We're Going to Need More Wine - Gabrielle Union Page 0,3

Teachers said it could follow you and you might not get into the college of your choice. The principal then told me that if I behaved for the rest of the year, he would have my name erased from it. But I didn’t believe him. Even years later, when I was applying to colleges, there was a small part of me that wondered, Is my name still in the Blue Book?

I was the only person to get in trouble for this conversation, and it had to have come from Tarsha. I wasn’t mad at her. I was very aware that I had done the wrong thing, but I also knew why I’d done it. It was survival of the fittest—Lord of the Flies in suburbia—and I had to eat.

Tarsha remained invisible to me through elementary school. At the time I told myself she was invisible because she just didn’t have much of a personality. I know now that I was only justifying my refusal to connect with her. I was afraid to take the risk of being black by standing next to her.

FROM SECOND GRADE TO SIXTH GRADE, JODY MANNING AND I WERE NECK and neck when it came to grade point average. Her family lived in the Meadows—one of the richest neighborhoods in Pleasanton—and they just had nice stuff. Their house, in my mind, felt like a museum. It felt rich. When I was little, one of my barometers for wealth was if the family had Welch’s grape juice. I noticed that all the rich kids drank it after school. The Mannings definitely had Welch’s. The Unions had grape drink.

After school and at recess, we started playing Days of Our Lives. Everyone chose a character and we just invented scenarios. Jody Manning was Marlena, Scott Jenkins was Roman Brady, and my friend Katie was Hope. I’d like to tell you that this is where I discovered a love of acting. No. Maybe because I always had to be Abe the policeman. He was the only black guy on Days. Black Lexie didn’t come on for a couple more years. So I was Abe the policeman.

As if it weren’t enough that she got to play Marlena, Jody and her sister also always had coordinating, full Esprit outfits. And it wasn’t from the Esprit outlets where you got like the sweatshirt and paired it with Garanimals trash. They were just perfect, those Mannings, and Jody set a high bar for competition in class. I remember we once did a presentation together in the sixth grade. The job was to come up with an ad campaign for a product, and we were assigned Bumble Bee tuna. I was the talent, thank you. Our catchphrase was just saying “Bumble Bee tuna” emphatically. Everyone was saying it at recess, so we got an A plus.

In case you are not already reaching for the Nerd Alert button, around this time, I started reading three newspapers a day. And that became an obsession, like times tables and square roots. I would figure out exactly down to the minute how long I could be in the shower, how long it would take me to get ready, and still have time to read the newspapers. The first two, the Tri-Valley Herald and the Valley Times, were exactly how they sound. Here’s an actual headline in the Valley Times, which I cut out and laminated for my civics class: MEXICANS ROB THE MALL. Meanwhile, the “Mexicans” were from, like, the next town over, and they probably knocked over a Sunglass Hut.

So those papers didn’t take me that long. But then I would read the Oakland Tribune, which was much more involved. On the rare occasion that I didn’t finish, I would take whatever was left and I would go through it in my first-period class, usually an English class. If I didn’t, I just couldn’t focus. I honestly don’t know what came first—a love of reading the newspapers, or wanting to be Super Negro, the magical special black person who has all the knowledge and is never caught out there looking ignorant. “She is so knowledgeable” is what I lived for. “That black girl is really something.”

My other job was to be popular, which I approached with the same strategy as my studies. Meaning it was everything.

Sleepovers were the thing among the girls, and you had to be there or else you would be “discussed.” I had all the sleepover worries preteens have about pranks and fears that I