I know I should run now that Pedro’s hands are off of me, but I don’t. Because my head is swimming, and it’s like the poison he put in my life that day at Ceci’s is coming back all at once. I feel him on top of me again, see his lips twist into that nasty smile. My head is hanging over the toilet, Anita is crying, I’m alone, alone, alone with what I let happen.
And then I remember his arm around Brenda’s shoulder.
My fear turns to rage so fast that I can’t hold it back. I slam the bottle against the edge of the counter. The bottom half of the bottle shatters, leaving a jagged edge. Pedro stops laughing and just stares at me.
I grip the neck of the bottle tight and press toward him. “You were going to force me,” I whisper just loud enough for him to hear. “I didn’t want to, I told you no. You almost—you almost raped me.” I point the broken bottle at him.
“You pendeja cunt,” he says, shaking his head. But he takes a step back. Then another.
“You may think I’m just some stupid girl, pero I will so slice you open if you try to touch me again.” I lean forward until the sharp edge of the bottle is pressed against his stomach. “The same goes for Brenda. Stay away.” I hear myself speaking in a voice too calm and level to be mine.
“What the hell?” He tries to back up, but he’s already against the wall. “Psycho bitch,” he says, but his voice trembles just enough for me to know he’s scared.
I jerk my arm to the right, grazing his arm with the broken glass.
“Fuck!” he shouts. A trail of red droplets beads up on his arm.
“You should leave.”
“Hell no, this is my party—”
“Leave. Now.” I think for a second about how I could hurt him the most, and I lower the bottle until it’s close to his crotch. No matter how he moves, I can cut him now if I want to. I can cut him before he could grab my hand and stop me.
“Jesus fucking Christ! You are one fucked-up pendeja.” He tries to sound tough, but his words fall flat.
I just stare at him with a calm I don’t feel and hold the bottle steady. “Vete,” I say again. “Go.”
A second later he’s out of the kitchen and shoving through the crowded living room. I watch as a few guys try to pull him into a drinking game, but he pushes them away and keeps moving.
The door to the garage opens just as he goes by, and Brenda walks in with a bucket of punch. She calls to him, but he shakes his head and pushes on toward the front door. A confused look passes over Brenda’s face, then she shrugs and starts passing out drinks.
I’m OK. It’s all OK. He’s gone. I step back into the kitchen and look around me. There’s a narrow door on the other side of the room, and I push it open. It’s the laundry room. I step in and slide down against the dryer. Something is tumbling inside it. Suddenly I’m exhausted, and I just listen to the steady thud-thud-woosh. Right now, I don’t need to think.
The dryer is still running when the door opens and a light flickers on. I blink against the sudden brightness.
“You OK?” Brenda asks. She squats down beside me. “Took me a while to find you. Too much booze, huh?” She holds her hand against my forehead. “No fever. Do you need—”
“Pedro tried to force me.” I say it like ripping off a Band-Aid—the faster the better.
“What?” Brenda stares at me. “Bullshit. Don’t joke about that; I saw him leave like an hour ago.”
“Not tonight. Back at the end of March, right after the fight with my dad and everything with Alan. Pedro . . . I was at Cecilia’s and he . . .”
Brenda puts her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God, Marisa. Oh, shit. All this time you were trying to tell me, and I just gave you hell. Lo siento tanto, babe.” She drops all the way down to the floor and puts her hands on my knees. “I am so, so sorry,” she says again. “Tell me what happened.”
“So he came to see Jose, but Jose was at the doctor’s. I was so lonely that when Pedro started talking to me, I felt a little better, and I talked to him.” I look at Brenda, afraid that I’ll see anger on her face, or even worse, blame. But she just reaches over to smooth my hair.
I tell her how he kissed me, how it felt good at first. How I knew it was wrong, but I just didn’t want to think about Alan. How I wanted to feel free from everything.
“Everybody feels that way sometimes,” she says.
When I finish telling her the rest, Brenda hugs me for a long time.
