by LJ Alonge
“You’re like your mother,” Papá once told me. I shook my head thinking it was just another one of his cryptic sayings. Mamá’s mother was a painter, and Mamá’s mother’s mother painted Myrtle Gonzalez’s official portrait. I’m supposed to be like Papá, gold chain peeking out from my collar, talking out of the side of my mouth, enough game to charm a snake.
CHAPTER 4
EMERGENCY
We have a play-in game at JamLand in a few weeks. If we win, we’re in an indoor league for the rest of the summer. Sponsorships, shoes, the whole nine. We’d never have to worry about gear again, or some fools snatching our court. Maybe a game on local access every now and then.
Coach Wise says this kind of opportunity doesn’t come around all that often. All morning we’ve been running up Cleveland Cascade, one miserable, crumbling step after another, until we get to the top. On nice days there’s a sweet view of Lake Merritt, all the glittering traffic and silvery water and the playground and the fountain and the dog walkers and the little foot-powered boats. It’s usually real pretty, except today I’m hunched over, breathing in big gulps of cool, stinging air, trying not to throw up. Somehow we seem to run way more than we hoop. I must’ve told Coach Wise a thousand times that this ain’t a track team. I stand up to shoot him a dirty look.
“Perhaps you should’ve looked at the last team like that!” he says. He makes a big show of taking a deep gulp of fresh air and blows his stupid whistle.
We run in a line down the steps, past the dog walkers and joggers and pairs of chatty old ladies. You have to look out for the people but you can’t forget about the branches and rocks in the path, either. The stairs are tiny, just big enough for a single foot. It takes a whole lot of finesse: One misstep and you’ll go face-first into a slab of concrete. But the end is in sight, one last flight. I try to speed up to get things over with when something catches my foot. Suddenly I’m at the bottom of the stairs and my whole body is aching, especially my ankle. My ankle: It feels like someone’s holding a hot knife to it, stabbing it in a thousand places. Bolts of fire shoot up my leg when I move it even a little. I don’t realize I’m biting my lip until I taste the blood in my mouth. The whole team surrounds me, saying things I can’t hear.
Everything that happens next is a blur: Coach Wise and Justin carrying me; my ankle hanging out of a truck window; my head in Janae’s lap, her wiping the sweat off of my face with her shirt. Then we’re in an emergency room, where it’s so packed there’s only one seat left, next to a guy with a bloody bandage wrapped around his throat. He smokes the butt of a cigarette and blows the smoke into his shirt. An angry nurse keeps coming over to tell him he has to put it out.
“Doesn’t even hurt,” he says, pointing to his bandage. “Looks worse than it is.”
He looks down at my ankle. It’s the size of a football, with blue and purple bruising around the bone. He asks how I hurt it.
I motion like I’m shooting a jumper.
“You? Basketball?” He laughs so hard that the bloody bandage around his neck starts to slip off. “You see something new every day.”
An hour later the nurse says it’s a sprain, wraps it up in a bandage, and sends me on my way with some ice and Advil.
“Looks pretty gnarly,” she says, eyeing the bruise admiringly. Her shirt is covered in happy-face stickers. After she wraps my ankle, she grabs a Sharpie and draws a smiley face on the tape. “Needs two or three weeks, at least.”
“Three weeks?”
“You saw that bruising? That’s your ligament saying ‘I’ve been stretched beyond my usual range of motion! Please rest me so I can be happy!’ Have a nice day!”
I’ve been lying in Papá’s spot on the couch, my foot propped on a stack of old pillows. When you’re hurt or sick in this house, everyone has to be nice to you. Those are the rules. Mamá makes sure I always have some ice packs nearby and rewraps my ankle every morning before she starts painting. Papá jokes about all the times he milked an injury to get out of pulling weeds in the summer. It kills him that I’m hogging his new TV to play video games, but he can’t say anything. Tomás follows me when I get up to go to the bathroom. He pretends to limp, his whole leg wrapped mummy-style in toilet paper. The way they’re treating me, I’m thinking I should get hurt more often.
