“Why didn’t you tell me James was in your class?”
“I didn’t know you’d care,” I say.
“Well, ‘care’ is a strong word. I’m just, I don’t know. I didn’t realize you had a class with him too,” Chelsea says.
I give her a look.
“What?”
“Um, does Chelsea Spencer have a crush on someone and isn’t telling me?”
“I, no. We’re just friends—I don’t, I don’t even know if we’re friends. It’s just that I have a class with him, and I didn’t know you two had a class together too. That’s all.”
“If you say so,” I tease.
“Jasmine—”
“Payback for all the comments and jokes you’ve ever made about me and Isaac.”
“Oh, please. You and Isaac are perfect for each other and just need to admit your feelings. James Bradford and I? We barely know each other.”
“If you say so,” I repeat. I go into the classroom and sit next to James. Our science class is officially called the Science of Social Justice. Mrs. Curtis is the youngest teacher in the school and is so honest with us that sometimes I wonder if she’s supposed to be telling us everything she tells us. I had her last year, and I know there is no holding back in this class. We talk about the intersection of ethics, social justice, and science, and sometimes it gets kind of heated.
On the first day of class, Mrs. Curtis gave us our course syllabus. The units of study this year will be “The Use of Human Subjects in Medical Research,” “The Rising Rates of Childhood Obesity,” and “The Environment, Climate Change, and Racism.”
I’m excited to talk about all of these except the one about obesity. I hate talking about weight with skinny people. As a big girl it’s like I’m invisible around skinny people; sometimes they make jokes or say things like “Oh my God I’m getting so fat,” when really they wear a size small or medium, and no one who wears a small or medium—or large, for that matter—is truly fat. They don’t know anything about being this big. And really, that’s not what bothers me. What hurts is the disgust in their voice, the visceral fear in their tone, like gaining weight would be the absolute worst thing to happen to them. And so I just sit there, kind of in shock for most of those conversations.
It’s completely opposite when I’m the only black girl in a conversation. If race comes up, people look to me to answer questions like I know everything there is to know about blackness. So pretty much my whole life is going back and forth from being super visible to invisible.
Mrs. Curtis starts class today saying, “Good afternoon, everyone. We’ve got a lot to cover today. Let’s jump right in. I’d like you to write down four words that describe you. Don’t think too hard about it. First four words that come to mind.”
I write down my words, and when Mrs. Curtis tells us to share our lists with a partner, I am paired with James.
He goes first. “Um, I wrote down athletic, outgoing, generous, and then I couldn’t really think of another one.”
“You couldn’t think of a fourth word?”
He laughs. “I don’t really think about myself like that. I mean, who walks around thinking about words to describe themselves? What, you got like twenty words, huh?”
“Just four,” I tell him. But I could have put down twenty. I really could have. I read my list. “Black, female, activist, actress.”
“Damn.” James leans back in his chair. “Why you and Chelsea always gotta be so deep?”
“What’s deep about me saying I’m a black girl who likes theater and who cares about our world?”
James doesn’t have time to answer—not that he’d have an answer—because Mrs. Curtis calls our attention back to her and says, “I want you to look at each other’s lists and tell one another what you notice,” she says. Then she adds, “And no judgments, just noticings.”
We swap lists. I go first this time. “I notice that you didn’t describe your ethnicity or gender,” I say.
He jumps in with, “I notice that you did. You definitely did.”
“No judging,” I remind him.
“I’m not. I’m noticing that you almost always bring up race and gender no matter what the topic is.”
“Well, the topic is to describe myself. So I did.”
James says, “If our yearbook has a category for Most Likely to Start a Revolution, you and Chelsea will be tied.”
I start laughing.
“What’s so funny?” James asks.
“Oh, nothing. I’m just noticing how you keep mentioning Chelsea. Any chance you get, you bring her up.”
Mrs. Curtis stands and calls our attention back to her. “Okay, so how many of you used adjectives that describe your personality?”
Hands go up.
Mrs. Curtis calls on a few students and writes their words on the board: loyal, funny, generous. Then she asks, “Anyone use words that spoke to a talent you have?”
More hands go up.
She writes athletic, musician, poet, singer on the board.
Then she asks if any of us wrote down words that describe our ethnicity. Not as many hands go up, and the ones that do are all people of color.
Mrs. Curtis puts the cap on the dry-erase marker, sets it down, and sits back in the circle. She gives us another handout. The top says “Science’s Role in the Social Construction of Race.” Mrs. Curtis says, “Even though race—especially in North America—is how humans get categorized, even though it’s what divided our country and sometimes still does, race is a social construct. It’s really true that on the inside we’re not that different, and in this unit we’re going to talk about that.”
When the bell rings, James and I walk out together. He says to me, “I wasn’t talking about Chelsea a lot.”
“And there you go again,” I say.
James laughs. “Okay, you’ve got a point.”
“I get it. She’s an awesome, smart, beautiful person. What’s not to love?”
“Love? Whoa—who said anything about love? Anyway, I’m with Meg.”
“What? Since when?”
“Last week.”
I hope Chelsea meant it when she said she doesn’t like James.
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s go! I want to see you push yourselves to the limit here,” Coach Williams yells in our general direction. I say that, because we are all scattered around the sweaty gym floor. It smells like a combination of BO and hairspray, and every time I breathe too deeply, I gag.
“Why would he want us to push ourselves to the limit? I don’t even know what that means,” I whisper to Nadine, who was forced to switch from band class to gym, since she’d already taken all her music credits. She was totally pissed, but it’s currently making my life much easier, since I have someone to talk to when my obsession over James becomes too much for one woman to handle. I’m beginning to think that I am too much to handle, and besides the fact that he looks good and knows that we’re in the same class, I have no real reason to even like him—I guess lately, it’s giving me something to take my mind off missing poetry club, or clubs in general.