Quite an Undertaking - Devon's Story (16 page)

Maybe I could ask Rebecca to go with us since we were kind of going in a group. It was a bad idea, I knew, but I was desperate.

REBEECA SAT STONILY next to me in French. We were supposed to be working on a worksheet, but I needed to talk.

“Rebecca?” I whispered. She looked up at me. “Are you okay?”

She simply nodded, and went right back to her worksheet.

I tried again. “Thanks for driving me to Greystone.”

She looked back at me and smiled politely. “No problem.”

“I’m sorry about your, you know, with Jessie. That can’t be fun.” I didn’t want to say, “break up” in case somebody overheard me.

“Oh, well, you know how it is,” she said coldly and didn’t look at me.

“Actually, I don’t,” I admitted.

She turned her head slightly. “You’ve never broken up with anyone?”

“I’ve never gone out with anyone.” Why the heck did I just admit that? I cringed.

“Devon, I find that hard to believe.”

So, go out with me and change that.
I felt my cheeks get hot, but I ignored my embarrassment and boldly asked, “Were you the one who broke up with…you know?” I had been about to say “her,” but caught myself in time.

“Yeah, I did, and it was long overdue.”

“I’m sorry things didn’t work out.” I tried to keep the glee out of my voice, but I’m pretty sure she heard.

Rebecca had been attempting to do her worksheet while we talked, but she put her pen down and finally turned toward me. She looked at me for the longest time as if wondering whether or not she could trust me. Finally, she leaned in closer and whispered, “I got tired of everything being all about her. I couldn’t have any other friends. I couldn’t walk to my own locker by myself at the end of the day. I got tired of doing everything she wanted to do. I never got to see the movies I wanted to see. We always went to some kind of shoot-em-up movie, never a chick flick like I wanted. We always talked about her basketball games, but she never asked me how my dance routines were coming or anything like that. I doubt she even knows the dates of my dance concert.”

“December 18th and 19th,” I said before I could stop myself.

“See?” She pointed at me. “She wouldn’t know that.”

I seemed to have opened up the floodgates because Rebecca went on and on about Jessie’s selfishness. She didn’t even stop venting when the bell rang to end the class. We packed up our books, and I did a quiet happy dance when I saw that Jessie wasn’t at the door. Even though Rebecca said she didn’t like the fact that Jessie escorted her to her locker, I found myself doing the exact same thing. Actually, I had no choice because Rebecca kept talking, and it would have been rude to leave her. As if I even wanted to.

On the outside, I wore my best sympathetic face, but on the inside my stomach did somersaults. Rebecca hated Jessie, and that left the door wide open for me. Didn’t it?

I knew I was getting way ahead of myself, but the first thing we’d do, after the tree lighting ceremony, would be to go to the chick flick of her choice. I wouldn’t even care how sappy it was. Then we’d talk about her dancing until our voices were sore. We wouldn’t talk about basketball or Jessie. Ever.

When we got to her locker, she laughed. “Oh, my God, Devon. I’m sorry. I talked your ear off.” She touched the sleeve of my shirt. “Thanks for being a good sport about all of this stupidness.”

“No problem.” My arm tingled underneath where she still held onto my sleeve. “I haven’t done anything, though.”

“Well, you listened. No one’s listened to a word I’ve said in over a year.”

“Well, I’ve got two good ears.” I pulled on both my earlobes and then instantly regretted my corniness.

She turned from me to work the combination on her locker.

“Hey, Rebecca?”

“Yeah?” She opened her locker and then squatted down to put some books away.

Somewhere I found the courage. “Um, the tree lighting ceremony is tomorrow night downtown. At the fire house. Do you, maybe, want to go with me?” Oh, God, why did I have to make it sound like I was asking her on a date? Why couldn’t I have said something more like, “Hey, Rebecca, want to check out the tree lighting thing tomorrow night?” That would have been so much better, but I had already cast out my line and was committed.

She was quiet for so long that my jaw started to ache from clenching my teeth. I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me. “Rebecca?”

“I heard you, Devon. I, uh…Look you’re sweet, but I can’t.”

