Others quickly nodded.
“My sister’s in college, and she does this thing called work-study. And she gets paid. Why can’t we have something like that?”
Mr. Rivera threw the question right back at us. “Why not?”
“I asked you that!”
“Biodu, if you want to start a work-study program, write up a proposal and we can look into it. Bring it to me by next Monday, and we’ll put it on the agenda for our next meeting.”
“For real?”
“For real.”
“Word.” Biodu took out a notebook and started working on it right then and there.
Then, crickets. But then, timidly, we brought up deeper stuff—color-blindness, insensitive teachers, Rayshawn. Apparently the district was going to give Rayshawn a home tutor while things calmed down.
There wasn’t time to get into all the issues we brainstormed, at least not in one meeting, but it was a start.
By the next METCO meeting, miracle upon miracles, Brianna had stopped rolling her eyes at me. So, that was something. We weren’t talking or anything, but at least I didn’t think DORITO GIRL every time she walked into the room. Mr. Rivera made us partners in some activity called two truths and a lie. I learned that she played the violin and she had been in METCO since first grade. That was a long-ass time! It made me wonder how long Rayshawn had been in METCO. It was a bummer that he was missing these meetings; they weren’t so bad. Plus, it felt weird not to have him there. So I sent him a text telling him I was thinking about him. He texted back a brown thumbs-up and a smiley face, but that was it.
Not a minute later my phone buzzed. It was Dustin. He asked me if I wanted to come over to his house after school, and what the hell, I replied yes.
So a few hours later, there I was, breaking like eighteen of my mother’s laws—walking with a boy, walking on a street without a sidewalk, not going where I said I was going, and oh yeah, going to a boy’s house. Which was why I’d borrowed Holly’s blue hoodie. I zipped it up to my chin, and I even wore the actual hood and tied it tight at my neck. Paranoid? Yes. It was clearly in my genes.
“So what’s it like being the youngest?” I asked Dustin as we walked to his house—ten minutes away, he said.
“Not too shabby,” Dustin said. “I get to do a lot more than my brothers ever did. And my oldest brother is already married. Did I tell you his wife is pregnant?” Then I swear he blushed.
“No,” I said. “That’s exciting.”
“Yeah. I’m going to be Uncle Dustin. Anyway, I’m not just the youngest. I’m also the smartest. And the coolest.”
I laughed. “It’s a good thing you don’t lack confidence or anything.”
I tried to memorize the area as we walked by. The neighborhood didn’t have blocks exactly, more like winding streets with looming trees that shaded the lawns and driveways so that it seemed later than it actually was—I was going to come back this way to catch the METCO late bus. But maybe Dustin would walk with me?
Dustin poked my arm. “Hey, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Why do you look like you’re in a witness protection program?”
I laughed again.
“Look at you. All I see is your face. I mean, don’t get me wrong. It’s a cute face. But you look like you’re wanted for murder.” Now he laughed. “Which would make me an accomplice.”
“Oh… I’m just cold.”
Dustin reached for my hand, pulled it out from my sweatshirt pocket. “Well, your hands are on fire. You sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah. I’m good.”
Dustin’s phone buzzed. He looked at the screen, then put the phone back in his pocket. “Just Steve,” he said, as if reading my mind.
“Hey, can I ask you something?” I asked.
“Shoot.”
“Why— How come— So how long—”
“Let me guess: Why are we such good friends if he’s kind of a dick?”
I almost tripped. “I didn’t mean—”
Dustin laughed. “It’s all good. I get it. He can be… obnoxious. But I’ve known him since preschool. Our parents basically put us together in every sport possible, since like, T-ball.”
What the heck was T-ball? But before I could ask, Dustin veered up a driveway, and my mouth fell open. Daaaaang. I could barely take it all in as he was whisking me through huge double doors, past a chandeliered foyer, and straight to the living room—not beige, like Holly’s, lots of blue tones instead. The furniture was all real leather—I ran my hand along the top of a chair as Dustin led me through the room. My brothers would rip that chair in a hot minute!
The wall on the far end of the room had a huge map of the United States on it. A bunch of stars marked different cities and a hand-drawn line connected the first half of them, from Massachusetts to Kansas. Dustin bounded over to it. “My brother Pete is driving cross country with his college buddies. We’re mapping out his trip.” He pointed to the stars, as if it wasn’t self-explanatory. I stepped closer to the map. Squinted. Dad was definitely on a different kind of trip.
“Whatcha thinking about?” Dustin was so close that I could smell his soy sauce breath. He’d had lunch in the cafeteria, and they’d had Chinese. You would think the smell was gross, but… Okay, it was gross. But still. It was Dustin. I couldn’t turn away. And then, his hand was on my waist and we were making out right there, standing there. Finally we moved to the couch, and even though I kept asking him if his mom was going to come home or something, he never answered, which I took as a no. Instead it turned out to be… one of his brothers who stood in the doorway and cleared his throat a few times until we noticed his presence.
“Uh—Dustin?”
I sat up real straight, tucked my hair behind my ears. Dustin hopped to his feet, stood halfway between me and a tall guy who looked like Dustin—but ten years from now.
“Oh, hey, Kev. This is Lili.”
“Hey,” his brother said.
“Hi,” I said.
I couldn’t read Dustin’s brother’s expression—surprised, curious, impressed—confused? His hair was so blond, it looked gray, but he was also tan, which made him look like an oxymoron, like I couldn’t tell if he was young or old or what.
