“Thank you, Maria,” he said, standing up from the table. He pressed her head to his chest and kissed the black, tangled crown of her head. He smelled turpentine, the scent of her school paints. There were tears in his eyes that surprised him, tears he didn’t want her to see, so he kept her locked into his arms as he said: “I’m so proud of you.” Then he caught himself before saying: like always.
Maria had only once seen her father tear up before, on the day she was accepted to Bell Seminary. She remembered how uncomfortable it felt to see him undone, and then later, how terrifying it was to see him really unravel after losing his job. She hadn’t admitted to anyone else in the family that she had been waiting so long for the letter and had anticipated unfurling it as if it were a scroll. In her mind, it had become something magical, as if it would bring not only news for her father but some other personal revelation. She imagined it would contain something other than words. Instead, it had unfolded into three neat panels. As Maria spat into the sink, washing the toothpaste from her face, rinsing until the suds were gone, she felt accomplished. Tomorrow was a weekday and she’d have to wake up early for school. She was looking forward to it.
Outside the bathroom, Ricky’s door was shut. Months ago, she told him about the last message she’d sent to Charlie, about how she had called off the plan just as the school year started. For weeks after what happened in the Hamptons, Maria pictured Ricky, how weak he was then, not even able to rise up on his elbows. She thought of those terrible beeps from the machine next to him, measuring out someone else’s life from behind the thin sliver of curtain. For so long, she tried not to remember what he had said. It always evoked the thought of Andres, who first threatened her into saying yes by mentioning other girls who would do it—girls who already had. How he’d roll off a condom without telling her in the middle of having sex. Ricky didn’t know that she was still riffling through all the layers of consensual, looking for it even as she rolled it back on, but at the very least, she came to decide that she wouldn’t accept Charlie’s bribe.
When she told Ricky that she wasn’t going to take money from anyone, Ricky looked upset. Maria couldn’t understand why.
“I’m sorry I was so hard on you, Maria,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said all of those things. I know I hurt you, and it was wrong. I was just worried about you.”
Maria felt a chill go down her spine. Her brother had never apologized to her before. She wondered if Alex told him to say it. But unlike Charlie’s money, this was one thing she was ready to accept. It’d been hard for her to try to remain upset with Ricky.
“It’s okay,” she said. “At the hospital, I was worried about you, too.”
Now, Maria flicked the switch in the hallway to see if she could make out the light from her parents’ room. She didn’t see anything and was relieved to know they were sleeping. When the Bell Seminary deans admitted Maria to the school, they lauded her parents for their gifted daughter, but Maria never believed she was actually extraordinary. Even now, even as she was preparing to graduate, she still couldn’t be sure. Gifted or not—whatever they called her—she had written the letter as best she could. She had picked the skin flaking on her lip, nervously clacked her fingernails on the keyboard. As her father spoke, she wrote and wrote. Sometimes, she took a few liberties, and then the writing went even smoother. She hadn’t been sure if any of it was good, or persuasive, or effective. But now she was sure. It had worked.
On a warm afternoon, in an empty classroom where a teacher had left a window open and a dewy, early April wetness had settled onto the sills, on the desks, in Maria’s hair so it stood up and curled on all sides, it finally happened. Maria, not having gotten up to leave for her next class, and Rocky, who was a bit early for hers, found themselves in the same room together with nothing but the faint sound of lockers opening and closing from the hallway to occupy the few feet of distance between them. Rocky’s hair had become so long, it fell limply against her back like the fringed ends of a scarf, and her fashion had changed since she’d been accepted to Harvard—what had been her staple black shirt and black denim jacket was replaced by a crimson hoodie, paired with a different pair of pearlescent earrings every day. Rocky looked at Maria, who was bent over her desk, her water bottle clouding her face. Through the water, Maria appeared like a bubble, and Rocky could see a larger-than-life rendering of her mouth resting in a partly open pout, an underbite that gave her the look of a pit bull. Rocky hated to think that once, Rocky had feared and admired her.
“Hey,” Maria said, without knowing yet what she was going to say. It was reflexive that when she looked at Rocky, somewhere beyond all the things she didn’t recognize—the hoodie, the bundle of hair that she’d let grow dark again, void of the zebralike stripes—she still saw some semblance of a friend.
Rocky was terse. “I thought this was Ms. Corthon’s.”
“It is. I just need to finish my homework before I go.”
Rocky was clearly uncomfortable. She kept taking her bag off her shoulder and then putting it back on again. Maria could tell that she didn’t know whether she should stay in the classroom or leave, and she kept looking at the door to see if anyone else would come in to save her.
“Congrats, Rocky. About Harvard,” Maria said. Rocky’s acceptance had made waves among the senior class because aside from the early acceptances in January, nobody had received their letters yet. They were all due to come this week. Maria, who had applied to nine schools, had yet to hear back from any. Every day when she went home, she’d been compulsively checking the mail, even though her mother always managed to get to it first. Maria had given her explicit instructions not to open anything with her name on it.
“I’m going,” Maria said, when Rocky didn’t answer. “Don’t worry.” She thrust her pen into the fold of her notebook and stuffed it into her backpack. She zipped it from one end to the other and stood.
Rocky laughed as she watched Maria get up, but it didn’t sound like she thought anything was funny.
“Don’t worry? I’m not worried.”
Finally, she took her bag off her shoulder. She adjusted herself so that she was no longer leaning to one side. When standing erect, she was a full three inches taller than Maria, and although this wasn’t a huge difference, it was significant enough that Rocky had the option of either looking over or down at Maria. Now, she stared into her face.
