Red Road

by Wiltz, Jenni

  She snatched them up to make sure her eyes hadn’t deceived her. A-.

  “MacLee-odd.” Mr. Lopez mispronounced Dan’s name and dropped his paper without ceremony. Dan grabbed it up faster than she had.

  “All right,” he said, spinning in his seat to face her. “On the count of three.”

  Emma nodded.

  “One, two, three.”

  She held up her test and peeked around it. He held up a stone-cold B+.

  “Highlander,” his water polo teammate hissed. “What’d you get?”

  Dan turned his test sideways to show him. “Shit, man, you kicked my ass,” the boy said.

  “And she kicked mine,” Dan said, pointing at Emma.

  Emma grinned. She couldn’t help it. She’d only scored higher than Dan on three quizzes the whole year. One on balancing chemical equations, one on orbital diagrams, and one on wave mechanics. On everything else, he smoked her like a salmon. Something in the universe was on her side after all. She was going to get an A in chemistry, she was going to go see Dan’s water polo match, and friends or not, she was going to go to the prom.

  Chapter Ten

  Tuesday, April 1

  “Hey, Em,” Mattie said. “What does ‘forsooth’ mean?” The two of them sat at the dining room table, working on homework before dinner. Emma had Lonesome Dove open in front of her, while Mattie struggled with Romeo and Juliet. At the end of the table sat today’s offering from Martin Rodriguez: a stuffed bunny with a blue ribbon around its neck.

  “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s like saying ‘for real.’”

  “Then why do they say it?” Mattie tossed down the paperback. “This sucks.”

  Emma picked up the book. “Is this where you were?” Mattie nodded and she glanced at the scene. “Okay, right here, this is Juliet’s dad asking where she is.”

  “Wait,” Mattie said, scooting her chair next to Emma’s. As Mattie leaned over her shoulder, Emma smelled something heavy and tropical—their coconut conditioner. She didn’t understand why it clung to Mattie’s hair but deserted hers five minutes after she hung up her wet shower towel. If there weren’t baby pictures to prove it, she would think either she or Mattie was adopted. “Okay, now,” Mattie said.

  Emma ran her finger along the text as she translated. “Juliet’s dad asks if she’s gone to see Father Laurence. He says church will do her good because she’s been misbehaving lately. Then Juliet comes back, and says she’s sorry for acting up. She says she’ll behave from here on out.”

  Mattie frowned. “But she’s lying.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She already took the sleeping potion from Friar Laurence. She doesn’t care what her dad wants her to do.”

  “See, you understand more than you think.”

  “Why can’t they just say what they mean?”

  “Because Shakespeare had to sell tickets.” Emma pointed at the fluffy rabbit perched on Mattie’s placemat. “What did you name it?”

  “Bunnicula.”

  Emma smiled. “That’s a good name.”

  In six weeks, Mattie would graduate eighth grade. Next year, they’d be at the same school. She hoped her classification as a socially toxic nerd wouldn’t destroy Mattie’s popularity. In middle school, smart kids were tolerated because you never knew who the next doctor, lawyer, sheriff, or president might be. By high school, most of that hope and goodwill had been erased.

  She turned back to Lonesome Dove, wishing the characters were a bit more lonesome to cut down on the number of pages she had to read. When she heard her dad’s truck pull into the driveway, she dog-eared her page and slammed the book shut.

  “What’s for dinner?” her dad asked as he opened the front door. “I’m starving.”

  “I saw cauliflower,” Mattie said. “And Mom says don’t say ‘starving.’ ”

  “Cauliflower. Yuck.”

  Emma glanced at a measuring cup of orange liquid sitting on the counter. “With cheese.”

  “That’s more like it.” He gripped the doorframe and used his toe to squeeze off his left shoe, then his right. “I’m going to wash up.”

  “Don’t take long,” her mom said. “The food’s nice and hot.” She pulled a glass baking dish from the oven. Four chicken breasts, covered with bread crumbs, hissed and sizzled as she set the dish on a trivet.

