Shiny White Suburban

“Go not far enough, and find yourself guilty of complacency, complicity, a political slumping into the cushions of your time. Go too far, and find yourself saying that you didn’t care that a white child had been eaten by an alligator.” ~Patricia Lockwood

A white woman in a white Suburban with chrome rims is bumping “Still DRE.” The Suburban has just been through the car wash, leftover drips rubbed away with a microfiber cloth. The white woman is flying down Main St., twenty over, her grip on the steering wheel so tight her rings feel like they’ll leave a bruise. An hour ago, she left a meeting with a school board member, which she’d requested in order to share the ugly details of her daughter’s transfer out of the public middle school.

“The school isn’t safe,” she’d said to board member, a woman in her 60s, who’d politely folded her hands and asked why. Like she didn’t know.

The white woman struggled to stay calm. Taking a slip of paper from the back pocket of her jeans, she answered the question with a list of questions. She’d come prepared.

Yes, there’s been a surge in violence, the board member acknowledged, after a long pause. Yes, kids bring weapons to school, but so far, no guns. Yesterday? That gun? That was at the high school, and it was in the student’s car, in the parking lot. The gun didn’t actually make it into the school. Yes, there was a fight involving forty students in the east wing of the high school. Yes, there were weapons. But no guns. Just aluminum bats and two by fours. Yes, there is a blood feud in the community that has leaked into the classrooms. Yes, there’ve been murders connected to this feud. Yes, many kids attacked a single kid in the middle of art class. Yes, it was coordinated. Yes, he was badly hurt. Yes, we believe in transparency. No, we will not release any details publicly. Details are weaponized by bigots and trolls. Unhinged parents, too. Yes, the board leans left, thankfully. But only by a single vote. The Right wants metal detectors and more cops, of course. No, we don’t keep cumulative record of violent incidents in the schools, but it’s not a bad idea. Perhaps a suggestion for the next board meeting?

The school board member concluded the meeting with a few tepid suggestions. Show up to more school board meetings. Suggestions should be palatable - no gristle, no bone. Feedback should be carefully framed. Avoid blame, especially of political allies. Change takes years. Sorry your daughter had a challenging experience.

With that, she closed her notebook and scurried out the door.

A challenging experience…

The white woman’s left hand is completely numb, her foot pressing hard on the gas. A cop flashes his blues and she groans, taps the brakes. Lowers the music and keeps an eye on the rearview mirror, exhales when he doesn’t pursue. At a red light, she sips from her pink Stanley and checks her lipstick. It’s feathered again, at the corners, fuck. Not enough sleep, too much coffee, wine, worry. She makes a mental note to pick up her prescription retinol cream, then turns the volume back up, G-funk blasting from her freshly washed Suburban. She vacuumed the interior, too, desperate to dump cortisol after that awful meeting. Bent in half, stretching under the seats with the hose, she sucked up trash. Felt good.

The bass is thumping so hard it sends shivers through the driver’s seat, and the white woman takes a big breath and bounces her shoulders a little. She’s on her way to pick up her daughter from the Catholic school where she was recently enrolled, transferred there after she discovered her daughter was caught in the crosshairs of a seasoned bully.

Recently turned twelve and one of the youngest in her class, it was her kid’s first year at the public middle school. Every day in September, her daughter had sprung out of bed and rushed through her morning routine to get to school before the first bell in order to see her friends. It’s going to be a great year, her daughter gushed over breakfast, her mouth packed with orthodontic metal. She’d gotten a lead role in the school play! Made the cheer team! Got elected for student council! Doused in body spray, she’d rush out the front door, slamming it behind her with excitement.

But after a while, it became clear that the public middle school was more of a gladiator pit than a place for algebra, first round of elimination over Snapchat. Kids encouraged kids they didn’t like to commit suicide, circulated rumors that hardened like cement in fledgling hearts. There were fights after the bell, just beyond school property, phones pinging with footage. A video of multiple kids swarming a single boy curled on the ground, cocking back and kicking him like a soccer ball. A video of a teacher getting hit with a metal chair, a girl on the bus punched repeatedly in the back of the head. A video of the school’s Student Resource Officer pinning a girl to the ground after she pepper sprayed into the school vestibule, which was packed with students rushing out after the dismissal bell.

