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His eyelids hung down, and he saw murky orange-redness—
capillaries
, he thought, millions of them. A thickly woven blanket of blood. And then the orange-red became a drowsy brown, and then through the brown, a blurred-out face. Wavy red hair, light eyes, pink lips.
This is the girl I’m going to New York to meet.

Chapter 4
    CASEY HAD TOLD Adam to take the M60 bus for $2.75 all the way from LaGuardia Airport to 116th Street, which was right in front of Columbia.
    The bus arrived and Adam claimed the corner seat in the back, as he always did, as every teenager he knew always did. It was weird to him that the whole civil rights movement had pretty much started over a fight to not have to sit in the back, and now the back was the only cool place to sit. Especially for black kids. A lot of times Adam had gotten on a bus, hoping for a back seat, but had to take something up front because a crowd of black kids had already staked the area. And, no, he could not just “join them.”
    Adam looked out the window. The inside of the bus was a pretty mixed group of people, but out on the streets every single person he saw was black. The storefronts read: JAY’S BARBER SHOP BEAUTY SUPPLY, DRUGS AND SURGICALS, SOLANGE HAIR DESIGN, HAIR AND BODY CONTROL, FOOT CARE CENTER (foot care center?), a fake Kentucky Fried Chicken called KENNEDY FRIED CHICKEN , and SHAE SHAE’S SALON. He wondered what part of New York this was.
    There were nine black kids who went to EBP. Yes, nine. Out of 152. Adam wasn’t friends with any of them. Even though they were spread out among the grades, they were all friends and ate lunch together (all except Nyiema, who didn’t eat lunch with anyone except the six stuffed animals safety-pinned to her backpack). There was this one girl, Kandis, who Adam was kind of scared of. She had transferred to EBP mid-semester and was the only black kid in Adam’s American history class, and whenever they were talking about civil rights or racism, Kandis would get all huffy and groan really loudly any time a white kid had an opinion. Their teacher, Mr. Grossman, totally played into it, always making sure Kandis got the last word on whatever they were discussing—like she was the necessary period to any sentence. Other teachers tried really hard
not
to single out Kandis or the other black kids when race topics came up, acting overly nonchalant about their opinions, like:
“Hmm. Maybe, maybe not. Just because you’re black doesn’t make what you say any more valid.”
    Or maybe Adam was just crazy. He hated the way he’d think obsessively about race whenever he talked to one of the black kids. One time Adam had come to school in a new hooded sweatshirt, and this black kid named Jonari had told him he liked it when they passed in the hallway. The sweatshirt had immediately become the coolest item Adam owned. Colin had a black friend who lived in San Francisco that he’d been friends with “since before they were born,” because their moms were in some baby group together. Colin was always going on and on about how tight he and Devon were, even though Adam had only met Devon a couple times over the years at Colin’s birthday parties and Devon had always looked as if he were just waiting until he could leave. One of Colin’s favorite things to say was that he “totally forgets Devon is black.” What did that even mean? Adam was pretty sure if Devon went to EBP, he’d be hanging with the nine other black kids—not Colin.
    Berkeley High was racially mixed, though, according to Sam, still really segregated. As far as Adam could tell, most of the gay kids Casey and Sam hung out with there were white. Casey had never really talked about race much, and Adam had been pretty sure she felt just as awkward about it as he did, but ever since Casey went away to college, all that had changed. Now Casey was constantly throwing around phrases like “white