by Fred Aceves
“More like ran past,” Art says.
“More like sprinted past,” Jason says.
Art and Jason give me the play-by-play of what went down last night. When Brian grabbed me in the parking lot, they both came running. As they was about to open my front door they heard the “No!” my mom shouted.
Brian punched me once, just like the cop said. Couldn’t punch me a second time.
“Punkass didn’t know what to do with us coming at him from both sides,” Art says. He’s punching the air with both fists, trying to demonstrate on Ruben who backs away.
I can see them doing it too, no problem, even if each is half the size of Brian.
Jason points to his left eye. “He nicked me once.”
“Wrong side, bitch,” Ruben says.
Jason points under the other eye.
“He can see your bruise, idiot.”
Art opens his arms wide. “He didn’t get me.” He turns his face to show me both profiles. “I’m still sexy.”
Ruben don’t look too excited. “Wish I was there.”
I mess with him. “We talking assault and battery, not a Kendrick Lamar concert.”
“Ya know what I mean.”
Now the others are gonna have at him.
Jason asks, “Why ya wanna see Marcos get hurt?”
“That’s messed up,” Art says, fake-mad at Ruben. “How about wishing it never happened to Marcos?”
Some jokes just whiz over Ruben’s head. “Damn,” he says. “I’m just saying what I think. And it’s the thought that counts.”
We laughing at that when Amy walks in. Total shock.
“Where were you?” Art asks her.
“Walking around.” She shows them the plastic hospital bracelet on her wrist. “I swiped one of these when the receptionist went after you guys.”
We hear voices in the hall. Amy gets behind the door.
“What’s going on here?” Rita wants to know.
A doctor and another nurse come in right behind her and look dead at me, like I smuggled my boys in here.
“We’re just leaving,” Ruben says.
They take off. It was a five-minute visit, tops.
After the nurse and the doctor leave, Amy comes out from her hiding spot and looks closely at my wound. “Nice face.”
I’m smiling so much my stitched cheek tugs. “You too. What’re ya doing here?”
“Obie told me to come.”
Which makes no sense. I wonder how he knew about her.
“He found me during lunch and told me to meet up with your friends after school. That he’d try to come later.”
Amy tells me I’m the trending topic at Hanna High. She’s been reading the news and comments.
“I want a selfie with you so I can be part of the first official photo.”
Laughing feels good but also hurts my face.
I show her the stitches, outside and inside my cheek. Tough girl don’t squirm at all.
She sits on the chair, feet up on my bed, and talks about how a scar on me wouldn’t look too bad. Listening to her soft voice, it’s impossible to not think about her in the old way, even though we just got back to being friends. If only Punkboy didn’t exist.
“What’s up with Mike?”
I damn near say Punkboy. I need to stop hating on the guy. He never did nothing to me.
“Mike and I broke up,” she says.
“Too bad.”
It ain’t too bad. It’s fucking great.
“I had to break up with him,” she says. “I got sick of hanging out on his couch while he smoked weed, played video games and ignored me.”
“You did that?”
She shrugs. “It’s like if you let people treat you like crap, you start feeling like crap, and then getting treated like crap becomes normal.”
“Yeah, I think that happened to me with that asshole.”
“Fuck Carver.”
“Yeah, fuck him,” I say.
Amy tells me how all those kids staring at her and her mom on the bus last night got her to look at life in a new way. “I don’t know how to help my mom and I’m sick of feeling guilty about it.”
“I hear you. I’m not dealing with my mom once I hit eighteen. I’ve wanted that asshole outta the house this whole time, but I realized I want to get outta that house too. I want a future out of Maesta. I’m going to college.”
I say it like it’s a fact and all of a sudden it feels like one.
“Speaking of school,” Amy says, and takes out a blue folder from her backpack. “I got the work you gotta make up.”
Schoolwork for Marcos is written in neat penmanship. Inside are worksheets from my classes, assignments from teachers. How great is this girl?
