Is it just bricks mortared in place, or is it reinforced with custom metalwork? Is it crumbling stucco with graffiti showing through the paint, or has the outer layer been shaped into a decorative relief?
I’m walking, trailing my fingers over brick and then stone and then steel and then brick again. Memory blurs the sidewalk in front of me, and I’m right there, five years ago with Reynaldo, running back from a pickup game farther from home than we were supposed to go. I’d never seen such fancy stamped concrete sidewalks and walls lined with flowering trees that smelled like the perfume Mamá wore on special occasions.
At first we just knocked the ball back and forth a little bit while we ran, and the walls were like a third player. We jogged sideways, bobbing and winding each behind the other to keep the ball from hitting the ground.
And then we started to shoot, tentatively at first. The edges of the brick became our goalposts, but there was no chasing the ball if we launched it into the air and over the walls, so we took our running starts and carefully aimed for the corners. Laces down, knee over the ball, plant and strike.
I couldn’t have been more than ten years old. I shouldn’t have known then the difference between rich and poor. And I definitely shouldn’t have felt the bitterness in the gap between the two. But if I didn’t, why did it feel so good when I landed a solid hit?
• • •
I lift my fingers away from the wall and tuck my hands into my pockets. The neighborhood gives way to a row of businesses, and instead of walls facing the sidewalk, it’s one roll-down metal door after another.
The police station is a four-story mint-green building. I walk up the steps, push through the door, and make my way to the front desk. The overhead light glances off my skin, and my shoes squeak against the linoleum floor. Two officers at the back of the room lean over an open file. I can hear the low murmur of their conversation, but I can’t make out the words. One of them looks up and motions for the other to deal with me.
“Yes?” The officer’s brows snap together as he approaches the front desk.
“I am here to see about my father’s taxi. It was confiscated, and I need to get it back.”
The officer hangs his thumbs from his belt loops. “Your father should be the one asking, not you.”
“He can’t.” I swallow. There’s no shame in just saying it. “They put him in San Sebastián. He would come if he could.”
“We can’t help you, then.” The officer taps the desk once and walks away from me.
“Papá didn’t do anything wrong. He’s not a criminal.” The other officer looks up. I’m shouting now. “If my father can’t work, then I have to work in his place. How am I supposed to do that without the taxi?”
The second officer approaches. His hands are up in the air like he’s trying to pacify a drunk or a crazy person or something.
“What my partner means is we can’t help you. Tránsito probably made the arrest, but after that, these cases leave our department. If your father was arrested on the 1008, I’m sorry to say it, but the taxi is gone. You don’t need the police; what you need is a lawyer.”
I shake my hands out and blink back the heat.
Mamá said the same thing. I hate her for being right. And all over again, I hate her for leaving.
• • •
I don’t even bother showing up late to school. I wait a few hours for Pilar, and we go to the plaza, where we lie down on one of the wooden beds in the street in front of the prison. Pilar stares at the clouds, clutching her doll against her stomach. I don’t know if anything will bring back who she was before.
I can’t help her, and I can’t help Papá either. I’ve never felt so useless in my whole life.
After we go inside the prison, I watch for the girl from school. Sure enough, she’s the last one through the gate before they lock it. She goes straight to her cell on the second level and doesn’t come out again.
• • •
When Papá comes into the cell after roll call, he’s holding my grandparents’ letter. It says:
Send the children to us—your father is too ill to travel. We will happily make a home for Francisco and Pilar here.
Papá sews a rectangle of fabric into the lining of my jacket and stitches money for bus fare to the Altiplano inside. He draws a map of the route out of the city, up to the high plains, and into my grandparents’ community tucked into a fold of the mountains.
“Go tomorrow morning,” he says. “Take your sister and go.”
“Papá, no. We have a cell now. We’re safer than we were before.” I hate that I have to fight him on this.
“Francisco, you have to go. If not for me, then for your sister. Please.”
Pilar’s eyes dart between us. Her silence is deafening.
“There’s nothing for me there. I’ll take Pilar if you think it’s safer for her, and if that’s what she wants, but I’m not staying.”
“Prison is not a good place for you, either, Francisco.”
No. He can’t make me. This place has already taken my mother from me, and my friends. My life—what’s left of it—is here, in the city. If I give it all up to go dig potatoes and tend sheep on the Altiplano, it’s over. My whole life is over. Doesn’t he know how much I have to lose if I give up on everything here?
“Listen to me, my son. You have to leave.”
“I don’t want to go live with a bunch of indios, okay?”
My father takes a breath, the kind that moves in slow and sits heavy in the lungs. He drops his head and blows it all back out in a rush. “Sit down.”
“Papá, I don’t—”
“Francisco! Sit down.”
My legs buckle, and I sink onto the mattress until my knees are level with my eyes. I wrap my arms around my shins, to have something to do with myself besides clenching and unclenching my hands.
