Sammy and Juliana in Hollywood

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

  Sometimes, I wanted to tell Juliana that I was hers. She would’ve laughed.

  So this guy asks her out, this good lookin’ gringo basketball player who always walked around Las Cruces High like he’d bought and paid for the gym and the parking lot. He just walked up to Juliana in the hallway and said, “So what time should I pick you up on Friday?”

  Juliana looked at him. “You asking me out?”

  “Guess so,” he said.

  She looked at him. “What’s your name?”

  “Everybody knows my name,” he said.

  “I don’t.” Then she walked away from him.

  “Where you going?” he yelled.

  “To class,” she said. “It’s a school, you know.”

  He ran after her and grabbed her arm. “I asked you what time I should pick you up?”

  All she did was look at him. She stared into his blue eyes, wanting him to see. She could be that way. When she wanted you to, she could make you see everything she felt. I saw the way she looked at him, and I knew what she was telling him, and I knew that she wanted him to remember what she was telling him for the rest of his worthless life: You think I should be grateful because you’d drive into Hollywood to pick me up for a night, spread my legs for you, that’s what you think, that’s what you’ve made up in your head—and if you don’t take your hand off me, I’ll break it clean off your arm and feed it to the pit bull that lives next door to me—and I won’t feel a thing, not for you, not for your worthless hand, are you getting all this? She said all those things in the look she gave him—and I swear his jaw dropped. For the first time in his entitled life that sonofabitch understood that the world was a helluva lot bigger than he’d ever dreamed it was. His coach had lied to him. Life wasn’t a basketball game. The spring was gone from his steps as he walked away. God, that made me smile.

  I remember almost everything about her. It was as if I was born to be her biographer, and knowing that, I began to take notes from the very beginning. Mostly I wrote those notes somewhere inside my head and my head became a chalkboard. I couldn’t bring myself to erase anything I wrote there about her. And now I think I need to empty everything out—so I can have my body back. The thing is this, I know she’ll always be inside me. Well, maybe it’s not her that’s inside me, but there’s something. I can feel that something. I feel wings, sometimes. And it’s like those wings are all caged up. And I’m the cage, and the wings are trying to find a way to get out. I don’t know. It’s confusing.

  “Everyone’s been seeing you with that girl.”

  “What girl, Dad?” I always pretended I didn’t know what the hell was going on. That trick always worked for me.

  “Tú sabes a cual muchacha,” my father said, “no te hagas tonto.”

  “You should see all the girls that are after me,” I said.

  “Really?” my little sister said, completely astonished. She was half my age and was addicted to other people’s conversations. “Lots of girls are after you, Sammy?”

  “Seguro,” I said.

  “I don’t know about that,” my father said, “but I know how many girls you’re after. Ya te conozco. You’re only after one. And her name’s Juliana Ríos.”

  “Really?” Elena asked. “Her sister, Mariana, goes to my school.”

  I didn’t say anything. My father’s analysis of the situation sounded like an accusation—like I was committing a crime. “She’s nice, Dad.”

  “Bueno, la muchacha tiene una cara muy bonita, pero eso no quiere decir que she’s nice.” My father looked down at his plate of food. He was an easy read. Any time he wanted to tell me something, he’d look at his food as if the sopa or the beans on his plate were feeding him words. “You and Juliana aren’t doing things, are you?”

  “Like what things, Dad?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” my little sister said.

  “No, tell me,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Elena said, “tell us.”

  “Never mind,” my father said. But he couldn’t quite give up on the subject, even though Elena was at the table. “What’s she like?” he asked.

  “She’s good and she’s pretty.” I looked at Elena. “Isn’t she pretty, Elena?”

  Elena nodded. She was crazy, crazy for me and always ready to be my accomplice. “Beautiful,” Elena said.

  “And she’s smart,” I said.

  “Does she study?” my dad asked.

  “No. She doesn’t have to. She just knows things, I guess. I don’t know. She doesn’t ever take her books home. But I saw her report card. All A’s except two B’s and one C.”

