Efrain's Secret

by Sofia Quintero

  Discern (v.) to perceive, detect

  When I tell her I start my new job at Jimmy Jazz this Saturday, my moms sighs and says, “I guess your sister is old enough to stay by herself now.” We both want to keep her young, but what choice do we have?

  Obviously, I don’t go to Jimmy Jazz. Instead, I take my first week’s earnings and head downtown to the SAT prep center and put down a deposit for my course. Suddenly, the money seems like enough, and it feels mad good to take that step toward securing my future.

  When I get back to the apartment, I try to study for the SAT before I have to pick up Candace, but I can’t concentrate. This is my first date. I mean, I’ve hung out with girls, gone places with them, messed around with them a bit…. You know, we bump into each other at People’s Park, grab some Mickey D’s, and then sneak off to a parentless apartment somewhere. Or maybe we sort of agree to be at the same place at the same time. That’s the closest thing to a date I’ve ever had. Despite the fact that I’ve just met her, I already understand that Candace is not just some breezy in the park. No wonder I’m nervous.

  So I just bounce around my room until it’s time to leave, changing outfits, re-counting my money, switching the hiding place of my shoebox, reorganizing my always tidy desk…. About fifteen minutes before I planned to leave, the telephone rings. “Hello?”

  “What’s poppin’, cuz?”

  “Chingy! How’s it going, kid?”

  “I’m here grindin’.”

  “Grindin’?”

  “Yeah, man, I got your last check and something I want to show you. Is it okay if I roll through?”

  “Nah, kid, you caught me just as I was about to walk out the door.”

  “So maybe I can catch up with you.”

  “Nah, I gotta pick up Candace to go see this movie.”

  “Ooooh—”

  “Shut up, yo.”

  “It’s like that, huh? That’s cool, though. Just don’t know why you can’t inform a brother. Keepin’ secrets and shit.” But Chingy’s just pretending to sweat it.

  “What secret, kid? I just told you, didn’t I?”

  “Whatever,” he laughs. “What y’all going to go see?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever the lady wants, I guess.”

  “Daaamn, look at you. All chivalrous and whatnot. I need to try your approach.”

  “What approach?” I tease. “That’s called sincerity, son.” The call-waiting signal sounds. “Yo, Chingy, someone’s trying to call, so let me holler at you later.”

  “Maybe I can swing by tomorrow with the check and this thing I want to show you. Get all the juicy details while I’m at it.”

  Chingy kills me, gossiping like Leti. “Most def.” The line bleeps again. “All right, man, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” I switch. “Hello?”

  “Efrain?”

  I can barely hear her. “Candace?” She sniffles. “What’s wrong, ma?”

  “My mother won’t let me go.”

  “But why?” I hear a woman in the background hurrying Candace to say her piece and hang up.

  “She just won’t.” Her voice breaks. “I’m sorry. I said yes because I really wanted to go, but she won’t let me because she doesn’t know you.” The woman in the background says more that I can’t understand. Suddenly Candace says, “I’ll see you at school.”

  “Candace, wait—” But she hangs up.

  I toss the phone on my bed. No, nope, sorry, I’m not feeling this at all. Where does her mother come off making judgments about me? She don’t know me! Shit, I’m the dude every woman should want for her daughter. I live clean, excel in school…. Didn’t Candace tell her moms all this?

  I leap on the telephone and call back Chingy. The second he answers, I just rip. I don’t know how long I go on before it hits me that we might have been cut off. “Yo, Chingy, can you hear me?”

  “Yeah, man, I’m just listening.”

  “So what you think, bro? Am I right or what?”

  “You right, you right…”

  “Why you say it like that, kid? Like her moms has reason to not let Candace go out with me.”

  “Well, it ain’t like the woman has a reason to say yes. I mean, Candace is right. She doesn’t know you.” Chingy sighs, then says, “Look, E., if this was any ol’ chick from around the way, I’d tell you to forget about it. Find you another, plenty of fish in the sea, and all that. But that girl and her family have been through things we can’t even imagine. Maybe Ma Dukes got a right to be a little overprotective.”