In the middle of semester I’m flunking all my classes except PE. The thought of repeating my sophomore year scares the hell outta me. All day I been worried about the work I was missing, and now that it’s in my hands, I know I’ll do the assignments. Breckner’s words still got me caring.
Amy says we should study together, and I’m down, but since the pills are making me drowsy and slow in the brain I let her do most of the talking.
She tells me how Obie found her behind the gym and invited her to the hospital. How player Ruben joke-flirted with her nonstop, how Jason paid his bus fare with nickels and dimes, how Art stood up to give Amy his seat when she gave hers to an old man.
She talks about herself too, but don’t say nothing half as interesting as when she said “Mike and I broke up.”
22
AFTER KNOCKING out the ten algebra problems and studying the periodic table for chemistry, I see that it’s just past five, about an hour since Amy left.
That’s a long time for me to sit still, especially if I’m doing schoolwork, so I’m happy when the beige phone in my room rings. A nurse came by earlier to say my mom would pick me up at seven, and that my mom said not to eat, which means she has something special in mind.
Maybe she’s calling again to say she’ll be here sooner.
“Hello?”
“It’s me,” Obie says. “They won’t let me past. Family only.”
I tell him the plan. He sits in the waiting area with a view of the hall entrance. That’s where I’ll be, nodding when the coast is clear.
I hang up and consider my hospital gown again. It looks like a long shirt, a few sizes too big. No biggie, really. I head down the hall where an old man, hunched over, pushes an older woman in a wheelchair. Nurse Rita pops out of one room, hurries down the hall a few steps, and pops into another.
I gotta walk to the very end of the hall for Obie to see me. From the bench where he’s sitting he glances at the receptionist desk a few times. When it’s clear he gets up and runs to me.
“Hey! Get back here!”
I hurry to the corner, Obie following me, and make a left. Can’t go back to my room where they might look so I’m thinking of a plan, where to go, when I see a sign for stairs. We go through that door and down one flight. The floor below looks the same.
We walk regular so we don’t draw attention, passing the rooms with documents on the doors detailing the patient information. We need an empty room.
At a dead end I try the doorknob. It turns. I switch on the light and am so shocked I just stand there for a few seconds before closing the door.
An operating room. White metal arms come down from the ceiling and turn into big round lamps. Under the lamps is the table where patients get cut open. Other arms hold computer screens and other high-tech stuff.
Obie hops onto the operation table.
I wanna celebrate the escape but there’s something bigger on my mind. Still outta breath, I ask, “How’d ya know about Amy?”
He does his silent laugh, eyes closed and head shaking. That Bucs cap cocked carefully to the side, barely gripping his skull, stays put. “Ya mentioned something about a white girl once. Plus in school, when ya look off somewhere, it’s always at her.”
Which gets me smiling. I press t
he tape on my cheek so the gauze don’t fall off. “I wanted to tell ya. I really did. But then I wasn’t sure she could be my girlfriend ’cause how we different and all, but then I found out she ain’t so different, but she had a boyfriend so, ya know, whatever, but now she ain’t got one.”
“Right,” he says, not sarcastic at all. He can understand me when I’m amped like this.
He looks different, tired maybe. It’s his eyes, dull yet glassy. He got high today.
“Messing with weed ain’t us,” I tell him. “Delivering or doing it.”
He looks surprised, but he don’t deny it. “I just smoked a little.”
“But you deal a lot.”
He says nothing so I continue. “You know that shit always ends bad. You know what happened to Fat Rick, Manrico, and all them.”
He smiles at me. “Okay, Mom.”
“Someone’s gotta tell you. Ya gonna fuck around and get busted.” I’m pacing, blowing off steam I didn’t know I had.
“Listen, man,” he says, his eyes following me.
“Fuck that. You were going to be a physicist, remember?”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he says. Like I’m the one who’s acting crazy.