  “Not as good as yours,” my father said.

  “Yeah, but I have to study, Dad.”

  “Can she teach me how not to study?” Elena asked.

  “No,” my father told Elena. “It’s better to study.” He was very literal about earning things. He looked at me. “You don’t give her the answers, do you?”

  “No, Dad, I don’t give her the answers.” I wanted to tell him that she sure as hell didn’t rely on me for the answers to anything. She found all the answers on her own. He didn’t know her, my dad, didn’t trust her. He thought she wasn’t good enough for me. Nobody thought she was good enough. I wondered what that was like. If people looked at me like they looked at her, I’d be permanently pissed off. “Look, Dad,” I said. “We’re all the same. We’re all from Hollywood.”

  “No. We’re not all the same. Some of us are good, and some of us aren’t. You’re not like Pifas Espinosa or Joaquín Mesa or René Montoya. Or like Reyes Espinoza. You’re not like any of them.”

  “You won’t let me be like them.”

  “No tiene nada que ver conmigo. You have that wrong, mijo. If you were like those boys, then nothing I would do or say could tame you. You’re not like them. You’re just not.”

  I wanted to tell him that sometimes I wanted to be as wild as them. I hated myself sometimes for being so tame, like some docile cat who’d been declawed—good for nothing but sitting on the windowsill. What good was I? In Hollywood, I was useless. “I’m not better than them, Dad.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  And then I said, “She’s a sweet girl, Dad.”

  “Sweet?”

  “She is, Dad.”

  He looked at me and shook his head. “I know her family.”

  “No,” I said, “you don’t know her, Dad.”

  “Didn’t she tell Mrs. López to—” he stopped and smiled at Elena. “She disrespected Mrs. López in front of the whole neighborhood.”

  “Mrs. López likes men, Dad.”

  “What’s wrong with liking men?” Elena asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. I looked at my father. “Mrs. López disrespected Mrs. Ríos by inviting Mr. Ríos into her house. At night.” I stopped, nodded at my father, and winked at Elena.

  “People aren’t supposed to visit each other at night, are they?” Elena asked.

  “No,” I said, “they’re not. They’re supposed to stay at home. Right, Dad?”

  “Right,” my father said, though I knew he thought it was wrong of Juliana to call Mrs. López a ‘puta desgraciada sinvergüenza’ in front of everybody who was buying vegetables at Safeway. My father looked down at his plate again. “Well, I don’t want you and Juliana smoking in my car anymore. No se porque fuman. Ya se creen muy grandes. You’re just kids.”

  I nodded. He got up from the table, and he and Elena started cleaning up. Every night, they cleaned the kitchen together, and afterwards, they’d eat ice cream and leave the bowls in the sink. I’d see their bowls sitting there on my way out the door in the morning. It was as if I took a piece of them with me. They were good together. Elena always had a hundred questions, and my father tried to answer all of them. Sometimes, when I’m doing stuff, I picture the two of them, Elena and my dad. And I think about how both me and my dad always fought like hell to protect Elena—as if we could prevent all the crap aroun
d us from touching her. You know, the funny thing is that my dad, well, I used to think of him as being as common and decent and ordinary as a piece of gum. But after everything that has happened, well, I think I didn’t know shit, not about my Dad anyway. What the hell did I know? What the hell did I know about the things he had to keep in his heart—the things he had to hide from us, the things he had to go through in order to save me and Elena? And why couldn’t I have been a thanker like him?

  I left them there, in the kitchen that evening. The two of them. As if they were always going to be there. I went to my room and called Juliana. Her father answered the phone and when I asked for her, all he said was: “Don’t call here. That puta’s not home. Just don’t call here anymore. ¡Pinches cabrones, todos! ¡Todos!” I wanted to run out of the house, run down the block, break down his goddamned door and shove my fist down his throat. I pictured me beating on him. It made me feel better. I wonder if things would have turned out different if I had done something like that. Maybe, if I’d done that, the whole history of Hollywood would have turned out for the better.

