* * *
And bonus—Mom didn’t suspect a thing! I brought my cardboard art supplies (including some cool neon paper I’d gotten at school) to the kitchen table. I told Mom, “I need to be able to spread out.” But really, being in the kitchen made it easier to perhaps maybe a little bit eavesdrop on my mom’s phone conversations. How else would I find anything out now that Tía was gone? And that’s exactly how I discovered that Mom was now talking to some lawyer lady about Dad’s situation.
A few days later I came home to find some white lady—the lawyer—at the kitchen table with my mother. They spoke in Spanish. Lady’s Spanish was mad good. My brothers were in the living room, watching a WWE SmackDown rerun, but I made like I was cleaning my room and kept coming back into the kitchen for paper towels, for Windex. Best I could follow, Dad was now in Mexico. He had traveled from Guatemala City to Tijuana, but at the border he kept having to turn back because of spotting Border Patrol. So Mom and the lawyer lady were looking into asylum. I think. Apparently, if they could somehow prove Dad was a political refugee, then he could possibly be let back into the United States. But it wasn’t exactly a good time to be seeking anything from the current presidential administration, hello.
Now Mom was shredding a napkin. “My question is, if he gets caught crossing with a coyote, can we still try the asylum route?”
The white lady’s eyes, for real, were full of sympathy. “If he gets caught trying to enter the country illegally, then no, unfortunately, he won’t be eligible for asylum anymore. So for today let’s focus on asylum?” She pushed her hair—curly, brown, streaked with gray—away from her face. I guess she was kind of like an amnesty lawyer or whatever. She seemed kind, and super calm. Not like Mom, who was totally mangling that napkin. The ripping sound alone was making my shoulders tense up.
“So, then, how long will this process take?” Mom asked.
“Well, it really depends.”
On what? How long could it possibly take? Would Mom kill me if I asked? More paper towels in my hand, I now pretended to look for something in the refrigerator, settled on orange juice, and took my time pouring it.
“Sylvia,” the lawyer continued, intent. “Crossing is extremely dangerous… now more than ever. Yes, seeking asylum might take longer—a good deal longer. But that’s the reality for a safer way in.”
My mother shot me a Get out of the kitchen look, so I hightailed it back to my room, thinking the lady was right. Even I knew that lawyers took mad long to do anything. Take this lady, for example. She sat at the table with Mom for, like, ever. I could still hear them as I tried to focus on my homework, all the words distracting me: “immigration,” “amnesty,” “refugee,” “human rights,” “Ronald Reagan.” What did Ronald Reagan have to do with anything? Wasn’t he president like a hundred years ago? And every time the white lady lawyer said my father’s name, it really bugged me, like she knew him, like she knew what he thought. She didn’t know my dad. I wished she would just stop. I mean, unless she was actually going to help. But what if she only made it worse? Though she had smiled at me when I went into the kitchen. Maybe she really was trying to help. She didn’t look that rich, the way her socks bunched at her ankles. It was trippy to hear really good Spanish coming from her, just like it was weird to hear English coming from my mom whenever we were in public. Man, I was hyper. As I went to brush my teeth, I heard Mom saying, “It’s dangerous no matter what… but we have to try.”
Try? The word echoed in my head. Try meant with the coyote.
In Enrique’s Journey there’d been a part that said that some coyotes just take a person’s money and then kill the person and vanish. There were so many men and women and children—entire families—trying to cross the US-Mexico border, like every minute. And now, right now, for real, for real, so was my father. What if… What if he ended up like all those others who didn’t make it? I couldn’t get my brain to stop pushing at these darkest places. What if the coyote just took his money and abandoned him in the desert to die of thirst? Or, what if Dad was caught by Border Patrol? What would they do with him?
My mood seemed to match the rides to and from school, which only got darker, colder. Christmas lights and ornaments popped up on nearly every house in Westburg. These suburban folks love their Christmas lights—some strung lights around their entire house! All chic white, of course. Except one house that—no joke—wrapped their house in Westburg High colors! They reminded me of that morning when the school was all dolled up in streamers and balloons. Got me thinking about Rayshawn. How long was he going to stay out of school? I’m sure the basketball team missed his skills on the court, too. They still didn’t know who’d posted the meme. I sent him another text. Miss Westburg? He replied quick: Nah.
Luckily, at least things with Jade and her grandmother had calmed down. Apparently Ernesto slipped an actual handwritten letter of apology for making Jade late to her grandmother underneath the door to their apartment. Turns out Jade’s grandmother really liked that. Found it old-fashioned and classy. So she let Jade invite him over for dinner, and that was that. He even started helping Jade’s grandmother, fixed the leak in the bathroom sink that had been annoying her for a month. So, as Jade would say, it was fly.
27
I got into hyper-focus mode at our next METCO meeting. I was like, I don’t know, looking for any kernel of hope. I wondered what an ulcer felt like. I knew worrying could cause one. And Dad wouldn’t want that. But this meeting—yeah, Dad would be all over it. He’d like Mr. Rivera’s enthusiasm, the way he talked fast when he got excited about something, or slapped the table with his palm. He was into it, for sure. Okay, Dad. I’ll be into it too.
“Listen up, people,” Mr. Rivera said, yep, slapping that table. “We’re going to dive right in, pick up on our discussion from last week. Did everyone do the reading?” I had. I mean, I had skimmed it while I’d been talking to Holly on the phone last night.
“Anyone at all?” Mr. Rivera pressed when no one responded.
We all swung around in our leather chairs. Genesis hadn’t shown up. In fact, I hadn’t seen her in a minute.
“All right. Well.” Mr. Rivera sounded deflated. He didn’t seem to have a plan B.
Brianna must have taken pity, because she blurted out, “I did.” The signature bun perched on top of her head wobbled.
“Wonderful! Brianna! Yes. Please tell us what you thought.” He looked like he was going to cry with happiness.
The article had been about the Little Rock Nine, a group of nine Black students who had enrolled in Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957. I guess at first, the governor had prevented them from entering the white school. But then President Eisenhower had said yeah, those students could attend that school. The article gave background information on Brown v. Board of Education and the Supreme Court, and there was a whole sidebar on the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). I got why Mr. Rivera was having us read it. Okay, so I’d done more than skim the article. Still, this wasn’t the 1950s.