  As much as I don’t want to admit it, that’s real talk right there. “Well, I’m glad I didn’t, like, go off on her for standing me up.”

  “Nah, man, that ain’t you,” Chingy laughs. “You really feeling this girl?”

  “I’m feeling her.”

  “I mean, you trying to get to know her, or you trying to get to know her, know her?”

  “Know her, know her.”

  “’Cause if you ain’t really feeling Candace, if you ain’t trying to get to know her like that, then leave that girl alone, E. But if you’re really feeling her, if you think she’s worth it, then figure out a way to let Ma Dukes know you.”

  That makes sense. And I do think Candace is worth it. I just have no clue how to win over her moms.

  My silence must speak volumes because, without my asking, Chingy says, “You know what I’d do?”

  Exorable (adj.) susceptible to being persuaded or moved by entreaty

  I wait in front of Candace’s building with my bags for about fifteen minutes until someone leaves. Before the front door locks shut, I slip inside and walk up to her floor. Chingy had advised me to ring the bell and wait for someone in Candace’s apartment to let me in, but I feel this is the better way to go. Yeah, I risk coming off brazen, and Candace’s moms might think I’m being shifty or disrespectful. But my gut tells me that Mrs. Lamb has to see me, and that may never happen if I wait for her to be willing to meet me. And it beats standing on the street under her daughter’s window hollering her name like some ghetto knight.

  Instead, I come to her door and gently knock. Before I came over, I followed Chingy’s advice and changed out of my Crooked Ink hoodie and LRG jeans and into an Avirex button-down and pleated khakis. On general principle, I shouldn’t have had to switch my gear, but if I’m taking this risk, better to not play into negative assumptions, as unfair as they might be. Behind the door, a woman says, “Child, how many times do I have to tell you to stay away from that door?”

  Aw, man, her moms is going to open the door! I hear her slide the cover to the peephole. “Who is it?”

  “My name is Efrain Rodriguez, ma’am, and I just wanted to drop off some things for your daughter.”

  The door clicks, then opens slightly. An ebony eye with wrinkled edges peeks under the security chain. “Come again?”

  “My name is Efrain, and I’m a classmate of your daughter Candace, ma’am. She told me that you wouldn’t let her go out with me for lunch and a movie since you don’t know me….” I hold up the two bags so she can see them. “So I thought I’d bring lunch and the movie to her so you could meet me.”

  The eye blinks at me a few times and then disappears behind the closing door. I wait, then hear the security chain slide across its axis. The door opens, and a middle-aged woman looks me up and down. She seems too old to be her mother and yet too young to be her grandmother. She squints at me. “Did you say your name was Rodriguez?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Where are your people from?”

  “I was born and raised here in the Bronx. So was my mother. She’s Puerto Rican. And Ru—My father is from the Dominican Republic, but he’s been living here for years. He finally became a citizen a few years ago.”

  “And do they know that you’re here right now?”

  “Well, my mother knew I had plans to go out with your daughter, but she doesn’t know I’m here now. She’s at work thinking we’re at the movies.”

  “And y
our father?”

  “Yes,” I lie. “He works at the auto shop on Jackson and 139th Street.”

  “You see what I mean, Mama? I told you he was a nice boy.” I look past Mrs. Lamb and see Candace in the hallway. Her eyes are red, and there are tearstains down her cheeks. “May I please go?”

  Mrs. Lamb whips her head to yell, “No, you cannot, Candace.” Then she turns back to me and steps aside. “But Efrain can spend time with you here.”

  Prescient (adj.) having foreknowledge of events

  On Sunday afternoon, I sweat through my physics homework when Mandy yells, “Efrain, Chingy’s here!”

  Thank God, because I need the brother’s help. Sometimes I spend the same amount of time on this mess as it takes to finish all my other homework combined. I jump up and toss open my bedroom door. “S’up, kid?” I say.

