The Friendship Song (7 page)

And Gus standing beside me with a big old twelve-string guitar hanging by a braided strap from her neck.

She was looking curiously at me. Then she strummed the twelve-string a little, and I could tell right away she really knew how to play it. She made that big old guitar sound like a roomful of rockers jamming. For half an instant I wondered if she had been the one making the twilight music all along. And I knew that was what she wanted me to think. But it wasn't like she was trying to fool me, really. It was more like she was offering me a chance to back away, to tell myself, Okay, I just heard Gus messing around on her guitar.

Forget that. I knew what I had seen, what I had heard. There had been a band. A hot hot hot happenin' band.

“I heard them,” I said to Gus, kind of loud—I had forgotten all about thanking her or being nice to her. “I saw them. They were
good
. Who are they?”

She just stood and looked at me with her fog gray eyes wide open. When she got her mouth under control and said something, it wasn't exactly an answer.

“Groover,” she declared, “you are something else. Girl, you sure must love rock music.”

CHAPTER SIX

“Gus is going to teach me how to play guitar,” I told Rawnie next time I saw her, which was Saturday afternoon.

“She plays guitar?”

“Yeah.” I hesitated. “I think it's sort of been her we've been hearing.”

“Sort of?”

“Well, yeah. Sort of. I dunno.”

I didn't mean to lie to Rawnie. But Gus never had really given me an answer about what I had seen and heard. And it had been so beautiful, the music and the feeling around the music, that I had dreamed neon rainbow dreams all night, and I didn't know how to describe to anybody what had happened. I wasn't afraid of what was in Gus's backyard anymore, and that made me feel lonesome. Different, as if I had put myself on the wrong side of a wall from everybody else. Apart from other people, the ones I couldn't tell. Well, how was I supposed to explain something I didn't understand myself? But maybe that was why—feeling strange, I mean—maybe that was why I acted so dumb in school on Monday and let Rawnie down.

It started when Aly Bowman asked me to sit with her at lunch. Rawnie always saved me a seat at lunch-time, and the kids at our table were lots of fun. But there was something about Alabaster. I guess she wasn't pretty, because she had kind of a beak of a nose, but she was so cool. She acted like she didn't care about parents or teachers or what they thought of her, and I kinda wished I could be that way. I liked the cool way she dressed too. She was real thin, and she had her hair dyed bright blond and cut real real short, only about an inch long, except she'd left a forelock of long spiral-perm bangs in front. She always wore black, like a black bomber jacket and a black leather skirt. She even had her fingernails painted black. And she had one ear pierced in three places. Altogether she seemed a lot more sure of herself than any kid I ever knew, and she was a couple years older than me too. So I was excited that she wanted to be friends with me, and I sat with her.

The girls at her table were okay. We played a game called MASH, which stands for Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House. It's a kind of fortune-telling game about who you're going to marry, what sort of place you're going to live in, and whether you're going to be divorced. And how many kids you're going to have, and where, like in the bathroom sink or what, and whether they're boys or girls, and whether they're black or white. That last thing seemed dumb to me, but the girls giggled over it a lot. They made me put Brent, the one who had pinched me, on my MASH as one of the boys I might marry, but he got crossed out right away, thank God.

Rawnie was kind of quiet when we walked home together and to school together the next morning. So when Aly asked me to sit with her at lunch, I said, “I'm going to sit with Rawnie today. I think she's mad.”

“That's dumb.” Then Aly giggled. “But I guess she would be dumb, wouldn't she?”

I didn't know what that meant and I didn't want to ask and look stupid. Thing is, I should have stood up for Rawnie right then, but I didn't. I just said, “I'm going to sit with her today anyway.”

“No, you're not. You sit with me all the time or you don't sit with me at all.”

I had been figuring I could sit with Aly one day, Rawnie the next. And I didn't like what Aly had just said. It didn't seem fair. But then again, I sort of did like it because not being fair was part of the way she was cool.

Anyway, I thought, I got to see Rawnie before school and after school and on Saturdays, wasn't that enough? I only got to see Aly in school. So I sat with her and her gang again.

