All American Boys by Jason Reynolds

Author:Jason Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books

Tuesday

On Tuesday morning, everything changed—for real.

Spray painted in wide, loopy neon-blue letters like a script of stars so bright they glowed in the day, and stretched so large it covered the entire sidewalk at the foot of the front stairs, was a graffiti tag. A tag so huge every single student, teacher, administrator, staff member, parent, and visitor to Springfield Central had to step over or around, and could not miss:

RASHAD IS ABSENT AGAIN TODAY

Everybody was staring at it, taking photos of it, posing with it, and definitely talking about it. As soon as I saw it, I felt a ball of shredded nerves unwind and whip around my stomach. Oh shit! And my first thought was, probably just like everyone else’s: Who’d done it?

At first you could tell the teachers were deliberately avoiding discussing it, but it was pretty much all we (the students) talked about between classes or at lunch. I say “we,” but I was still trying to take Coach’s advice and ignore all distractions, so when it came up, I tried not to engage. But it was frigging impossible. At lunch, kids were taking food from the cafeteria and heading out to the front steps, eating and talking while sitting near the giant graffiti tag, but I avoided that and looked for some of the guys on the team in the cafeteria. We’d always sat together at lunch, only in fragments, never the whole team together, but with the impromptu gathering out front, everything had shifted.

Only Guzzo, Dwyer, Hales, and Reegan sat inside—the four other white guys on the team. Guzzo looked up and saw me in line. He waved me over to their table, and although he’d ignored me all day yesterday, his interest now kind of ticked me off. See, that wasn’t Guzzo’s style. Usually, he’d let others call the shots. But today he was too insistent, beckoning me like he was some kind of Mafia boss and I was supposed to hustle right over to him.

And besides, once I had my sad, soupy Sloppy Joe on the tray and looked out over the rest of the cafeteria, I realized it wasn’t just the basketball team divided up this way today. Paul had once told me about how the city’s demographics had changed over the last thirty years, and why that mattered for his job. “It’s harder to be a cop here now than it used to be,” he’d said, and his facts had been so particular I couldn’t help but think of them now as I looked across the deserted tables in the half-empty room. Thirty years ago the city had been 84 percent white, Paul’d told me. Now, not counting Hispanics and Latinos who identified as white, Springfield was 37 percent white. Strange how some of that stuff just sticks to you, especially the shit that suddenly feels so real. Because right now, only about half the high school who had lunch fifth period sat in the cafeteria that day. The white half.

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