The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz

  Occasionally she would come home and find her collection scattered from its hiding place in her bunk. She longed for the time when she was an only child, when her family looked like the one in the picture—just her, her mother and father, and the ruby. She’d once been a rare, precious gem.

  “Your toys are not fun at all,” all the children said.

  Leticia hid. She didn’t frolic in front of the open fire hydrant, or spread out on the pavement to play jacks, or dart in and out of the jump rope for double dutch. She folded herself inside the corners of the apartment, wedged herself under the kitchen table in between the chair legs, built forts out of sheets and open umbrellas, and gathered the rocks in her hands, pushed them around on her palm.

  She looked at her favorite library book, a glossy explosion of color, which showed rocks in their unpolished and polished forms side by side. There was a picture of dark men with shiny foreheads and sweat-stained shirts and pants tied together with rope, holding pickaxes, one of them in the foreground with a big, white, toothy grin, holding up a piece of craggy earth to a white man in a wide-brimmed safari hat, pleased with his worker’s discovery. She had seen dark, sweaty men like these back home—men resembling her father—hanging off the sides of trucks, yelling in everyone’s faces, selling plátanos and mangos.

  In Cibao, her father’s birthplace, amber was sometimes mined through bell pitting, a process that required the miners to dig foxholes, which often collapsed. Some men perished like the animals and insects trapped in the amber and were dug out of their tombs by dusty-faced men like themselves, who delivered their bodies to their loved ones wrapped in the burlap sacks they used to carry away the earth’s treasures.

  Leticia would talk to her rocks about how they came into being, where they lived, and what composed them; she honored the places and minerals they came from and praised the rocks they had become. She enjoyed classifying and reclassifying them and going on geological expeditions around the projects. She referred to their pictures in the books and then painted them with felt markers to mimic mineral content, and in this way the cement chunk of the sidewalk became azurite (blue marker), limonite (red marker), zippeite (yellow marker), and so on. Then she put them in different boxes according to the region in which they belonged, where she wished she had found them.

  In his De natura fossilium (1546), Georgius Agricola (1494–1555, German) presented the first scientific classification of minerals and ponders whether amber is the “unctuous sweat of the Earth.”

  Geological changes that took thousands or millions of years to occur looped in Leticia’s head like a never-ending movie: mountain ranges pushing out of the earth, minerals being formed from fluids that solidified and turned into beautiful crystals, rocks being compressed by heat and pressure, and the tiny scream of a mosquito as its life was pressed away. In volcanoes, the slow processes were sped up like the cataclysmic changes she wanted in her own life, but most people were like rocks—shaped by circumstances and time. Yet once in a while a person explodes out of her bedrock and becomes something else. When she was twelve, she told her parents about her plans—to be the first famous Dominican geologist and perhaps volcanologist. The conversation:

  “Where will you live? I don’t see any volcanoes here.”

  “Do something practical. If you apply yourself you can become a secretary or maybe an accountant.”

  “She’s going to leave and get married and have kids and then we wasted our money.”

  “I don’t want you working in factories like us. You have to work in an office like a professional.”

  And, quieter, when they thought she wasn’t paying attention:

  “We’ll see what Gabriel wants to do.”

  When her father came over, rubbed her cheek, and said, “Your rocks will be a nice pastime,” Leticia thought of a city-sized, burning globule of a millipede snaking its way through the 125th Street fault line, pushing up through manhole covers, softly searing anyone and everything it touched, the screams and crushing sounds muted in her mind.

  She looked over at Adriana—perpetually clad in pink, with her long, wavy hair clasped in plastic bow-shaped barrettes—as she played with her dolls. In contrast, there was Leticia with her shlubby self, always wearing things that were too tight in the wrong areas and too loose in the right areas; it turned out that she would be shaped like her father and such was the way that clothing would always fit her. Her hair was matted down to her head, as her mother had already begun chemically relaxing it in an effort to make her look somehow neater, less unwieldy.

  She had hoped maybe getting older would move her out of her awkward stage, that she could start talking to someone about college; maybe someone could suggest the right classes to take, or there would be some sort of program that would identify her as special in some way. Only the pregnant girls received special treatment at her school.

  She wanted special treatment too, or maybe just a place in history.

  George Barrow (1853–1932, English) discovered that different temperatures produce different metamorphic rocks from the same ingredients. The index mineral (determined by the composition of the parent rock) forms under specific pressure and temperature conditions.

  Gabriel liked to swim at the community pool or chase cats into traffic, and there wasn’t much more to him as far as Leticia knew, but that seemed to be enough for her parents because he was a boy. Adriana liked to stick stickers on things, and let boys stick their hands down her pants, but the family found out about that only later, and also she was the other half of Gabriel and that was enough too. But they were still young and there was time and hope—this they had. When they were together, they kicked each other’s feet for hours while they watched TV after school. If one of them left the room, the foot of the remaining twin would stop moving, but as soon as the foot from the other twin came back, they would start up again. They were unaware that they did this, but Leticia was aware, because she stared at them, wishing she had been fused to someone too. The few times she tried to interest them in a volcano documentary on PBS, Gabriel would answer, Only if there’s lava and people burning and screaming, and then Adriana would laugh and say, Yeah. Duh.

