by Jaquira Díaz
We spent most afternoons that way, in the park, smoking my mother’s cigarettes, drinking her beer. Sometimes we paid the neighborhood tecatos to get us bottles of Cisco or Mad Dog 20/20 or St. Ides Special Brew. Occasionally Kilo, my boyfriend, and his cousin Papo, would show up with a bag of Krypto and smoke us out. We’d lie on the bunk beds, listen to DJ Laz’s power mix, and laugh our asses off. Until the effect wore off and we were ourselves again—reckless, and unafraid, and pissed off at our parents for not caring that we spent most of our time on the streets or drunk or high, for being deadbeats and scutterheads. But it wasn’t just our parents. We were pissed off at the whole fucking world. Our teachers, the principal, the school security, the D.A.R.E. cop. All those people, they just didn’t get that there was no way in hell we could care about homework, or getting to school on time—or at all—when our parents were on drugs or getting stabbed, and we were getting arrested or jumped or worse. Only three months before, Mikey, Kilo’s best friend, had been killed in a drive-by shooting.
One Saturday morning, after a long night of drinking and smoking out on the beach, the four of us walked back to Normandy Isle in a haze. It was so early the sky was still gray and the Metrobuses had just started running. The sidewalk along Normandy Drive was secluded except for the four of us. For a while we just walked, sand in our sneakers, our mouths dry, my hair frizzy from the beach air, Kilo holding my hand, Papo and Boogie holding hands in front of us, the four of us marching down Normandy Drive, laughing and fucking up all the lyrics to Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh’s “La Di Da Di.” It was our thing—
pretending we were beach bums, that nothing could touch us, that life would always be like this. Carefree and limitless and full of music. We still didn’t know that Miami Beach wouldn’t always be ours. Or that even in a few years when we were all gone, we would still lay claim to it always, that we would never truly belong anywhere else.
We had just gotten to Normandy Park when we spotted this kid riding his bike across the street. He was dark-skinned, with hair shaved close to the scalp, wearing a wife beater and baggy jean shorts. I knew him from the neighborhood. Everybody called him Bambi. He was older than us, out of high school already, but he looked young.
Papo had put his arm around Boogie, pulled her close, and I hated him then, even though we were friends. She smiled, brushing her overgrown bangs out of her face, and kept singing. She had just dyed her long, straight hair auburn, and had a slight tan from our days on the beach. Papo had beady little eyes and an overgrown bush of messy, shapeless curls, and I couldn’t see why she was attracted to him and not me. I was only thirteen, but I was already wearing a C-cup, and I masturbated so much I was sure I could bring another girl to orgasm, no problem.
When I glanced at Kilo, he had grown quiet, and his face had changed, turned the color of paper. His lips were pressed together, and I could see the vein in his temple throbbing like it did when he was fighting with his mom, or when he was about to throw down. We all stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, and Kilo let go of my hand, pulled out his pack of Newports and lit one. He took a long drag, then rubbed at his eye with the back of his hand.
“Y’all know that guy?” Kilo asked.
“That’s Bambi,” I said.
“Doesn’t he look just like Mikey?” Kilo asked, but nobody said a word.
Back in my room, the four of us piled up on the bunk beds. Kilo and I sat side by side on the bottom bunk, our backs against the wall, and Boogie and Papo fell asleep on the top. She breathed softly, Papo snoring.
Kilo leaned over and lay his head on my lap, the vein in his temple still throbbing. I put my hand on his head, listened to him breathing, and after a while I noticed he had tears in his eyes. I wiped them away with my thumb, but they kept coming. He wrapped his arms around my waist awkwardly, like he needed to hold on to something but didn’t know how. This was not the Kilo I knew.
The Kilo I knew threw up gang signs and wore baggy jeans and wife beaters and high-top Air Jordans. He was tattooed and foulmouthed and crazy. He looked at people hard, laughed loudly, talked back to everybody, played street ball and dunked on half the guys in Normandy Park. The Kilo I knew smoked blunts, drank Olde English 800 by the quart, talked dirty, cracked his knuckles, sucker punched a guy twice his size for calling me a bitch, tagged all over the back of the Metrobus, got kicked out of school.
