Not even after I flipped him the bird in front of the entire seventh grade class did Hiram understand I didn’t want to be his girlfriend. Before I could bat an eyelid at the boy I did like, Ms. Molly Meade gave me my second-ever demerit right then as the whole school shuffled into the gym for the assembly. She yelled my name like I was the first Catholic schoolgirl in Beverly to raise the middle finger to a black boy. For a second her face matched the hot red flames of her hair so that her freckles disappeared and I understood why the boys called her a flaming leprechaun. She was new and twenty-two and still squealed when Catholic schoolboys and girls broke the Golden Rule.
She pulled me aside in English class later that day. Because she was also to blame for my first-ever demerit--gifted to me when I dropped all of my textbooks and yelled “shit” in front of her, also in the gym--she required an explanation “This is very unlike you,” she began. With the rest of the seventh-grade class pretending to read The Giver behind us, I started to cry. My first course of action was to blame it on my new best friend because everyone knew Hannah Pienton was meaner than the meanest class bullies. Even though Hannah wouldn’t do the same for me, I left her out of it and instead told my first lie to my favorite teacher. “Actually, Ms. Meade, I stuck this finger at Hiram’s face,” and flipped her my ring finger.
She asked why I did it. The snot running down the back of my throat and genuine confusion caught my tongue. Why had I done it? For one, Hiram was the most annoying boy I had ever known. He subscribed to the laws of grade school romance that dictated all lovestruck boys drive the girls they like mad by ignoring them at recess and excluding them from their Pokemon Card clique, only to sneak glances at them in class thirty minutes later. He didn’t speak but screeched and cackled like he was afraid of being ignored, and he flailed his thick arms and legs around like a t-rex so that the floors vibrated to announce his presence. Indigo, the only black girl in his class, was his best and only real friend. She sat with him at lunchtime and during school assemblies, and while she made friends with the other six-grade girls, each afternoon Hiram walked home with only the silence his classmate begged of him during school hours.
The middle school boys called him oreo: black on the outside, white on the inside. As if the color of his skin didn’t draw enough attention to him, he spoke with a faint lisp, played guitar when most other boys played football, and never stopped smiling. One day a few weeks before the assembly, Hiram batted his beautiful brown eyes at me and became one of the first boys to ever flirt with me. I ran away, afraid he’d ask me a question to which I didn’t have the answer he was hoping for.
Hiram wasn’t the first black boy to admit he liked me. After Mrs. Flood sat Matt Brown and I next to each other four times in a row in fourth grade, Matt came to history class on Valentine’s Day with a red sealed envelope and a card inside that, in beautiful handwriting read, “Happy Valentine’s Day, Emily! I was going to put $40 in here but my mom wouldn’t let me. Love, Matt.” I told him I needed a few days to think about it, hoping he’d rescind the offer once he realized that, in fourth grade, it was really quite simple. You either liked someone or you didn’t. Like the rest of the fourth grade girls, I was saving myself for Pat Kelly, and so I justified the rejection on the grounds that I couldn’t date a boy with better penmanship.
That wasn’t the whole story. By the time we graduated, Matt would pursue most of my friends and get rejected by every one of them, and no one would ever mention the color of his skin. In Beverly--where 85% of the population was and is Irish Catholic--and at Christ the King School--where Matt Brown crowned himself the token black boy of the graduating class of 2005--people talked about race as often as our Catholic priests talked about suicide, and skin color was as relevant as God in our religion classes.
There was something just as instinctual about my aversion to Hiram three years later, except this time, a memory was at work somewhere in the back of my mind. I was eleven years old sitting in the backseat of a van on my way to Tia Tencha’s house in Monterrey, Mexico. Tito and Tita sat in the front; Mom, Dad and the aunts in the middle; the grandkids in back. Conversations with Mom’s side usually turned to boys and dating because it was the only subject that didn’t bore the aunts. They soaked in stories of Becky’s transient high school relationships with the sports captains and musicians. We knew Tita preferred we marry nice Mexican boys to keep our traditions alive, but she didn’t seem to care that all of Becky’s boyfriends were güeros. White boys. My cousins and I were becoming the first generation of Almaguer women who didn’t date and were likely not to marry Latino men because our parents opted out of the Latino neighborhoods of Chicago and into the white ones with the better schools. Becky was the first and wouldn’t be the last to get serious with a white boy.
