The district attorney shrugs as if he were just asked whether he wanted his sandwich on whole wheat or rye. “Fine with me, Your Honor.”
“Will Mr. Rodriguez please approach the bench?”
I start to step around the table when Miss Avery pulls me back. “She means your father, Efrain.”
My heart boxes my ribs. “What does she want with him?”
“Knowing this judge, she’s just going to lecture him on how he’s responsible for you now, that he should do a better job minding you than he has been, blah, blah, blah. Maybe even make him go on record pledging to be the second coming of Michael Brady. All you need to worry about is keeping your nose clean and making your next court date, which is six weeks from today.”
No, Miss Avery, that’s not all I have to worry about.
Abhor (v.) to hate, detest
As Rubio and I exit the court building and walk down the Grand Concourse toward his car, I sense him glaring at me. We get in his car and drive off in silence. At the first stoplight, Rubio finally barks at me. “¿Y cuándo te metiste en toda esa baina de drogas?”
But I don’t have any words for the man. Rubio can lecture me, interrogate me, insult me, whatever. I’ll save my reasons for metiéndome to the parent who actually gives a damn.
“¡Efrain, te ’toy hablando!” I just stare straight ahead at the bumper of the car in front of us. Then bam! Bastard punches me in the left cheek, sending my head banging against the window. When the pain radiates toward my jaw and temple, there’s no denying that this was more than a disciplinary backslap. The motherfucker punched me like a man hits another man. I finally turn to look at him. Rubio’s eyes blaze, and his chest heaves as if that punch took so much out of him.
It didn’t take enough out of me. I spring onto that son of a bitch like a leopard on a gazelle, slamming my fist into his temple and knocking his dome into the headrest. That, Mr. Harris, is PE to KE for you. Rubio swings his forearm between us and then slams it into my chest. He knocks some of my wind, and I fall back against my seat. Rubio comes for me, but I muster enough energy to block him with my left and throw a hook with my right. Rubio follows with a cross to my jaw, and it’s on. We just go at each other in the front seat of his car, like ultimate fighters in a refrigerator. Drivers pound their horns and curse through their windows, but we won’t stop. I can’t stop. As I grab a fistful of Rubio’s hair, it flashes through my mind: I’m going to kill him. Never mind this is the man who gave me life. For giving me this life that hangs in the balance right now, best believe I have it in me to take away his.
I ignore the banging on my window and the muffled yelling in Spanish. Seconds later I feel the rush of cold air, then two hands as they grip my shoulders and yank me out of the car. When I realize what’s happening, I throw out my arm to brace myself for the fall against the hard asphalt. I wait for my bones to settle from the crash landing, then slowly draw myself onto my elbow. That’s when I see the blood on my knuckles. I don’t know whether it belongs to Rubio or me.
“You all right, man?” the man asks. No, I’m not fucking all right. “What the hell happened?” I just gave my father a long-overdue beatdown.
I stand there in the middle of the street amid all the commotion and stare at Rubio for a minute. Now he has one leg out of the car, the other one still kneeling on the front seat, and two dudes holding him back. When I’m done with you, he’s cursing at me in Spanish, you’ll never disrespect me again. I turn my back on him and start to limp away. Rubio demands that I come back and face him like a man. Fuckin’ clown. When he’s done with me? I’m done with him. I’ve been done with him.
Repudiate (v.) to reject, refuse to accept
It takes me almost two hours to get from that stoplight on the Grand Concourse to my bus stop at Port Morris. Throughout the entire trip, folks stare at me as if I stepped out of a horror flick. All I want to do is get home, take a hot shower, and sleep forever.
Moms must’ve been looking out the window for me, because when I reach my floor, she’s standing in the open doorway. “Efrain!” She pulls me into the apartment and puts her hand to my bruised face. “Oh my God!” Moms throws her arms around me. “Look what they did to my baby!”
And who is standing behind her but that bastard. He ain’t such a pretty boy now with his swollen nose and fat lip. I pull out of my mother’s embrace and point to Rubio. “He did this to me.”
Moms spins around to face him. “¿Le diste a mi hjio?”