We were like that for a long time, Kilo crying into my lap, holding me, and me, not able to say a single word. While I hated seeing him that way, the truth is it also made dying seem like more of an option. And I realized that that was exactly what I wanted—a love like that. I wanted somebody who loved me so much my death would break her.
The first time I was eleven.
I was living with Mami in South Beach. She’d been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia three years before, and was on a cocktail of antipsychotics and anxiety medications. She was also using cocaine. Our nights together were unpredictable. Sometimes my mother slept for sixteen hours straight. Sometimes she paced around the apartment talking to herself, laughing, screaming at me for doing God-knows-what. Sometimes she threw plates across the room, or threatened to burn me with a hot iron, or gave me a full-blown ass-whooping. I was five-foot-six by the time I was eleven, four inches taller than my mother, something she loved to remind me of as she was kicking my ass—the bigger I got, the bigger my beat-down had to be. Eventually I started hitting her back. We came to blows regularly.
That weekend I was alone with my mother. She was manic, talking to herself, screaming at me, insisting that I’d stolen a pair of her heels. She searched the entire apartment, turning over cushions, upending tables, emptying all the drawers onto the floor, pulling hangers out of the closets. When she didn’t find her shoes, she made me search, standing behind me as I opened and closed and opened and closed drawers, as I turned over mattresses and emptied out the bathroom cabinets. I did this over and over, and every time I didn’t find the pair of heels, she’d slap the back of my head, harder each time. Until I refused to search anymore.
I knew what it would mean, to defy my mother, but I did it anyway. I turned to her, balled my hands into fists, took a step back, and said, “I didn’t take your God. Damned. Shoes.” I turned to leave, and that’s when I felt the whack on the back of my head—hard, much harder than before—and then a shower of blows.
She beat me until I fell, and after I fell, and stopped only when she was good and ready.
Afterward she put on multiple layers of makeup, slipped into a slinky silver dress, found a substitute pair of heels, and announced that she was going dancing.
I was still on the floor when she walked out the door, couldn’t have gotten up even if I’d wanted to.
I got up a few hours later and took my mother’s pills, all of them—antipsychotics, sleeping pills, anxiety pills. I washed them down with half a bottle of Dawn dishwashing liquid. I’d heard the stories about toddlers who’d gotten poisoned with Drano, or detergent, or bleach, but all we had was Dawn. If we’d had any Drano or bleach, I would’ve downed that, too. I was determined to die.
I sat in the living room, waited for my mother to come home.
When she found me, I was on my knees on the kitchen floor, throwing up blue.
I don’t remember falling asleep, or making my way from the living room to the kitchen, or being on my knees.
There is the faint memory of riding in the ambulance, sitting up on the stretcher, someone’s hand pressing hard against my chest, shaking me, bringing me back from wherever I was.
There is a woman’s voice: What is your name? Open your eyes. What did you take? Don’t fall asleep.
There I am sinking, sinking. Then I’m gagging, a tube up my nostril, down my throat. Don’t fight it. Don’t cough. Swallow.
There is chaos, the shuffle of people all around me, moving me, prodding me, holding me up until I’m throwing up charcoal into a plastic container.
There I am: stomach thrusting against th
e back of my throat until my eyeballs are almost bursting, until there’s charcoal vomit splattered down the front of my T-shirt, until there’s nothing left inside me and I realize I’m in a hospital and I’m in a hospital bed and there is my mother and there is my father and there I am: I am eleven and I am alive.
I used to imagine that the French woman knew something about pain, about planning. That she had tried before, as a child, as a teenager. That she sat in her bedroom and listened to whatever was on the radio, wrote poems about darkness, dreamed of jumping off bridges and arsenic cocktails and death by electrocution. Because she was no ordinary girl.
I’d like to think that someone loved her—before she jumped, and after—even if she didn’t know it.
Or maybe she did.
On Halloween, we decided to throw a party. We’d spent the night at Kilo’s house, slept on his two twin beds and woke up around 2:00 p.m., crusty-eyed and cotton-mouthed and ready for trouble. I called up Tanisha, who lived a short walk from Kilo’s neighborhood—and smoked weed all day every day—and told her we needed a place for a party. An hour later we were at her apartment on Harding Avenue, smoking her Krypto and listening to her ’80s freestyle. We called everybody we knew with the details. Bring your own weed, we told them, and wear a costume.
