The following photograph is in no way affiliated with Agoura Hills or Agoura High School. The images were independently captured in the Fashion District using an iPhone by Mitchell Royel, and any implication of association with the aforementioned entities is purely coincidental and unintended.
Disclaimer: This episode of Mitch Leyor serves as a nostalgic homage, perhaps reminiscent of the 2006 Myspace era, while evoking the essence of "King Kong" by Jibbs and Chamillionaire.
Picture this: it's 2009, you're sixteen, and your entire personality is a Livestrong bracelet, a Razr flip phone with a cracked hinge, and a football jersey you wear on game days like it's a medal of honor. Congratulations. You're me.
My brother and I went to Agoura High. Go Chargers. We were a year apart but somehow landed in the same fourth-period Health class. Which is hilarious, because nothing about how we behaved back then was healthy. We sat in the back row, passed notes like CIA operatives, and treated Mrs. Delgado's unit on "emotional wellness" as a nap opportunity.
We were both on the football team. And if you've never been on a high school football team, let me explain the rules. There is no handbook. Nobody hands you a laminated card. But somehow, by week two of summer conditioning, you know the code. You laugh when the guys laugh. You back your teammates. You never, under any circumstances, make another guy feel corny in front of the group.
That last one is the big one. Getting called corny in 2009 was basically a social death sentence with no appeal process.
So there's my brother. We'll call him by his name, because he's earned it at this point: Tyler.
Tyler was a linebacker. Loud, funny, the kind of guy who could make a whole bus crack up just by saying "bro" with the right timing. He had a Sidekick phone that he flipped open like he was a Bond villain. Everybody liked Tyler.
I loved Tyler. He was my brother. Which is exactly why this was so uncomfortable to watch.
We took the activity bus home after practice most days. The bus smelled like Axe body spray, Hot Cheetos, and the quiet despair of twenty sweaty teenagers. And on that bus rode a girl named Simone.
Simone was in our Health class too. She was Black, light-skinned, with curly hair she usually wore up and these green-hazel eyes that made you forget whatever you were about to say. She was also doing editorial modeling. Real photo shoots. Not "my cousin took pictures of me at the mall" modeling. Actual magazine-style stuff, with lighting and makeup and those dramatic, serious faces models make. Somebody found the photos online, and they spread around school faster than a Facebook rumor.
And my brother, out of every possible response available to him, chose the worst one.
He started calling her King Kong.
Every. Single. Day.
Look, I wish I could tell you it happened once and we all moved on. It didn't. It was every day. On the bus, in the hallway, in the back of Health while Mrs. Delgado talked about "respecting boundaries," which in hindsight is some world-class irony.
Tyler would see Simone and start the bit. Loud. The chest-thumping, the noises, all of it. He'd hold up his phone with one of her modeling photos and narrate it like a nature documentary — his voice dropping into this ridiculous deep baritone, like he was Sir David Attenborough covering a wildlife special nobody asked for. The guys around him would lose it. And Simone would just stare out the window with her headphones in, iPod Nano turned all the way up, pretending she couldn't hear.
She could hear. The entire bus could hear. The bus driver, a seventy-year-old man named Gus who had seen everything, could hear.
And here's the part I'm not proud of. For a while, I laughed too. Not big laughs. The little ones. The polite, nervous chuckle you do when you're not sure the joke is funny but you're very sure you don't want to be the only one not laughing — and especially not the one who looks like he's checking his own brother. You know that laugh. It sounds like a cough with a guilty conscience.
That's the thing about being sixteen. You don't laugh because something is funny. You laugh because silence is terrifying. And when it's your brother running the bit, silence feels like a betrayal in both directions at once.
But something started bugging me. I'd go home, and it would just sit in my chest like a bad burrito. I'd be on the bottom bunk, Tyler on the top, both of us on our phones, and I'd be replaying the bus ride while he was probably already asleep.
Because it's not like I didn't know. You don't have to be a history professor to know that comparing a Black person to an ape is about the oldest, ugliest insult in the book. People have used that exact image for centuries to say Black folks are less than human. Tyler didn't invent it. He just picked it up off the floor and handed it to a whole bus full of people like it was a party favor. And he was my brother. My teammate. My blood. Which meant, in some way the football code didn't cover, this one was on me too.