It’s amazing how much people can talk when they know you got to listen. Every few days the team comes by with news. When Coach Wise isn’t here, they sit on the floor and pick at the rug and complain about him, how he’s running them to death and he takes everything too seriously. When Coach Wise comes alone, he complains about them, how they’re not taking the challenges of indoor ball seriously.
And then Officer Appleby stops in with a gift.
“Frank,” he says, “my opinion is always: Once one door closes, another opens. While you may be out of commission basketball-wise, you’re still free to develop other skills.”
It’s a journal. The front cover has a pen dripping tiny drops of ink. Inside the front cover it says THERE IS NO GREATER AGONY THAN BEARING AN UNTOLD STORY INSIDE YOU. Jesus.
I ask him what I’m supposed to do with it, since school’s out and I have no writing assignments.
“Use it to spend some quality time with yourself,” Officer Appleby says. He pulls out a matching journal and flips through pages full of neat cursive. “Learn how to notice things. Tell stories. Write jokes. Or secrets. Write letters to your friends. Whatever your heart desires.” He says he’ll be checking my progress every few days, just to see if I’m doing things right.
He wants me to notice things? When you’re trying to walk out of the Apple Store with an iPhone at the bottom of your backpack, you learn how to notice things real fast. I’m already a pro at that.
Journal #1
I don’t know what to write. My favorite food is pistachio gelato. My favorite movie is Scarface because that’s a dude who’s about his money. My favorite color is green. My favorite subject is math. My favorite animal is the whale shark.
I hate crabs, Pokémon, and people who talk with their hands.
Justin Shaw is my best friend. He’s known me the longest. We got secrets I wouldn’t even write here.
Nobody thinks I have deep thoughts, but I do. The judge in my last case barely even looked at me. Didn’t even hear me out. He said I’ve shown a “pattern of stupid decision making” so it was no surprise that I was standing there in front of him. He basically called me stupid. Like I never got an A in math or “mugwump” on Jeopardy! before.
People think that because they got a position that’s higher than yours they’re better than you. That’s what gets me the most. I’m supposed to bow down to somebody just because they got a position? They never made no mistakes? Their shit don’t stink?
I want to get rich. If I was rich, I wouldn’t even spend all the money on myself. The first few things, yeah, of course: nice house, nice car that could become a boat or submarine. But after that I’d help everybody else out. I’d get Mamá a house just for her paintings. I’d get Papá a new muscle car with real brakes. I’d get Tomás his OWN bed!!! The whole team would get new uniforms and we’d always fly private jets to games and we’d only eat at Olive Garden. Not to mention women galore. Little robots that did your chores for you. Everybody would be living good, and when somebody needed something I’d take care of it, no problem. All they’d have to promise is that they’d have my back if something happened. That’s the most important thing to me—loyalty. If you don’t have loyalty, you don’t have nothing. Doesn’t matter how much money you have.
Running out of ideas now. I’m good at telling stories, so maybe I’ll write one. Tomás eats my stories up, even the bad ones. For example, that Batman story is crappy but he loves it. I got stories way better than that. Maybe I’ll try something new. Sci-fi or Western. Ever since I saw Gattaca I’ve been wanting to write a sci-fi story. What I won’t write is no love st
ory. That’s not what I do. And what if this thing got into the wrong hands? Now the whole world knows Frank Torres writes love stories in his journal like a girl? Never gonna happen.
CHAPTER 5
THE NEW MONA LISA
Mamá wants to ask a favor. I can tell. She’s been laying the m’hijos on thick all morning and just now put a steaming mug of hot chocolate in front of me, marshmallows bobbing on the top just the way I like it. She put Tomás on time-out for watching cartoons while I was trying to sleep. That’s never happened before. Now she’s sitting on a small sliver of couch next to my head, tucking my blanket around my shoulders.
