Free All the Wild Children by Josh Stallings Page A

seat.”  I look up.  She is huge with small brick colored blood shot eyes.  This is homeroom.  First period.  When I entered the room I hung back, then a pretty, real pretty girl looked up and smiled at me.  It was going to be OK.  Better than OK.  Sliding into the desk next to the pretty girl, I gave her a casual little head nod.  Her hair is shiny and flipped up in loose curls.  She reminded me of Diana Ross, not disco Diana, Stop in the Name of Love Diana.
    “I said, get the fuck out of my seat.”  The big girl looks ready to hit me.  Looks like she could crush me.
    “I don’t see your name on it.”  I look the desk over carefully, hoping the pretty girl is catching my cool.
    “I always sit by Verdel, even a dumb ass like you should know that.”  Slapping her meat paws on the desk and chair she heaves.  I feel the airy sense of weightlessness.  She is picking me up.  Her biceps bulge like two Easter hams.  The desk slams down. 
    “Chenille, he didn’t know.” 
    “Fuck that noise.  Come over here and take my seat.  Uh uh.”  She looks like her next move is a punch. 
    “Fine, I’ll sit wherever.”  I grab my backpack and move to the back of the room.  If I don’t look at Verdel, she can’t see my red face.
    “Smart move White boy.”  James has a ratty afro and an easy grin.  “One time down at the park I saw Chenille kick this poor bum’s ass, a full grown man, so hard he never did get up, not while we were there at least.  I’m James, but they call me Slim Jim.”
    “I’m Josh, and after today I think they’ll be calling me Sissy Boy.”
    “Fuck that.  There’s not a cat at this school would go up against that she-beast.” 
    The rest of the class is a mushy blur.  Class schedules.  Official campus rules.  Locker assignments.  James tells me which halls to walk down.  Which to avoid.  Where to eat lunch.  Where the kid was killed last year.  James is welcoming me to the new normal. 
    I will only last a year here.  I will learn to creep houses with Tomas.  We will plot to take over the world.  We will buy an ounce of hash with swirls of opium in it and sell light grams.  We will buy Turkish hash with state seals branded in it.  We will sell light grams.  We will be badass.  We will drop acid.  I will eat speed in the morning to keep from crashing.  We will carry guns.  I will start every day smoking a joint with Tomas to keep the werewolf size fear from eating me alive.  I will crack when my brother gets hepatitis from a dirty needle and is bedridden.  I will tell my mother I am changing schools because of girls.  A White boy doesn’t have a chance here.  I will change schools because I’m afraid of dying.
    1973, I’m just trying to get from one end of a day to the other without getting killed.  In my English class, Bob Dylan as poetry, I meet Tomas.  He is a half foot shorter than me and fifty pounds heavier.  He has the round face of his pueblo ancestors.  His parents were led by a coyote across the Mexican border.  His father cleans offices and banks at night.  His mother cleans their house in the day.  Tomas is smart, and funny.  We hit it off.  And not just because of the outcast thing.  There aren’t a lot of Mexicans in the school.  No, we actually like each other.  Tomas’s oldest brother graduated from Stanford and is a mover in the Chicano Brown Berets, activists modeled after the Panthers.  He had insisted Tomas educate himself. 
    Tomas’s other older brother, Jorge, is an acid casualty, who insisted Tomas learn to get high.  Since I was along he taught me as well.  We sit in his pimped out VW bug and smoke massive joints until everything has a cotton candy glow.  All soft and sweet.  Then we can handle the morning drama.  At lunch repeat.  After school repeat. 
    Tomas studies Leopoldo Zea, the theology of liberation and Kung Fu.  He tries to teach me Kung Fu, I am useless.  So he teaches me how to use a