Profusion of Goth Refinery

I saw them. And for an instant, I stopped walking.

They stood there, between me and the Walmart service counter, exuding their dark, mysterious vibe—lips and hair colored black and clothes as dark as a funeral. Each held in his arm an equally grim skateboard.

Perhaps I didn’t need the Walmart service counter after all.

But before I turned away, I caught myself.

My middle school students and I had just read The Outsiders. This is a book about a bitter rivalry between two groups with socioeconomic differences. My students had appreciated the themes—that differences don’t need to make enemies and that commonalities exist among people with differences.

I had hoped reading The Outsiders would help my students build bridges, not walls. And here I was, my feet fixed to the floor.

I took a step and then another. They noticed me coming, their eyes watchful. And suddenly, I was surrounded, arms reaching out to hug me. I knew them. There was Jason, who lived down the street, and Jamal, who loved to draw, and Andre, who had come to talk to me on the day his father entered a state prison, and Isaac who had stopped by my room on the last day of school several years before to thank me for a good year.

We stood there blocking the Walmart service counter while they told me what was going right for them and what was going wrong. And we remembered the detention I had assigned to Jamal for disrespecting the girl who sat in front of him and the phone call I had made to Andre’s dad when he couldn’t remember to do his homework.

Then we realized we were blocking the Walmart service counter, so we hugged each other goodbye. As I stepped to the counter to do my business, they, in their profusion of goth refinery, walked the other way.