  While her mom served up, Emma watched the dark-skinned news reporter on TV stand on a street corner, crime scene tape spun like a spiderweb behind him. When the video rolled, a Mexican woman sobbed and pointed to a chain-link fence surrounding a yard with dead grass and a garden hose so old it looked like a shed snakeskin.

  The mug shot of a Mexican boy flashed onto the screen, his hair gelled stiffer than meringue. Tattoos covered his neck with the thick stems and fine arcs of Old English calligraphy. His black eyes were empty. Whatever he had been arrested for, he felt no regret.

  The boy’s name was Jesus. Emma didn’t understand why Mexican mothers named their boys after the son of God. All it did was set them up for failure.

  In the background, she heard her dad’s footsteps pound down the stairs. His eyes went straight to the chain-link yard on TV. He sucked in his breath and balled his fists. Emma felt the movement in her bones, shearing through the muscle and tissue like a shock wave. He knew that lawn, that house, that corner, and he knew they meant danger. “Dad,” she whispered.

  “Turn it off,” her mom snapped. “Now.”

  Emma reached for the remote and pressed the big green power button.

  “Eat,” her mom said. As they sat down, Emma’s stomach growled, drowning in enzymes produced by hunger and fear. The cheese on her cauliflower rolled down the stalk and pooled against the chicken breast.

  They slurred their way through grace, unable to adjust the rhythm to get it over with any faster. When it was over, her dad tucked his paper napkin into the collar of his dress shirt. He forked a piece of cauliflower and a drop of stoplight-yellow cheese splattered onto his sleeve.

  “Roger,” her mom sighed.

  She stared at him, performing a silent count to five. Then she went to the sink, held a corner of the sponge under a dribble from the tap, and dabbed at the stain. Her dad sat, motionless, while she worked.

  Emma looked away. Her mom hated stains. She hated scratches on the hardwood floor. She hated juice glasses being put on the right side of the top dishwasher shelf instead of the left.

  “So,” her dad said. “What did you guys do in school today?”

  I fell in love, Emma thought. “I got an A- on my chem test.”

  “I knew you could do it.” He raised his hand to give her a high five. More words crept up from the pit of her stomach, temporarily suspended in the blackness behind her throat. They were all there, jumbled like Scrabble tiles, but she couldn’t sort them out in time. Boy, test, Dan, pool, car. She coughed and reached for her milk.

  “How about you, Matt?”

  “We did Act IV, Scene I of Romeo and Juliet in class.”

  “Was it fun?”

  “No.”

  “I never really understood Shakespeare.”

  “Forsooth,” Mattie said.

  Emma tried to think of another antiquated word or phrase to answer with, but the only thing that popped into her mind was, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. She kept her mouth shut.

  Mattie reached for the dish of peas. “How was work, Dad?”

  “Fine.” He shoveled a forkful of chicken into his mouth.

  Her mom sliced her chicken breast into three rows, four bites each. “Did you ask for a transfer?”

  “Mshgm.”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Mattie said. “Even I know that.”

  “He knows it, too.” Her mom set her knife against the plate and the diamond in her ring caug
ht the light, flashing blue and orange and silver, every color co-existing in one simple shape.

  Emma felt the mood begin to slide into something unstable, a house on stilts on a cliff in the rain. She did the only thing she could think of to prop it up. “I might need the car on Saturday.”

  “For what?” her mom asked.

  “School stuff.”

  “What school stuff?”

  “A friend asked me to go to the water polo match.”

  “Rachel?”

  “No.” She knew she was going about this all wrong. Her mom had already offered money for a prom dress, which meant she was okay with the idea of there being someone to go with. But what if she insisted on meeting Dan first? What if Dan somehow didn’t meet expectations? “Via has a crush on this guy on the water polo team. She wants to see a game, but her mom won’t let her go unless she brings one of the girls with her.”

