by Aida Salazar
Juju is playing with his Legos
and talking like he does
about who messed up
during the show and why.
I look out my window for Luna.
Where is she tonight?
She is nowhere.
She is in her dark phase
our time for potential Mima says
the time to plant seeds
that will bloom when the moon is full.
I think about Iván, Aurora, Magda, and my foolishness.
What will we harvest when the seeds planted are so mean?
The following Friday night
I’m on the tablet watching a movie
when a text comes through.
Sup my Celi?
It’s from Iván.
I begin to answer,
Leave me alone, I don’t text with jerks!
but I pause before I send it
because he is typing too.
My curiosity grows bigger than my anger.
…
It’s my birthday
tomorrow
Going with some of the
guys to the movies
You wanna come?
I hit send.
What?
So does this mean no?
Yes
Yes you’ll come or yes it
means no? (crazy face pleading emoji)
I’m only inviting a few
guys, c’mon it’ll be hella fun
Then that familiar flutter in my panza returns
and I feel an ebb back to him.
What are you watching?
Jurassic Attack (three dinosaur emojis)
Will your mom be there?
Nah it’s a drop-off
I’m turning 13 (emoji smile with glasses and bucked teeth)
My mom probably won’t
let me.
LMK
show starts at five
Grand Lake Theatre.
K
My locket is in a tussle
tattered battered
but lifted.
I hear Magda’s words,
Sometimes we say things we don’t mean when we are hurt.
Maybe, I just don’t know what’s hurt Iván
for him to have said the things he did to Magda.
My curious locket wants to know and so
I ask permission.
Mima says I can go
but
only if she and Juju
can find another movie to watch
at the same time in an adjacent theater.
The flesh-eating dinosaurs would frighten Juju.
Lucky for me, a penguin movie is playing
and I can go and be one of the guys
with Iván, Pedro, and Leandro
but not really.
I know I will never be able to tell Magda.
But it is something my locket cannot hide.
Mima, Juju, Pedro, and Leandro know too.
My mind is mush.
Right now
I can’t think about
how to keep this secret safe.
Tomorrow, I’m going to the movies with Iván!
In the lobby, I buy Iván popcorn
and hand him a medicine satchel
I threw together for him
for skateboarding first aid:
tea tree oil to disinfect
tepezcohuite salve to heal a scrape
bandages, medical tape, gauze.
He thanks me with a slight shove on one shoulder.
Iván saves a seat for me next to him
so we can share the popcorn.
I can’t think of anyone but Magda at first
and how she might want to be here too
but I’m distracted by Mima and Juju
who’ve come all the way up to our seats
just to see where I’m at!
I clench my jaw at her and shoo her away
then the movie starts.
I forget Magda and Mima
get lost in the terror on-screen.
I’m eating popcorn instead of my nails
and so is Iván.
I reach into the bucket of popcorn
he reaches in after me
grabs my buttery hand and
holds it there
lost in the movie too.
I look at him
slip out my hand
from under his
my flor more sparkly than ever.
I pick up my root beer with two hands
sip in the flavor of this
excitement and fear.
Not so much because of the movie
anymore but because now I know
what it’s like
to have held a boy’s hand.
He leans in and whispers, Are you scared?
A little, I confide.
Though he’s asking about the movie.
For a moment, I wish to be in the theater next door
watching the penguin film
with Mima and Juju.
That thought is cast aside
by a buttered locket
a held locket
beaming to be here
without Mima and Juju.
I flow open.
Swim in all of the special attention
he’s giving me.
I am warm and feel like
I’m floating
when he simply turns to me to ask,
Can I have a sip of your root beer?
When do you turn twelve? One thick eyebrow rises.
Soon, I’m a summer baby.
Would your parents let you have a …
Oh, never mind, he sighs.
Inside thoughts tumble like weeds.
Have a first kiss
on the lips.
His
really touching mine.
My parents would never allow it.
Papi says, I have to be thirty
and Mima says I have to be thirteen
when I’ll also be able to wear makeup
and crop tops, have a phone,
and go to the mall without a chaperone.
Why do I have to wait for all of the
good things when I don’t feel
like a baby anymore?
