“Yes,” he answered. “We’re going to make three-dimensional germs and parasites, and April’s going to stick them to my body with Velcro.”
“That’s good,” said Mr. Peterson. “Kids get higher scores, I’ve noticed, when both play a part in the presentation.”
This bit of news penetrated the fog and worried Enrique. Although Gene had gathered all the information for the project and would be responsible for the ants, there was no way he would ever take part in presenting the project to the judges.
“Enrique, Gene, interesting stuff,” said Mr. Peterson. “No ants, though. They don’t allow live animals in the science fair, even insects. I should have told you.”
“Oh,” Enrique said with some ambivalence. He had not wanted the ants either—it had been Gene’s idea and seemed cruel—but the death of the ants comprised the whole of their demonstration.
“Also, Cameroon is a long way from Eula, and it sounds like they haven’t even figured out what’s behind all this. You might want to rethink the whole thing. The winning project is almost always something of local relevance, okay? Miriam, do you have a partner?”
“My little brother is my partner,” Miriam said. She lifted her chin proudly and refused to look at Enrique, who, again, winced under a stab of pity.
“Well, your project is very relevant. You’ve done good research. But you have to have a project. You have to do something, grab the judges’ attention. You’re a smart girl and I know you can do it, okay? Talking about cow farts isn’t enough.” With this Mr. Peterson smiled kindly, to let Miriam and the others know he was joshing.
No one laughed.
“Anyway, kids, some members of the high school science club have generously offered to mentor you through the science-fair process. These are excellent students who have competed in science fairs before. Some of them have won. I strongly suggest you take advantage of their offer. If you are interested, you should go to the science club meeting Thursday at three in room D204.”
The kids looked to each other with wonder and apprehension. Years later, the high school would move to a new building with a clock tower on a sunlit hill west of town, and the junior high would take over the entire ancient complex. But until that day, the two would remain separated only by a lawn. The room Mr. Peterson mentioned was in a high school building none of these kids had yet had reason to enter.
THE HAPPIEST DAY in Enrique’s life so far had been the previous June, when men came with a semi and hauled away the tiny trailer with dents in its aluminum sides, then returned to fasten together and secure in its place something that resembled a real house—the doublewide that he himself had helped his mom pick out. Now Enrique had a real bed in a real room, although both were tiny. With sunlight pouring in his big new window and lighting the sawdust still in the air, Enrique hung all his Garfield posters. In a place of honor above his bed he hung the oversized chart showing all the different species of whales. He had been collecting these posters for years in anticipation of the move. When he got thirsty and went to the kitchen where his mom was happily wiping down the walls, he realized that this doublewide wouldn’t teeter like the old trailer did. In the past, when Enrique had to pee in the middle of the night, he’d walk from the pullout couch to the bathroom at the trailer’s farthest end. He’d sit down to pee, because his weight would shift the balance, and cause the trailer to slowly tip onto its other feet with enough of a jolt to send his urine splashing across the toilet’s rim, if he was standing. In the new doublewide, he would be able to pee like a boy.
A few days later, Jay had arrived with a duffel bag, having refused to bring all his belongings from the Van Bekes’. Enrique stayed in his room with the door ajar as, with a few slams, Jay set up his room, then turned on the TV and threw himself across the couch. The next morning, he swaggered into the kitchen as Lina was scraping burned toast over the sink to make it edible. “I hope that’s not for me,” he said. The way he cut his eyes at her like she was a washerwoman—like she was a Mexican—made Enrique hate him.
Gene, on the other hand, was completely awestruck by Jay from first sight. About a week after moving in, Jay pulled up and walked from his car to the house, dribbling his basketball with angry blows past where Enrique and Gene sat in the grass. Gene’s jaw hung. “Don’t stare, Gene. He’s a jerk.” Of course, Enrique wasn’t blind. He could see why Gene stared. Jay had dark, deep-set eyes, long arms with dents along the biceps, and a taut stomach with a belly button set in it like a brown pebble. And all of this was embarrassingly on display, as Jay seemed to think that wearing a shirt around the house would be too much a show of respect. The shade of his nipples, brown bordering on gray, surprised even Enrique, whose skin was nearly as dark. It looked as if they had been licked and dusted with cocoa.
