by Gary Soto
They didn't find the cat or the seagull.
"She's gone," Marisa cried.
"I'll find another kitten," Rene promised. "A really pretty one. Just you watch."
All morning Marisa couldn't concentrate on her classes—she worked a pen quietly across her binder, her mind drifting. Then, during first break, Priscilla introduced the boy who had been following her—it was the skateboarder who had taunted Rene.
"Hi," said the skateboarder, whose name was Erik. Marisa could tell that he remembered her. He might even have remembered Marisa's outburst when he had called Rene a doofus. Erik was wearing fingerless black gloves, and his skateboard, pasted with stickers, was under his arm. His hair was still dyed green.
"We gotta go," Priscilla said. She looked up at Erik, blushing, and all indications were that she liked him a lot.
"She's picked a grungy dude," Marisa told herself. They disappeared among the crowd, and from that same crowd appeared Rene.
"I just saw Priscilla," Marisa said. "Remember that guy who called you doofus?"
"No, I don't remember." They were heading toward the secret room in the abandoned part of the gym.
"What do you mean? He was riding his skateboard and we were sitting over there." She pointed to a bench, where three girls in long leather coats and net stockings sat polishing their fingernails black.
"People call me names all the time," Rene explained. "Or they used to. I can't remember them all." He changed the subject and took her hands in his. He began talking rapidly about the debate team that was forming, but Marisa was not listening. She loved Rene more than ever, all because he appeared helpless. She knew that usually the guy protected the girl—or at least that was what she had salvaged from the story lines of teenage romances. But their roles were reversed. It was she who opened the door to the gym, she who held his feet when he did sit-ups, she who spotted him when he lay grunting on the bench press—he could now lift sixty pounds.
He did three chin-ups, legs bicycling as he struggled to get his chin up to the bar, and followed that with a set of bench presses and a single set of curls for his biceps. For Marisa, her exercise was to lift him into her arms and carry him out the door. She let him slip from her arms when they got outside.
"I think—really!—that I've gotten stronger," Rene remarked.
"I noticed some little hills in your arms." She asked him to show her his biceps, and she squeezed his small, round muscle. It wasn't rock hard, but neither did it feel like a water balloon. There was some muscle beneath the skin.
After school Rene, giddy with excitement, coaxed Marisa aside and said, "Look at this. I did this in calculus."
When he started to roll up his sleeve, she thought that he was going to show her another bruise. She was ready to chant a litany of bad words and sting that mean mother for hurting her boy. Instead, Marisa saw her name inked on his slender forearm. Her name was in a heart, and her mind leaped back to the chalkboard with the heart around the name Samantha.
"I'm going to get a tattoo here when I turn seventeen," he announced proudly. "In four years. I'll be old enough then."
In four years? she wondered, and began to do the math in her head.
"How old are you?" she asked. She was fourteen and would be fifteen in January.
"I'm thirteen. I skipped a grade because, you know—"
"Thirteen!" she screamed, her chewing gum nearly shooting out of her mouth.
"But I'm mature for my age," he claimed.
"Nah, you're not. You're my beautiful egghead. My little huevito head." She touched the ink tattoo on his arm.
He wagged his head and honked his funny laugh. He agreed that he was an egghead with plenty of smarts upstairs.
They walked toward the auditorium for drama rehearsal, Marisa secretly dazed by the fact that her boyfriend was younger than she. Oh, now he would really have her protection. She would scratch, kick, spit, and pull hair for her dude. No bully was going to push him around anymore. If by some unlucky chance a car should fall on him, she would beat her chest like King Kong and lift it off him. There was nothing that she would not do. She would even catch up to him in math and, in the evenings, while sipping a shared soda, they would explore complicated equations. In her veins swam a large dose of love.
Marisa instructed Rene to stand on the other side of the chorus of sixteen students during rehearsal. When he asked why, she told him she wanted to view him from a different angle. She longed to cast smiles and kisses and see him from the distance of a few feet. And he had better not flirt with the girl next to him—she raised a claw and hissed.
"You like me, huh?" he asked.
"Mucho," she confessed.
They entered the auditorium to find Romeo and Juliet fighting onstage.
"My mom took my cell phone away," Rene moaned into the telephone that evening.
"Where are you?" Marisa had fallen asleep on the couch with a math book on her lap. Her father was also asleep in his recliner, the remote control in his hand and the television muted. Her mother was nowhere about. She said to Rene, "Wait a minute."
Marisa got up and took the call on the front porch after slipping into flip-flops. She shivered in the cool autumn air.
"Where are you?" she repeated.
"I'm calling from home. Mom's in the shower." He told her that he had never been so down. "I don't think she likes me. She says she wants me to succeed, but she's mean about it."
"Why don't you tell your father?" Marisa suggested.
There was silence. Finally, he answered, "I don't know."
They talked for a while and Marisa let Rene repeat himself, how he wished he could be old enough to go away to college. In college he would have new friends and a place of his own, even if it were only a shared bedroom in a noisy dorm.
"I'll go with you," Marisa said. She pictured herself and Rene driving a car to college. "We can be with each other."
