It’s easier to decide who you’re not.
Chapter 1
The paralyzing hell of committing to a one-way relationship started on the first day of high school. Seth leaned out of his seat to pick up his pencil. The cute brunette in front of him reached back for it at the same time, her hair hiding her face. As she passed back his eraser-less Number 2 her warm fingertips brushed his palm.
Seth accepted it silently. “Thanks,” he finally whispered to her back.
The girl turned around. She smiled at him like this whole thing was normal. “You’re welcome,” she whispered back. Her breath smelled like coffee and Juicy Fruit gum.
That was it. She’d handed him a pencil: he’d handed her his heart .
* * * * * *
Today, like usual, he’d spent the first six periods craving and dreading the seventh. Seth sucked in a deep breath. The sweaty ooze from the nearby locker rooms competed with the urgent smell of spring rain hitting concrete.
Seth wiped his clammy hands on his jeans, and traced the outlines of the month-old letter folded inside his pocket. He pulled it out. I’ve liked you since the beginning of 10th grade. We haven’t had any big conversations but. . . A smudge on a top corner mocked him as he re-folded it and slid it back into his pocket.
Senior year was almost over. Pretty soon he’d never see Quinn Ganey again. All of this unspent . . . whatever . . . would have been pointless. This stupid crush, this blight on his already uncertain horizon, had turned into a matter of diminishing returns: hope used to outweigh the fear. Now Seth had almost no hope at all and felt queasy most of the time. Putting the note in her hands was the only way to get a reprieve.
Once, he’d watched her eat lunch with a big table of friends, hearing her loud laugh ping across the cafeteria. Her straight posture and careful comments in class gave her a sort of dignity. But her laugh—this rolling, little-girly giggle—exploded out of her like pop from a shaken can. When a jock named Trey catapulted a greasy kernel of canned corn into her hair she pretended not to notice. But when he started harassing another pretty target, Quinn lobbed her entire hamburger across the table, smacking him hard on the side of his face. The girl had balls.
Seth slammed the door of his locker, pinching the calloused underside of his thumb in the metal seam and sending a zap of pain up his arm. The locker door rattled as he tugged his hand loose.
Maybe it was her easy way of being in the world. Just watching her for three years made him feel like good things were finally within his reach. Even, maybe, her affections.
Sometimes his crush eased up by congealing into resentment. She made it look so easy to jump into a friend’s car for a fast food lunch, like everybody had cars and friends and money to spend, like she’d lived her whole tidy life in Lincoln, Nebraska. Seth wanted to yell at her that people only came from here: nobody but Southeast Asian refugees and university professors came to it.
Lincoln had that smug, small town thing going on: it puffed itself up over its pioneer history and civic pride while ignoring what it didn’t want to see. The weed-choked sidewalks and long blocks of disintegrating buildings near his house made Seth crave Virginia’s civilized green spaces. No wonder his mom had moved them here five years ago for a landscaping job. He’d never seen a place more in need of landscaping.
At the end of the hall Jennifer Nguyen bounced up and down with another tiny Vietnamese girl, squealing with each impact. “He asked! I’m going!” Another breathless conversation about senior prom. Perfect.
Seth checked the hallway clock as he slumped one shoulder against dented metal. He sucked the white ridge on his thumb. The clock gave him two more minutes. His heart slammed against his ribcage as he ran his pulsing thumb over the folded edge of the note. Suffering the consequences had to be better than just plain suffering. Seth pulled up his backpack on his shoulder and swiped his hair out of his eyes.
He’d wait for her outside of class. As of right now it was officially unbearable to carry around an unread love note.
Chapter 2
Quinn tucked in the white cotton strap of her bra. It had been sneaking beyond the two-inch wide boundaries of her sleeveless sundress all day. The dial on her locker’s padlock nearly spun itself, letting the lock release with a pleasing thunk. She smoothed her hair behind her ears.
