Black Ice Read Online Free PDF Page A

way. Whose fault? Whose?
    And it was as true as our barely acknowledged disappointment in the big Yeadon house, which had not made us happier together, as I’d expected it would. Why else had we bought it? Why else the scrimping and saving, the thrift-shop furniture, the careful hand-washing of delicates, the parade of used, rather than new, auto parts?
    I made a freeze-frame of my parents in my mind: big, expansive, generous, unhurried. It was what I had done as a child when I had felt in danger of getting too happy. I’d make a picture in my mind to go back to later and enjoy in bits. My mother was wearing her best lipstick, and my father sat content, wanting to be nowhere else but right there, with us. I made a picture of them like that—I can still see it—and I held my new gorgeous reverence for them way deep inside where it made me warm and giddy like brandy.
    Then, Mr. Dick asked my parents to leave. Their interview was over. They had passed; how could they not? It was my turn, but I felt guilty that they should go. How could I sit alonein the office, discussing my worthiness for an education they’d never had? It was quiet after he’d shown them out. Quiet. It was hard to pull myself back, to stop watching others and start promoting myself. I wanted to watch some more. I wanted to look at Mr. Dick, his mannerisms, his eyes. I wanted to read his files and eavesdrop on his phone calls so I’d know who I was dealing with.
    “Tell me, Lorene, what most attracts you to St. Paul’s School?”
    “I guess what I would look forward to most is being somewhere where all the students
want
to learn. In my school, if you get a really good report card, you feel like you better hide it on the way home.”
    It was partially true. Afraid of becoming an egghead and of appearing to be one, I smoked in the bathrooms, cursed regularly, and participated in mild pranks. But Yeadon High had plenty of ambitious kids of ambitious parents, and was hardly so tough a place as I insinuated. Mr. Dick did not seem to know that. I wondered what he thought it was like.
    “It’s not considered cool to do well?”
    “Not really.”
    “And do you like school?”
    “Most of the time, yes.” A bald-faced lie. I disliked school, always had—the clanking institutional sounds in cavernous old buildings, the cheap dropped ceilings and multipurpose cafeteria-gymnasium-auditorium rooms in new ones. I hated fights. I was offended by standing in lines (“We’re not moving until everybody is standing ab-so-lute-ly still”); insulted by teachers’ condescension (“If you can’t pronounce Mrs.
Rak-our
, you just call me Mrs.
Rock-over
”); I was numbed by busywork (“Copy pages five hundred and fifty-five through five hundred and fifty-eight from your dictionaries, and see if
that
can keep your traps shut”). I dreaded gym. Mr. Dick could tell that I was lying; he smiled.
    When we got around to books, I was finally set, as our minister would say, on solid ground. I gorged on books. I sneaked them at night. I rubbed their spines and sniffed in the musty smell of them in the library. I sped through my grandfather’s paperbacks that lined the wall of their mint-green sun parlor and read and reread the dirty parts until I was damp. I memorized black poetry—stately sonnets, skittering bebop rhymes, any celebration of black women—and I drank in the fury of my contemporaries. I did not tell Mr. Dick that I’d been reading
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
, or that I was attracted to the murderous rage of the protagonist, a token black like me.
    When my interview ended, Mr. Dick opened the door for me. He held it while I stepped through. “I hope you’re ready for homework,” he said. “Because there’s plenty of it here.”
    Was he assuming that a black girl from public school might not be up to it? I wondered. Or was I too sensitive? I’d been told that before, and I knew it was true, but I couldn’t always tell when. Sometimes