“¡Claro que sí!” Rubio booms. “Y lo haría otra vez si se lo busca.”
“¿Si se lo busca?” My mother shakes with fury. “I don’t care what Efrain does. Don’t you ever hit my son again. Ever!”
Even though the evidence is all over his grille, I wait for Rubio to admit that I fought back blow-for-blow like a man. And just as if he can read my mind and intends to concede nothing, he says, “I am the man of this house—”
“This is my house, César!” yells my mother. “Your house is down the block.”
Rubio looms toward my mother. “I’m the head of this family!”
He has never raised a hand to my mother, and I’ll be damned if he starts tonight. I step around Moms to shield her. “No, you’re not. She is.” I get in his face. “You don’t have a family. All you have are obligations you never meet.”
“Efrain!” My mother grabs at my arm and yanks me away from Rubio. “Go to your room while I talk to your father.”
“Fine.” I shoulder Rubio as I shove past him and head to the bathroom. As I turn the corner, I catch Mandy peeking out of her bedroom door. She’s crying, and I expect her to run out and throw her arms around me like when Rubio brought me home after hours in the emergency room with food poisoning. Instead, Mandy fumes, then slams her door shut. She turns the lock for good measure. Moms must have told her the truth about where I was. I can’t lie. Her reaction hurts, but all I can do is try to explain on our walk to school tomorrow.
I get into the bathroom and look in the mirror to examine the damage. No wonder heads were staring. I still got the best of him, though.
I shower with water as hot as I can stand, washing away the blood, the snot, the dirt, the street, the jail. But even though I lather twice and wash my hair, I just can’t strip the weight of what has happened. Sometimes my mother and Rubio’s voices rise over the hard spray of the shower. Only when I hear the apartment door slam do I turn off the faucet and pull back the curtain. I towel off, change into the dingy sweats hanging behind the door, slip into my chanclas, and go face my mother.
She stands in the living room staring out of the window. She hears me shuffle into the living room and turns to face me, her eyes swollen with exhaustion and anger. “First things first… Did you do it, Efrain? They arrested you for selling cocaine, and I need to hear the truth from you. Are you guilty of the charges?”
I knew this would be a hard conversation, but, man … I had no idea how deep it would cut. I don’t know what hurts more: the fact that Moms still believes in me enough to grant me the benefit of the doubt or the fact that in the next second I will prove to her that I don’t deserve it. “Yes.”
And as if that single word gave her a push, my mother reaches for the windowsill to maintain her balance. “How long have you been doing this?” Damn, if she would just scream and curse, or even hit me, I can get through this. I can handle the rage. I want to take it. But I can’t carry this kind of weight. If I hurt her any more, it will break me.
“I’ve only been out there a few times.” I drop my head, tears stinging at the corners of my eyes. “And only to make money for college.” Moms scoffs. “That’s the truth!” I lift up my head because I know if my mother looks me in the eye, she will understand. “Mami, I’m tired. I’m tired of following all the rules and never winning the game. You want to hear the truth? Nice guys finish last, Mami. No me metí en drogas to have money for nice clothes or jewelry or anything like that, but why do I have to choose? I’m tired of being the good boy who
never has anything to show for it, whether it’s a cool pair of jeans or money for school. Doing the right thing is supposed to be its own reward, but that’s not enough to pay my tuition. Whatever it takes, remember?” No one should understand better how exhausting it is to do the right thing for its own sake without so much as a rebate. Regardless of what happened tonight, this more than anything proves that I am her son.
But my mother grabs my chin like a vise and yells, “You don’t pay tuition when you go to prison!” Moms shoves my head backward as if she wants to snap it off my neck. “And if you get killed, soy yo la que va tener que pagar. I pay, Efrain. I’m the one who’ll have to pay for your burial plot.” She wraps her arms around her body as if trying to contain herself. But within seconds, Moms explodes. “I’m sick of the men in this family taking me for granted! I sacrifice myself day in and day out for years, ¿y pa’ qué? Just for you to decide that it’s not good enough and break all the rules and humiliate me, you selfish, insensitive …” In all my life, I have never seen my mother so enraged. No matter what he did, she never got this angry at Rubio. The knot of emotions sitting in the pit of my stomach paralyzes me. Moms points at me and says, “I’ll be damned if I bury my son or visit him in prison because he’s out there running the streets when I’m busting my ass to keep him off them, Efrain Rodriguez. This is not how I raised you, and I won’t stand for it.”
