South Central Noir

It’s almost like she doesn’t care. That worries me in adults. What made them stop caring?

My problem, and this isn’t official, is that I care too much. That’s not word for word what Ms. C said, but it does have something to do with why I’m here, scrawling my pencil across pages in a cheap composition book.

Everything here at the Accelerated School is cheap. When I was a kid — I mean, when I was younger — I knew LA had a lot of rich people, so why weren’t there any rich people in our school? And why was our elementary school so dang poor we had busted swings and shit that nobody was allowed on so it was roped off, which posed a whole new set of challenges?

It wasn’t until I got older that I found out the rich have their own schools. Wow. What a setup, right? I found this out recently, when our pathetic, bony, no-talent volleyball team, of which I am a member, set off with our PE teacher, Mrs. Jones, in her scuffed and smelly minivan, the kind of minivan Carmela’s mom drives. We teased her about it being so old. Carmela just sniffed at us, “At least she has a car, she’s not taking the bus!” That shut us up cuz all our moms take the bus.

Although we all felt it was rude of Carmela to point that out.

In any case, we drove through hills that were greener than anything I’d seen before. Why was our neighborhood so parched and dry? Even in elementary there was only concrete and maybe a little sand underneath the roped-off swings.

You might think I’d seen LA on TV, and wealthy places and green hills, but we all know just because something’s on TV or in the movies doesn’t make it real. Fast & Furious, right? My mom loves those films and it just makes me laugh.

We drove up through all these green hills with a view of the beach. Straight up. Green hills, beach, blue skies. The most expensive houses I’d ever seen in real life, imagine all the expensive stuff inside, and not one of them had bars on the windows. Where I’m from all of our windows have bars. I realized I was in a completely different part of the world. Even the air smelled better.

We shuffled out of Mrs. Jones’s beat-up van and went to a school gym where the floor had been waxed and polished so hard it was glowing. The walls looked freshly painted. There weren’t a lot of people in the stands, something I should have been grateful for, but I could see the stands looked brand new. This gym didn’t stink of cafeteria food and sweat and yelling teachers. This gym smelled of money. And I was gagging on it.

Right across the net from us were four girls who looked like Amazons in training, and eight more standing by for their time at the net. I swear to God each of them was two heads taller than Annette, our captain, our star, our tallest member.

The weird thing was, after we lost game after game after game, I don’t think any one of us felt humiliated. Nah, a volleyball game against rich girls in the most beautiful school we’d ever been to? Nah. We, or at least I, realized we lived in a parallel universe. An entire world lived not too far away, somewhere bright and shiny.

After the game Mrs. Jones pulled into a beach parking lot and set us off down the beach. She’d even packed Subway sandwiches and chips and drinks in a cooler. I didn’t think about it until right now, writing it down, but it probably cost her something. I hope I said thank you. Now I’m worried that I didn’t.

Which, full circle, the writing down is what I’m supposed to be doing here, and not the overthinking. Ms. Cifuentes gave me a stern talk, said that I was overthinking things, and overthinking was gonna freeze me and make me unhappy.

I have a theory that plenty of other things make me unhappy, but I didn’t want to disagree with Ms. Cifuentes and risk her not talking to me.

She told me to write down everything that I was overthinking, fifteen minutes a day, and somehow, like magic (she didn’t say that, I’m drawing an inference, as my English teacher, Mrs. Banks, would say), all those things I worried about, all those things that went round and round in my head, would disappear.

That seems so laughable I might even give it a try. But the things going round and round in my head aren’t anything that I just put down here. Well, at least my fifteen minutes are up!

Ms. Cifuentes said she wanted me to do this every day, each time I was sent here to her. My problem is I got a mouth. I wonder sometimes what it would be like if I was made like my friend Jenny Tenorio. Jenny is all long braids and silence in class.

Plus, Ms. C said write about the stuff that’s bugging me. So having a big mouth does kind of bug me. It’s just that I can only keep things in for so long when there’s so much stupid going on around me!