The Radius of Us

by Marie Marquardt

  She looks down and shrugs.

  “I’ve got a towel.” I leave my hand on her stomach for a second. It doesn’t seem to want to move from there. I let it drop down to her hand. I wrap my fingers through hers and lead her to the big rock where I always leave our stuff.

  I look back, wanting to gesture to Ari, to let him know I’m going to shore. He’s way out, though, waiting to catch his next big wave. So I walk with Gretchen to the edge of the beach, both of us looking down at the sand.

  “How did you know we were here?” I ask, handing her the faded beach towel we borrowed from Ari’s foster family.

  “I went to the house where Ari is staying.” She wipes her front once and hands the towel back to me.

  I wrap it tightly around my chest, under my soaked T-shirt, over the goddamned tattoo. Then I lift the shirt off and lay it out on the rock to dry. I reach into Ari’s backpack and grab a dry one. I don’t have to think about this. I’ve done it so many times—changed shirts while still managing to keep the stupid thing covered.

  I’m thinking about Gretchen, and about how carefully she’s watching me. I wonder if she’s seeing that tattoo in her mind, even though it’s under the towel. I turn away from her.

  “They’re nice,” she says quietly. “Ari’s foster parents.”

  “Yeah.” My back is to her. I’m pulling on the dry shirt over the towel. “Ari’s a lucky bastard.”

  I reach down and pull the towel out from under my dry shirt. The shirt feels good, warm against my clammy skin. I feel her hand on my back. Even through the shirt, her touch is like a wave, pulling me into it.

  I turn around to face her, feeling that strange scary swell in my chest. “I’m so sorry, Gretchen. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “You didn’t hurt me.” She keeps her hand on me. I don’t think she knows it, but it’s right on top of that stupid tattoo. “I was hurt already, and you were trying to help me get better.”

  “I should have told you—”

  “You tried.” She’s looking at her hand, on my shirt.

  “I should have tried harder.”

  I take her hand from my shirt and wrap it in both of mine. We lean against the rock, looking out over the ocean, not saying anything. Ari’s catching a wave, and even though I can’t hear him, I know he’s screaming. I can tell by the look on his face, the way his hands are thrown out in front of him, like he’s Superman.

  “I shouldn’t have relied on you like that,” she says, “to make me feel better.”

  “I wanted to help,” I say, rubbing my thumb across her hand. “I mean, I cared about you—I care about you.”

  “I’m getting help now,” she says. “Her name’s Janet. She’s great.”

  “I’m so glad,” I tell her. And I am. I want for Gretchen to have everything she needs.

  “Is that Ari?” she asks, pointing to him. He’s struggling to stand up in the shallow surf.

  I nod. “Yeah, stupid kid can’t get enough of those waves.”

  She smiles. “Phoenix.” She’s looking at our hands, wrapped around each other. “I know what happened—how you got the tattoo and everything. There’s nothing you have to tell me anymore.”

  I look over at her, and I guess she sees how confused I am, because she smiles even wider and says, “Ty told me about your conversation in the garden, and we went to meet Bo and Barbie.”

  This is surprising. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. Is it okay, that they told me?”

  I nod, remembering all those crappy fast-food meals around their kitchen table, and how great they were. I miss those guys.

  “I wasn’t trying to hide anything from you, Gretchen. Maybe at first I was, but—”

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you,” she says, “in the way they could.”

  “How are they?” I ask, because I’m not sure how to tell her what I want to say—that she was more there than any other person I’ve ever known.

  “Great. Barbie took me over to see her kitchen—the color you picked is perfect. I’ve got pictures.” She digs into her pocket to pull out her phone. “Those two are adorable together; after everything they’ve been through, they’re still totally in love.”

  Totally in love.

  We both turn to look at each other at the same time. My body is shifting toward her, and my hand is reaching over to hold her face. I pull her in toward me and she doesn’t resist. She lets me kiss her softly on the lips. She puts her arm around my waist and pulls me in closer. She keeps kissing me, which—after all this—feels sort of like a miracle. To be kissing Gretchen on a beach in California, and for her to be kissing me back.

