Janet starts clearing the letters off the board. When she’s done, she tosses Lexi the bag.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
Janet shrugs. “Whatever.” Like always when Lexi gets like this, Janet pulls out her paperwork and ignores her.
Lexi dumps the tiles back out onto the table and starts flipping them faceup. After a while, Janet sets down her pen and fiddles with the tiles, too. She doesn’t say anything, but she pulls letters toward her and spells out words. First S-L-E-E-P, then K-I-T-C-H-E-N, then B-O-O-T.
Lexi mixes up the tiles in front of her and reaches for an S. She’s way slower than Janet, playing with each letter before setting it down. She spells S-P-I-T and then squeezes in an R and an I to make it S-P-I-R-I-T. After that, she makes her own name. Next she spells out C-R-A-Z-Y. Then Lexi is pulling the A and the Z down from the first word and adding an A, an E, then an L. She sits staring at the word, at my name.
So she knows me. She has to. She knows me, but what does she know? Maybe she’s the one who’s not talking.
“Know what it means?” Janet asks. She doesn’t look up from the tiles she’s fiddling with.
“No,” Lexi says. “What?”
“I don’t know. Want me to try to find out?”
“Fine,” Lexi says. “Whatever.”
This throws me because I realize that even though it’s my name, I’ve got no idea what it means. Never even thought that the name my crew stuck me with might mean something. When my homies started calling me Azael, I took it on like everything else, no questions. Now I think maybe I should have asked just what kind of shit I was painting myself with.
Lexi scoots the letters in my name closer together then spreads them far apart. After a long time, she sweeps them into her hand and drops them back into the bag.
I’ve had enough of Lexi by the time I finally get back to my cell. Too much. I feel like talking to Tiger, but his cell is empty. Pakmin’s probably got him glued to a chair watching his cousin. It’s some stupid shit they put us through in here.
I’m counting the concrete blocks in the walls when I remember the papers I stole from my file yesterday. I’m such an idiot—who forgets something like that? I listen for Gabe’s footsteps, and then when I’m sure nobody’s coming, I lift the mattress and slide the pages out from under my black book.
First I set aside the blank pages I was supposed to use for notes. I’m thinking these will be good for some practice drawings because I’ve only got one page left in my black book, and I’ve got to save it for something good. Then I pull out the stuff I took from my file. It’s only about three pages, and I’m planning to just read them top to bottom. But then I feel a kind of a lump on the last page, and I pull it to the front of the stack. I know right off from the handwriting that it’s from Becca. The butterfly necklace I gave her is bunched up in the corner and covered in tape.
2 My Forever Azael,
Take your stupid necklace back. I’m so mad at you it’s like somebody gave my heart a fucken hot pepper and then wouldn’t give it no milk. I’m so mad at you for proving my mom right. I’m so mad at you for all the times you kissed my stomach and said all that sweet bullshit, that you was working to change. I’m so mad at you for giving me the buterfly and promising that this time it was for real because it wasn’t. You lied about changing. You turned around and went rolling with your pinche boys toward nothing but more trouble. Javi stinks of trouble but you didn’t bother to sniff. It’s your own fault for going w ith him.
I had all these stupid ideas for us. Just like a girl. I was gonna get my nurse aid certificate one day and you was gonna get your GED and maybe some kind of training. We was gonna have enough for our own apartment, a car, maybe cable. Not the kind of money you thought of, you and your SUVs and rims and fancy fucken kicks. But I was gonna teach you how to be real happy with what we had, not to want more. You know how good I could always satisfy you.
This time you gone too far and nothing you could say can take it back cuz you ain’t gonna be talking to me no more. Like it or not, we’re done. And I don’t like it because I wanted you and you wanted me but that aint good enough in this world. I’m making myself crazy with all this shit and I can’t do it, I got to stop. Who knows if you’ll ever see this. There was times before that they didn’t give you your mail or nothing. But this is a thousand times worse. There’s no way back to what we had. I can never be yours now. It hurts, baby, it hurts, but that’s how it is.