  Leticia had some friends she barely talked to at school, so mostly she ditched to take the subway to Central Park and climbed up on the slabs of metamorphic schist (part of the Manhattan Cambrian Formation) that were scattered throughout the park. The schist was corrugated with striations carved out by rocks embedded in the base of the North American ice sheet that moved over the schist during the last ice age in the Wisconsin Glacial Episode. She lay down on the slab, running her hands slowly over the striations, looking up at the sky, and imagining riding the ice sheet as it moved southward toward melting.

  The tenants of the building told them what had happened: people screaming, doors flung open, yelling out of windows, running toward the street—and running toward them. One could hear those goddamn boys and the cliff and Gabriel and jumping and finally, not breathing.

  Leticia pictured Gabriel, a carefree, careless boy soaring through the air, then plummeting down, layers of millions of years of Earth’s history speeding by his beautiful face.

  Interspersed between her mother’s screams, she heard her father say, “My boy,” over and over again. Adriana had tears running down her face as she made a low, continuous rumbling sound like gears of machinery winding down. She sat on the couch, kicking her feet out in front of her, kicking the air she breathed.

  Leticia drifted out of the apartment and made her way to Marble Hill, to the place the three of them had loved, where she would be alone, her brother and sister with their friends. The boys would jump into the dirty waters of the Harlem River and pretend like they lived in Ohio, or Iowa, or something, where people frolicked in swimming holes like it was nothing (something their parents talked about doing back on the island). The cops usually chased them away, occasionally arresting one or two of them as a show of force. Everyone would ignore her as usual while she
studied the low-grade metamorphic marble that was formed when continents collided against each other during the breakup of Pangaea. She’d watch her siblings pirouette—Gabriel off the cliff, Adriana off the wet hands of the boys who waited their turn. When the cops showed up Leticia ran away too, alongside all the wet boys, exhilarated at being so close to their bodies, their pulsating muscles dripping with river water—so alive.

  William Morris Davis (1850–1934, American). A founder of geomorphology (scientific landform studies) who developed a theory of the cycle of erosion. (Is it really a cycle when you are ground down to nothing? Then what?)

  Among many jobs, Leticia worked at a clothing store, folding jeans and shirts over and over. No small talk, only answering questions about colors and sizes, the inventory of which she memorized as she replaced and restocked. None of this school and geology nonsense. Fit in like everyone else. Fold and tuck yourself small.

  Her father worked when he wasn’t getting fired from the factories, depending on how much rum had been brought back by someone from the bodega or Cibao. Her mother had developed a “nervous condition,” discovered “the system,” and had her disability payments extended.

  Adriana became obnoxious and loud enough for two people. No one in the family could pin her down long enough to make her get a job, so Leticia toiled for all of them and tried hard not to upset her parents. Adriana tried to upset them at every chance. On the mineral hardness scale of one (talc) to ten (diamond)—each mineral is able to scratch all those softer than itself—Leticia estimated her sister was a nine, like corundum, the mineral that ruby is derived from. Adriana cried, screamed, ran, stole, and fucked her way through her teenage years, but she never got a reaction out of their parents. And she didn’t get a reaction out of Leticia when Adriana would wait until Leticia was snuggled in bed, exhausted from a full day of work, and Adriana would ask her things like Hey, have you ever been fingered? Or Have you had a dick in your mouth? The answer was no, but Leticia kept that answer to herself.

  At some point, the questions stopped and the crying began, softly in the middle of the night. Leticia paid for Adriana’s abortion with money she had saved up for school, for one day when she had the time. Leticia folded herself around her sister’s body, snuggling her arm around her waist and burying her face in her hair in order to protect her sister from her own sharp crags, and Adriana let her—every mineral can also scratch itself.

  As time passed, like compasses, they all began pointing more or less in the same directions they had been pointing before Gabriel’s death. Leticia took a part-time job at a crystal store and enrolled in community college while she sold crystals and geodes to people looking for something sparkly to put on their desks, kooky New Agers searching for their energy, and more serious types like the guy who had a piece of the San Andreas fault in all its scratched glory.

  Mark walked in looking for something he saw in a magazine ad—geodes cut in half into bookends. Leticia thought those were a travesty but didn’t tell him that.

  “What color bookends are you interested in?” She hated asking this question. People had no idea what they were buying even after she told them.

  “My sister likes pink.”

  He was wearing a Columbia T-shirt, so she asked him what he studied there as she pulled out the dissected Brazilian pink-agate geode. He said he was working toward a master’s in astrophysics. “Oh,” she said. She was instantly jealous. “What interested you?”

  “When I was a kid, I saw a PBS documentary about stars that explained that humans are partly made out of stardust, like the carbon in our bodies and the iron in our blood. So of course I went outside and proceeded to name every star. You know—my mom, dad, sister, uncles, aunts, anyone else I could think of.” He paused, seemed to make sure she was listening. “I guess that’s when I started looking at them all the time.”

  As she noticed his beautiful eyes, the color of translucent brown eulytite crystals, she said, “Wow.”

