“It wasn’t me,” I said.
Tiggy sized me up suspiciously. “Really? Because it looked like you. My mom drove me over to Erewhon because she was out of pomegranate arils, and you know she’s addicted to them.”
I whipped out my monthly bus pass, which I had begun purchasing just the month before. “Must be nice,” I said.
Willow looked at the bus pass. “Wow. This is expensive. Don’t they have a student discount?”
I wanted to sink into the ground. Of course they probably did have a student discount bus pass. I just hadn’t thought to purchase it.
“Think quickly, think quickly,” I thought, tapping my foot furiously.
“If I get the student bus pass, then me and my dad can’t share,” I said. “This way, we save money.”
Willow looked at me with her big brown eyes, and she looked as if she wanted to cry. Then she hugged me. “You make me realize how much I take for granted,” she said.
Then she handed me her shopping bag. “I want you to have this,” she said.
It was her Alexander Wang leather jacket.
“I couldn’t,” I said, and this time I meant it.
“Yes, you can,” she said. “I’ll ask my dad to buy me another one, and then we can be twins. Really, please, take it.”
Don’t hate me for what I did next. Because there are two things you should know. Number one: it was honestly the cutest leather jacket I’d ever seen. Number two: it is rude not to accept a gift.
The next day when Sergio called to check in on me, I took a page out of my mother’s telenovela play book and doused my eyes with drops so that my face would look tearstained. Then I bit my bottom lip hard before I answered Sergio’s FaceTime call.
“Hey,” I said listlessly.
“You don’t look good,” he said. “Tell me about it.”
That would’ve been the perfect moment to just stop it, the lying and the pretending. But I couldn’t stop. I liked the weird dichotomy of having Willow and Tiggy feel sorry for me and at the same time, the sweet superior feeling that I was getting one over on them. I wanted to keep it going, just a little longer. But I needed Sergio to think that I was a good person, not the pendeja he had once accused me of being. Hence the tears and the subterfuge.
“I told them,” I said, lying. “And things got pretty ugly.”
Sergio looked exasperated. “Well, what did you expect, loca? For them to throw you a parade?”
“I know, I know.”
“At least you still have Milly, the friend you never lied to.”
“That’s true,” I said. “She invited me over to her house for dinner tomorrow night.”
“In East LA? You should have Albita drive you,” Sergio said.
“Now who’s being shallow and superficial?” I asked.
“Seriously, Cammi,” he said. “LA is safer than Mexico City, but that doesn’t mean you can be reckless.”
I promised him I’d ask for a ride.
Of course, I had no intention of asking Albita to drive me anywhere. That Saturday, I breezed into the garden and told my parents that I was going to meet Milly at the library downtown.
My father jumped up and dangled his car keys. “No problem. I’ll drive you.”
Shoot. I held up my phone like it was a lightsaber. No te preocupes, Papá. “I can call an Uber easy peasy lemon squeezy.”
My mother peered at me over her giant sunglasses, interested. “Easy greasy what?”
“Easy peasy lemon squeezy,” I said slowly. “It’s an expression that means ‘No big deal.’ ”
My mother took out the little notebook where she had begun writing expressions and words that were new to her. “Say it again?”
I took the notebook from her. “I’ll write it for you.” I wrote it out and handed the notebook back to her.
It was cute the way she walked around with that little notebook, repeating phrases to herself like “in there like swimwear” and “it’s the freakin’ weekend.”
My father would not be deterred. “I’m driving you, Cammi.”
I gave my mother a hug and said “Your eyebrows are so on fleek” just to watch her scribble it into her notebook.
In the car, I fessed up. “Full confession, I’m not going to the library.”
“I know,” he said.
“I’m going over to Milly’s house. She invited me for dinner.”
“Sergio told me.”
Only my jet-setting brother could tattle across eight time zones like that.
“So give me the address and call Milly to let her know there’ll be one more for dinner.”
It took nearly an hour to get to Milly’s house. It wasn’t that far. Just seventeen miles, but that’s LA traffic for you. The minute we turned onto Whittier Boulevard, I felt like I’d been transported back to downtown Mexico City. The streets were packed with people and street vendors, colorfully decorated food trucks, and cool-looking low riders.