But maybe Iván only likes
to have me around
to be one of the guys
and was just gonna ask
about something else.
Our movie lets out.
Mima and Juju are still in there
so we wait by the large cardboard dinosaur display.
When they come out of their movie
Iván thanks Mima for letting me come
and asks how the movie was for them.
Mima loves it when kids look
an adult in the eye when talking.
Juju erupts in mental diarrhea,
So, Celi, how was your date?
I fume and instantly throw a Junior Mint at him
then cover his mouth with my hand.
Juju pries away my fingers and spills,
You haven’t even had your moon ceremony
but Mima let you go in there by yourself anyway.
Mima gathers Juju to her while fake smiling
to stop me from attacking him.
Then Iván asks,
What’s a moon ceremony?
I feel like someone is stepping
on my chest
my breath stolen away.
It’s a beautiful coming-of-age ritual
that our indigenous ancestors
held for young girls before quinceañeras.
Mima is now oversharing with IVÁN!
I don’t know what to do with myself so I try to tug Juju’s ears
but Mima pulls him behind her and farther away from me.
Cool, like something the Aztecs did? Iván nods and
looks at me sort of cross-eyed
but then winks.
Iván refuse
s a ride home
prefers to skate with the boys.
As we leave, we watch them ride off
on their boards though it is getting dark.
Just enough night to see that Luna
watches over them too.
I don’t tell Mima about
his holding my hand inside the movies
the almost girlfriend question
or what he thinks about Magda.
These nuggets are for my locket to keep.
Sunday morning I awake
to Juju talking to himself
about being cold in early June,
You know that water freezes
at thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit?
Since we are made of water
we can freeze too.
The almost-summer mornings
in Oakland wouldn’t be
so cool if it weren’t
for the fog that rolls across
the Bay like a wet blanket
and seeps into these old walls
with no insulation
the crisp wood floors
of our little house
that seems to be more
alive because of the bold
teals, reds, mustard yellows
that punctuate the walls
in each of the different rooms.
My eyes still closed
I hear the whispers of the freeway
relive every moment from the day before
a silent choreography in my mind.
I get a text
from Teresa’s phone number, from Magda.
Need to talk to you
In person
Can you come over?
Today?
Ya
Anytime
Too stunned to say no.
She’ll see right through me.
Maybe she already knows
and that’s why she needs to talk to me?
Guilt rides on me
like a backpack too full of books.
As I get ready to go see her
Mima says that the rest of the family
has been invited too.
But Papi’s got a gig
and Juju is his roadie today.
Anyway, I can’t imagine Magda sharing
anything too personal with them.
Magda stands at the door, next to Luis.
Her always smile eclipsed by an almost frown.
They ask us to remove our shoes.
I feel as transparent as a screen.
We don’t go into her room
to hang out like we normally do.
We are invited to sit on cushions in a small circle
on the living room floor with our mothers and her dad.
A clay bowl of dried white sage branches
sits at the center.
Teresa ignites the sage, lets it
come aflame, and then blows it out.
She douses her limbs, her head, her chest
with the swirling bitter-smelling smoke.
Luis, Mima, and Magda do the same.
When I am handed the smoking branch
my eyes water, it trembles in my hand.
The smoke will reveal everything.
Still, I smudge my body
keep the sage near my chest
gather the smoke in the
cup of my hand
pull it into
my heart, my heart, my heart.
When Teresa speaks finally
the words that come out of her
are foreign.…
Our child has arrived at a new truth.
A real self, an authentic self, the reality always meant to be.
Marco is his true name.
Magda is part of his historia, the earlier chapters of girlhood.
Also born a boy energy into the body of a girl
it is the wisdom of the sacred masculine placed
in the body of the divine feminine.
We could not claim it for him
until he was ready to understand on his own.
In our ancestral Mexica tradition, Ometeotl
is our Creator spirit that is neither
female nor male but both—divine duality.
Marco has Ometeotl energy
a person who inhabits two beings
the female and the male at once.
Though we can’t be certain how our
ancestors felt about people of two energies
because there is so much we don’t know
so much we are still learning
as new Mexica, we regard it an honor
to be a reflection of the Creator.