Terrence, her locker neighbor, half-strutted and half-bounced to his locker on Quinn’s right. He nodded a greeting down to her, but directed his opening volley over her head to Brent, the guy opening the locker on her left.
“Yo, Man, this girl Nicole was all over me,” said Terrence. “I’m telling her, ‘This is my little brother’s recital, awright?’” He primped his oiled curls with one hand, and spun his lock with the other.
Quinn returned Terrence’s smile, yawning as she opened her locker. By March of her senior year she’d become a bored but tolerant bystander in their mildly amusing testosterone war. She slid her French text book onto a shelf.
Brent made a point of catching Quinn’s eye. The dim fluorescent lighting in the second floor hallway made his red hair look redder. His flop hairdo screamed “1986.” This was 1989. When he caught Terrence’s attention, Brent made a sad grimace and shook his head.
“Dude,” he said, “you spun me the same, sad tale last week and I’m still not buying it. I’m embarrassed for you, Man, making a fool of yourself in front of our girl here.”
Terrence opened his locker and caught his uncoiling cardboard break dancing mat. He shoved it back in while straightening up to his full, narrow height of over six feet.
“Brenda,” Terrence told Brent, “you just jealous. I know you ain’t had none since about birth.”
“Teresa,” Brent told Terrence, “I ain’t had none since about breakfast.”
Quinn rolled her eyes as she knelt on the marble floor and pried a notebook from the stack on the bottom shelf. She closed the locker door as she stood up, making the lock catch with a bump from her hip. The guys dug for their books and pens. She leaned in between them as if to share a conspiracy theory. “See you virgins later.”
She darted across the noisy hallway traffic into the girls’ bathroom. The stalls, floor tile and walls of the Girls’ Room shared the same relentless hue of lemon yellow, inflicting a universally unflattering glare on all who entered. Quinn headed for a toilet. She’d drunk a huge Diet Coke with lunch.
From her stall Quinn heard her best friend Trish demand, “Do I look like someone who ‘does’ crepe paper?” Quinn pictured Trish standing there with one hand on narrow hip and the other raised as if to say “what?” She was grumbling about her latest run-in with Mrs. Nash, the office secretary and Prom Committee Advisor.
Mrs. Nash was outflanked: she just didn’t know it yet.
* * * * * *
Trish and Quinn’s mutual, total failure to do a flexed arm hang for the Presidential Fitness Test had sealed their friendship in seventh grade. Trish had observed out loud that only stupid people hung from a metal bar. This kind of protest was a revelation to Quinn.
Trish’s dad had just moved out. Back then her family-minus-one rented a series of apartments in a sun-baked complex near Highway 2. Quinn spent her junior high years eating M & M’s at track meets with her older sister and parents, and taking private piano lessons. Trish supervised her little brothers’ homework and made scrambled eggs for dinner. Quinn remembered Trish’s mom creeping around after work like a weepy volunteer for an experiment in sleep deprivation.
In ninth grade Trish’s mom married a real estate developer who moved her family into a fancy new house. It was as though Trish had landed the part she’d always meant to play, and was now acting it out in full costume. Once, Quinn teased Trish about her conversion to the church of Ralph Lauren. Trish put her fingers in her ears like the manic television icon Pee Wee Herman: “La, la, la! I cannot hear you!” The real Trish still lurked in there behind the new wardrobe: still flip, still funny, still the unflappable arbiter of cool.
* * * *
Trish complained about her perma-wedgie from her new black jeans while Quinn washed her hands with the school’s caustic powdered soap. Quinn watched her friend in the mirror over the sink as Trish pursed her lips and imitated the office secretary’s flat, prissy voice.
The problem, of course, with being friends with audacious people was that it made you see your own fraudulence more clearly. Then again, Quinn’s proximity to Trish’s audacity was sometimes the only thing that kept Quinn from evaporating into thin air.