“You’re angry, Francisco. I see that. I ache for you and this anger that nips at you like a dog at your heels. You think my parents’ way of life is an ignorant one, a worthless one in this modern world. But ignorance has many faces in this world. You will understand that someday. The most educated, polished, privileged person can be rotten with ignorance. And someone who never spent a single day inside a classroom can be full of knowledge you won’t find in any textbook.
“You think I am who I am because I left that place and that way of life. But the truth is, I am who I am because I came from that place. You think I am kind? I learned that from my indio father. You think I am strong? I learned that from my india mother. You think I’m a poet because I left the Altiplano, because I chose not to lead the traditional life my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents led? My son, I am a poet because I came from the Altiplano, and the beauty and history and tragedy of that place is stamped on my soul.”
October 19
I’m still not leaving, no matter what Papá says.
When he walks us to the gate in the morning, he places Pilar’s hand in mine, kisses her on the head, and tells her, “Do not let go of your brother’s hand. No matter how many miles separate us, you will always be my beloved daughter.”
Then he rests his hands on either side of my face and looks up into my eyes. “My son, I hope with all of my heart that you do not return here tonight. Know that my dream of you will never fade. My love for you will never fail.”
He’s saying good-bye, like it’s the last time he’ll ever see us.
It’s just—if I take Pilar to the Altiplano and come back to the city, where I can visit Papá in the evenings and find a way to get a lawyer, I’ve still abandoned her up there, and what—her education is over? Her chance at a modern life in the city is over? And if I stay with her, then I abandon Papá and any hope of a life for myself.
We all lose.
Pilar has a vine or something wound between the fingers of her right hand—I didn’t
even notice her pick it up this time on the walk to school.
“Papá’s right, you know,” I say.
Pilar looks up at me, questioning.
“It’s not safe for you in the prison.”
She nods, and her head drops again, her chin almost resting against her chest.
“I’ll take you to Abuela and Abuelo now if that’s what you want.”
She doesn’t answer.
“Should I try to track down Mamá? Maybe you could stay with her.”
Pilar bites her lip. “No.”
I drape my arm around her shoulder, and she leans against me.
“I want to stay with you and Papá as long as I can.”
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”
• • •
I look for the girl from prison when I get to school. She’s already in her seat when I walk into algebra class; her hair is wet and dripping down the back of her white shirt. The backpack beside her chair bulges with the rolled-up lump of her shed overlayer.
She glances up, and I quickly look away, though the feeling of her eyes on me lingers. I want to look back again, and maybe say something. But I don’t.
I stare at my desk. The bell rings. Profesor Muñoz starts talking, but I’m not listening.
Does she have any friends? How is it that I don’t even know her name? Is she alone out there on the streets? Is her only defense in this world a set of baggy clothes to hide the shape of her?
After the last bell, I follow the girl as she leaves school. I trail half a block behind, on the other side of the street, weaving through the gaps between parked cars and street-side walls. It’s not like I’m going that far out of the way to Pilar’s school.
It’s just—somehow this girl has figured out how to survive in the prison, and on the streets, apparently all alone. Okay, so I’m curious. What’s wrong with that?
Two guys, older than me and not wearing school uniforms, step out in front of her. They’re standing in a gap between parked cars, and I can see every feint and sneer, hear the bite and juice of their words, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. One of them slides beside her and reaches a hand under her skirt.
In that second, her whole being bristles. She yowls like a wildcat treed by a pack of dogs. Instead of slinking away and running down the street, she leaps at them and claws at their faces, aiming for the soft flesh of their eyes.
Run! I’m screaming inside. Why isn’t she running?
But I don’t say anything. I don’t do anything. I just stand there. Bone fused to bone, locked in place by tendons that have forgotten how to bend and sway.
I never back down from a fight. But now, when someone could actually use my fists, I just stand there.
The guys dance out of the way of her swiping claws. “You filthy bitch!”
But for all their words, they’re the ones who back up.
She watches them go, tail switching, flicking, lip curling over her fangs. She tracks me then, sees me standing there, watching. And her hackles rise again.
My bones unlock, and I hurry around the corner, out of sight. I can’t take on anyone else’s problems right now. I can’t. Papá, Pilar, and what’s left of me—it’s already too much.
“How was school?”
Pilar sighs. I know I sound stupid, but it’s what Mamá would have asked.
“We’re studying butterflies.”
I should say something about chrysalises. Or wings. Or caterpillars. But nothing comes out.
Great talk, Francisco.
I take her backpack and her hand, and we walk the rest of the way in silence. What is there to say anyway? We’re stuck in our own husks of emotion, unable to break through, afraid of the struggle to drag our bloated wings from their prison.
When we walk into the prison courtyard, the disappointment on Papá’s face is like a day-old sunburn, peeling skin away from skin, leaving an itchy, raw place behind.