I look over at Magda and fight confusion
a boy in the body of a girl?
I have always known that she was different
a tomboy for sure, more free than anything else
but simply Magda, Magdalena Teresa Sánchez.
Not Marco Sánchez!
Not Marco Magdalena Teresa Sánchez!
Mima taps me back to attention
when Luis begins to speak.
From what we do know
people who danced between
or to other energies
than what they were assigned at birth
were sometimes called xochihuah.
Xochitl is the word for flower in Nahuatl
and a xochihuah is
the one who bears flowers.
They were known to worship
at the temple of Xochipilli, the flower prince god
who protected people of all gender identities
and queer folks.
Marco, my son, carries the blossoms
of his truth inside him
as a sacred xochihuah.
A sho-chee-wah? I stretch to pronounce
unable to hide
my unraveling thoughts.
Yes, a xochihuah,
my truth
Magda assures.
I look up to the light
of hopeful
you-understand-me eyes
and all of a sudden
I do somehow
and it’s easy.
I pause only to find
my own it’s-all-right look
to offer.
I see Magda’s hands shake a little
when she says,
Being Marco feels good
even if I have two energies.
My parents say that I don’t have to decide yet.
That’s part of my road to figuring it all out.
But I feel more boy than girl at the moment.
And because I can be both
I’m going with Marco for right now.
Then Teresa turns to me,
We need your help to make his transition
as a xochihuah safe and loving within the community.
And though we don’t know
how we will reveal it
there will be those who will judge.
We need everyone’s support and no
one more than yours, Celi.
I feel the weight of Teresa’s words
fall feather light on my shoulders
wound up in the love I have for my best echo.
I nod my head slowly.
Magda smiles. No. Marco smiles.
Reaches to squeeze my hand.
The wide white doves of his teeth
are proof of his faith in me.
He is grateful I have his back.
Marco and I reason
in Spanish, the word friend has a gender:
amigo, male
amiga, female
as do many other words.
Friend in English has none.
But in Spanglish, our happy mixed-up tongue,
amifriend has both
the warm sound of amor in am
and friend, the sweetest word English can muster.
Marco is optimistic,
I hope that others will get me like you, Celi.
But then again, there will be the Iváns
who will mock and sneer and hurt
and never understand him
ignorant of Ometeotl and xochihuah, blind to the honor.
No hay mal que por bien no venga.
Marco’s right, there isn’t anything bad
that does not bring something good.
If it hadn’t been for Iván and his friends
Marco thinks he would have never changed a thing.
Celi, it was right then and there that I finally got it!
I knew that I couldn’t pretend anymore.
But maybe you would have without them?
Maybe. Well, at least we don’t have to deal with Iván ever again.
Our clasp, snap, bird-flight-fingers handshake
seals our understanding.
Inside, I wince.
Marco asks Ms. Susana
and most his teachers, including Papi,
to simply call him Mar instead of Magda.
Mar is the word for sea in Spanish.
He wasn’t ready to go all the way there
with every one of the kids in bomba class
or in world drums class or at school.
Though most of us could sense
his new kind of happiness.
His parents said they would do that carefully, perhaps
with a community gathering, or a letter
so it is the safest for him.
When we echo, it does not matter
where our gender lands
what our lockets hold
we are body movement
drum movement
song movement
creativity in movement.
Ten minutes before class ends
Iván walks in holding his skateboard.
My heart crinkles and shakes outside of me.
He watches the class like a begging puppy
I think he wants to join
and I feel sorry for him.
When class is over, Marco
helps put away the drums.
I shove my skirt into my bag
and then I feel Iván standing behind me,
Did you get my texts? He sounds anxious.
I’ve texted you about a hundred times.
You mad at me or something?
I signal him to follow me as I walk
toward the café away from Marco.
He continues,
Or did your mom take away your tablet again?
I want to tell him that it was a mistake
to have gone to the movies with him
that I really can’t be friends with a person
who totally misunderstood and hurt my best friend
no matter how my heart spins.
But I don’t.
It is as if my mouth shrinks with the truth.
I’m sorry, yeah, mom’s got my tablet.
Whew! I was hecka worried for a minute.
You know, Pedro said that he had a nightmare