I described how the cops handcuffed Jade’s father and told him to “Shut the eff up!” (I thought I might get points taken off if I used an actual swear word.) I described how the paramedics placed Jade onto a white stretcher, how I could see that Jade had a hundred bits of glass speckled across her skin and sticking out from her T-shirt. The paramedics gave her an injection of something they said would make her feel better. After that Jade’s father was deported (I know that now, but at the time I just knew he had been taken away), and Jade’s mother had a nervous breakdown and started using drugs and hanging out with even sketchier dudes.
Jade’s grandmother had raised Jade ever since. Her father was still in Honduras as far as I knew.
I wrote until my hand hurt. And at last I was done. Mrs. Grew noticed, because she came over and asked if she could read my pages. “Sure,” I said with a shrug. She took them to her desk while I read the syllabus front to back, trying not to watch her. When she was finished, she remained seated, looking into the distance. It was not an A for Your Essay look. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned the police? I stared at the prompt written in green marker on the board. Describe one of your worst fears… overcame it… Oh, wait. I hadn’t written about that. I had written about a time when I was afraid, but not a time I overcame it! NOT the same thing. Ugh.
I felt so relieved when the bell rang. My classmates zipped backpacks and bolted out the door, one guy asking another, “Dude, what’d you write about?” The other answering, “Not making the traveling team. I was so afraid I wouldn’t make the cut, so we hired a private coach for a month before tryouts.” What the—?
Mrs. Grew stood up at last and handed me back my essay.
“Liliana. I hope this is fiction.”
My throat tightened. I managed to nod.
She squinted as if suddenly seeing me through a new lens. Just then another teacher interrupted us—thank God! I escaped into the hall. On my way out I crumpled up the pages, then slammed the wad into the nearest trash can. No, it wasn’t fiction. So what? So this happened to my best friend. And yeah, I was fearful. So I didn’t exactly follow the prompt, but I mean, weren’t writers supposed to write about the worlds they knew? I blinked hard, fighting back tears. No way I was going to let anyone see me cry.
I checked to make sure Dustin wasn’t in the hall. But then I wanted to see him. Maybe that’d make me feel better. I reached for my phone, sent him a text: hey.
He wrote back right away: finishing up lab. Want some cat intestines?
I replied: all set thx . At least he put a smile back on my face.
Hey, meet at outside bleachers for lunch?
My stomach dropped. In the best way. K , I replied. I was about to text Genesis next, ask her what was up with Mrs. Grew, but up ahead I heard kids laughing. They were surrounding Rayshawn, who somehow had a blazer (teacher’s?) over his hoodie and was sashaying down the hall, tossing out pink detention slips and letting them fall like confetti. Kids were dying-laughing. As I walked past them, someone said, “Yo, Rayshawn! Do it again!” And so Rayshawn did it again. And everyone laughed again.
A teacher in the hall actually clapped before taking the pink pad from Rayshawn and saying, “That’s enough. Thank you for the performance, brother. But keep that energy for the court. Season is just getting started. All right. Now get to class.”
Whoa. Did that teacher (white) call Rayshawn “brother”? Rayshawn either didn’t hear or pretended not to hear. But he must have heard it! Others moved on to their classes. But it all really… bugged me. As I walked to my next class, I tried to figure it out. Aside from a white teacher calling Rayshawn “brother,” it was like… Rayshawn was their entertainment and they held the remote control. Yeah, it bugged me.
I texted Genesis. Hey girl. Where r u? Immediately she wrote back: theater club… all ok? I responded with the brown-skinned thumbs-up emoji. But what’s the point of having a METCO buddy if they’re never around? So I texted her again and asked: what play are u in anyway? She replied: the Emperor's New Clothes—which I thought was mad random. She read my mind because she added: i play one of the spoiled daughters lol. I sent her an emoji with stars in its eyes and stuffed my phone back into my pocket. Good for Genesis.
After checking my hair in the bathroom mirror, I walked to the field, and sure enough, Dustin was sitting in the top row of the bleachers. He waved his sandwich in the air—ha. I had mine too. Ham and cheese. His was bleeding purple, so PB&J. “Hey,” he said when I got to the top. “Table for two?” He took a little bow. Aw… We sat so our thighs touched, even though there was space for like, a thousand more people. And I tried, tried, tried not to obsess over whether or not I had a piece of ham stuck in my teeth. But I couldn’t. So I talked mostly with my hand over my mouth. I told him about Mrs. Grew. He said not to worry about her. That she was officially now Mrs. Ew. I laughed. Took a sip of water. Screwed and unscrewed the cap about fifty times. When we finished eating, he gently pulled my sleeve, and I scootched up and sat even closer to him. He put his arm around me and we sat like that, tucked into one another, the half hour wrapped around us, the fresh air on our faces, until the bell rang.
9
When Mom asked me how school was, I said that it was whatever. No way was I telling her about Dustin, hello. She muttered something about how it would get better, but then went back to staring at the television. She was beyond obsessed with the news (understandably, hello), in Spanish and English. She watched all the channels and brought home three different newspapers, hunting for information on what was going on at the border. She didn’t even watch her telenovelas at night. And she hardly left the apartment anymore, and never at night. If we ran out of milk, too bad, the boys ate their cereal dry in the morning.
One of the top stories on the news: a rival gang shoot-out at a nearby park. A bystander had been killed. We knew the gangs did their thing, and we knew not to wear certain colors in excess, but still. Knowing this happened just three blocks away wasn’t exactly comforting. Then, as if that weren’t bad enough, the news switched to an image of the president and “the wall” on the southern border, like between the US and Mexico. Whaaat? An actual wall? For, like, hundreds of miles? Mom began praying superfast in Spanish, her eyes screwed shut.
I draped a wool blanket over her. “Can I get you anything?”
“No thanks, mija.” She didn’t take her eyes off the TV.
“You hungry?”
She shook her head. I didn’t bother asking if she’d made dinner; she’d never even gotten out of her pajamas. Dang. That meant she took the twins to school like that. Double dang. I checked in on them. No surprise, they were playing video games, firing their remote controls, making gun sounds, pat-dat-dat, pat-dat-dat. I told them to turn down the volume, but they only lowered it a little.
Everything felt so cramped all of a sudden. The rooms, the walls, the apartment building, the streets. Even the air. Which was weird, because you’d think the place would feel bigger with one less person in it. But it was as if Dad’s absence was sucking up all the oxygen. Thing was, if Dad had been home right then, he’d probably be wrestling with my brothers. They capital L Loved to wrestle. Dad would pull one of their mattresses into the living room, and then the three of them would really go at it. The boys would jump from the couch onto the mattress, aiming right for Dad’s chest. They got all kinds of wild. Drove Mom bananas. She’d have to leave the apartment and go do laundry or something because she was sure that one of them was going to get hurt and then we’d be spending the rest of the day in the emergency room. I thought it was pretty funny. Sometimes I even recorded it on my phone, and then we replayed it in slow motion. That was really funny.