“I told you, I’m not going.” I don’t know why he wastes his hope on something that’s never going to happen.
But it’s like he refuses to hear me. That night while he peels potatoes and stirs the pot of rice on the hot plate, he begins teaching us how to speak Aymara. Just a word here and there. Willka: sun. Kurumi: rainbow. Jawira: river.
I don’t even pretend to try.
Pilar does, though. Papá has been slowly drawing her out, and she’s talking more now—not chattering every second of the day like she used to, but the shock is draining from her eyes, and little by little, she’s coming back to us.
So she practices the new words while she decorates our little cell with the things she finds on the street. Nothing wants to stick to the walls—nothing wants to be stuck in here—but she just picks the scattered things off the floor and tacks them back up again, with bits of reused tape, every time they fall. Moth wings separated from their bodies. A cracked cherry pit. Leaves with holes like lace punched through their desiccated skin.
It all looks like trash to me.
October 20
In the morning, I sling my backpack over my shoulder and follow Papá and Pilar out of our cell. I’m trying to put my finger on what it is that’s different about Papá. I mean, he’s sad, but who wouldn’t be? He’s underfed and uncomfortable and overworked, but so is everybody else in here.
Papá walks us through the dim hallway lined with cell doors stacked on top of each other like bats under a bridge. We go down the stairs, and through the courtyard. His arm is draped over Pilar’s shoulders, and he’s speaking softly over her head.
From this angle, you can’t tell that something is seriously wrong. I don’t see it until he turns and beckons to me, places my hand in my sister’s, pats my cheek, and looks up into my face.
It’s his eyes. You could see it before—the mind behind those eyes. And the heart too.
Now it’s all I can do not to flinch when his eyes meet mine. They’ve dimmed and darkened, like whatever lit them from within is slowly being smothered.
“Your homework,” Profesor Perez says. A chorus of groans fills the classroom, and he holds up a hand. “I was only going to make it a five-paragraph essay. Should I make it seven?”
The groans stop.
“All right, then. A five-paragraph paper on the educational system in this country.”
The bell clangs and the room fills with the shush and crumple of notebooks closing, and books sliding inside backpacks. The groans are back, too.
Reynaldo’s seat is empty—I haven’t seen him in a few days. My classmates push in their chairs and bodies bump down the aisle, out the door and into the outdoor patio at the center of the school.
“Francisco, a word?” Profesor Perez says.
Great.
“I have spoken to the rest of your teachers, and we are all concerned about you.”
Here it comes.
“You have always gotten by on a minimum of effort.”
I look up, sideways a little.
Profesor Perez’s eyebrows rise halfway up his forehead. “Don’t look so surprised. Of course we noticed. Now, I know things have become difficult for your family, but your performance at school has slipped. You’re missing class, and even when you’re here, you’re not paying attention. You’ve been walking the edge for so long you might not realize how easy it is to slip off.”
I lean my head back so maybe he can’t see me roll my eyes.
“Did you know that only one in five teenagers finishes secondary school? If you don’t get it together, after all these years of school, you won’t receive a diploma. If you don’t get a diploma, university is out of the question.”
He looks at me like he expects a response, but what do I have to say? That I wish I wasn’t even here? That school is the last thing on my mind right now? That there’s no way I’m ever going to university?
“Fr
ancisco, do you have any idea how much potential you have?”
“You sound like my father.”
“Well, your father sounds like a smart man. Francisco, this is serious. With only a few weeks of classes left, you can’t give up now.”
Great. The minute Papá stops riding me about school, my teachers start. How any of them think school matters one bit now that my life is walled in and locked up is beyond me.
I don’t plan to follow the girl from the prison again after school, but my feet carry me that way anyway. Those guys are back. They don’t stop her, don’t try to touch her again, but they trail a step behind, baiting, laying steel jaws in the ground at her feet.
And I understand—finally—why Papá’s pleas are so earnest. It’s not just the one awful day Pilar already survived. It’s years and years of days like that—and like this—after I leave. Guys like Red Tito in the prison, and guys like these on the streets.
Pilar will never be safe. I’ll have to leave the prison in December when I turn eighteen, and without me, the wildcat life is all she will have. My sister is smart, but she doesn’t have claws hiding beneath her skin.
I hurry to pick up Pilar. I’m not going to the Altiplano, no matter what Papá wants. But if I can’t find another place for us to stay before I turn eighteen, we’ll have no choice. Pilar will have to go.
October 21
We don’t get much class time to work on our essays, and we have only four weeks left until the end of school, so when Profesor Perez quits lecturing fifteen minutes before the bell on Thursday, the room is almost silent. I’m trying to get it down, everything I’ve learned about equity and education. But every time I try to write it out, it just ends up a mess of frustration and anger fighting for space on the page.
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