Read Online I'm Down: A Memoir by Mishna Wolff - Free Book Online

one I had ever met had done.
    It was then that the girls looked up at me sitting on my metal perch above them. I could have said something, could have asked them what other places they had been, but instead I pretended like I hadn’t heard a word they said.
    And I reminded myself,
you have friends at home
, while climbing down from the jungle gym and walking toward the school—careful not to let my filthy, peasant gaze soil the princesses on the foursquare court.
You come here to learn.
     
    Meanwhile, my sister had started going to my old kindergarten, and that afternoon when I got home she was sitting at the kitchen counter across from Dad, who was making her a sandwich.
    “What’s going on?” I asked. “What are you doing home?”
    “Well,” Dad said, licking the mayo knife, “I had to pick Anora up from school. She got in a little trouble today. No big deal.”
    “How much trouble could she have gotten in?” I asked. “She’s in kindergarten!”
    “S’true,” Dad said, handing Anora her sandwich and NOT giving me information.
    “So, what’d she do?” I wondered if she had been sarcastic, too.
    Dad readjusted his Kangol and said slowly, “She got caught smoking. But she learned her lesson.”
    “I did learn my lesson, Dad!” Anora said, and dug into her sandwich.
    “How did Anora get a cigarette?” I asked.
    “I got some big girls to give it to me,” she bragged. “They were in the bathroom.”
    God, she was already cool.
    “Her teacher smelt it on her . . . ,” Dad said, and then looking at Anora added, “ ’Cause-it’s-nasty! And-it-stinks!”
    “I know that now, Daddy.”
    I couldn’t believe my five-year-old sister could smoke, and I couldn’t have white friends. And from what I could tell, her punishment was a sandwich. When I broached the subject of her punishment Dad said, “Why don’t you keep your eyes on your own self. Or go outside, I think Latifa wants to play with you.”
    “I have homework.”
    Dad wrinkled his nose. “You know, I’d really like you to go out and play a little. All those kids you go to school with aren’t really that well rounded. You got friends, you gotta pay attention to them.”
    I put my school bag on the counter next to my sister, who was happily eating her cheese sandwich and headed outside for some double Dutch.
     
    The next day on the bus I decided that isolating myself at school was unreasonable. Anora was already making older friends and I was sure she had people to eat with. I should, too. I thought,
I’ll just try to be like my family when I’m at home. And when I’m at school I’ll act like school people
. I imagined that’s what integritywas. I kept thinking about it as I picked at the black pleather bus seat in front of me.
If I could fit in at GSCC, I can fit in anywhere. When I’m around these people, I’ll just pretend to be rich and normal in that white kinda way!
At the time it seemed feasible.
    It wasn’t like anyone at school knew where or how I lived, because the school bus didn’t even go to my dingy neighborhood. It went to a good neighborhood that bordered it, and I had to walk a good ten blocks home. So that afternoon when the bus didn’t pull away immediately, rather than let the kids on my bus see me walk toward my neighborhood, I crossed the street and walked into the good neighborhood. That’s when Adam, a blond fourth-grader, who also got off at my stop, asked, “What are you doing?” He pointed to my neighborhood. “You walked from that way this morning . . . and yesterday.”
    “I’m going over to my cousin Jane’s house,” I said. A lie. “She has a Nintendo.” Lie upon lie.
    The bus pulled away, but Adam flanked me now, so I couldn’t just double back to the ghetto, like I had planned to. I had to commit, and started walking up his street toward my fictional cousin’s house. I watched him silently walking next to me. His perfect Lacoste polo sticking out of a cable knit sweater that matched