Her daughter’s bully was fifteen, still in 8th grader due to being held back, and dragging a BIP full of recommendations that hadn’t worked. She’d been warned this year already: one more fight and she’d be expelled, so she began snuffing flames without using her fists. Her daughter caught the bully’s attention because a thirteen year old mustachioed baddie wearing Hello Kitty pajamas and Crocs said hello, told his friends she was cute. The bully had a friend who liked this boy once upon a time, and his attention aimed elsewhere was reason to thug. You think u cute but u chopped, the bully had texted her daughter. Hope u sweet head don’t get cracked.

But since school lunch was the bully’s most reliable meal of the day, her daughter’s head stayed uncracked. Though the game of Cat and Mouse didn’t give the same rush as clawing skin from a pretty face, it meant the bully could keep her stomach full of cafeteria pizza while messing with them bitches. After school, she fucked with hoes over SnapChat and TikTok. Though the woman had taken her daughter off of social media the moment she realized they were megaphones for cruelty, her daughter’s friends sent screenshots of the bully’s threats. A sniped pictures of her daughter on TikTok. If you see this girl, the bully wrote, fade her. To the woman’s horror, the comment section grew with tweens swearing fealty, promising they’d jump a twelve year old some of them had never even met.

But everyone felt bad for her, the bully. Something was clearly going on! Youngest daughter of a notoriously troubled family, she’d likely seen bad, bad things. Generational trauma, people concluded. She could barely be blamed for her behavior! In conversations about the crisis of increased violence and plummeting test scores, well-meaning adults wrung their hands with worry about the school-to-prison pipeline while tweens were sent to the hospital, concussed, and teachers fled to other districts.

On more than one occasion, the white woman was asked if she’d considered having the bully over for an afternoon visit. Lunch, perhaps, a bounce on the trampoline? Inviting her over might help the bully humanize her daughter, it was suggested, might help the bully understand the pain she’d caused. The first time it was suggested, the woman blushed pink with Christian shame for not having already thought of it. But shame gave way to rage. The sanctimony of the proposal. The Stockholm-y ick. Not a chance, she answered, unable to hide the acid in her voice.

Hurt people hurt people. The white woman repeated this like a mantra when she found herself fantasizing about grabbing this little bitch by the hair and digging her acrylics into the back of her neck. Mama Bear mode is what she called it when her friends asked how she was dealing with the stress, laughing to assure the ferocity was politely tucked out of view. She was upset but not venomously so, she lied. Though the bully has a long history of cruel behavior, she’s only fifteen, for God’s sake! At that age, everyone deserves a chance, no? At that point, the phrase “restorative justice” was volleyed back and forth, and everyone felt better for saying it as long as no one asked what was just, or restored.

“Don’t get me going,” said one friend, who’d worked in an elementary school for over two decades. “I finally got an admin position after years of busting ass, and now I spend half of my days in a padded suit stuck in a room with a kid it’s taken my staff a fucking hour to remove from the classroom. Because they can’t put their hands on him. Even after he’s tried to stab another kid. With a pencil!”

“A padded suit?” the woman asked, staring.

“Yes,” her friend said. “You heard me. It’s basically a twin mattress, so when I’m kicked and punched, I don’t feel a thing. After fifteen minutes or so, the kid eventually fatigues. De-escalation, it’s called. And I swear to god those kids take fucking turns.”

So, the bullies stayed at school and disrupted learning, then received one-on-one attention the moment they threatened to throw sparks. No one wanted them to end up in prison, so they got snacks. Research showing emotional regulation was the pathway to becoming a decent adult meant there were boardgames for decompression. Some pop music, volume lowered, and a page to color. But when boredom crept in after a few powdered donuts and a lesson on the powers of deep breathing, the dopamine hit of cat and mouse beckoned. Back to the classroom they went, salivating. This, of course, was not called recidivism - far too damning a term for youth.