Your once one and only,
Becca
This changes everything. Now I know that things are screwed up real bad. The fucked-up rating of my life is through the fucking roof. Whatever they’re saying I did, whatever Becca heard, it was bad enough that she doesn’t want nothing more to do with me. It has to be something whacked because Becca’s real loyal. She’s no run-scared snatch.
And then it hits me. I’m not the one supposed to inform on Lexi; she’s the one who’s dumping shit on me.
She could’ve been hanging around the park the day of the battle with Crazy Crew. Maybe she got picked up for something, and then the officers came along offering to ease up the charges in exchange for information. Maybe she didn’t want to report on one of her homies, so she decided she’d screw me over instead.
It’s got to be that. Lexi is running some kind of racket here. She has to be lying because I didn’t do anything. Hardly nothing, except for pounding that punk who messed with Eddie. But I saw him stumble away all hunched over; he couldn’t have been too messed up.
So Lexi’s faking that she saw me do something. Probably tomorrow I’ll start hearing her tell lies about me. Just try it, I want to shout. Just try pinning shit on me, white girl. It’ll fly right back into your face, bitch, it will. Pinche puta.
The heat of my anger cracks against the icy silence in my heart where I used to hear Becca’s voice. I picture those sad eyes of hers, so big and brown you could disappear in them. No way can I believe she could mean that it’s over. I never would’ve done this to her. I swear if I’d got her knocked up, I would’ve married her and taken care of her forever. She can’t mean it. Then I look back down at the words written out in her careful girly handwriting. I see the necklace there. Proof that she’s done with me.
It’s not that I was lying to her about changing. I just should’ve done it faster.
I pull the pencil out from under the mattress and grab one of the blank sheets Gabe gave me. I’m going to draw something for Becca to make her see that she’s wrong to quit on me.
I start working out a butterfly in gray spirals across the page. I draw Becca in the corner sitting with her face in her hands. I put the butterfly on a leash that goes all the way to the other corner. I draw myself there with my best apology eyes.
I’m feeling good about my work until I take another look at the butterfly. When I see what I did, my hand slips, and I break the tip of the pencil.
There it is, twisted inside the butterfly along with all the spirals: LEXI.
I rip the drawing in half and shove everything back under the mattress. I lie down on top of it, but I can’t get her name out of my mind.
CHAPTER 18: THEN
It was maybe ten in the morning, and me and Pelón’s older sister Maribel were stretched out right on the kitchen floor, listening to Mega 101 and trying to stay cool. The temperature was already in the high 90s, and the AC was busted again. Pinche Bel-Lindo, everything chafa and broke. We were going back and forth about the question, could you really ever change your life? I thought maybe, but Maribel said yes, all you had to do was decide. She wanted to get a tattoo of a butterfly on her wrist so that everybody could see that she was changed. Transformed, she said. She wanted it right there so she could take a look at it any time and remind herself, too.
Maribel was the one who gave me the idea for the butterfly necklace. I needed something for Becca’s birthday anyway, and Wal-Mart had a couple. I picked the shiniest one. It was silver with little diamonds at the c
orners of the wings and all along the center. When the lady who opened the display case went to help somebody else, I palmed the butterfly necklace and slipped a cheap-o piece from one of the racks into its place. I was out the door before anybody noticed what was up. Anyway, I was changing for Becca, for myself even, but not for Wal-Mart.
I couldn’t wait to give it to her. Even though Becca’s birthday wasn’t for another week, I went to find her at the mall. She was working in this shoe store, and I grabbed her hand and took her over to one of those little angled mirrors that make it easy to see how your shoes look even when you’re standing up. I made her sit down on the floor in front of it, and I told her to close her eyes.
“Don’t boss me, Azz,” she said. She acted tough, but she closed her eyes and tilted her chin up like a little girl waiting for a kiss.
I gave her a sweet one with just a flick of tongue, and then I swept that curtain of shiny straight black hair forward over her shoulder so I could fasten the chain around her neck. “Go ahead, mamita. Open your eyes,” I told her.
