Lightest Lights Against Darkest Darks

When I opened my locker the first day of junior high, I found a bra hanging from the coat hook, its assertive cups the grayish drab of whites washed too often with darks. I shut the door before anyone saw. Most of the white families left the district when busing began, but my parents stayed, so I came in with the busload of southeast Denver kids that were shipped a half-hour north to Cole Middle School to mix things up every day. The locker partner assignments were meant to encourage cross-town friendships, but that was hard with kids who wouldn't see each other after the bell rang. According to the slip of paper my homeroom teacher had given me, my locker partner was named Arika, and as I studied the combination, trying to memorize it, she brushed past me, flanked by two chattering friends. She opened the locker, snatched the bra out, and stuffed it in her backpack like she didn't care who saw.

"Hi," I said, too quiet for her to hear. That morning I'd worn a red bandana through the belt loops of my jeans, a fashion statement I'd seen in Seventeen. An eighth grader who caught the bus at the same stop convinced me to take it off. To make me feel better, the eighth grader said that another kid had worn British Knights sneakers to the bus stop and ended up going home when she told him that those were Crip shoes, BK for Blood Killer. As I thought of the bandana, balled in the bottom of my backpack, I hesitated, and Arika walked off without acknowledging me. I placed a few books on the locker's lower shelf, hoping she wouldn't mind if I claimed that as my own.

A guy wearing sagging jeans and a pick in his hair did a slow, stylized walk down the hall, taking wide steps with a hitch in them, shaking his right hand as if he were shooting dice. Across the hall, a boom box wedged in a locker blared a booming baritone: "How low can you go? Death row, what a brother knows." A teacher lingered in a doorway nearby, and I waited for her to put a stop to it, but she just stood there with her arms crossed over her chest like she was guarding the classroom.

By the end of the day, I felt exhausted and lonely, and headed into my final class, art, with relief. The classroom was in the farthest corner of the top floor, at such a remove from the rest of the building that it felt like an artist's garret, with huge frosted glass windows lining one side. Arika sat at a table in the back, but instead of joining her I walked to the front and sat at an empty table. I pictured all my sixth-grade friends, scattered across the city, probably enjoying their first days of school. Busing worked like this: from first to third grade I rode the bus to west Denver, where I went to school mostly with Mexican American kids. From fourth to sixth grade, the same kids were bused to my neighborhood. I'd probably never see most of them again, and only a handful of the kids from my neighborhood showed up on the bus to head north for middle school, because over the summer the gang violence in the area had picked up.

The art teacher, Ms. Omber, looked white but acted like she didn't want to be. Petite, with long caramel curls coaxed into semidreads through knotting and neglect, she wore faded jeans so tight they revealed the definition of her crotch. Her leathery skin was permanently tanned, or maybe that was its natural color—it was impossible to say. I, for one, thought she was just white like me but wore it a whole lot easier than I did. She spoke like the black people from that part of town, not with a fake accent but an easy, mellow cadence, dropping in a "baby" here and there when she...