“Just relax and I’ll fix you right up and you’ll be golden, Mr. Aristotle Mendoza.” She was smiling from ear to ear. “Liliana Mendoza. What a wonderful woman.”
Thirteen
I WAS SITTING BY MYSELF at lunch, and then I saw them headed toward me: Cassandra, Susie, and Gina. They sat down, surrounding me. And somehow, I felt trapped. I knew what was coming. “Spit it out,” Susie said. “Everyone’s asking Gina, ‘So what happened to Ari? He got into another fight, didn’t he?’ And Gina comes up to me in the hallway and says, ‘Ari got into another fight.’ And so I go to my next class and there’s a guy named Kiko who has a black eye. And not that we’re friends, but you know me, I had to ask—and he says, ‘Ask your friend Ari.’ ”
“And nobody asked me anything. Nobody knows we’re friends yet. I’d like to say let’s keep it that way.” I couldn’t tell if Cassandra was annoyed or not. “But I did hear a group of vatos saying that some guys got into a fight in the parking lot and one of them wound up in the hospital with a few broken ribs. That your handiwork, Ari?”
“Could be. Or it could be the work of my colleague, one Danny Anchondo.”
Cassandra. “Danny. He’s a year behind us. He’s one of the few guys in this school who actually talks to me. And he’s one of the few guys I respect. Totally sweet guy.”
“We agree,” Susie said. “Gina went out with him once.”
“Yeah, it didn’t go well. But we sort of became friends. He’s not easy to hate.”
I looked at Cassandra. “We took on five guys. That totally sweet guy is a born street fighter.”
“You took on five guys?”
“Well, I took care of one of them before Danny arrived on the scene. Then I took two and Danny took two. If you’re going to pick a fight, you better know what the hell you’re doing—or you could wind up in the hospital with a few broken ribs.”
Susie was looking at me. “I know you like to fight. But I can’t picture you fighting.”
“Actually,” Gina said, “I can’t quite picture it either.”
“I can,” Cassandra said. And she said it with conviction. “Speaking of which,” Cassandra said, “just ahead of me and to the left, Amanda Alvidrez. She’s as bad as her mother. And she has just spotted us. Don’t look, Gina. We do not notice her. She’s invisible to us, although she might as well be taking a picture. So, Ari, I want you to show me your wrapped hands and I’m going to kiss them.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Dead serious.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
I showed Cassandra my wrapped hands, and she kissed both the palms of my hands in a moment of tenderness. Of course, there wasn’t actually anything tender about that moment, but that’s not what everyone else around us saw. She managed to keep her composure—but I know she wanted to bust out laughing.
“Cassandra, you’re awful.”
“I’m not awful, Susie, I’m giving the gossip columnist over there something to print in her column. I have to practice being the actress I’m going to become.”
I had to smile at that. “You’re already that actress.”
“Yeah, but I’d like to get paid for it someday.”
“What? Our friendship isn’t enough payment?”
“Not by a long shot, Mr. Mendoza. But I’m sure you’ll find a way to repay me for having made you the center of attention at second-period lunch.”
“Just what I wanted to be—the center of attention.”
“Oh, you’ve always attracted attention,” Gina said. “Just because you liked to sit by yourself in the corner didn’t mean you weren’t getting attention.”
Susie laughed. “Ari, did you actually think you were making yourself invisible?”
“Well, yeah, I guess I did.”
Susie shook her head. “For such a smart boy, you can actually be pretty stupid.”
I wanted to tell her that the same thought had crossed my mind—more than once.
Fourteen
HIGH SCHOOL.
Teachers.
Students.
Some students would have preferred to have no teachers. Some teachers would have preferred to have no students. But it didn’t work that way. Somewhere along the line, high schools were born. That was the place where the country of teachers and the country of students met, where the two countries embraced, collided, clashed, crashed into each other, fought each other, and, through the efforts of the citizens of both countries, something happened called learning. I thought about these things a lot, maybe because my mother was a teacher.
I think that because my mother was a teacher, I was a better student. Or maybe that wasn’t true. But I do know that because my mother was a teacher, I looked at my teachers with a different perspective. I saw them as people. And I don’t know if a lot of my classmates saw them that way.
I think mostly what we learned in high school was about people, about who they were and what made them change or refuse to change or incapable of change. That was the best part of high school. And teachers were people too. And they were the best and worst of people. The best teachers, and the worst ones, they taught you as much about people as the students in the hallway.
The country of teachers.
The country of students.
The country of high school.
The country of learning.
Just because everybody had visas to enter into those countries, didn’t mean that everybody would use them.
* * *
One of my teachers was fresh out of college. This was her first teaching gig. Her name was Mrs. Flores, and she was amazingly smart. Some teachers were alive with a kind of intellectual energy. I thought Mrs. Flores was a kind of angel. And she was smart, in and out of the classroom. She had a look at my bandaged hands and she knew exactly what she was seeing. But she couldn’t help but ask, “Ari, do you happen to be accident prone?” She had a seating chart, and I didn’t doubt that she’d already memorized all our names.
“Yes, I think so. Sometimes my hands clench up and they seem to belong to someone else—and they accidentally run into things.”
“And even when your hands clench up and seem to belong to someone else, you do have an understanding that your hands belong to you and only to you, right? And that you are responsible for whatever they do? If you remember that, then maybe your hands won’t be so prone to having so many accidents.”
“Well, I don’t have that many.”
“One accident is one too many, don’t you agree, Ari?”
“You know what they say: Accidents do happen.”
“They do. That’s why paying attention is important. People who are prone to accidents aren’t paying attention.”
“Maybe they’re paying attention to more important things.”
“Or less important things.” She smiled. “Ari, let me ask you a question. Do your fists run into things? Or people?”
“Who said anything about fists?”