Malik had been daydreaming when Mrs. Birch called his name in front of the whole class. “Malik, your thoughts?”
The present reality collapsed onto him. Monday, fifth period, Algebra 2, solve for X. A scrawl of numbers and variables covered the whiteboard. Desks were aligned five by six (Malik sat in the third row closest to the window), and it took his eyes a tenth of a second to scan the classroom of students gazing at him until he spotted one who was still gazing at the equation on the whiteboard. Another tenth of a second and he took in the mocking smirks of his classmates, the way they were giddy with anticipation for him to stumble over his words, freeze up, or make an obvious guess that he’d then have to explain, ultimately embarrassing himself. The word schadenfreude, which he’d just so happened to learn in third period German, flashed through his mind like a neon sign; schadenfreude—the joy or self-satisfaction of watching another be harmed or humiliated. Malik could see the self-satisfaction on their faces, like a jury of his peers watching a judge sentence an obviously guilty criminal. He understood how seeing him humiliated swelled their pride and stroked their egos. How they chambered the solution to X on their tongues, itching to shoot up their hands and fire it off the moment Malik misfired. It reaffirmed their sense of superiority and self-importance. That, Malik concluded, was the whole purpose of this humiliation ritual. To teach them a lesson. Never mind that, in the following tenth of second after these thoughts passed through Malik’s mind like a breeze, he did the mental math to distribute, combine like terms, and isolate the variable, so that when he started working through the now simplified equation out loud, he could make it seem as though he’d already been most of the way through when Birch called on him.
This all occurred in less than a second.
“Aight, so after everything’s simplified, we get 48=6x. Then divide both sides by 6 and you get…” He’d already solved the problem, but made a show of performing mental math, replicating the vacant expression he’d had while daydreaming moments before. “7. No, 8.”
Several low snickers. Someone snorted obnoxiously—Ryan Geiger, whose thin lips peeled back in a grin that showed pink gums and overcrowded teeth, and pale eyes crinkling with glee. Malik fantasized about driving his fist into the White boy’s mouth and opening a gap in his grill—
“X equals 8.” Malik had to make it believable. Make Birch think he was struggling and that he was really trying so hard to solve for X that it looked like daydreaming. In that moment, he wanted to make Birch and the others feel guilty and ashamed for their assumptions. He wanted their sympathy and acceptance. To pass this test unscathed as he had time and time again.
It was Mrs. Birch’s reaction, the way her lips twisted in contempt, that made Malik flush with the heat of rage and embarrassment. There were several sucked-teeth and disappointed groans across the class. Thin lips and White faces mimicked Birch’s expression. Later, he would ask himself why he felt the need to pretend to be like them.
“Let’s plug that back into the original problem to check if that answer is correct,” she said.
They both knew it was correct. This was the lesson. She made a show of substituting 8 for X and balancing the equation. And to draw things out longer, she opened the floor to the class to find the final product of the equation. Hands shot up. Ryan Geiger had the fastest hand and fired off the answer he had prepared. “Correct!” Birch said, proving Malik’s answer correct.
This was when reality shifted. This was when Malik’s old way of seeing the world had been simplified into something that reflected reality in a truer way. He’d had the entire equation laid out in front of him for a long time, work and all, but he’d been in denial. The math was never wrong. He hated himself for believing his Blackness cost him nothing and could be overlooked by his peers as easily as by himself. He hated them not for their actions, but because he felt as though he needed their empathy and acceptance. The power of his Blackness would always carry a steep cost to match it, and that power could not be ignored. It was him and he was it. The equation would always balance if it were true.
###
“You have to carry yourself with pride, boy. Walk into those rooms with your head high. You’re a Black man.”
Malik looked up from his plate of turkey bacon and buttered toast.
“Babe,” Kendra Weathers said, “those rooms could be dangerous for him. You should never be the only Black person in a room.” She let the water in the Keurig coffee maker heat up while picking out her glorious afro. She and her husband were cutting it close on their commute to work and had to brew coffee and get dressed and groomed all at the same time.