Quinn faced her own reflection. “A quiet beauty” her Dad called her. She’d rather be a loud one. Her breasts were okay but who else besides her would know? Her parents, especially her dad, didn’t let her wear anything tight or revealing. Quinn’s fine brown hair defied any attempts to style it. So she wore it parted on the side every day. It bored her just thinking about it.
Trish caught her eye and read her mind. “If you spent some of your humongous allowance on funner clothes you wouldn’t mind having boring hair.” Quinn made a face at her. Trish knew that Quinn saved most of her spending money: her parents expected her to pay for a full semester plus books at her dad’s alma mater, George Washington University.
“Funner’s not a word,” Quinn said, probing a subterranean zit. The light blue eyes that looked back at her from the mirror were her father’s and a million other Irish family members’. They smiled even when her mouth didn’t. They also kept a polite distance: even with nice breasts no one would ever mistake her for a cheerleader.
* * * * * *
A few minutes later, after turning in an order form for her cap and gown in the school office, Quinn made sure no one was watching before she skipped down the marble staircase by the front entrance. Her light green sundress puffed and settled with each bounce. The translucent afternoon sun warmed the marble foyer by the doors. Maybe Spring would actually stick. Quinn watched as a tiny breeze jiggled the branches of the narrow pine trees framing the building’s entrance. A wide stretch of blue sky promised her through the transom window that three years of self-conscious high school angst were almost over.
What other people saw as Quinn’s success really just boiled down to obedience. Study and perform. Study and perform. The path to a good college and a bright future ran straight and clear: take the Advanced Placement classes, study and perform, join the Debate team.
She hated the Debate team.
She’d become one of those stupid cardboard characters in a first grade “Dick and Jane” reader.
See Quinn perform. Perform, Quinn, perform!
As she rounded the bottom of the stairwell Quinn saw Seth Burton; a lean, scruffy loner, approaching their social studies classroom from the opposite direction. That guy never talked to anyone, unless you counted “hi” when Quinn said “hi” first. She’d shared a couple of classes with him but until Mr. Levine’s U.S. Foreign Relations class this semester she’d never heard him speak in complete sentences. Seth Burton gave off a slight undercurrent of general hostility, as if to say “I’m learning life the hard way. Screw you.”
He’d almost reached the classroom. His dark blonde hair looked like it wanted to cover his eyes but failed. Seth sometimes wore a subtly menacing goatee but not this week. Something about his shabby clothes and reluctant-but-intelligent comments in class sort of conspired to make Quinn feel frivolous. Then again, resenting someone who skulked down the sides of hallways looking anxious made her feel stupid. She wondered if he ever noticed that she competed with him.
Seth drew near enough for Quinn to read his t-shirt. A cartoon of Uncle Sam silk screened in black and white on the front said “Join the Army. Travel to exotic, distant lands. Meet exciting, unusual people and kill them.” Quinn mentally rolled her eyes. Liberals like him always acted as though people like her invented war while only they defended peace and love and teddy bears. Quinn read his shirt again. Okay, maybe it was kind of funny. But it looked out of place on a guy who never smiled.
She had less than a minute before the bell rang. The hallway was emptying out.
Seth passed the classroom door. Why was he headed straight for her? His tan cheeks glowed bright pink and his eyebrows scrunched together. Quinn’s shoulders crept up.
When he was ten feet in front of her Quinn said in what she hoped was a casual voice, “Hi, Seth.” She waved to her friend and debate partner, Ilene, who was disappearing into their classroom. Quinn tried to veer out of Seth’s path.
But he side-stepped in front of her, forcing her to stop. Quinn frowned as they stared at each other for a second. The dark brown of Seth’s eyes blended right into his pupils. He had wide shoulders for a lean guy but he was barely two inches taller than she was.
Seth started to say something. Then he kind of deflated, pressing a limp, folded piece of notebook paper into her hand. Scowling at the floor, Seth just mumbled under his breath before rushing into the classroom.
Quinn looked around to see if there had been witnesses. There hadn’t. She walked into Room 105. As she sat down she returned a few people’s greetings. Taking a deep breath she slid the letter into her notebook and pulled a pen out of her backpack.
