Angry Black White Boy Read Online Free PDF Page B

porous yellow-painted brick, the mildewed smell of institutionality . . . Déjà vu tickled Macon’s nose and he sneezed, loudly. A thin, moist spray of liberated germs joined billions of their cousins on the rug. Macon’s sneezes were always dramatic events, seldom stifled by a hand or tissue, as if the First Amendment were at stake.
    He reached his room, found the door ajar, and gave it a halting push. Sure enough, a dude his own height—five-eight, five-nine, neither short nor tall, an elevation undistinguished enough to inspire ardent weight lifting—turned from the window and squared broad shoulders to Macon. The blue evening, slung mellow over brownstone rooftops, outlined the follicle-fingers dangling around the cat’s eyes: baby dreads too short to be tucked into the full-stuffed headband at the back of his neck. So this was Andre Walker. He was shorter and lighter than Macon had expected, and the locks were a surprise.
    Macon raked a hand through his own cropped light-brown hair and meditated on the freedoms nobody but dreads had. Locks were fashion carte blanche. You could be Brooks Brothered down and get over on the contrast, or rock eccentric, idiotic shit: big butterfly-collared shirts with wide horizontal stripes, a dirty, pointless piece of string tied like a pageant sash, whatever. A dread was hip regardless, cooling nonchalant at the far end of the spectrum from where Macon huddled good-looking but not fly, forever struggling to hide the meticulousness in his cool like a bald spot, sporting the right gear and compensating for his hair by fucking with his facial growth. His sideburns flared into dramatic bell-bottoms, less stylish than aggressive—a half-successful hip hop remix of the only cross-racial revolutionary hairstyle to limp past Watergate.
    Macon took a mother-may-I giant step across the threshold and Andre took two toward him on clopping Nike flip-flops and filled the space between them with his outstretched hand. Macon spoke first.
    “Been wondering when you’d touch down.” A double-pump handshake. “Welcome to the crib. I’m Macon Detornay.”
    “Andre Walker.” He crossed thick mocha arms over his chest and leaned against the knotty side of a pinewood bookshelf beached in the middle of the room, evidence of his roommate’s ongoing efforts to redecorate. Macon had smoked the crack of dawn on a five A.M. Bonzai Bus down from the Bean ten days ago, Columbia’s first move-in day, in what had turned out to be a highly overzealous bid for first-come, first-served primacy. Living in a freshman double was going to be hard enough, he’d reasoned; if there was a nicer side or plusher mattress, he needed it. Macon had been switching beds nightly, though, and he’d developed no real preference.
    “How long have you been here?” asked Andre.
    “I came down for the pre-orientation camping thing. But when I got here, I realized I’d rather just have a week by myself in the city to get settled, find a job, shit like that. So I skipped it.”
    Andre nodded. “Yeah, me, too. I didn’t come to college to learn how to wipe my ass with leaves.”
    Macon chuckled, mostly to cover the whirring of his brain. All summer he’d been fretting over this moment, afraid that when faced with his roommate in the physical, he’d chicken out and not say what he had promised himself he would. The full-disclosure Macon knew he owed Andre seemed so foolhardy; why drop a million pounds of cement history between the two of them before there was anything else? Macon had spent hours telling himself it would be a bridge, not a wall.
    Now, at the crucial juncture, it seemed almost trivial. Macon’s feet still squished in his boots, adrenaline-soaked. His jaw still hummed with the violence, wit, and ideology of what he’d done. The robbery had been a giant step into himself, into the enormous suit of warrior’s armor he’d always felt it was his destiny to fill. New York was pushing him just like he’d known