We had a lot of fun. Those girls didn't care what they said. They mocked everything and everybody and made me laugh and laugh. When it was time to go back to class Aly said to me, “See, wasn't that better than sitting with a certain little jig?”

I just stood there with my mouth open while she walked away. I mean, of course I knew Rawnie was black, but it had just never occurred to me that it should make any difference. I don't usually think about people that way, like being Jewish or Italian or Vietnamese or Puerto Rican or whatever is all that important, except that it's nice to know where you come from. Or at least I never used to think about it much until I came to this school. But that afternoon I kept thinking about the differences between people and I started to wonder if maybe I was missing something. Having attitude about other people seemed to be part of being cool. Aly always had a name for everybody, like “He's a zipperhead” or “She's a crotch watcher,” or whatever.

On the way home Rawnie was real quiet again, but I was still thinking so much about what Aly had said that I blurted out, “Are you all the way black?” I mean, it wasn't real obvious. Calling her black made about as much sense as calling Nico Torres Korean, or calling me French because my one grandmother came from France.

Rawnie looked at me and her mouth was pressed into a flat thin line. She said, “Does it matter?”

“No, not really. I just—”

“You don't want to be friends with me because I'm black, is that it, Harper Ferree? You'd rather hang around with the skinheads? Well, forget it. Forget everything. You can just walk by yourself from now on.”

She took off running, and she really knew how to do that. I couldn't have caught up with her even if I'd tried, which I didn't, because she'd just made me really mad. What did she think I was, some sort of baby? I could choose who I hung around with, and I could take care of myself. I yelled after her, “I don't need you to walk with me!”

I really didn't. I walked to school and back by myself the next three days, and I wasn't afraid of the street corner guys, even when they hollered at me. I was too angry and miserable to feel afraid.

Rawnie and I weren't speaking. If we met each other in the hall at school, we looked past each other. I hadn't gone over to her house and she hadn't come over to mine. At lunch on Wednesday I sat with Aly and her friends and made it a point to laugh hard so Rawnie would hear me. By Thursday I wasn't laughing at all.

“What's the matter with you?” Aly wanted to know. She didn't ask it like she cared—more like she wanted me to get out of her face. But I told her anyway. I needed to talk to somebody, and she was the only friend I had now.

“Rawnie's the matter,” I said. “She makes me mad.” What I really meant was that I felt awful that she was mad at me.

“So, who cares about her? You just stick with us white girls, babe. We're better.”

I wish I could say I got up and told her off, but I didn't. I just sat there and felt like my brain wanted to scream. If I went against Aly, I wouldn't have any friends left at all. But Aly didn't seem so cool anymore.

Really Aly wasn't my only friend, there was one more. Only she wasn't anywhere near my age, so I hadn't thought of her right away. It was Gus. All the time I wasn't going to Rawnie's house she'd been teaching me to play guitar, and she was so funny and nice I wondered why I hadn't liked her before. We didn't go out in the backyard to play though. We didn't go anywhere near where the red Cadillac convertible was. We just sat in the house.

That night we tried to get my stupid fingers to do a G chord, but they wouldn't stretch. Nothing was going right. I said to her, “Gus, what's a skinhead?”

She gave me a worried look. “Well, it depends,” she said. “There's skinheads and there's skinheads. Which kind do you mean?”

“Whatever kind we've got around here.”

Gus sighed, not like she was annoyed but like she was sad. She said, “Around here we've got the Nazi kind.”

“What's that?”

“White supremacists. People who say all other people are inferior to white people. People who are bigoted against most of the world and want to take it over, the way Hitler wanted to take over.”

I was starting to understand now. I had seen Aly's boyfriend, with his shaved head and combat boots.

“Oh, jeez,” I said.

“They stand for violence. Lately they've been marching with the Ku Klux Klan.”

“Oh, jeez.” I felt sick.

“You been having problems with skinheads? They been giving you trouble because you're friends with Rawnie?”