Whenever somebody’s mom would ask about a chaperone, we put Tanisha on the phone. She gave them her address and phone number, said please and thank you, laughed easily. She was every teenage hoodlum’s dream, my aunt. Like an older best friend who would cover for you, go to court with you when you didn’t want your parents to find out you got caught stealing at Woolworth’s or the bodega around the corner, who acted like a kid even though she was older. She partied with us, smoked us out, then took us to the movies or skinny dipping on South Beach. She taught us not just how to fight, but how to fight dirty, to use anything as a weapon.
That night, China couldn’t make it because she had to take her brothers and sister trick-or-treating, and Chanty never showed up. But Boogie and I dressed up as toddlers, parting our hair into pigtails, dotting our faces with eyeliner freckles, baby blue pacifiers hanging from the gold chains around our necks. We wore Mickey Mouse and Pooh Bear pajamas, sucked on Charms Blow Pops, drank malt liquor out of baby bottles. The apartment filled up with our friends from Nautilus, Kilo’s friends from the barrio, Tanisha’s weedhead friends. We sat in a circle on the living room floor and passed around a Dutch, blasting House of Pain on Tanisha’s stereo, until Kilo and I got bored of watching everybody jump around, and stole a dozen eggs from her kitchen.
Outside, we climbed onto the hood of somebody’s old Chevy Caprice and flung eggs at trick-or-treaters, some old scutterhead stumbling down the street, a guy in a pickup. Afterward, when all the eggs were splattered down Seventy-Seventh and Harding, we jumped off the car, Kilo all sweaty, the malt liquor in my baby bottle already warm. Kilo lit two cigarettes, handed me one. I slurred a faded version of Lil Suzy’s “Take Me in Your Arms,” and we started slow dancing right there on the sidewalk, Kilo breathing smoke into my neck. Danced in the yard next to Tanisha’s apartment building, and collapsed onto the grass. Then we lay there, side by side, laughing and laughing at nothing, at everything.
Everybody else seemed so far away, even though we lay there listening to them coming and going, the building’s front door opening, closing, footsteps scurrying across the lawn, our friends coming over to say, “You got grass all up in your pigtails,” and “I think they passed out,” and “The hell you doing down there?”
When Boogie and Papo came over, one of them kicked my sneaker. Then Papo said, “Think they’ll notice if I piss in their mouths?”
“I’ll fuck you up,” Kilo said.
“You dead?” Boogie asked, giggling.
“My eyes are open,” I said.
“Don’t mean you can’t be dead,” Boogie said.
I didn’t look over at Kilo, but I could hear him breathing beside me. He wasn’t laughing like the rest of us. I wouldn’t realize it until much later, after the Krypto and the Olde English had worn off, after that miserable fall with my mother, after going back to my father’s house, after Kilo had cheated with a girl from the barrio and gotten her pregnant and named the baby Mikey, like he hoped this Mikey would be the one to save him. After hating her for stealing him from me, after stealing him back years later, even if only for a little while, after the two of us, trying to be those same two kids we’d been, got drunk on the beach on a Saturday night, snorted an eight ball in just a couple hours, after he watched me take one bump of scutter after another and told me to Slow down, ma, and Watch out, baby girl, go easy, that’s how motherfuckers OD, and I told him that that was exactly how I wanted to go and that it would be the best way to die and that nobody would miss me anyway, after he snatched the baggie from me, took my face in his hands, his breath rank like stale cigarettes and Hennessy, and said Don’t ever let me hear you say that shit again and I don’t wanna lose you and after I let him hug me and thought about the two of us lying in the grass that Halloween when we were only thirteen and fourteen, how we were just kids but seemed so much older, already so tired, so damn tired it was like we’d been fighting a war. That’s when it would hit me, that maybe Kilo wasn’t that different from me, that maybe back then he’d also been dreaming about dying. Maybe it was seeing his homeboy shot down right in front of him, and having to look in the mirror every day, accept that he was still here, still alive, Mikey’s memory like a ghost that was always calling.
