“Who says I’m just starting?”
Soledad’s eyes flare wide. “I don’t need you for that.”
“Don’t call it worry, then.” I flick my pepper-stained fingers back at her. “Call it pestering.”
She laughs. I stuff the empty plastic bag in my backpack and wipe my fingers on the bricks.
“Seriously, are you not sleeping?”
“When can I rest, Francisco?” Soledad shoves off the wall and takes a step toward me. “When can I ever let down my guard? Papá is a ghost of the man he was before. Some days I don’t even know if he sees me right in front of him. Some nights I barely sleep because he’s up and down, and if I don’t watch him, he’ll unlock the door and then what? Wander somewhere he shouldn’t be? Let Red Tito stroll right in?”
“You know you can stay with us.”
Soledad’s eyebrows raise. “You want me in your bed, Francisco?”
She means it as a joke, but I can’t laugh about that. The blood rushes beneath my skin, filling my ears, clouding my eyes like I’m a normal teenager and not some stack of bones rattling through life.
“If it would take the bruises away from your skin, yes. If it meant you could sleep through the night, yes.” My voice is thick. I stop talking, and I stuff my hands into my back pockets so if I lose my head I can’t reach out and pull her toward me until there is not so much as a gasp of air between us.
She steps closer. I thought there wasn’t anything left beneath my ribs, but I feel it now, pumping, banging against my chest. I lean in, so slow, and rest my temple against the side of her head for a second, maybe two. She doesn’t flinch away, so I close my eyes and drop my forehead onto her collarbone.
Soledad lays her hands on my chest and tucks the bridge of her nose into the crook of my neck and shoulder. Her breath against that bare triangle of skin burns like chili peppers.
The doors to the primary school bang open, and Soledad jerks away. The skin of my neck goes cold, and a shiver shakes through me. I blink, and Pilar is between us, holding our hands, jumping up and down, and begging for some escabeche, extra pepper, extra pepper!
Soledad doesn’t look at me the rest of the afternoon. But when we settle in a corner of the library, while Pilar reads and I work through the test prep book, Soledad curls on the floor between us and the wall, and she sleeps.
I feel it building all that afternoon, all the way home, all evening. It’s in the weary tilt of Papá’s face, and the way Pilar smooths her doll’s frayed hair, and the way my throat constricts when Soledad disappears behind that bolted door for the night.
You want my soul, Profesora Ortiz? Here it is.
The bone that holds my chest together
is cracked down the middle.
Air winds between my organs
dust cakes the crevices
between bone and tissue and blood.
My ribs are pried apart.
This one pulled that way,
that one, this.
And two more beneath,
stretched until they snap,
splayed
in odd directions.
I can’t take care of her, and him,
and her, too
and also, somehow, me.
One of us
—maybe all of us—
is going to crack.
And if we’re splayed
in odd directions,
if we splinter away from one another
I think it’s going to break us all.
November 5
It’s Friday, and just like last week, Soledad makes some excuse after school and takes off in the other direction. I watch her walk away, the narrow V of braids down her back twitching from side to side. I won’t see her again until Sunday night maybe, or Monday morning. She rounds the corner two blocks down, and I feel it, like a punch in the gut, when she’s gone.
• • •
When Pilar walks out of school, she’s holding a stick with something hanging off it that looks like a bullet casing, only translucent white, ripped open and trembling with each step she takes.
I lift an eyebrow.
“It’s a chrysalis.”
“Isn’t there supposed to be a butterfly inside?”
“She already left. I don’t like the flapping and flying far away part. I like what she left behind.”
This kid.
I take her backpack and her empty hand, and we cross town to San Simón. I’m getting to know my way around the place, so it doesn’t take long for me to find the admissions office.
Pilar waits on a bench inside while I go up to the counter. A woman in owlish glasses and a wide smile comes to meet me.
“How can I help you, young man?”
I clear my throat. “I would like an application to San Simón for next year.”
“Excellent,” she replies, and hands me a double-sided form. “You’re signed up to take the entrance exams?”
I nod.
“Your scores will be sent directly to us. Fill this out, mail it in, and you will receive notice of your acceptance or denial through the mail as well.”
“Thank you.” My hands are sweating.
I tuck the form in between the pages of the test prep book in my backpack and sling the straps over my shoulders. Pilar follows me outside. “You’re doing this for Papá, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
She nods. “If you can do this, even though I know it’s not what you want, I can try to be happy with Abuelo and Abuela, even though it’s not what I want.”
“Yeah?”
She wraps her arms around my waist and squeezes. I can’t fail that test. Not with her, and Papá, and everything riding on it.
• • •
When we get back to the cell that night, Pilar hangs the branch from the window so the torn-apart chrysalis dangles there, empty. The sunlight goes right through it. One strong gust of wind, and it’ll be gone.