See Quinn acting casual. Act casual, Quinn, act casual!
Mr. Levine had been messing with the blinds again: three of them clung to their cords at steep angles. The state of the blinds, though, Quinn thought, was incidental to the general chaos of the classroom itself. Dusty books slouched two-deep in sagging bookcases, and teetered in precarious towers on top. Stacks of papers, dirty coffee cups and floppy files scattered across his desk. A cheerful spider plant with dozens of pale green shoots presided over the mess. From the ceiling tile over Quinn’s desk, President Kennedy ordered her not to ask what her country could do for her but what she could do for her country.
While the class filed in, Mr. Levine strolled over to his desk and jiggled a lidded McDonald’s cup. The ice had melted. He poured the light brown water into the bushy spider plant.
As soon as Mr. Levine started lecturing on apartheid in South Africa, Quinn flipped open her spiral to the note.
Dear Quinn,
Here’s what I’ve wanted to say to you for a long time: I’ve liked you since the beginning of 10th grade. We haven’t had any big conversations but I feel like I know you.
I know that you’re genuinely nice. Even though you have a lot of friends you make a point of saying hello to people like me (the painfully shy, anti-social types!) You’re really pretty, especially when you wear that green dress. You’re also smart. I hear George Washington University figured that out, too. Congratulations on getting in.
I wondered if you’d like to go to a movie sometime. I know it sounds weird coming from someone who can barely talk in class let alone talk to girls (and especially from someone who would tease you about being a Republican) but I hope you’ll say yes.
Seth
Quinn closed her notebook quickly and stared at the back of Tuyen Tran’s pink shirt.
Not in a million years would she have seen this coming.
Her cheeks burned. Prickles of heat and sweat broke out on her back and neck. She straightened up in her desk.
At least having a boyfriend—Jason—made a rejection easy to explain. Not that she had to explain herself.
She tucked her hair behind her ears, then un-tucked it to give herself a thin wall of privacy. Seth didn’t see her as a fraud. But he did see her. And he liked her anyway.
“Apartheid means ‘apartness’ in Afrikaans and Dutch,” said Mr. Levine, pulling his ugly gray stool near the overhead projector with a toe-curling screech and writing down the word. “It lumps people into strict racial groups and gives all of the power to the Whites.”
Mr. Levine’s reputation for never giving tests attracted college-bound seniors to his second semester U.S. Foreign Relations class. He was kind of handsome for a guy in his forties. He wore his curly light brown hair cut short. Rumor had it that he went out with Ms. Scacci, the new English teacher with the miniskirts.
“As we know from America’s own experience,” Mr. Levine raised his arms and included everyone in the compliment of assumed knowledge, “‘colonialism’ is a euphemism for ‘suppressing indigenous cultures and stealing other people’s natural resources.’”
Quinn’s giggle sounded shrill even to herself. She felt Seth look at her then look away fast.
“Dutch farmers—also called Boers or Afrikaners—like the British who came later, believed that God sent them to South Africa to save the land from savages.”
Quinn had caught on early in the semester that Mr. Levine was a Democrat but she didn’t mind. He didn’t act like a stereotypical liberal. Unlike her friends who lobbed their lefty views around like self-evident truths, Mr. Levine dealt in actual facts. He also unknowingly helped her play the Devil’s advocate at the dinner table.
Quinn liked to offer up these classroom discussions to her dad, Mr. Republican, like bait. Sometimes she really did mean to antagonize him. But mostly she just wanted to figure out the right answer. She’d spent her whole life hearing political arguments. How did a person get the real story? Her dad’s cheerful, reasoned opinions made her feel as though a smart person like her should agree with him.
Lately, though, his tidy theories were rubbing little blisters of irritation. Like if Reagan was such a plain-spoken genius, Quinn wondered, why did some people still go hungry? Even if politics didn’t affect her personally she wasn’t blind: she knew that some people had really suffered during the last decade.