  “Thank you,” I whisper. “For coming all the way out here and for—”

  “Loving you?” She pulls back, and she’s looking me right in the eyes, telling me she loves me.

  She’s telling me she loves me.

  “You make it easy, Phoenix.” She touches my face. “Everyone loves you—I guess what I’m trying to say is that everyone wants you to be okay. We’re so worried about you because we all love you so much.”

  I feel like I’m gonna explode. It’s amazing to hear her say that, and it also makes me really sad. Because all those people loving me—Gretchen loving me—is not gonna make it easy to do what I have to do.

  “Let’s sit down,” she says. “We need to talk.”

  She drops down into the sand, sits cross-legged. I sit down next to her and stretch my legs out on the beach.

  “I talked to Sister Mary Margaret.” She’s looking at me. I’m watching Ari, who just caught another big wave.

  “Yeah, she told me,” I say.

  “You talked to her?” She sounds surprised.

  “Mmmhmm,” I look over at her. “I talk to her every day.”

  “Did she tell you about Delgado? About what he did?”

  I don’t want to keep looking at her. Not with Delgado in my head. So I turn back to face the ocean. “Yeah.”

  “And what she did?”

  “Yeah.” I can’t resist shaking my head when I think about it.

  Delgado had some of the guys dig two big holes in front of the convent. They were the perfect size for bodies. Then they stuck a big rock in front of each hole with a word spray-painted in black on each rock: Phoenix and Arizona. They also tagged the wall of the convent, behind the rock. Which was a stupid thing to do.

  When the federales came out, they thought the whole thing was about a city in the Estados Unidos. Sister Mary Margaret knew it was about me and Ari, but she couldn’t convince them. So she went over to Delgado’s house and confronted him. And she recorded the whole thing with her new iPhone. She’s so goddamned proud of that new phone.

  Anyway, I guess Delgado said he wanted us dead because I worked for her, when I was supposed to be working for him instead. Something like that. He called me a bunch of names, and he said I was wrong if I thought the church was more powerful than the gang. He said the church couldn’t save me. He said he ran this town now, and that my rosaries and my novenas weren’t going to protect me anymore.

  Which is funny, because I’ve never even prayed the rosary or said a novena—not once in my life.

  Gretchen moves back toward me and leans into my shoulder. “Sister Mary Margaret is one badass nun,” she says.

  “Yeah, she’s the best.”

  I’m kinda worried about her, though. They used to leave the church alone, but now—since the truce fell apart—it’s like those guys think they’re gods, like no one can touch them—not the church, not the government. That scares the hell out of me.

  And in three weeks I’m going back there. I might as well just head on over to the convent and climb into that grave they dug for me—save everyone the trouble.

  At least Ari won’t be climbing in next to me.

  “She wrote a letter to the judge, you know?” Gretchen is reaching over to touch my knee. “And she’s getting some priest to write one too—he’s, like, a bishop or something.”


  “Yeah, she told me.”

  She wraps her arm around my thigh and shakes it a little, like she’s trying to wake me up. She makes me look over at her.

  “Phoenix,” she’s saying, “this is huge. You know that, right? It’s religious persecution. That makes for a really strong asylum case.”

  I don’t say anything. I’m thinking how weird it is that I could maybe get asylum for religious persecution, since I’m not really all that religious. I guess I did pray once—back in that shelter in Texas, I prayed for Ari to make it out here. And he did, so who knows? Maybe I am religious.

  “Everything is totally different now. Don’t you get that? If you appeal, you’ll have a great case, and in California courts, which are supposed to be so much better than Georgia—”

  I look away, because I hate seeing that look in her eyes: hope—stupid goddamned hope. She doesn’t want me to keep things from her, but she also wants to hope; she wants me to have hope too. That can’t happen. What am I supposed to do? I need to make her understand.

  “There’s something else you should know, Gretchen—I mean, a problem with my asylum case.”

  “You mean, the torture?”

  Oh Christ. “You know about that?”

  “Yeah. I know.” She rubs my leg gently, like she’s trying to soothe me. How can she even touch me? How can she look at me, knowing what I did?

  “Damn. I wish you didn’t know about that.”

