Chapter Thirteen
“Lookin’ good, dyke.” Trey smirked as I entered homeroom.
I stared at my shoes, my hand touching the bare base of my neck and wishing I could just sink into the floor.
Did they have to take everything?
I’d spent two hours in the bathroom, trying to rinse the sticky tar from my hair. It was like someone had dipped my head in a pot of honey. The tar clung to every dreadlock and I tore large clumps of hair out before I realized what I had to do.
My stomach churned from the fumes and my hands trembled as I took Loretta’s scissors and chopped off my hair. Dreads fell to the floor like limp, dead worms. My beautiful hair – a gift from Dante’s sister before she got shuffled to another home – gone, just like every other thing in my life.
I didn’t cry. I had no tears left.
After I was done, I was left with a thin, matted mess. Combing the tar out of the roots had torn out half my hair, and what was left was thin and fine – longer on top where the roots had grown out. But at least I still had some hair. Luckily, I’d been cutting my own hair since I was eight, and Dante’s sister had taught me a trick or two. I evened it out as best I could, keeping it longer on top in a kind of punk-rock mini-hawk, and used some styling product I borrowed from Greg to make it sit on top of my head in spikes. If Dante were here, he’d have said it looked fierce.
But Dante wasn’t here, and fierce was the last thing I felt right now.
Trey’s knowing look punched me in the chest. I wanted to shout something, but I was too raw, too broken. Courtney was right – she was going to win this. I took my seat without answering Trey, staring down at my book and listening to the whispers swirl around me.
“Today, you’ll be starting your main assignment for the year. I’ll assign you to work in pairs. You’ll each research a historical event that caused a paradigm shift in society. Please avoid the world wars, as we’ll be dealing with them in the third quarter.” Dr. Morgan came through the class and paired everyone up. I shuffled my seat closer to Greg, hoping we’d be paired together. But she paired Greg with Amber, and I got… Ayaz Demir.
No, no.
I couldn’t face talking to one of the Kings today, let alone working with one on an important assignment.
But the assignment was twenty percent of our final grade. Dr. Morgan explained that each pair would create a display about their event that would focus on the impact it had on future generations and its impact on the world today. The top displays would be showcased at the end-of-year graduation event for parents and alumni, and the students who submitted that project would each be awarded 200 points.
200 points. My heart hammered. That would jump me ahead. That kind of gain could help me close the gap between the high-achieving students. If I did everything right, it could shoot me past Trey Bloomberg when the time came.
“Join up with your partners and start brainstorming ideas,” Dr. Morgan said. “You have the rest of the hour to decide on a topic and create a plan. Most of the work will need to be done outside class time, so you’ll need to set a schedule and divide tasks evenly—”
I didn’t look up from my desk as Ayaz pulled his desk opposite mine, but I couldfeelthe ambivalence rolling off him. “Trust Morgan to stick me with the circus freak dyke plague victim,” he muttered. His book hit the desk with a metallicclangthat rang through my chest.
“Let’s just focus on this assignment,” I said, pulling out my books.
“If you wish,” he said. His words sounded curiously old-fashioned. I wondered about Ayaz. He was a King of the school, and yet his skin color, his foreign-ness, the odd way he spoke sometimes… everything about him should have made him someone who was ridiculed, like me. And yet here he was, a monarch. Even though he sat only a foot away from me, he was on another planet.
I touched my hair, expecting to feel the weight of my fingers in my dreadlocks, but instead, I touched the bare skin on the base of my neck. A few thin strands of hair came away in my fingers, and I shuddered at the violation that’d been done to me.Did you do it? Did you sneak into my room and paint tar all over my hair? Did you take the last piece of my old life away from me?
“I think we should do the Salem witch trials,” I said, surprised by the venom in my voice.
“Feeling a little persecuted, are we?” Ayaz sneered.
“Let’s say I have an affinity for those who are tortured for being different.” My fingers reached up to touch my hair again.
“And how did the deaths of some witches change anything?” Ayaz said. “It’s not exactly relevant.”
“You mean how the Salem trials have been used ever since as political rhetoric and in popular culture to warn against the danger of mass hysteria and false accusations? What about the transition from medieval to post-medieval culture? What about identity and religion in our colonial past? What about the witch as a symbol both of patriarchal oppression and of early feminist thought—”
Ayaz’s eyes burned into mine. “You really give a shit about this stuff.”
“I give a shit about those 200 points,” I said.
Ayaz’s mouth twisted. “So do I,” he said. He seemed like he wanted to say more, so I waited, but he didn’t.
“Good.” I nodded. “I know you hate me or whatever, but can we just agree that we want to win, so we’ll both do the work and neither of us will sabotage this assignment?”
Ayaz stared at me for a long moment, and I could feel myself shrinking in my chair. His incense and opium scent wafted around me, sending a flame down my spine. After what seemed like a century, he nodded. “You might be right about this witch trial thing. You know there’s a connection to the school?”
