In the passenger seat of her mother’s idling car, at the only stoplight in town, Araceli counted a silent one…two…three…four… Exactly on five, the light turned green. Purgatory, she decided. It was like purgatory, but smaller.
It was late, after midnight, on the night before the first day of school. Town was almost as dead as a child expects the world to be in the small hours between goodnight prayers and the sound of mom’s voice calling her to wake up. The late arrival wasn’t any kind of precaution Araceli and her mother had planned. They were held up by a long parting in Corpus with the Vela family, people who seemed fonder of Araceli than she was of them. They felt they had taken her in like one would a wounded puppy. Araceli, though, felt like a teenager forced to spend her last summer in high school with strangers.
Her mother didn’t decide immediately to send Araceli to the Velas’ for the summer. It wasn’t until she called her husband at work and he went into hysterics that she realized her daughter would have to be protected from what was going to happen all over town. Her mother decided to give her daughter time and space so that she could process the loss of John Mejia, whose friendship and shared time made him something more than a childhood love, something like a brother to Araceli—a boy whose fears and insecurities only she knew, like only she knew how ticklish he was behind his right knee and how sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night after having dreams about striking out or missing his mark on a deep pass, leading Greenton High to a loss and Greenton proper to great disappointment and anger.
She didn’t resent her parents for sending her to Corpus. She was grateful she didn’t have to go to the Johns’ funeral, and that she wasn’t part of the town-wide craziness that she’d gotten almost nightly doses of over the phone. Half, or less, of that craziness was relayed by her mother, trying her best to be as delicate and considerate of what her daughter was going through as she could. She had to tell her the truth about the wreck Araceli’s father had become at the loss of the son-in-law he would never have.
The most news, however, came from the house Araceli used to sneak into and out of most nights so that she could be with the person she honestly believed she would be with for the rest of her life.
Julie Mejia didn’t call Araceli on the day the Johns died. She left that, like so much else, to Goyo, who called the Monsevais house himself. When Araceli picked up, he asked her in a calm tone to give the phone to one of her parents. When she saw the look on her mother’s face, she remembered thinking that nothing that had been reported could hit her as hard as it hit her mother. And, aside from the kick of the initial shock, Araceli was right.
Araceli was not, however, mourning the loss of any plans to be with John Mejia after high school. A rift had formed between the couple when John returned from a visit to Austin. He and Robison had toured the campus, had taken a few very unofficial swings at the Longhorn practice facility. Mejia was given what he called—in defense of his stupidity—a “dry and painful” handjob from a drunken coed at a party in the apartment of a red-shirt sophomore pitcher from Brenham. She’d cried tears over their relationship then—they both had. Against her better judgment and in a desperate attempt to hold onto the place she’d forged for herself in Greenton, Araceli took him back. But it was never the same.
He began talking a lot more about the future, but her role in John’s plans seemed a peripheral one. He would mention being in school and playing ball and hoping for a future in pro ball and, after that, in coaching. The I became more pronounced as the we seemed to shrink on the horizon until Araceli was left behind like all of Greenton would soon be.
She didn’t mention it, but, after he and Robison signed their commitment letters with UT, the end of their relationship hung on and around every minute they spent together. She told John that ‘commitment letters’ sounded funny to her, like some sort of pre-nuptial agreement he had made with the university. He laughed, but she saw that it was something much more meaningful and romantic to him. Officially joining the ranks of Roger Clemens and Burt Hooton and Spike Owen—cementing it in ink, on 25# paper, with all of Greenton and much of South Texas watching in person and on TV—was the biggest moment of John Mejia’s life. And while she was there, it was a moment not really involving Araceli, as they almost all would be from then on.
That silently acknowledged inevitability arose every time John mentioned the time they would spend apart during his freshman and her senior year or his probable start in the minors, living out of a bag on the road, in buses, playing to half-filled stadiums in Bumfuck, all in hopes of being mined up ahead of the other prospects on the field by a big league team—living the dream. She suffered the obvious with feigned indifference, a cold stoicism that seemed to hurt Mejia more than the fact that soon he would break the heart of the only person he’d ever loved.
The night before he and Robison left town—the night before they died—John took Araceli as far away from the party lights at the Saenz ranch as its boundaries let him. He drove his father’s truck along a dirt path that led around the perimeter of the property, stopping a few miles away when they reached a locked gate.
John turned off the engine. He and Araceli got out of the truck and climbed onto a blanket John laid out on its bed. They didn’t say a word. When they finished, she wrapped the blanket around them. John cried silently on her chest, his tears rolling up to her collarbone and down off her back. Araceli lay counting stars, certain that this was the end, determined not to break down with him.
The next day, on the front lawn of his parents’ house, John Mejia broke up with Araceli Monsevais. Right there in front of everyone. “We have to break up,” he said. A few tears fell, but as soon as Araceli felt them coming, she steeled herself and stopped. He held her and whispered to her that he would always love her and be her friend. He told her he still wanted her to go to UT when she graduated, to be with him. He said he would call her every day and asked her to please look after his mother which, last-minute public breakup or not, she knew wasn’t asking too much.
