The entire class ran, rushing to the door all at once, ramming against each other, trying to be the first ones to spill out into the hallway. I waited at my desk for the crowd to thin out so I could leave at my own pace without pushing against anyone: I had nowhere to hurry to. Rochelle joined me as I headed out of the classroom and told me all of our friends were going to hang out at her place for the rest of the day. Was I coming?
“I can’t. My mom checked off the box,” I said.
“So? Just leave. You know these white-bread teachers don’t give a shit about what we do.”
The rest of our friends — Anita, Jordan, and Aishani — were at their lockers packing their things. Anita came over to us, twirling her straightened hair into a ponytail high up on her head.
“Nuh fret it, Chelle, you know she’s not gonna come. She too ’fraid of Mummy. Got her on lockdown and shit, she canna even run ’cross di street fi buy a patty at lunch.”
“Kara, I live two streets over from you,” Rochelle said. “Just come.”
I had never been to Rochelle’s house when her mother wasn’t around, and never for more than a couple of hours: my mother always called me home way before the other girls had to leave. And every time I was forced to leave, something good would happen: Truth or Dare or a scary movie on TV or a game of Nicky Nicky Nine Doors. The next day they’d all laugh about a moment I’d missed. I’d smile with them and then they would look at me, all of their eyebrows raised. “What’re you laughing at? You weren’t even there.” They would continue to giggle, and I would bite my lip and watch. To stay in the group, thick skin was a must — being able to take an insult was respected just as much as being able to throw shade.
Aishani and Jordan tilted their heads up in my direction. “So what’s going on, Kara?” they asked. “You coming?”
“Just come,” said Rochelle. “You never do anything.”
There were no adults in the hallway to see me leave and Rochelle was right: the teachers here really didn’t care about you if you weren’t a student in their class anyway. It wasn’t like my old school downtown on Ferndale Avenue, where everything and everyone was under watch. I’d had to beg my mother to transfer me out and away from those kids who were so eager to comment on my thick lips and grab fistfuls of my kinky hair; beg her to let me do my two years of junior high around the neighbourhood, around my friends from the block.
“If you get into any sort of trouble, I will pull you out and enroll you back downtown, you understand me?” she’d said. “That includes failing math.”
“Yes, Mummy.”
I looked back toward the stairs that led up to the office, rubbing my palm against the back of my neck.
“I told you she’d stay,” said Anita, smirking.
For once, I wanted to shock that smirk off her face. I turned to her. “Fuck it,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Anita narrowed her eyes as I opened my locker and started packing my things. Everyone had left the hallway except us. Rochelle and the rest were grouped together in a circle, wearing cropped winter jackets with fur-trimmed hoods, their hair freshly relaxed or pulled back into ringletted ponytails, their tight jeans tucked into suede boots that reached their knees. I didn’t look as good in my clothes as they did in theirs. I had no meat on my bones, no pout to my lips, and they were all starting to curve into that thickness Island boys loved, their eyebrows cocked in that flirty curiosity that got those boys’ attention.
“They’re faas,” my mother would say, “and one of them is going to end up pregnant. Just watch.”
Behind me, Jordan and Aishani were arguing over just how cute Jhamar, the student council president, was, Aishani rolling the R’s with her tongue every time. She was Indian, like from India Indian, but told any boy who swaggered up to her that she was Trini and explained that being born in Canada meant she couldn’t put on the accent. Once we asked her what the capital of Trinidad was. When she said Tobago we doubled over laughing, and later on that day she pulled me to the side to ask what was so funny about her answer.
I zipped up my jacket and swung my knapsack over my shoulder.
“Ay, look at this, Kara ah take charge! She think she a bad gyal for she break the rules dey,” said Jordan, laughing with Rochelle.
“She’ll probably cave halfway to your house and run back to school, Chelle.”
“Quiet, Anita. Yuh run yuh mouth too much,” I said.
“What’s this? Miss Canada gwine fi bust out the patois? Yuh need to stop Ja-fakin’ it, Kara.”
I opened my mouth to respond but felt my shoulders roll back, felt acrid spit fill my mouth, and knew I looked the way the women in my family did when they had a loud point to make. Trouble usually followed whenever they spoke in that stance, and I wasn’t up for that. I kept walking. I always lost when I went head-to-head with Anita anyway; her comebacks were harsher and her accent was better. Real. Not something she had to put on. The rest of us just cobbled together what we could from listening to our parents or grandparents, but Anita was fresh from Jamaica — there was no competing, especially when I had the weakest accent out of all the Canadian-borns.
We pushed through the doors and stepped out into the schoolyard. The snow had started to fall, light and fast and fluffy; it was good for packing, for snowmen and snowballs, but I wasn’t fooled. This was how all storms started. Gently.
We all tugged our hoods over our heads, Rochelle and Anita squealing every time the snow dappled their straightened strands with wetness. Already, I could see the frizz coming out, kinky and tight, disrupting the silkiness they’d endured the hot comb for the night before. I grazed my palm over my scalp to see if my braids were still smooth. They weren’t, but it could’ve been worse.
Our school was right at Vaughan and Oakwood, hidden in one of the residential pockets in the centre of the area where the Caribbean and Europe converged. Once you left the playground you could turn right toward downtown and head to Little Italy on St. Clair West; but we were turning left up toward Eglinton West and Marlee: Island Town. The walk in either direction was mixed with both groups, though. Bungalow windows boasted the colourful banners of the Island flags: red, yellow, and green for Guyana; black, yellow, and green for Jamaica. Nonnas and nonnos crowded every other porch, teetering on rocking chairs, drinking beer or Brio Chinotto, their pit bulls snarling in the backyard.
“I can’t get my hood to stay on,” said Jordan, bunching up her jacket at the neck so that the snow wouldn’t get through the gap and melt on her chest.
“White girls can get their hair wet,” said Rochelle. “Stop frontin’ like you need your hood.”
The rest of us laughed, and Jordan gave us the finger. She was mixed. Her mother was black Guyanese and her father was Canadian. Seventh-generation Canadian, too, not Italian-Canadian or Portuguese or anything. She’d come out a light, light milky brown — almost beige — with a small pointed nose, hazel eyes, and hair that was short and auburn and kind of curly but mostly straight. The year before, she’d done a home spray tan to make herself darker but ended up making herself orange instead. I was the only one who knew that. I don’t know if it was because I didn’t go to school with everyone yet or because she knew I was too nice to say anything to anyone, but she’d told the others she couldn’t go to school because of the flu.