“You think we’re so rich,” Rocky said. She took a step closer to Maria. “But you’re wrong. We don’t owe you anything.”
Maria didn’t like how close Rocky was getting, and the more she approached, the more she had to lean back to look at her.
“My father isn’t a bad man.”
Maria’s grip on the straps of her backpack hardened.
“I don’t think he’s a bad man.”
“No. You just think you’re better than me.”
“I’ve never thought that.” Maria had heard this kind of thing from Andres before, but she would have never dreamed that Rocky—Rocky of the apartment on Fifth Avenue, Rocky who smoked cigarettes like a movie star, Rocky who’d just claimed she wasn’t rich, whose future was so much her own that she was going to Harvard since the day she was born—never did she think this Rocky could be insecure.
“I’ve never thought I was better than you,” said Maria. “Never.”
Rocky scoffed.
“You’re not even that broke,” Rocky said.
The classroom became utterly quiet.
“Rocky,” Maria said in a low voice, “I deleted Charlie’s number months ago. If you want, I can delete yours, too. I’m sorry I ruined our friendship, but—” Something uncomfortable and hard was rising into her mouth. Maria paused to swallow it down. “But I don’t want your money. The last thing I want from you now is your money.”
Rocky looked astonished. She shook her head.
“Always playing the victim,” she said. “You were never my friend. It was always so clear what you wanted. And now—jus
t because you didn’t get what you were after—you think we’re such horrible people.”
“That’s not true!” Maria shouted. “You’re wrong!”
Two girls were standing by the door of the classroom. They were staring at Maria and Rocky, their noses upturned as if they could smell a good secret. Like a hostage released, Maria fled. She ran down the hall, then flew down the old marble staircase, a spiraling flight the color of clouds, through the massive front corridor lined with laid stone, past a hand-carved statue of Jesus whose face she liked to peer into sometimes as if watching for a sign of a miracle. She ran past the private staff bathroom that the girls were banned from using lest the school’s board members find the wrappers of their tampons carelessly strewn about. She whizzed by the dining room, the gym, escaped into an open-air hallway where the old mansion connected to a newer annex and where ivy scaled along the walls.
In this outdoor hall, between the two buildings, one constructed before Tammany Hall and the other erected at the turn of the twenty-first century, it was sodden and dark, the damp brick blocking out any vestige of sun. Maria knew that the history of the building went further back than what she could trace of her own family lineage. Bell Seminary’s legacy was that of perennial success, year after year, class after class. It was only a month until her grade’s photo would be taken and produced in an old-fashioned black-and-white print to hang on the school walls, with all the others that came before them.
Maria’s next class had already started when she took a seat at her desk and quietly peeled off her backpack. As she tucked it beneath her chair, Maria glanced out the window. Below, the ground looked faraway, and she had the feeling that she was going farther and farther away from it, as if she were being carried away on a plane. She suddenly grew anxious, but all she needed was to blink, and instantly, the illusion disappeared.
Once Maria graduated, she would never again gaze out of a Bell Seminary window. There’d be a different Maria then, one for whom the ground would rise up to meet. From there she would be grateful to have gotten so close to a thing that once mesmerized her, a thing so rare and sparkling that it was only natural that it would lose its luster, until it looked just like a worn ticket stub for an event that had already passed. On the wall of the school’s entrance, she would remain suspended, flattened behind a frame. Alongside her classmates, she would stay. With eternally round, adolescent faces, all of them would stay.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to my agent, Danielle Bukowski, for being this book’s spirit guide. Your support has been invaluable. Thank you to the wonderful team at Little A, especially my editor, Vivian Lee, who helped me identify my blind spots. Thank you to Meghann Foye, who told me to reach for the stars. To Hannah Chavez, who was my very first reader and reassured me that this assortment of pages was something a person might call a book. To Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, to Gotham Writers Workshop, to the Young to Publishing Writers group, to Latinx in Publishing, to the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and everyone who once lent an eye, a hand, an ear, or some dollars, in service of my writing. To Danya, who left hearts all over a very early manuscript, when I was clandestinely printing bound copies in Penguin’s basement print shop. Thank you to Paula Teclada for being my cover back then. To my writing group buddies, especially Mariah Stovall, Loan Le, and the Jasper Jessicas, who kept me accountable to the words. To Toni Margarita Kirkpatrick for her spot-on suggestions. To Dylan Landis, whose profound insight into the world of my book moved and humbled me. To Alex Primiani and Al Guillen for your advice (on everything). To all the phenomenal, inspiring mujeres mágicas who I am lucky to call friends, and to all the teachers who made me believe I had something to say, especially Leona Casella. Thanks to everyone who gave me a platform to read my work—The Freya Project, Renegade Reading Series, Boundless Tales, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Thanks to the total strangers who read my early work and asked when they could get their hands on the novel—here it is! Thank you, Paul, for making the world so much fun. You give me my best and strangest ideas. And thank you to my family, who has somehow forgiven me through the messy and wondrous process of growing up. I love you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo © 2018 Mary Florence McKeithan
Stephanie Jimenez is a former Fulbright recipient. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in the Guardian; O, The Oprah Magazine; Entropy; Vol. 1 Brooklyn; YES! Magazine; and more.
She completed a novel-writing intensive at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and she attended the 2017 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for fiction. They Could Have Named Her Anything is her debut novel. She is based in Queens, New York. Visit Stephanie at www.stephaniejimenezwriter.com.
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