After school, Ali stood waiting, and hating herself for waiting, for Wallo, on the sidewalk at the side exit closest to their bus stop on Cermak. My bus stop, she caught herself. Not his. The sky was blue and shiny and the clouds sheet-metal gray coming in from the far-away lake and it pissed her off, if she let those fists close around her heart, that this boy didn’t treat her right and still she debased herself for him, waiting around like some eligible maiden in an anti-feminist fairy tale.

Across the street a mangy lot grew between unrolled sheets of cyclone. The “FOR SALE” sign had been fading all summer, a cruel reminder that Progress had no athletic field. Of course no one tried to put two and two acres together. When Ali’s kids were overexcited she’d just declare the next twenty minutes recess and let them run around the too-small classroom until their collective steam clouded up the few inches of air beneath the drop ceilings.

And on Monday it would be Columbus Day so on Tuesday she would have to teach a wonderful lesson plan that would live up to the work she and Carmen had done together to render the exquisite ironies of America’s Columbus Day celebration into child-size words. On the one side she wanted her kids to know that Cristóbal Colón had been a raping murdering enslaving imperialist. On the other hand it might make her fifteen Mexican chicos and chicas proud to know that our discubierto was by a Spaniard. In any case she’d have to think on it all week.

And anyway here was Wallo, jostling along the cement with his bag banging his thigh and his hair poking the air like spring grass. She watched him as he dragged a finger along the ruddy brick of the school building. He looked like Christopher Robin. And then he looked up and saw her and his face dropped, suddenly sullen, Stanley Sulks, not a carefree child but a petulant teenager, secret tantrum thrower, suffocating son.

“Can I help you?” he said.

“I was just waiting to see what you were up to,” she said. “Jesus.”

“I’m going home,” said Wallo. He leaned his back against the brick as though Ali had just found him here, as though he had been here first and she was the one who had walked up and bothered him, intruding on his peaceful primeval pasttime. “Anything else?”

“What is wrong with you?” Ali asked. Thunder sounded in an empty distance. In the parking lot an older teacher was arguing with a security guard beside a double-parked car. A thin stream of cold air slid past Ali’s cheek.

“I just—” Wallo gasped for words, tried to manipulate them with his hands as though emotions were like chemical fumes to be conjured.

Ali waited. “Yes?”

“Why do you have to keep sucking?” He gaped. “Me towards you?”

She stared, incredulous. She did not ask if there was more. She wanted to hear it all. Her eyes were on his handsome face.

Wallo’s eyes searched the sky for words. The clouds rolled on, the blue sky was eclipsed from view. A thin smile held his mouth. “You’re like…” He clenched his fists. “A black hole!”

Ali laughed. The tight throaty noise rose up not from her aerated lungs but from her neck, her laugh the gurgling sound of a throat clenching so that any air contained therein was forced up through the nose and mouth. A black hole. The rage gathered around her temples like storm clouds. She could feel the air pressure drop between her ears. It was clever, actually. She was black, after all. Did have, apparently, in Wallo’s estimation, some sort of gravitational force about her that may or may not have emanated from the deep depression between her legs. A hole. A Black hole. The words spelled themselves out before her blinking eyes with that Capital B asserting itself, ever politically correct. Black. The letters cleared and the lines of Wallo’s dark eyes and neckline reconfigured themselves before her. She saw him shake his head.

“Are you confused?” she asked. “Don’t be.” She nodded her head along with him, turned away, looked back, took another step. “Pendejo motherfucker,” she said, to the parking lot. She walked.