“Nobody should ever have to go through that,” she says. “Especially not alone.”
I look down. I’m still holding the broken beer bottle. I start to shake, half laughing, half crying again. “I was in here getting water, and he came in. Started talking shit, put his hands on me. I kind of snapped. I broke this, and then I pointed it at his balls and told him I’d cut him if he even thought about touching me. Or you.”
“So that’s why he was looking like a scared-shitless dog when he passed me. I could tell he was guilty for something, the pendejo.” Brenda starts laughing too, and she leans back against the dryer next to me. “You got guts, loca, you know it?”
chapter 32
We’re on our way to pick up Anita after school a few days later when Brenda’s cell phone rings. She grabs it from the dashboard, then raises an eyebrow at me.
“It’s Alan.”
“Really?” I try to keep the hope out of my voice.
“Should I answer?”
“Of course, mensa!” For a second I forget she’s driving and grab her arm.
“OK, OK!” She swats my hand away, then flips the phone open. “Hey, Alan. What’s up?” She listens. “Really? What time did she start the labor and everything? Already? I love the name. Good for her. Sure, I’ll tell her. Yeah, just give me the room number. OK . . . OK . . . See you soon.”
“Jessica had her baby?”
“Three weeks early, but everything is fine. It’s a girl. Katalina Cinthia Peralta. He wanted to know if we could bring flowers or something.”
“We?”
“He asked me to tell you. You’re coming, right?” Brenda says.
“Are you kidding? If he wants me there, nothing could keep me back.”
Her cell rings again. This time it’s Greg. “Looks like you and me both might get our chance,” she says. “Time for some relationship CPR, chica.”
I watch Alan from where I’m standing at the end of a long hall in the hospital. He’s the only one standing in front of a big window into some kind of hospital room. He seems so at peace that I’m afraid to disturb him.
“Hi,” I say when I finally walk up beside him. “Your mom told me you’d be here. You should see the mess of balloons Brenda picked out. They barely fit through the door.”
“Just look at her,” he says reverently, pointing at a skinny, red-faced baby wearing nothing but a diaper. “Meet Katalina Cinthia Peralta.” The baby is lying in a little plastic cart while a nurse cleans her foot.
“Wow,” I say. To me she looks sort of like an alien monkey. But Alan is in a trance.
“So totally new,” he murmurs.
“Yeah,” I say. We watch as the nurse pulls out a needle and starts drawing blood from the baby’s heel. “Is that normal?” I ask him.
Alan nods. “Jess asked me to come watch while they did the tests and stuff. She wanted somebody to stay with the baby until they bring her back to the room.”
The nurse is done drawing the blood, and Katalina looks only a little pissed. I stare at her hard and try to see her through Alan’s eyes. I want to slide in front of him, pull his arms around me, and listen to him tell me what he sees. Maybe it’s just being close to him, but I can feel something I haven’t felt in a long time creeping back into me. Hope.
There’s a lot of truth that needs telling, ugly truth. And there are no guarantees. But the only chances I’m going to have are the ones I make for myself.
We stand there without talking for a long time, just watching Katalina as the nurse listens to her heart and does some other tests
. Katalina purses her lips and sucks at the air, then presses her tiny fists against her cheeks. Her eyebrows wrinkle into twin squiggles when she starts to cry.
Alan doesn’t take his eyes off of her. “Good strong lungs.”
I don’t know for sure, but I think there’s an opening here, maybe just big enough for me to get through.
I slip my hand into his. He doesn’t pull away.
chapter 33
“Are you nuts?” Cecilia says. Some of the people standing by us turn to stare.
“It’s not like it’s a crime for me to skip it, Ceci. Graduation is way more important. I don’t even like to dress up.” I elbow her so she’ll move forward in the line. The department store is going out of business, so the place is packed. The checkout line is so long it looks like half of Houston is here.
“Your prom is a once-in-a-lifetime thing! You’ll always regret it if you don’t go. I mean, I thought about skipping it. I already had a big belly and everything. But for that one night, every girl is a princess, every guy is a prince.”