She blushed like crazy. “What’s this for?” she asked. “How’d you get it?”
I just told her, “Now you gonna be reminded every time you put this on that I’m changing for you, baby. ’Cause you’re my world.”
She made sure her boss wasn’t out in the front of the store, then she kissed me long and hard. After that she kicked me back out into the mall.
“Before I lose my job, Azzie,” she said. She was smiling.
CHAPTER 19: NOW
When Gabe comes by this morning, he makes a kind of surprised grunt. I guess he saw that I didn’t eat my dinner last night.
“You all right, son?” he calls from the hall.
I don’t move. I have the blanket over my head and I’m not planning on doing anything but lie here for the rest of the day.
“You sick?” he tries again. When I still don’t say anything, he starts to walk away. A second later he stops. “If you make me come in and check on you, I might have to search your cell, too. For contraband.”
Shit, now Gabe’s blackmailing me? I make a lot of noise sitting up on the cot so he’ll know I heard him. Last thing I need is more trouble.
I guess he’s satisfied because he starts walking down the hall. He’s humming again, and I could swear I know the song. Screw him, messing with my head.
I make myself get up off the cot. I don’t want to think about Becca, but I can’t help it. I pull out the papers and sit back against the wall, right under where it says WELCUM HOME FOOL.
I’m scared shitless of what I’ll find out, but I’ve got to know what they say I did. What was so bad that even Becca quit on me? I lay out two pages cut from newspapers. At least I guess they’re from newspapers. It’s that kind of super-thin paper, but one piece is totally blank except for the name of the newspaper and a date, June 16, 2011.
The other page is whacked, too. I can tell it’s an article about the rumble in Montrose, but whole chunks are blacked out with a fat marker. I turn the page all different ways, even look at it from the back, but I can’t see what the marked-out words say. What I can read is enough to make my stomach flip.
It don’t take a genius to figure out what’s going on here. The paper’s dated June 12, the day after they must’ve brought me in here. Somebody’s dead, and they think I have something to do with it. Becca must believe it, too, the way she was talking in that letter.
I can’t remember how the rumble ended. Everything goes to fog in my memory. But I know I’d know if I killed somebody. I’d be different inside, like after what happened with Pájaro. I’d know it for sure.
Something real messed up is going on, because they been holding me here for maybe two weeks, and I ain’t been charged with a damn thing. That’s some illegal shit. But then, everybody knows that the government breaks whatever rules it wants to. Just because I dropped out don’t mean I’m stupid. I’ve heard of Guantánamo Bay.
I ought to tell Gabe that they owe me a phone call, but who am I going to call anyway? No way Becca’s going to talk to my stupid ass, not after everything in that letter. Tío Beto doesn’t want nothing to do with me; he warned me off when I skipped out on him and my tía.
And I can’t call Pelón or Eddie or Javi because I got to protect them. I don’t want to send the cops their way. If what’s in the article is even half true, if somebody on the other side got offed, then my boys are probably already getting hit up by these Crazy Crew pussies. Pisses me off to imagine those brown-and-red raggers messing with my homies, disrespecting my hood. “La Eme Ese controla,” I say out loud, like that makes any difference.
I didn’t kill nobody in that fight. I know I didn’t. But still, shit. It can’t get worse than getting pinned with murder.
Only then I remember that it can. Eddie. Pinche huevón, Eddie. What if they think he did it, and they’re trying to get to him through me? Taking their damn time, for sure, but that don’t mean it ain’t what they’re up to. They might have him locked up somewhere else, trying to keep us separated.
I didn’t kill nobody, but right now I’m pissed enough that I could. Too pissed to think or draw. Too pissed to lie down. Too pissed to sit still.
I yank the mattress and blanket off the cot and stand the frame up on one end so that the legs are sticking out. I shove it back into the corner, then I pull myself up by the bar between the legs. Down, up, down, up. I’ve got myself a ghetto-ass private gym.
