by Lexie Ray
“Tell your cousin not to worry,” Maribel said. I noticed for the first time that her lunch was spread out in front of her, but not a single item had been so much as taken from its wrapper. “Tell her that it wasn’t so bad, even. They told me I was pretty and the only reason I got hit was because I tried to run away. Next time, I won’t run away. I learned.”
It was hard to stay seated, to not run away, but I felt like I owed to Maribel to bear witness to whatever she needed to say. I’d never tell my cousin, of course. Nobody needed to know this, just how thoroughly they’d broken Maribel.
“I want you to know that I’m here for you, okay?” I told her, leaning closer to her and wincing as she flinched at the sudden movement. “I’m sorry. I’m here if you need to talk about anything.”
“Thanks, Sol.” That sharp smile spread across her face again and I was afraid her lips were going to crack and bleed.
“I have to get to class, now,” I lied. “See you around.”
But Maribel stopped going to school, and no one was ever clear on what happened to her. Either her parents had taken pity on her and sent her away, or the gang had swooped in for her, deciding she was maybe too much of an asset to let go.
Rumors swirled, speculation and unkindness. Seeing how the incident had affected Maribel so drastically bothered me in a way I had trouble defining, so I tried to stay above the fray, tried to walk away whenever anyone launched into the subject.
But one time, I heard an ugliness that I couldn’t ignore while I was walking down the hall on my way to my last class of the day.
“You know what I heard about Maribel, though?” a classmate was telling a tittering group of boys. Automatically, I did my best to shut my ears and walk faster, but I couldn’t outrun the next remark. “I heard that she liked it. I heard that she liked it so much, she went back to beg for more and that’s why she’s not around anymore.”
I whirled around, unable to fathom what I was doing or why. I pushed the guy — I think he might’ve been in my first period class, but my rage was blinding — up against some lockers and put my nose against his.
“You’re an ass,” I told him. “How dare you make that kind of shit up? You have no idea what she went through. Until you do, you don’t have the right to spout such absolute crap.”
“Jesus,” he said, trying to squirm away from me unsuccessfully. I had him pinned. “Get out of my face, freak.”
“Not until you admit you’re an idiot,” I spat at him. “Or I could just kick your ass, right here in front of all your little friends. Would you like that?”
I heard myself speaking vaguely, as if my voice was floating up out of a deep well. I had never threatened violence against anyone. I considered myself generally as a person who could get along with most everyone. Why was this happening? Why was I feeling so righteously prepared to kick the ass of some misinformed, ignorant, immature classmate?
“She got what was coming to her, and you’ll get yours, too,” the guy declared hotly.
As if someone else was controlling it, my arm cocked back and I slapped him in the face — hard. He yelped and the rest of his friends gasped. When I drew my arm back again, this time balling my hand into a tight fist, intent on adding some injury to the insult, someone dragged me away.
“Sol, what the hell are you doing?” Antonio peered into my face, more flabbergasted than angry.
“Man, get control of your girlfriend,” my classmate spat, looking shaken in spite of his words of bravado. The outline of my hand reddened on his cheek.
“Get control of yourself, idiot,” I snapped weakly, shock doing quick work of numbing my rage. I let Antonio haul me away, and we decamped to the library, my hand stinging. I wondered if my classmate’s face hurt even worse.
“What’s going on?” Antonio asked, sitting me down at a study table tucked away behind several shelves of books. He towered over me, pensive. This was a side of me he hadn’t seen before. Hell, this was a side of me I didn’t know existed.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “They were making fun of Maribel and I just couldn’t take it.”
Antonio sighed and ran a hand through his hair before kneeling in front of me. “You can’t just accost people like that, Sol. What happened to Maribel is sad, but you have to keep your head down.”
I blinked a couple of times. I expected to be admonished for resorting to violence — not fussed at for standing up to people destroying Maribel’s already tenuous reputation.
“What are you talking about?” I demanded. “Keep my head down? You’re the one who wants to influence social change in this place. We have to start somewhere, don’t you agree?”
“I don’t mean for you to get embroiled in these things,” he said. “This kind of work is tricky and dangerous. If you attract the wrong kind of attention … I just couldn’t watch you get hurt, Sol. And since when are you interested in the cause?”
I shrugged. I’d always been pretty blasé about Antonio’s social change underpinnings — if only for the reason that it was all but impossible to solve the problems of Honduras single-handedly. I’d just unexpectedly pounced on something that upset me, something that I wanted to see changed in my own life’s experience.
Maybe witnessing Maribel’s tragedy — and the fallout that occurred afterward, the utter lack of support from the people who used to call her their friend — struck closer to home for me than anything else that had happened. I’d been young when my father was killed, but now I saw more of the world and understood more of its ugliness. How had one acquaintance inspired such a change in me?
“It wasn’t right, what they were saying about her,” I said. “It just wasn’t. How could I walk right by them and say nothing?”
Antonio shook his head. “You must do just that,” he said. “It’s too dangerous to try and make a stand against those kinds of things. Too many of our classmates are connected to the wrong people. Don’t put a target on yourself, Sol.”