  “I know, I know. It’s silly, but I was five or six or something.”

  She fidgeted with the geode, poking her finger into its crags. “So . . . umm . . . do you spend all your time looking through telescopes?”

  “No, these days I spend very little time looking at actual stars. It’s mostly looking at hard data.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Yeah, of course, it’s more complicated than just looking up at the sky. I do that a lot. Just look up.” She couldn’t believe she said that. She put the geode down and picked up a long piece of jagged citrine quartz off the counter, jamming it into her palm.

  He smiled. He said, “Well, I still stare up at stars when I’m not at school. I still name them after people I know. Only difference is I know their scientific names too.”

  She considered this and thought about naming a star after Gabriel. Maybe Mark could help her choose the right one.

  He continued, “Now I know that my Uncle Charles is actually Gorgonea Tertia.”

  She laughed and then told him what she had never told anyone before. “When I was little, I used to paint rocks different colors to classify them according to mineral content and pretend they were the real thing. They became kind of elaborate after a while.”

  “Cool! Do you still have your collection? Have you compared it to real samples?”

  “No, it’s gone.” She didn’t tell him that throwing it out after Gabriel died had felt like the right thing to do. It had felt like the end of a lot of things.

  Mark looked down at the geode and picked up the half she wasn’t holding. “That’s too bad. My parents still pull out the drawings I made of stars with people’s faces on them. Maybe your parents kept some. You know, to embarrass you later.”

  “No. You’re talking about, like, regular parents. My parents are mostly tired all the time.”

  He nodded his head. “Yeah. I guess kids are hard . . . especially if you have more than one. Do you have siblings?”

  “Yes, two. But now one.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  She didn’t want to ruin the moment. All she could think of saying was “Yeah. He was the star.” She smiled.

  Each time Mark came back, he asked her increasingly detailed questions about the crystals. If she was busy, Mark would wander around the store until Leticia was available to help him. Whenever she didn’t understand his question, she spat out random rock properties, and he would just look, smile, and then ask more questions. She felt he was testing her but wasn’t sure to what end. He waited for her after work one night and walked her to the subway.

  When they reached the subway entrance, he looked up, pointed at a star, and said, “See the one next to Alpha Cassiopeiae, the double star I told you about? That one is called Zeta Cas.” He paused and looked into her eyes before he continued, and pointed up again. “There you are. There’s Leticia.”

  That’s when her poles reversed. The earth has experienced many polarity reversals, lasting from hundreds to thousands of years. Paleomagnetists can study sedimentary deposits on the ocean floor to date when these polarity reversals occurred. The anomaly can be observed as a stripe in the sedimentary rock layer. One thing was clear to her as she stared up at her twinkling star: nothing would ever be the same. Leticia believed that when she was dug up one day, there would be a visible stripe in her bones marking the moment she fell in love.

  Mark didn’t seem to be as afraid to meet her parents as she was to meet his. And her parents were afraid of him too. As soon as he stepped through the door they sat down and stared at the TV, which they had turned to an English-speaking channel, a show that she knew they didn’t watch because they didn’t understand it. Adriana took the time only to say a quick hi to Mark and then motioned for Leticia to meet her in the kitchen. She whispered, “Dang, Leti. You brought home—the—whitest—guy.” She laughed as she walked out of the apartment.

  When Mark spoke, her mother lifted a tray of chips with dip—an American appetizer that she had bought at a store, and not the tostones
with mojo she usually made, and her father asked him if he wanted a beer by pointing back and forth between the one he was holding in his hand and Mark. Watching them with him made her realize that she was the same way with Mark, always nervous, but she felt there was nothing she could do to lessen the magnetic force of fear.

  She didn’t know what she was doing, didn’t know how to be his girlfriend. He was a real scientist and she was taking intro to trigonometry at Borough of Manhattan Community College. She was afraid to meet his friends, afraid to be asked, So what do you do? She was afraid—no, she would have fantasies—that when his parents asked her what her parents did, she would feel backed into a corner and scream, The North American plate is slipping under the Caribbean plate right now, and we’re gonna be on top of you one day! She was afraid she would never have the courage to say this. When she did meet his parents, she found them to be adorable, well-meaning people who were intrigued by her, charmed by the implausibility of a girl from the projects with such interests and that their son met her in the first place. His mother said things like “You have the most beautiful smooth brown skin,” which made Leticia feel as if she were about to be eaten. But she knew they were decent people, and at least they tried.

  This was the best thing that had ever happened to her, and she didn’t want to ruin it. She was so grateful to have found someone who called her his twin ball of hydrogen gas, because stars are formed when enough hydrogen gas is pulled together into one spot.

  No one in the family had ever moved in with anyone out of wedlock. Her parents had approved of Mark, had appreciated the fact that he wasn’t one of what her father called the charlatans from around their neighborhood, but her mother screamed so loud the earth shook.

  Georges Lemaître (1894–1966, Belgian). Proposed the Big Bang theory for the origin of the universe. Some scientists believe that there was never an explosion, but rather an expansion of matter. Both camps, however, believe that there is expansion and that it is still happening, distant galaxies moving farther away from us at great speeds.