  “Water polo?” her father asked. “When I was in high school, we only had football, basketball, and softball.”

  Mattie smiled. “Back in the ice age?”

  “Yeah, after we carved the football out of stone.”

  Emma reached for her glass. “So it’s cool if I go?”

  “I suppose,” her mom said. “It’s just at school?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, don’t forget to call if you’ll be later than noon. Via has a phone?”

  “Everyone has a phone, Mom.” Emma looked down at her chicken breast. Some of the bread crumbs lodged in a small depression had turned charcoal black. She cut into the chicken and ate all the parts with carbonized crumbs, wondering if that’s what it felt like to swallow her own soul.

  • • •

  After dinner, Emma took Lonesome Dove to the ancient hide-a-bed sofa in the living room. She was only three hundred pages into the book, with a ten-page paper due next Friday. Percival Everett would be disappointed in her if she resorted to Wikipedia or SparkNotes. That meant averaging almost two hundred pages a night for the next few nights.

  Seventy pages later, she heard a car pull into the driveway. She glanced out the narrow window next to the front door and saw a blue Kia kill its headlights. There was no sound from the family room except the familiar good-cop-bad-cop interrogation of a detective show, which meant her mom was probably asleep already.

  Emma slipped out the door, closing it gently behind her. The porch light’s motion detector clicked on as soon as she stepped onto the doormat.

  “Rachel? ” she said, walking out to the driveway. “Is that you?”

  Her friend opened the car door. Still clothed in the yellow polo and khaki shorts of the Falafel Hut, she shook her hair out of its ponytail. “Sorry I didn’t call first. I thought you might not answer after earlier.”

  “I would answer.”

  “I wanted to apologize for what happened earlier, when Via said she didn’t know what Dan saw in you, or that you’d get communicable diseases from holding his hand.” Rachel picked up a strand of hair and wound it around her index finger. Her perfect skin reflected milk-white in the moonlight. “I don’t think she knows how rude she was.”

  “Via,” Emma repeated. “Right.”

  She looked up at her bedroom window, above the garage. Her door was open, and she saw the hall light flick on. Mattie must be headed to bed. Mattie, who had trouble with Shakespeare because people couldn’t just say what they meant.

  She took a deep breath and looked straight into Rachel’s eyes. “Why don’t you ever date anyone except right before a dance?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You do. We all do.”

  Rachel looked toward the street, her hands pressing against the body of her car.

  “You could date anyone, any time you wanted. I might finally have a chance to date one person. In three years, that’s all I’ve ever had.”

  Rachel looked past Emma’s shoulder to the front door. “Is there a question in there somewhere?”

  “You have everything that matters in high school.”

  “And you have everything that matters in real life,” Rachel snapped, flinging open the car door. “I was just trying to be nice.”

  Say it, Emma thought. Tell her what her dad saw in that parking lot.

  Rachel turned the key in her ignition and Emma felt her throat close up. Even if she told Rachel what she saw, it would somehow end up being her fault. Rachel would still drive away and be angry tomorrow.

  Emma let her go.

  Rachel rolled through the stop sign at the end of the block, brake lights flashing like Morse code. A breeze shook the elm tree’s new leaves above her. In the moonlight, Emma saw a dozen hairline cracks in the driveway, spreading toward the lawn with long, spidery roots.

  Chapter Eleven

  Wednesday, April 2

  Mariachi trumpets wailed through the courtyard speakers, punctuated by the thump of an accordion. Three groups of students were painting Cinco de Mayo murals on the glass wall of the southeast corridor. Every year, the student body voted on a winner and the principal awarded prize ribbons during a lunchtime ceremony.

  The MEChA club had the window closest to Emma’s table. Ana Gonzales, a girl Emma recognized from freshman year typing class, stood on a ladder outlining an enormous Mexican flag waving behind an Aztec head in profile. She had a piece of paper folded in her back pocket and pulled it out every few minutes to make sure she was drawing it right.

