The Season of Children

When the hurricanes hit that summer, the three of us were kids in the sense that we were violently hopeful. We walked to the flooded basketball court. We pulled at its metal lock, kicked at it, threw rocks. We climbed the fence and splashed down, sat with our legs splayed on the cracked concrete. We soaked in the dirty water, spat into it. We twisted our pruned fingers into the green chain-links behind us. Sweat ran down our faces, each of us bearing a smirk that matched ourselves—our way of showing who we were, and that we did exactly what we wanted. But in truth, we were a ragged bunch—a brown kid, a white kid, and a black kid—and someone looking at us would have said we looked like a collection of things disinherited.

Before the hurricanes came, we lived outside. None of us had much money. Everyone in our Central Florida neighborhood got by, delicately straddling middle-class and poor: each family was only separated from the next by the oldness of their clothes and shoes, the condition of their car, the number of bedrooms they squeezed into. But when we stepped outside, we forgot. 

The basketball court was our bodega. Games ran all afternoon long, a steady soundtrack of noise: basketballs thudding on the concrete and clanging against the metal rim, kids shouting scores. Around the court hovered the middle-schoolers, high-schoolers, mostly brown kids and black kids—standing or sitting, inside the fence or out, with bookbags slung over their shoulders—not even interested in the score of the game, but content to just be there. BB guns got waved around. Cigarette butts were smashed into the ground. Paper plates of rice and beans got eaten too quickly. It’s where I spent most of my afternoons, and where