  “It’s okay, Phoenix. Some guy named Jesús Monteverde—”

  “Blackie?”

  “Yeah, Blackie. He was there, right?”

  “Yeah.” My hand flies to my head, rubbing back and forth, back and forth. I really don’t want to think about Blackie.

  “Ms. Pérez—she tracked him down. He lives here now, in DC. He’s legal and everything.”

  Another lucky bastard.

  “She said he’s, like, super-religious. An Evangelical. He goes around trying to convert gang members.”

  “For real?” I lie back in the sand and look up at the sky.

  “Yeah, for real, Phoenix.”

  “He told Ms. Pérez that you were doing everything you could to make them stop.”

  “He said that?” The sun is glaring into my eyes. I lift my hand to cover them.

  “Yeah. He’s writing it all down. He said he’d testify for you.”

  “Blackie? For me?” With my eyes shaded, I look over at her. She’s up on her knees, leaning in toward me.

  “It’s true, Phoenix. You were only thirteen. You did all you could.”

  Yeah, I guess I did. But it still happened—all of it.

  She’s still kneeling next to me, her hands clasped. “Please, Phoenix. Please appeal.”

  I prop up onto my elbows and look at her. “You know how much that shit costs—to appeal?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s only money.” Her hands are on my chest, still held together like she’s praying, or something. “If you won’t do it for yourself, do it for Ari. If you get asylum, you can become a permanent resident. Do you know what that means?”

  I nod. Ms. Pérez explained it all to me already.

  “You can work, go back to school. You can get custody of Ari!”

  “Ari’s in a great situation. Those people he’s living with are really nice, Gretch.”

  “Then do it for me.”

  Gretchen is leaning over me, her hair fanning out across my chest, and she’s begging me to stay.

  Madre de Dios.

  “I want to be with you,” she says, pleading. “I’m going to apply for college out here, Phoenix. So I can be here with you and Ari.”

  “You would do that?” I’m starting to feel dizzy, like, confused. Did Gretchen really just say she wants to come to California? To be with me?

  “You can’t do that.”

  “You can’t stop me from doing it. That’s what I’m doing. I don’t care if we have six days or sixty years together; that’s what I’m going to do, Phoenix.”

  I sit up so my face is level with hers. I don’t feel dizzy anymore. I feel fine. Better than fine. I feel great. And I know exactly what I need to say.

  “Yeah, all right then.”

  “All right?”

  “Yeah, I’ll do it.”

  I can’t believe I’m saying it, but I know it’s right. Even if they tell me no, which they probably will, even if the whole thing puts me through hell again, I need to do it.

  “You will? Really? You’ll appeal?”

  Her face is all lit up, and she’s got this huge, beautiful smile spreading across it.

  “Really.”

  She launches forward and wraps her arms around me. Then she lets out a squeal. “Oh my God,” she says. “Thank you.”

  I’m laughing my ass off, because this girl is thanking me. I’m pretty sure that’s not right, but I’ll take it.

  Christ, I will so take it.

  She’s laughing too, but then she kisses me, which shuts us both up. I’m holding her face, and we’re kissing and smiling at the same time, which is sort of challenging to do. But neither one of us can stop smiling.

  “I love you,” I whisper into her ear.

  “I know,” she says. “I love you too.” Then she jumps up, all excited. “Hold on,” she tells me. “I’ve got something for you—stay here!”

  Which is kind of a funny thing for her to say, because where the hell else would I want to go? She takes off, jogging toward the parking lot. It feels really good, watching her go, and knowing she’ll come back. When she disappears, I look out toward the ocean, and Ari is walking toward me, finally worn out, I guess. Gretchen gets back to me first. She hands me a thick piece of drawing paper, rolled up. “This is for you,” she says. “Read it, okay? I’m going to go say hi to Ari, and then we’re gonna call Ms. Pérez.”

  She heads down the beach to meet Ari. I watch them hug. He looks happy, seeing her again. They’re talking, mostly with their hands—Ari’s English is pretty terrible, and Gretchen really needs to learn some Spanish.

