Tyler is my somewhat troubled, somewhat gullible twin brother. We were born on June 16 (a day that broke the record as the hottest day of the year), just two minutes apart from each other—Tyler being first. It was a sticky and miserable Saturday, Mama tells us. Dad was there for Tyler’s birth, but he got sick and left before it was my turn. And sometimes, I think maybe that’s just a metaphor for my entire life.

There are two types of twins in the world: identical and fraternal. Tyler and I are in the middle. We look alike in the face but are not identical. I’m slim; he’s not. I’m on the darker side of the spectrum; he’s not as dark. I look a lot like Dwayne Wayne from my favorite show, A Different World, except he had a box cut and I have a low fade, but I even own a replica of Dwayne’s sunglasses; Tyler does not. Tyler and I are synonyms and we go together like salt and pepper, but we’re not at all the same.

Really, though, out of all the shades of black, I got one of the darkest of the family. Tyler got a medium-brown complexion, like Dad and G-mo. But everybody always says we look more like Mama. We got her long, curly eyelashes and her hair that always curls up after a shower. Only thing we got from our dad was his nose. It’s a curse that we used to make fun of each other about over Thanksgiving and other holiday dinners.

Mama’s 1990 Volvo station wagon smells like a blend of cigarette ash, Tyler’s gym socks from intramural sports, and mildewy leather. The seats are ripped from years of wear and tear, holes coughing for oxygen in the roof. And the windows don’t even roll down. All of this and then some is why Tyler and I never look forward to rides from Mama. Especially not to Sojourner Truth High School. It sucks there’s no school bus that comes to our neighborhood.

The ride is about fifteen minutes long, and we’re listening to a local radio station that plays a lot of R&B oldies—Mama’s favorite type of music—and she’s on the phone with her older sister, Auntie Nicola.

Auntie Nicola lives all the way in Indiana, where she used to be a cop before becoming a stay-at-home mom. She was about to be recruited by the FBI, too. That’s how good of a cop she was in corn land. Auntie Nicola just goes to show that not every cop is bad, which can be hard to see sometimes. Mama says Auntie Nicola made enough money to quit and marry some rich black business owner, who’s supporting her and her kids—she real boujee like that.

They change convos, and now they’re talking about the cops around Sterling Point and what happened to Tyler, G-mo, Ivy, and me on our way home from the store. Auntie Nicola is on speakerphone, so we hear everything. “You need to have ‘the talk’ with them again, girl,” she says.

After she clicks off the phone, Mama goes, “When y’all get home today, I’m gonna need to talk to y’all. So best get ready.” And by the sound of her voice, I already know what she and Auntie Nicola are referring to. The talk is not gonna be about the Birds and the Bees. No. This talk is going to be THE talk. The talk that happens far too many times but somehow isn’t enough. The talk that all decent black mothers and fathers give to their children at least once a month. The You-Live-in-a-White-Man’s-World-So-Be-Careful talk. I know she wants to have this talk now more than ever because of what happened last night.

She parks in the drop-off section and has to get out of the car to open the doors for us, since the handles on the inside are all broken, except for the driver’s. “Have a blessed day, you two,” she says, strangely detached. Her tone is serious, but her words are sweet.

She kisses us both on the forehead and squeezes us real tight, like she has this feeling that at any given moment we’ll be taken away from her, sent into a black hole in outer space or something highly illogical like that. People don’t just get sucked away from the world. Or do they?

Tyler and I rush to A-Quad, where our lockers are. They’re next to each other because they’re assigned in alphabetical order. Bloodred with silver scratches from decades of badass kids keying them up, brushing up against them during hard-core make-out sessions with shanks in their back pockets. The air smells like recently lit weed.

I open my THUG LIFE backpack to put in the books I need for the day, and I notice Tyler frowning hard, shoving all the wrong books into his bag.

He slams his locker shut and turns his back to me.

“Wait, Tyler,” I say, catching his elbow. I pause, meeting his gaze. “You okay?”

He rolls his eyes and licks his lips, which Mama says makes him look like he’s been sucking on cherries since he was born. “I’m a’ight.” A damn lie. I know it.

In my mind, I flip through all the things it could be. I can tell something is on his chest.

“It’s about a girl, isn’t it?” I say, fake smiling.

He fake laughs, slings his backpack over his shoulder, and slips a hand in his right pocket. His gaze falls down to my feet.

There’s a short pause between us, people coming and going in the hallways, minding their own business for once.

“If it’s about last night, with the officer and that boy—”

“It’s not,” he says a bit too calmly, cutting me off.