Her dad liked it when she challenged him. Their arguments could be fun. But if she didn’t chase down every relevant fact and figure about welfare queens or whatever, he’d tease her about her idealism and expose the emotional flaws in her logic. Sometimes her self-respect got crumpled around the edges.
She looked at Seth’s note again. Her mouth twitched in annoyance. It was kind of a set-up: no matter what she told him he’d think she just didn’t date guys like him. Even telling him the truth would sound to him like an excuse. Then he’d feel all smug and vindicated.
Fine. It wasn’t like she’d been pining away for him: she barely noticed him. Judging from the look on his face he already knew her answer to his note.
It was funny, though, how a reserved person could open up in writing. When she read the note again she saw that its self-deprecating humor let her off the hook. Maybe she could reject him without feeling like she was kicking a puppy.
Ilene, in the next seat over, smoothed on some Chapstick. Ilene had skipped second grade. Quinn felt her watching.
Two rows beyond Ilene, she saw Seth sagging in his seat, his anxious brows still clenched together.
Chapter 3
Sitting ten feet away from her in class, Seth wanted to throw up. Quinn had looked at him in the hallway like she was being jostled by a friendly but dirty dog. That her answer would be “no” was crystal clear: she’d blown him off before he’d even opened his mouth.
He’d wobbled to his seat in the middle of the furthest row from the door figuring that if he sat with his chin in his hands, he might be able to keep himself from puking or curling into a fetal position. He’d thought about getting up and leaving before the bell rang.
The bell rang.
Mr. Levine flipped off the lights and closed the door. He clapped his hands once. Then he rubbed them together with the sinister glee that teachers saved up for pop quizzes. Seth leaned his head sideways against the wall, trapped in Hell.
Why had he actually acted on his stupid idea, the Hail Mary pass of love letters? Seth looked over at Quinn saying hi to the people around her.
Hating her was the only answer.
Mr. Levine slapped an outline on the overhead projector on which he’d scribbled the title, “South Africa.” The class groaned. Seth stole a look in Quinn’s direction. She was reading his note, her eyes wide. Christ. He flipped open his spiral notebook. The only thing he could do now was pretend to ignore her as she casually broke his heart.
Mr. Levine raised an eyebrow. “Just for fun, who can draw some parallels to American history? Senator Johnson?” Mr. Levine capped his marker and wriggled out of his sports jacket, revealing sweat stains under his arms. He tossed the blazer across his desk with one of the sleeves inside out. Seth surreptitiously sniffed his own armpits.
Trish Johnson, Quinn’s stuck-up best friend, pried her attention away from her pencil rubbing of the leather tag on her purse. Seth could see the faint outline of the word “Coach” on the page of notebook paper. Once she’d walked right by him in a nearly deserted hallway and pretended not to see him.
“Umm, the Pilgrims? The Oregon Trail? Manifest Destiny?” she offered. Lucky guess. She pulled up her hair and held it in a ponytail with her hand before letting it go and giving every guy in class the chance to watch.
Mr. Levine smiled. “Yes. Exactly. ‘Manifest Destiny’ is the foreign relations equivalent of ‘God told me I deserve your land.’” He pulled a red Jolly Rancher hard candy out of his shirt pocket and tossed it to her. She caught it.
Quinn’s giggle sounded an octave higher than usual, jolting Seth’s eyes in her direction before he remembered he was ignoring her. At the beginning of sophomore year he’d watched her hover around the edges of the popular group before quietly joining their ranks. On club fair day in the cafeteria he saw her sitting with the Young Republicans. That was when the self-loathing set in.
Leave it to him to fall for someone who was both out of his league and beneath his dignity.
“Blacks live in shacks on dirt roads with no heat or running water,” said Mr. Levine. “Whites live in nice suburban houses with lawn services and cable TV.”
Maybe taking notes would make him look normal on the outside. He wrote: apartheid = bad.
