Excerpt from ‘Hey, Liberal!’
With Algebra under his belt, Simon weaved down a crowded second-floor hallway in the new building, on his way to Driver’s Ed. An overload of on-the-go conversations echoed off beige metal lockers and the tall arched ceiling like everybody was inside a big drum. Someone tapped him on the shoulder.
“Hey, Simon.”
He whipped around, and there was Dia cradling a stack of books in her arms. Petite and doe-eyed, had she tipped forward she would have kissed no higher than his sternum.
“You walked right by me.”
There was a long pause during which Simon all but swan dived into her affectionately exclusive gaze, lost contact with time and space, and then reeled himself in.
“Hi.”
“Well, aren’t you the shy one! Are you going to walk me to my homeroom?” It was as if Dia, who had recently begun to single him out for special attention between classes in the hallways, felt that being white at Dexter was no more than an occasional inconvenience, probably because she attended “honor” classes enrolled primarily with middle-class students who came from the better grade schools in the district. Simon, one of the few whites tracked in “regular” classes, thought of honor students as members of an exclusive club. He watched these “gifted” kids on the sly—small clutches of them in the hallways or at a lunchroom table. The girls wore tight miniskirts with white blouses, the guys in button-down-collar shirts with the tails hanging out of their bell-bottom pants. They were cool, of a dying breed at Dexter, and, by Simon’s reckoning, off limits.
“I really don’t have . . . I mean I’ve got to get—” A slap on Simon’s shoulder packed a playful sting.
“I’m more important than risking a stupid tardy slip, aren’t I?”
The girl’s bold, pouty gamesmanship left him no options. Shit! He grabbed hold of her arm as if afraid he might accidentally snap it just above the elbow and began escorting her down the hall. Within only a few steps, he felt a peculiar pride ballooning in his chest, gliding him forward.
A trip up a flight of stairs later, they came to a stop at a classroom doorway. Letting go of her, he realized that his palm had left a sweaty imprint on her cotton sleeve. Now what? As a couple of students filed past them into Dia’s homeroom, she seemed to be counting on him to jumpstart the conversation again, but all he could think to do was reach up and self-consciously brush his fingers through the wavy dip of hair on his forehead that never, when things really counted, behaved.
“So,” Dia finally said, “how’d you end up in this lovely dump?”
“Umm . . .” Under pressure to impress, Simon simplified the complicated. “I used to live on the far Northwest Side—you know, everyone’s white and lives in rinky-dink subdivision houses. My dad’s a Presbyterian minister, and . . .like . . . he got involved in the civil rights movement and thrown in jail in Selma, Alabama, with a bunch of other northern clergymen. They went on this three-day hunger strike—you know, to keep protesting Jim Crow laws and all that jazz? Then he came home skinny as hell. Pissed off a lot of people in his congregation, so last year he quit and we moved here. Now he runs the Body Politic Theater.”
“Hmm, interesting.”
Simon rolled his eyes. Blowing it! Then horrified that Dia might take his eye-rolling as an opinion of her, he rambled on about other freedom marches his father had gone on — Montgomery, Washington, D.C., where King gave his “I have a dream” speech. And as Dia listened to his every word, she snagged a piece of lint off his tan V–neck sweater, then rested her hand for a moment on one of his belt loops, touching, always touching, but with the nonchalance of someone oblivious to her own effect.
“Wow!” she said. “That’s stuff you can tell your kids someday.”
He looked away, then straight down and scuffed the sole of his gym shoe against the checkered, maroon-and-black tiled floor.
“You’re bluuush-ing.”
“Am not.”
“Yep.”
“Will you stop . . .” He reached up and shook his fists—“Arrrrgh!” Dia was already giggling.
“So’kay.” She rested her hand tenderly against his chest and let it linger for a moment before sliding it down, her index finger speed-bumping on shirt buttons underneath his sweater. “Just means you’re sweet.”
In Simon’s Fruit of the Loom briefs, his prick stirred. Great. The last thing he needed was a boner. Desperate for a distraction, he asked, “Say, do you know a kid named Louis Collins?”
Now it was Dia’s turn to roll her eyes. “Yeah, I know him. A real nutcase. Why do you ask?”
Simon quickly told her about Louis ditching music class via the window. “Funny as all shit! I bet Egan’s still having a stroke.”
“Yeah, that’s Louis, all right . . . Mr. Drama,” Dia said. “He used to go steady with my best friend, Gail, but then last summer he changes overnight from being a kid who’s idea of fun is solving calculus problems on his slide rule to one who smokes or pops every drug he can get his hands on. Gail says he even tried smoking catnip.”
“Catnip?” Simon asked. “Gets people high, too?”
