by Dave Eggers
“You want to see something?” Pilar said to the younger girls. She took her wallet from her purse and removed her driver’s license. “He gave it back to me today.”
They crowded their heads over the license.
“It looks so fake,” Estela said. “The five is a different color.”
“It’s good enough,” Pilar said. “They want to let girls in. I just need something to flash at them. We’re going tomorrow night.”
“You mean you’re sleeping at Amber’s Friday night,” Luz said.
“Isn’t that what I just said?” Pilar said, smiling.
The next morning, Kayla felt a small illicit thrill as she pulled her shorts on without any underwear beneath. The roughness of denim on her naked skin and the cool early morning air coming directly against her crotch were unfamiliar and pleasant. But when she arrived at school, Luz was wearing long pants. This possibility had not occurred to her, but as soon as she saw Luz she felt herself go weak and she knew she had done a stupid thing.
They were in gym class, the whole class sitting in a circle doing the butterfly stretch, flapping their legs like wings, when the boy next to her said, “Kayla’s not wearing any underwear!” and scooted away from her.
She straightened her legs but it was too late. The class went wild. The gym teacher, a balding man with teeth stained so badly they seemed to have rusted, shouted at them to settle down. He put a boy in charge of leading the rest of the stretching and walked Kayla to the nurse’s office.
Her mother was called at work. The nurse suggested that she bring Kayla home for the rest of the day so the sting of embarrassment could wear off. Tammy arrived breathless. “I don’t know where she could have gotten the idea from,” she said with exaggerated cheeriness to the nurse.
She squeezed Kayla’s hand harder and harder as they walked across the school parking lot to the car. As soon as the doors were closed Kayla burst into tears. “Don’t you dare,” Tammy said. “Nobody is in the mood to feel sorry for you right now.”
Tammy looked straight ahead, eyes focused on the road.
“What were you thinking?” she said.
“I forgot,” Kayla said.
“The hell you forgot. Nobody forgets to wear underwear.”
“It’s true,” Kayla said quietly.
“Your whole class is going to go home and tell their moms about it. Is that what you wanted?”
She looked at her mother helplessly. All she could see was Luz looking right at her with a peaceful, bored expression as the gym teacher led her away, as if none of this had anything to do with her.
Tammy had called her father to let him know she would be dropping Kayla at home, and he was waiting with a cup of milk and a plate of glazed donut holes when they walked in the door.
“You would think this called for a reward,” Tammy said to him. She walked to her bedroom and shut the door behind her. Kayla fell into her grandfather’s arms.
She curled up on the couch with her head in his lap and he stroked her hair. “Someday you’ll barely even remember,” he said.
Tammy came back into the room, her car keys jingling in her hand.
“Are you a baby? Get your head out of that lap,” she said. “Have you even put on underpants?”
Kayla shook her head.
“Are you waiting for some sort of further humiliation? Have you not had enough fun yet?”
Her daughter looked at her with small scared features. The resemblance was uncanny: If you could go back in time and switch Kayla for Tammy during one of her own mother’s rages, Pearl might not have even noticed the change. And she supposed her daughter thought of her in this moment as she had so often thought of Pearl: a monster. She wanted to tell Kayla she was lucky. This was nothing. This was just the soft gray ashes of her own mother’s combustible temper.
Her mother looked at her with eyes that dazzled with anger. She will never do this. When she has a daughter, she will never.
The summer before Kayla was to start kindergarten, Tammy went to the Juniata County public library and photocopied the rankings of America’s Best Public Schools in US News and World Report. She circled all the schools in Pennsylvania and states that touched it. She left her father at home with a refrigerator full of labeled meals and took Kayla with her all over the breadbasket states. When they arrived in the town that would become their home, Tammy felt it at once. Downtown, red roofs shone in the gold sun. Food shops sold jewel-toned salads of baby vegetables. The stone elementary school had been built at the turn of the century. Kayla was so young—after a few years, she might not even remember that anywhere else had ever been home.
