Red Road

by Wiltz, Jenni

  At the other end of the hall, a group of four cholas turned the corner, walking shoulder to shoulder. The tallest walked in the middle, dressed in a red T-shirt and jeans that puddled over her shoes. Her lipstick looked like brewed coffee. When she saw Emma, she put her hand in her pocket and held it there.

  They’re coming, her dad had said. They found us.

  But who was coming? And when? Were they just supposed to hide for the rest of their lives? She remembered her dad’s hands as he reached out for the sliding glass door, fingers spread wide in panic, knuckles arched in desperation. I want to understand, she thought. If she did, the grip of anger tightening her heart might dissolve. But was it even possible? Every time Mr. Parker tried to tell them about Iraq, he took off his glasses and wiped his eyes first. “The sand,” he said, “it sticks to you like mud. When you go through a sandstorm, it chokes you, and the choke feels like—” But he never told them. “Pray you never feel it,” he said instead.

  But I need to feel it, she thought. I want to understand.

  Emma stepped into the center of the hallway. All four cholas shuffled to a stop in front of her. Someone’s tennis shoes shrieked against the dirty linoleum. “What the fuck,” one of the shorter girls said.

  “Move,” the tallest said, her eyes focused somewhere over Emma’s shoulder.

  “No, she said. A drop of sweat slid for home into the band of her bra.

  “You’ll move.” The tall chola shoved Emma’s shoulder, launching her backward a few steps. “See?”

  The three other girls laughed and hissed.

  Now her armpits were wet, and the backs of her knees. She looked at the tall chola. The girl’s eyes would be pretty even without the layers of black eyeliner and mascara. I’m sorry, she thought as she stepped into the center of the hallway. “I won’t move,” she said.

  “What is this?” The tall chola tilted her head. “You wanna thrown down? Right here?”

  “Bitch is crazy,” one of the other girls said.

  “Hella disrespect,” said a third.

  “For the last time,” the tall chola said. “Move.”

  “No. Not for you.”

  “It’s on,” one of the other girls said. “Do it.”

  “Not for me?” The tall chola’s eyes glittered like black sequins. “You don’t even know me, bitch. But now you will.”

  She reached for Emma’s hair. Pain sizzled across Emma’s scalp as her head snapped sideways. The girl’s leg swept a circle beneath her, knocking her feet out from under her. Emma hit the ground hip first, a shock wave forcing all breath from her lungs. Her body curled into a fetal position on instinct.

  “Fight!” one of the kids in front of the Spanish class cried. “Fight!” Emma heard the squeal of sneakers on linoleum as almost every student within shouting range converged on the hallway.

  Something big and heavy hit her in the side. A foot, she thought.

  The floor smelled like rubber. She pressed her face into it and held her breath.

  Another heavy thing hit her where her arms were crossed, over her chest. She closed her eyes.

  Something long and thin raked across her left cheek.

  I want to understand, she thought.

  Then a deep male voice interrupted everything. “Break it up!” she heard. Then, closer, “Hold her.”

  “Don’t touch me! I’ll fucking kill you!”

  “I said hold her.”

  Emma let out her breath. It blew dust and sand across the floor, onto the shoe of the man bending over her. She lifted her head and the red jacket of an assistant principal flooded her field of vision. The nametag on his jacket said Assistant Principal Gallegos. “Can you stand up?” he asked.

  Emma released her arms and found them shaking. So were her legs, once she unfolded them from her fetal position. She pushed her palms to the filthy floor and pressed herself into a sitting position.

  “All the way.” Gallegos yanked her to her feet, keeping one hand clenched around her upper arm. She looked down at his knuckles, dotted with thick black hair.

  “Emma?”

  She looked up and saw Via standing behind the assistant principal. Mr. Parker was there, too, holding out his arms to keep the three other cholas from joining the fight. He looked worried, his eyebrows floating above the rim of his glasses.

  Via ducked beneath Gallegos’s outstretched arm. “What happened?”