All of Greenton watched, oblivious to the fact that their king and queen were a couple no longer. She told herself that she’d known it was coming, but still it hurt like she thought a gunshot might. Araceli was proud that she hadn’t cried, that she hadn’t done something foolish like making an angry scene.
Riding back into town on the night before the start of the school year, Araceli remembered what hurt her most that day: the realization—as the Johns drove off with their police escort and the whole town cheering them on—that with Greenton’s king leaving town, she was no longer its queen. She was just a girl. Maybe she was more beautiful than the girls around her, but she was no longer any more special or remarkable than all of the prettiest girls in school who had come before her—girls who only ever seemed to get married and pregnant and fat, left with picture books and school annuals to show kids who don’t really care that their mothers were young once too, that they used to be beautiful.
FALL
School started on a Wednesday. Chon woke up early, not as tired as he should have been. Sammy Alba was taking advantage of the last days of Chon’s daytime availability and had scheduled him to work open to three on both Monday and Tuesday. Rocha was taking advantage of Chon working that shift on Tuesday too because he didn’t show up the night before. He called Sammy, and even Art in San Antonio, he claimed, but neither answered. Chon tried getting hold of Ana, but she didn’t answer, as had become her practice on her days off, especially now since Chon had stopped coming over. Chon did some half-hearted sulking and moaning to himself during his second shift at The Pachanga, but couldn’t get into it as, in the dead minutes and hours between customers, his mind wandered constantly to Araceli and the excitement of seeing her the next day.
After the floors were swept and mopped, the cash in the register dropped into the one-way slot in the floor safe, his paperwork slid under the office door, Chon turned off the lights and locked the store up for the night. At home, hi
s sleep was uneasy, restless.
When he woke up the next morning, though he had already done so the night before, Chon showered. This was unlike him, and his parents noted it.
“Pito’s not even this excited about his first day of school,” his mother said.
Chon ignored her, hoping that the real reason he was so excited wouldn’t be apparent to his parents or his brother—and certainly not to his classmates. Because what would that make him in their eyes? A predator? An opportunist? Chon wasn’t ready to recognize that in himself, much less in the angry, judging eyes of everybody within the walls of Greenton High—from its students to its teachers and administrators, to even its two janitors and three lunch ladies.
He put on the new clothes his parents bought him and the Polo boots and Seiko watch, plus a dab of the cologne he had bought on a trip the family took to the mall in Laredo. He looked at himself in the mirror. The pricey acne medication he had also bought on that trip was working. His face was clearing, pockmarked and scarred, but no longer oily and red. The bedroom push-ups, backyard weight lifting, and daily glasses of chalky whey protein shakes he’d been drinking were bulking him up, little by little. On a good day, like this one, Chon could see the image before him in the shiny glass and let himself believe that he wasn’t too bad looking.
Maybe, just maybe, there was a chance.
Chon left the bathroom and made three tacos of the chorizo and egg his mother had woken up early to make. She didn’t do this often. Chon usually got breakfast on the way to school with his own money. Usually Pito was planted sleepily on a chair at the family dining table with a bowl of cereal in front of him and the morning’s news playing on the TV. This was a big day however. It was Chon’s first day of his senior year of high school and Pito’s first day at Greenton Junior High.
Chon wrapped the tacos in a paper towel and walked to the door. Pito though was only halfway through his breakfast.
“We leave now, or you walk,” Chon said.
“Concepcion.” His mother only ever called him by his proper name in reproach. “Be nice.”
“Yeah, Concepcion,” Pito said, mocking.
“Guadalupe, you listen to your brother,” their mother said, getting up and meeting the boys at the door. “I love you guys.” She gave each of them a kiss on the cheek. “Be good.”
Chon and Pito sat, letting the Dodge-nasty’s engine warm up. Pito interrupted Chon’s reverie.
“Do you think today will be weird?” Pito asked.
“It’s just another day at school. Only you’re at a bigger campus with lockers and bells ringing every period and dressing out for gym.”
“No,” Pito said. “I mean at your school. This will be the first day of school after it happened. It’ll be the first time everyone sees Araceli. Don’t you think that’ll be weird?”
Foolishly, in all of Chon’s planning and scheming over this day, he had never factored in what he knew had to be waiting at school, even though the frenzy had died down a bit. The church had stopped sending its statue of the weeping virgin from house to house so that every believing, willing family would say a novena for the Johns. The View, Greenton’s weekly, five-page news circular was no longer running stories about the Johns or at least had begun relegating them—now mainly responses to letters to the editor—to the back page of the paper. While folks were still coming into The Pachanga and buying John stars, they no longer did so weepingly or out of grief, but acquisitively and in line with the trend running through town.
Pito was right though. This was the first day all the teenagers in Greenton would be in one place—within the walls of the high school which were adorned by so many trophies and banners won by the fallen heroes, where they had walked and studied and presided as the ultimate alpha dogs, held in high esteem by even the teachers and administrators.
