Graffiti

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Jesse was a fool and probably still is. And if Jesse had believed me when I said I was only kicking it with Mike that night, I wouldn’t have felt like a fool too. And if I hadn’t hustled off the phone—My ride’s here!—he wouldn’t have called back and caught me in a lie. Then I wouldn’t have ended up in a police car. And Dad wouldn’t have said it happened because I was the only black kid there.

And if I didn’t have Mom’s pale skin, I would have listened to Dad, instead of forgetting the times I’d wished to be just one color. Because I wanted to believe that I was black when I got a nod from the guys bussed out to my school from the city, or when girls smiled and touched my hair, but I wanted to forget it when Dad said, You’ve gotta behave better than the white boys because you’re on display. People are waiting for you to mess up.

But the only way my crew messed up was by always meeting at the same outdoor train station. Jesse knew this and appeared, backpack rattling with paint cans. And if anyone before me had been nice to him, he wouldn’t have been working so hard to impress us. But if he didn’t always try too hard, he might have had some friends.

And it wouldn’t have been winter dark, Jesse across the tracks, hood up, his spraypaint frozen breath under the lamppost he was tagging, moving on to a bench, a train map. The last commuters were passing fast, not wanting to get roped in, and a new gravity rippled through my friends—a couple Irish like Mom, a couple Jewish, with curly hair like mine—as we related to the adults. Jesse, what the fuck are you doing?

And if the cops hadn’t rolled up before the next train, trapping us from both sides of the station, we would have been free. And if we weren’t so green, we might have tried to run. Because we were 14, 15, in hoodies and baggy jeans, and they were going to say we’d done this together. But who is together when one guy is out for himself?

And I wouldn’t have been trying to slouch in the cruiser’s tiny backseat, watching a silent film called Cops Searching My Friends, as years of Dad’s warnings explained why other kids woke up one day about to get cars, and knowing how to talk to teachers, and I had a skateboard and a train station and jokes about my grades like C is for “Chris.”

And I wouldn’t have been scared that this was the last straw before the move that had been threatened since last year. Dad said there was less pressure in Virginia, but I’d never been anywhere else and I wasn’t about to believe a man who was at home far more than he was at work. Who got money from selling the house and bought a new TV VCR microwave sneakers skateboard hoodie I wanted that made me look extra shady to the cops.

And if my black dad and beat-up house didn’t make the town expect the worst from me, there’d be no voice in my ear in my head in my Walkman, saying, This isn’t your world, so don’t bother trying. Get your own. And my crew wouldn’t have been rolling like that. And Jesse wouldn’t have thought we were cool. And I wouldn’t have been so eager for friends that I spent the night at Jesse’s that past fall and huffed a can of air freshener with a gym sock over the nozzle and saw myself floating up and out the dark window over his staircase. And Jesse wouldn’t have decided we were friends even though every time I saw him, I tasted that chemical potpourri and remembered his long devilish face in the end of the sun in the field behind his house talking about how he wanted to get fucked up.

Lucky for me, since Jesse had shown up at the train station, I had a real reason to ditch him. Because it’s hard to say, I don’t want to kick it with you because you’re a herb, but it’s easy to say, Uh-uh. You got me in thrown in a cop car.

And, I admit it. That night, I was carrying a big marker and a sketchbook and the itch to do what Jesse had been doing. But I wouldn’t have done it like that because the line where daring turns into stupid is clear when you are who you are and no one else near you is and deep down you know that everything you do stands out like silver paint on a green wall.