For three years now, he’d watched Quinn move through her life like she expected it to be kind, like someone who had perfect parents who bubble-wrapped her in curfews and rules.
Getting into trouble was a luxury Seth didn’t have.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Quinn yank a page out of her spiral. She crumpled it up and started writing again. She scribbled lecture notes like she hadn’t just demolished him in the hallway. He added to the generations of layers of ballpoint pen ink in the wooden pencil trough in his small, right-handed desk. He was left-handed.
Mr. Levine said something about English settlements. He jumped up and wind-milled his arms. “It’s all fun and games, Folks, until someone loses an Empire.” Mr. Levine flipped the classroom lights on, making the class shrink back, and kept talking while Seth picked paper vertebras out of his notebook’s distorted metal spiral.
“Secretary Burton, can you think of an American parallel?” asked Mr. Levine.
“What?” Seth put down his pen. As he clenched and unclenched his hand his embarrassment thudded out of his ears like the oppressive bass beat in the generic club music he hated.
Mr. Levine cocked his head at him. “I said, running two wars on the other side of the world cost lives and money, and started the British Empire’s slow decline. I’m asking you to come up with a comparison.”
Duh, Seth thought. “Vietnam,” he lobbed right at Quinn. She looked back at him for a second before opening her notebook and facing forward.
Mr. Levine, seated again now, evaluated Seth briefly over the tops of his reading glasses. He cleared his throat. “Yes. Good.”
A year after Seth’s parents had met at a war protest in Washington, D.C. a sniper killed his dad in Vietnam. Seth didn’t remember him. Sometimes he hated him, though, for checking out instead of taking care of his wife and kid. Maybe then they could have afforded the rent for longer in Washington, D.C. instead of moving five years ago to the boring Midwest.
Mr. Levine reached behind him for the blackboard eraser on his desk and winged it at Trey who caught it one-handed. Trey had landed a full ride to the U starting next fall. Colleges apparently paid track stars to just show up even if their families had more money than God.
Trey tossed the eraser back to Mr. Levine with an arc of dust.
“Got it, Ambassador?”
“Actually, no,” said Trey, adjusting slightly the blue-tinted black sunglasses perched on the top of his gelled hair. “You’re saying the Vietnam War started an American decline?”
Seth wondered if Trey had ever left his stupid cul-de-sac.
“Good.” said Mr. Levine. “No. I’m suggesting that the Boer Wars and Vietnam both cost more than they were worth. Would you agree?” Trey gave a non-committal shrug. Mr. Levine jump shot a Jolly Rancher into Trey’s outstretched hand.
Seth should have left when he had the chance instead of sitting here pretending to care about voting rights in South Africa. Okay, he did care. Just not today. He should have stayed a coward. His work friends at the lumber yard—mostly older, muscled guys in their twenties and thirties—would have a good laugh over this one. If he told them. Which he wouldn’t.
Seth watched Quinn tucking her hair behind her ears. He’d memorized this gesture. Next she’d try to make the ends stay behind her shoulder but they wouldn’t. She did. They didn’t.
“….so family and tribal life pretty much fell apart as men left for the cities to find jobs.” Mr. Levine paced now, and forgot his own note-taking. He threw his reading glasses—“cheaters,” Seth’s mom called them—onto the crowded desk.
Seth roused himself to write: Townships and homelands = reservations. Ahead of him April crossed her ankles, revealing cute, pale calves. Her silver bracelets clinked as she moved.
“Then Blacks lost their voting rights and the right to travel. Sound familiar?” asked Mr. Levine.
“Yes,” a few people murmured.
“Why? Marcus?” Marcus fingered an enormous gold, square hoop in his earlobe.
“Jim Crow laws,” he said.
“Good. And when did the U.S. get out from under Jim Crow?” Marcus sucked his teeth and looked at Mr. Levine. “Mmmm..,” Mr. Levine nodded. “Yes, one could argue that Jim Crow lives on in America. But how long has Jim Crow been illegal?”
“Twenty years? Twenty-five years?”