“Dustin… I just came by to… pick up some books.” He turned to me. “I’m working on my dissertation.”
“Pretty soon, we’ll have to call Kevin doctor,” Dustin told me.
“Oh, and tell Mom I’ll be back this weekend to do some laundry,” soon-to-be-doctor Kevin added.
“Laundry day. Yep.” Dustin gave his head a shake to flick his bangs out of his eyes.
“Well, nice meeting you, Lili.” Kevin smiled in my direction.
“Nice to meet you, too. Bye.” A moment later we heard him leaving out the front door.
“Well, that was a little embarrassing,” I admitted. Dustin stroked my cheek.
“Nah, Kev’s cool.” He paused for a second, then said, “He doesn’t really have that much laundry, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
“And he probably didn’t really have to come here to get those books.”
Now I was totally confused.
“My parents are… getting divorced.”
Oh. Ohhhhh.
I reached for his hand. “That must be so hard.”
Dustin flopped onto the couch, patting it for me to join him. “Yeah. Kev comes over all the time with these totally random excuses, to check on me like I’m a little kid or something.”
“That’s actually kinda sweet.”
We scootched closer to one another on the couch, but making out didn’t exactly seem like it was on the menu any longer. Then, in the softest voice, Dustin said, “My mom… she, like, had an affair or whatever.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah… with her boss. So cliché, right?”
“Well…” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Only, it isn’t really a cliché. I mean, her
boss is a woman.”
Dustin went on about his mom and her lady friend and basically everything that had happened. I listened. Rubbed his hand. He kept moving it to bite the side of his thumb. But he kept talking, kept sharing.
Then he suddenly asked, “So what about you?”
“What about me?” I said warily.
“Your family. Your parents. And your dad—you hardly ever mention him. At all, really.”
“Well, my father…,” I began, then shifted to, “What time is it?” I took out my phone. “Oh my God. I’m going to miss the late bus if I don’t leave like right this second!”
Dustin pulled me up to my feet. “I’ll walk you, and you can tell me on the way.”
I pressed my lips together hard. I didn’t have to walk to the bus stop by myself! But I’d have to tell him something about my dad.
Turned out, talking to Dustin about my dad was so easy, and once I started, I just couldn’t stop. I told him everything, then swung back to when I was a kid—how Dad had gotten me hooked on reading.
I used to totally hate reading. Then, once, after a school book fair, I came home all annoyed. Dad asked me what was wrong. I drank juice from a small carton with the curly red straw I’d gotten from Chuck E. Cheese at a birthday party. I loved that freakin’ straw. “Boring books at school,” I said. “We have to pick, and they’re all sooo boring!”
Dad nodded, thought for a minute, and nodded again. “Let’s go. I’m taking you somewhere special.” He grabbed his keys and we tiptoed out of the apartment.
I loved going into Boston with Dad. He whistled while we walked. He nodded to strangers on the street. When he saw a homeless person, he always—and I mean, always—gave them a dollar. A whole dollar! On the street sometimes women checked him out. Sometimes men. I mean, Dad was handsome. He had black hair sometimes cut close to his scalp or sometimes grown out into a long ponytail, big eyes, a wide forehead (which he said means you’re smart), and dark skin like mine. And he was tallish. Too bad I didn’t get that gene. Whatever. That afternoon we took the orange line train to a stop I had never been to before—Haymarket. When I asked where we were going, he kept saying it was a surprise.
After a few minutes we reached some concrete steps. Dad took them two at a time to the landing. I scrambled after him.
“What is this place?” I said, looking around. People everywhere. Tables lined up in rows, boxes and crates and stacks upon stacks of books.
“This is a book fair,” he said. “A street book fair.”
I wandered around as Dad explained that this was the best place to get books in all of Boston because (1) they were cheap (and they really were; some were only ten cents), and (2) they were used. “If you read a book you love, you want someone else to read it,” he said.
That afternoon, with the sun following us around from table to table, Dad helped me pick out a whole bunch of books, including one by Sandra Cisneros. He said I was too young to read her books yet, but he would buy it for me and give it to me in a couple of years. The fact that he’d said I was too young to read it of course only made me want to read it more. Come to think of it, maybe he knew exactly what he was doing. Because that was the afternoon I became a reader, for real.
“So, your dad got you into reading and writing,” Dustin said now.
“Yeah.” I was wishing the walk back to school were longer. We were only a couple of blocks away.
“Man, that really sucks, what you all are dealing with. It’s not like he did anything bad or anything!” Hearing those words from Dustin’s mouth made me—all kinds of ways—relieved. I wasn’t hiding anything anymore. And it really didn’t sound all that bad: It sounded fixable because Dad wasn’t a bad guy. But at the same time I also felt a little uneasy. Like, now I had to trust Dustin with that information. And I did trust him.
“Exactly,” I said. “My dad is actually a pretty fabulous guy.”
“So, wait.” He stopped short. “Are you, like, undocumented too?”
“No,” I said. “I was born here, remember?”
“Oh yeah.” And he clasped my hand.
I thought about the two of us walking down this shaded street, together. There I was walking free in this suburban neighborhood, but where was my dad walking—where was he walking to, or away from? It was like the latitude and longitude of your birthplace can ultimately determine your life’s borders. I know—heavy. My head literally began to hurt. I squeezed Dustin’s hand tighter. And I didn’t care who drove by. I held his hand the whole way back to school. Hood down.
* * *
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 tr
y.”
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.
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