But the white woman knew she couldn’t complain too loudly about the failings of the school or risk attracting her own bullies. Instead, in every conversation, she was careful to mention her family’s class and racial privilege, because without doing so, her story was guaranteed to fail harder than the school’s statewide ranking, which couldn’t get much worse.

“I know, I know, blame systems not individuals,” the white woman said to the public school principal when meeting to discuss her daughter’s transfer out of there. The principal narrowed her eyes when the white woman slipped and complained how unfair it was that a chronically-misbehaved student had made school unsafe for her child. Using the word “trauma” at least a dozen times, the principal lectured her about the challenges faced by the district. When the white woman asked whether being threatened at school could be considered a form of trauma, the principal differentiated between big T and little t. What her daughter experienced was little t trauma. She was coming to school fed and washed, no? Her basic needs met?

The white woman, minding her manners, swallowed her anger. Noting her restraint - rare these days in conversations with parents - the principal offered an olive branch. “Listen,” she said, leaning forward, dropping into a whisper, “our hands are tied.” The principal was about to say more, but the walkie-talkie attached to her belt squawked with an emergency. A rapidly-escalating situation near the south stairwell sent her rushing out the door without a goodbye.

“You probably have a black pussy,” the bully had said to the woman’s daughter. The white lady did not know how to explain this one to her kid. When she tried, the conversation sputtered and her daughter begged her to stop. “It’s time to get the hell out of there,” the woman blurted, to which her daughter responded with a meltdown. “I’ll get my ass beat eventually, and then she’ll move on,” she sobbed. She did not want to leave her friends, who she loved more than anything! Pressing her face into the woman’s shoulder, she wrapped her legs and arms around her torso, like she’d done as a toddler, leaving a wet patch of snot on the woman’s blouse.

The white woman’s brain gurgled like a stuck drain. Perhaps she should let her stay? Perhaps surviving this gladiator pit was how her daughter would gain the tools she’d need to deal with all of the snakes and scumbags she’d encounter in life? Perhaps this was how she’d molt the last layer of childhood? Maybe this would force her reach inward, access her own venom, learn how to fight back?

Being sweet was dangerous, the woman concluded. Or was this absolutely insane, trading sweetness for a thicker skin?

“Welcome to the experience of being a poor woman of color,” her friend said over a bottle of iced chardonnay when she’d shared her worries. The white woman suspected she knew what this friend was trying to get at, and part of her always wanted to slap this friend, who was an avid enthusiast of the Trauma Olympics. Annoyed, she switched the subject and complimented her friend’s new hair color. “Looks nice,” she said, applying lip gloss, “almost looks natural.”

Besides, for the past five years at her workplace, the woman had shared a lunch table with a small group of women, none of whom were white. Two of the women made double what she did, the other two, she suspected, much less. They’re a good cross section of their city, they joked, capable of solving any problem since they’re all moms. When she spilled her worries over lunch, the oldest of the group set her fork down and shook a finger in her face. 

“Get your baby out of there.” 

“Thank you,” the white lady sighed, relieved she’d been given official permission to make the obvious choice. 

“Ain’t nothing stopping you from teaching your baby girl how to throw a punch,” the woman added, dabbing the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “When I was a kid, my daddy gave me a switchblade, which was funny ‘cause I wasn’t allowed to wear slacks, so I kept it in my bra.” 

The white lady went home that night and showed her daughter how to throw a right hook, which she learned from two years of Billy Blank’s Tae Bo. She held up a cushion from the couch and her daughter balked - she did not want to hurt anyone, ever. ‘C’mon!” the white woman hollered from behind the cushion. “Smash it!”

Her daughter said no. She would not.