Lamar Weathers kissed his teeth and fiddled with his blue necktie. He was a big man with broad shoulders, a shiny brown head, and a thick salt-and-pepper beard. There was never any confusion on whose father he was. “It’s high school, babe. The boy won’t always get to choose what rooms he’s in. But he can’t let that dim his light.”
“But how does pride keep him safe?” Kendra glanced over her shoulder at her husband and rolled her eyes behind her big round wire-frame glasses. “Babe, stop, you know your ass can’t tie a tie right.” She left her mug by the Keurig coffee maker and crossed the kitchen toward him.
Malik was sitting at the kitchen table picking at his breakfast while he waited for the bus. It was Tuesday, his second day at the new high school. The Weathers family morning topic of conversation had spoiled his appetite. This was his first time entering into a majority White school, and the first time he had to grapple with being one of the few Black students in several of his classes. Over the summer break, The Weathers family had migrated from West Philadelphia to the Poconos for work (both Lamar and Kendra taught at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania a couple towns over), more affordable living, and to set up their only son in a better public school. After many parent-teacher conferences to discuss Malik’s low grades and missed assignments, his parents understood that it was the school that had been underperforming, not Malik. Upon review, Malik had proved to his parents that he knew the material in all of his classes, and in fact had studied ahead of the curriculum. He should have been top of his class, but he simply couldn’t find the motivation to do the homework and assignments, which to him felt like arbitrary busy work. Together they decided that their son needed his mind challenged in a safe environment, and that the Shelton suburban school district provided that. He was happy to transfer because his cousin Xavier had moved there a year before him, and Malik’s parents were glad to move closer to family.
Lamar raised his chin higher as Kendra looped and maneuvered his tie. “The thing you gotta remember, babe—and this goes for you too, son—a lot of these White boys are really just punks. Straight up. They move in mobs because they don’t have the heart or the backbone to face a Black man and stand on business. They love to knock us Black folks down because they envy us, son. They can’t stand the fact that we can walk into the same rooms as them and outperform them when they’ve been given all of the advantages we’ve been denied.”
Despite her husband not truly answering her question, she couldn’t help but smile and swell with pride at his words, because both she and he had lived that truth. They’d had to be twice as qualified as their White peers just to be in the same rooms as them, and even now they had to navigate their predominately White faculty.
Malik twisted his lips in doubt. He understood the systemic racism Black people faced in America, but he wasn’t sure what to do with that information. He couldn’t shake the sense of impending doom that came with being seen by his White classmates, and potentially becoming a target. He opened and closed his mouth around the beginning of a question, but he was unsure how to ask it, or what to ask, or if his parents would even have the answer he was looking for. How do I survive this?
Kendra read her son's mind the way mothers do and understood the question he couldn’t quite put into words. She finished tying Lamar’s tie and massaged the wrinkles from the lapels of his grey blazer. “Your daddy is speaking facts, son. But if you run into any problems at school; with them kids, teachers, the principal—whomever—you let us know. You call me or your father and you let us know. We’ll drop whatever we’re doing and come down to that school and put belt to ass if we have to. They’d have to throw me in jail.”
Lamar flashed big teeth. “What your mama said, boy. Don’t stress yourself out about them White folks, you hear? Me and your mama didn’t have parents who’d fight for us, but you do. So don’t stress. Hold your head high. You’re royalty. You’re Black.”
Malik believed them, and that knot in his chest loosened. They’d seen in him a brilliance that his teachers and grades convinced him was absent. Despite the uncertainty of this senior year, his final year, he was unafraid. He knew he was not alone.
###
“Aight, aight, aight—” Ryan performed a stereotypical impression of Malik, eliciting laughter from the ten out of the seventeen boys in the gymnasium locker room. It was Monday, sixth period. Gym class had concluded and, drenched in sweat from fifty-five minutes of the Presidential Fitness Test—shuttle runs, push-ups and pull ups until failure, and a mile run around the gymnasium. For Malik, a fat boy with asthma, it was a short stay in hell.