  Chapter Two

  “So what’s the symbol for potassium?”

  Birdwail, the chemistry teacher, looked right at Juliana. She gave him the right answer. “And the symbol for hydrogen and the symbol for aluminum and the symbol for magnesium and what are their valences?” He kept shooting questions at her. I swear they were bullets and he wanted to kill her. But she wasn’t in the mood for dying. She answered them all. One after another, she answered all of Birdwail’s useless questions.

  “Very good,” he said.

  “You’re surprised, aren’t you?” She just stared at him.

  “What?” he said.

  “That I know.”

  “I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, Miss Ríos—”

  “I can see it.”

  Birdwail ignored her question. He told us to turn to page 163 of our textbook.

  Juliana got up, turned in her lab notebook and walked toward the door. “Last time, you gave me a B on my lab notebook because you said it was late. It wasn’t late. And neither is this one. Now I have witnesses.” She walked out the door.

  “Come back here!” he yelled. “Come back here!” But she didn’t. His face was on fire. “Read chapter 11,” he told us, then sat down at his desk and tried to pretend he was in control. But he kept muttering to himself. He caught me looking at him. I wanted him to see what I was holding in my eyes.

  After school, I went looking for Juliana and found her at her locker. “Why did you do that?” I asked. “They’re gonna—”

  “I went to the principal’s office,” she said. Her voice was as calm and still as a hot summer afternoon. “I told him some girls liked Chemistry and Biology. Even Mexican girls. I told him Birdwail’s job was to teach. To encourage. I told him Birdwail wasn’t doing his job. And he said, ‘Well, you can drop the class if you want. I’ll make sure you won’t need it to graduate.’ I told him I didn’t want to drop the class. I told him that I didn’t want any trouble. I told him I earned A’s in Birdwail’s class and that I expected to get A’s. ‘A’s’ he said. ‘A’s’, I said. And I just looked at him.”

  “And what did Fitz have to say after that?”

  “He kept nodding, then finally said, ‘You won’t have any more trouble. I promise.’”

  “Well, Birdwail still hates you,” I said.

  “He hates you, too.”

  “So?” I said.

  “He gave you a B, too,” she said. She gave me one of those looks. One of those looks that you didn’t quite understand—except that you felt like you were the biggest idiot in southern New Mexico.

  “So? It was just a lab notebook. I’ll make it up.”

  “Why should you have to make it up, Sammy? He cheated you—he cheated both of us.”

  “Okay.” I nodded. “So, you talked to the principal, huh?” I knew I was wearing that grin, the one that pissed Carlos Torres off. That grin. “So you won,” I said.

  “I’m from Hollywood. No one from Hollywood ever wins. We just don’t always lose.”

  She pulled out a pack of cigarettes from her purse. She was a smoker now. A good one. She offered me one. We walked home. It was a long way to Hollywood, but we both hated the bus. “They think we’re animals,” she said.

  “No, they don’t.”

  “They think they’re better.”

  “We don’t always behave like—”

  “So we don’t always behave like them, Sammy. So what? You think those pendejos on the football team behave like people?” She looked at me as she lit her cigarette. Then lit mine. “You want to be like them, don’t you?”

  “Like the football players? Hell no.”

  “But you want to be like them, don’t you?”

  I couldn’t look at her. “I don’t want to live in Hollywood the rest of my life, that’s all.”

  “I don’t either, Sammy. But you don’t have to be like them.”

  “You don’t have to worry,” I said.

  “I worry,” she said. She was warning me. Later, I understood what she was warning me about. And I wondered how she knew. She was sixteen. How did she know?

  The next day, Birdwail didn’t say anything as she walked into class. She was late, and he didn’t say a word. Nada.

  He handed back our lab notebooks. After what happened, I thought that he would break Juliana and me up as lab partners. But he didn’t. He got us started on our experiments. When he came by, he stood over us and watched as Juliana carefully poured some chemicals into a beaker. He watched her every movement. I thought there was going to be more trouble. Maybe he wanted to rattle her cage. She completely ignored him. Finally, he said: “Your hands are steady. Very steady. You may have the hands of a surgeon, Miss Ríos.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I’ve always been good with knives.”

