Sloan stood outside the window, so close he could have stepped into the room, his mouth set in a hard line. He kept her gaze, kept the rifle pointed at her as the janitor swung open the door. Sloan lowered the gun and said, “The rules were easy, Callie.”
The bullet, lodged somewhere in her lungs, spread a dull ache down each arm, up into her head, through her torso. The cold dead weight of the pistol sat in her hand and she tried to close her fingers around it. It was impossible to move, to reach for the bullet hanging around her neck. She heard the train approach, saw a mound of shredded paper targets in its path, endured the searing pain. Then, as the air of her final breath escaped through the hole in her chest, Callie saw herself standing at home plate, the bat resting on her shoulder, hoping for the right pitch.
PABLO ESCOBAR
by Yuly Restrepo Garcés
Largo
On the Tuesday of my second week of eleventh grade in America, Nicole found me eating on the stairs by the soda machine and introduced herself. Several weeks later, I’d be clinging to the back of her sweater as we said goodbye for the last time before she got on a plane to somewhere in Oklahoma, but that Tuesday I was just scared to talk to her. The school floor plan dictated that at lunch students had to gather in a big rectangular space in the middle of the building, and there were few places where I could eat without being out for everyone to see me. The previous week, my cousin and her friends, who were in the tenth grade, had made fun of my ratty, faded Chuck Taylors and middle part and the fact that I was wearing jeans instead of a skirt and my general FOB-ness. After that, I stopped sitting with them at lunch. I wanted to talk to no one, especially some girl who couldn’t speak Spanish.
Nicole put a lot of coins in the soda machine and pushed some buttons and took out two plastic bottles with what looked like blue liquid in them. She walked over to the stairs, where I was failing to take delicate bites out of what the cafeteria sign said was a sloppy joe sandwich. Nicole handed me one of the bottles.
The liquid inside was, indeed, electric blue, and the label said Fruitopia.
“You’re in my French class,” she said. “I don’t think you’ve seen me because I sit in the back. You’re always in the front.”
Nicole was short and chubby, with brown hair that she had styled in stiff curls, and small, incandescent blue eyes. Even as my heart raced with the responsibility of answering, I thought of my mom, who would have loved the color of Nicole’s eyes as she had been loving the blue eyes of people we encountered in the overly air-conditioned grocery stores of Largo since we’d come to America a few weeks earlier. Nicole was wearing cargo pants, a tight navy T-shirt, and crisp white sneakers that she later told me were K-Swiss, as if that was supposed to mean something to me. She’d soon be my first real American friend, and I’d lose her just as quickly.
“Thank you,” I said. “We’re in French together?”
“Yeah, I sit in the back. Might as well because I never know the answers to the questions. You know all the answers, but I can never hear you when you say them.”
“I know a little French,” I said. Before leaving Colombia, I had been in college for a semester, studying foreign languages. My French was good, but English was what I liked to study the most. Now it made me feel dumb when Americans spoke to me and I couldn’t keep up, or I pronounced a word I knew well in a way they couldn’t understand, so silence became my refuge.
Nicole opened her soda and drank three big gulps, pointing with her eyes at my bottle, asking me to do the same. The soda tasted like cotton candy. I thanked her again.
“Where are you from?” she asked. When I told her, she said she didn’t know where Colombia was, but that some cousins on her mom’s side were from the Virgin Islands.
“South America,” I said. She nodded.
Outside, a blindingly bright and hot late-August day raged, but any natural light that entered the building did so through a row of small windows high on the walls above student lockers. The spotless white floor, the blue lockers, the cafeteria tables—all had the sheen of fluorescent lighting.
“Did you know there was a shooting at this school a long time ago?”
“Someone shot in here?”
“Yeah, my dad told me two kids brought guns to school and started shooting people at lunch. I think the principal died or something. But it was a long time ago. Anyway, they were fucking crazy.”
