A Good and Happy Child by Justin Evans Read Free Book Online Page A

groggy. I stirred, and it took me several seconds to open my eyes. When I did, I jerked upright with a horrified gasp.
    “Wha’s that?”
    I sat there, chest damp, exposed and chilled. The room was entombed in darkness: the hour of night when not so much as a squeaky brake disturbed the silence. But I had seen something in an instant, a a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d
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    single flash. A child lying next to me in the bed. Grinning, eyes narrowed in mischievous glee, chewing its fingers, wondering if it would be caught in a naughty, practical joke. I sighed. Of course—it had been my Friend.
    “Are you there?” I whispered. “Are you there?”
    r r r
    After school. An uneventful Monday. Byrd and Toby, with their adjacent lockers, barked details to each other about an after-school basketball game. I stood watching, balancing with difficulty my French horn, lunchbox, and bookbag, waiting to be invited.
    “There’s a basketball game?” I said, finally.
    “Yeah,” said Toby, studiously filling his backpack. “But there are too many people already. I’m not sure I’m gonna go.”
    “Oh, there are too many people?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Oh, okay.”
    A voice came into my head.
    Maybe I’ll go for a walk.
    “Maybe I’ll go for a walk,” I heard myself saying. Byrd’s voice dripped with contempt. “Go for it,” he said. I made my way outside and walked alone down the steep incline of Ruby Hill, past blocks of small, sooty houses. The Julius Patchett Middle School, the town’s formerly “coloredonly” school, now integrated, was named for a 1940s black minister and civic leader who had grown up on Ruby Hill—symbol of the town’s black section, the north-facing slope that descended to Main Street and the trickling creek that ran alongside it. Next to the columned mansions on Early Avenue, the homes on Ruby Hill were dollhouses. The narrow streets clung to the scrubby hillside; each lot seemed cramped between the curbs; and on a single block, prim yellow wood-framed houses with fresh paint and hanging plants might alternate with shacks, built from crates whose Sunbeam and Coca-Cola insignias remained branded on the wood.
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    J u s t i n E v a n s
    Every day white kids were driven here, in Audis and Mercedes, to attend a school named for an integrationist. They came from the prosperous white sections, lined with long drives and houses with twocar garages and swimming pools and rec rooms, on streets named for Confederates—Hill Avenue or Beauregard Road. Their parents were lawyers, dentists, realtors. The old “white school” now served as the elementary school; and the high school—Preston High, Go Hornets! —
    closed the loop of school system and social class by linking Preston students to the county—to Pumphouse Hill, Home of the Hicks. In Preston ethnography, the hicks were the black kids’ natural enemy, so it was only natural that, from a topographic perspective, Pumphouse Hill actually abutted Ruby Hill, with only a dip in the landscape and three hundred yards between them. It was equally natural that, to drive between them, you would need to circumnavigate a three-mile loop—no street connected the two. Aluminum-sided houses, studded with satellite dishes and pickup trucks, characterized Pumphouse Hill; and if the rich white kids with their white-and-watermelon turtlenecks had pretentious names such as Tobias and Violet and Byrd; and the black kids had names (female) like Tameka, Latrina, Sharnaya, with the boys seemingly all named Boo; then the hick kids, tending to the fat, had perhaps the most unintentionally comical names of all: sets of twins named Goldie and Pearl, or Earl and Erwin; and boys with such doggedly unoriginal handles as J.J., or Tex. I walked down Ruby Hill, and I felt alongside me the presence from the night in my room—my Friend. He was like a shadow, following right out of the corner of my eye. He made no noise, but as he walked behind I constantly fought the desire to