  Every day, after school, I’d walk across the street to get my little sister from Mrs. Apodaca’s house. I wasn’t sure, but I think my father gave her a few bucks for watching Elena. Not that she was much trouble. She was sweet, Elena. One day, sweet Elena was on Mrs. Apodaca’s front porch waiting for me. It was late, almost dark. She took my hand and we walked home. I turned on all the lights. I always did that, turned on all the lights. When my dad came home, he’d turn them off. It was like having an argument. I walked into the kitchen and Elena followed me. “Something happened,” she whispered.

  “What?” I said.

  “A boy hit me.”

  “What?” I picked her up and put her on the kitchen counter. I examined her face. Her cheek was a little swollen. Not much. I kissed it. Elena laughed. “Let’s put some ice on it,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Mrs. Apodaca did that already.”

  I nodded. “Who? Who hit you?”

  “Pico.”

  “Pico who?”

  “Pico Salazar.”

  “I know his brother,” I said. “I’ll go over there after supper.”

  “It’s okay,” Elena said. “Juliana fixed it.”

  “How did she fix it?”

  “Well, I was playing tether ball with Gabby and Pico comes up to us and says we have to stop, because it’s his turn. And I said we were here first. And Gabby says, yeah, and she told him he was nothing but a cucaracha, and I said, yeah, you’re a cucaracha, and cucarachas had to wait their turn because we were here first, and if he didn’t wait his turn someone was going to come along and step on him because that’s what happened to cucarachas. And then Pico says that he’s not a pinche cucaracha and if we don’t move, he’s going to have to hit one of us because girls have to do what boys tell them. And I say I don’t have to do what any boy tells me to except my brother, Sammy, and he wasn’t Sammy. And so he got mad and he punched me in the cheek. I didn’t cry, Sammy. Well, I cried a little bit, but not a lot, and then Juliana comes up to us, and she grabs Pico and she says, ‘If I ever see you hit a girl again, I’m going to kick your little Hollywood butt a
ll the way to Mesilla.’ And then he starts to cry, and then she tells him she’s sorry and to stop crying, and that she didn’t mean to hurt his feelings, but he shouldn’t go around hitting girls—especially nice girls like me and Gabby, and she tells him again that she’s sorry, and she gives him some gum and she gives me and Gabby gum, too—cinnamon—and she made Pico tell me he was sorry, and he said he was sorry and Gabby wanted to know if he still thought girls should do what boys said, and he said no and so Gabby said she was sorry for calling him a cucaracha. And that’s what happened, Sammy.” When Elena told you a story, it was as if she was running a race—the faster she talked, the better the story. And she never left anything out. I looked at her, and she kissed me. She was always kissing me, that kid. “Juliana likes you,” she said.

  “How do you know?”

  “She said, ‘You’re Sammy’s sister, ¿verdad?’ I said yes. ‘You’re beautiful,’ she said, ‘just like your brother.’ I’m beautiful, Sammy. Juliana said so. But how can boys be beautiful, too?”

  “You’ll have to ask Dad.” I always let Dad handle the questions I had no answers for. I was the brother. Not the father.

  That night, I called Juliana. I asked her if she had had a good day. Mostly she said no. But sometimes, sometimes she said yes. And that day, she said, “Yeah, Sammy, I had a good day.” And I could almost see her finger on her bottom lip. We talked. Mostly I got her going. And I listened. That’s what I wanted to do. Listen to her voice. I kept picturing her telling Elena that I was beautiful. No one had ever said that about me. Finally I said, “Hey, thanks for helping Elena out.”

  “So she told you, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She changed the subject. She started telling me about a dream she’d had. As I listened to her, I thought about what Elena had said. “Gabby says that maybe Juliana’s an angel. Angels always appear right when you need them.”