises.) Admit it: It’d be better to get back to that one tree y’all got in your little African village, the one that throws enough shade to cover your small little dicks. Oh yeah, I heard about that—your secret’s out. They took all the big-dicked dudes outta Africa and brought them here . . . and left all you small-dicked niggers to satisfy your poor-ass women there. Which would be why the ladies love us. (The black guys were whooping and hollering by this point.) And why they steady running from you fake-ass Negroes. (Jake Evans, the varsity quarterback, was clapping and laughing with his friends, like they were watching the Super Bowl or something. And all the teachers and lunch monitors were pretending that nothing was going on, like usual. Eventually someone handed Hassan a wad of napkins to clean himself up.)
“Let me think about it-oh,” Kollie said, as casually as he could muster.
Abraham laughed. “Think all you want-menh. Just don’t be surprised if someone else gets her while you doing all that thinking.”
Kollie pounded the controller as fast as he could, but his zombie’s bazooka refused to fire.
Sitting to his right, Gabriel laughed. “Team Plants ’bout to eat you alive, my brother.” He snickered.
“Eeh-menh! What the fuck is wrong with your console?” Kollie whined. What he really wanted to do was throw it across the room, but he didn’t want Gabriel’s parents to come down from their Bible study group. They had already threatened to throw away the PlayStation last week after a five-hour, seven-player odyssey of Dark Souls II got a little too rowdy. And before that, the boys’ gaming sessions had earned them exile in the basement. The steady stream of profanity did not go well with the Kamara family living room’s fifty-five-inch 4K OLED TV, with its clear-plastic-covered leather love seat and recliner, or with the framed poster of a white Jesus smiling down on it all.
“Gabe, you so corny, man,” Tetee said, perched atop the back of an old couch. He stuffed a handful of Doritos in his mouth.
“Yeah, but at least I don’t suck,” Gabe said, firing a round into Kollie’s staggering masses and blowing off most of their heads.
“Fuck you, asshole,” Kollie said. “The fact is, this bitch-ass game is some motherfucking bullshit.” Sometimes he marveled at how easily swear words rolled off his tongue now. When he had first come to America, every time he had even heard a swear word he had jumped. Now he couldn’t even imagine speaking English without them. They were like ketchup on a hamburger or pepper in soup—they gave everything flavor.
“Spoken like a true loser,” said Gabriel.
“Whatever, bitch.” Kollie pounded the X button on his controller until his finger hurt, but still his rocket launcher refused to reload fast enough. “Fuck!”
These words had power when he used them, like little bombs going off all around. When he was ten, he hadn’t understood that, hadn’t gotten why the black boys used them every other word. But now he was sixteen.
“Yes! Who’s a bitch now?” Gabriel threw his hands in the air. Kollie resisted the urge to punch him. He knew Gabe well enough by now to know that he was only playing, that this was part of the fun of gaming with his crew. Still, his belly felt raw. Things had been bothering him lately that he knew shouldn’t, but somehow, he couldn’t help it. He dropped the controller into his lap.
“Plants vs. Zombies, who comes up with that pussy shit? Just stupid-oh, a flower running around with a peashooter, trying to eliminate zombies. What kind of faggot game is that-menh? Americans can be some stupid-ass people-oh,” said Kollie.
Tetee leaned down and put a hand on his shoulder. “Relax, Comrade.”
“And then you got to be even stupider to actually buy the fucking game,” Kollie continued, undaunted. “My man, would you plead temporary insanity was what made you buy this piece of shit?”
Gabe’s suppression-fire specialist massacred the last of Kollie’s zombies, and the big red game over flashed across the screen. “I wouldn’t plead shit, Comrade My-Bitch,” said Gabe. He had been in the U.S. since he was four, so it was easy to mistake him for a regular black guy. “What I would do is tell you to get used to getting your ass kicked by a damn plant.”
Tetee laughed.
Kollie’s stomach still hurt, and his fist was now screaming to connect with Gabe’s jaw. He knew that Gabe had no idea, that he had really meant nothing by it—this was all part of regular gamer trash talk. But Kollie couldn’t shake the idea that it would feel so good to hit him, to hit anybody.
Tetee, who had lived next to Kollie in Red Light the year before the war came to Monrovia, squeezed his shoulder again. “Relax, Comrade. It’s just a game-menh.”
Kollie sighed and closed his eyes. An image of his family and Tetee’s huddled together in a small church auditorium while rocket launchers exploded into the night flashed before his eyes, and then he pushed it aside. Instead, he imagined himself kissing Sonja, her soft lips covering his. His breath became deeper, more regular, and he began to feel like himself again. “My man, put down the chips and play this rebel bitch already.” Kollie stood up and handed the controller to Tetee. “Motherfucker, you ’bout to get shown how plants are put down in Red Light.” Kollie was both surprised and encouraged that he could manage a smile.
Tetee laughed and moved to sit beside Gabe.
Gabe stood too, and then pulled his jeans down below his butt, exaggerating the way the black dudes wore them at Brooklyn Center. Then he started jumping around, making an AK-47 out of his hands. “Try me, bitches. Do it. Niggas call me General Saggy Pants, ’cause my Small Boys kill Big Men in fancy suit-oh,” he said. “My AK shoot your zombie dead with my black magic peas!” Gabe said now, prancing around like a pony on amphetamines.
Both Kollie and Tetee collapsed in laughter on the floor.
And just like that, everything was fine again.