Free Black Boy White School by Brian F. Walker

looks like, right?” a boy whispered from behind them. “A butthole. You know, like a hole for her butts?”
    â€œShe doesn’t smoke through it, jerk,” the girl said, and then shifted uncomfortably. “Starting today, I’m quitting. . . . Today or however long it takes to finish my carton.”
    The period ended and Anthony went on to the next class, thinking of the movie, the girl who’d sat next to him, and mixed messages. The handbook stated that Belton was a smoke-free school. But dorm parents handed out flashlights to smokers at night and directed them to off-campus spots near the roadway, where they could stand in the darkness and puff. The same was true for how the school handled hazing and sex. In a way, the whole place was a farce. On weekdays it was a lot like the catalog: smiling kids and happy faculty interacting in classrooms; crowds cheering the teams on the fields. But weekends at Belton were a lot like full moons, and most of the students were werewolves.
    That night, Anthony sat at dinner with Brody and Nate, half listening to them insult each other, feeling a bit more settled in at the school but still nowhere close to contented. He missed home but didn’t always think about it, which usually brought on rounds of guilty phone calls. He had already burned through two months of laundry quarters in just a little over four weeks.
    George walked into the dining hall then, slapped hands with some of the kitchen staff, and stopped briefly to talk with the headmaster. Then he went and sat alone at a table but didn’t keep his solitude for long. A steady trickle of kids, from athletes to burnouts, came to sit with him or offer high fives.
    â€œEarth to Tony?” It was Brody, and he was waving his chicken.
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œNever mind. What about you, Nate? Wanna go to North Conway tomorrow? My dad said I could bring a friend.”
    â€œI dunno,” Nate said haltingly, “your dad seems kinda weird. . . .”
    â€œForget it.”
    â€œ. . . He kinda has that look.”
    â€œI said forget it. Jesus Christ, dude, you just go on and on. Maybe you’re the weird one. Ever think about that?”
    Anthony turned to watch King George, surrounded by his court of twenty-five-twenty, calmly eating his food. A blond girl rushed over with a slice of apple pie, put it down, and sat on his lap. For all of his warnings about the nature of white people, George seemed to have a lot of them as friends.
    â€œ. . . Tony?” It was Brody again, and it was clear that he was getting annoyed.
    â€œI told you to stop calling me that.”
    â€œSorry, Anthony . So you’ll go, right?”
    He thought about the day he met Brody’s parents, the way they’d made a joke of his last name, how Mr. Lavallee had seemed to take pleasure in almost breaking his hand. Anthony didn’t want to see them again any more than he suspected they wanted to see him. “Naw, man,” he said, deliberately not looking at his roommate. “You can count me out.”
    Across the room, George got up and left, the blond girl draped over him. They walked past the headmaster’s table, where a few of the men sitting there either looked away from the couple or grinned.
    Nate made an obscene gesture. “Where do you think they’re going?”
    â€œAnywhere they want,” Anthony said in quiet awe.
    The dining hall slowly emptied. Kids left in pairs and in threes and in groups, some determined to screw or kill brain cells. And the teachers, jacked up from cups of dinner coffee, went out to try and stop them from succeeding.
    Anthony soon found himself at the pay phone on his floor, waiting for the operator. On the wall, someone had drawn a smiling penis with running legs, not far from Nate’s name, scrawled in the same color. Someone else had drawn a pair of cartoon bears, dancing in a field of mushrooms. And there was