Dance to your favorite song loud loud
Call your friends & talk them into walking the mall with you
Call someone that likes you more than you like them
& let their adoration fill you up
Put on your favorite pair of leggings
& strut to the corner store slow
Buy something small:
a pack of gum, a candy bar, or a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos
Laugh loud in front of your enemies
Don’t write about it Don’t write about it?
Nah, don’t leave evidence of the sads.
& never ever let it take you somewhere you can’t come back from.
NOW, WHEN I GET A CHANCE TO HAVE MY FIRST KISS
I jump
Literally
Out my skin
Then I climb in the closet with Adrian from the junior class.
The thing is my shorts ain’t short enough
& my tank top ain’t tight at all
I figure I ain’t too much to look at no way
So, when Adrian
choose me for a round of “Seconds in Heaven”
I decide he know what to do with a kiss
Besides
He got the freshest flattop
& run the Edison Alternative School
the one opposite RFK Prep Academy up the hill
You know,
The one we heard all the bad stories about.
STORIES
like the ceiling with water falling in on the classrooms even after it rains for days on end. The desks are moved to the front of the room leaving the blue wastebaskets to collect the water before one of the students is assigned with dumping the water in the nearest bathroom sink.
STORIES LIKE THE BOYS
who compare videos of girls in their locker rooms. Like the boys who leak the videos online when they mad. Like the boys who leak the videos online when they get bored. How the videos made the girl into a mess her mother would have to clean up. Like the time the mother transferred the girl out of school because her daughter couldn’t walk into a room without people whispering & giggling. Like the boys were expelled from the entire school district. Like the girl went to a whole other school & by the time she got there the videos had surfaced over there too. Like the boys never really felt no kind of way because they were too busy being celebrated & given high fives from their homies.
STORIES LIKE THE ONES WE HEARD ABOUT ANGEL
She was once the one everyone wanted to be like. Until Lay Li arrived on campus. Tight jeans with patches
strategically placed everywhere: Hip. Butt. Right knee. Left shin. It made the eyes check out her fly. Her baby hair
was eco style perfect and her lips pouted with the shiniest MAC sheen ever. I didn’t really hang with Angel then.
But I thought she was nice enough. We all dance in a circle at homecoming one year when we still thought
a bunch of barrettes and a set of earrings made you special enough to be remembered.
Angel had light light eyes. Like green, light. Like tree, bright. She sport her ash-blond hair
bone straight. Which was pretty hard to do surrounded by all the valley’s humidity. But Angel
ain’t gave up. She kept a brown brush in her back pocket & tied the handle with her green scrunchie.
Angel had four younger siblings. All of them heads full of ash-blond hair. Curly tight bangs
covered their eyes like a perfect Disney character. But they mama being the janitor at our grade school
made them the butt of everyone’s jokes. I ain’t laugh. Ain’t nothing funny about making sure your kids fed.
But Angel couldn’t get away from the laughter.
STORIES ABOUT ANGEL’S MAMA
began to circulate like a wasp’s nest, bothered. Someone said they socks went missing.
Someone said they lunch money went missing. Everyone blamed Angel’s mama. Sat in her face
in the lunchroom and dared her to pounce. But Angel was sugar sweet. At first,
she didn’t like to fight. Rumor has it her daddy beat her mama. That’s why
her mama walked slow around the rooms, cleaning & humming. No hurry. No care
for the things that children might say about her. Just feeling like she had to get
from one task to the next, safely. One day, it’s like Angel woke up.
Just wound up her fists & started swinging.
Some think maybe she started to fight so people would stop focusing on her mama.
But Angel’s anger grew until it had legs, arms, and its own nervous system.
She stole a car once. She fought on the back of the bus another time. She smacked a girl over lollipops in the back of the team van. As it drove the cheerleaders to the away game across town.
STORIES CAN CHANGE WHO YOU ARE TO YOURSELF
Shoot, stories can change your whole world. Look at Angel. Darius became her world. & here comes a whole new story about who Angel is & how we will remember her. Darius became a new story. He was an older boy at Burbank High that took a real liking to her. Saw her at one of the away games & told her to sit beside him after the game was finished. He wasn’t a ballplayer. But he was respected. Black hoodie and army fatigue jacket covered his shoulders. And he didn’t smile much. But when he saw her, he did. In no time Angel and Darius were inseparable. People stopped talking bad about Angel’s mama. But Angel ain’t stop swinging. Angel quit cheerleading altogether. Darius was known to be hot tempered and even more hot handed. He swung on anybody. He connects like Iron Fist. Like Street Fighter. Like Mortal Kombat. Him & Angel began to turn on each other. It got to the point Angel ain’t allowed to walk too far away from Darius when she visits him at the away games. My mama said that’s a bad recipe. & the way her & my pops broke up, I believe her. Boys from other schools who don’t know what’s the what. History ain’t always passed easily. And Angel is beautiful like that. She caused boys to stop and talk about silly things. Talk about anything that would keep her attention. Darius get to swinging on the boy that look too long into her pretty eyes. He doesn’t listen to Angel screams, telling him to stop. He tried to swing on her school security too. That’s how he got kicked out of Burbank and afterward the only school that would take him is Edison Alternative. At least that’s the story I heard.