Free The Cruisers by Walter Dean Myers

books and the signs I had brought with me, I followed her into the hallway.
    Kelly stood very close to me and spoke quietly like she always did.
    “Zander, I’m not a racist and I don’t like being treated like one,” she said. Her whole body and face looked mad but she still spoke softly. “This is not fair and I’m going to complain to Mrs. Maxwell!”
    “Who said you were a racist?” I asked her.
    “Nobody
said
it,” Kelly answered. “But if the black kids walking around with signs about being degraded can look at me in the same way that they look at the Sons of the Whatever, then they’re putting me in the same category as them, and I resent it.”
    There were tears running down her face and I knew she wasn’t into any acting. I didn’t know what to do.
    “I’m not saying that you were degrading us.”
    “Zander, I can see your point. But when you make things this simple—just black against white—you’re including everybody,” Kelly went on. “And I don’t want to be degraded by anyone for who I am or what I am. I go out of my way not to degrade anybody else. If anybody is being degraded, then we’re all being degraded.”
    I handed her a sign.
    Kelly looked at the sign and then at me. Her mouth moved as if she was trying to say something, but nothing came out. Then, in one quick movement, she turned the sign around and put it across her chest.
    As she walked off I knew it was good and bad. She was saying that the black kids had to own what we were doing the same way that I was saying that Alvin and his crew had to own what they were doing. Okay, but she was also pinning the tail on Alvin, just as I hoped she would.
    The period ended and when we went into the hallway there were groups of kids gathered around the bulletin boards where we had put up the broadsheets. It was Mr. Weinstein, the gym teacher, Cody’s father, who tore the first one down.
    “You’ve got to put that back up!” I heard Cody say. “It’s a school rule that you can’t take something down from the bulletin board unless it’s obscene.”
    “Cody, don’t you go starting trouble!” Mr. Weinstein said. “Because that’s against
my
rules!”
    “Put it back up, please!” Cody insisted. “Sir.”
    Mr. Weinstein dropped the paper on the floor and stormed down the hallway. Cody picked it up and tacked it back onto the bulletin board.
    Sidney Aronofsky came up to me and asked me for a sign. Soon I was passing them out to more kids, blacks and whites, girls and boys.
    LaShonda had been right. A lot of the kids at Da Vinci had been checking out the Sons of the Confederacy and hadn’t liked what they were doing. But they had been quiet until we had given them a way to express themselves. We gave out all of the signs, and before I knew it a lot of students were speaking to me. They were telling me how they were glad that someone was speaking up. One boy said that his grandfather had gone South on a bus with the Freedom Riders.
    “He got beaten up,” the kid said. “But on the way home he was thinking that was the only fight he had ever won.”
    In Language Arts, Miss LoBretto changed the lesson to a poem that Yeats had written called “The Second Coming.”
    “Who knows what Yeats meant when he wrote the lines ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,’” she asked.
    We spent the rest of the period talking about Yeats and the poem and about people speaking up when they see something wrong.
    I was feeling good when Phat Tony came up to me after Language Arts.
    “You’re the Zander man,” Phat Tony said. “I might even let you join my posse.”
    “Mr. Scott!”
    I turned to see Mr. Culpepper less than four feet away from me. Ashley saw him and came over quickly.
    “This is a private conversation, Ashley,” Mr. Culpepper was talking through clenched teeth.
    “Better make it fast because I just called the city newspapers,” Ashley said. “You know, I call them if I have