I kept trying in vain to eat daintily while Nicole told me tales of the place where I had come to live. She told me about the rainbow stain in the shape of the Virgin Mary that had surfaced on an office-building window in Clearwater, about a town full of psychics and mediums, about alligators in people’s swimming pools and ghosts in an old hotel that was now a university building in Tampa. She said her dad was a huge nerd and liked to collect all kinds of things, including these bizarre Florida happenings. She said we could eat together from now on, and that I could go over to her house whenever I wanted.
That night, my mom and I dragged a beige leatherette sofa we had found on the curb of our street into our duplex. It was the only piece of furniture we now had, aside from a TV-dinner table my mom’s boss had given her. The previous night, the aunt we had come to stay with had yelled at my mom for not doing anything around the house, and we’d had to leave and move into the apartment we had found only a few days earlier. We had planned to move into it after we got some furniture. My aunt didn’t work and spent all day watching tennis matches on TV and sipping vodka out of an iced tea can and crying while showing me clothes she had worn when she was younger and thinner. I didn’t know what to do with all that, so I pretended I had something else I needed to do. I didn’t even have the guts to tell her she was being unfair to my mom, who worked two jobs. Eventually, I understood this was what made being friends with Nicole so easy. She expected nothing of me but what I could give her. She didn’t even expect me to talk.
The morning I met Nicole, before I’d left for school, my mom had given me a piece of paper with the address of the apartment we were moving into. It was one street over from my aunt’s place, a street full of duplexes just like ours, whitewashed, with overgrown front yards and chain-link fences and old cars parked outside. Ours was a 1975 Chrysler Cordoba a coworker had sold to my dad for five hundred dollars. It had no air-conditioning.
I told my mom about the Virgin on the window, and she said we could go see her when my dad felt better. I also told her about Nicole. She said she felt happy I had made a friend, and that it was good that she spoke English, and not Spanish, because my English would improve.
We dragged the sofa into the living room. Then I laid a sheet over it and claimed it as my bed for the night. My mom had already put some thick blankets and bed covers on the carpet of the master bedroom for my father, and that’s where she’d sleep too. The three of us drank iced tea and ate a pizza my mom had bought at the grocery store and heated up in the oven. The pizza was topped with tiny, spicy meatballs, which I hated, but the iced tea was sweet and cold.
After dinner, I finished what was left of my homework and lay on the couch, ready to sleep. The neighborhood felt wholly quiet in a way I wasn’t used to. At night, my neighborhood in Medellín was full of the sounds of passing cars and neighbors’ conversations and music and, even after people had gone to sleep, the steady whistle of the night watchman. Now all I heard was the hum of the air conditioner and the fridge, which made the apartment feel emptier.
In the middle of the night, I went back to the bedroom to ask my parents if I could spend the night on the floor with them instead. The couch, it turned out, was riddled with ants.
* * *
My dad’s accident happened three days before my aunt kicked us out and four days before I met Nicole. Only a couple of days after arriving in the States, he got a job at a recycling plant. He hadn’t even had time to visit the beautiful Clearwater Beach my aunt kept telling us about before he went to work. The day of the accident, one of the plant’s conveyer belts stopped wor
king, and my dad, who had been a mechanic back home, offered to take a look at it. He climbed onto the belt, which was about two stories high, and removed stuff that had gotten it stuck, at which point, one of his coworkers, who didn’t realize my dad was up there, turned on the belt, and my dad fell into the machine at the end of it. His whole body went through the grinder before anyone could help him. He broke no bones, but he bruised some ribs, and when my aunt brought him home from the ER, he looked like someone in one of the many stories I’d heard back home of people being given scopolamine and taken to various ATMs around the city until their bank accounts were empty and they didn’t know who or where they were. His dark hair was gray with debris and his eyes were bloodshot and his shredded work pants barely covered his scraped-up legs. Upon seeing him, a flood of heat and tears rose in me, and he said, “Don’t worry. Things can only get better now.”