“Not unless you sprout long whiskers and start eating mice,” Dia assured him. “One day, the doorbell rings at Gail’s house. Good thing she opens the front door instead of her mom or dad because there’s Louis on the porch wearing nothing but a blue-and-gold striped tie, his underwear, and construction boots. Yuck, right? And it’s November, not exactly tanning weather. He shoves a bouquet of wilted red roses in her face and says, ’Will you marry me?’ The next day at school, he’s got the nerve to come up to her in the lunchroom and ask, ’Why’d you slam the door in my face, bitch?’ Got to the point where she wasn’t sure what the whacko would do next—kiss her, stalk her or spike her orange juice with LSD—so she talked her parents into letting her go live with her aunt and uncle in San Francisco.”
“Sounds fucked up,” Simon said, trying to sound mature. “What’s his problem?”
“Dunno. Maybe he smoked too much catnip? But I did hear something about his dad getting killed a few years back. Car accident? Not sure, really. Come to think of it, someone mentioned Louis’s dad was a preacher, too.”
“Then he’s a PK—preacher’s kid – just like me.”
“PK, PB. and J, whatever,” Dia said with a dismissive wave. “All I know is the boy’s definitely bonkers. Take my advice, Simon; he’s nothing but a walking piece of bad influence.” Then, changing the subject, she told him, “You have freaky eyes.”
“Really?” Simon took the benefit of the doubt and assumed freaky was a compliment.
“And I suppose you’re going to tell me you don’t know you’re one of the cutest boys at Dexter?”
Simon felt his already overheated face deepen a few more shades of red, a reaction that pleased Dia enough to make her giggle again. His put-on-the-spot expression, from under a shelf of thick and straight eyebrows, could easily have been mistaken for brooding, and he felt a drip of sweat from one of his armpits tickle down his ribcage. Before he could think of how to answer without sounding either vain or blind, she asked, “Are you going to walk me to my classes from now on?”
“What for?” Then Simon all but slumped, thinking, BECAUSE SHE LIKES YOU, IDIOT! Not far away, a couple of black girls reached the top of the nearby staircase, and as they lollygagged through a crowded hallway intersection, one told the other, “I ain’t lying. Sheila say she pregnant.”
“Or maybe it’s true what I’ve heard about you,” Dia said. “That you’re stuck up.”
“Me? I’m not—”
“Prove it.”
Dia’s tactic was about to work like a charm on Simon, when three Latino gangbangers came out of nowhere and stepped in between them.
“Excuse me,” the one in the middle said to Simon. Though the boy was short enough to qualify for a Napoleonic complex, his peach-fuzz mustache compensated him with a pubescent dash of manhood. “You don’t mind if I interrupt, do you?” The flash of his smile drove home the message: beat it. He and his taller buddies flanking him wore long, black knit cardigans with gold bands circling the shoulders—signature sweaters of the Latin Kings street gang. Just the week before, members of that “club” had shot and killed a Dexter student and member of the rival Harrison Gents in a drive-by on Halsted Street. Kings did that sometimes: killed people.
The beefy one on the left ran his eyes slowly up and down Simon. Then he shook his head sadly, the white boy failing inspection.
“Do you?” the middle King repeated, dropping all pretense of a smile. After a moment in which Simon showed neither the sense to retreat or the balls to object, all three gangbangers about-faced so that he had nothing but the wall of their backs to stare at.
“Say, baby. What’s your name?”
Dia, eye level with her new admirer, didn’t miss a beat. “Who wants to know?”
“Hector, baby. I think you’re a fine-ass mamasita. What say you and me—”
“My name,” Dia said, sweet as punch, “is Good-bye.” And with that she ducked inside her homeroom just as the bell rang.
The King on the right laughed. “Put you low!” Narrow in the shoulders and extra long everywhere else, he slapped five with his stout friend. They found Hector’s blown attempt to “lay the rap” so hilarious, they’d gone all wobbly.
“Puta!” Hector spat. Did him like that in front of his boys? Remembering the white boy, he spun around, intending to save face by decking him, but the maricon had vanished. At the other end of the corridor, a woman hall monitor clapped her hands and shouted at stragglers, “Let’s move it, people!”
•
Simon loped down a hallway toward the east end of the new building. Like she’ll ever talk to me again? He hadn’t yet learned that in some precarious situations at Dexter, white girls knew when to cut a boy slack. The halls were all but cleared of students now, the second bell about to ring. Coward! The look on his face see-sawed between fierce and hurt, and he walked with his reed of a tall body bent forward as if he were battling against a gale aimed at him alone. Asshole Kings!
Shawn Shiflett is an Associate Professor in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. His novel Hidden Place (Akashic Books) has received rave reviews from newspapers, literary magazines, and Connie Martinson Talks Books, (national cable television, UK and Ireland). Library Journal included Hidden Place in “Summer Highs, Fall Firsts,” a 2004 list of most successful debuts. He received an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship for his work and was a three-time Finalist for the James novel-in-progress contest, sponsored by the Heekin Group Foundation. New City newspaper elected Shiflett to their Chicago Lit 50 list, an annual ranking of top figures in the Chicago Literary scene. His essay, “The importance of Reading to Your Writing (Creative Writing Studies, UK) was published in 2013. He recently finished Hey, Liberal!, a novel about a white boy going to a predominately African American high school in Chicago during the late 1960’s.