  I start unrolling the paper, thinking about how I’m going to teach Gretchen to speak Spanish. Thinking about all the things I’m going to be able to do with Gretchen if she really comes out here to live with us. Maybe we could hike in some of those canyons Ari’s foster parents told me about. Or I could take her out for pupusas. There are pupusas everywhere out here. Or maybe we could go to school together—study at the same university. How nuts would that be? To go to university with Gretchen?

  A smaller piece of paper floats out and lands on the sand. I put down the rolled-up one and read. It’s a note from Bo.

  Phoenix—

  That piece-of-shit tattoo is part of you, man, whether you like it or not. Don’t go through the pain of getting it taken off. You don’t need to do that.

  Take this design to Danny at Ink Wizards in Fullerton. I made it special for you. He knows you’re coming. He’ll fix you up. It’s gonna look kick-ass, and nobody will know what’s under there.

  I know what you’re thinking, asshole. Don’t worry about the stupid money. I got the bill covered. You earned it.

  And one more thing. Barbie wants me to tell you that Gretchen’s real good for you. She says don’t let that one go.

  —Bo

  It’s amazing. I mean, the design. It’s a freakin’ work of art. Somehow he made that ugly, horrible hand into a tattoo masterpiece.

  Bo’s a goddamned genius.

  I smooth the paper out flat on the sand, and I study it for a while, all the details. Then I look out at Gretchen and Ari talking to each other. I see the waves behind them, still battering the shore.

  The two of them come back and sit down with me, and we look at the design, the bright indigo bird, blue fire below it and long red and orange and yellow flames licking its sides. The terrible, ugly hand is still in there, but it’s been swallowed up by the blaze so that the fingers become part of the flames. The bird’s wings are spread wide open like it’s about to take
off, and it looks tough, but not mean or harsh. It’s strong and bright and beautiful.

  “Do you know what it is?” Gretchen asks Ari.

  He shrugs. “A bird?”

  “It’s a Phoenix,” she says, “rising from the ashes.”

  “Un phoenix,” I repeat, “renaciendo de las cenizas.”

  “Cool.” He’s trying out his English slang. “Too cool for you!”

  I take the little pissant into the crook of my elbow and toss him into the sand. He laughs and kicks and screams, and Gretchen’s laughing too.

  I let him go, and then I turn to Gretchen.

  “Hey,” I say. “Can I borrow your phone for a sec? I need to call my kick-ass lawyer and tell her she better file those appeal papers today.”

  Gretchen smiles and digs her phone out of her pocket. She finds Ms. Pérez’s number and pushes call. Gretchen hands me the phone, and I take it because I’ll do anything this crazy beautiful girl asks me to do, because she’ll do anything for me.

  EPILOGUE

  FINAL EXAM—SEMESTER TWO

  ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages)

  Level 1

  Loma Mission Middle School

  Ms. Hernández

  Describe your family. Tell about each member of your family: What is her/his name? How old is he/she? Where does he/she go to school or work? What does he/she like? What does he/she dislike? What is one special thing about him or her?

  My family is three people: Ari, Phoenix, and Gretchen.

  My name is Ari. I am thirteen years old. I am in grade seven in Loma Mission Middle School. I like California. I dislike cold. I am very good swimmer.

  Gretchen is the girlfriend of my brother. She is nineteen years old. She goes to university at Los Angeles. She likes math and figs and my brother. She dislikes guns. She is very smart and very nice.

  My brother is Phoenix. He is twenty years old. He works in the Home Depot. One day in the future he goes to university again. He likes to kiss Gretchen. He dislikes airplanes. He has a tattoo. It is big. It looks like this:

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have so much gratitude for the people who made this book possible.

  An enormous thank-you to the wonderful and talented Carlos Morataya. Your illustrations brought these characters to life for me. Thank you to Laura Chasen, who continues to be my staunch advocate and dear friend, from all the way across the country. To Erin Harris, my brilliant agent, who always knows just how far to push me. I cherish our relationship. To my editor, Sara Goodman. I am honored and privileged (and still a little bit amazed!) to work with you. To Alicia Clancy, Angie Giammarino, Brittani Hilles, Kaitlin Severini, and all of the talented people at St. Martin’s Press. Thank you for loving books, and for taking such good care of mine.