I’d never seen him so frail. Even on the day his brother was murdered on a street corner for helping as a messenger for one of Medellín’s branches of the liberal party, at a time when being open about any kind of politics made you someone’s deathly enemy, my dad had been sturdy as he grieved.
Now the sight of him told me the opposite of what his mouth said, and that’s what I should have listened to. If I had, I could have protected myself at least, but now it was me, in high school after having attended college; my mom, working two housekeeping jobs that kept her away from home from six in the morning until ten at night; and my dad, trying to heal his bruised bones even as he slept on the floor. We shared an empty duplex, and we had no one but each other.
Or at least I thought so. My parents wanted me to think otherwise.
“How do you think we got this car?” my mom said. “And who helped us get this apartment?”
We were sitting on the carpet, sharing another pizza. This one had only vegetables on it, and I liked it much more than the one before.
“Well, it wasn’t our family,” I said.
“Don’t say that,” my dad chimed in. “If it weren’t for your aunt, we wouldn’t be here.”
“Yes, but that’s money you still owe,” I said. “And how are you going to pay her now?”
* * *
A few days after we moved into the new place, Nicole asked if I wanted to go to her house after school, and when I said I couldn’t because I had to go take care of my dad, she asked what was wrong. As best I could, I told her about my dad’s accident and our empty apartment, about how we didn’t have pots and pans for our kitchen and how all our money had gone into paying a deposit and first month’s rent on the duplex.
“I’ll come visit. I promise I won’t stay long. I’ll get out of your way if your dad isn’t feeling well.”
That afternoon she showed up at the duplex with two men. One was overweight, dark-haired, and pink-skinned, the other tall, lean, and blond. They both wore baggy jean shorts and black shirts, though the big man’s shirt had bright-yellow and orange flames all around the bottom. Nicole’s hair was in a high ponytail, and she wore olive-green shorts, a red crop top with spaghetti straps, and huge gold-hoop earrings.
“This is my dad,” she said, pointing at neither of them. “I told him about you guys, and he wanted to help. God knows we have enough fucking stuff.”
“Hi, I’m Jake,” the tall, thin one said, shaking my hand. “This is my friend Cory. We brought you a mattress and some other things. The mattress is good, I promise.”
“Okay, thank you,” I said.
We all walked to the driveway, where a small silver trailer was hitched to a giant black pickup truck. Nicole’s dad opened the trailer to reveal a mattress on which my parents would surely be able to sleep, and an array of chairs, tables, kitchen things, and even a twenty-inch TV.
“All that is for us?” I asked.
“We have an air mattress in there too,” Nicole’s dad said. “Nicole’s going to inflate it for you. Listen, you have to tell your dad about worker’s comp. He should have some money coming. Do you understand?”
My cheeks, already warm from the summer heat, grew warmer with tears. I nodded and thanked him. I could hardly speak from sobbing.
“Now girl,” Nicole’s dad said, “let’s not turn this into some sappy moment. I know that whenever Nicole needs you, you’re going to be there for her. This is purely selfish, okay?”
“Like everything else he does,” Nicole said, and gave him a taunting grimace.
He didn’t react, instead stepping into the trailer to push the mattress out. I thought that was so strange. I could count on one hand the number of times my parents had hit me, but saying something like that to them would have surely added to the count. And here was such a nice man doing kind things for us at her behest, and this was how she treated him. I stopped crying, mostly from feeling like I should behave extra obediently to make up for Nicole’s brattiness. I decided to please Jake, to be as invisible as I could while they brought stuff inside. I let myself feel his kindness and the warmth of hopefulness.
In less than an hour, Jake and Cory had taken everything inside and dumped the ant-riddled sofa back on the curb. I went to get some iced tea, only to find them sitting on it when I got back. The thick August air made my hair stick to the back of my neck and my clothes feel heavy, as if I’d been swimming in them. The men’s faces dripped with sweat, and they drank in big gulps and talked about other people they knew. Even though they looked so different, they seemed like the same person. They modeled each other the way children do their schoolmates. They both seemed good humored. They wore the same clothes and moved in the same jumpy, birdlike way. Both had patchy beards and wore chains that linked their wallets to their belt loops, but neither wore a belt. After they drank the tea, Jake took out a pack of Newports, gave one to Cory, and put one in his mouth. I could tell it was the same for everything else—they liked the same music, the same food and drink, the same women.