These same adolescents would focus all of their collective sadness on Araceli. Chon realized he would never get her attention, never get her away from the watchful gaze of almost a tenth of the people in town.
“Whatever. They can get over it,” he told his little brother.
“Yeah, but they won’t get over it today,” Pito said. “It seems like no one ever will. They were—” he stopped here, either because he couldn’t put into words what the Johns meant to the town or to him. Or because he knew Chon wasn’t listening to him.
Chon dropped Pito off at the junior high, a WPA-era building erected to look like a fallout shelter and a factory for the crop-cut future GIs who would come up in the last pure, pre-rock ’n’ roll era of American youth. You could almost hear Hank Williams tunes hanging in the air of the parking lot of what was initially Greenton High, with its vomit-hued green and pink tiles and cracked speaker box intercom system. At least it had windows, which is more than could be said for the new Greenton High, built like a high-security prison with cinderblock-walls and fluorescent lights.
When he got to the high school parking lot, he sat for a while behind the wheel of the Dodge-nasty, day dreaming. The loud mock-childish whine of a DJ in some cramped booth in Laredo coming through the radio snapped Chon out of his trance. He killed the ignition and got out of the car, not bothering to lock its doors or even roll up its windows. He saw two girls in front of school break down and cry at the sight of each other and rush into an embrace right there in the student parking lot. Ohhhh. It was going to be a long year.
The crying girls walked into the school building, arm in arm. In front of the school, the sun had only risen partially in the eastern sky, but the lack of trees or buildings to block out its rays made the day bright and already hot. Chon saw only his own reflection in the glass doors at the entrance. He readied himself for chaos on the other side—a building full of people falling all over each other, seeing who could wail the loudest or who had the best story about the Johns—but there no one to be found. In fact, the entrance hall, which was flanked on either side by the school’s main office and library, was barer than Chon had ever seen it. So too was the main hall. A note was taped to the office door: an assembly in the gym would start at 8:50 am.
Every student in school was there, sitting on one side of the gym bleachers. Teachers were standing, doing the business of corralling students and having them sit in sections according to grade level. Each grade had about sixty students, except for the senior class, which had only fifty-two. They had started out with sixty-seven, but eight had moved away, six had dropped out to work or dedicate their lives to various drugs of choice, and one had been arrested trying to sneak a few pounds of weed from Mexico through the Sarita checkpoint just up the highway.
Chon had gone to school with most of these kids since kindergarten. He would know them forever. He just hoped that he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of his life with them.
Chon scanned the rows of seniors as soon as he entered the gym. Only Araceli was missing. Chon took a seat next to Henry, who was sitting alone, only two ass-lengths away from the nearest person—close enough to make small talk, but not close enough to commit himself to any clique or conversation.
“This is gonna be a fucked up year, man,” Henry said, giving Chon a pound on the shoulder when he sat. “It’s all going to be this day, just a little different, for the whole year. I guarantee it.”
Chon nodded his head in agreement, looking around the gym at all the teenagers in town. Seeing the home side of the gym barely halfway filled, Chon had one of those moments—God, Greenton was small.
On the floor was a podium, no mic. They didn’t need a mic. Behind the podium stood two veiled frames on easels.
“Oh Lord, did they do portraits or something?” Chon asked.
Henry shrugged and turned to say something to Chon. When he saw Chon scanning the rows of students and looking anxiously at the gym doors, he rolled his eyes.
“She’s coming, man.”
The door to the gym opened. Everyone turned to look. Araceli walked in wearing a new pair of jeans and a plain pink T-shirt. Her hair was pulled bac
k. She wore no makeup or jewelry. All the other girls in the gym were decked out in clothes some of them had worked all summer to buy just for this day—not too low-cut blouses, summer skirts and dresses, new shoes and sandals. They had woken up very early that morning to wash and primp and preen. By comparison, Araceli looked like a girl who had shown up without a pencil to take a test that she didn’t know was being given, in a subject she hadn’t studied, written in a language she couldn’t read.
But none of the other girls’ attempts brought them any closer to the perfection Araceli achieved without trying. She was the essence of what Plato would have imagined if he tried to quantify the highest form of beauty. At least she was all Chon could imagine when he tried to do the same. It was the moment Chon had longed for, seeing Araceli walk back into Greenton High and back into his life. It was too brief, a moment that Chon couldn’t focus on and savor like he would have wanted. His attention was diverted by the looks on the faces of his classmates and the anger he felt at the groups of students, pockets of them in all grade levels, obviously and tackily leaning over to whisper their speculations and theories, some of them even pointing as Araceli made her way to the other side of the gym.
When she started up the bleachers, her fellow cheerleaders began making room for her. They flashed big smiles her way, conveying with their eyes their deepest sympathies. Each one of them thought they shared a close bond with her because—unbeknownst to each other—they had all slept with John Robison at various points over the last few years. Araceli gave them an unsmiling, indifferent wave as she passed them by. They made no attempt to hide their shock. They turned around fully in their seats, watching her walk away with looks that towed the line between hurt and contempt.
Seeing Off the Johns Page 6