“Hey, faggots.” Those were Jay’s first words to Enrique that summer.
Enrique’s first words to Jay, when they came a few days later, were ones of gentle assistance, despite his hatred. Enrique came upon Jay slapping the TV on its side, then taking both antennae and working them back and forth like ski poles. Enrique showed him how, to get channel seven, you had to turn the dial just a hair toward eight and push it in so it stuck. Of course, Jay didn’t thank him.
Jay filled the house with the hard rock Enrique despised: Van Halen, Ratt, Quiet Riot. Jay’s old tapes, Enrique discovered when he snooped in Jay’s room, were originals, but the newer ones were dubbed onto blank cassettes. This made sense; Jay no longer had the Van Bekes’ allowance to buy what he wanted, so he had to copy from his friends. Snooping further, Enrique found a box of condoms, their packages attached in long strips. He took one to the bathroom and tried it on. It came coated in its own lubricant and, in it, Enrique’s penis reminded him of a snake shedding a pale, wrinkled skin. After he removed it with a shudder and flushed it, a gummy residue remained.
Soon, though, Enrique found escape, for this was a season of trips to the mountains with Gene and the rest of the Boy Scouts, and to the mall with Miriam. Enrique’s two best friends didn’t like each other, or, rather, Miriam was frightened of Gene, and Gene refused to acknowledge her—or any girl’s—existence. Enrique was happy to keep one friend in the mountains and the other at the mall.
A visit to the mall began with a quick “lap,” or trip up and down the mall’s short length, lost in conversation about what junior high would be like. Then, if they had money, Enrique and Miriam might get a drink. They cautiously became friendly with the head-banger girls who hung out at Orange Julius—girls who blackened their eyes with makeup, sprayed their hair to rise like haystacks and cascade down their backs, wore heavy metal band T-shirts that usually featured a rotten corpse playing an instrument, smoked cigarettes, and used the F-word. Aside from that, they were like Enrique and Miriam, harmless kids with nothing to do. Enrique and Miriam would visit with these girls until they finished their juliuses, then move on.
Miriam liked to shop for clothes. She didn’t buy them, she took them off the rack to squint critically at their stitching and sometimes tried them on. Later, she’d copy them; at Miriam’s, they made their own clothes. Some of her copies were good, but most were too big in the collars and cuffs and looked clownish. Enrique praised them nonetheless.
Enrique didn’t like clothes-shopping, so this was the point when he’d go off to the video arcade, where he played Space Invaders. There were newer and funner games, such as Donkey Kong and Ms. Pac Man, but Space Invaders was easy, and Enrique could stretch a dollar out for almost an hour. The male counterparts to the Orange Julius girls were here at the arcade—boys with zits and stringy hair, who would slip out the emergency exit to the parking lot, then return, coughing conspicuously and smelling of pot. They slammed the buttons of the games with their open palms and cursed at the screens—“Die, motherfucker!”—while their friends who were out of quarters hung from the top of the game (causing their T-shirts to rise a few inches from the tops of their jeans) and sniggered at their defeat. Pinball machines li
ned one wall of the arcade, winking and shuddering. Long past their prime, they were like old bums waiting for a handout. No one gave them a quarter.
One afternoon midsummer, when Enrique was out of money, he wandered into the bookstore. In the psychology section, he found a book of interviews with women about their sexual fantasies. This entertained him for a while, less as a turn-on than because it relieved some of his boundless guilt to know that women (whom he had always assumed to be the purer, higher-minded sex) had even dirtier minds than he. Then someone came around the corner, and he quickly put back the book and walked deeper into the bookstore. In the health section, he found a book called Working Out, an exercise manual filled with photos of men demonstrating different ways to lift weights. The shocking thing was what they wore: tiny bathing suits that barely covered them, like the ones the divers in the 1984 Olympics had worn. (Enrique had loved the diving competition; he had never seen men wear so little. At Eula’s public swimming pool the boys always wore roomy, ballooning bathing suits that revealed nothing.) He came to a chapter on hygiene, with men bathing, shaving, applying creams to their skin. The men in this book were more handsome than anyone Enrique had ever seen in person, and their bodies . . . Enrique didn’t see them as beautiful so much as detailed. There were gouges down the front of their thighs and along their arms; their abdominal muscles fit together like puzzle pieces; and the various patterns of body hair were fascinating—a fan at the armpit, a whorl under the navel, a ring around the nipple.