November 6
I used to love weekends. No school. No place I had to be. Rey and I would kick around the days, dreaming mostly of when we would be done with school for good, and our real lives would start. Now the weekends can’t go fast enough for me.
In the morning, I help Papá stitch up the holes in his work shirt, and after checking to make sure Red Tito isn’t in the courtyard, I bring Pilar down into the sun where she draws on the ground with a discarded pigeon feather.
We spend most of the day in our tiny cell so I can study without distractions. But it’s enough to make a person crazy, breathing the same stale air and staring at the same cracked walls all the time.
I know Soledad’s gone, but I walk past her cell twice, just in case. I wish I knew for sure that she’s okay out there—wherever she is.
I’m never going to get her out of my head just sitting here.
• • •
I leave Pilar with Papá and call Reynaldo from the kiosk at the prison, and it takes a little convincing, but we make a plan to meet up in half an hour at the San Simón campus, where there’s a grass field with goalposts and actual nets. I lace up my cleats and jog over. If Rey’s still mad that I wouldn’t get into the shit he’s into, he’ll get over it on the field. We’ve always been like that—if anything’s off between us, we fix it in the game.
I get there early and wait on the goal line. We’ve got the whole place to ourselves.
“Hey, man.” Reynaldo jogs across the field to meet me. He drops the tough-guy act and slaps me on the shoulders, pulling me into a big hug.
“Hi, Rey,” I say, and because I can’t trust myself anymore to keep everything under wraps, I slap the ball out of his hands and dribble in the other direction when he pulls away.
We never get the chance to shoot on goal, so today that’s all we do. Chip shots and trick shots and hard-
driving balls to the corners of the net. We’re laughing and digging at each other like we used to, but this isn’t like a real game, where the rush and rhythm wipe my mind of all its worries. They hang there, under the laughter, just beneath the layer of sweat dripping off me.
When we give up at last and collapse onto the grass at the back of the net, I tuck the ball under my knees and knot my hands behind my neck.
“Really, Francisco,” he says, “how are you doing?”
Looking up through the net, the sky is sectioned off into dozens of soft-sided rectangles. “Honestly?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a mess. Every day, Papá is slipping away from us, and from himself. My sister is in this place where she never gets to just be a kid, and where she’s never really safe. Me? I can’t go off and do what I want with my life and leave them there, like that.”
Reynaldo rolls onto his side. “Let me help you. What can I do?”
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
“Francisco, what can I do?”
I close my eyes, but the sun still burns through my eyelids, turning the insides red and gold. “There’s this test I have to take.”
“Don’t tell me you need a study partner. You’re asking the wrong guy—”
I chuck the ball at Reynaldo, and he swats it away. “The test costs seventy bolivianos, and I don’t know how I’m going to scrape together that much money.”
“Francisco, seventy bolivianos is nothing.”
“Maybe for you.”
“I said I wanted to help, didn’t I?”
“You’d lend me the money?”
He rolls his eyes. “I’ll give you the money. But I’m telling you, if you just come work with me, you won’t need whatever test it is that you’re so worried about. We’ll get our shop open even faster with you selling too . . .”
I hold up a hand, and he closes his mouth over the rest of that sentence.
“I have to do this, Reynaldo.” I sit up, so I can say the hard part to his face. “Before I can think about what I want. Before I can even think about our shop, I have to do this.”
“Okay,” he says, and the joking is over. “I’ll send you the money tomorrow.”
November 7
The next morning, a priest offers Mass down in the courtyard, reciting the liturgy in a loud voice so even behind closed doors, everyone can hear.
I recite the words on the study sheet in front of me. Branches of government. Systems of democracy. Heads of state. Like a penitent with his tongue outstretched to receive the Eucharist, I’ve bet everything on this, my salvation. If I can’t pass this test, if I can’t get Papá out of here, it’s not just him who will never be free. It’s me, too. It’s all of us.
• • •
I’m lying on my back and, for once, taking up the whole mattress, my arms and legs sprawled out as far as they can reach. Papá and Pilar are downstairs with some of the other kids drawing with colored chalk on the courtyard stones.
The money for the entrance exams arrived today from Reynaldo. I already spent the whole morning studying, but that doesn’t mean I’m done. There’s the essay for Profesor Perez, and I still have to write a few more poems. Profesora Ortiz’s words echo in my head: Where are you in your poems?
I reach back under the corner of the mattress and start digging through the things I have stashed there. In class, we study famous poets, long-dead poets, Spanish poets. What do they know about my life? If I am going to learn how to really write from the raw places, how to make a poem my own, I need Papá as my teacher.
I pull out the stack of poems he wrote for me, unfold the first one he ever gave me years ago, and start reading.
The Naming
It did not occur to me
That in the moment my son
Was placed in my arms—
Small, and warm,
His lips pursed
His eyes wrinkled shut
Not yet ready to look on this harsh world—
It did not occur to me
That I would long for my own father
In that moment.