After they moved to the town later that summer, Tammy took Kayla to the school to register her. Tammy wore pinstriped pants and a white collared shirt. In the cafeteria where the registration was being held, the other mothers wore sundresses or shorts. Children raced around; a game of tag was in progress. Kayla leaned against Tammy’s leg.
“You don’t want to go play? You want to stand in line instead?”
Kayla nodded.
“But it will be fun,” Tammy said.
“It will,” said the woman in front of them. The woman smiled warmly at Tammy and then at Kayla. Kayla turned her face into Tammy’s hip.
“I hope you have them paying you overtime for waiting in this,” the woman said, rolling her eyes at the length of the line.
Tammy looked at her quizzically. Then she understood: the woman had mistaken her for a babysitter.
“I’m Tammy,” she said, holding out her hand. “And this is Kayla. My daughter.”
The woman shook Tammy’s hand and introduced herself, looking at Tammy vaguely. Then she turned around to face the front of the line.
At the school’s annual parent nights, the way the husbands looked at her made her sick.
“Which one is yours?” a man said to her once, as she surveyed collages hung by clothespins on a wire. He wore a suit. They all did—they had all rushed home from jobs in the city.
“That one,” Tammy said, pointing to a sheet on which squares of pink and orange tissue paper had been glued. Kayla’s name was written in the corner.
“I didn’t know we had a Kayla in this class,” he said.
“We do,” she said.
Then a woman, rail thin and with a neck full of tendons, came over, her eyes twinkling with displeasure: “Oh there you are,” she said, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder. “And you’ve made a friend.”
What did these women think she was here for? To land a rich daddy for Kayla? To seduce their husbands with her young breasts and the dark circles under her eyes?
For Kayla’s sixth birthday Tammy threw a party at the town park. The day was cloudless and warm. She had sent out invitations to all of the children in Kayla’s kindergarten class and reserved two picnic tables shaded by big oaks at the edge of a grassy field. She moored bouquets of balloons with rocks at the ends of the tables and set her father up in a folding chair with a disposable camera. The pastry chef at the Crane House had even baked a cake, the top of it sprinkled with the shake leftover from the gold leaf ornaments he made for dessert garnishes. When the mothers came with their children, she told them they could return in two hours. Instead they lingered. It was a nice day, they said. Besides, couldn’t she use an extra hand? It was the benevolence with which they said it that indicated to her they had discussed their intention to stay amongst themselves. They didn’t trust her with their children. As soon as the last child arrived, one of the mothers clapped her hands. “All right kids, into the sun, time for a game.” And just like that the party was lifted out of her hands.
The next night, Kayla was at Luz’s as usual, running into the concrete walls in the basement. They did not talk about what had happened yesterday. A part of Kayla knew she had been betrayed by Luz, that a truer friend would have specified that they should both wear long pants if they were going without underwear. But starting a fight with Luz would mean the loss of the entire
Lopez family and the universe of their home. The power dynamic between them was clear: Luz had her sisters to fall back on and Kayla had no one. Luz could afford to push and Kayla could not afford to push back.
Besides, she did not want to miss tonight. Pilar and her girlfriends were driving down to the eighteen and over clubs in White Plains. Pilar had already cleared a sleepover at her new friend Amber’s house with her parents. The plan was to stay out until the clubs closed at two, then crash at her friend Maria’s because Maria’s parents both worked night shifts and wouldn’t be home to notice how late the girls came in.
“Who’s Amber?” Manuel said as Pilar waited for her ride.
“I’ve told you about her,” Pilar said.
“She does gymnastics,” Luz said.
“Her boyfriend’s on the soccer team,” Kayla said, pleased with the lie.
Pilar returned home at nine the next morning, just in time to put on fresh makeup, throw on a lavender dress and cardigan and pile into the minivan with the rest of them for the drive to church.
By the time the priest started in on the sermon, Luz had run out of patience.
“How was Amber’s house?” she whispered.