  Gallegos dropped his arm, forcing Via back. “Come on, you’re going to the office.”

  A second assistant principal held the tall chola’s arms behind her back. “Are you gonna behave?” he asked.

  She smiled and licked her lips. “Yeah, I’ll behave.”

  Gallegos pointed down the hallway. “Get her out of here.” The pair of them obeyed, the girl turning back to smile at her friends and mouth you fucking bitch to Emma. “I’ve never seen you before,” Gallegos said. “Are you new here?”

  “Junior,” Emma croaked.

  “Well, the nurse will clean you up and then I’ll take you to the principal.” He gave her a gentle push with his hand and she obeyed. Her hip hurt, and her back and her side. But she didn’t see any blood on the floor beneath her. When do I know if it worked? she thought.

  The crowd of students gathered to watch the fight parted like the Red Sea for Assistant Principal Gallegos. He kept one warm hand on her shoulder to pilot her around the corner, back to the main hallway.

  As Gallegos stepped in front to open the main office’s door, Dan came around the corner from the chem hallway. He stopped dead, eyes wide. “Emma!”

  “Keep moving,” Gallegos said, ushering her inside and closing the door behind them.

  Dan dashed to the window and pressed both hands to the glass, eyes traveling from Gallegos to her face to the chola already sitting on the bench in front of the principal’s office. His mouth hung open, but his lips never shaped a word.

  Emma let her eyes float back up to his. Wide and bright, they glowed like wet morning grass. I’m sorry, she mouthed.

  He stood, hands pressed to the glass, until Gallegos took her into the nurse’s office and closed the door behind them.

  • • •

  “Three seconds. Three. That’s how lucky you are.” Her mom sat across from her in the counselors’ office, the same room Kobilinski had taken her to a few days ago. Under the artificial light, her mom’s skin looked yellow instead of blue.

  Emma pressed her cheek to her shoulder, feeling the strange rub of sweater against plastic. The nurse had put a rectangular bandage on her cheek where the other girl scratched her. “How is that lucky?”

  “Let’s get out of here, and then I’ll deal with you.”

  Emma frowned. “Out?”

  “The principal is coming to talk to us first.”

  Right on cue, Principal Brooks opened the door. His loosened tie lay crooked beneath his neck like a custom-striped noose. “Mrs. West?” he said, flipping open the file in his hand.

  “I am Mrs. West.” Her mom used her back-of-the-throat voice, the one she used with deliverymen and repairmen.

  “I understand this is your daughter’s first offense?”

  “My daughter is a model student, and if that’s her record you’re looking at, you’ll know she’s the least of your problems right now.”

  Principal Brooks pulled out a chair between her and her mom and sat down facing her. “Emma, care to tell me what happened out there?”

  Emma looked at the cracked skin on the backs of his hands. It flaked like dandruff, centering on the veins visible beneath his skin. How could someone whose worst problem was dry skin understand how she felt when she looked at her dad’s sopping plum eye? “I always move,” she said. “They never move for anyone, and I wanted them to see me, just once.”

  “Who are ‘they’?”

  Her
mother coughed, but Emma ignored her warning. “The cholas.”

  “We’ve had some trouble lately,” her mom said. “My husband was attacked by gang members, and I don’t think Emma knows how to deal with that.”

  Principal Brooks shifted in his seat, facing her mother instead of her. “Are you saying the situation at home is the reason for her behavior?”

  Her mom flushed in red blotches that traveled from beneath the neck of her cardigan to her cheeks. “The situation at home is one no college-bound teenage girl should have to deal with. But it exists, through no fault of her own.”

  “Regardless of what prompted it, she knows better.” He glanced back at the folder. “Assistant Principal Gallegos noted that he broke up the fight three seconds before the bell rang. That being the case, I am going to suspend your daughter for one day. She can come back tomorrow.”

  “You can’t do that. It’ll go on her record.”