“M’hijo, could you do me a favor?” she asks sweetly.
“I knew it,” I say. I can hear Tomás crying softly in our room. “Tomás never gets in trouble.”
She tilts her head up and listens to him cry for a moment. “Tomás is fine. Can you do me this favor, m’hijo?”
“What is it?”
“I want you to agree before I tell you.”
She adjusts my pillows and runs one of her hands through my hair. Blotches of dark paint dot her fingertips. Mamá has never stopped thinking of me as a five-year-old. I can do no wrong with her, and somehow this makes me feel guilty, even when I’ve done nothing wrong.
“Fine,” I say.
“I want you to be in a painting.”
I stare at her, waiting for the joke. “Me? What happened to your hills painting?”
“M’hijo, I won’t be the one painting. I have a student.”
Since I’m not doing anything, she says, I’d be a perfect stationary subject for one of her beginner students.
“Nah,” I say. “I don’t want nobody drawing my picture and having me out here looking crazy.”
“Frankie, she’s so talented! You won’t look crazy, I promise. She just needs practice.”
“She?”
Mamá’s eyes narrow. She holds my nose between her fingers like the olden days and squeezes. “Frankie, I want you to promise you’ll be on your best behavior. Di me. Promise me you’ll let her do her work.”
“Fine,” I say. Like the olden days, we shake on it.
Journal #2
Ankle is starting to feel better. I hobbled to the bathroom and didn’t want to die. Looked in the mirror and my eyes were red from too much TV. Don’t want this girl thinking I’ve got pinkeye or something, so no more TV for me.
I miss basketball more than I thought I would. I thought I’d miss the crowds and the girls but I mostly miss my friends. Losing sucked but at least we were losing together. Too cheesy?
I’ve been kinda feeling low lately. Usually I would tell Justin, but me and Justin are going in opposite directions. Justin is tall and has a girlfriend. I have no girl plus a bum ankle. It’s like: I want to call him, but if I call him and admit I’m not doing good that would be admitting I’m the loser in the relationship. But if I don’t call him, maybe he’ll think I don’t want to be friends anymore? I don’t know.
Mamá is very good about keeping her altar neat. She checks on it all the time and changes the veladoras as soon as the candle burns past halfway. We haven’t gone to Mass in a while but I’m not complaining. Mass feels like school except everyone you know has to wear a collared shirt and act like they’ve never farted before.
Do art chicks like leather jackets? I was watching Breakfast Club. I think art chicks like sensitive guys, guys with lip rings. Do art chicks like guys who play basketball? Do art chicks like guys that are hurt? Because they look sensitive? Every time Papá comes home with an aching back, Mamá is nicer. Not calling Mamá an “art chick,” but just saying.
CHAPTER 6
NO NEW FRIENDS
Her name’s Toni. Typical art chick who thinks she’s some special misunderstood unicorn. Green swoop of hair that covers her eyes, nose ring, studded belt, studded bracelets, black shirt, black jeans, black shoes, black nail polish. Barely says a word. The type of chick who smokes cigarettes just so everyone will beg her to quit.
When she walked in with Mamá, I turned the TV on and tried to play it cool. But one look at her and I felt stupid about how I’d hurried to cut my toenails, gel my hair, and brush my teeth (twice) before she got here. My whole routine wasted. You don’t need to break out the big guns for a girl like this. She set up her easel and a little table for her pencils and brushes. She opened the window to air the room out (I put on a bunch of Papá’s cologne). Now she’s just standing there, looking at me. It would be one thing if she was batting her eyelashes, the way girls like to do. But I feel like she’s trying to look inside me. Everybody’s always trying to look inside me—Officer Appleby, Papá, every assistant principal and school counselor I’ve ever had, everybody. Did anyone ever think that maybe I don’t want them knowing what’s going on in my soul?
“Excuse me,” she says. “Can you take that jacket off?”
“My leather jacket?” I ask.