My body went cold just as the bell sounded for class. We were late, but I didn’t care. Had I really made myself a target by accosting those gossipers? Such a possibility had never crossed my mind.
It was hard to sit through class, and harder still to walk home. Was I interested in influencing social change in my country, like Antonio was so passionate about? It scared me. All I’d wanted to do was defend Maribel, defend the rights of innocent women who got swept into male-dominated conflict.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Antonio said, seeing me to the door of my uncle and aunt’s house. He planted a kiss on my lips and gave me a small smile before jogging off to his own house. He’d been having meetings with like-minded individuals — the majority of whom had already graduated from school. I worried about him. If I was planting a target on myself just from confronting some punks at school, how big was the target on my boyfriend’s back?
All thoughts of Antonio fled when I entered the house. A flurry of activity, of clanging pots and pans, of my aunt and uncle and cousin dashing around, putting this and that into bags, all distracted me from my worries.
“What’s going on?” I asked. Only my uncle stopped from whatever preparations he was making to answer me.
“An opportunity has presented itself,” he said cryptically before snapping his fingers at my cousin. “Do you really think you’ll need that? Think, hija, think! This isn’t a vacation.”
My cousin, her face painted with guilt and grief, set aside a journal and pen she’d been trying to slip into a bag and went back to join my aunt in the kitchen. The smells wafting out of there were delicious, but I didn’t get the impression that they were just getting dinner together. The atmosphere in the house was different, somehow, one of panic and hope and change.
“Are we going somewhere?” I asked hesitantly, eyeing the bags and peering into the kitchen. My aunt and cousin were preparing enough food to feed an army, swiftly wrapping and packing whatever delicacies were coming off the stove and out of the oven away into additional bags.
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�No, Sol, not ‘we,’” my uncle said, laying his hand on my shoulder and steering me away from all the action. “I don’t know how to tell you this difficult thing, so I will just say it. An opportunity has presented itself for your tia and prima to go to America, and we are seizing it.”
He looked deeply into my eyes to make sure I understood, then walked back over to the kitchen to continue supervising the activities.
I didn’t really understand, though. My aunt and cousin were leaving here? Leaving Honduras? Leaving me? My uncle hadn’t said he was going. Why? Was he really about to split up our family? Hadn’t my family been decimated enough?
Surely seeing and understanding the shock and despair on my face, my uncle rejoined me at the base of the stairs, watching my aunt and cousin dart around from bag to bag, checking and rechecking and packing and repacking each item.
“Understand, Sol,” he told me, not taking his eyes from my aunt and cousin. “We’ve been saving money to send your cousin away to school, away from Honduras. When we heard about a man taking people to America, and when we realized the price would send your cousin away with her mother, it sounded too good to be true. But I spoke with him, and he seems like an upstanding gentleman, and the real push was Maribel.”
My uncle fell silent, his eyes trained on my cousin, and I shuddered because I knew what he was thinking. If my cousin had happened to be standing by her friend that day Maribel was taken from school grounds, chatting and laughing, two innocent girls, would my cousin had shared Maribel’s same sad fate? I suddenly understood why I’d reached out to Maribel, why I’d defended her honor to those idiots at my school, and why, as Antonio had warned me, I was so gung ho at putting a target on myself for a girl I’d barely known.
It was her closeness — her connection to my cousin, my family. I hadn’t realized it until now, but dread had filled me ever since the incident. What if it had been my cousin? That was a possibility this family couldn’t cope with. It would tear us apart from the inside out, plunge us into a hopelessness that would be so difficult to find our ways out of again.
My despair didn’t fade with my sudden flash of understanding, but it was easier to accept, now. Yes, my uncle was splitting up this family, but it was to save as many members as he could afford. I knew that I was just a necessary addition, that I didn’t completely fold into this family’s fabric. Tragedy had booted me into my uncle’s family, so I might not figure into many of the plans he had for it.
If my aunt and cousin could escape from Honduras, then maybe it would be easier, at some point, to escape myself. Maybe my uncle and I could, after saving more money, join them in America.
The idea of America seemed about as foreign as the idea of living on the moon — and just as fanciful. America was the place where all your problems would be solved. In America, work was plentiful, violence was nonexistent, and prices were cheap. You could do what you wanted to do, go where you wanted to go, and live without fear that one day, you would be plucked senselessly from the streets, left in a pool of your own blood for the police or just some unlucky passerby to find.
But no one had the money to go to America, especially not in this neighborhood. It surprised me that my uncle had been able to save enough money to afford such an extravagance.
“Sol?” He was looking at me, and it seemed almost as if he were, in a way, asking for my permission to do this, to save his wife and child instead of himself and me. How could I resent his decision, or deny him what came naturally to him — to protect his own family and better their situations?
“I understand,” I said, nodding swiftly. “What can I do to help?”
I was stationed in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches on a veritable feast of tortillas, salted meats, empanadas and other foods that would travel well. I didn’t know how long it would take my aunt and cousin to get to America from here, but they would be well fed for many, many days with everything we’d cooked.
It was the middle of the night before all the preparations were complete, and I assumed that we would all go to bed and see my aunt and cousin off early in the morning, when they’d embark on their travels.