“Good,” said Mr. Levine, setting a piece of candy on Marcus’ pencil tray.
“Is everyone following this?” Mr. Levine looked straight at Quinn who nodded uncertainly as the school intercom blared an announcement about graduation forms. Quinn’s blank expression gave Seth some satisfaction.
He pretended to stare out the window while Mr. Levine lectured about the Black resistance. Tidy little Lincoln frowned on litter bugs, but March sucked the potato chip bags and candy wrappers out of every hiding place. Today it blew them all across Lincoln High’s crumbling asphalt parking lot in a loose, mini-tornado.
Again, Seth heard the sound of ripping notebook paper. As he looked at Quinn she looked right back at him. She crumpled a second page. She turned red.
A surge of nausea, and the realization that Quinn was writing to him hit Seth at the same time.
“Young communists and other radicals, including Nelson Mandela, took over the African National Congress,” said Mr. Levine. “Has anyone heard of him? Black activist, leader, prisoner?”
Some of the class nodded.
Seth’s hand trembled in time with his heartbeat.
“The ANC started a passive resistance campaign in the 60’s. Sound familiar, Ilene?”
Ilene was the one friend of Quinn’s—that Seth knew of—that he could actually stand. Not that they were buddies or anything.
“Yes. Freedom Riders, Sit-Ins,” Ilene responded without a beat. That girl knew stuff. Once he’d heard Mr. Levine ask her about her plans after graduation. She’d said, “I’m going to Harvard” like you’d say “I’d like fries with that” and changed the subject.
“Exactly,” said Mr. Levine, handing her a Jolly Rancher. “But it didn’t work. Police massacred the demonstrators. Blacks fought back with a bombing campaign led by Nelson Mandela which landed him and thousands of others in jail. By the mid-1960s, the resistance movement was broken.”
Seth had to be the first one out the door when the bell rang. Maybe by tomorrow he could piece together his shredded dignity but he couldn’t face her again now. He stole a look at Quinn. She was reading whatever she’d written while crunching on her pen cap.
Mr. Levine sat back on his stool and clasped his hands around one knee. “So here’s South Africa as we know it now, Folks. Blacks conduct strikes and boycotts and President Botha, who just lost the election, uses guns and tear gas to stomp them down.”
Seth flipped the page on his spiral notebook. He wrote: Botha (bwo-ta) = asshole. He glanced outside again at the mid-March day masquerading as spring.
Lincoln melted and promised balmy breezes one day, and then laughed in your face and blizzarded the next. Last week Seth had shoveled four inches of snow from the front sidewalk before jogging to school. Today the sun acted innocent. But the wind taunted him with gusts and whistles through cracks under tall windows.
“Violence is at an all-time high, resistance is illegal, and the government muzzles the media.” Mr. Levine stood up and stretched his arms over his head. Seth winced as Mr. Levine cracked his knuckles. “Back in the good old days, boys and girls, we called this ‘fascism.’”
Mr. Levine strode over and thwacked a lime green poster tacked above Seth’s head with a manila folder. Seth craned his neck to read it:
“Human beings the world over need freedom and security that they may be able to realize their full potential.”—Aung San Suu Kyi, Burmese Democracy movement
Mr. Levine scanned the classroom. “How would you feel if you were a black South African right now?” What do we know about people who have survived cruel leaders, foreign invaders and civil wars? How does it feel to watch your family get murdered and your children starve?”
Like a light bulb over an old medicine cabinet, the class only skipped one beat.
“Really, really pissed off.”
Seth’s stomach lurched again: class was almost over.
“And what are Americans doing about it?” Mr. Levine walked across the front of the room to the side blackboard on the class’ left. He put his hands on his belt and peered up and down the metal tray. “My kingdom for a piece of chalk,” he murmured. Trey rustled behind several laminated maps on the tray and held up a white stub. Mr. Levine nodded his thanks.
“Go!” he shouted, causing Seth to jump half an inch in his seat. A few people responded.
