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Kids are not racist.
Kids are not judgmental.
Kids don’t care that your car costs twice the annual salary of the average American.
Kids are fun.
Kids are pure.
But I’m not.
I was a biracial man in a white world, so I knew exactly how Luna was feeling. Just like Luna, I didn’t physically stand out, not even in the WASP-y town of Todos Santos. I wasn’t even dark-skinned. My mother was German, my dad African American. My skin color was diluted, watered-down. Still, it was there. It was there in my height and my soft lips and my curly hair (when I let it grow, which was fucking never.) It was there when people made jokes about big dicks and basketball. It was there when I’d tried to apply for odd jobs while I was supporting myself in college. It was there, but others pretended that it wasn’t.
There’s something to be said about us biracial people. Society fucked us good in all holes and angles. I was too black to be fully accepted in the white, rich town I went to high school in (football scholarship), and too white to be accepted in the black community in San Diego where I grew up.
It’s not that I didn’t have friends, because I had many. It’s the identity I’d been lacking. The tribe. That puzzle into which I’d fit.
Luna was both different and similar to me in that sense.
She was beautiful and exotic, a rare diamond who was likely to suffer less from prejudice because times had changed. She drew people to her and fuck, she looked so normal, until she opened her mouth and nothing came out. Until an unsuspecting mother asked her name, and my daughter looked away and tears prickled her eyes, because she’d been spoken to by a stranger.
Until the mother’s kid called Luna a freak.
“She doesn’t speak English, Ma. She doesn’t even speak Spanish. The freak doesn’t speak at all.”
What did I say? A shit show.
My mother was there to squeeze my shoulder, pleading with her eyes for me not to kick the kid’s head to the ground and shove his face in the dirt and make him eat it. The party took place on the beach, out of all places, and the heat was slowly slaying the cupcakes, face paint, and my nerves.
“What kind of fucked-up kid says something like that, anyway? They’re four.” I dragged a hand over my head. Luna was sitting with Sonya under a tree a few feet from us, trying to calm down from the incident. They were sharing an apple. Since Little Miss Busy on Saturdays was too important to accompany Luna and me, I figured I’d take an arsenal of people as moral support and to keep me company. My parents, Darius and Trisha, tagged along, and Sonya managed to stop by at the very last minute, even though she was supposed to watch her son in some sports competition I couldn’t even remember.
“They’re four, they’re privileged, and they’re blunt. You grew up with the nastiest kids in the country. Why this behavior still surprises you, I have no idea.” My mother ironed my shirt down with her hand. She’d come a long way from Trish who worked at Walmart part-time since I’d hit the corporate jackpot. Wearing designer everything and not apologizing for it, she now looked like the women she didn’t even have the honor of serving, because they’d never set foot in that store. I loved that we were now part of a club that never really accepted us. It was ironic, in the Groucho Marx kind of way.
My dad was the only black male member of the Todos Santos Country Club.
Luna went to school with Toby Rowland’s daughter, the rich bastard who’d broken my ankle in high school to steal the captain of the football team title from me.
We were blending, meshing, stealing everything that wasn’t offered to us.
And. I. Fucking. Thrived. On. It.
“Time to wrap this shit up. I’ve officially reached the end of my patience.” I shook my head and let out a sigh when Luna refused to budge from under the tree and join the other kids in a dance, even when Sonya encouraged her, no doubt promising to never leave her side. Luna was especially trying in social events. I’d spent the first year after her mother disappeared at home with her, before finally caving in to life. I wanted to share the world with her. She was mine. My blood, my DNA, my cells, my eyes, my fucking being. Still, I wished she’d be more accepting of the outside world, and that it would be more accepting of her.
My parents exchanged worried looks, frowning. They’d been a tremendous help with raising Luna ever since I’d moved from Chicago, where I’d managed an FHH branch, back to Todos Santos, selling a healthy percentage of my stocks to Jordan Van Der Zee, along with a piece of my soul in the process.