My father looked around, smiled, and said, “Hombre! It pays to go exploring. Look at that, Salazar Park.”
He began to hum a song I’d never heard him sing before. Then Papá explained that Rubén Salazar was a Los Angeles Times reporter who died during a Vietnam War protest in 1970. Salazar had been exploring the growing resistance to the Vietnam War in the Chicano community. A songwriter composed a famous corrido about his death. My father whistled. “Look at this park. Swimming pool. Baseball diamond. Tennis courts. He would be proud.”
If Milly and her parents hadn’t been waiting for us, I think my father would’ve ditched me at the corner of South Alma and Whittier and gone off on an adventure.
I don’t know what I expected Milly’s house to be like, but I wasn’t expecting Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul. Milly’s house wasn’t like any other on the block. It was dark blue with bright yellow shutters and had a crazy Aztec-style sculpture. The front garden was full of cactuses and other succulents. The driveway was painted like a mural with a beautiful mosaic pattern. My father whistled and said, “It’s so beautiful, I don’t want to drive on it.”
“Hello, hello!” Milly called out as she walked onto the front porch. She showed us where to park, and then we all hugged hello.
I told her, “Oye, chica, you didn’t mention that you lived in Willy Wonka’s house.”
She laughed and said, “Come and meet the Oompa Loompas.”
In the backyard, three little boys jumped on and off a Slip’n Slide. Milly’s mother, a pretty, petite woman who was a good three inches shorter than both of us, stood up to greet us.
“I’ve heard so much about you,” she said. Then, peering over my shoulder, she added, “And of course, I know all about your mother’s work.”
“She’s not here, Señora Flores,” I told her. “But this is my dad.”
My father did a dramatic bow and kissed the back of her hand. “Es un placer.”
“Hey, hey!” I heard a booming voice call out. “You’ve got to watch out for the slick caballeros from the Distrito Federal.”
It was Milly’s dad. He was dressed in paint-splattered overalls and a cowboy hat. He looked cool, and I could tell as they shook hands that he and my dad would totally be friends.
“We’ve got pernil, rice and peas, and aguacate,” Milly’s mother said shyly.
“Yum,” I said.
Milly’s father clapped my dad on the shoulder and said, “Before we eat, let’s talk about art. Let me show you my studio.”
He took my dad into his studio, a two-car garage that he’d tricked out with a giant skylight and a fancy glass garage door. It was the kind of rolling glass door that I’d seen in my mother’s design magazines. I guess, just like Willow and Tiggy did, I thought everyone who lived in East LA lived in poverty and squalor. I was embarrassed by my ignorance.
“I thought you said your dad worked security,” I whispered to Milly.
“He does, but he does his night job so that he can spend his days doing what he loves—painting.”
&n
bsp; “That’s cool,” I said admiringly.
As I followed her to the kitchen, she said, “Let’s see about those mad salad skills that you’ve recently acquired.”
“Don’t hate the player, chica,” I reminded her. “Hate the game.”
I was walking down the hallway at Polestar when I saw two teachers talking. I recognized one as Señora Sepulveda, one of the Spanish teachers in the lower school. I thought the second one might be the substitute biology teacher. Tiggy had mentioned that she was Mexican. I was walking behind them, and I heard the teacher I didn’t know say, “Haven’t you noticed how much Camilla looks like Carolina del Valle? They even have the same name.”
My heart jumped into my throat and lodged there. I quickly darted into a doorway.
Then when I thought they were far enough ahead, I started following them again.
“They have the same last name,” Señora Sepulveda said, “but they can’t be related. I heard Camilla’s a scholarship kid from East LA.”
“Maybe she’s a poor distant cousin,” the other teacher said. “Besides, if Carolina del Valle’s daughter was at this school, there’d be mad security. That kidnapping madness has started to make its way across the border.”
I turned then and went toward the gym, relieved that my cover wasn’t blown. I was only slightly worried that kidnapping could be a danger in LA.
