“What happened in school today?”
What happened? I lied to my mother two days in a row. I kissed a girl in the prayer room, of all places. Grades just came out and I was tenth percentile. Tenth percentile and I was made a fool of by someone who couldn’t even pass Trigonometry without my help. What use were my world histories and grammar and chemical equations to this heartbreak? The handbook was right. I should have listened to Teacher Grace. This is a sin. This is unhealthy. This is bad for you. I wrapped my arms around Mama and silently vowed never to do the lying and the kissing ever again.
This Wednesday is by far the hottest day of the summer. Thirty-seven degrees and rising. It’s a fever outside. It’s a fever inside. It’s a fever within. I feel like the burning bush, only less fire-resistant. All this heat is melting my brain into goopy mush. It’s compromising my good judgment, leading me to do that one thing I hate most in this world. Even my parents are shocked at the sight of me tying up the crispy shoelaces of my rubber shoes. I run in place, and a tiny dust cloud forms around my ankles. The rubber soles, toughened by disuse, creak in pain when I stretch my toes. That is how often I use my running shoes.
“Ma, Da. I’m going for a run.”
“A run?” Dada asks, a lilt of disbelief right at the end. You know how sitcoms set you up to the cracking joke? Let the bad pun linger in the air. The characters are frozen. They either look at each other or assume an unnatural pose or wear a stupid face. Let that laugh bubble up your throat. And, then, cue laugh track! That’s how my parents are laughing right now. I just set up the punch line to their favorite joke. The joke is me.
“A run?” Mama repeats. There they go again with the laugh track.
“Don’t hurt yourself on your way out.”
“Honey, don’t do this. You have a full life ahead of you.”
“At least let me massage your legs before you go.”
“Should I be calling the healers, Da?”
Laugh track. Laugh track, laugh track. I leave them laugh-tracking their way through their after-dinner coffee. I’m at the end of our street, and I still hear them. I break into a sprint, and a little wind picks up. Or, perhaps, that’s just my mass breaking air resistance. I let the wind sweep between my ears and render me thoughtless. I run until I round a bend and come across an uphill street, at the end of which her house stood.
In the suburbs, size matters. Bigger is better. That is the philosophy that determines the pecking order. At the bottom rung, the neat, red-roofed houses sit wall-to-wall. Duplexes. Triplexes. Sextuplexes. They’re the fillers to a landscape that would otherwise be just forest and countryside-style mansions miles apart from each other. That’s us, by the way. I’m a red-roofer. Next up are the stand-alone family houses with their warm yellow lights and white SUVs and the occasional creepy-ass garden gnome. And then there are houses at the end of an uphill street. Five-car garage space, gardens front and back, balconies as big as my bedroom. It doesn’t get any better than that in the suburbs.
“Get back here, young lady!” a shrill voice orders. I look back, expecting to see my mother, all flushed in the face, ready to pull me back home by the ear. She’s not there. That was my conscience speaking, which – surprise, surprise! – talks like my mother. Now, if only my conscience had a more pleasing voice, I would have obeyed in a heartbeat. Half a heartbeat, even. No questions asked. I would have skipped along like a good little piggy, wee, wee, wee all the way home. I wouldn’t have played dare, double dare, chicken or repeat with myself.
My phantom self is already halfway up the slope. The showboat is running backwards and sticking her tongue out at me.
I dare you to run to where I am.
Done.
All the way up?
Done. I don’t feel so good.
Ring the doorbell.
I should really go back. My legs are turning to jelly.
Chicken.
Don’t call me that.
Repeat.
I ring the doorbell. The lights are all off. Please, please, please God, let nobody be home. But, God is busy healing the sick and turning water into bland wine in some remote mountainside. You’re all alone, kid. A light switches on somewhere upstairs, and I stand there thinking it’s not nice now to bother an old lady for nothing. I am after all my parents’ daughter. I have the genes for excessive politeness. I stay behind the gates, weak knees and all, waiting for the window silhouette to become a real person.