My muscles burn enough to calm me down until another thought starts to mess with me. What if Eddie’s the one who got cut down? What if that’s what they’re keeping from me because they know once I find out they won’t get another damn word from me? I flash back to that dream. Eddie’s face, and then those hands with blood on them.
But if this is about Eddie, why the hell do they have me watching Lexi? What does she know?
I keep doing ghetto chin-ups until the muscles in my arms are screaming loud enough to drown out the craziness in my head again. I know one thing for sure: I got to get my hands on that diary of hers.
CHAPTER 20: THEN
Everything changed after Mami died. Her sister, our Tía Julia, came from California and stayed with us for a while. Papi didn’t talk hardly at all, and he never looked at Regina. I think he put Tía Julia and the baby in the bedroom on purpose so that he wouldn’t have to see Regina. There was food and nobody hit us or nothing, so we were okay then. But at the same time, we weren’t. The apartment felt empty, and nothing was funny, not even cartoons. When Eddie and me left for school, Papi would be lying on the couch, faceup, eyes glued to the water stains on the ceiling. Sometimes when we got home, he was still in the same spot. Other times, he sat at the table holding one of Mami’s dish towels and studying it like there was a message written on it.
After a couple of months, Tía Julia had to go back to her family. She offered to take Regina for a while, but Papi said no. By then he was heating her bottles and everything, but whenever we were home he had me or Eddie hold her. He went back to work and started paying Mrs. Guzman to watch Regina while we were at school. And so Regina had Mrs. Guzman and she had me and Eddie. But she never had Papi.
One day just before Regina’s first birthday, we brought her home from Mrs. Guzman’s apartment like usual. It was early afternoon, and Papi should have been at work, but we found him passed out on the living room floor. The smell of booze on him was bad. Me and Eddie didn’t say anything, just took Regina into the bedroom and closed the door. A little later, we were playing with her on a blanket when we heard glass breaking in the other room. Eddie tickled Regina to keep her from crying, and we stayed real quiet until the crashing stopped and we heard the front door slam.
“Listen, Eddie,” I whispered, “we got to be the moms for Regina.”
“We’re boys, stupid,” he said.
“You know what I mean. Look out for her. Make sure nothing bad happens to her. You know how Papi’s been since . . . pues, no es como antes.”
> “What do you want me to do?” Eddie acted like he was bored, but I knew he was listening.
“Promete,” I said, “promise we’ll take care of her.”
We made that promise before we even saw what Papi did in the living room. He’d gone and smashed up all the picture frames and ripped the pages out of our one photo album. There was nothing left but bent cardboard, shattered glass, and splintered frames. He didn’t leave a single picture of our mom behind. It was like he didn’t want Regina to ever know what Mami looked like. And that was a shame because you could see what a good person she was just by how she turned her head a little when she smiled.
Eddie and me took turns cleaning up and watching Regina in the other room. “See? I told you,” I said.
“Shut up,” he said, taking the trash bag from me. But from then on, he listened to me like we was the same age.
CHAPTER 21: NOW
I’m counting on talking things through with Tigs, but he’s not outside at rec, and his cell is still empty when Pakmin comes to get me for observation.
“Hey, where’s my man at?” I ask, jerking my head toward Baby Tiger’s cell and then looking back at Pakmin.
Pakmin stops walking for a second and rests one hand on his belly.
It takes me a minute, but then I remember how Tigs introduced himself. “Where’s Jason? He in some kind of trouble?”
“You’re all in trouble,” Pakmin says. “It was time for him to move on.”
“Move on? Where to?”
Pakmin ignores me until we get to the observation room. “Everybody’s time runs out sooner or later, don’t you see?” he says as he unlocks the door. “Yours will, too.”
I know it’s a threat, a reminder that I’m not doing what I should be, but I’ve got nothing to go on.
“Sir?” I say before Pakmin pulls the door shut behind him. He steps back through the doorway, eyeing me. “I want to—” I pause to find the right tone, “I want to do your program and everything, but I’m wondering . . .”
The Knife and the Butterfly Page 6