The fact that I was more worried about being found out than about kidnapping made me think that I had to stop telling this crazy lie. I thought, “They’ll be pissed and then we’ll move on.” Sure Tiggy had a little bit of that RBF (resting bitch face) that Patrizia had, but she was also funny and fearless. She’d say anything to anyone, do anything if you dared her to. And Willow was the nice girlfriend I’d always wanted when I was back home. She reminded me of that beautiful human rights lawyer who married the famous actor who said he’d never get married. One day, Willow would change the world and look gorgeous doing it.
But today was not that day because they wouldn’t forgive me.
There, I’d said it.
They wouldn’t forgive me and I wouldn’t forgive myself for blowing the kind of friendships I’d dreamed about having back at home.
All day Sunday, I rehearsed what I was going to say and how I was going to say it. There was the “It’s all a big joke” approach:
“Hey, Willow and Tiggy, this is so funny. Well, you know how you thought I was poor? I’m not. And you know how you thought my mother was a maid? Well, she’s not a maid; she just plays one on TV….”
Then there was the “Surprise! You’ve been punk’d” approach:
“So, guys, I have something to confess. I’ve been working on a big sociological study for this AP class I’ve been taking at UCLA. It’s all about race, class, perception, and expectation. Well, you two, you did just what we thought you’d do. Sorry for the subterfuge. Let’s go to the Grove. Blue Ribbon Sushi on me.”
I even played with the “Split personality” defense:
“For a very long time, I’ve had two personalities fighting for control over my existence. Camilla is a well-meaning and sweet but helpless pathological liar. Cammi has her feet on the ground. She is a trustworthy and upright citizen, and a good friend. You’ve probably met both personas over the past few months, and it’s my hope that you’ll forget about Camilla from the barrio and just be friends with Cammi from Beverly Hills. Okay? Are we good?”
Oddly enough, this last defense felt closest to the truth. And I began to wonder if there was any truth to what my mother had said about us being more alike than I’d thought. What I had been doing with Willow and Tiggy was acting, pretending, making up a character, and I loved it. But now I was ready to come clean. Sure there was bound to be some blowback, but once the truth was out, life would be so much simpler.
At school, a lot of the kids liked to joke about how elite and pampered they all were. “#firstworldproblems,” they called it. Like, “My laptop is dying, but my charger is in the other room. #firstworldproblems.” Or “I drove all the way to Whole Foods and they were out of my favorite Greek yogurt. #firstworldproblems.” But I had managed to carve out, at least in my own twisted mind, this little loophole for myself. I was from Mexico, so I wasn’t as petty and naïve as the rich LA kids I went to school with. I was an outsider at Polestar, so I knew how to keep it real. But when I looked at Milly, whose life was so much like who I was pretending to be, I knew that what I really had was #lyingtomyselfproblems.
By Monday morning, I marched into Polestar Academy with my mind on the truth and the truth on my mind. Then I sat down for lunch with Willow and Tiggy. They were going on and on about what an incredible weekend they’d had in Palm Springs.
“You guys went to Palm Springs without me?” I asked, genuinely hurt.
Tiggy explained that her mother’s boutique had a pop-up shop in Palm Springs and that the family had a suite of rooms at the Viceroy and they’d invited Willow along.
“I’ve never been to Palm Springs,” I said quietly.
Tiggy rolled her eyes. “You’re from East LA. I’m assuming that there are lots of places you’ve never been to. Am I supposed to take you every place I go that would be a fun and new experience for you?”
Willow flinched. “Come on, Tiggy. Stop being mean.”
But Tiggy was on a roll. She reached into her handbag and took out her cell phone. “Let me call my mother and tell her to book you a ticket to Paris, where we’re going for spring break. I’m guessing you’ve never been.”
