The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez
Page 1
Copyright © 2008 by Alan Lawrence Sitomer
Cover photo by Glowimages/Getty Images
All rights reserved. Published by Jump at the Sun, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Jump at the Sun, 125 West End Avenue New York, New York 10023.
ISBN 978-1-4231-4019-1
Visit www.hyperionteens.com
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
chapter uno
chapter dos
chapter tres
chapter cuatro
chapter cinco
chapter seis
chapter siete
chapter ocho
chapter nueve
chapter diez
chapter once
chapter doce
chapter trece
chapter catorce
chapter quince
chapter dieciséis
chapter diecisiete
chapter dieciocho
chapter diecinueve
chapter veinte
chapter veintiuno
chapter veintidós
chapter veintitrés
chapter veinticuatro
chapter veinticinco
chapter veintiséis
chapter veintisiete
chapter veintiocho
chapter veintinueve
chapter treinta
chapter treinta y uno
chapter treinta y dos
chapter treinta y tres
chapter treinta y cuatro
chapter treinta y cinco
chapter treinta y seis
Also by Alan Lawrence Sitomer
About the Author
For Tracey …
chapter uno
I was born in the United States of America. That makes me legal.
Pero mis padres jumped the border to get here. That makes them illegal.
I have documents.
They don’t.
I speak English.
They don’t.
I have a social security number, a passport, and a license to drive.
They don’t. They don’t. They don’t.
Actually, mi papi does have a social security number. Three of them. You can buy them for fifteen dollars apiece down at the taquería.
I know it’s wrong, but it’s not like he’s doing anything different from anyone else. One vato down the block has fourteen different sets of official state identification cards, like he’s the Mexican James Bond or something. That would be funny, James Bond-zales, Agent Double O Siete.
Maybe I shouldn’t write about that. After all, I don’t want to get mi papi in trouble. He only came here for opportunity.
In Mexico, opportunity doesn’t exist. There’s too much poverty. If a person isn’t born rich, it’s almost impossible for them to make a living and support their family—so mi papi jumped the border. He hired coyotes, fought off bandidos, bribed policías, and nearly lost his right hand from poison when he was bit by a yellow scorpion in the middle of the desert.
All that to provide a better life for his children. All that for me.
Now, I know I don’t write so good. But I’m a Latina. A first-generation Latina—or “Hispanic American” or “Chicano immigrant” or “wetback puta,” whatever you want to call me. And people should hear the truth. The real truth.
About my secrets. (Secrets that no one has ever heard before.)
I apologize in advance if my book stinks. Like I said, I know I don’t write so good. Yet still, I think my story is important. And some parts are juicy. There is sex and violence and drugs. I know people who read books like that kind of stuff. But there is love too. In my opinion, love stories are the best of all.
But most important, there is truth. And sometimes la verdad—the truth—can save your life.
chapter dos
Being the oldest daughter in a familia of seven has its benefits. I cook, I clean, I mop, I sweep, I shine, I bake, I dust, I do laundry, change diapers, wipe coun-tertops, and scrub the goopy grime off the tile floor in the shower. I even do windows. Like I said, being the oldest daughter has its benefits:
For everybody else. It’s part of mi cultura.
Don’t get me wrong, I love mi cultura. I love it deep in my bones. I love the cooking and the food. I love the music and the dancing. But most of all, I love the people. Smiles, honor, family, amor—Latinos have warmth in their blood. I think it’s all this warmth that makes our skin turn brown. It’s as if the heat of our passion has boiled the liquid in our veins and cooked our flesh from the inside out to make our coloring go crispy brown like a flour tortilla being used to make a delicious quesadilla. Mmmm, I love quesadillas. Especially when they are crispy brown.
Sí, adoro mi cultura.
But I hate my culture, too. I hate that so many stereotypes are true. We do shove fourteen people into a van and drive twenty miles slower than the speed limit in the fast lane of the highway. And we do make lots of bebés at a young age and let them run around with bare feet and dirty clothes in front of the super-mercado, sucking on candy lollipops. And we do come to this country and speak no English and then act as if there is no reason for us to even learn the language in the first place. Sí, yo bablo español, but I speak English too. That’s why I am going to write my story in English (well, mostly English), to prove the stereotypes wrong.
If I can.
After all, some stereotypes are too powerful to change. Like the ones about my people and tequila. It’s true, we do have a lot of alcoholicós in our culture.
Like my drunkle, my drunk uncle. He’s a mess.
“¡Sonia…ayúdame!” mi ama called out. The literal translation of the word “Ayúdame” means “Help me,” but when my mother calls out “Ayúdame,” she rarely means “Help me.” She more means, “Do this for me.”
And what she was asking me to do was clean up my drunkle. He’d pissed his pants.
It’s not uncommon for alcohólicos to pass out and pee themselves. You’d think they’d be embarrassed about it, as if the shame of wetting yourself like a two-year-old would be enough to get them to give up the booze bottles. But there’s nothing strong enough to get my drunkle to give up the booze bottles. He’d choose tequila over work, family, money, self-respect, and love. Already has, as a matter of fact. He’s never held a job, all the mujeres in his life have left him due to his rotten ways, and he’s taken unfair advantage of his familia over and over and over again. So many times that we’ve all lost count.