A dagger thrust into my heart. I looked around the hallway to make sure no one was within earshot and whimpered, “Don’t you like me? At least a little? Is that why you didn’t text me back?” God, I was pathetic.

“Oh, Devon, no. You’re…amazing, but just forget about me. Okay?”

“I can’t.” Maybe it was too soon after Jessie. Maybe I wasn’t good-looking enough. Maybe I was too much of a journalism nerd. I knew she wanted to leave it at that, but she told me, just the day before, that she found me attractive. I clung to it like a life preserver.

She closed her locker so hard that I jumped at the force of it. She looked me in the eye. “Look, if Jessie—”

“I thought you guys broke up.”

She looked down. “We did.” She didn’t look at me for the longest time. When she finally lifted her head, her hard expression forced me to take an involuntary step back.

She said, “Okay, here’s the deal. I’ve taken a lot of flak for hanging out with you.”

I know my mouth dropped open, but I couldn’t close it.

“I’m sorry, Devon,” she continued. “You’re cool, but I just…can’t.”

“Why? What’s wrong with me?” It felt like someone was twisting my stomach into knots.

Her face softened. “Nothing. There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re one of the sweetest people I know. It’s obvious how much you cared for your grandmother. You’re smart and funny and cute.” She said the word, “cute” kind of shyly. “It’s, uh...Well, they’re saying that I’m not staying in the community, and I’m already condemned for liking girls, even though a lot of the guys think they can convert me back or something. Idiots.” She rolled her eyes. “Devon, I’m sorry, but I just can’t go out with a white girl right now. It’s too much. I like you, a whole lot actually...” She looked down again, and I thought for a second she was going to change her mind, but then she said firmly as if trying to convince herself, “Devon, I can’t.” She looked past me down the hallway. “I’ve got to get to my dance rehearsal. I’m sorry.”

I stared after her retreating back. I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. She couldn’t go out with me because I was white. Even though, and she’d said it herself, she thought I was cute and smart and funny. She couldn’t go out with me because my skin wasn’t as dark as hers. At that moment, I finally understood the word discrimination.

I didn’t have time to fall into a depression because as soon as Rebecca turned the corner Jessie appeared from out of nowhere behind me. I jumped and fell back against Rebecca’s locker.

“What do you—” I started to ask.

Jessie didn’t let me finish. She poked my shoulder with her rock-hard finger and growled, “If I ever catch you alone again, Raines, you’d better make peace with God, ‘cuz you’re gonna need Him when I get through with you.”

Her hot breath in my face made me grimace. I was shaking from head to toe. “Why do you hate me so much? I haven’t done anything to you.”

“As if you don’t know,” she said slowly. Her steel-hardened glare softened for a micro-second, but then her face stiffened again. “All she ever talks about is you.” She slammed her open palm against the locker right next to my head. The sound of metal denting so close to my ear made me whimper which I’m sure she thoroughly enjoyed. When I tried to move away, she put her other arm up blocking my escape. She looked me right in the eye, and I swallowed hard. I’d never been in a fight before, and I didn’t know what to do.

“Just stay away from Rebecca.” She stepped back, but poked my shoulder one last time. She pointed at me with so much fury that I wanted to crawl into the locker digging into my back. She turned on her heels and stormed down the hallway.

MRS. GIBSON POUNDED the keys on her keyboard so loudly that I couldn’t concentrate. Hiding out in the Journalism room after school on a Friday was getting me major suck up points from Mrs. Gibson, but I didn’t care about that. It was all I could think of doing to avoid Jessie. If I hung out at school long enough, she’d get tired of waiting to beat me up, and leave me alone. Of course, I didn’t know for sure if she was waiting to beat me up or not, but I didn’t want to take that chance.

I redoubled my efforts to focus on the email in front of me. Julia Knight, one of the girls’ sports reporters from the sophomore class, had submitted an article proposal about the history of girls’ sports at Grasse River High School. I’d gotten the email from her on Wednesday, but hadn’t gotten a chance to reply yet.

