He was, as it happened, the gentlest person she knew.
Not soft. There was nothing soft about Malcolm Johnson. He was six foot three and built like a door, with a shaved head and a short beard going gray at the chin and a jagged white scar that ran through his left eyebrow, which he had gotten, he told her when she was six, from a fight with a very angry pelican. He moved through rooms the way water moves through a channel, quietly and without any wasted motion, and when he was angry, which was rarely, he did not shout. He went still. He went so still and so quiet that the room seemed to get colder around him. Alana had seen it happen perhaps four times in her life, and every time it had frightened her more than any shouting could have.
But he was gentle. He braided her hair when she was little, badly, with enormous fingers that kept getting tangled, while she sat on the kitchen counter and laughed at him. He cried at movies about dogs. He did crossword puzzles in pen. He had driven three hundred miles through the night once, after getting back from somewhere he could not talk about, to make it to a cheer competition in Sacramento, and had arrived in the bleachers forty seconds before her team took the mat, still in his travel clothes, unshaven, gray-faced with exhaustion, and had stood up and cheered so loudly through the whole routine that the judges looked over.
He had taught her a great many things. How to swim in cold water. How to tie a bowline. How to change a tire and check the oil and jump-start a car. How to do a proper push-up, chest to the floor, elbows tucked. How to read a map. How to read a room. How to tell, from the way a person stood and where they put their hands and how often they blinked, whether they were lying to you. How to stay calm when everything inside you wanted to panic. How to wait.
Patience, Lani, he would say. Patience is a weapon. Most people lose because they move too soon.
She thought about that on the first morning at Westfield High School, sitting in the passenger seat of her mother's car in the drop-off lane at seven-fifty-one, looking up at the building through the windshield.
It was a big building. Bigger than any of her other schools except the one in Tacoma. Red brick, three stories, with tall white columns at the front and a white clock tower on top that someone had clearly built to make the place look older and more important than it was. A wide lawn with very green grass and a flagpole and a sign on a stone plinth that said WESTFIELD HIGH SCHOOL — HOME OF THE COLONIALS — EST. 1958. A parking lot full of cars that were, Alana noticed, newer and more expensive than the cars in the parking lot of any school she had ever attended. A lot of trucks. A lot of SUVs. A few small, sleek, foreign cars that she suspected belonged to students rather than teachers.
Students were streaming toward the front doors in clusters. Almost all of them, she saw, were white.
That was not new. She had been one of very few Black students at three of her six schools. She knew what it felt like. She knew the particular quality of attention it brought, the way some eyes slid over you and some eyes snagged on you and some eyes, worst of all, very deliberately did not look at you at all. She knew how to handle it. She had a system for that too. But she felt it now anyway, settling over her shoulders like a coat that did not quite fit, as she looked out of the car window at the flood of mostly white faces moving up the wide stone steps between the white columns.
"You okay, baby?" her mother asked.
Renée Johnson was a nurse. An intensive care nurse, nineteen years, the last twelve of them in military hospitals and the civilian hospitals near military bases, which was one of the very few jobs in the world that could follow a Navy family from one end of the country to the other without ever running out of work. She was small and quick and fierce, with close-cropped natural hair and reading glasses she was always losing, and she had come off a twelve-hour night shift at Sentara Virginia Beach General an hour and a half ago and had driven straight home to take her daughter to school because her daughter's father was in Mississippi for the week at a training course he could not get out of. She had not slept. She had a cup of gas-station coffee in the cup holder that had gone cold and that she kept picking up and putting down without drinking.