B0061QB04W EBOK (42 page)

I came out of Barney’s Liquors and Market with the charcoal lighter, and I knew I should hurry home because Papi was making carne asada on the grill and was waiting for me to come back. But Luis waved at me from across the street and motioned for me to come over. The light wasn’t even green yet, but my feet were already pointed in that direction, and I took a step onto the street. The light had turned green by the time I was halfway to Luis and his emerald eyes.

He said, “Let’s go for a walk,” and he got off his bike and walked alongside me. He didn’t talk much, and I didn’t either. Ours was a silent love. I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. He had curly hair, curlier than mine, and it was the color of crushed brown sugar, like the kind Abuelita Chinta would put on boiled ripe guavas to make them syrupy. Luis said, “Have you ever been kissed?” and I shook my head, feeling the ground turn into mud beneath my feet. I felt a rushing in my head, and I looked into his green eyes. I thought of the vacant lot by Abuela Evila’s house, of Carlos, Mago, and me driving the old car toward the Mountain That Has a Headache. Except now it was the mountain that was moving toward me, and I got lost in its velvety beauty.

Papi said, “Where the hell have you been?”

I glanced off into the distance, and in my dreamy haze I handed over the charcoal lighter and walked past Papi. I wondered if Luis was thinking about me and about the kiss we’d just shared. My lips were still throbbing.

Papi whacked me on the head with his hand. “Answer me,” he said.

“They didn’t have any lighter fluid at the liquor store, so I had to go to the store on Avenue 52,” I said.

He said he wasn’t stupid. He knew I was lying. He said, “As long as you live under my roof, you aren’t going to lie to me, girl. Now where were you?”

I couldn’t tell him about my first kiss. He would beat me for sure, ruin the whole memory of it. And why couldn’t he just let me be so
that I could replay the most important moment of my life again and again without disruption?

“Answer me now!” he said, putting a hand on his belt.

“I don’t have to live under your roof if I don’t want to,” I said defiantly, thinking about the kiss. In my euphoria, all I could think was that he couldn’t treat me like a little girl anymore. “Whenever I want, I can go live with my mother.”

I turned around and headed to the gate. I walked toward the corner of Avenue 50 as if I were on my way to catch the bus. I didn’t really mean to leave, but I was tired of Papi always making me feel as if
he
were our only option. Maybe he was. Mami had never once told us to come live with her. How would we have fit in that tiny room of hers? But Papi didn’t need to know that.

Luis and his friends were sitting on the block wall surrounding the house on the corner. He lived on the other side of Granada Street. He was sitting there, and he and his friends whistled at me. Luis shouted something at me, and I didn’t hear what he said, but the next thing I knew my hair felt as if it had caught on something and was tearing right out of my scalp.

“Hija de la chingada, you’re not going anywhere!” Papi said from behind me. He pulled me back to the house by my hair, and I yelled for him to let me go. Luis and his friends whistled louder, and I thought I heard them laughing. I couldn’t see Luis through my tears, but I knew he was there, witnessing my shame. Papi took me into the house, and Mago and Carlos begged him to let me go, but he took off his belt and whipped me with it. I thought about Luis and his green eyes, and soon, I didn’t even feel the sting of the belt.

On Monday during lunch, I went in search of Luis. I wondered if he would ask me to be his girlfriend now that we had shared a kiss. But when I came up to him and his friends, Luis glanced at me and then turned around as if I weren’t there. His friends pointed at me, and Luis shook his head and didn’t turn to look at me. Farther down the hallway, I saw Phuong with her Asian friends. She smirked and then turned away from me, and it hurt me to know I had lost my friend for a boy who was no longer interested in me. Was I a bad kisser? Is that
why he didn’t want to talk to me? Or was it that Papi had humiliated me in front of him? Did he think I was still a little girl because I got beaten by my father? I touched the right side of my thigh where Papi’s belt buckle left a raised tattoo. Maybe Luis thought like my father and like my mother. Maybe, it was just too easy to leave me.

I returned to my favorite spot—the steps that led up to the band room. Mr. Adams wasn’t there so I sat on the steps and took out my V. C. Andrews book because she, at least, was still my friend.

15

I
N
J
UNE OF
1990, five years after we arrived in the U.S., Mago made history. She became the first person in our family—from either side—to get a high school diploma. I became the third person (after Mago and Carlos) to graduate from junior high. My little accomplishment might not have been much to be proud of, but I told myself this was just the beginning. Through all his talks of the future, my father had instilled in me something I could not put a name to in English, but in Spanish it was called “ganas.”

When my father beat me, and in his drunken stupor called me a pendeja and an hija de la chingada, I held on to the vision of the future he had given me during his sober moments. I thought about that vision when the blows came, because the father who beat me, the one who preferred to stay home and drink rather than to attend my band concerts or parent-teacher conferences, wasn’t the same father
who told me that one day I would be somebody in this country. That much I knew.

A second thing to celebrate was that, the month before, our green cards had finally arrived. We had become legal residents of the United States! Finally we could let go of our fear of being deported and look to the future with hope. Papi said, “I’ve done my part. The rest is up to you.” And the three of us clutched our green cards in our hands, imagining the possibilities. The first one to take advantage of our new status was, of course, Mago. It was just in time for her to be able to attend college and be eligible for financial aid. In Mexico, the biggest dream Mago had was to be a lawyer’s secretary. Now, Mago didn’t want to be a secretary—she wanted to be the lawyer who had a secretary. That is what Papi had taught us—that here in this country we could be anything. Papi took out a $5,000 loan under his name to help her with her college expenses because he said his “Negra” was going to make us proud.

In the summer, I attended band camp at Franklin High School because that was now my new school. I was glad Franklin had a marching band. I liked Burbank’s little band, but all we did was have a couple of concerts each year. But here at Franklin, we would be doing parades, football games, pep rallies, and lots of other things we didn’t do at Burbank. The best part was that the school provided each student with a marching uniform. It was navy blue and gold, and it had Franklin’s mascot—a panther—on the front. The only thing they didn’t provide was the marching shoes, which Mago bought me with the money she earned at a collection agency where she now worked part-time.

Every day we did drills and practiced marching around the football field. During our breaks, I would find a quiet spot to eat my lunch, away from the rest of the band members. I hardly knew any of them. There was one boy, Axel, whom I had met in the band at Burbank. He was a year ahead of me, so this was my first time seeing him since he’d graduated from Burbank. He had his own friends now, and I was too shy to say anything to him except hello in the mornings.

After years of being laughed at because of my name and my “wetback” accent, which I still had no matter how good my writing
skills had gotten, I was a full-blown introvert. I looked at Axel and his friends, and I wished I had the courage to go sit with them. Instead, I hid behind my eyeglasses and buried my nose in the Stephen King novel I had brought.

Band camp made the summer go by quickly. Next thing I knew August came to an end, and September was upon us. On the seventh, I would be turning fifteen.

I wouldn’t be having a quinceañera, as I had always dreamed of.

Papi said those kinds of parties were too expensive. A few months before, we had finally moved into the three-bedroom apartment so that Mago, Carlos, and I could have privacy. Papi said we were too old to be sleeping in the living room. Now with his and Mila’s part of the mortgage being much more than before, Papi said there was no money for anything, especially a party. Instead, that Labor Day weekend he was taking me to Raging Waters for the first time. I told him he couldn’t fool me. We weren’t going there to celebrate my fifteenth birthday. We were going there because Kingsley Manor was having an employee summer picnic. He said he wouldn’t be going if it weren’t for my birthday. I replied to him in English with a word I’d picked up at school from other kids.

“Whatever.”