Malik faced his gym locker and slipped out of his grey, sweat-soaked XXL graphic Tee depicting the Japanese kanji logo for the “World Martial Arts Tournament” from the Dragon Ball series. He was sure that if he wrang it out the locker room would flood. He whirled around and glared at Ryan. “Ay yo, ssssshut the fuck up.” He had a stutter, too. His brain moved faster than his mouth could, but he had learned to manage it as time went on, save for moments of stress.
“Ay yo, ay yo,” Ryan mocked, “shu-shu-shu-shu the fu-fu-fu—” He broke into laughter before he could finish his mocking, and the others joined in. All White boys of varying backgrounds and ethnicities who unified to participate in the humiliation of a Black boy. Time and again Malik was reminded of that German word—schadenfreude—which had the power to melt the boundaries between European-Americans in a way neither love nor hatred seemed to. The joy of drawing and quartering Black bodies brought them all together in celebration, and it was in this way that Malik’s existence formed the glue that held these descendants of conquered nations together in a foreign land. Without him—without his Black skin and type 4 natural hair and Philly accent and attention-deficit-hyperactive-disorder—there would be no unity among these boys who called themselves White. There would be no White. Only wops and polacks and those Jew-hating, Hitler loving krauts, but no niggers. Nigg her? Never even heard of her.
Malik made a fist and his breathing increased. His chest heaved and the heat of rage and embarrassment washed over him. He knew that if he decided to cave Ryan’s chest in with his fist, the smaller man, despite being more muscled and athletic, would crumple. What Malik lacked in endurance and agility, he compensated for in strength and size. Six-one and 265 pounds of force behind a punch that would fold the White boy’s clothes with him still inside them. Malik turned his back on the boys and retrieved his travel-size bottle of Dove body wash and a washcloth from his backpack in the locker.
“Don’t start chimping out on us now,” Ryan said.
That’s when Malik slammed the soap bottle back into his locker, dropped the washcloth, and squared up to Ryan. “Fuck you just say?”
The boys dispersed like a group of hyenas from a roaring lion, if only to form a wide circle around Malik. He kept his head on a swivel in case one of them decided to sneak him from behind or from his blind spot. “We aren’t afraid of you,” the boy standing beside Ryan said. He was a grubby looking blonde kid with a long neck and pronounced Adams apple.
“This isn’t the hood or prison,” Ryan said. “Stop chimping out.”
Before Malik could close the distance and knock Ryan’s block off, a shadow passed over him and something soared over his head—his school bag, containing his cell phone, house keys, lunch for next period, and several folders of classwork and homework. Another boy who Malik thought resembled Harry Potter (from the illustrations not the Hollywood actor) caught the bag, his eyes bright with a mixture of terror and excitement. He looked at Malik as though the Black boy were a raging bull who’d spotted the red flag in his hands, and before the Black bull had a chance to charge and gore him, he pitched the fairly light backpack over Malik’s head and to another boy behind him. Malik spun, but the backpack was already mid-flight toward Ryan, whose fast hands shot up and caught it. He curled his lips into an “O” and made chimpanzee noises before passing the bag to another member of the humiliation circle.
They weren’t the only ones in the locker room. There were seven other boys who either ignored the whole ordeal or watched from their lockers with that same self-satisfied expression of (Malik imagined a Nazi educator in S.S. uniform slapping a wooden stick against the word chalked on a blackboard and pronouncing slowly for the class) schadenfreude. Nobody did anything or came to Malik’s defense. But then, why would they? When had he? To disrupt this process was to volunteer oneself as human sacrifice, and nobody wanted to hang with the Black boy.
Malik had had enough. He drew blood from his palms with how tight his fist was. His body shook, arm and belly fat jiggled. He ground his teeth together, leaving bitter enamel dust on his tongue. Tears welled up in his eyes from the intensity of his emotions. The full brunt of his anger was directed at Ryan, the ring leader; the Imperial Wizard.
“Dude is really crying!” Harry Potter said, and “Ay yo’s” and laughter filled the locker room.
