A Good Kind of Trouble

Shayla walks to class, and the girls from the relay team follow her as they gossip loudly and meanly about her. She runs into the bathroom, where they corner her and ask why she isn’t with Tyler. Shayla tries to explain that she didn’t break up with him, because they were never in a relationship in the first place. When she says she didn’t “know why you all thought we were together” (251), Angie reacts strongly to the phrase “you all,” assuming Shayla means Black people, and she reminds her that Shayla is Black, too. The relay girls accuse Shayla of breaking up with Tyler because he’s Black and that she’s an “Oreo […] white on the inside, Black on the outside” (250). To their surprise, Shayla confesses that she likes Jace, who is also Black.

The girls ask Shayla why she doesn’t have any Black friends or sit with Black classmates at lunch, and she repeatedly responds that she’s had the same friends since elementary school, where there were only a few Black people in her grade. They insinuate that she doesn’t have Black friends because she thinks she’s better than a Black person. Stephanie tells her she’s “thinking [she’s] all that with [her] big ol’ forehead” (254).