But just because he takes advantage of us doesn’t mean we turn our backs on him. After all, he’s familia, and in mi cultura, familia means more than anything. Familia es lo primero, no matter what.
Me, I just wish he’d leave. Disappear. Take off. Or maybe trip and fall and break his back and snap his spine and twist his neck so that he’d be forced to live in a rusty wheelchair for the rest of his life, which we could roll off to another part of the city. I know that sounds really mean, but my drunkle’s really mean. I once saw him flick the head of a crying baby to get it to shut up. Of course, this only made the baby cry more.
I was gonna snitch to the baby’s mother, too. I really was. After all, I did see it happen, and the poor woman was so freaked out by the mysterious purple-and-black lump on her baby’s forehead that she rushed her child to the emergency room and asked the doctors to scan her kid’s head for brain tumors.
But I didn’t. I
couldn’t. You just can’t. Not when it’s familia. Familia always sticks together, even when we’re wrong.
I wish someone would flick him in his head, though. With a baseball bat.
“Mija,” mi papi had said to me when he’d heard how I felt about his brother-in-law, “always remember, do not stoop to that level.”
That’s what my father always says when I get angry and want to do things I’ll later regret. He says, “Do not stoop to that level.” I try to listen, but it’s hard.
“Sonia…” mi ama called again.
I put down the jar of grape jelly I was using to make a sandwich for one of my younger brothers (who hates peanut butter but loves peanuts, go figure) and went to take off my drunkle’s shoes. Since I wasn’t stooping to the level of not helping a family member in need, I had to stoop to the level of where my drunkle was lying passed out on the floor in a puddle of his own pee. I reached for his feet while mi ama unbuttoned his shirt. Then, after I had my drunkle’s socks off, my mother told me to wait in the kitchen so she could unzip his pants, strip his clothes, and wrap him in a towel. Being pregnant with twins made the task of undressing my uncle muy difícil for mi ama, but still, she didn’t want me to help beyond taking off the stuff on his feet. After all, no little girl should ever risk seeing their drunkle’s pecker.
His socks were wet and cheesy. I walked back to the kitchen to put on my orange dish gloves because I didn’t want any part of my drunkle’s clothing to touch my bare skin. In mi casa I was like the Spanish Cinderella, except there was no ball, no pumpkin, no fairy godmother, no magic pair of slippers, and there was certainly no Prince Charming anywhere in sight. All I had was a drunkle, a drunk uncle who peed his pants.
Mi ama brought me the dirty clothes. I tried to avoid breathing through my nose but still couldn’t avoid inhaling a nasty whiff of urine. Phew! I turned my head and made sure to handle my drunkle’s wet underwear as carefully as I could.
Then I dropped them. Right on top of my left foot. Wet piss juice ran between the creases in my toes. Ugh! Stupid me was only wearing flip-flops.
I took a deep breath and tried not to freak out. There were still two more lunches to make for mis otros hermanos, a sink full of breakfast dishes to wash, and the laundry to take off the clothesline in the backyard because the weather forecast guy said it might rain. And now I’d have to shower again before class. First day of tenth grade and already I’d be late.
“Sonia…” mi ama yelled again from the other room. I paused without answering. Maybe if I didn’t respond, she’d stop calling for me.
“Sonia…” she repeated. “Ayúdame.”
Ay, Ama, I thought to myself. I have to get to school.
A moment later I heard a gag. Then my drunkle puked. It was a liquidy vomit, the kind that looked like broth soup with small chunks of light brown meat in it.
“Sonia…” mi ama called again.
Yep, first day and I’d be really late.
chapter tres
America prides itself on being a melting pot. Only problem is, white people seem to melt a lot less than the rest of the pot. Especially at the bottom of the pot, where us minorities live. One look at my high school tells the whole story. It’s una zona sin gringos, a Caucasian-free zone.
Sure, we got lots of white teachers, but no hay estudiantes gringos. Just blacks and browns, with a few scattered Asians.
I’m not racist, though. In fact, my best friend is black. Her name is Theresa Anderson, but most people just call her “Tee-Ay.” And Tee-Ay’s way smarter than I am. She already knows lots of words for the SAT, and some of them are over ten letters long. Me, I struggle with high school but I promised myself a long time ago that no matter what, I was going to be the first Rodriguez in America to graduate. For some people that may not sound like much, but for me it’s a big deal. A very big deal. Especially because I’m a girl. Of course, no one expects me to do it, but in my heart I am determined, more determined than anyone gives me credit for.
Besides, graduating is the only way I’ll ever be able to pay back mi papi for all he’s done for me. Mi papi, he’s the best.