Ryan wasn’t laughing. He dropped his thin-lipped, gummy grin, and was looking at the teary-eyed Malik with a mixture of disgust and unease. He shrank away from the circle, clearly no longer amused, and turned toward his locker without another word. He’d already taken his bird bath in the locker room shower while Malik was forcing himself through the last bit of the fitness test, so he took up his backpack and reached into it as he began inching toward the exit. He never took his eyes off Malik. Never blinked. His lips were made thinner by how tight he had them pursed. Now, he was looking at him like a threat. No longer the dumb, obese chimp that never hit back or intervened. They had pushed the boy too far, and Ryan Geiger was acutely aware of the impending criticality accident they had on their hands. The Demon Core about to blow. Ryan seemed to be the only one to take heed, as the rest of his circle continued playing Monkey in The Middle despite Malik ignoring them completely. Malik and Ryan were the only boys in the locker room now, as far as either of them were concerned. Time and space converged to send them on an inevitable collision course.
“I’m not afraid of you, fat boy,” Ryan said, but the slight catch in his voice contradicted this. “Touch me and see what happens.”
“Call me a chimp again.” Malik took a step forward.
“Touch me and see what happens.”
The goading of the circle became background noise—like television static.
“Whatchu got in that bag?”
“Touch me and find out.”
“You don’t got shit in that bag.” And Malik, with his long legs, took one great stride forward and drove his big palm into Ryan’s chest, launching him backward and slamming him into his locker. He hit it so hard that it left a dent, and the crash of steel shut everyone up in unison. The ritual changed.
Ryan bounced off the locker, and before he even steadied himself, he shot his hand up from his bag. It took Malik a tenth of a second to identify the black Glock in the White boy’s hand. He willed his body to move as fast as his mind could, to dive to the ground and out the line of fire, but the world—including himself—slowed down. All he could do was watch as the gun rose, then fell to draw a bead on him. He knew he was a large target. This equation had only one solution.
Ryan had made a mistake. He was moving too fast. His palms had started to sweat from the adrenaline of the impending violence, so when he jerked his hand to aim the pistol at what should have been a large, easy target, his fingers slipped and the gun dropped to the floor. The equation was a contradiction.
The boys both dove for the gun.
###
“Ryan Geiger? That one White dude who be hooping, right? Yeah, I don’t know about him, cuzz.”
Malik leaned against his locker outside of homeroom, supporting himself on the steel door, listening to his cousin Xavier break it down for him. This was Malik’s second week as a transfer student—three weeks before the Monday that’d alter the course of Malik’s and Ryan’s lives. He hadn’t yet interacted with Ryan Geiger, but he’d seen the boy in several of his classes. He’d seen him and his friends throwing rubber erasers at the backs of the heads of other Black kids. He’d scribble tiny swastikas and bananas on them, and when he’d see the rush of emotion in his poor victims’ faces and bodies—shock and embarrassment giving way to rage, maddening rage, until the shoulders sag and heads fall in defeat—he’d laugh. Sometimes his victims would laugh too, despite the assault on their nervous system. It enraged and embarrassed Malik to watch the ritual, but he remained a bystander out of fear of becoming a target himself. He didn’t want to rock the boat so early in his semester here, when barely a soul knew him by name.
Xavier shut his locker and tucked his chemistry textbook under his armpit before running his Black-power fist pick through his high-top fade. He looked over the top of his glasses at Malik as an elder uncle would while imparting old-head wisdom. “You knew Ryan’s dad was a CO at the jail up the street from here?”
“Word?”
“Deadass. Word is his daddy keeps hella guns in the house, and our boy Ryan keeps one of his daddy’s straps in his backpack.”
“You believe that shit?”
Xavier gave Malik that dead-eyed stare that told him he was dead-ass. “I could see him shooting a motherfucker around here and getting off light for that shit. His peoples go to the same picnics as the local judge, bro. Need I say more?”
“Picnics my nigga?”
“Know your history, my nigga.”
Malik was more concerned than he’d like to admit. “Nah, I-I get the picture.”
Xavier extended his hand and Malik dapped him up. “I’d keep your distance from that dude Ryan and his people. And never let them catch your black ass alone, you feel me? Shoot you nine times and tell the cops you shot yourself. And you know your big ass is an easy target.”