Instead, a knock sounded on the door and my uncle admitted a hardened-looking man with a scar on his cheek.
“Let’s go,” the man said, his voice raspy and low, as if he’d worn it out with talking. “No time to spare.”
“It’s better to leave at night, in the dark,” my uncle explained, probably noting the shocked look on my face and the fear on my cousin’s. “People might ask questions about where you’re going in the daytime, and you don’t want to get stopped.”
I started to realize that this trip might be a little more complicated, more clandestine, than I’d thought. I didn’t know anyone who’d actually been to America — just people who dreamed about going. What would that journey require of my family?
We hurriedly loaded the bags we’d packed into the car, and there was barely enough room for my aunt and cousin to fit with three other people already inside. Were all of these people going to America? Desperation filled their faces instead of joy. Whenever my classmates spoke of going to America, their eyes lit up, already seeing the riches and luxuries they would discover waiting for them in that faraway place. The people in that car were going to America because all other options had been exhausted.
America, for them, wasn’t some wonderful vacation, some amazing fantasy that occupied their daydreams. America was a last resort.
My uncle and I kissed my aunt and cousin good-bye, all of us too stunned for tears. I saw my cousin’s face crumple in the car as it drove away, saw my uncle clutch at his chest briefly before turning to walk into the house, stooping like a man who’d grown old in the span of a few minutes.
And then the car rounded the corner and was gone.
“Come inside, out of the dark,” my uncle instructed me. “It’s dangerous out there.”
The house was too quiet, too big, and my cousin’s bed was too empty. Yes, abstractly, I was happy for her and my aunt to escape, to get out of Honduras when the opportunity presented itself, as my uncle had put it. But I was scared for them, and sad for myself. We hadn’t had a chance to properly process the change before it happened. How would I contact my cousin? How would I know where to call her or write her? Would they be all right?
Would I ever see them again?
“Don’t you have some homework to do?” my uncle grumbled half-heartedly at me as we sat silently in the front room, both of us looking at the door where my aunt and cousin had walked out of our lives. I realized that my uncle wanted to be alone — maybe so he could finally cry about his loss, about what he had to do to preserve his family in this upside down world of Honduras.
“Yes, tio,” I said. “I’ll go upstairs, now.”
“There’s leftovers in the refrigerator,” he said gruffly, and I knew if I looked at him, I would burst into tears, a slave to emotions I had trouble naming. Grief, fear, jealousy, hope, and despair all cycled through me. My uncle had done what he could to protect his family even if he had to sacrifice his own happiness to do so.
“That’s all right,” I said. “I had a big lunch and I’m not very hungry. I think I’ll go straight to bed after my homework. Long day tomorrow.”
I didn’t wait for his response, didn’t want to put pressure on him to come up with anything else to say, to normalize the fact that our family had just split up. The silence in the room I’d used to share with my cousin was deafening, and sleep was a long time coming.
Antonio was understanding and supportive when I told him the next day at school what had happened, why he wasn’t walking both me and my cousin to classes, but he wasn’t completely in agreement.
“I don’t think they should’ve left,” he said finally, but only after I’d pushed and nagged him to tell me what was wrong and what he wasn’t saying.
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “The opportunity presented itself.”
“What do you do when
you get into a fight?” he asked. “Do you run away from it or do you stand up for what you believe in? Do you let a bully win just to save yourself?”
I shook my head, incredulous. “Antonio, are you listening to yourself? Just yesterday, when I tried to stand up for Maribel to those boys, you told me it was best just to keep walking, to run away to save myself. Which is it, then? Do we stand and fight? Or do we flee?”
Students were walking by us in the hall, rushing to get to class, but we stayed still, Antonio searching for words and me searching for meaning. How could he judge my aunt and cousin for leaving when they could? How could he deny them the chance at happiness and a safer, more successful life in America? How could anyone say a human being doesn’t have the right to seek out a better situation, to remove themselves from danger, to take their children to the safety of simply “somewhere else?”
“It’s difficult, Sol,” he said, still struggling to find the words to explain himself to me.
“That’s an understatement,” I snorted. “You can’t even seem to get it right for yourself.”
“I want to protect you,” he said finally. “I want you to be safe. But I don’t want to abandon Honduras. This is our home, amor. What good are we if we don’t try to make it better?”
“I don’t know if anyone can make it better,” I said. “We’re all afraid of the gangs, the government doesn’t do anything about them, and I trust the police less than anyone. When do you stop bailing water from a sinking boat and swim for it, Antonio?”
“Get to class!” a teacher barked, making us flinch and scurry down the hall with the rest of our peers.
“I don’t have all of the answers,” he said, seizing me by my wrist as I tried to duck into my classroom. “But I care about this country, and I care about you.”
He only let me go after kissing me swiftly, earning us whoops from our classmates and baleful stares from our educators. I had to give Antonio some credit. The situation was difficult to sort out, and it was nearly impossible to know which battles were worth pursuing and which weren’t worth the time. At least he hadn’t thrown in the towel on all of it, resigned to the fact that if he was able to dodge the gang recruiters, he’d have to pay a tax to them for protection for whatever business he chose to go into.