“Like a night is supposed to be,” Pilar said. “Like I’m done doing anything else.”
After church, the girls took cold tamales up to the bedroom. Pilar pulled off her dress, revealing a lacy yellow bra and panties. “Get me out of this!” she said, unclipping the bra and flinging it across the room. “¡Mira!” she said, pulling up her breasts. Beneath them, where the underwire had been, were two tender red arcs. “I danced myself raw,” she said. She lay down on her bed, settled into it as if into a meadow in a dream.
“Tell us about the boys,” Luz said.
“What boys? These were men.”
“They’re all under twenty-one, or they’d go to a real club that doesn’t let high school girls in,” Estela said.
Pilar shook her head in frustration. “The girls are all under twenty-one. A lot of the men are older.”
“That’s messed up,” Estela said.
“Don’t worry, Stelbell. I’m sure when you’re in high school you’ll never go to such a messed up club,” Luz said.
“I won’t need to. I’ll have a boyfriend.”
“You’ll have a boyfriend like she’s got a best friend named Amber.”
“Shut up, you two,” Pilar said. “Some of us need our rest.”
From then on, every Saturday night Pilar told her parents she was sleeping at Amber’s house, and every Sunday she threw a dress over her lingerie and came to church. She danced so long her legs continued to feel like they were moving all through church. If she’d kissed a man for a long time, her tongue kept feeling like it was moving, too, the whole of her body rocking and quivering like coming off of a boat onto dry land.
She met DeMarcus Moore on her fourth trip to the clubs. He was from Yonkers and was working at his cousin’s garage while taking classes towards his real estate license. At the end of the night he wrote his phone number on the underside of her wrist. He kissed her neck and told her he would need to see her again.
“It’s all smudged. You can’t even read it,” Estela said when Pilar showed the girls her wrist the next morning.
“Nine one four one nine three nine,” Pilar said, dreamily.
“They’ll kill you,” Estela said. She meant their parents and Manuel. A Hispanic boy, good, fine. A white boy, so long as he was Catholic, even better. But a black boy could be Jesus’s own altar boy and Pilar wouldn’t be allowed to date him.
“Only if they know,” Pilar said. “Swear.”
They swore.
After that Pilar wasn’t going to the clubs to tease as many men as possible. She was going to be with DeMarcus. She told the girls he moved slow, like a gentleman. He didn’t even slip his tongue into her mouth until the third time they saw each other. When DeMarcus’s friends found them locked together on a chair in a dark corner, they asked him what had taken him so long. “In case you didn’t notice, this is a lady,” he said.
On weekday afternoons, she called him from the payphone at school to tell him how much she missed him. Two months after they first met, he pulled her out of the line on the sidewalk in front of the club. “I’m tired of dancing,” he said. “And my ma’s not home.”
He spread a blanket on the roof of his apartment building.
“The view was so romantic,” she told the girls.
“You were in Yonkers,” Estela pointed out.
A week later, Pilar pulled a little red box from her purse. Inside was a crystal charm of an angel wing on a silver chain. She put the necklace on. The tiny crystals threw bursts of rainbows onto the white bedroom walls, and Pilar tilted her chest back and forth so the rainbows danced. “I think I’m in love,” she said. She looked at the rainbows as if this feeling of love were located there, in the radiance cast by his gift.
Kayla could no longer pretend not to stare. Pilar had been blinding just lazing around after a boring party in town. Pilar enshrined in the light of forbidden love was something else altogether. Kayla got his strange name stuck in her head like a song. DeMarcus DeMarcus DeMarcus.
“Where did you get that?” Manuel asked Pilar one day, pointing at the necklace.
“I bought it,” she said. “Amber and I got matching ones.”
“You’re getting tight with this gringa.”
“Luz has a white best friend. Why can’t I?”
