Free Mixed: My Life in Black and White by Angela Nissel

offering my jump-rope suggestions. I’d wait until they accepted me to try to change them.
    “Here, try again,” Kim said. I started turning the ropes. Keisha, a tall bronze girl shaped like a pogo stick with tiny breasts, entered. She held one arm protectively over her breast buds as she jumped. I studied her feet as I turned. She made it all the way to “Apple Pie.”
    “Have you ever jumped double Dutch before?” Keisha asked, snatching the ends from my hands.
    Everyone was annoyed with me, but it was finally my chance to jump.
This is my chance to prove myself. God, please let me make it past
Filet.
    The ropes slapped the ground, awaiting my entrance. I held my breath and leapt in with all the grace of a drunk jumping off a cliff. My arms flailed at my sides. My legs landed heavy on the rope as if I had cement in my shoes.
    “Big,” all three girls called out unenthusiastically.
    I didn’t even make it to “Mac.” I couldn’t even get a whole burger.
    “Let her get a freebie,” Kim said, enlightening me on two double-Dutch rules. One: She was in charge because it was her rope. Two: If a jumper can’t get past the first word of the McDonald’s jingle, it must be everyone involved’s fault (no one is that un-talented); thus the jumper gets a second try.
    The ropes spun again. This time I tried to imitate how the other girls looked when they jumped in. I scowled at the ropes like they had killed my firstborn. I put my arm protectively across breasts I didn’t have yet. I swayed my body back and forth to the timing of the rope turns, timing out my entrance in my head.
Jump now! No,
wait. Jump now! No, wait! Just do it!
    I jumped in, and a sharp pain flew across my forehead. I fell backward to the cement, heard a popping sound, and saw a barrette launch into the street and hit the tire of the G bus, which had stopped to discharge passengers.
    I tried to get up, but when I moved it felt like someone was pulling a zipper through my hair. When I could think past the pain, I deduced that one of the ropes had smacked me in the forehead, traveled along my head, and got tangled in my braid. My curly hair tends to spiral around anything close to it, and with the barrette no longer holding the ends of the braid together, the individual strands were coiling around the rope.
    Butt cheeks still on the cement, I tried to yank my head out of the rope. The girls, stunned stiff with looks of pity until this point, dropped the ends and rushed to unravel me from the clothesline.
    “No, Kim, you untwist and I’ll hold her head straight!” Nikki yelled, cradling my head in her hands. “Twist the rope to the left,
then
to the right! Go
with
the braid!” she yelled.
    I looked up at her helplessly as she commandeered the double-Dutch surgery. I was one notch above a shivering dog floating down an icy stream yelping at the amateur rescue squad. Perhaps I could have been the feel-good story on the evening news:
Oreo kid
moves to hood, gets curly Oreo hair caught in rope, and is freed by local girls.
They’d interview Kim.
    “No, I don’t consider myself a hero,” she’d say, explaining that anyone in her situation would have done the same thing.
    While looking up at them unraveling me, I wondered how the Star-haired girls hadn’t met this same fate. It must be the flat braids, I reasoned. If your braids fling around loose, you were bound to get ensnared by clothesline.
    “You got it!” Nikki yelled. “She’s free!”
    “Ick, there’s a bunch of hair on my rope!” Kim said.
    Nikki released my head. “Where are you from?” she asked, her tone indicating that she was asking a grander question, like “Where is your type of person manufactured?” as opposed to which house I lived in. Even though I knew this, I turned my sore head slightly and pointed to my grandmother’s house, where I saw my mother coming onto the porch. I used her as an excuse to bow out gracefully.
    “Well, it was nice meeting you-all. I’m