Enrique stood for a long time, far too engrossed in the pictures to devise a way to hide his erection. It poked straight out, tenting the front of his shorts. Light-headed, he walked back into the mall, the thing leading him like a divining rod to the bathroom, where he locked himself in a stall and did the sin which he had learned in confirmation classes was called “masturbation,” the wasting of one’s own seed. (He had learned this name after having believed, for a year, that the act was his own invention.)
Now Enrique had his own destination while Miriam went clothes-shopping: the bookstore, then the bathroom.
It was wrong to masturbate, and it was super-wrong to masturbate thinking about men from Working Out, but this seemed to Enrique a sin that rose from a featureless perversity rather than being specifically “gay.” The men were exercising, not touching each other, and, in his bathroom-stall fantasy, they crowded the locker room, barely noticing the short, pudgy Mexican kid moving among their hard, hairy thighs. Enrique admitted in confession that he had masturbated and quietly added that he had a “dirty mind,” but the specter of homosexuality was so unimaginable that Enrique still felt clean of its touch.
“Gay,” in grade school, had been a rude word that meant “lame.” “Fantasy Island is so gay,” kids—but never Enrique—would say. Among the older kids, Enrique saw, it was an insult that could become attached to you. But being called a pig didn’t give you hooves and a snout. He had not yet discovered that among adults there were men who had sex with men.
One afternoon late in the summer, Enrique looked up from Working Out to see Miriam standing at the end of the aisle, watching him.
“Oh!” Enrique said.
“I’ve been looking for you,” Miriam said with a cross expression.
“Oh!” He crammed the book back onto the shelf.
“You were late.”
They stood searching each other’s face in a mute guessing game. Was she admonishing him for being late or apologizing for finding him? Had she seen the book? What did she know?
They made only one more mall-trip that summer. Miriam turned blouse sleeves inside-out, and Enrique stuck at her side, bored but eager to prove he wouldn’t sneak off on a dirty mission again. Then school started, and they hadn’t returned since.
One day in early October, the two sat together in the lunchroom. Everything was fine between them, as long as neither mentioned the science fair. The previous week Enrique had made a mumbling, inarticulate apology for choosing Gene and not her as his partner; Miriam had tossed her head and answered, “That’s okay; he needs you more than I do.”
Miriam rose before the end of lunch period. “I have to go over something with Miss Holly before class,” she said. “See you there?”
“See you there.”
Enrique broke his cookie into bite-sized pieces, which he began to dip one by one into his milk, then pop into his mouth.
Pete Randolph approached and flashed a big smile. “Hey, Enrique,” he said.
“Hey, Pete,” said Enrique. He felt a little thrill. Pete was new, and Enrique had been wondering if they would become friends. He wore expensive clothes—shirts with epaulettes snapped on the shoulders and pants riddled with zippers. Enrique had seen kids wear clothes like these on American Bandstand, but no one in Eula had previously had the nerve. Some of the Mexican dropouts who wore red bandannas around their wrists to look like gang members and liked to break-dance at the roller rink—kids Enrique’s mom called cholos and told him to watch out for—wore cheap imitations, but Pete’s were the real thing. Pete was already popular, even though he had only moved here from Boise at the beginning of the school year.
He straddled the bench, and Enrique noticed that he was flanked by a few other boys. “I was wondering if you could help me with this report I’m writing for health class.”
“Okay,” said Enrique.
“It’s on AIDS. I was wondering if I could ask you some questions.”
The other boys snorted and kicked at each other’s shoes.
Enrique looked down.
