Ten days in, Alex had gotten calm enough to sit down and total up his starting position, and the total came to: very bad.
Start with poor.
Welfare really did cover nothing but the basics.
Aunt Susie picked up a little extra minding neighborhood kids on weekdays, but against a household this size that money was a drop in a bucket.
As for the seed capital a man in his situation might have hoped to wake up with — forget it.
What he had in his pocket right this minute was three quarters, kept there in case of an emergency that needed a pay phone.
His cousins were in the same boat, and the clothes told the story fastest.
What he and Tony wore came from churches and charity drives.
Tony’s dark coat had started life as a factory uniform, and the cuffs and elbows were almost gone.
Alex’s own black suede jacket had belonged to somebody in the Air Force — USAF1969 was stamped inside the collar — and the color had held up about as well as the jacket.
Connie and Emily did considerably better; Aunt Susie wouldn’t let her girls go out looking shabby.
Unfortunately the combination of 1980s taste and a fondness for very bright colors produced a total effect he couldn’t bring himself to compliment.
All of which, he reminded himself, was strictly the opinion of a man who’d arrived from somewhere else.
Poor he could live with.
Not getting shot was the bigger problem.
The South Side’s crime numbers were right at the top of the national rankings — poverty, guns, drugs, gangs, and payback all feeding one another — and lately the trend was getting worse, not better.
The kind of shooting that would have shocked the whole country back in China happened here several times in a short stretch and nobody blinked.
There were news items about bystanders being killed by stray rounds from gang crossfire.
Below the shootings, robberies and the rest of the low-grade stuff were simply everywhere.
Gangs and drugs had long since gotten inside the schools, and the public schools in the Black neighborhoods where he and his cousins went were where it landed hardest.
Case in point: the half-grown boys also waiting at the bus stop, passing a cigarette around and pulling on it hard.
You didn’t need a second look to know that was bad news.
“Yo. Tony.”
Luckily they were all from the neighborhood.
One of the boys, in a baseball cap, called out to Tony first.
“You rolling with Lil Lori now?”
“Hey.”
Tony put Emily onto the elementary school bus that had just pulled up, grinned, and bumped fists with the baseball cap.
“Come on over here.” He deliberately steered clear of Alex and Connie and walked off to the other end of the stop.
The cap was familiar.
Alex had never heard anyone use anything but the nickname — ET — presumably because his eyes were big and bulged, like the alien in the movie that had been everywhere in the eighties.
But the corner of a patterned bandana showed under the brim of the cap, and that told you this ET, who couldn’t be more than two years older than Alex, was a genuinely vicious piece of work.
On the South Side you didn’t put a bandana on your head casually.
Tony had a lot of friends.
The middle school bus came soon after, and he and ET’s crowd went to the back row to keep laughing and talking.
Connie linked up with the girls in her grade.
“Morning, A Plus!”
The little cluster of ninth graders Alex belonged to sat up front.
He’d barely gotten into his seat before somebody hollered it, and the boys and girls around him cracked up.
“Morning…”
Alex scraped together a smile for them, then leaned back against the seat, shut his eyes, and pretended to sleep.
Poor and unsafe he couldn’t solve yet.
The item on today’s agenda was a different one: getting bullied at school.
Here was how it happened.
The original Alexander Song’s grades had sat somewhere near the bottom of the class.
Then, ten days ago, the soul in the body got swapped out for Alex’s, and he strolled through a math test with a perfect score.
Which should have been nothing.
In an America a few decades further along, no classmate would have any interest in anyone else’s score.
But American political correctness hadn’t “evolved” that far in 1990 yet, and the math teacher was delighted.
She announced his A+ to the whole room, praised him to the rafters, and held him up as a spur to the “slower” students.
So here came the trouble.
Inside ten days, his classmates had him nicely isolated.
“Alex,” which everyone had been calling him without any problem at all, became “A Plus,” always with laughter attached that nobody bothered to explain.
And a few of the boys near the bottom of the class had started stopping by every so often to test him out.
For now the testing amounted to putting a shoulder into him in the hallway, or knocking a book off his desk on the way past.
Even so, the direction it was heading made Alex distinctly uneasy.
Song Ya had been a standard-issue easygoing Chinese kid.
Comfortable family, grades a bit above average, no burning ambitions.
He’d graduated from university and six wallets — his parents and both sets of grandparents — had put a down payment on an apartment for him.
A few years of writing code after that and he’d saved up for a car and had begun thinking about finding a wife.
His life had been running smooth and level, and then it dumped him into this.
This environment was genuinely hard to handle.
And who in China had ever been frozen out and pushed around for acing a test?
Nobody there was handing out idiot nicknames like “Hundred Percent,” either.
The real injustice was that while his math had gone up by leaps, his marks in P.E.
and art had gone straight down a well.
In an American high school that ran on credits, it was honestly hard to say whether he’d come out ahead or behind.
So the one advantage I’ve been given is — what, a Chinese education?
In that case P.E.
and art were write-offs.
Put everything into math and the natural sciences.
And English and social studies couldn’t be allowed to slide either.
And even then, best case, I finish the credits maybe a year and a half early.
Which still leaves me at least three years of surviving in here…
He planned the rest of his life the whole way there, and the bus reached school without his noticing.
“Alex, don’t run off after school. Wait for me.” Tony came over as they split up.
“What for?” Alex asked.
Tony leaned in to his ear.
“Lil Lori.”
“Basketball again?” All the air went out of him.
“Can we not?”
Since the switch, whatever athletic base this body had once had was gone.
Basketball was pure torture now — and this was street ball in the Black ghetto, which had nothing in common with the shots he used to toss up before gym class back home.
“Fuck you! No haggling! Don’t try that shit with me!” Tony’s face changed instantly.
Then, softer, as he walked away: “Just do it for me.”
“Fine. You’re the boss.” Alex had no choice.
He pushed in through the noise of the hallway, got into his classroom, and found his desk chair flung into the corner of the room.
Kindergarten shit.
He couldn’t be bothered chasing it down.
He picked the chair up, wiped it off, and began another day of American high school.