Read Online The Friendship Song by Nancy Springer - Free Book Online Page A

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?”
    â€œNo, not really. I just—”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œWhat’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.
    â€œRawnie’s the matter,” I said. “She makes me mad.” What I really meant was that I felt awful that she was mad at me.
    â€œSo, 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?”
    â€œWhatever 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.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œWhite