My Life by CAPE

Author:CAPE
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MTV Books
Published: 2022-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

The First Time

Seventh grade. I am thirteen years old. Riding the chartered city bus that carries us Black kids across the Park to our middle school on the white side of the city. On the way to school, this drunk white man gets on the bus, belligerent, angry, yelling. He calls us all the N-word, tells us we’re all going to hell. The boys at the back of the bus stand up, pushing forward, ready to fight. I am hot, I am shaking, my heart is pounding. I see the hate in his eyes, the way he looks at us, like we’re animals.

The bus driver manages to kick him off, and we ride the rest of the way to school in silence. We walk through the cops and metal detectors at the entrance. We eat lunch in the cafeteria, where the Black kids sit on one side of the pillars, and the white kids on the other. We sit in fourth-period Algebra 1, where there are only four of us, where the white kids who walk to school instead of riding a bus make fun of our names and call us ghetto when they think we’re not listening, where we are always trying to prove them wrong.

That day, I go home and tell my mom about the white man on the bus. I sit there in the kitchen while she calls the city bus company and reports the incident, getting more and more worked up. I look at my mom. She is angry. She is hurt. But that man on the bus, he was talking to me. He was calling me that. Not her. She is hurt, but she is not hurting like I am. Sitting there in the kitchen, suddenly, I feel the gap between us. The ways in which she is safe and I am not. And I realize, she cannot protect me. I sit there in the kitchen, with the weight of all this. I am still shaking.

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