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bothered to tell me.
She knew other things too. “Do you know how to fight?”
she asked me one day. Sitting on the queen-sized bed we shared
in our room, watching Tara play with her hair in the mirror, I
thought the question came out of nowhere and I didn’t like
hearing it. “Well when you start high school,” she continued,
“you’re going to have to fight.” She hadn’t waited for my an-
swer, I assumed, because she already knew the truth of my life:
I was sheltered and knew nothing. Of course I, an 8th grader in
an almost entirely white, Catholic middle school of only 500
students, had never even thought about being in a fight or even
seen one. And even though I had never heard of kids getting into
fights at Saint Vincent Pallotti—the equally small and equally
Catholic high school that almost all the St. Mary’s kids ended up
attending—I suddenly had doubts. What would I do if one day at
school belligerent high schoolers demanded I fight them? I was
terrified by the thought. Tara confidently twisted her hair up into
a complicated looking configuration—a style I’d never be able
to pull off with my wildly curly hair that defied all my feeble
attempts to tame it—and looked at me in the mirror. “I can teach
you,” she said.

When the TV screen blinked on, what I saw shocked me.
Neither the naked man, legs splayed open on a battered beige
sofa nor the naked woman on her knees at his feet surprised me.
Although I wasn’t entirely certain what I was going to see when
I pushed play, I knew it was going to be something sexy. What
shocked me was that both of the people on screen were black. I
don’t know why this came as such a surprise to me. Maybe it
was because I was used to seeing white actors on TV. Maybe
it was because the stories and daydreams I played in my mind
starred white faces only. I remember one year my grandmother
gave me a businesswoman Barbie for my birthday. She wore a
sleek, gray skirt-suit and came with a briefcase and cell phone.

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