“Yeah, it’s in the way.”
Oh.
She’s been sketching me for two hours, sitting with her back straight, her pencil making quick scratching sounds across the large pad. I’m annoyed. She doesn’t care that I’m ignoring her. It’s like she thinks I’m a piece of furniture, a part of the couch.
“Diego Rivera’s my favorite artist,” I say. Actually he’s one of Mamá’s favorites. “I really like the way he drew people.”
“He didn’t ‘draw’ ‘people,’” she says, not looking up. “He painted. And the people he painted were peasants. Poor people. Folks everybody else forgot about.”
“That’s what I meant.”
“That’s not what you meant. If you meant it you would’ve said it.”
She thinks she’s so smart and so much better than everybody. I’ve been around girls like her before. You just have to show them you’re smart, too, and they come right down off their high horse. So I put the news on and they’re talking about a school closing down the street.
“That school sucked anyway,” I say. “I never learned nothing there.”
“Maybe,” she says, “it would’ve sucked less if there was money for books. Or if the buildings weren’t falling apart. Or they paid teachers better. Or they stopped building liquor stores across the street. Or they taught about Dolores Huerta and Richard Aoki.”
You could sweep up all the names she drops. Every conversation is like that. I say something and she gives me a lecture, waving her paintbrush in the air like a gavel. That is how she talks, like a PBS special. She’s so stuck up and she doesn’t even know it. I can’t figure out what Mamá sees in her.
Journal #3
Toni is this girl who thinks she’s the only person in the world who can draw. You don’t have to be all sad and gloomy to draw. Here’s this:
CHAPTER 7
DO I KNOW YOU?
“Do you trust me?” Officer Appleby asks.
“Should I?”
He’s looking out our living room window and into our neighbor’s yard. Ms. Nuñez is back there putting wiring up around a tomato bush with her daughter, Vanessa. Ms. Nuñez can garden, straight up. They’ve got an apple tree, too, and sometimes it drops rotting apples into our yard—really good for throwing at your kid brother. It used to be that they’d bring empanadas over on Sundays and Vanessa and Tomás would play tag and Ms. Nuñez and Mamá would laugh about all the chisme in the neighborhood. Now they don’t talk to us. Mamá thinks it’s because we’ve got a cop at our house all the time.
“Do you trust that I’m steering you in the right direction? That I’m looking out for your best interests?” Officer Appleby asks.
That’s how he’s sounded since he got here. Real businesslike, like he’s never met me before. It’s making me nervous. I shift so that I can sit up and get a better look at him. His eyes are baggy and red. He wrings his hands and wipes them on his pants. Earlier, he leafed thr
ough the pages of my journal quickly, chewing his pen cap and looking disappointed.
Now he turns back to the window, to Ms. Nuñez. She looks up at us, and when she sees Officer Appleby she grabs Vanessa’s hand and goes inside.
“Are those nice people over there?” he asks, pointing.
“Don’t know them,” I say.
“Sure.” He shoves his hands in his pockets. “Everybody wants to keep secrets.”
There’s a cop show on TV. In this episode, a kid goes missing, and the TV detectives are chasing the school principal down a back alley. The cops all have chiseled jaws and their veiny biceps bust out of their tiny uniforms. When they catch the principal, they start talking in punch lines, like TV cops do. They tell him he’s going to “detention.” Officer Appleby rolls his eyes.
“You know,” Officer Appleby says, “I went to school, unlike a lot of these guys. But I thought: I’m gonna work my way up, not take any special favors. Be one of them.”
I keep my eyes on the TV.
“Some guy in my class got promoted because of a bust he just walked into,” he says. “Routine traffic stop and he found a truckload of real bad stuff.”
He stands in front of the TV, blocking my view.
“Do I think he’s a better cop than me?” he asks. “No. I know he doesn’t put the work in that I put in. The hours.”
Now he stands over me, so close that I can see the scabs under his chin where he cut himself shaving.