“At least until the after-parties start,” I say.
“Skip those, whatever. But the actual prom—the dancing, the fancy dresses, the pictures—you have to go. Doesn’t Alan want to?”
I pull Anita back from the toys and candy that the evil store owners put right by the checkout. “He said it was up to me. But I don’t want to spend that kind of money on a dress.”
“It always comes back to money for us, doesn’t it?” She sighs.
We finally make it to the front of the line, and Cecilia heaps up the clothes we picked out for Anita.
“These are 75 percent off?” Cecilia asks as she adds a pair of pink sandals to the pile.
“Everything’s on clearance, hon,” the saleswoman says. “They want this place emptied out by next Saturday so the new store can come in.”
When she finishes paying, Ceci turns to me with this sneaky smile. “I want to look at one more thing,” she says.
“After waiting in that long line, now you want to look at more stuff?” I shake my head. “Anita, your mama is crazy.”
Anita twirls her finger in circles by her ear and chants, “Loca, loca, loca!”
Cecilia ignores us. “What’s your hurry? You’ve got an hour before you have to be at work. Come on.”
“Tía, mira esto.” Anita tugs on my arm and drags me over to another rack.
“Sweetheart, dresses have to be the right size. You can’t just grab one and—” I shut up when I see it. It’s strapless, with gauzy layers of shimmery material over soft gold satin. A velvet ribbon wraps around just above the waistline, and the skirt is full and elegant without being poofy. I’m not the kind of girl who dreams about prom dresses, but if I were, this is the dress I would want.
Anita’s little feet peek out from inside the rack of dresses. She loves to hide there. Normally I’d be chasing her out, telling her that the rack could fall over, but right now all I want to do is check the dress size.
“Doesn’t my daughter have good taste?” Cecilia says.
“She does. And look, híjole, she even picked the right size.”
“It’s a sign,” Cecilia says. “Why don’t you go try it on?”
“There’s no point if it’s a hundred and ninety dollars or something,” I say.
Cecilia reaches for the tangle of tags hanging from the dress and flips through until she finds the price. “Not anymore. Used to be two hundred sixty, now it’s twenty-six bucks. That’s insanely cheap. Hey, it’ll be my graduation present to you if it fits.”
“OK, OK,” I say.
Ten minutes later, we’re standing in the enormous checkout line for the second time.
chapter 34
The wine Greg’s uncle gave us with dinner is only a faint hum in the back of my brain by the time the limo driver drops Greg, Brenda, Alan, and me off at the hotel on the night of the prom. All the fancy extras are thanks to Greg’s family. My dad—well, his big contribution was just letting me go.
“Oh my God,” Brenda whispers when we walk into the ballroom.
We pass under a huge arc of roses and a sign that says “An Evening in Paris.” Tables covered in white are staggered around a big dance floor, and each one has a bowl of white flowers floating in water. In the back corner by the photographer there’s a giant Eiffel Tower. Long strands of white lights hang from the ceiling. Everywhere people are laughing, smiling, and moving funny in their prom gear.
I watch guys I’ve known since middle school walk between the tables with their dates. These are boys who talk dirty in the hall and look at porn on their cell phones, but tonight they hold their girls by the arm and act almost like gentlemen.
We make our rounds through the ballroom, stopping to talk to everybody we know. We take so many pictures that my mouth starts to hurt from smiling.
The DJ puts on a fast song, and the mood on the dance floor heats up.
“I love this song!” Brenda shouts, and she and Greg take off.
“Let’s go too,” I say to Alan, laughing and jumping up and down.
We squeeze in between a group of girls dancing together and a guy doing his own wild thing solo. It takes me a while, but I finally find the rhythm. Alan’s having a harder time.
“Let’s go toward the middle, it’s easier to move there,” I shout.
The next two songs are fast and get us sweating more than I’d like. Finally there’s a slow one. Alan looks relieved as he pulls me close.