Wednesday. Yeah, Wednesday had been the good day. That was the day Rebecca broke up with Jessie, told me she was gay, and held my pinky. Three amazing things in my favor. But Thursday, yesterday, that was the day that sucked. It sucked for two reasons. First, Rebecca turned me down flat when I asked her out. She was the first person I had ever asked out in my entire life, and I got rejected. All because I was white. Well, maybe there was more to it than that. Maybe she liked someone else, or maybe she just didn’t like me. That would have been easier to stomach than the fact that she didn’t want to go out with me on account of my pale skin. The second reason Thursday sucked was because Jessie Crowler almost beat the crap out of me.

Rebecca wasn’t in the cafeteria at lunch again, and she didn’t talk to me much in French class, either. Well, to be fair, I was the one doing most of the non-talking. All I kept thinking about was how white I was and wondering how I could work on my tan because maybe she’d go out with me if I wasn’t so glary white. Getting a tan in December this far north was impossible. Sunlight was a luxury we couldn’t seem to afford in the North Country, especially during the winter. God, like my dad, was probably trying to save on the galactic power bill or something, but, c’mon, the shade of my skin wasn’t really the issue. My ethnicity, my heritage, my background. Those were the issues. Rebecca didn’t want me because I was different.

I groaned and tried to shake myself out of my misery because I had to get my head back into Julia’s proposal, finish up, and run home—literally. Julia wanted to write an article about the Title IX initiative from the seventies that had changed girls’ sports in a major big way at Grasse River High School. Title IX was supposed to equalize boys’ and girls’ educations in public schools and that included sports. Julia’s mom, it seemed, played softball at Grasse River in the seventies before Title IX went into effect. Julia said her mom’s team was bused to one of the local elementary schools where they played on a neglected field with a rusty weed-infested backstop. The grass was never cut, Julia wrote in her email. The boys’ baseball team, on the other hand, played on a beautifully manicured field right on the school’s property. The photos Julia attached in the email were incredible. The difference between the miserable girls’ field and the meticulously groomed boys’ field was an absolute crime. What a shame it took a federal law to make things equal. Did people have their heads buried in the sand back then or what? Thinking about the Title IX era made me question whether someday in the future, people would look back at my time and wonder how gays could be treated so unequally. They’d think we had our heads buried in the sand, too.

I went to a lot of girls’ games in my role as sports editor, and those games made me understand why it would completely suck for girls to get the shaft in terms of crappy fields and bad equipment. Girls played just as hard as the guys and deserved fair treatment. If Julia could get people to experience the same outrage I felt after looking at the pictures, two things might happen. Maybe they’d shake their heads and wonder how unjust things were back in the seventies and, more importantly, maybe they would start to think about the inequities everybody still accepted today.

My lofty goal for Julia’s article may have been wishful thinking, but her idea was definitely a good one. I wanted her to flesh it out a bit more, though, to show how Title IX influenced other sports besides the softball team. The January/February issue might be too soon, and the February/March issue would be too crowded with winter sports wrap-ups and spring sports previews. The best issue for Julia’s Title IX article would be April/May. I felt odd making such a huge decision about what went into the newspaper, but Mike told me that editors made decisions like that all the time.

I wrote back to Julia telling her what a great idea her article was and included my suggestions. I ran the spell checker, and then sent it off. I saved both her proposal and my email response in my editor’s folder.

Mike was the one who suggested I keep track of all of my email responses. He said it would save me time later because I could quickly look up what I’d said to whom and when. He was smart. I was glad I could learn from him. I closed up my files, turned off the computer, and got ready to run home, backpack and all. If I actually did make it home alive, I had to figure out a way to break up with Mike at the tree lighting ceremony later on, even though we weren’t seeing each other.

MY MOM CALLED up the stairs to me. “Devon, I think Gail and Travis are here.”

“Okay,” I called down. I checked myself in the mirror. Regular gold posts, hair down, nothing that screamed as if I’d made an effort. I flicked off the light in my room and headed down the hallway. I paused in front of my grandmother’s dark room. “Wish me luck, Grandma. I’ve got to break up with someone before I’ve even gone out with him.”

I took the steps two at a time.

My mom looked up from her book. “Have fun.”

My dad muted the sitcom blaring from the TV. “Be back by midnight.”