“I’m so lucky to have the resources to consider an alternative,” the white lady whispered to a girlfriend while unrolling her yoga mat, since the alternative was accompanied by tuition. Though the strain of this experience had triggered migraines and the type of insomnia no visit to Sephora could hide from her face, the woman’s friend agreed with her. She was fortunate. 

“I’m teaching my daughter how to fight,” she told the same friend, over lattes.

“You mean to say you’re teaching her self-defense, right?” her friend asked, brow cocked.

The majority of the white woman’s friends were white liberals, and when her daughter was young, she too vowed to support public schools by sending her kid to them. Supporting local schools is a basic civic duty, her left-leaning friends argued, though a few sent their kids to private school, a detail far too impolite to mention. But then, her daughter came home from school one day and crumpled into her arms, recounting how the bully chased her down the hallway, barking like a dog. Her daughter ran into the bathroom and locked herself in a stall, tucking her feet onto the toilet seat to hide. The worst of it, her daughter sobbed, was that she wouldn’t have been able to stomp the bully’s head if she’d tried to crawl under the door, and the thought of being trapped in the bathroom stall with her caused a panic attack. She’d rather have her ass beat in front of the entire school than get stuck in a tiny space with that delulu, her daughter sobbed, the lids of her eyes a freakish rabbit-pink from hours of crying.

The white woman moved quickly and quietly. She got her baby out of there. 

The memory of that horrible day makes her heart skip a beat. The meeting she'd just had to try to address it, fucking infuriating. The woman grips the steering wheel again. Takes a big breath, tunes back into Dre, swears to not let her day be ruined.

Man, those lyrics are sweet, the white lady thinks, and cranks the volume.  

Still fuck with the beats, 

still not loving police, 

still rock my khakis 

with a cuff and a crease. 

To be clear. The white lady was never a fan of defunding the police! She imagines a world without police as a sickening orgy of rape and gunshot wounds and motor vehicle fatalities. Occasionally, a demented man, grinning and holding a knife to her throat while she sleeps. (Because she is white, she lacks a certain type of imagination, she’s been told.)

But then, Snoop sticky-ickies, and man, oh man, does the white lady miss snapping her fingers to 90’s hip hop, shaking her ass until she’s dripping with sweat. And though she’s vibing hard right now in her shiny white Suburban, she is simultaneously devastated by how ugly the world can be, so she is feeling her feels. 

Feeling feels is something that’s totally okay to do, proved by the Millennials. Everyone should hold space at all times - for themselves, their friends, even perfect strangers - to feel everything. And though the white woman has been told that some feels matter more than others, she ignores that part. Right now, for the white woman, the feels are certainty and sorrow, and they’re combining as pressure in her stomach, below her tits. The woman suspects a fart would release the feeling, but withholds out of politeness even though she’s alone in her car. 

The repressed fart sends a cramp into her hip before transforming into a surge of rage, and she grips the wheel and steps on the gas, hard. Gah! She’s so fucking sick of things! She recalls the last school board meeting, attended from her phone, from the comfort of her kitchen since in-person meetings smell like cigarettes. Though she’d already transferred her daughter to the Catholic school, the white woman felt compelled to tune in. To share her experience. To help.

But the first public comment was so unsettling! A twitchy, gray-faced man gripped by paranoia accused school board members of stalking him, haphazardly pulling scraps of paper from a plastic bag and shouting about 5G. The board stayed grimly silent until the timer dinged, a sound that seemed to deflate the man like a balloon. Shuffling away from the podium, he sat down and closed his eyes, instantly falling asleep. If hope was scant to begin with, now it was gone.

“Heartbreaking” the white woman reported back to her friends, though the more accurate word was “galling.” Thinking of the twitchy man threatens to overpower her Dre vibes, so the white woman “yes, ands” with such commitment she almost swerves off the road. She rights the vehicle and adjusts her oversized sunglasses, cracks the window to temper a hot flash. Calm down, you dumb bitch, the white lady says to herself, since shame is practical.

