“We received a complaint,” the officer inside says.
“Hi, Officer… Bradford,” Kimberly says, looking at his name tag. She puts on that voice she uses to get boys to do what she wants. Unbothered, she twirls her hair into a rope and wrings it out so the water drips onto the concrete. He watches the water as it falls.
The rest of us stand silently behind her.
“Trespassing’s a serious offense.” The officer isn’t too much older than we are. About twenty or so, brown haired with a whisper of a jawline. Officer Bradford squeaks and then overcorrects with too much bass. We’re not that close, but we’re also not that far from where the Rodney King beating occurred. I wonder if this officer knows those officers. Maybe he works out with them, plays basketball or does community fund-raisers with men who laughed afterward about beating a man until they fractured his skull, damaged his kidneys, and scrambled his brains.
“I think there’s been some confusion,” Kimberly says. “My dad’s totally friends with the owner, and he said it was okay if we used the pool while he’s away.”
He doesn’t buy it, but Kimberly’s leaned over the window and all her beauty is spilling into his car. He pulls his eyes away and looks past her at the rest of us. Grandma Opal used to say that white kids wear their youth like body armor. Bradford’s eyes land on me, and he squints as though he’s found the root of our hooliganism.
“You could call him if you like,” Kimberly offers.
Instead, he makes us sit in a row on the curb. Michael’s legs are hairy and pale next to mine. The burn above his ears is getting worse. He crosses his eyes and sticks his tongue out at me. A Mercedes speeds around the corner.
“That guy was definitely speeding,” Heather says. “That’s a real danger to the neighborhood, officer.”
Officer Bradford ignores her.
“You’ve been drinking?” He sniffs the air around us.
“No,” we say in chorus.
“You’ve been smoking?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” he says.
“We’re seniors.”
“Truancy is against the law,” he says.
It is?
“Driver’s licenses and school IDs,” he says. “Now.”
He reaches for Michael’s first.
“I don’t have any ID on me.” Michael shrugs. He’s definitely lying, and Bradford definitely knows it.
Bradford asks Heather, and she gestures at her bikini top. “Doesn’t exactly go with the outfit.”
“Don’t be a smart-ass.” Officer Bradford points to me and reaches his hand out. “You.”
My black ass is not going to risk lying to a police officer. I pass my ID and license over to him with a slight tremble in my hand. I still had braces in my school ID photo. I used alternate colors on each tooth so my smile was a rainbow.
“Oh fuck,” Kimberly whispers.
“I’m calling your school,” he says.
* * *
And he does.
“Everything would’ve been fine if Ash wasn’t with us,” Kimberly says, laughing, as we walk back to her place. “Otherwise we’d totally have gotten away with it.
“ ’Cause you’re black,” she says by way of explanation.
Sometimes she says “black” like it’s this really funny dirty word.
“Yeah, I got it,” I say.
* * *
The first time I remember one of my parents being pulled over by a cop, I was eight. The day before, my mother had brought home a brand-new convertible, white with a tan interior, like a pair of buttery leather gloves against your skin. We had a girls’ day, just the two of us, and she put the top down so that the wind blew about our faces, and I reached up and out and tried to catch the sky in my fingertips. It felt a little like flying. My fingernails had been painted the pink of the inside of a seashell at the spa, same as my mother’s, and the two Vietnamese spa owners had laughed and shouted across the squeaky leather chairs at each other as they pushed back our cuticles. My mother and I were laughing, our hair undone in the wind, when we saw the flashing lights in our rearview mirror. The officer was younger than my mother, with the same wispy blond goatee he must’ve had in high school. He looked like a bullied kid turned bully, the kind of kid who’d been too big, too poor, or too dumb and was now more than happy to pull over anybody he deemed too anything. In our case, too black.
“Why are you pulling me over?” my mother asked. Her hair looked a little crazy, and she smoothed it down quickly.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“I live here. Just a few miles up the road.” She recited the address.
“What apartment number?”
“None. It’s a house. Is all this necessary?” she said.
“There’s no plates on your car.”
“That’s because it’s brand-new. I just bought it.”
“License and registration, please.”
She slowly and carefully reached into the glove compartment for the little folder with her new-car paperwork and insurance, announcing everything she was doing as she did it, and then she passed it over to him along with her license. He made a big show of radio-ing everything in, hand resting on his gun, which hung right by my mother’s head. Instead of staring over at her, I kept staring down at my new pink nails, afraid to look up.
When the voice on the other end finally confirmed ownership, he looked disappointed, then quickly discarded us like a Christmas toy come New Year’s.
“Have a good day, ma’am,” he said.
“You too, officer,” my mother said, smiling.
But when she went to turn the key in the ignition, her hands were trembling. She rolled up the windows and pulled the convertible top up so the car grew small and dark and our heads no longer touched the open sky.
“Asshole,” she muttered.
* * *
When Lucia pulls up to Kimberly’s house, I’m already waiting outside. Inside, Kimberly’s mom is yelling at Kimberly, so rather than watch a preview of our own inevitable parental verbal ass whuppings, the rest of us wait on her front steps. I wave to Heather and Courtney before I make the perp walk to the car. I’ve hardly even opened the car door before Lucia starts yelling at me, her pretty mouth an AK-47 shooting Spanish bullets. Her nails and mouth are always red, like a gash or a rose, and she says this reminds her that she’s still a woman, even when covered in somebody else’s dirt. The words keep coming out in a rat-a-tat-tat until finally she pauses and sighs. “I won’t always be around, mija.”
On the radio, a grown man yells at me to go to some for-profit college: “Aren’t you sick of your dead-end life? What you waiting for?”
These are the ads they play on Spanish and Black people stations—bail bonds, cheap auto insurance, ads in which grown men berate your very existence. As we drive, the surfers pack up for the day along the rocks, reedlike and tan, half-naked and black from the waist down in their wet suits, like one of those half-chocolate Pocky snacks Heather brought back from her trip to Japan.