I guess she hadn't noticed. I mumbled, “I'm not friends with Rawnie anymore.”

“No?”

I shook my head, looking down at the guitar Gus had given me. It was a nice little electric guitar, bright enamel red, like the Caddy out back.

“You sure? Just because you're fighting right now doesn't mean you can't still be friends.”

“I think I blew it pretty bad.”

“Ouch.” Dad would have been trying to get all the details out of me, but Gus could tell I didn't want to talk about it. I guess it made it easier that I was not her own kid. She was pretty good about leaving things up to me. Which is what she did next. She said, “Bummer, Groover. And here's another one. I got the Neon Shadow tickets all right, but they would only give me two.”

My brain felt tired, and I hadn't been thinking much about the Neon Shadow concert anyway. I just looked at her.

She said, “That band is really hot. I couldn't get more for love or money.”

“Um, two is okay. Thanks, Gus.”

“You don't have to thank me.” It was the first time I'd thanked her for anything, and now she sounded like Rawnie, not wanting to be thanked. Jeez, I missed Rawnie.

Gus said, “You just have to figure out what to do with them.” She stood up and got the tickets out of a cigar jar and handed them to me. They were electric red, and they were in a little envelope with
NEON SHADOW
in neon gold letters against a shadow blue background. I wondered how much she'd paid for them, but I didn't really want to know, so I didn't ask.

The concert was Saturday. All day Friday I tried to cheer myself up by thinking about going to it with my dad or Gus, whichever one wanted to take me. But it didn't work. I kept on thinking about Rawnie.

She wasn't saving me a seat at lunchtime anymore, of course, and I didn't want to sit with Aly and her snooty gang, so I went off to the back of the cafeteria and sat by myself. There were other people I could have sat with, I guess. Really, there were more nice people in that school than not, once you got past the clothes and haircuts and stuff. But I just didn't feel like talking to anybody. Same between classes. And same walking home. I could have caught up with Benjy and his sister and walked with them. But I didn't.

That night at supper I asked Gus, “Do you mind if I just give the concert tickets to Rawnie?”

“Fine with me.”

My dad looked real surprised. “Harper, what are you talking about? Gus got those tickets for you.”

“I know.”

“So don't you think you'd better use them? Do you have any idea how much trouble and expense—”

“Buddy,” Gus interrupted him in a real quiet way, “Groover knows what she's doing, and I think I do too.” She nodded at me. “Go ahead, Groover, run those tickets over to Rawnie if you're done eating.”

I looked at my dad, and he looked kind of bug-eyed for a minute like he might explode, but then he nodded. “Gus says it's okay. But you aren't really finished with your supper, are you?”

“Um, yeah, can I be excused? I'm not hungry.”

I had to go to the bathroom too. On my way back down the stairs I heard Gus saying to my dad, “You want me to be a role model for her, Buddy, you got to let her get big and ornery like me.”

Big and ornery, huh. Those days I felt pretty small.

“And you got to let her do what she's got to do.”

Which wasn't going to be easy. I headed right over to Rawnie's house before I could chicken out, but it took me probably half a minute to lift my hand and knock on the door.

Her father opened it, which was the first time I had seen Mr. Stellow. He was a slim man with glasses, and his skin was Pepsi brown. I think I looked at him a little bit too long before I said, “Um, is Rawnie around?”

Mr. Stellow was looking at me too. “You must be Harper.”

I blushed. Right then I wasn't real proud of being Harper. But Mr. Stellow was smiling, a good smile, like he really meant it. He said, “Yeah, Rawnie's around. I think. Why don't you go up to her room and have a look?”

When I climbed the stairs my legs ached. I felt ancient.

Rawnie was in her room all right, belly-flopped on her bed, and when I came in she looked up at me, but she didn't say anything.

I told her, “Um, listen, Gus only got two tickets.”

She looked down, pretending she didn't care. “Tickets?” she said in a bored voice a lot like Aly Bowman's was sometimes, except in Aly not caring was real. “Oh. You mean to that Neon Shadow thing.”