But that Halloween, the two of us on the grass, all I knew was that I felt nothing and everything all at once. Boogie and Papo lingered for a while, joking, smoking, laughing, and I didn’t even notice when they snuck back to the party. I couldn’t tell how long we lay there—could’ve been minutes, could’ve been hours—but I sat up when we almost got trampled by a pack of kids running wild though the yard toward Tanisha’s building. There were like six or seven of them, boys and girls we went to school with, sprinting, pushing each other out of the way, calling out, “Move!” and “Run!” and “Go-go-go-go-go!”
Later, in the middle of Tanisha’s living room, with the music turned down and their eyes wide, everybody listening and holding their breaths, they would tell a story about how they’d been hanging on the corner of Seventy-Seventh and Harding. How a couple of them had been sitting on the hood of a car, while Kilo and I were passed out in the yard or pretending to be dead or whatever it was we were doing. How some guys in a pickup had pulled up right next to them, how the passenger had rolled down the window, pulled out a gun, and asked which one of them had thrown the eggs. And while I stood there, the spinning in my head already fading, the dancing and the laughing and Kilo’s face against my neck already like a dream I was sure to forget, I wouldn’t feel guilty for egging those guys, and I wouldn’t feel bad that my friends almost got shot because of us. I would resent them for being that close to death. I would imagine, like something out of a movie, the truck pulling up, the slow opening of the tinted window, the moonlight reflecting on the glass, then the barrel of the gun, like a promise.
I walked into the school counselor’s office one afternoon, on a whim. It had been months since I’d been to see Paula, my court-appointed counselor, and it wasn’t like I missed her or anything. I told myself it was because I had a math test during fifth period that I hadn’t bothered to study for, that I didn’t want to see Ms. Jones’ face in front of the class as she handed out the test, how she’d be staring at me as I took one and passed it back. Truth was I couldn’t care less. Every time Ms. Jones called me to her desk and asked, her voice almost a whisper, why I hadn’t turned in any homework that week or the week before that, or why I never brought books to school, I just shrugged, rolled my eyes. The last three times, she’d threatened to send me to the principal’s office if it happened again. Next day, same shit. I’d walk up to her desk, again, cross my arms, say, “My bad,” and act like it was the first time in my life I’d ever heard of books or
homework.
I didn’t know what I’d say when I walked into Ms. Gold’s office. That it was hard seeing Chanty sitting in the front of the classroom with all her new friends when we barely spoke anymore, thanks to her mom? That China was planning a huge birthday party for her quinces, with ball gowns and tuxedoes and a DJ, and that we were so poor there was no way I’d be able to come up with the money for the gown? That every time I went back home to Papi’s, I’d end up fighting with Anthony, and he ended up pounding on me until he got tired, and that no matter what, Abuela always took his side?
Ms. Gold was known in most cliques as the counselor for the losers, druggies, troublemakers, kids who got suspended, kids who fought or brought knives to school, kids who flunked so much they were already too old for Nautilus, kids whose parents were drunks or junkies, or whose parents beat them, homeless kids, bullied kids, kids with eating disorders, or brain disorders, or anger problems. So naturally, when I showed up at her door, she knew exactly who I was.
“Come on in, Jaqui,” she said, her voice hoarse, like she smoked a few packs a day. “Have a seat.” She ran her hand through her long mane of orange hair, and I noticed her fingernails were long as hell and painted gold. She dressed like she was a young woman—ivory pencil skirt, short sleeved blouse, black high heels—and smelled like floral perfume. She was an attractive woman, and wore lots of makeup, but up close, you could tell how old she really was. Older than my mother. Probably a grandmother. This made me like her right away.
I stepped inside the small office and sat in the nearest seat. It was bigger than I’d imagined, with a few chairs set up in a circle. I wondered how she knew my name, and if there would be other people coming.
“I’ve been wondering when you’d show up,” she said, sitting at her desk chair. She leaned over and opened a drawer, rummaged through some files, then pulled one out. “I was going to get you out of class if you didn’t make it over to me soon.”