  “It’s an everyday struggle, yo,” Chingy says. He always cracks me up with that line. When does Chingy struggle with anything? He hands me my last paycheck, bounds over to my desk, and switches on my computer. “Damn, E., Barney Rubble had a faster computer than this thing.” It’s true what Nes said about Chingy being spoiled. For his last birthday, his parents bought him a new laptop. For my birthday, my mother gave me a card with twenty bucks that immediately went to pay my library fines for overdue SAT prep books. At almost nine o’clock that night, Rubio finally cornered me in the bodega and asked me what I wanted. I answered him by walking out, leaving the candles I was buying for the cake Yannis’s wife baked me on the counter.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I say, putting the check into my backpack so I can take it to the check-cashing place tomorrow. “You done your physics homework yet?” Chingy nods as he hits the button on the disk drive to my computer. “Then give a brother a clue ’cause it’s kicking my ass.”

  Chingy snickers. “All you gotta do is choose the right formula, plug in the numbers, and, bam, you got the answer.” He slides a CD into the tray and closes the drive. BK’s roommate at Morehouse is a deejay, so he’s always sending him CDs of underground hip-hop mixes. They’re usually fire, and I’m down to listen but after I’m free from physics.

  “Nah, son, I have no answer, never mind the answer.”

  “You think too much, cuz.” Chingy turns on my monitor. “But a brother’s gonna hook you up with this here birthday present I made for ya. Sit down.”

  I grab my extra chair and pull it up next to him. “My birthday was over three months ago, kid.”

  “And what’d I give you?”

  “What you give me every year. Nothing but a hard time.”

  Chingy laughs as he clicks the mouse. “Well, happy belated birthday, E.”

  The hourglass on the screen bursts into a giant spreadsheet with a dozen columns, each headed by the name of a school I’m applying to. For each school, there is a list: GPA, SAT, Class Ranking, Interview, and other things colleges consider when weighing someone’s application. “What’s this?”

  “This here is the Rashaan Perry College Admission Probability Calculation System,” he announces. “You enter the data, right? Your grade point average, your SAT score, or whatever, and the system calculates your odds of getting admitted.”

  “That’s dope! Slide over.” Chingy moves aside, and I drag my chair in front of the monitor. Under Harvard, I enter 4.0 for GPA and 2400 under SAT. Pure fantasy, I know, but I’m curious. The last cell in the Harvard column flashes a number: 95 percent. “You could make mad paper selling this.”

  “I proposed this as my final project for my advanced programming class thinking it’d be easy, but man …” Chingy whistles. “My teacher says if I can get it to work, I should enter it into a few competitions. Get my scholarship on. I figured you’d be my perfect beta tester.”

  “No doubt.”

  “In order to be as accurate as possible, I couldn’t just develop one code. I had to create a unique algorithm for each and every college.”

  It takes me a second to grasp his point. “Because Hunter College may place more emphasis on your class ranking than your SAT score than, say, Harvard might?”

  “Exactly! And there’s no way to really assess that unless you talk to someone at every admissions office or, better yet, compile statistics on incoming freshmen.” I get a kick out of seeing Chingy so serious about something. “Plus, let’s say an interview is optional. Whether it should increase your odds depends on how well it goes, right? That’s mad subjective, yo, so how much weight should the system place on it?”

  “Still,” I say, “this program’s fire, son.”

  But my boy’s in another world, trying to figure out how to perfect his invention. “I think I’m onto something by accounting for the averages. For example, in the algorithm for Harvard, I included the average SAT score for an incoming student, which is 2100—”

  “Don’t remind me.” But being a glutton for punishment, I enter 1650 into the SAT cell and watch my odds of admission plummet. I’m surprised my computer didn’t just crash.

  “—Did that for each of the schools. Same with percentage of applicants who are admitted at each college, too. Factors like that.” Chingy leans back and sighs. “It’s a work in progress, and I’ve got a long way to go, so treat it like a game, E., a’ight? Don’t OD and take it too seriously.”

  I play around with the numbers and say, “So when I take the SAT again in January, which score should I use?” Please say the better one.

  Chingy throws up his hands. “Damn, I forgot about that!” He jumps to his feet and hunches over my keyboard. “Slide, yo.”