I nod and take the hint. He doesn’t want to talk. And besides, I don’t really know what to say to make him, so I don’t press anything. Still, I can’t help but feel like he’s been more distant lately, and that kind of stings.

I watch him wiggle his foot.

“I’m heading to class now,” he says. “I’ve got a quiz later. Gotta get the answers from a friend before the bell rings.”

He leaves me standing there in the hallway, trying to figure things out. I look up at the ceiling for a moment, just at brown leak spots. Then I head to class, too.

Ms. Tanner’s high-ability English class is whack as shit. We don’t learn about anything worth knowing, and today’s been just the same old dead white people and white poems that she forces us to write on white pages. And now she tells me that Shakespeare was the world’s first rapper.

I know that’s just a load of BS. Ms. Tanner probably knows it, too.

Her class is one reading after another, one project after another—pointless shit that’s meant for the white kids. You see, this school—this classroom—wasn’t meant for me. It was meant for the white folks, as Mama always reminds me. Ms. Tanner’s class is for white folks, even though it’s an honors class and we’re supposed to do honors-level stuff, like learn about culture, learn about heritage, learn about truth, learn about the hate the world gives to people who look like me. Brown people. Black people. Some people, no matter what, will just hate forever.

I look back, and in the last row, Tyler is dead-ass asleep. That means he’s going to be asking me for homework help—no, more like for the answers. And that’s all right, because all this stuff is shit I already know anyway. Shakespeare invented iambic pentameter, and he wrote Sonnet 18 for a man, allegedly. A past participle is a verb, typically ending in ed. Ethos, pathos, and logos are the conjoined triplets of persuasion. Blah, blah, blah.

I’ve become a pro at daydreaming and pretend-listening, blocking out the white noise coming from Ms. Tanner’s mouth. And yes, sometimes it helps that I have memorized episodes of A Different World to replay in my drifting thoughts.

And suddenly, I hear G-mo’s voice. He whispers, “Yo. She’s talking to you, dude?” And then fingers poke me in the back.

I look up, wiping at my eyes. I shake my head. “YES?!” I nearly jump out of my seat, my hands clammy and warm, like a fuse just lit inside me.

“The expression draw a blank is an example of what, Mr. Johnson?” says an irritated Ms. Tanner.

She glares at me, and within seconds I’m having hot flashes.

“How to load a gun?” I answer her.

She stares harder, and the entire class combusts in laughter. “An idiom,” she shoots back at me. The class’s laughter gets louder, and I look back and see Tyler jolting awake.

I promise I’m actually sensible. I know what an idiom is. I promise. It’s just—I was caught off guard and so I didn’t really know how to answer her, and I stumbled over the words in my head.

As she turns her attention back toward the Smart Board, I float away again inside my mind, far, far away from this place.

Pretty much, if you’re in the hood, you’ve got a street name. No matter what. We nobodies don’t get AKAs that are threatening and dangerous, like Big Killa or Lil Death. They give us stupid names like Dawg, Fruitcup, or Squeaky if your voice is too high, or maybe straight-up Silent for extra dramatic effect.

They call G-mo, Ivy, and me Oatmeal Creme Pies. Brown on the outside, white in the middle. We’ve embraced the name. Oatmeal Creme Pies are delicious—by far the most delicious Little Debbie snack—so we’re proudly the Oatmeal Creme Pie Squad.

After third-period trigonometry with Mrs. Bradford, I head to the cafeteria, also known as the Lion’s Den. It’s supposed to resemble a mall food court, but the architect did a very shitty job, and if anything it looks like an old, run-down, hole-in-the-wall food joint in a bowling alley. It has a bunch of tables tossed in, scattered throughout.

I meet up with G-mo and Ivy at our usual shabby lunch table. We’re a group of high-ability geeks who love science and A Different World as much as life itself, sitting amid a pool of jocks, preppies, tomboys, cheerleaders, gamers, hipsters, wannabe gangsters, and, you know, just the punks who are always getting in trouble. Our world is the tiniest of them all, but that’s okay, because—as I read in some book—we don’t have the power to choose where we come from. We can’t choose between if we come from the bottom or top or from a tiny world of poverty or not.

“I told that chick I was messing around with to fuck off,” Ivy says.

G-mo’s light brown eyes get wide. “Word?”

Ivy says, “I found out she was straight,” and she puts air quotes around the word straight. “I told her I ain’t ever putting my mouth on hers again until they make condoms for kissing. Online dating’s a real bitch.”