"You can help me pick my clothes," he said, trying to lighten the moment.
But the mood was dark as the sky. They talked for a few minutes, and then he said he had to go—the shower had stopped.
"I know she's trying to break us up, but she's not going to do it." Rene hung up without a good-bye.
Marisa remained on the porch, leaning against the rail. She couldn't register the emotion inside her. It was close to loneliness, yet not loneliness. It was sadness, yet not sadness. She pocketed her cell phone and walked down the porch steps to retrieve the free weekly newspaper no one ever read.
She gazed up at the night sky, rubbing her arms and shivering. The stars appeared to be pulsating a silvery light, and the moon was nowhere in sight. She had read her horoscope that morning while eating a bowl of Cheerios with thin slices of banana. The horoscope predicted travel and changes in friendships. She remembered laughing and thinking, Yeah, right, and rattling the box of Cheerios as she debated if she should have a second bowl. She had decided against it, though she devoured a second banana.
"Poor Rene." She caught herself crying under the night sky. "Poor baby." She chanted Rene's name, retrieved the newspaper, and returned inside, where she stirred the shoulder of her sleeping father and whispered into his ear, "It's time for bed, Papi."
The horoscope was true in its prediction. Marisa would travel, but not too far. There would be new friends—sort of. The next day at school, Mr. Laird, the counselor, called her into his office and informed her that she had to return to her old school because she didn't live in the Hamilton district. His large hands were like gavels on his desk, and after a moment of staring he offered a light reprimand for using her aunt's address on her registration.
"But you wouldn't like the school I had to go to! They slash teachers' cars at that stupid school!"
Mr. Laird ignored Marisa's outburst.
"How did you find out?" she asked.
"We just found out."
Maybe Rene's mother told him, she thought. Was it possible? Was his mom that desperate?
Marisa was
escorted from Mr. Laird's office by the secretary. She waited in a room where copy machines hummed and the janitor came in periodically to search through the cabinets.
Her mother arrived an hour later, sparks nearly chipping off her high heels when she was led into the room where her daughter sat, legs splayed and arms crossed over her chest. Marisa's posture said everything—she was mad! In turn, her mother was even madder. She scolded the counselor, then spent some of her wrath on the vice principal. Right then Marisa could see that she was like her mother. Her mother let words fire and hit the school staff where they stood.
While Marisa had sat in the room waiting, she'd mused on what she could only call her misfortune. When she risked a cell phone call to Rene's house, his mother picked up and told her that he was ill in bed. She was hostile and warned her to leave her son alone.
Now this showdown at school.
"There are policies!" the vice principal claimed sternly. He was a man who dealt daily with students and parents, and knew when to raise and lower his voice. The moment called upon him to hitch up his pants and defend his school.
Marisa's mother waved him off and led her daughter outside to the parking lot. They got into the car and drove away.
"That stupid school," her mother barked, knuckles white from her hard grip on the steering wheel.
"But Mom, we don't live in the school district. Mr. Laird is right." All the anger had left Marisa; she just felt defeated. She sat with her hands laced on her lap and didn't give any credence to her mother's illogical tirade: This was America and her daughter could go to any school she pleased.
Marisa let her mother speak her mind because her own mind was on Rene. Sure, they would see each other on the sly, but she would miss seeing him daily. She started weeping and turned away when her mother offered her a Kleenex. She stared out the car window until the nice neighborhood around Hamilton slowly gave way to homes that were not so nice.
By third period Marisa was at her old school, sitting in an English class where the students were asleep, talking, or looking out a window scarred with names scrawled on it. The teacher, Mrs. Pacheco, was discussing another Robert Frost poem set in snow, although no one among them had ever seen snow. Ice, yes, ice in Big Gulps and sodas of various flavors. But snow falling from the sky and whitening the world with a fresh look? An absolute no.
There, in a wobbly chair in the third row, Marisa could see that she wasn't going to go far. She might never see snow. She might never know another kind of life. In a way the horoscope of the previous day was a lie.
Chapter 15
So it was back to Washington, back to the crowds kicking down the narrow throat of poorly lit hallways, back to girls dipping their fingers into potato chip bags and throwing their heads back as if everything was funny. Back to the earsplitting laughter, the shouts of, "Girl, what you mean!" and the roll of Spanish from Mexicano boys who, three months before, had been country boys but were now suddenly urban vatos. The Vietnamese boys with spiky hair threw sideways glances like darts. It's noisy here, Marisa thought at lunchtime. When she found one of her feet in a puddle of spilled soda, she grimaced and stepped out of the syrupy glaze and advanced a few steps in the cafeteria line. She paid for a bag of potato chips (she couldn't help breaking her vow to stay away from junk food), left the commotion of the lunchroom, and headed out toward the front of the school, a quiet sanctuary. Security guards paced in front.
Marisa had to wonder how this move had happened. Only a few hours before she'd been at Hamilton Magnet, and then there she was at Washington, ripping open a bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips. She had attracted a single pigeon, but that pigeon beat its crooked wings and flew to a group of students having lunch at a far bench.