  I plant myself in his way, laughing. “C’mon, man—”

  “Nah, man, I got to account for that.” He clacks away at the keys. “I guess I should just average them.”

  “No!” I yell. I may suck at physics and may not be as good at math as Chingy or Candace, but I know damn well that averaging my scores will kill me. “Wouldn’t it be more accurate to weight the second one more than the first one?”

  Chingy considers it. “You might be right.” He tinkers with the spreadsheet, changing SAT to SAT1 and adding a row named SAT2. “But let me tell you something, bro. You better rip that sucker ’cause if you don’t do as well or better the second time around, it’ll hurt your odds more than if you never retook it, ya feel me?”

  As if physics weren’t enough to worry about. At least I’m feeling better about my chances now that I’ve registered for that SAT prep course. Not that I bring that up with Chingy in case he asks me how much it costs and other questions I don’t want to answer.

  Corroborate (v.) to support with evidence

  “Man, E., what you keep smiling about?” asks Nestor. “All ear to ear and whatnot.” Then his mouth pops into a big O. “You finally got some!”

  “Shut up, yo.” But my face hurts from grinning so much. I can’t control it.

  Nestor laughs. “You be all secretive, Efrain, but I knew it all along. I figure in time you’d spill the beans. GiGi González?”

  “No, nope, sorry.”

  “Yeah, she ain’t trying to mess with you.”

  As stupid as it is, I get upset. “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Same thing that’s wrong with me. You ain’t Snipes.” Nestor gives me a slight shove. “Why you getting bent out of shape? Two seconds ago when I asked if you were going out with GiGi, you were all Hell no! Now you offended.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Come with me to Fratelli’s. I’ll treat you to a pizza or a hero or something.” Nestor starts to walk east on Hunts Point Avenue. “So what’s her name?”

  “Candace.”

  “No wonder you’re whipped! Candace is, like, the title of a female ruler in ancient Africa,” says Nestor, a huge grin busting across his face. “Sisters who be running shit like the queen of Sheba.”

  While I like the idea of having a girlfriend with a name of distinction, I’m not too crazy about being called whipped. “Shut up.”

  Nestor, of course, keeps on. “For
real. Candace is the Latin version of Kandake or something like that. Is she Boricua? ¿Dominicana?”

  “Black.”

  “Ah!” And the clown breaks out into his jig. “I should’ve known.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I should play cool and keep it at that, but I can’t help myself. “I got me a nice Southern girl.”

  “You’re going out with some chick from Brooklyn?” Nestor laughs as he dodges my chop to his neck. “Yo, I’m only messing with you. I may be a high school dropout, but I know where the South is. So is she, like, from Texas, Alabama, Georgia, or what?”

  “Louisiana.” I hesitate for a second, wondering if I should say more. Candace might not like me putting her on blast even to one of my closest friends. But I want to tell someone about her, and I don’t plan on introducing Nestor to Candace anytime soon. “New Orleans.”

  Nestor’s eyes open. “K-Ville? Yo, was she living there when Katrina hit?” I nod. “Damn …” He gets an extra bop in his walk. “How did she get out?”

  “I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it yet.” I increase my stride to keep up with him. “We’re still getting to know each other, so I don’t know where she is with all that. I’m afraid to ask her and stir up any painful memories, you know?”

  “I feel you.” Suddenly Nestor punches his hand into his fist. “You know that jail barge I was telling you about? It was built in NOLA.”

  “Get out.”

  “For real, kid. Cost, like, 160 million.” We walk a few paces in silence. Then Nes gets angry. “You see that, E.? All that money for a jail in the ’hood, but folks in K-Ville still living in trailers.”

  “If that,” I say. Candace’s family is hardly the only one spread throughout the country. I wish she would talk more about it. Or at least give me some kind of permission to ask.

  “What Kanye said on TV during that fund-raiser?” says Nestor. “That was truth right there.”

  “Real talk.”

  Nestor and I get to Fratelli’s and order a couple of sausage heros. After grabbing some sodas from the refrigerator, we decide to wait outside while they prepare our order. Nestor asks, “And what about Chingy? Who’s that player messing with these days?”