For the next hour, the van filled with jokes about white boys and brown boys. Tita kept to herself in the front seat until someone mentioned the blacks. She didn’t engage in conversation because half the time she didn’t know what any of us were saying. Thirty-something years after coming to the U.S. from Mexico, she couldn’t keep up with the way young people talked. So when she did speak, we listened and remembered. So when Tita turned her head to the back row of the van and shouted, “I disown any granddaughter who marries a black man!”, not sure then if it was the truth or her racist humor, I soaked it in alongside the sounds of Elvis Crespo on the radio and carried its weight with me into the assembly that seventh-grade afternoon.
I knew Tita didn’t think warmly of black people, or even dark-skinned Latinos, after Mom told me the story of her boyfriend, Hank, a man darker than the darkest Mexicans in Little Village. Mom would have married him if not for Tita. That’s how it was on Dad’s side, too. When Sonica came out of Auntie Juana looking like a black baby, Tia Chole called Sonica pobrecita (poor thing) and Aunt Juana never spoke to Tia again.
Ms. Meade didn’t hear that side of the story, though. I stuck to the part my whitewashed mind could make sense of.
That’s how it went in seventh grade. Hiram stomped his dinosaur stomp and looked at me with his dumb cartoon smile. Meanwhile, Hannah made jokes about his big lips and loud mouth while I listened, always knowing there was a not so simple reason why I stuck my middle finger up at him, or why, when I saw him trailing not too far behind when school got out, I walked home a bit faster than usual so he wouldn’t catch up and ask me to be his girlfriend. I never thought to tell him that Mom had a strict “no dating until sixteen” rule because Lauren’s very public eighth-grade relationship with Charlie Rodriguez proved its irrelevance or Mom’s obliviousness, and it didn’t make much of a difference. I would have traded a lifetime of grounding for breaking it had Pat Kelly returned at least one of my infatuated gazes at his clownish smile, let alone asked me to grab burgers at Top Notch or spend a Saturday afternoon skimming magazines at Borders. I wasn’t afraid to break Mom’s rule with Pat because his penguin waddle and unwashed blond mop proved he was harmless and our relationship wouldn’t survive the summer. He was also white. Even if I had liked Hiram, I could never bring him home to the family.
Ms. Meade ordered me to write a formal apology after I flipped him the bird. The next day I sat on the steps outside the cafeteria and drafted the letter that was henceforth known as my rite of passage into adolescence. Had she told Mom and Dad that their sweet Emily had a mean streak, they would have grounded me for a week but at least helped me write the letter. But she didn’t, so I was left to it with my God-fearing conscious and sorry seventh-grade eloquence. It went something like this:
“Dear Hiram,
I’m sorry I stuck my middle finger at you in the gym. I did not mean to do it. I hope you can accept my apology.
From,
Emily Guzman”
I gave it to him the next day and he smiled like I had handed him a love letter. He continued to smile at me so big I forgot all about it once springtime came, and all I did think about was the gap in his two front teeth that shined so bright against the blackness of his skin that it occurred to me just how white our world was.
In the months following the incident, I said hi to him in the hallway, where I never smiled too warmly, while he still showered me with Valentine’s Day candy and haikus that I hid from friends and tossed in the garbage when I got home. I still watched for him on the sidewalk when school let out and listened to Hannah put him down for things he couldn’t control.
On the last day of seventh grade, I dragged behind on the front lawn while everyone else walked home with their friends. I figured the end of the school year meant the end of Hiram’s unrequited romance, until he came up to me from behind, pulled me aside, and out came the question I hoped he never asked.
“Emily, will you be my girlfriend?”
I shouted at my neighbor Allison to wait up before I hurried some excuses, not thinking to tell him some truths, like Mom didn't let me date until I turned 16, and not wanting to tell him others, like at eleven years old, I sat in the back of a van in Mexico and heard Tita say that no granddaughter of hers will ever date a black boy.
I shouted at my neighbor Allison to wait up before I hurried some excuses, not thinking to tell him some truths, like Mom didn't let me date until I turned 16, and not wanting to tell him others, like at eleven years old, I sat in the back of a van in Mexico and heard Tita say that no granddaughter of hers will ever date a black boy.
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