  Emma turned to look at the other panels. One had an Aztec pyramid and a man holding an unconscious woman in his arms. She’d seen this motif on Mexican boys’ T-shirts before. The unconscious woman was always beautiful, with dark, tumbling hair and enormous breasts about to fall out of her top. Most of the time she was dressed like a cavewoman, in tattered animal skins or rags.

  The last group was also sketching out the Mexican flag. They were slower than the other groups, so it was impossible to tell what else they had planned. She hoped they had more than a flag up their sleeves if they wanted to beat Ana’s group.

  Emma pushed back her sleeve to look at her watch. There were still fifteen minutes left in morning break. On the bench beside her, Rachel crammed for a Spanish quiz. She hadn’t said a word to Emma all morning. Via either didn’t notice or preferred not to comment. Emma sighed and looked back to Ana’s Aztec pyramid. She wondered if Ana had ever seen the real thing. Mexico was so close—not like Sweden or Scotland or any of the other places in her family tree.

  “Via, do you ever want to go to Africa?”

  Via put down her midmorning snack, a corn dog from the cafeteria’s express window. “Why do people say ‘Africa’ instead of the name of a country? Africa is a big fucking place.”

  “Ethiopia, then. Don’t you want to see where your dad came from?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “Before my parents split up, I remember my dad taking a rug out onto the balcony five times a day.” Via dredged her corn dog in a combination of ketchup, mustard, and hot sauce. “I thought he was doing yoga.”

  Rachel looked up from her notes, a finger holding her place on the page. “What does that have to do with it?”

  “He also kept a machete under the driver’s seat of the car.” Via put the corn dog down and looked out at the courtyard. Thick black lashes scraped her high cheekbones as she blinked. “I can’t go somewhere people pray five times a day to a god who lets so many bad things happen that you can’t leave the house without a machete.”

  “What kind of bad things?” Emma asked.

  Via held up her right index finger. Emma and Rachel leaned forward to see the small white line carved across her fingerprint. “If I ever go missing, that’s how you’ll find me.”

  Emma couldn’t imagine a place where people hacked at each other with sharpened blades to get what they wanted.
“What happened?”

  “My dad happened. Can we change the fucking subject?” Via picked up her corn dog and pointed it at Rachel. “What happened to your jailbird boyfriend?”

  “Suspended,” Rachel said. “My dad’s still working on it.”

  “Rewriting school rules for your personal convenience?”

  Rachel held up a hank of hair and nearly crossed her eyes inspecting it for split ends. “Lawyers don’t actually have to do anything. They just have to threaten to do it.”

  “Can he get an injunction to keep sophomores out of the prom? Or outlaw hand-holding on campus?”

  “We weren’t holding hands,” Emma said. “We were shaking to seal a bet.”

  “Who won?”

  “He did. I have to go to his water polo match on Saturday.”

  Via paused in mid-bite. “Are you fucking kidding me? You made me go to the afternoon showing of that Sundance documentary because you couldn’t get out of bed for the matinee.”

  “I made you go to the afternoon showing because it was a Sundance documentary.”

  “So you’ll change your routine for a guy, but not for your best friend?”

  That was just a movie, Emma wanted to say. This is my life.

  Freshman year, when Via crowed over her date with Will Decker, Emma drowned her admittedly faint hopes of doing the same and gnashed out a smile as Via described their fevered groping in a dark movie theater. When Will dumped Via, Emma hugged her and called Will an asshole even though he probably wasn’t. She never talked to him again and didn’t look at another boy for six months. “How would you know what I changed for you?”

  “Maybe you do belong in a church.” Via flung her backpack over her shoulder and picked up her half-eaten corn dog. “You sure as shit think you’re holier-than-thou.”

  Emma watched her storm off, feeling the same numbness she had when Rachel drove away last night. She knew she should feel something. A thesaurus’s worth of emotions flew through her head (shame, anger, regret, resentment), but none of them touched her heart. A grotesque gulp of laughter crawled its way out of her throat.