B0061QB04W EBOK (36 page)

“And she’s not!” Carlos said.

“I was trying to defend you, pendejo,” Mago said. We all jumped up from the couch when the doorbell rang.

Carlos went and opened the door. Then he turned to look at Mago, his eyes opened wide in surprise.

“Tell your sister to come out,” I heard a girl say in Spanish through the screen door.

“It’s
her
,” Carlos said. “How did she know where we live?”

“How would I know?” Mago said. She went to the door and opened it. “What do you want, girl? You want my brother to stare at you some more?”

“I came to teach you a lesson,” the girl said.

“Okay, give me one minute.” Mago headed to our dresser and took out a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt. She went into the bathroom and changed out of her jeans and blouse.

“Mago, don’t go outside,” Carlos said. “I don’t need you to defend me. I’m not a little kid anymore.”

“This is no longer about you,” Mago said as she bent down to retie her tennis shoes.

I walked over to the door, and there I saw the girl that had my brother drooling like a cow. Behind her were three other girls. María was very pretty. Her skin was light and she had a few freckles sprinkled on her cheeks. She was wearing white jeans and a black shirt with a hot pink image of Hello Kitty, and white sandals. I instantly envied her Hello Kitty shirt. It had been almost a year since Mila had
taken us to Kmart to buy us clothes. She’d been bringing us bags of clothes from the old ladies at Kingsley Manor. Mago said those were dead people’s clothes. I didn’t know if the old ladies were dead or not, all I knew was that there was no way I would ever find a Hello Kitty shirt in the bags Mila brought us.

“Look, I’m sorry, María. I won’t look at you again, but you don’t need to fight my sister,” Carlos said.

María pushed him aside and called him a sissy. She and her friends followed Mago to the parking lot of the fourplexes.

María didn’t know that Carlos wasn’t trying to protect Mago. She didn’t know that the previous week Mago’s heart had gotten broken, and ever since then she had been itching to punch something or someone. She didn’t know that only the day before, Mago had hit me because I had taken her rubber band without permission to put my hair up in a ponytail. She didn’t know that Mago had punched Carlos in the stomach because he spilled water on her math homework. But she soon found out.

A second after they reached the parking lot, the fight broke out, and Mago had her fingers wrapped in María’s long brown hair and was punching her in that way she had perfected after years of hitting me and Carlos. This time, Mago didn’t hold her cuss words back. María spoke Spanish and because of that Mago fired off her cuss words faster than a machine gun. Soon, she had María on the ground and María’s pretty, white pants were turning gray. But the worst part came when Mago dragged the girl to the space where Papi always parked the old Ford truck he drove to work. Mago rolled María around and around in the puddle of motor oil from Papi’s truck and soon María’s white pants were completely black and her friends were rushing over to pull Mago off.

“Enough, enough!” the girls said as they formed a barricade to protect María.

Mago wiped the sweat off her forehead and looked at the girl who was still lying in the puddle of motor oil. “When my brother looks at you again, you better be happy about it, pendeja.”

Mago walked back to the apartment, and Carlos and I followed behind her. Carlos turned to look one more time at the girl he sat behind
in class. She was on her feet now, trying to smooth out her messy hair. Only Hello Kitty had escaped, unscathed.

Carlos said, “You aren’t ugly, María. I am.” And then with his head hanging down, he went inside.

I stood there in the parking lot feeling terrified. What was going to happen to
me
when I fell in love? I wondered.
Would I have the same rotten luck as my brother and sister?

9

M
RS.
A
NDERSON ANNOUNCED
there was something important she had to tell us. Through Mr. López, I learned there was going to be a schoolwide competition. That week, every student in each class would be writing their very own books, and the teachers would select the best ones in their classes. From there, the selected books would be judged and three lucky winners chosen.

I will finally get my chance to make Papi proud!

For the rest of the week we spent a lot of time working on our projects. Mr. López said we could write our stories in Spanish since that was the language we knew best. At first, I didn’t know what to write. I’d never written my very own story before. I’d always liked to read in Mexico, but here in this country, books for kids my age were very difficult for me to read because of my limited English. The books Mr. López gave me were those for kindergarteners—books with big
letters and lots of pictures. I loved looking at the pictures, but the stories weren’t very interesting.
See Spot Run!

I missed the literature books I left behind in Mexico, the ones I was given at school. I loved the stories in those books. My favorite one was of a little pine tree that wished his needles were made of gold. He got his wish and his needles turned to gold, but a robber came at night and stole them. Then he wished for his leaves to be made of glass, but they broke when a strong wind came. Then he wished his needles to be big glossy leaves, but the next day goats came and ate them. The little pine tree then learned to like himself as he was.

Because I couldn’t think of any story of my own to write, I started to write the story of the little tree. But the next day I felt bad about copying someone else’s story, so I threw away the pages and started again. I thought and thought, and finally I decided what I was going to write. The story of my birth.

