Lies We Tell Ourselves: Shortlisted for the 2016 Carnegie Medal

My shoes feel like lead. I run, my legs pumping as hard as they can, but I’m not fast enough.

“Stop it!” I shout. It comes out as a screech. The white people gathered on the sides of the hall are still and quiet, watching.

The boys have caught up with Ruth. They’ve got her in a corner where she can’t back away. I’m still too far to see her face, but I can picture the fear in her eyes.

“Leave her alone!” I scream, but the crowd has gotten noisy again. No one hears me.

I don’t care about the rules anymore. I’m not going to ignore what’s happening.

I tear down the hall after them.

But I can already tell I’m going to be too late.

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Lie #8 (#ulink_4dab57e2-8f34-52b8-926e-4e51ba72216c)

THEY CANCELED THE prom today.

Because of the colored people. Everything that happens now is because of the colored people.

If Daddy has to work late at the paper it’s because the integrationist teachers are making up stories. If I’m behind in English it’s because the NAACP forced the school to close last semester. If I get caught daydreaming in Math it’s because the colored girl in the front row distracted me.

But the prom? Why did they have to get that, too?

I was going to the prom with Jack. It was going to be my last date of high school, and the first time Jack and I went to a dance together. Jack is far too old for these sorts of things—he’s twenty-two—but he said he’d come anyway. He said I shouldn’t have to miss out on my own prom just because my fiancé is an older man who’s long past childish stuff like school dances.

“I don’t see why they had to cancel in the first place,” Judy says. She has to raise her voice for me to hear her. There’s noise up ahead. People shouting. There’s always shouting in the halls now that the colored people are here.

We’re walking down the hall toward the first-floor bathroom near the stairwell. It’s the only bathroom Judy ever wants to go in because it’s always empty and she can fix her makeup without anyone seeing. The toilets in that bathroom have been stopped up since our freshman year.

“It’s obvious,” I say patiently. You have to be patient with Judy. She’s not slow like people think. She’s naive, that’s all. “No one wants white people and colored people dancing together.”

“Would that really happen?” Judy says. “Was someone going to force us to dance with them? Wouldn’t the coloreds only dance with each other?”

“Coloreds isn’t a word,” I tell her for the hundredth time. I swerve to step around a group of giggly sophomores. People are so rude, blocking the halls like this. They think just because our school is integrated they all have the right to act like animals.

“Right,” Judy says. “Sorry. The Nigras, I meant. But wouldn’t they?”

“Who knows what would happen,” I say. “No one thought we’d be forced to let them into our school. It’s not as if they didn’t already have their own. If they weren’t happy going to school with each other, why should they be happy dancing with each other?”

“Oh,” Judy says. “I hadn’t thought about it that way.”

I picture the shiny blue dress in my closet. It’s strapless, with a matching blue wrap and blue high heels. It looks almost as good as the fancy one from Miller & Rhoads I modeled in the Future Business Leaders of America fashion show last year. Mom took me shopping for it the day they announced the schools were going to reopen. She said it was too bad about the integration, but at least I wouldn’t have to miss out on all the fun of my senior year.

Daddy was furious when he found out. He said I wasn’t going to any dance with any colored boys. I told him I wasn’t going with a colored boy, I was going with Jack, and besides, it wasn’t my fault the governor gave up on segregation. Daddy said as long as I was under his roof I would speak to him respectfully, and I said then it was a good thing I wouldn’t be under his roof much longer. Then he pulled back his hand. For a second I thought he was going to do it. I think he thought so, too.

I almost wanted him to do it. To prove I still mattered to him even a little bit.

But he didn’t. He put his hand down and said I was an ungrateful little girl and he had work to do. Then he went to his study and didn’t come out again all night. As though he’d forgotten I was out there.

Mom told me to keep the dress because you never knew. Daddy had been known to change his mind about things. Then she disappeared upstairs with a glass of sherry and I was alone again.

The noise is getting louder as we near the stairwell. “We’re gonna shut that nigger up!” a boy yells.

Oh, for heaven’s sake. This again?

“That looks like a colored girl they’ve got there,” Judy says. The shouting is so loud I have to strain to hear her.

“A girl?” I say. “Who’s got her?”

“Bo and his gang, I think.”

I could’ve guessed. Bo Nash and his friends are a bunch of nobodies. Or they would be, anyway, if Bo hadn’t scored two touchdowns back-to-back sophomore year. He went from no-good redneck farm boy to town hero in one night. It only got worse that spring, when he pitched a no-hitter for the baseball team’s state championship. Girls stopped joking about Bo’s dirty, mismatched socks and started cooing about his dreamy blue eyes. It was enough to make you vomit. Now Bo thinks he owns the school. And everybody else seems to think so, too.

Well, not me. Any boy who wants to beat up on a girl, colored or not, isn’t worth the sweat in his undershorts. Bo’s a star of the team, so I can’t be outright nasty to him—not unless I want to hear everyone whispering about me in the halls all year—but I can take him down a peg or two.

Bo is right up in front of the colored girl when I get there. He and his friends have got her backed into a corner. She’s turning her head this way and that, looking for a way out. It’s one of the younger ones. Her white blouse has an ink stain on it, and her brown skirt is old and patched.

I stride up to the group and step in neatly between the boys and the girl, facing Bo. He scowls at me. Behind us, people are yelling, and another girl is screaming. I hold out my hands the way Reverend Pierce does when he’s trying to get an especially rowdy congregation at Davisburg Baptist to sit down and be at peace already.

“What’s the matter, Bo?” I ask, raising my voice so everyone can hear. “You’ve got everybody all riled up. For a second I thought Elvis came to town.”

A bunch of people laugh. I smile, because I know it’ll make Bo mad. I haven’t forgotten what he said to Judy in French yesterday. If he thinks he can get away with treating my best friend like that, he’s even dumber than I thought.

“You best just get on out the way, Linda,” Bo says. “We’re teaching somebody a lesson.”

I look over my shoulder in fake surprise, as if I didn’t know the colored girl was there. She’s cowering against the lockers. I take my first good look at her. Her eyes are wide and shockingly white around her deep black irises. The sleeves of her blouse have been let out so far the frayed edges are showing. She probably lives in one of those falling-down shacks out in Clayton Mill. My brothers say those places are full of lowlifes and it isn’t safe for a girl like me to go near them.

The colored people are all poor as dirt. They look it and smell it, too. Everyone says so.

I turn back toward Bo. “Right,” I say. “Because picking on some dumb, dirty little colored girl takes you and twenty of your friends.”

There’s more laughter behind Bo. The girl who was screaming before has stopped, thank the Lord. Everyone is watching me.

“She talked down to Gary’s girl,” Bo says, nodding toward the black-haired boy behind him. “She needs to learn her place.”

“Gary has a girl?” I’d heard that—Gary started going out with that freshman Carolyn, because everyone says she’ll go all the way with anyone who gives her his football pin—but I pretend I haven’t. “That’s really nice, Gary. Maybe we can double-date sometime.”

“Well, sure, Linda,” Gary says, smiling as if it’s a sunny Sunday afternoon, and there isn’t a scared little colored girl hiding behind me in the hallway. All the boys on the team want to go on double dates with Jack and me. “That’d be swell.”

Bo isn’t smiling.

“I’m not joking around, Linda,” he says. “You got to get out of our way. I don’t like to push a girl, but—”

Unless she’s a colored girl, apparently. I lower my voice so only Bo can hear. “I’m sure you didn’t just threaten me, Bo. Because if you did, you know Coach Pollard will hear all about it.”

Bo cocks his head to the side. His face slackens. I’ve won.