It was so cold and so unexpected. I tried to cycle back through my rich-girl memories in Mexico, because Tiggy’s remarks didn’t just hurt my feelings. They triggered something in me, a memory of off-the-cuff remarks I’d once made in a sad attempt to seem cool or clever. I thought about all of the girls who had been my friends in fourth grade through eighth grade. I didn’t know and didn’t care what the parents of those girls did for a living. I assumed they had money because Greengates was an expensive school. I honestly didn’t know if any of the dozen girls I’d eaten lunch with or invited over to my house had been on scholarship. We’d all worn uniforms. We’d hung out at my house because my family had had a pool and a home theater and my mother was an actress. When I thought about it, for as long as I could remember, I’d operated under the assumption that people were nice to me because of who my mother was. So I indulged them, brought them to my home, let them take selfies at the “Casa de Carolina,” and I thought I was doing them a favor because they did me the favor of being my friend, letting me eat lunch with them and be part of their seemingly impenetrable circle of girls. I was so on the defensive, it never occurred to me that I might come off as aggressive or offensive, snippy or cutting in my remarks. But I bet I did. I couldn’t remember what I might have said and to whom, but I was willing to bet a sizable chunk of my parents’ hard-earned money that on more than a few occasions I’d been as bitchy as Tiggy was being.
I looked at Tiggy, who I’d gotten to know and like, and I could see in an instant that she was having a pendeja moment. I also could tell, from our months-long friendship, that she had no beloved brother like Sergio in her life—no one to tell her to rein it in and clean it up.
Willow tried to make peace. “Camilla, I’m sorry we didn’t invite you to Palm Springs. I thought about it, but whenever we go, we do so much shopping and rack up the craziest room service bills. I didn’t want you to feel awkward, because I know you don’t have money to spend like that.”
It was very, very nice of her to say. More than nice. It was a window, my opportunity to say, “Hey, guys, you went to Palm Springs without me, and yeah, that kind of stings. But the truth is, I can afford to go shopping. And oh yeah, I’ve been to Paris, a few times. And not to be a jerk about it, but your mother wouldn’t need to book me a ticket because we usually fly private.”
I could have said, “Speaking of flying private, that’s how my family came to California.”
I should have said, “I can’t str
ing you along any longer. My whole Cammi from the ’hood thing has been one big lie.”
Instead I said, “Well, while you guys were hanging in Palm Springs, I was keeping it real in East LA.”
I felt Milly standing behind me before I saw her. I turned around and tried to dial it back. Milly looked furious, like Medusa-turn-you-to-stone mad. Milly reached into her bag and handed Tiggy the copy of People en Español with my mother on the cover and that horrible photo of me as a kid on the inside.
“She’s not poor,” Milly announced. “She’s not on scholarship. Her mother is one of the most famous actresses in Mexico.”
“You don’t live in East LA?” Tiggy asked, dumbfounded.
“No, she lives in Beverly Hills,” Milly said, disgusted.
“What? That doesn’t even make sense. That’s not true, is it, Cammi?” Willow said.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything.
“Why would you lie to us?” Willow asked. Her face was a mess of confusion, and I thought she might actually cry.
“Camilla, you see how Mexicans can be treated here,” Milly said. “Instead of doing something to lift Latinos up, you make being poor and vulnerable into your own little psychodrama. You give Mexicans a bad name. No tienes ninguna vergüenza?” And she walked away.
Did I not have any shame? All I had was shame.
I hardly knew what to do. But I jumped up to follow Milly. Tiggy glared at me and said, “Don’t leave your bag, Camilla. We don’t want to be friends with you either. You’re on your own.”
I grabbed my bag and found Milly in the east staircase, sobbing. “You have no idea what it’s like to really be Mexican in LA. My dad works security and my mother cleans houses, and about thirty-six hours a week they get to be who they are in their hearts. My father is an artist and my mother cooks up a storm for the family and plays her music and imagines herself in a palapa by the beach. And when the gangbangers roll through our neighborhood, shooting just to be shooting or shooting for revenge, we pray—we get down on our knees and pray—that nobody innocent gets caught in the cross fire. But there are shootings all the time—you can hear them, even if you don’t dare go to your window to see what’s going on. Then the next day, someone knocks on your door with a photo of a little kid—her hair is in two braids or he’s got a mullet and his two front teeth are missing. And the reason they are knocking on your door is because the kid has been shot and the family doesn’t have the money to buy a tiny little coffin. That’s what it’s like to live in East LA. It’s not about pretending to be a chola or a vato. It’s not about coming to a fancy school and the stupid shit that rich girls say. It’s about trying to live your life in the midst of so much chaos and death. You’re from Mexico City. You think you’d know better.”
The Go-Between Page 11