“Arms embargoes.”
“Sanctions.”
“Banned from the Olympics.”
“Good,” said Mr. Levine. He hiked up his jeans by the belt loops and flung the used up chalk stub into the metal can by his desk, making a clanging three-pointer. “Yes. The whole world is pressuring South Africa to wake up and smell the democracy. Quinn, what’s a sanction?”
Seth’s head spun left. He watched Quinn look up from her notebook and give Mr. Levine a blank stare.
“Would you like me to share your note with the rest of the class?” asked Mr. Levine, holding out his hand. Quinn’s face mottled into an even brighter shade of pink.
“No,” she mumbled.
“Then put it away.” He scooted over a stack of bulging files on the small table by the entrance. As he leaned on the table, he braced them to keep them from pouring out onto the floor. Quinn turned the page of her notebook and faced forward.
“Tuyen, what’s a sanction?”
“Uh…like when you say ‘I not buy your stuff or sell you my stuff’?” Tuyen replied. Tuyen hadn’t spoken any English at the beginning of sophomore year.
“Good.” Mr. Levine stood up. He now wore a stripe of dust across the seat of his jeans. He walked over to a desk in the front row where Terrence draped, sleeping, on his folded arms.
Seth envied the peace of mind it would take to be able to sleep in a class. Few popular people spoke to Seth but Terrence did sometimes, especially when none of his jock/rapper friends were around. Terrence thought he fooled people by acting all M.C. Hammer with his baggy pants and sunglasses, but everyone knew he went to some kind of genius camp in the summer.
Mr. Levine scanned the room, inviting everyone in his joke. He slammed his hand down on the desk. Terrence’s head and each of his limbs flailed in a different direction.
“Terrence, you’ll be interested to learn that President Reagan thought sanctions would mess up fair trade. He used a policy of ‘constructive engagement’ with the white government. He thought appealing to Afrikaners’ wallets would improve civil rights.”
“’That right?” Terrence asked, wiping drool on his sleeve.
“Yes, and that’s not all, Terrence,” Mr. Levine opened his mouth to deliver some more mock-earnest enthusiasm when Quinn dropped a frayed-edged notebook page on the floor. Seth felt his own face burn as she snatched it up. Mr. Levine frowned.
“Hand it over, Quinn,” he ordered, stepping over to her desk.
Christ. On. Crutches.
Quinn’s eyes pleaded with Mr. Levine as she blushed again. He kept his hand out until she gave him the notebook paper. The room hushed as he scanned it for a few seconds. He looked at her again, hard. Folding it once, he handed it back. “Put it away,” he said.
Seth let out a trapped breath.
Quinn nodded miserably. “Sorry,” she whispered. She stuffed it into her backpack.
Before going back to picking on Terrence, Mr. Levine looked at Seth for a second. Pretty much every cell in Seth’s body screamed in abject humiliation.
“Where the heck was I?” Mr. Levine asked the floor in front of him. “Right. American citizens decided that Reagan was sucking up to Whites and ignoring Blacks,” he confided to Terrence. “Do you know what these Americans did?”
Terrence shook his head, defeated.
“We boycotted U.S. banks so they’d stop lending money to South Africa. We lobbied Congress and made them pass sanctions and override Reagan’s veto. So far, we’ve pressured over ninety American businesses to leave.”
Terrence nodded and blinked his eyes hard.
“Citizen action forced America to finally join the rest of the world in demanding Mandela’s release,” said Mr. Levine. “Makes you proud to be an American, doesn’t it Terrence?”
Terrence tendered a weary smile. “Yes, Sir.” Mr. Levine walked over to the chalkboard and erased his notes in an explosion of dust.
The metal shades rattled slightly against a gust of wind. The clock ticked toward the bell. The class rustled. Seth’s heart pounded as he closed his notebook and put his pen in his back pocket. The bell rang.
Mr. Levine walked over and flipped off the projector, leaving the classroom in near darkness.