“Sí, señora.” She’s had her fill of loving men who lie in her face. I get it.
My mother walks back over to me and reaches up to stroke the bruise on my cheek. Just as I lean into the caress, she snatches back her hand as if she’s afraid to be too tender. Moms says, “I want my son back, Efrain.” It sounds more like a plea than an order.
“Sí, señora.”
Then my mother falls into herself as if diving into her own heart for something deeply buried there. She swallows hard and says, “So I want you to live with your father until you graduate from high school. While you were in the shower, I packed your things in a laundry bag—”
“What?” No way. I can see the reluctance in her eyes and hear the doubt in the spaces between her words. Does Moms really believe that if she puts me out, I’ll crawl over to Awilda’s like the prodigal son, and Rubio will straighten me out? “No, nope, sorry,” I say, throwing myself against the wall and folding my arms across my chest.
“You can’t stay here, Efrain. What kind of example is that for your sister? What am I supposed to say to Amanda the day she decides to do God knows what with strange men because she needs to earn money for college?”
“Damn, Mami, don’t OD!” Ain’t no need for my mother to paint that nasty picture in her own mind, never mind mine. “Like that’s going to happen.”
“If yesterday someone had told me my son was selling drugs, Efrain, I wouldn’t have believed it either,” says Moms. “And I refuse to hold you to a different moral standard just because you’re a few years older than she is, and certainly not because you’re a boy.”
“But I’m not a boy anymore!” I yell. “That’s the problem right there, Mami—”
“I don’t know what Nestor y esos títeres en l’esquina have told you, Efrain. I don’t give a damn either!” my mother interrupts. “Breaking the law and doing time and all that gangster nonsense is not some rite of passage to manhood. Until you understand that, not only are you merely pretending to be your own man, you’re not the kind of person who is welcomed in this house. Go, Efrain.” My mother’s voice wavers. “Before I call the police. It’s over to Rubio’s or back to jail. The choice is yours.”
I come off the wall. “Mami, you can’t be serious!”
“Take your shit and leave now!” My mother pushes past me and heads to the apartment door. She grabs the laundry bag and my backpack and flings them out into the hallway. Clothes and cash spill across the dirty tiles, including the leather jacket and Baby Phat handbag I gave her and Mandy for Christmas. The second I rush across the threshold to retrieve them, my mother tosses my jacket into the corridor, then slams and locks the door behind me.
I scoop all the money and clothes back into the laundry bag and then pull my keys out of my jacket pocket. Nothing can stop me from letting myself back in and refusing to go. But when I step to the door with the keys in hand, I can hear Moms wailing as if she were desperate to heave up her blistering heart to make the pain stop. Then I hear the patter of Mandy’s feet against the linoleum as she runs from her room to my mother. She cried, too, when my mother finally put out Rubio, but not like this. Nothing like this.
I slip my keys back into my pocket and reach into the laundry bag for a couple of bills. I smooth out each one and slide them under the door. My mother continues to sob, oblivious to my gesture. It’s all good. I would hate for her to misinterpret this as a bribe. As smart as I’m supposed to be, I never figured out a way to find a way to funnel some of my earnings her way. When Moms finds a couple of hundred dollars on the floor, will she throw it out because it’s from me? I won’t be here to take it back, so she might as well get ahead on a few bills.
When I’m done sliding my apologies past the welcome mat, I stand up, grab my bags, and bounce.
Raucous (adj.) loud, boisterous
Marlene answers the door holding an open bottle of soda in her hand. “Hey, Efrain!” She steps aside to let me in as I drag the bag behind me. “What you got in there?” Then Marlene notices my chancl’as. “You must be crazy, walking the streets in them sandals in this cold!”
Ignoring her, I ask, “Mind if I wait for Nes in his room?”