  “Ma’am, I can’t do anything about that.”

  “She laid there and let them hit her without fighting back! Is that worthy of a suspension in your eyes?”

  “I have three witnesses who said she pushed the other girl.”

  The other cholas, Emma thought.

  “Emma wouldn’t do that. She’s never hurt anyone in her life.”

  Principal Brooks turned his wrist to look at a big gold watch. “Why don’t you talk about this at home? Emma needs to leave school grounds immediately.”

  Her mom’s eyes filled with tears. “Please, you don’t understand. Isn’t there anything we can do? She’ll need scholarships. She needs a clean record.”

  “Good day, Mrs. West.” He rose from his chair. “Emma, you may return to first period tomorrow morning.”

  “What kind of school are you running? Who punishes an innocent girl for being beaten up?”

  Principal Brooks held the door open and stood next to it, waiting to usher them out. Emma’s mom held her chin high, with all the fire of hell in her eyes. “I’ll be writing to the school board. And the superintendent. And anyone else who cares about the good kids in this school system.”

  Emma slipped her sweaty palm into her mom’s and squeezed it hard.

  • • •

  She dropped her backpack at the foot of the staircase. She ached in places she’d never felt before: the outside of her elbow, the curve of her waist. She slipped past her mom into the downstairs bathroom and closed the door, ripping off the bandage the nurse had put on. Turning her head, she saw two red lines bisect her cheek, thin as a fine-point Sharpie. The light streaming through the frosted bathroom window tinted her like an Instagram filter. She forced a smile, feeling the angry tear of tissue as she separated cells that had started to cleave together again. She knew she was supposed to feel bad, like she’d lost something, but she didn’t. She’d never seen the glow of morning light in the downstairs bathroom before.

  When she opened the door, she saw her mom leaning on the kitchen island with her elbows, both palms covering her face. At the sound of the bathroom door, she stood up straight and wiped her index fingers beneath her eyes. “Emma, you can’t keep doing this.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Trying to fix things. Taking your father outside. Getting in fights at school. It’s not helping.”

  “Nobody else is even trying.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Emma frowned. “I’m in school, and I’m the one who called the police to check on Dad’s truck. How messed up is that?”

  “I handled it. You’re just making things worse.”

  “Dad can’t see, he hasn’t been to a doctor, and now he won’t even go outside. What about that did you handle?”

  Her mom’s lower lip quivered. “It’s on your record, Emma.”

  “I’m just a report card to you, aren’t I? I could have a broken rib, but who gives a crap as long as Harvard doesn’t know how I got it?”

  “It’s your future. You need to care about that.”

  “Maybe there’s something I care about more.”

  “There is nothing I care about more.” Her mom’s eyes flashed with the force of a falling star, gravity pulling its pale fire into the atmosphere. “Go upstairs. I’ll tell your father you came home sick.”

  • • •

  The computer’s glowing screen would tell her mom she was still awake, but Emma didn’t care. She was convinced that nothing short of a pool of blood under the door would make her mom look her in the eye again that day. She’d eaten her squished sack lunch in her room at noon. At six, Mattie had come up with a tray. “I have to go back downstairs,” her sister said. “I’m not supposed to stay.”

  “I know. It’s okay, Matt.”

  Her sister’s wide blue eyes blinked once. “Did you really fight someone?”

  “Is that what Mom said?”

  “Kayla’s older sister texted her. She asked me in fifth period.”

  “I didn’t fight. Maybe I should have.”

  “Did they hurt you?”

  “A little.”

  “You’re the smart one, you know.”

  “Mom already gave me the lecture.”

  “But you won’t listen if it comes from her.”

  Emma looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t listen to anyone. Ever.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It is. Maybe that’s the one thing you don’t already know.”

  “So who should I listen to, Matt?”

  “Until today, I would have said you.” Mattie set the tray on the foot of Emma’s bed and closed the door behind her.