“Can I help you?” Mrs. Alves greets from behind the gate. Is that really Mrs. Alves? I can’t remember her being so fair-skinned. She’s glowing so white even the nighttime fireflies come hovering around her. I open my mouth to speak, but the words are as hard to come by as an Israeli pharaoh.
“I…I just ran a little too far. And, I…maybe…I could have some water…for the way back?”
The hot night is doing its work on me. Sweat is working its way down my arm. My lungs are raring for a nice, big gulp of air. I raise my water bottle and take a step, but my feet are at odds with each other. The left wants to go right, and the right wants to go left. I think running has made them stupid. The result is one hundred thirty-five pounds of Sam falling with a thud on the terracotta stoop. I try to use my arms to stand up and fight for a shred of dignity. But, who am I kidding? I just did a faceplant on the front step of the biggest house in the village. This is already a lost battle. Let this be a warning to kids out there. Exercise is never good for you. It turns muscle into goopy, useless gelatin.
“Fireflies…” Mrs. Alves’s eyes grow wide as she hovers over me like the tiny fireflies buzzing around her. It’s the last thing I see before my vision blurs, before everything turns black. Why, oh, why can’t good things happen to me?
“How are you feeling?” The voice comes like an echo, like an auto-tune electronica track that’s well-done.
“I…” I rub my eyes awake. Cold sweat sticks to my palm. The couch is soft against my back, generous enough to catch my weight. Which means this is not the couch at home. I catch my breath and the oxygen wakes up my head. I am not home. I sit up too quickly, only to fall back down on the couch. I clutch my head, more in an effort to hide my face in shame than to shoo away an incoming wave of nausea.
“Why don’t you just lie down for another minute? I’ll make tea. It will calm your nerves.”
Mrs. Alves’s house makes me feel small. The ceilings are too high. The walls are not four-adjacent. The rooms have too many corners and are too far between. In the red roofs, everything is five steps away. Five steps to the kitchen, five steps to the sala, five steps to the second floor landing. I couldn’t escape my overbearing parents even if I tried. Our house is small and full. This is just big and empty, nothing but air and fancy furniture to fill up the space. When Mrs. Alves disappears into a hallway to brew tea, a horror-movie kind of loneliness hits me. The silence is unnatural and disturbing, like some masked maniac would just leap at you from behind and take you captive. I imagine living here every day on my own. I would grow bored and sad out of my mind and die a boring and sad death. A half-empty teacup and a chessboard I had been playing all by myself.
The tea does help gather my senses and gets my skin all prickly with warmth. I remember my manners and sit up straight and tie my hair back into a neat bun. My knee hurts when I stretch it. I look down and see a gash, golden brown with Betadine. I cringe at the thought of having a stranger treat my wound, having a stranger see me bust into a sprint, only to bust my gut and my knee in the process. “Mrs. Alves, I really am sorry for making you go through all this trouble.”
She sips some of her tea. I bet she’s hiding an amused smile behind that porcelain cup. Her eyes tell me that much. She clears her throat before saying, “Oh, you made my night interesting. People don’t usually drop half-dead on my porch.” She gives in to a little chuckle.
“And, I apologize for ignoring you last Sunday, Mrs. Alves.” If she recognized me from Sunday, she did a bang-up acting job hiding it. Her eyes narro
w in confusion. Her mouth turns into a frown. She doesn’t remember me at all.
“In church,” I add, expecting her to remember. She just nods, the kind that people give you when they have no idea what you’re talking about.
“I sat beside you.” Surely, that ought to jolt her memory. She squints, looks up at the ceiling, takes a little bit of the tea before shrugging her shoulders.
“Funeral wreath?”
“Oh, that was you?” Her eyes light up with humor and her mouth breaks into a smile. I knew that dress was good for something. It was so ugly it had good recall. It was so ugly she remembered it better than my face. We take turns jabbing at the dress Mama made me wear, and it lightens the mood somehow. The nice-to-meet-you jitters are still there, but just a smidge. I have overstayed my impromptu welcome and stand up to leave. I thank her for the tea and apologize one last time for the fainting spell.
“Thank you for losing your way here…” She forgot to ask for my name in all the blur.
“Sam.”