The two of them keep going back and forth, making each other laugh. It’s only three of us at a table for ten. We’re as diverse as any single lunch table gets. We’ve got G-mo, AKA a young and improved Carlos Vives, my best friend since grade school, who’s from Colombia; Ivy, who’s mixed and a lesbian (which I think is dope because she gets all the superfly-looking girls); and then there’s me, a slender, Southern Baptist black boy—not as black as skin gets but close—and geekier than most.

G-mo and I are eating chicken quesadillas topped with lettuce and tomatoes, but they look more like extra-flattened grilled cheese sandwiches. Ivy’s smart and got an actual grilled cheese and chunky tomato soup. The three of us talk about what happened last night.

“I’ve been checking Twitter,” G-mo says. “I haven’t seen anything. Like, nothing. It’s pretty crazy that no one’s talking about it.”

“I thought about starting a Tumblr for the guy who got killed. He went here, didn’t he?” Ivy asks. Ivy’s not only wise beyond her age but also really caring. I love that about her.

“That’s what I heard,” I reply. “It’s scary and sad as shit.” All my life I’ve heard about people getting killed by police, but I never really prepared myself for it to happen so close to my neighborhood. I mean, I figure if I stay out of trouble, and if I convince Ivy and G-mo and Tyler to do the same, and if I always do as I’m told by the law, I’ll be okay.

Security guards stand around the perimeter of the cafeteria because lunch is the place where most of the fights happen. We’ve yet to go a single week in our school’s history without a fight. Out of all the schools in all the counties within a twenty-mile radius of Sojo High, our school is known to have the most expulsions. Most of which come from fights. And since our sports teams aren’t that good, we pride ourselves on being recognized for something, even if it is the highest number of physical altercations.

I turn around and catch a look at Tyler sitting with Johntae’s crew, laughing and cracking jokes with one another. Tyler’s never sat with Johntae and his crew before. He stopped sitting with us to sit with the jocks last year. Why the hell is he sitting there now? Johntae is a notorious drug dealer in Sterling Point, a Sojo High bully, a gang member, and yep—he’s known to love weed like Kanye loves Kanye, or like G-mo loves masturbating. Defying all odds, Johntae has managed to stay in school, hanging on to a 1.9 GPA by paying geeks like me to do the work for him.

He’s midsentence when he looks over at me, stopping his conversation with Tyler, who’s sitting directly across from him. I get the feeling that Tyler’s purposely not turning around, purposely not trying to catch me watching him. Johntae gives me the coldest look, and I find my eyes quickly shooting away, back to my tray.

“You know what I hate?” I ask.

“Yo. Mrs. Bradford? Don’t we all,” G-mo shouts a little too loudly.

“No, no,” I say, sighing. “I hate how I feel trapped. I feel, like, boxed in. I feel like I’m the mouse from Flowers for Algernon, like I’m destined to be this geeky black boy with no sense of direction for the rest of my life. Man, I wanna live. Man, I just wanna be like them sometimes. I wanna fit in. I hate not fitting the part.” And then my eyes wander back over to Johntae and his posse.

“Those guys?” G-mo goes. “Wangsters? You want to be a wangster? Who are you and what have you done with my best friend, Marvin Darren Johnson? Because the Marvin I know would never think about being one of them. Do you not remember that we almost lost our lives because we were mistaken for some of them? Fuck that.”

“I don’t want to be a gangster,” I say. “I just want to… fit in with them. You know?”

“I get you,” Ivy replies, and it’s kind of nice, because Ivy is also always the understanding one. She just gets things, gets my way of thinking, like she’s the girl doppelganger of me. “It’d be nice to fit in with the cheerleaders.”

“You look like one,” G-mo mutters to her.

“Yeah?” she asks. “My chest is so flat, though. I hear that’s what the coaches look for.”

“That’s why you gotta get in there and bribe the shit out of the coaches. That’s what a lot of them did,” he says. “Like, one girl brought in blackberry pie.”

“Only white people make that shit,” Ivy says. We laugh.

Before I can say anything else, it happens. The fight. Today’s fight ends up being between two girls. One black, big, and mean girl wearing a short skirt against another black, tomboyish-looking girl. They go at it hard, flinging weave everywhere, slapping each other with lunch trays, and then the fight makes its way over to us. One of the girls slams the other right on top of our table, the wind of the motion blowing in my face, and from here, everything sounds like crunches and bones breaking.

G-mo, Ivy, and I jump back from the table, and then security and Principal Dodson run over to stop the girls from ripping each other’s heads off. After they go, all that’s left around us is a lingering waft of sweat and musty armpit and hair grease.

