The New Detroit, circa 2115

The morning wind zipped between our ears as we hoverboarded down Michigan Avenue.

This was always the best part of the day for me and Christian; riding forty, in a hurry, electro-funk in our ears, and unfinished homework at our backs. We hit a somersault at 20th, then switched the tint on our smart glasses so we could high-five the sun before we got to school.

But it was about to be a shit show now because life at Gilbert high school sucked. See, Gilbert is for super rich kids. Kids whose parents run the companies that made the hoverboards we ride every day, kids whose parents own the corporations that make those ugly flying cars, and kids who have parents who never tell them about the old world (well, the old Detroit, as grandpa Joe calls it). Most of the students here are like walking programmable zombies. No personalities, no cool, just living off data and their expectations. Christian and both hated it.

See me and Christian were fellowship kids. We were supposed to be going to Helen Moore Academy, but we passed some funky test in 8th grade and were awarded the opportunity to go to high school without the rest of our friends. Yippeeeeeee! Had mamma acting like I had won the lottery or something. I mean, just because I’m bumping tablets with rich kids at Gilbert High don’t mean I’m going to have billions in bitcoin when I graduate. See she thinks money works like Covid — as long as you breathe the same air as someone who has it, you’ll catch some too. I begged her not to make me go to this school but she said, “You’re going to become a better version of yourself at that school, I just know it.”

Christian’s parents are no different. They used to live in the burbs back when the burbs were special, but had to pivot to a 2-family flat on the east side once GM stopped letting black people be in charge. In fact, his parents go crazier on him than mamma do on me. They’re always throwing out goofy ideas like, “Christian, you should invent a flying toaster!” Or “Christian, you should make a floating backpack so kids don’t need desks.” I mean Christian is the smartest friend I got, but dang, they be trippin’!

Now my grandpa Joe, on the other hand, is the opposite of both of our parents. He used to teach high school math. He even helped coach the football team before the sport was banned. He loves telling me stories about his grandfather working at a Chrysler factory on Jefferson, back when real people did real work, “Friendship and fellowship. That's all we had,” he tells me. Now I don’t know exactly what that means, but I’m sure it has something to do with all the robots that currently work at that same factory. “The white man loves the robots because the robots don’t have no soul,” is his other favorite sayin’.

I caught up with Christian at lunch, and he told me he overheard a couple of teachers saying Tech was down. Tech is the statewide online babysitting system that tracks all our locations. You can’t take a poop or sneak a feel in the stairway without Tech snitching on you. We figured if we could skip the rest of our classes, with hopes that Tech wouldn’t come back up until the school day was over.

So we snuck out the side door the janitors use and hopped on our hoverboards, trying to figure out a destination.

“Hey, let’s go to those tunnels?” Christian asked.

The tunnels is this trashed out and fenced-in area on West Ford and Waterman. It was supposed to be downtown Detroit 2.0, but the 2.0 part never happened after they flattened out the land (the city of Detroit always does weird stuff like that). So now people just use it for a big ass trash can and setting old cars on fire. We mostly avoided the area because grandpa Joe says it’s full of ghosts. The story is that it was the last neighborhood from the old Detroit, and when the black people didn’t want to leave, the city just poured concrete on top of them. That's where the phrase, “They built the new Detroit on top of the old Detroit,” comes from. I didn’t believe that, but I figured grandpa Joe and mama just didn’t want us getting into no trouble.

We rode to the tunnels, left our hoverboards by a busted fire hydrant, and slipped through a hole in the fence. One look around and it felt like something outta a Gotham City comic mixed with an old Dune movie. There were burnt out cars, old wood, piles of dirt, computer parts, and mountains of old tires resembling pyramids.

I looked at Christian and told him, “Tech is off, nobody will find us if we get gobbled up.”

“Fuck it,” he responded.

The whole area smelled like mama’s burnt eggs and papa Joe’s vomit. The further we walked, the worse it smelled and the higher the trash got. It was like the trash dumpers were trying to play Jenga with the damn trash.

Christian pointed and walked over to the blades of a forklift coming out of the ground. Next to it was a molded bible, and a stinky can of old tuna.

“What the fuck bro,” he said. “I think that’s blood on the blades bro!”

Suddenly, a skeletal frail face appeared yelling, “What you’re looking for is right here!”

Me and Christian started running QuickSilver, fast jumping over empty paint cans and construction piping along the way. The problem was, we couldn’t remember where the fence was we came in at. We kept looking back and he kept coming with a scraggly scream, “It’s right here, we’re all right here!”

Suddenly papa Joe appeared. It was like seeing black Jesus but not knowing if he was bringing love or a whip!

“Get your asses over here,” he said in his husky voice.

We found our boards, got in his car, and no one said a word the whole ride. Before we walked in the house, papa Joe turned, looked at me, and said, “I guess now you’ll believe me when I tell you the stories about the old Detroit.”

Kahn Santori Davison is from Detroit. He’s a husband and father of four and a self-described “Kid who loves rap music.”