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following morning my phone rang, and I was genuinely disappointed to find that it wasn’t him. The fact was that I’d enjoyed our conversation. The sales part was a little tiresome, but with that behind us, I hoped we could move on to other things, and that listening to him would be like reading the type of book I most enjoy, one about people whose lives are fundamentally different from my own. By this I mean, different in a bad way. Someone who lives in a mansion spun of golden floss, forget it, but someone who lives in an old refrigerator beside a drainage ditch—by all means, call me! Collect, even.
      
    “You need people like that in your life so you can feel better about yourself,” my mother used to tell me. The first time she said it, I was fourteen and had recently begun the ninth grade. Our school system had just desegregated, and I wanted to invite one of my new classmates to a party at my grandmother’s apartment complex. The girl I had in mind, I’ll call her Delicia, was pretty much my exact opposite—black to my white, fat to my thin—and though my family was just middle-class, I felt certain we were wealthy when compared to hers.
    The kids who’d been bused to my school were from the south side. This was a part of town we drove through on our way to the beach, always with the car doors locked and the windows rolled up, no matter how hot it was. I wasn’t sure which of the run-down houses was Delicia’s, but I assumed it was the shackiest. Even dressed up, the girl would have looked like a poor person, not a sassy, defiant one but the kind who had quit struggling and accepted poverty as her lot in life. The clothes she wore seemed secondhand, castoffs suited to a frumpy woman rather than a teenager. Her shoes were crushed down in the back like bedroom slippers, and because of her weight she was frequently out of breath and sweating.
    One of the things the north siders learned that year was that black people discriminated against one another just like white people did, and often for the same reasons. Delicia was dark-skinned, and it was that more than her weight that seemed to bring her grief. There was something old-fashioned about her appearance: these full cheeks and round, startled eyes, their whites dazzling in contrast to the rest of her face.
    We had two significantly overweight black students at our school that year, and I was always surprised when people confused them for each other. The second girl, Debra, had processed hair, and sticking from it like an ax handle was the grip of an oversize wide-toothed comb. She’d sit at her desk with her book unopened, and when the teacher asked her to turn to page thirty-six, she’d mutter she wasn’t opening nothing to no damn page thirty-six or two hundred neither.
    “Did you say something, Debra?”
    “No, ma’am,” she’d answer, followed by a closemouthed, almost inaudible, “Hell, yeah, I said something. Take your ugly head outcha ass and maybe you can hear it.”
    “I’m sorry, but is there a problem?”
    “No.” Then, “Yeah, bitch, you my problem.”
    Delicia, by contrast, was timid and sweet, with short Afroed hair and a soft, almost childlike voice. I thought that because she was shy she’d be a good student, but those two things didn’t always go together. She was polite, certainly, and seemed to try as hard as she could. It just wasn’t good enough for the north side. The two of us were in the same English class, and though I told myself that we were friends, her reticence made it hard to hold any kind of real conversation. Like all the new kids, she used the word “stay” in place of “live,” as in “I stay on South Saunders Street,” or “I stay in Chavis Heights.” Delicia stayed with her aunt, which she pronounced to rhyme with “taunt.”
    That was all I knew about her personal life. Everything else was my own invention. I decided for a start that she was virtuous and eager to change, that our association