But she can’t stop thinking about the school board meeting! The next public comment was even worse, almost causing her to smash a ceramic dinner plate against the countertop. A person with a patchy beard and black lipstick spoke into the mic like they were making a TikTok, with so much vocal fry you could toss a piece of battered cod in their direction and crisp it up. “Y’all look like nice enough people,” they said, smiling wanly. “But you don’t look like the students in our classrooms, and that’s fact.” Running a hand through oiled hair, they leaned into the mic and moaned, “Do better.”

The white woman raised the dinner plate into the air, threatening to bring it down over the marble countertop. “Is this person serious,” she spat in the direction of her husband, her left eye twitching. “Are they implying that it’s the job of these exhausted, underpaid board members to find their own replacements?! For positions they were elected for?!”

“I need to ask the obvious question before addressing your excellent points,” her husband said, amusedly kicking back in his chair. “Which is why does this person sound like they’re making porn?”

Unable to waste another second of her time and concerned about a hypertensive incident, the white woman handed the dinner plate to her husband and beelined it for the master bath. After a hot shower, she decided, she’d exfoliate her feet with a strange but effective tool marketed to her on Facebook. Then a Valium. Then she’d hit the sack.

Recalling the meeting makes her grip the steering wheel even harder, the tops of her knuckles bright white. But the hood of her newly washed Suburban reflects the sun, temporarily blinding her, and her outrage is rinsed away and replaced by satisfaction. Nothing pleases her more than clean lines and gleaming surfaces! She taps the brakes and exhales through her nose.

No stress, no seeds, no stems, no sticks!

Some of that real sticky-icky-icky

Ooh wee! Put it in the air!

Well, you's a fool, D-R, ha-ha

The song is on repeat, but she lets it play. 

Sadly, the white woman can’t smoke weed anymore because it causes panic attacks. But she used to! The thought of puffing on a joint causes the planet between her legs to spin, slow revolutions that radiate big heat. A memory swirls to the surface like smoke - the first time she kissed a woman, their mouths whiskey-warm, hair skunked by the blunt they’d just shared. Dre was playing in the background, she remembers. The other woman had been watching her crip walk before she pulled her close, by the belt.

The white woman slows to turn into the new school, shifts into park, and texts her daughter that she’s arrived. She sits in a line of trucks and SUVs, half of them displaying red MAGA stickers on rear windows and back bumpers. A black Ford with oversized tires has mounted a flag of Donald Trump holding a rocket launcher, his bare arms Rambo-ripped even though everyone knows he’s got flapjacks. Confusing. The white woman moves her mind away from this absurdity, chooses optimism. Just last week, when picking up her daughter after her first day, she could see the relief on her face when she climbed into the passenger seat. “It’s weird,” her daughter said, watching students streaming out the double doors of the Catholic school. “I’m not even a little bit scared.”

It was an offhanded observation, but the white woman felt it like a stab to the heart. The faces of her daughter’s friends, still at the public middle school, spun like the numbers of a roulette wheel. She prayed to God that none of them get hurt, that the ball never land on their number, like it had her daughter. Because what else but pray could the white woman do? 

She switches to the next song on the playlist, Tha Shiznit, and lowers the volume since hard-hitting bass seems inappropriate for the parking lot of a Catholic school. Then she reconsiders. Turns it back up. Just a little. 

The white woman thinks again about the twitchy man. The person with the yuck beard who spoke into the mic like they were having phone sex instead of registering public comment. The bully. Ugh, the fucking bully. In this exact moment, the white woman realizes what it is she feels in her heart and gives it ample space. Decides it’s time to call her Republican friend, visit the shooting range, decompress.

There are other things too that she feels. Self-righteousness. Defensiveness. All normal, she assures herself, and tips her head back to feel the sun on her neck. She closes her eyes. There’s a moment of yummy nothingness before a thought worms its way to the surface, and she sits up, vexed.

Ugh, it’s so annoying when other white people say ‘de nada’ when someone thanks them, as if they’re très cool.

She turns up Tha Shiznit, just enough to rattle the sunroof. Her daughter will be out any second.