Claudia’s toddler Joshua races past me on his way from the kitchen to the living room. Seconds later some guy in his late twenties chases behind him. Must be his father. I think his name is Robby. He does a double take and stops in front of me. “Who you?” he says.
“That’s Nestor’s friend Efrain,” volunteers Marlene.
“Efrain?” The guy squints at me, his breath foul with Corona. “I don’t know you.”
Marlene sucks her teeth and yells, “That’s ’cause he’s Nestor’s friend!”
“Shut the hell up, Marlene! I heard you the first time, damn.” He starts to say something to me when his cell phone rings. Recognizing the number, Robby flips open the phone and barks into it. “Claudia, where the hell you at?” I take that as my cue to leave. “I know it don’t take that long to bail nobody outta jail!”
I get to Nestor’s door and reach for the knob to find a gaping hole and splinters of wood scattered all over the floor. Someone hacked the knob out of the door. I push it open and find Melo by himself sitting on the floor playing Grand Theft Auto. “Hi, E.!” he says with barely a glance at me. “Where’s Nestor?”
It takes me a second to rebound from the question. “He’s coming soon.” Melo cackles as his game character yanks another out of his car, beats him down with a swift kick to the head for good measure, then roars away in his ride. I grab the box off the bed and read it. Rated “M” for “mature.” “Melo, aren’t you too young to be playing this?”
“My brother bought it for me. Sometimes we play together.” Then he makes a face. “But not a lot ’cause Nestor has to work and go out with GiGi.” Suddenly Melo gets on his knees and leans forward to open the console under the television. “You wanna play with me?” He’s already reaching for another game controller.
I’m not in the mood, but I don’t want to hurt his feelings. “Ah, you don’t want to play with me,” I say. “I don’t know how.”
“I’ll teach you.”
“No, you play. I’ll learn by watching you, okay?”
Melo falls back on his butt and resumes his game. “Okay.”
Not wanting to take the bed should Nestor return, I ease into the lounge chair. All I want is to fall asleep in this chair and awake in my own bed to Mandy’s chocolate fingers and my mother’s pot banging, the storm in my head subsided and the fault in my belly healed. But with the pariseo down the hallway, Melo’s exaggerated reactions to his simulat
ed pillage and plunder, and my mother’s anguish and rage tearing at my soul, I can forget about sleep any night soon.
Acerbic (adj.) biting, bitter in tone or taste
When I wake the next morning, Nestor is still not home, the Xbox screen saver runs across the television screen, and Melo is passed out across the floor. I haul myself out of the chair to pick him up and carry him to bed. He should be getting ready for school now, but I don’t have the heart to wake him. Instead, I head to the bathroom, hoping to find whatever I need to get presentable for school. That’s right, I’m going to school. It’s all I have left to undo the damage I’ve caused.
Someone beat me to it, so I lean against the wall and wait. And wait. And wait. I knock on the door, trying to play it off as if I’m concerned. “Hello? Is everything all right in there?” On top of everything, I don’t want to be late for Miss Polanco’s class.
The bathroom door opens, and a sheet of steam billows out into the hallway. Marlene stands there in a towel that barely covers all that should be covered. “I’m almost finished,” she says, running her fingers through her wet hair. “But you can come inside if you want.”
I jerk my eyes to the floor. “Just knock on Nestor’s door when you’re finished.” Then I bolt. I feel Marlene’s eyes on me, begging for me to turn and peek. And God knows I’m tempted, but not only is she Nestor’s little sister, she’s only fourteen. I can’t go back home too soon.
Then the second I walk into Spanish class, eyes latch onto me while voices downshift into whispers. As I walk to my seat, Marco whispers to Stevie about the bruises on my face, and even Miss Polanco peeks at me from the corner of her eye. When the bell rings, she picks up a stack of booklets off her desk and distributes them to the first person in each row. In Spanish, she announces that we’re going to spend the next few days practicing for the Regents exam. The class groans, but I’m all for it. With the Regents almost two weeks away, this focus might keep me off folks’ minds and my name out of their mouths. At least in this class anyway.
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