Nicole stood by the chain-link fence that separated our duplex from the one next to us, kicking the grass with her pristine sneakers and sending the gray sand that had been resting among the brown blades up in the air. This was how all the yards on our block looked—spotty, brown, equal parts grass and sand from the soft Florida soil.
“Why are you here and not there?” I asked Nicole.
“They don’t want me there. They keep whispering shit to each other, so I might as well not fucking interrupt them. They’re probably talking about my mom anyway. God, he’s such an asshole.”
“Your mom?”
“All they do is fight, and then they do shit like this—throw parties, volunteer at school, give away stuff. She hasn’t even slept in their bedroom for months. She calls him an idiot for all the nerdy, creepy shit he’s always been into that she knew about from the beginning. So then he brings Cory over and they stay up all night listening to music and watching their weird-ass movies at top volume and smoking weed. He yells at her for not letting him enjoy his life. They’re both assholes.”
“Don’t they care? When you call them that?”
She shrugged. “My mom’s threatening to move back to Oklahoma where my grandma lives. Anyway, if you ever want some weed, I can steal some of his.”
Nicole’s dad got up and crushed his cigarette stub, while Cory threw the iced tea cans in the garbage and shook off the ants that had managed to crawl up his legs. They both laughed softly at something one of them had said. I couldn’t imagine Jake yelling at anyone, much less his wife.
“Does your mom work on Saturday?” Nicole’s dad asked.
“No sir,” I said.
“If she’s going to take care of your dad, I’ll take you and Nicole to the beach.”
“If you let me drive, you wouldn’t have to take us anywhere,” Nicole said.
“You’re not going to drive this huge-ass truck, honey,” he said.
“Can you even reach the pedals?” Cody said, and laughed until he was out of breath. I didn’t know whether his face was flushed from the heat or the laughing.
>
“God, you two are such fucking dicks,” Nicole said, then climbed into the truck and slammed the door.
* * *
Indian Rocks Beach was one of the hottest places I’d ever been. There was nowhere to hide from the light here. Even in the late afternoon, the air smelled of sulfuric heat, just as it had on the day we landed in Miami after our flight from home. On that day, as we drove up that lonely four-hour stretch of highway to Largo, to the apartment we’d be kicked out of a month later, I could see waves of heat rising up from the pavement. Before Jake brought me and Nicole to this beach, I had only been to Clearwater Beach once, when my aunt had brought me and my mom to eat ice cream by the pier. Mine was promptly stolen away by a seagull. That had been when my mom didn’t have any job at all, and we all still pretended my aunt didn’t have a drinking problem. We played the game of getting along, while I slept until noon every day and told myself repeatedly I liked this quietude, hoping the day would come when I’d believe it.
Now, Nicole, her dad, and I sat on towels on top of sand coarsened by millions upon millions of shells, and I wondered why the only people in the water were parents with their young children. Otherwise, we were surrounded by a few older people, often sitting in pairs on beach chairs and reading magazines or thick paperback novels. Nicole’s dad said all of them lived in the condos that lined the shore behind us, their pastel facades a rainbow.
“Most of them only come in the colder months, so a lot of those apartments are empty now,” he said. “It gets pretty cold up north. But some of them move down here for good. I’d like to own one of these myself when I get older.”
I wondered how anyone could afford these beachfront properties in the first place, let alone as second, winter homes. I couldn’t understand how I was here now, surrounded by luxuries I’d seen in movies, when only a few months ago our neighbors had pooled money so we could pay our power bill, so my mother could cook dinner and I didn’t have to do my homework by candlelight. It was hard to understand how these places were within reach now, but I still had to wonder whether we’d make rent next month.
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