“Sam.” She says it like she’s savoring it, getting used to it, letting it fill her mouth. “Thank you. Do come soon.” A flutter of the eyelids, a second too slow. Blink and I might have missed it. She doesn’t want me to leave. Being alone is suddenly such a scary thing. When she tells me to come again soon, I have this feeling that it’s more than a turn of phrase. It’s not what Mama says to weepy Mrs. Cruz when she wants to end her visit. It’s not some play at courtesy. “Do come soon.” It’s a hope. It’s a wish. It’s a prayer.
The chessboard catches my eye again. I walk to it and find it between moves. There’s no one else here. A black pawn and a white pawn meet in the center. They are bound by the line that is neither black nor white. Forever apart, imprisoned by their little squares. Try to come near and you fail your king. Try to touch, and it’s the dungeons for you. “A chessboard? Do you play, Mrs. Alves?”
“I’m not so bad. And, you, Sam?”
“A little,” I lie. Dada taught me the basics one summer and I became a chess God, pardon the blasphemy. He had me memorize the matrix of letters and numbers, so I can plan my moves easier. He always reminded me of three things: develop the pieces, control the center, protect the king. I was a geek over it. I loved the guessing, the thinking, the scheming, the tall glass of milk and Oreos we shared. But, when I realized that being a chess master gets you teased in school, I dropped it like fresh-boiled corn and forgot all about it. Mrs. Alves’s pieces call out to me in Dada’s voice. Develop the pieces. Control the center. Protect the king. “Can we play some time?”
“I would love to.”
“I’ll come by Friday after Bible study. Mama’s hosting and I’m on kitchen duty. Good night, Mrs. Alves.”
“Good night. And, Sam?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Clara.”
Chapter 3
I STOOD IN THE quadrangle, squinting at the sun growing higher and higher above me. The morning flag ceremony, complete with school hymn, Bible scripture of the day, that other school hymn, was long enough as it is. We should have been retreating to our air-conditioned classrooms by now. Instead, we had to wait for Teacher Nida to penguin-walk her way up the platform. When she prefaced her announcement with “It has come to my attention…,” we knew we were in for a long morning.
The object of Teacher Nida’s attention was a freshman, name withheld for security reasons like we weren’t already suspending our disbelief. We knew it was Dinah Torres from I-St. Lucy. She was a forgettable and mediocre sort of girl, if it weren’t for the rumors going around that she was dating the valedictorian-in-running. It was one thing to date a senior. But, to be a freshman dating a senior celebrity was the golden standard. You earned cred for dating celebrities: the varsity captain, the student council president, the valedictorian, everyone with a special title except for the editor-in-chief. Nobody dates the school paper. They date themselves.
Word in the pergola was that Dinah’s parents were starting to grow suspicious of their daughter’s habits. Dinah would retire to her room early but stayed up late, probably flashed pale and white by the glow of her phone. You know, like a normal, socially-functioning teenager. Mr. and Mrs. Torres thought this was enough reason to sort through Dinah’s trash. Their suspicions weren’t entirely unfounded as they found torn-up pieces of a love letter. The parents went to Teacher Nida to protect Dinah from so-called bad influences. If they had any inkling to how an all-girls school works, if they knew more than what the brochure told them, they wouldn’t have acted the way they did. It would have crossed their minds that what they did was the opposite of protection. It was Dinah Torres’s social suicide.
In the days that followed, Mrs. David and her posse of guidance counselors cracked down on girl-to-girl couples. Forget those riding in cars with college boys after school, those smoking their first Marlboros in the park come dusk, those filling their Starbucks tumblers with San Mig Light during field trips. A relationship with the same sex was a far graver misconduct than these.
Jocks were breaking up with their flavors of the month two weeks early. School paper kids had to shut down their in-house shenanigans. The mean girls had to snag boyfriends real quick. Even the middling flock, those buried in books and go straight home from school, was brought in for questioning. I was brought in for my friendship with Christina. I was a freshman at the time and had a counselor whose bottom lip never moved. It was freaky, the lip and the interview. I was terrified to my bones. The balance of this society, maintained for decades by those that came before us, was completely thrown on its side. We were all so terribly lost in this chaos, but we had to suffer in silence. We dared not ask for directions to the exit.