Kayla felt warm with pride. Her position as steward of Pilar’s secret injected an energized quality into her days. At night she imagined she’d been injured in some brave act to protect the secret from Manuel. Pilar and DeMarcus nursed her to health in a cabin surrounded by tall pines. Pilar brushed her hair. DeMarcus spooned broth between her lips. He put his smooth dark palm against her cheek.
On the drive home from the Lopez’s one Sunday, Kayla asked Tammy what she would think if Kayla fell in love with a black man.
“Why? You haven’t actually found one in this town, have you?” Tammy said, laughing. She had just come from her weekly visit to Miami Tan and she was feeling good. The twelve minutes she spent surrounded by the hot white lights of a tanning bed, in the dry warmth that reminded her of how a desert might feel, maybe in Southern California, were her favorite part of the week. She didn’t even like the color it turned her anymore. She knew the orange cast of her skin looked harsh and artificial. It was the peace of those minutes she returned for, and would return for every Sunday of her life until she was forty-one and a dentist, of all people, told her she had better get the mole on her shoulder checked.
It was a Saturday night in mid-June. Kayla lay awake. She heard Estela’s soft snores, Luz’s dream-fueled murmurings, and a chorus of frogsong floating in from the swamp. A car came up the driveway, and then she heard doors slam and voices growing louder as they approached the house. She recognized them immediately as belonging to Pilar and Manuel. “What’s happening?” said Luz, who had been roused by the noise. “What’s she doing back?” Estela whispered.
The front door was thrown open and they heard Pilar yell. The girls raced down the stairs. Pilar struggled against Manuel but he held her tightly against him. On his white T-shirt, starbursts of red shone brightly. Against Pilar’s skin were stains of darker red.
Mr. and Mrs. Lopez came down the hall from their bedroom. When Mrs. Lopez saw the blood she bent over and emitted a low, lowing sound.
“Estela. Luz. Ven arriba,” Mr. Lopez said quietly.
The girls didn’t move.
““¡Ya!” Mrs. Lopez said.
From the bedroom they listened to the shouting below. It was like being inside of a dream: the vividness obscured things rather than clarified them. Kayla heard a slap and a little cry from Pilar, then another slap and a grunt from Manuel, and knew it must be Mr. Lopez delivering them.
“What happened? Is it his blood or hers?” Kayla whispered to Luz.
“It’s DeMarcus’s.
Manuel followed her and found her with him.”
Mrs. Lopez’s heavy steps came up the stairs. She stood in the doorway of the bedroom with the telephone in her hand. “Kayla, you call mama,” she said. “She come take you home.”
Luz and Estela were not in school on Monday. That afternoon Kayla called Luz’s house over and over. Nobody answered. When Luz wasn’t in school again the day after that, their teacher asked Kayla if she was sick. Kayla shook her head. When four days passed and neither Luz nor Estela had shown up at school, Kayla was called to the school counselor’s office. The woman explained that she wanted to talk to her to see if she knew anything that might help her friends.
What did she know? Who could she help? She knew that Pilar had been in love with a black man she met at a club and that four days ago Manuel had come home covered in his blood. She knew the man was DeMarcus Moore from Yonkers. She knew he had given Pilar a crystal necklace, and that it was her dream to be given such a gift by a man someday.
She was sent back to class, but later that afternoon a woman from the front office knocked on the classroom door and asked for her. The woman led her back down the hall to the counselor’s office. Her mother was there, waiting for her. “I thought I’d take you home a little early today,” Tammy said. “There are some things I want to tell you about.”
On the drive home, Tammy was quiet for the first few minutes. Kayla pressed her face to the window and watched the lush foliage of early summer flutter by.
“Your friend’s family left town,” Tammy said. “They were illegal.”
“Illegal?”
“It means they’re not supposed to be here. They snuck into the country without permission. Your counselor got in touch with the kid your friend’s sister was seeing. He said he thought his friends drove up and threatened your friend’s family after what her brother did.”
“Where did they go?” she said.
“Who knows? Another town. Somewhere they can get work.”
Kayla nodded. Tammy reached over and tousled her hair roughly.