So one afternoon, maybe October, the bus was rolling past the hills on the way home, everything golden and orange the way Agoura gets in the fall. Tyler started the bit again. Same noises. Same phone. Same nature documentary baritone.
And I just turned around and said it.
"Tyler. Are you calling her King Kong because she's light-skinned and because of her modeling pictures?"
The bus went quiet. I mean library quiet. Funeral quiet. Gus-looked-in-the-rearview-mirror quiet.
The question didn't even fully make sense, and honestly, that was the point. There was no logic to the joke. None. She was gorgeous, she was talented, she was doing something way cooler than anything any of us were doing, and the only response my brother could come up with was to call her an animal. I was basically asking, out loud, in front of everyone: "Bro, what are you actually talking about?" And Tyler had no answer.
Tyler looked at me like I had just stolen his lunch money and keyed his car. He was my brother, so it hit different. He stood up a little in his seat. His jaw got tight. For a second, I honestly thought we were about to brawl on a moving school bus, which would have been the dumbest fight in Chargers history and an incredibly awkward dinner table situation later that night.
But it wasn't really anger. It was something else. It was something closer to panic. Like I had just called him out in a language he didn't know how to respond to. Like as his brother, as his teammate, as a fellow card-carrying member of the Agoura Chargers football program, I was contractually obligated to laugh at whatever came out of his mouth. Like there was some unwritten clause in the team bylaws that said, "Section 4, Paragraph 2: Thou shalt not ask thy brother why his jokes are racist."
He said, "You're tripping." Then he sat back down and put his headphones in.
And Simone? She looked back at me for one second. Didn't smile. Didn't say thanks. Just looked. Then she went back to the window.
That look stayed with me longer than my brother's did.
Here's where the story takes a turn that no sixteen-year-old version of me could have predicted.
Tyler and Simone are dating now.
Yeah. Read that again. I'll wait.
My brother. The guy who spent an entire semester making her the punchline on the activity bus. The self-appointed nature documentary host. That guy. He's with her. They've been together long enough that she has a drawer at our mom's house, and he gets nervous when she doesn't text back.
Turns out he was into her the whole time. Like, deeply, embarrassingly into her. The kind of into her where you don't know what to do with your hands. And instead of just saying, "Hey, I think you're incredible," he did the ape noises. In front of thirty people. For months.
I asked him about it years later, at a backyard barbecue. He looked down at his cup for a long time. Then he said, "Man. I didn't know how to like somebody out loud."
Which might be the most honest thing a former linebacker has ever said.
And credit where it's due, he apologized to her. A real one — not a "sorry if you were offended" one. She made him work for it. As she should have. He told me it took three conversations before she even let him finish a sentence. I told him that sounded about right.
Here's what I keep coming back to.
We do this. Guys do this. We take the girl we like and turn her into a cartoon. We mischaracterize her on purpose, out loud, in front of other people, because admitting you like someone feels like handing the group a loaded weapon. So we flip it. We roast her. We make her the joke before anyone can make us the joke.
And we tell ourselves it's harmless. It's just teasing. It's just how brothers are. It's just how boys are.
But it's not harmless. Simone spent months riding a bus where a crowd laughed at her every afternoon. She didn't know my brother had a crush. All she knew was that she'd step onto that bus and get turned into something less than human by a guy with a Sidekick and a captive audience. She carried that home. She probably carried it way past graduation. A crush doesn't erase that. Dating him later doesn't erase that.
And when the joke leans on race, it gets heavier. It's not just "he's being immature." It's him reaching for something that's been used to hurt people who look like her for generations. You can't pull that out of the drawer and claim you didn't know what it was.
And me? Sitting there laughing those little guilty laughs? I wasn't a bystander. I was the opening act. A bit only works if there's an audience, and I was a front-row seat for way too long. If I'd said something in week one instead of month three, maybe the bit dies on day two. Maybe Simone gets one fewer month of that bus ride.
So if you're sixteen right now, or if you've got a brother who is, here's the deal. Liking someone isn't corny. Being cruel to cover it up is. And the person who asks the awkward question on the bus — even when it's aimed at their own brother — isn't soft. They're the only one on that bus with any actual guts.
The louder we laughed, the less we knew what to do.
Turns out the answer was pretty simple. Stop laughing.
-Deck