Dinah became the brunt of the whole school’s collective anger. And they weren’t shy at all in making her feel it. They called her a rat and squeaked every time she walked by. Even the Sixers, indiscriminate grade-school fangirls that they were, left her alone in the cafeteria at lunch. It would have been fine if the teasing was a seven to three affair. Business hours only, come back tomorrow. But, the bullies followed her home. They sat with her at dinner. They breathed down her neck in the shower. They laid in wait under the blankets as she made for bed. They hounded her with an arsenal of video uploads, status updates, shares, likes, retweets, reblogs. You would think dating the valedictorian would offer some sort of immunity. It could have taken one word posted online for all this to stop. But, a gold medal and a graduation speech weighed much more than whatever affectionate friendship she had with Dinah. Ms. Valedictorian hit the books and kept mum about it. She didn’t say a word. So, nobody said a word. The bullying continued.
Weeks passed, and we saw less and less of Dinah. The last time I saw her, she was sitting by the piano in the Music Room. She was singing this song by some old singer called Vitamin C, the hymn of choice for graduates. It was a song that made you cry while you hugged your friends close. It was a song that made college so real and exciting and scary. It was a song that made you promise to go back to your roots even when your 10-years-hence self were to be a corrupt senator, a pro-bono lawyer or the scientist that cured cancer. It’s not a goodbye, the song seemed to say. It wasn’t supposed to be. But, Dinah sang that song and lived the rest of her life without stepping into St. Peter’s ever again. A month later, she shot herself with her father’s handgun. She was thirteen.
Fridays are for the Stuck-up Moms’ bible study. It’s Mama’s turn to host, which means I get to be a little fancier cook than usual to impress the guests. Truth be told, the only person that needs impressing is Mrs. Bautista, the group’s den mother and Mama’s sort-of idol. Mama makes me wear dresses because Mrs. Bautista thinks women should always appear feminine. Feminine means flowers and lace and stockings. They have the same tight up-bun that stretches all their wrinkles. Mama is practically Mrs. Bautista’s stunt double. I wish Mama knew that she is never going to get Mrs. Bautista’s spot ever. She will be the biggest Stuck-up Mom until the day she dies. If she could
snap at our skirt length from the afterlife, I think she would.
“You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the children of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.” I finish up on the preparations, as Mama says the verse that ends their session. Leviticus 19:17? No, wait. I think it’s 19:18.
Wait for it.
“Leviticus 19:18.”
Score!
A final Amen ushers them to my kingdom of Teflon pans and German knives. They sit down on the table, teetering and sniffing in disbelief that a 19-year-old could beat them in the kitchen. Mrs. Bautista sits at the head of the table. Mama sits on the other end, with me and Dada flanking her on both sides. Everyone was in the middle of my chicken galantine when my question suspends dinner for a split-second.
“Why isn’t Mrs. Alves part of your group?”
Spoons stop clanking, some suspended in mid-air. Dada coughs up a spit of water. Mrs. Lopez’s cheeks, already plump and ripe as they are, are stuffed with rice, like a rat caught nibbling a piece of cheese. Mrs. Bautista gives me that glare she reserves for teenagers who wear denim and micros in church. Mama is the first to recover, faking a foodgasm. I’ve been cooking for you long enough to know that’s fake, Ma. “This is delicious! Honey, you’ve outdone yourself. Be a dear and fetch us more, please?”
I oblige and refill the bowl of salad greens. Upon returning to the table, I immediately ask, “Okay. But, Mama, why?”
“Because she isn’t a mother, dear. It’s called Moms Standing Up For Christ, isn’t it?” Aha. That’s what they’re called. I should take a note. Not a mental note, but an actual Post-it note.
“Mrs. Cruz is here. She has no child.”
“I had a miscarriage. And that counts! She was my baby the moment Ernie and I fertilized her in my womb,” Mrs. Cruz defends. The table braces for hysterical weeping. “It was hard.”
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