I tell him, “At least one person in our graduating class is gonna be a surgeon. Someone else is gonna be an engineer. Someone else is gonna be a lawyer. You were gonna be a physicist. Now you’re a drug dealer.”
“What are you gonna be?”
“I don’t fucking know, but I ain’t washing cars or sweeping parking lots for the rest of my life, and I damn sure ain’t gonna be a drug dealer like you.”
“Fuck this.” He hops down. “I don’t need this shit.”
“You are a drug dealer, Obie. Don’t get mad at me over some real talk.”
He takes a deep breath, hops back on the table, and lies there. I wish one of these machines could scan his brain and tell me what he’s thinking.
He sits up and says, “When making money suddenly became easy, it took over everything. Became even more important than school, I guess.”
“I don’t blame you,” I tell him. “I get it, even. But you gotta forget that now and buckle down on school.” That’s a Breckner phrase.
He laughs. “Buckle down? That punch you took rearranged your brain.”
To make him understand it ain’t a joke, I say this carefully: “I’m getting outta Maesta.”
“Sure,” he says, all serious. “Okay.”
“No, listen to me. Really listen. Nobody else gets out, but I’m gonna do it, and you supposed to be my inspiration.”
“So that’s what this is about?” He smiles. “For a second I thought you was worried about me.”
I shrug. “There’s that too.”
He tells me he worries about getting caught all the time and that he got his first C plus last week in history.
He hops off the table. “You right. If I don’t stop, something’s gonna stop me. Soon as my aunt finds somebody else, I’m out.”
“Promise?” I slowly raise my fist.
“Depends,” he says. “Do you promise to let us know when someone fucks with ya?”
“Promise.”
After we bump fists, Obie says, “When they let out Brian or Carver or whoever, he better hope I don’t run into his punkass.”
A smile grows on my face, so big that one side of my gauze pops off and flaps there like a broken screen door. I smooth it back over the stitches.
Obie’s comment is like Ruben saying “Wish I was there.”
I ain’t into violence, have had enough of it, believe me, but there’s something crazy beautiful about a friend wanting to hurt the person who’s hurt you.
23
THAT NIGHT when me and my mom get back from the hospital she puts a lasagna in the oven, the special-occasion dish for new boyfriends or for when her cousin Zenaida visits from Puerto Rico.
Lasagna might be the closest thing I’ll get to “Sorry,” since she ain’t mentioned the asshole boyfriend who used to live here yet.
I’ll take it. Eating a nice dinner together is just one change of many I feel coming. The obvious change is the house, cleaner and more organized than it was yesterday. The table, forever cluttered with coupons and bills, is almost clear. The ashtray on the windowsill is gone, though the stink of tobacco still clings to the air.
You can smell the boyfriends for days after they leave, like the sweat and car grease of José the mechanic, the spicy Cajun stench of Rogelio, who managed Popeyes.
Though my mom usually comes home sluggish, tonight she’s moving like a woman on a mission. From the living room armchair, still drowsy on pills, I watch the Heat game as she works in the kitchen.
There’s no Brian demanding things. No listening out for his car so I can turn off the TV and rush to my room before he walks in.
I’m feeling different too, proud and happy like I just killed it out on the court. I guess I did kill it today, with my homework.
After a three-pointer gives the Heat a lead, I hear the oven door shriek open and my mom say, “Please set the table, honey.”
The table? My heart drops and wiggles in my gut. I turn off the TV, all my excitement draining away. A new boyfriend already?
In the kitchen my mom’s peeling a cucumber. She’s got this way of holding a cucumber in her hand, turning it with her thumb, the peeler swiping down quick so that the dark green skin slides off in long pieces. In seconds it gets sliced, each circle the same thickness.
She sways right to let me open the cupboard next to her. I ask, “For how many people?”
Her eyes go wide. “Did you invite someone?”
“No.”