“First of all,” Pete said, “do you have AIDS?” Enrique said nothing. Some of these boys were his friends, or had been. “Okay, what else? Does it hurt when Gene puts his dick in your butt? Do more Mexicans have AIDS than white people? Do you think you’ll always be gay, or do you think it’ll go away?”
Enrique’s heartbeat rang in his ears. Inside, he became very quiet and small. He was like an animal in the woods, for whom stillness is the first defense. Don’t move.
“Okay,” said Pete. “Thanks for your help.” He got up from the table and walked away, followed by the other boys, who now laughed loudly.
Enrique sat quietly looking at his tray, wondering if everyone had seen. How loudly had Pete been talking?
The bell rang.
Enrique quickly took his tray to the window, then rushed outside with his shoulders hunched and his arms taut at his sides, like an escape artist who walks away from his challenge with his arms still bound. He didn’t look at the other kids running to class but kept his eyes on the pavement.
Then, suddenly, trees were exploding out of the lawn—huge trees with trunks the size of silos. Redwoods, giant sequoias, ancient trees, shooting up a mile high, throwing chunks of earth over the school buildings. Like Jack-and-the-Beanstalks; like volcanoes erupting, but erupting tree trunks. The thunderclaps they made as they exploded from the earth, which were really Enrique’s own heartbeats banging in his ears, drowned out the echoing of Pete Randolph’s questions.
“What’s wrong?” Miriam asked when Enrique sat down next to her in English class.
He didn’t answer. He didn’t hear another word that Miriam or Miss Holly or anyone else said for the rest of the day.
Chapter 6
In order to play a sport or join a club, a kid had to have either a car or a ride. The bus left at two-thirty sharp, the time most extracurricular activities started. So the school-sponsored groups, be they debate team, French club, or football, were made up mostly of rich kids, and the afternoon bus passengers were mostly poor. To take advantage of the science club’s offer, Enrique and Gene would either have to make the hour-long walk home afterward under the open sky, or find a ride.
“Jay,” Enrique said without looking up from his supper Sunday night, “could you give us a ride home after school on Thursday?”
“I got football practice.”
“I know. We have a meeting after school, so we can’t take the bus.”
&
nbsp; “You and E.T.?”
“His name is Gene.”
“Yeah. I’ll pick you up in front of the junior high at four-thirty.”
“We’re going to be at the high school. Building D.”
“Look, I’ll pick you up in front of the junior high, all right?”
Enrique, who had been hoping Jay would ask what he would be doing in the high school building, now understood that he didn’t want to be seen with him. “Okay,” he said.
If either boy had looked up from his plate, he would have noticed Lina smiling to herself. This was less from the satisfaction that Jay had agreed to do Enrique a favor than relief at not having had to broker the deal herself.
On Thursday, Lina went to the Halls’ house and cleaned. She had not received the call from Sandra that she had expected. The anger Lina had felt when Sandra had asked her not to vacuum had faded, and Lina could see that it had been silly: Sandra had been tired; of course she didn’t want a vacuum roaring in the next room. She didn’t suspect that her husband had kissed Lina and wasn’t going to fire her.
Lina cleaned well, making up for the last time. She wiped down the high shelves in the breakfast room and—even though it was an off-week and she wouldn’t get paid for it—thoroughly dusted the train boxes in the basement. Usually she gave these a quick once-over with the feather duster out of disdain and the knowledge that, even if Mr. Hall ever came down here, he would never be able to see dust on the boxes in this dim light.
Later, when she was deep in thought, vacuuming the Halls’ bedroom, Mr. Hall stepped in. Lina stood and, with her toe, turned the machine off. There was silence. Lina opened her mouth once, then closed it. She couldn’t think of what it was she had prepared to say.
Mr. Hall walked toward her. Lina felt a little panic. He took the vacuum hose out of her hand and laid it on the floor. He took her face in his hands like a boy who had learned to kiss from watching TV, and kissed her. There was warmth in the kiss. It was unrushed and deliberate, as if he had been searching the world for Lina these past weeks, all the while thinking of how he would kiss her when he found her. Now he had.
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