I know people think my father is just another illegal, border-jumping, wetback immigrant, but the truth is, everything good I have in this world comes from the sacrifices he’s made for me. Por ejemplo, my braces just came off last week, and everyone keeps telling me that my teeth look good. The only reason I could even afford to have braces is because Papi took a third job selling mini palm trees at a Swap Meet. For three and a half years he woke up every Sunday morning at 4:15 a.m. just so he could buy me a nice smile. When you already have two hard jobs and you take hard job number three, well…sometimes when I think about the sacrifices my father has made, I want to cry. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for him.
Even geometry. Now that’s love.
During lunchtime at my school, some girls do their makeup. Some girls gossip. Some girls sneak off and do things with guys. Dirty, nasty things. Me, I do math homework. Usually I do it while eating french fries and drinking Diet Pepsi with Tee-Ay. In a way, it’s our own little tradition.
I opened my math book and stared at the problem in front of me. Math hurt my brain. Sometimes it even felt like the equations were staring back at me, like they had beady little eyeballs all their own.
Question #1
JX = XN
4XN + 2 = 14
Find the Value of JN
Question #2
LT = TX
5LT - 3 = 7
Find the Value of XL
NOTE: Figures not drawn to scale
I popped a fry in my mouth and squinched my eyes real hard, trying to concentrate. Geometry was hard, but I needed it to get a diploma.
“Hey, Sonia, what do you think Jimmy Gomez looks like naked?” Tee-Ay asked, not caring that she was interrupting me.
I didn’t look up. Maybe she’d drop it if I ignored her. Tee-Ay was always yapping about all kinds of kooky things. I squinched my eyes tighter and felt my forehead crumple. Math was going to give me wrinkles. To find the value of XL I’d need to…
“I bet he has pimples on his butt,” Tee-Ay continued. “Those big, red juicy kind that when you squeeze ‘em, white-and-green pus oozes out.”
“¡jesucristo, Tee!” I said, cutting her off before she got too gross. “Can’t you see I have homework?”
Tee-Ay just laughed and ate another french fry. I tried to act as if I wasn’t interested in Jimmy Gomez or pimply butts or naked boys, but Tee-Ay knew me too well for me to hide the truth. No, I wasn’t interested in Jimmy Gomez. And no, I definitely wasn’t interested in pimply butts. But naked boys? Well, I had to admit, the thought of swinging ding-a-lings did make me curious. However, boys puzzle me.
For ejemplo, I once read that most teenage boys masturbate. And a lot. It said that some of them do it like five or six times a day. I wonder, did it feel that good? Well, it certainly explained why so many of them didn’t do their math homework. They’re too busy playing with their penises.
Boys are liars, though. I learned that the minute I started to grow boobs. It happened when I was twelve, and a fourteen-year-old Latin-lover type named Enrique started telling me how pretty I was and began asking me out on dates. He had green eyes and dark, caramel skin. But of course, when you’re twelve years old you certainly can’t go out on dates.
Especially with seventeen-year-olds. That’s how old Enrique really was. It turned out that a group of hombres had formed a crew called the coño huntaz and were having a competition to see which guy could pop the most virgin cherries in our neighborhood. That’s why I hate boys. They’ll tell you any lie they can about love just to get into your pants.
¡Qué monstruos!
Actually, it was Tee-Ay who found out about the crew and warned me about Enrique. She and I pretty much told each other everything. She’s told me about how she couldn’t stand being compared to her older brother and how she got caught smoking pot and was almost sent to live in one of tho
se detention camps, and I told her about how my older brother was a total loser and how I once caught my drunkle staring at me in my pajamas like some sort of freaky perv. Right after those words left my mouth about my drunkle, though, I’d wished I’d never said them. Some things about familia aren’t meant to be told to anybody. Not even to your closest friends.
At least, that’s what I used to think. After what happened, though, I learned different.
Anyway, I took a final sip of Diet Pepsi, wiped my hands with a napkin, and turned back to my homework. Lunch was officially over. The thought of a sweaty boy with big, bubbly pimples on his butt had ruined my appetite.
Thanks, Tee.
I squinched my eyes again, relooked at the math problem, and started to do some substitutions.
Question #1
JX = XN
4XN + 2 = 14
Find the Value of JN
Question #2
LT = TX
5LT - 3 = 7
Find the Value of XL
NOTE: Figures not drawn to scale
Question #1
JX = XN
4XN + 2 = 14
4XN + 2 - 2 = 14 - 2
4XN = 12
XN = 3
JX = XN
JX + XN = JN
3 + 3 = JN
JN = 6
Question #2
LT = TX
5LT - 3 = 7
5LT - 3 + 3 = 7 + 3
5LT = 10
LT = 2
LT = TX
LT + TX = XL
2 + 2 = XL
XL = 4
It took me six tries to get it right, but finally I finished. I always finished. I had figured out that completing all of your homework assignments is the secret key to graduating from high school, so last year as a freshman I promised myself that no matter how many classes I had to miss or how often I would be late to school due to mi familia, I would always do my homework.
Always.
After all, this was the way of the tortuguita. That’s the nickname mi papi gave me. For years he’s called me his little tortuguita. I guess for people who know me well, it kinda fits.