"I don't care," she remarked wistfully as she raised a chip to her mouth and began to chew without tasting the barbecue flavor. She watched the cars pass beyond the fence and pedestrians stroll, hurry, gallop, and run down the sidewalk. La chota cruised past like a shark waiting to bite, and a UPS truck pulled up, braked, and turned on its hazard lights. For a moment she imagined that the muscled UPS driver was delivering more potato chips, the preferred food group of this school. But he was pushing a dolly loaded with boxes of textbooks.
It was a busy world beyond the fence and a lonely place where she sat. She wished she could write a song and sing it. She had discovered at Hamilton Magnet that she possessed a good singing voice. The choir director had smiled at her when her voice stretched, and wasn't that a sign that the voice inside was pretty? "I'm in a place," she sang, "in a place..." But that's as far as she got before her made-up song faltered.
Across the lawn she spied Alicia and Roberto sitting on the edge of the school fountain, a gift from one of the classes long ago when the school had been white and money had appeared like leaves on a tree. Now the fountain was turned off and was used mostly as a garbage can—cups and wrappers, bottles, old gym socks, Popsicle sticks, splintered Bic pens, poorly spelled notes, a binder, Valentine cards from the year before, and other debris lay in a moat of rust-colored water.
Marisa buried her face in her hands. She couldn't bring herself to talk to Alicia yet. Maybe it wasn't true about her and Roberto. Maybe they were just talking one last time, but when she peeked through her fingers she could see they were holding hands. And was that the sparkle of a ring on Alicia's finger? Had she forgiven that rat? How could she?
"I'm not going to be like them," she muttered. It was a vague promise, one that she knew she couldn't explain even to herself. She poured her potato chips onto the ground, and the pigeon that had been working the group of other students returned to feed on the spicy calories that would keep it warm under its bent feathers.
Barrio bird, she thought. Poor barrio bird. Poor all of us.
Marisa knew she would still remain friends with Alicia. They had known each other for years. What harm had Alicia done to her? That she had picked a sorry-ass boyfriend wasn't her fault. But maybe they just wouldn't be best friends anymore.
Marisa got up and returned to the main quad, where she encountered Latisha, who screamed, "What you doin' here? You spyin', huh?"
Marisa gave Latisha a light hug. "They caught me and sent me back across the border."
"And look at you!" Latisha had stepped back. "You, like, lost weight. You sick o' something?"
"No, just trying to get one of them." Marisa threw a hitchhiker's thumb at three guys headed toward the gym.
Latisha and Latisha's friends sang like a chorus: "We hear ya."
Marisa didn't take more than three steps before she dismissed her proclamation as an utter lie. She had lost weight for herself, not for some boy on his way to shoot baskets. She didn't care what those stupid boys thought. Why did they play during lunch and then bounce to class when lunchtime was over? Didn't they know they smelled funky after ten minutes? No, she had lost weight for herself and, yes, for Rene.
The day was a bumpy ride from class to class, and that afternoon she was glad to get home. She went to her bedroom and cried onto the tiny shoulder of her stuffed animal. She slipped into her pajamas, finished with the day. She was tired and hungry. Tears would roll again later when she lay in bed recounting the vice principal's scolding accusations hurled at her mother.
Marisa scrutinized the clock—4:15. Rene would be at rehearsal and singing like a bird. She was waiting for him to return home. Rene's mother would have sent him back to school after she figured out that Marisa, the chola, had gone away.
She heard her cell phone ring.
"Rene?" she asked, heart thumping.
"Yeah, it's me."
"Where are you? I thought your mom took your cell away."
Rene told her that he was using Trung's cell phone, that he was in the parking lot at school, and that he had only a few minutes before his mother picked him up.
"They sent me away," Marisa blubbered. She almost added that she thought that it was his mother who had called the school and ratted on her.
"My mom was really mad."
Marisa could hear him start crying. His crying sounded like his honking laughter.
"Rene, stop that!" Marisa scolded.
"I can't help it. Wait a minute."
Marisa could hear him honking into his handkerchief. She had to smile. He was the only boy she knew who pocketed a clean handkerchief at the start of the day.
"I think my mom is the one who turned you in. She asked me a lot about you, and I ended up telling her where you live. I'll call you whenever I can." He blew kisses into the cell phone and then hung up.
Marisa was touched. His friend and main opponent in chess had been standing at his side and had witnessed Rene's words of love.
That night after dinner Marisa's father kept the television off in protest of his daughter's being expelled from Hamilton Magnet. He looked so much like a sad mule that Marisa considered patting his tanned forearm to say, "It's okay, Papi. I'm gonna live."
He sipped his coffee and finally spoke up. "It's better this way. You'll do good, mi'ja." He began his story about the treks from school to school when he was young. His parents were migrant farmworkers who worked crops in Oregon and Washington, and in California's Central Valley. Using his thick fingers, he counted sixteen schools, including one called Washington and another called Hamilton. He sighed as he finished his coffee.
But her mother was still fuming. She sat on the couch and, by the light of a dim lamp, worked furiously as she knitted what looked like a hangman's noose. Marisa swallowed. Was she really making a noose? If so, the vice principal—what was his name?—would at least hang in a noose made of soft wool.