Then she must remember what lasagna means. She dumps the cucumber slices over the lettuce and says, “Just us two.”
Music to my ears. We sit down to a family-type dinner, where she looks at me from across the small round table. Ain’t gonna lie. It would be a million times better if we had a family-type talk. She speaks only to offer me more salad or lasagna or Materva soda, and I ain’t trying to say too much and ruin it.
If she can look at me in this way, like we know each other, it will be enough.
“What did you tell the cop?” she asks me.
“Nothing.”
She nods and chews slowly. “What did he ask?”
“He asked me questions about . . .” I rather not say his name. “I didn’t tell them anything about you.”
“Good. It’s nobody’s business.”
“Right,” I say. I get it. She’s worried about getting in trouble. “It’s all over now.”
I take a sip of soda.
“Not yet. A social worker will be coming to talk to you.”
“Why?”
“Probably to ask you the same questions, honey.”
We eat quietly until her phone rings. She answers it right away. “Hello? . . . Oh, one moment.”
She tells me to keep eating and takes the call in her bedroom, the door closed. After a few minutes she comes back. “Sorry about that.”
We eat in the quiet glow of the kitchen light with me wondering, just like when I was little, what I can say to get her talking.
I ask her about work: everything is fine.
I ask her where she learned to make lasagna: from the instructions on the pasta box.
I tell her that Future Success is a fun class hoping she’ll ask me why. “That’s nice,” she tells me, and sips from the last can of Natural Ice.
Then something dope happens. When I take the final bite of lasagna and say “Mama mia, datta wasa delichoso,” my mom laughs.
Even if it’s more like a chuckle or a giggle, whichever’s softer, it feels like we really together at the table. And that love is here too.
24
FOR THE past few weeks I’ve been hitting the books hard, even with my boys knocking on the front door, trying to get me on the court.
I told them from the start that I ain’t trying to spend another year as a
sophomore, while they get one year closer to graduating.
I gotta pass each class and not just to move up a grade. I gotta dodge summer school too. Maybe that now makes me ambitious, a Breckner word.
I still got the ambition for money, and the hole in my sneaker has gotten bigger, but I ain’t got much time for job searching with all this school catch-up.
My teachers didn’t die of heart attacks when I asked them for extra credit. Instead, they got sorta happy, like they love coming up with assignments on the spot.
Yesterday for English I wrote a thousand words on “The Chrysanthemums.” I was feeling that lady in the story, the one who loves something nobody understands. Then I was feeling the nice man who wanted to fix her pots and pans. But in the end I guess I identified most with the chrysanthemums, them flowers in the middle of the road.
With me kneeling on the floor, my bed turns into a desk full of textbooks, notebooks, and pens. When I’m set up for studying like this I feel in control of my life.
I ain’t gotta coach myself like the first days, which was basically my brain bossing my body around. Sit right there. Read that textbook. You can get up in twenty more minutes.
I sounded like my own mom should, which might mean I don’t need one.
I cross out the assignments from the list when completed and each slash feels like a trophy for my shelf.
I didn’t lie in the last study journal entries I turned in to Breckner. I really did all that work—the note-taking in class that made my hand sore, reading entire units again and again, answering the comprehension questions.
I made plans to study with Amy and Zach. Obie wants to study with me as soon as his schedule loosens up. His mom found out about his grades slipping and his punishment is that he comes home directly from school every day to do homework. His aunt found somebody to replace him right away, so I’ve stopped worrying about him.
Sure, sometimes I wanna take long breaks, wanna burn these books and go outside, but then I think of me and Amy kicking it during all of June, July, and August.
That girl’s damn motivational.
My first days back in school I was given rock star attention. Don’t ask me why violence and injuries are cool. All I know’s that bruises or cuts get you attention, stitches get you more. Plus everybody heard I got punched by Carver Shepard. I walked through school like Kanye on a red carpet, with kid reporters popping up to get spontaneous interviews.