As I wrote, I closed my eyes and saw Mami lying down on the dirt floor over the straw mat. The midwife came into the shack next to Abuela Evila’s house and saw Mami bending over in pain. I could perfectly picture the midwife lighting a fire under the comal, the big round griddle where Mami made tortillas, and putting a pot of water there to boil. I could feel the heat of the flames.

“Don’t push yet,” I heard the midwife say as she sharpened her knife. “You aren’t ready yet.”

As I wrote, I told about how I couldn’t wait to be born and the midwife barely had enough time to catch me before I hit the dirt floor. “It’s a girl,” the midwife said as she put me into Mami’s arms.

Then came the best part of my story, my favorite part. I wrote about how Mami had turned to face the fire so the heat of the flames could warm me. As the midwife cut the umbilical cord, Mami pointed to a spot on the dirt floor and told the midwife to bury it there. I wrote how even though I was now living far away from Mami and my country, I hadn’t forgotten where I came from.

Mr. López helped me fix my spelling and gave me suggestions for improving my story. When it was as good as could be, he gave me white paper so I could write it nice and neatly. When I was finished, I started my favorite part, drawing pictures.

Mrs. Anderson showed the class how to bind our books. She gave
us two rectangular pieces of cardboard and butcher paper to make the cover. By the end of the week we were all done with our books, and Mrs. Anderson picked them up and put them on her desk. Because it was Friday and we had worked hard all week, she put on a movie for us to watch as a reward. She said she would read our books while we watched our movie.

The movie was about an alien named E.T. who wanted to go home. I felt bad for the alien because life in the U.S. was very difficult for him. I could understand his wanting to go home. I was jealous because he seemed to learn English a lot faster than I had all those months.

I couldn’t concentrate on the movie because I kept glancing at Mrs. Anderson. She had put all the books on the right side of her desk. As she read, she began to make two piles. One pile was getting bigger and bigger, and the other pile remained small. I knew the big pile was of the books she hadn’t liked.

I froze when she picked up my book.
Here it is. Here is my big chance!
She opened it, flipped through the pages in the blink of an eye, then she closed the book shut and put it in the big pile. My eyes began to burn with tears. My book had been rejected.
But she couldn’t have read it. No one reads a book in a second! She doesn’t even speak Spanish well, so how can she read it so fast?
I wanted to stand up and say something. I wanted to tell her she had made a mistake, and she should look at it again. But I didn’t have the English words to say what I thought, and so I said nothing at all.

E.T. was going home. He was saying bye to his friend and getting into his ship. How I wished I could go home, too, back to Iguala where I could speak to my teacher in my own language. Where I could stand up for what I believed in, not caring if afterward I got hit with the ruler for my rebellion. I didn’t want to be in this country if that was how things were always going to be.

At the end of class, Mrs. Anderson held up the books she selected for the competition. Out of the eight books she chose, not even one was written by one of the kids at my table, the non–English speakers.

“You kids did a great job on those books,” Mr. López said to us in Spanish. “Just because they weren’t chosen doesn’t mean they weren’t good.”

“Just not good enough,” I said under my breath. I put my head between my hands, tears threatening to flow as I felt the disappointment come at me like a huge wave.
Don’t let go of me, Papi.

Mr. López looked at me, and then at the other four students at my table. He said, “There is no reason for any of you not to get ahead in life. You will learn English one day. You will find your way. Remember, it doesn’t matter where you come from. You’re now living in the land of opportunity, where anything is possible.”

Mrs. Anderson put all the rejected books around the room to display them. I knew she was doing that so the students wouldn’t feel bad for not being chosen. But when we were dismissed, as I was walking by my book, I took it from the shelf where Mrs. Anderson had put it.

One day
, I promised myself, thinking about Mr. López’s words,
I will write a book that won’t be rejected, one that will make my father proud.

10

I
N
M
AY OF
1986, a year after we’d come to the U.S., Papi fell off a ladder at work and hit his head and injured his knee. He stayed at the hospital overnight for observation, and he had to take a few days off from work until he got better.

Papi wasn’t the kind to stay home doing nothing. Early the next morning, he left for downtown to walk around. He took the bus because the doctors told him not to drive. He came home just as Carlos, Mago, and I were sitting down at the kitchen table to do our homework. He took a sip of the beer he had just taken out of a paper bag and said, “Your mother is not in Mexico.”

We stared at him, not understanding.

“Didn’t you hear me? Your mother is not in Mexico.” I’d thought he was joking. Then I realized that he wasn’t.

“Where is she, then?” Mago asked, lifting her head from her homework. Carlos and I also stopped what we were doing, and we sat there at the kitchen table and looked at our father.

“She’s been in this country for months now, and she hasn’t even tried to contact you kids,” Papi said.

“But how can she be here?” Carlos asked.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

“Of course I’m sure,” Papi said. “I ran into her today.” He told us that he’d waited for the bus to come back home. When it arrived, the last passenger to get off was our mother. She lived downtown on a street called San Pedro.

“Your mother never ceases to amaze me,” Papi said. He laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. It was a laugh of bitter disappointment.

“And Betty?” Mago asked.

“Didn’t I just tell you? Your mother never ceases to amaze me. Where do you think your little sister is?”