Later, after fifth period, I get called into Principal Dodson’s office. The tiny room is filled with coffee stains and spilled mustard trails and stacks of old papers and books, and it takes only a couple seconds for me to break into a sweat, beads falling into my eyes. The office smells and is as hot as the devil’s ass crack, and it makes me literally itch all over, to the point where I have to make a mental note to shower ASAP.

Principal Dodson looks like a fifty-year-old ex–football player: broad shoulders, a mean expression always on his face, a line of sweat running down his black forehead like he’s coming from the gym. Most of the teachers here are white, and I used to think Dodson and I would get along because of our shared culture. Nope. One time, he wore icicle-shaped cuff links just to prove he’s made of ice. He has a reputation of being a dick, so most try to avoid him.

“Mr. Johnson,” he says. “Do you know why you’re in my office?”

“No, sir.” My hands get a little clammy and sweat coats my palms thickly, like my hands got dipped in jars of Vaseline, so I wipe them off on my pants.

And then Dodson leans back in his desk chair, waving a packet in my face. “You know what this is?”

“No, sir,” I answer, unable to read what’s on the pages.

“Look closer.” He tosses me the papers.

It’s the paper I recently turned in for my English class. The one about my favorite show, A Different World.

“Why should I give my time to someone like you, who doesn’t really give a damn?” Dodson yells at me from across his cluttered desk, books and piles of paper covering the surface. His voice is loud and piercing, stabbing my ears.

“But I put a lot of thought into that paper. The assignment was to write about a piece of art I find inspiring. Dwayne Wayne is my hero, and this show actually paints my reality.”

Dodson just laughs in my face, like what I’ve told him is the funniest thing he’s heard in a while. A tear even rolls down his cheek—that’s how hard he laughs. And then when his laughter winds down, he glares at me in silence, waiting for me to take back my words. I stare at him, too. My hands get moist, and sweat beads my palms again.

“So, you really think some TV show counts as art?” Anger gleams in his eyes, like days of rage that have been building up are about to be unleashed on me.

“A Different World was—is—more than just… some TV show,” I shoot back at him, as confident as ever, pressing my fingers into his desk to emphasize my words. “A Different World shows blackness in a way not many other shows do. It taught me that I could be successful, even when people think otherwise. It taught me not to be afraid of daring to be different. The characters knew what it meant to be like me.”

Dodson laughs sarcastically. “So, a TV show taught you that, but not important writers like Langston Hughes and Toni Morrison?”

“Sir, that’s not what I’m saying,” I mutter, shrugging my shoulders. “Not to be rude or anything, but black people aren’t a monolith, and we’re allowed to be inspired by more than one thing or a handful of people. Hughes is my favorite poet, but that doesn’t mean he’s the only person who inspires me.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard. Wait, no—your paper is definitely more ridiculous.”

My heart sinks in my chest. And I remember what Dad wrote in his letter. It’s best to cry when it’s dark and I’m alone. So right now isn’t the time to cry, even though I feel like just busting out in a watery stream.

“You really have the audacity to think that MIT’s gonna accept somebody who doesn’t take school seriously? I’m going to be real clear with you. Unless you’re going to start treating your education with respect, you might as well keep MIT out of your vocabulary.”

“What?”

“This is real life, not the movies. Boys like you don’t have a place at MIT. Or any of the prestigious schools in America.”

“Well, Mr. Dodson, sir, I’d like to think otherwise. I think there’s plenty of room for boys who look like me. But people like you make it hard for us to see that.”

“Who do you think you are?” he bellows, getting out of his chair, leaning in toward me. “You go to Sojo Truth High School, one of the worst-rated schools in the state. To the admissions committee, your high-ability classes, your straight As, your inspiration—none of that means shit.”

“But… sir…” And suddenly, I just want to scream at the top of my fucking lungs, because right now I’m reminded that I’m not enough, never ever will be enough. That I will never get out of here. A Different World is just fiction. There’s no future for people like me.

He rolls his eyes and balls up a fist, almost gnawing on it ’cause he’s on edge.

“Get out of my office and get to class” is all he says.

I exhale deeply before grabbing my backpack and my paper and walking toward his office door. Just when I touch the doorknob, it creaks, and his ceiling fan wheezes. I look back at him and see his eyes still glued to me.

I tell him, “Oh, and by the way, if you ever get a chance, you should watch an episode. It’ll show you what education has the potential to be. You might even like it.”

And I leave his office.