I spend the whole summer in the weight room tearing little holes in everything my momma gave me. I might get to start on the football team this season and nobody wants to wear a JV anything. I want this so bad I tear my arms, I tear my knees, my quads in the pursuit of newer flesh and I believe it is worth it. I was born out of a wound, I come from a wound again and again. I work out in the same spot as the hockey players and they’re dreaming of rings too. Locks spill out from the back of their scalps in a way the physics of my otherness can’t conceive. It’s a trend, the barely flood framing the neck, all around me golden tidal waves, all around me little ambitious disasters.

My favorite English teacher can’t stop saying nigger. With it a tide of fleeting nervous gazes keep washing up on the doorstep of my face. I mean we are reading Huck Finn and me and Medaria sit next to each other pretending to take notes and be offended when really we are emailing each other in a thread where we have rap battles. We’ve gotten very good at this, exchanging one expectation for another. I should probably be paying attention but this book has nothing to do with me outside being a receptacle. Every glance begs We are sorry, so sorry. Guilt is a currency I’m wealthy in and this thought is enough to make racism kind of funny, kind of survivable. Above the tiles are painted to look like Dante’s inferno and the whole room smells like tea. The room where nigger is said the most is also the place I feel most at home. The irony is not lost on me while I think that behind me there is a hall made up only of doors, some with locks, some knowing you wouldn’t dare.