When I was a child,
My father taught me to go forth in this world
Bearing the past—
our ancestors, our history, our stories—
before me.
Now that I am grown
And holding my son in my arms,
I finally understand
That though he is miles away
I hold my father before me, too.
I wish Abuelo were here now. He wouldn’t have a clue about how to get Papá’s case through the legal system—he doesn’t even speak Spanish. But I think he would know, better than me, how to bring my father back to himself.
The Aymara live with the weight and the wisdom of the past in front of them. I always held what was coming—my future self—up in front of me: what I would be and how I would make a place for myself in the world.
But all that’s changing. I never would have guessed prison would be the thing to make me more like my father.
November 8
On Monday morning, Soledad’s back again, without a word about where she went, or why. After we drop off Pilar, it’s just the two of us. I should have asked where she went when Pilar was still here. Or maybe even made Pilar do the asking and pretended I didn’t care either way. But I didn’t, so the question hangs there all morning.
It’s all I can think about during math and then writing and then science, so I run to catch up with Soledad before history class. I loop my thumbs through the straps on my backpack and shorten my steps to match her smaller ones.
My face is bright red. So what if she knows that I look for her when she’s gone? That I miss her when she isn’t there?
“Hey,” I finally say, “where do you go on the weekends?”
“Out.”
I tug the straps on my backpack, and it lifts and then slams back down on my hips. “But where? Where do you sleep?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“It’s just—are you alone? Is it safe?”
And for the first time ever, she turns her claws on me. “Who made you my protector, Francisco? Since when do I have to tell you where I am and what I do every minute of every day?”
They rake across my face, and they rip the words from my mouth.
“Oh, so I’m the bad guy now, to care about you.” Did I just yell that? The hallways that are always spinning come screeching to a stop.
Everyone is staring at us.
“I’m a giant cojudo because it matters to me whether you end up dead in an alley somewhere? That makes me the bad guy?”
I drop my voice to a whisper. “In case you haven’t noticed—it’s dangerous out there. What’s so bad about looking out for each other?”
She just clenches her teeth and glares at me, so I turn and walk away. I never thought I would walk away from her. I feel it crawl under my skin, and slip through my veins. I feel it in every inch of my body. I’m not just a skeleton anymore, and it sucks.
I fling open the door to Profesor Perez’s classroom so hard it slams back against the brick, and the noise echoes like a gunshot through the hallway.
I look for Soledad when school lets out, but she’s already gone. Pilar and I walk to the plaza, and then to the prison, just the two of us. It’s Pilar’s birthday, so we splurge a little. Dinner is a whole roasted chicken, and we eat every last bit, licking our fingertips and laughing as Papá cracks the bones and sucks out the marrow.
When the chicken is gone, Papá passes around a plate of cocadas and we each take one. I eat mine in nibbles, mincing the pieces of coconut between my teeth.
“How’s it going in the wood shop, Papá?” Pilar asks.
“Oh, I’m still learning,” he says with a dismissive wave. “
They only give me the idiot jobs that can’t be messed up: sweeping sawdust, stacking wood, or sanding bedposts.”
Pilar takes his hand and lays it against her cheek. “Someday,” she says, “you will make the most beautiful furniture. People will come from all over Bolivia to buy your things.”
Papá laughs. “Well, I did make one thing on my own, though it’s no masterpiece.” He stands and leans over the pile of boxes in the corner, reaches behind them, and pulls out a wooden shadow box with nine little shelves inside. He hands it to Pilar, and she runs her fingers over the smooth grain.
“You made this?”
He nods, gesturing to her collection on the wall. “For your things.”
Pilar curls into his lap and rests her head against his shoulder. She props the shadow box against her legs. “It’s perfect. Thank you, Papá.”
The look on her face cuts into me. A shelf and a roasted chicken for her birthday? All I can think of is what a party for a normal kid who doesn’t live in prison would be like—balloons, music, cake, and kids everywhere hopped up on sugar.
Not here. Here, all I can think of is what she’s not getting.
Papá goes down for roll call. I’m trying to memorize this world map for the entrance exams, and I keep getting Niger and Nigeria and Algeria mixed up. Pilar’s trying to help me, and she laughs every time I make the same mistake. I’m tempted to keep screwing it up just so she doesn’t stop, but I have to get this right. I have to pass this test.
The intercom quit a while ago, and I know I heard the gate shut and lock. The guard station is closed down for the night. So what’s taking Papá so long?
Beneath Pilar’s laughter, I hear this yell that lifts the hair on my neck. I jump up and open the door, listening.
“Stay here and lock the door behind me,” I whisper.
I run to the balcony. The guards are gone, and the lights are off, but I can still make out a circle of men in the courtyard. They’re all yelling and in the middle of it, two big guys are pummeling this smaller figure on the ground.
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