  Emma’s breath caught like she’d been slapped. Now there was one more person she’d failed to make understand. First Rachel and Via, then her mom, then Elvira, now Mattie. They all asked her for answers, until they didn’t like what they heard. Then they wanted her to be quiet and go away.

  “Goddamn it,” she said, leaving her desk and crouching at the foot of her bed. The tray held a dinner plate with a small pile of spaghetti and a crust of French bread, along with a small glass of milk. The crust of bread tasted better than every bite of spaghetti. When she finished, she put the tray on the floor and went back to her desk.

  Four hours later, Emma felt the sharp pulse of a vein behind her eyes. She looked up from her chem homework, something about the reversible reaction of dissolving a solute in a solution. The headache had been there for at least an hour, but she managed to ignore it until it started tapping on her eyeball. “No one’s home,” she groaned. “Go away.”

  All night, she’d listened to the noise of movement and motion in the house: floors creaking, water pipes rushing, the plastic rumble of the dishwasher’s top rack being rolled out. The neighbor’s Corolla sputtered home and parked across the street. Someone walked a yippy dog. A kid rode by on a bike with noisemakers on its spokes.

  She was the only one who wasn’t making noise.

  She pinched the blinds apart to look down at the street below. What if the happiest she’d ever be was walking a small dog after work, feeling it pull on the leash while she held her hand over her eyes to shield them from the thick fog? She thought about how long it would take for her to be that person. Five years—one more of high school and four of college. She didn’t get to make a single selfish choice for the next five years. Instead, she’d get an IV drip full of stress, a third-world nation’s worth of student loan debt, and the burden of paying it all back while finding a place to live and a job that didn’t make her feel like Edward Norton in Fight Club. And she hated Fight Club, because it was a lie, a trick, a cheat.

  She shoved her chem book off her tiny desk and turned on her computer instead. As soon as the hard drive stopped grinding, she signed into chat. Immediately, Redhead_Rachel messaged her.

  Redhead_Rachel: Emma!! Is that you? You okay?


  BookGirl14: Fine. My head hurts.

  Redhead_Rachel: How long are you suspended?

  BookGirl14: It’s already over. I can come back tomorrow.

  Redhead_Rachel: What happened? Did you really swing at that girl?

  BookGirl14: No. I wish I did.

  Redhead_Rachel: I’m glad you didn’t. You know what they say. Violence isn’t the answer.

  BookGirl14: Tell that to the people who beat up my dad.

  Redhead_Rachel: I can talk to my dad for you.

  BookGirl14: Why?

  Redhead_Rachel: So you can go to prom. You can’t go if you have a suspension, remember.

  BookGirl14: I’m not going to the prom.

  Redhead_Rachel: Dan looked miserable in chemistry. Just so you know.

  BookGirl14: When did your mom leave your dad?

  Redhead_Rachel: What does that have to do with anything?

  BookGirl14: When?

  Redhead_Rachel: October 12.

  BookGirl14: Would you have given a shit if prom happened on October 13?

  Redhead_Rachel: Emma, you’re doing it again.

  BookGirl14: What?

  Redhead_Rachel: Being weird. Angry.

  Emma wanted to type sorry not sorry, but figured she’d caused enough trouble for one day. She imagined a character, just like her, who wanted to make everyone happy. What would Jesus type? I’ll get better, she wrote.

  Then, smiling, I want to get better.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Tuesday, April 15

  Emma walked into the locker room with her backpack slung over both shoulders instead of just one. Her body ached too much to let all that weight sit awkwardly on one side. She’d tapped her elbow against the shower door that morning and felt a kick of pain shoot up her right arm. Although her mom didn’t say anything in the car, Emma felt her eyes roving over her body, looking at the scratches on her cheek (already fading), analyzing her movements to see if she was really hurt (a bit late). Her dad hadn’t questioned the story about her being sick, and she had no idea how her mom explained the scratches. Maybe he never even asked.

  Emma looked down at her watch. 7:51 a.m.