“I’m glad to be here with you,” he says into my ear.
“Me too,” I say. “I missed you. So, so much.”
He’s still talking, saying something sweet, but I stop hearing him. Because all of a sudden I’m back on Ceci’s couch feeling Pedro move against me. My heart starts to break all over for what I almost did.
I lean my head against Alan’s shoulder and try to let the sound of his heartbeat and the words of the song calm me down.
The song fades out before I’m ready for it to. We hold each other and wait for the next song. Instead, the stage lights up, and the senior class sponsor takes the microphone. “Time to announce this year’s prom court!”
We watch as she names the dukes and duchesses, the jesters, and the lords and ladies. There’s the occasional boo from people who voted for someone else, but mostly everyone claps and cheers.
“And this year’s prom king . . .”
“Tony Mendez!” someone yells, stirring up a ripple of laughter. Tony is one of the slow kids in the special education classes. He doesn’t get the joke, and his mother has to tug him back when he starts to roll his wheelchair toward the stage. That makes my heart hurt, but I don’t have long to think about it.
“The prom king this year is . . . Pedro Jimenez!”
My heart skips a beat as he jogs up to the stage and does a little dance. The girls toward the front whistle and cheer him on.
Of course it’s Pedro. This is not really a surprise— everybody’s been saying it was going to be him—but hearing his name still hits me in the gut. Brenda shoots me a just-say-the-word-and-we-can-jump-his-ass look. I just shake my head and look down.
“You OK?” Alan asks softly. He squeezes my hand. Because even after everything I told him, he is still that good.
“Yeah, but let’s get out of here for a while,” I manage.
We slip out past the teachers and security guards at the door to the ballroom. I don’t say anything because there are people milling all around us. There’s a bunch of elevators, and as we walk past, one opens. I duck in, pulling Alan with me. We’re the only ones inside, so I press the button for the highest floor. When I look over at him, I see that his face is red. His hand is hot in mine, too. He’s pissed. I’m just hoping he’s not pissed at me.
“I’m sorry, Alan,” I say. “I mean, it’s always somebody like Pedro who wins. Please don’t let him ruin this night for us. He’s not worth it.”
“He’s worth an ass-kicking, that’s what he’s worth.”
Alan lets go of my hand and paces the elevator. He looks like he’d like to take a bat to the wood paneling and punch through the pretty framed mirrors on the walls, but after a minute he takes a huge breath and comes back to stand next to me. We ride the rest of the way up in silence.
When we get off at the top floor, we’re in another elevator lobby. This one has a glass door off to the side, and when I push it open a little, I’m surprised to feel outside air rush in to meet me.
Through the glass I can see a patio with a garden and a little stream. A path twists between big beds of red and yellow flowers. It’s beautiful—magical, even.
“I guess this is supposed to be closed,” he says, pushing a stack of folded lounge chairs out of the way of the door. “But it’s open for us.”
We walk along the dark path until we get to a little bridge, then we stop to watch the fish swim in their illuminated pond. They’re orange, black, yellow, and silver. Whiskered, too. Like the ones you see in Chinese restaurant paintings.
Alan squeezes my hand. “Sorry for getting mad. I know we’re putting this whole thing behind us, but it’s not easy. He took advantage—”
I put a finger over his lips. “Yeah, he did, but I messed up before that.”
Alan nips at my finger with his teeth and shrugs. “At least there’s just a week of school left. Hopefully you’ll never see his sorry skin again. He’s probably not going to college. Or even if he does, he definitely won’t be at U of H. The loser skips all his classes.”
I feel my mouth go dry. It took all my guts to tell Alan about what happened with Pedro—and then to keep him from enlisting all his male relatives to pound Pedro into bits. Getting Alan to look me in the eye again, that took some time. Plus we’ve been busy visiting Jessica and Katalina and taking care of Anita.
So I haven’t exactly had a ton of chances to say anything about the letter from UT or what Ms. Ford found out from her phone calls. But now I know I’ve got to, fairy tale night or not.
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