“Ay, fuck you man.” Xavier laughed and Malik punched him lightly in the chest. The cousins dapped each other for a final time, and Xavier turned and headed down the hall in the opposite direction of Malik’s next class.
###
A shot went off in that locker room, and there was a mass exodus of boys flooding out of it and into the hallway, some partially deafened and partially clothed, fleeing in random directions without any destination in mind. The gunshots could be heard across the entire school. Girls laid flat against the floor in their locker room while some huddled in the showers in groups, shaking and whispering in fear. Those still in the gymnasium abruptly cut their fitness tests short and took cover behind bleachers. The PE teacher rushed to lock the gymnasium doors. In classrooms across the school, students were hitting the floor, taking cover under desks with arms over heads, frantically calling parents and siblings and family on their cell phones. Kids wept. Some were barricading the doors of their classrooms with their desks. In the cafeteria, many of the kids simply evacuated the building against the lunch monitors instructions—they fled off school grounds and would be found hours later at their homes, in parks, the local mall, or just wandering the general area in groups. Some of the kids used the shooting as a means of skipping with impunity, while others were simply terrified for their lives. School resource officers took a minute to mobilize and secure the classes and shepherd fleeing students into the nearest classrooms and safe places, while isolating the location of the shooting. Witnesses all said it was the boy’s locker room, and the SROs locked the hallways leading to and out of that place. In the eastern wing of the school, Xavier was hunkering down behind a barricade of desks in his sixth period chemistry class with other terrified students. He was spamming Malik’s iMessage but received no response.
After several minutes, police sirens could be heard nearby, and soon flashing blue and red lights appeared. EMS arrived shortly after. After several more agonizing minutes of briefing and coordinating—figuring out if the shooter was still active (yes), their location (locker room), their weaponry (Glock .45 ACP), victims (one) etc.—a unit of police officers entered the building with pistols drawn and cleared the hallways leading to the locker room.
That’s when Malik exited the locker room and came into the empty hallway. His bare chest and belly were covered in blood. His arms and hands, too, were soaked, but he was uninjured. His chest tightened; he could hardly breathe.
Several minutes before, when Ryan had fumbled the Glock, Malik had moved with a quickness and had grabbed it first. He’d intended to run with it; run down the halls and out the school and all the way home to his mama and daddy who’d know what to do with the weapon and the situation. But in the instant Malik had raised the Glock, Ryan lunged and clutched the barrel. Those pale eyes blazed with the terror and bloodlust of a cornered German Shepherd, and Malik saw himself reflected in the bloodshot whites of them, knowing that this boy would blow his ass away the moment he got his gun back. Malik hung on for his life, and so did Ryan.
He hadn’t meant to fire. The safety had never been on to begin with, and Malik’s finger had found its way to the trigger in the struggle. He pulled it while trying to wrestle the gun away. When the police and EMS eventually arrived, they would find Ryan Geiger's body slumped against his dented locker in a pool of his own blood, with a wet tunnel in his chest where his aorta had been.
Now, back in the hallway, Malik trembled as the horror of this new reality collapsed onto him. I want my mama. I want to go home. Wake me up now, please. Please God oh please—
It wasn’t the thought of taking another life that horrified him. It was his conversation with Xavier, and the bit about Ryan’s dad being a CO and being cool with the judge. It was the jury who would see him once, see his crime, his victim, and condemn him. It was the judge persecuting him to the fullest extent of the law. It was Ryan’s father finding his son’s killer in jail and avenging him with impunity. It didn’t matter that Ryan had pulled the gun or that Malik had fired in self-defense. The equation had only one solution. Whether or not Malik had been shot dead in that locker room or Ryan had; even if he’d done nothing; Malik would always be a sacrifice. That, he realized, was his purpose here. In the classroom, in the courtroom, in the jail and federal prison, and on the national headlines—the lesson was the same.
He stood near the end of the hallway, facing the double doors and the sound of stomping boots beyond it, waiting for the police to throw that door open and find him. He brandished the Glock like a talisman to ward off evil.
He would be an easy target.
Contributor Notes
