When did the shooter stop being a human being? When did his heart harden into stone, disintegrate into sand? What pressure, what heat made that sand turn into glass, sharp, cold, deadly?
“Can love overcome hate?”
“I don’t know. Once, I liked to think I couldn’t hate anybody. Once…”
Fuck prison where he would get street cred. Where he would be housed, fed, get dental and medical care, earn the high school diploma Blanca would never get.
“Ms. Mercado?” A kid working on the biology of tears walks over.
“I’m good, Ms. M.” I give her permission to go, so I can have permission to STOP. Back up. DELETE.
Lunch—as usual in my office. I have every hair under control. Until I detect what might be a split end at the tip of a braid. Which means I have to pull the whole braid apart. And if I don’t hold the split end tightly enough, I might lose it and have to spend hours digging for it. Which makes my eyes all crossed and my back hurt and my mother think I’m possessed by El Diablo. Thus, I rebraid. Only to start all over again. It’s my third round when somebody bangs on the stall. An apple hovers just below the door and disappears.
Danny takes a bite and holds it out to me again. “I don’t pretend to get what you do in there. But I’m here to nourish you.”
I hesitate. I look like Medusa. And FYI, Medusa wasn’t cursed with snakes. She was just a girl having a really freakin bad hair day. But I don’t want Danny to go. I stick my hand underneath the door. Grab the apple, chomp it, and hand it back.
“Okay.” Crunch. Danny takes a bite and passes it back underneath the door.
I can’t help but reboot and laugh.
“Tomorrow I hope to add the Holy Grail—a buttered roll.”
We take turns eating the apple. I know Danny knows when I bite where he last bit. When we get to the core I have no choice but to step out of the stall. I can’t fix my hair because my hands are sticky.
“Wow!”
I lower my eyes so I don’t see myself in the mirror. “Don’t be a hater.”
“You look like a lion. Roar!”
I snort-laugh. “I think all teenagers are shapeshifters. This is but one of mine.”
Danny looks straight into my eyes. “I like all your shapes.”
Me turning into girl gush: “I like yours too.”
From outside the bathroom: “That motherfucker better not be in here.”
That motherfucker bolts into the third stall.
The door to the restroom flies open and @Rican_Havok scans the stalls. “Go ahead, Nita.”
Apparently Nita, @Rican_Havok’s sister, has to pee and needed an escort. Nita with the blond ’stache. She thinks bleaching it makes it invisible. I personally want a day of rebellion where girls can brandish their God-given ’staches. God didn’t give me one though.
“Dude,” I say to @Rican_Havok, “you step one foot in here and I will pull off a toilet seat and beat you with it.” Or the lid of the trash can. I also know I can escape through a dirty window on the back wall. And use the rusty nails as a weapon.
Nita scopes under the doors checking for feet. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?”
“You know I heard if you hold your pee too long,” I throw a glance at her lady parts, “you could get a major infection down there.”
She rolls her eyes and locks the door in stall one. I go into stall three and pretend to have to pee. Danny is sitting on the tank. Nita pees, flushes, and then it gets dead quiet. I know better than to move yet. The tattle-tale creak of Nita actually leaving the stall breaks the silence. After a minute I guess she gives up. The faucet turns on. Another second of silence.
I get hit. With? “Uh! What the hell?”
Nita laughs and runs out the door. She threw a whole soaking wet toilet paper roll over the stall door.
“Oh, please tell me this isn’t wet with her pee!”
Danny and I bum-rush the sink and bathe in it. We dry each other off with paper towels. Danny manages to finger-comb a strand of my hair.
I swear Danny’s hand is an outlet turning my whole self ON. We’re a closed circuit, and I don’t want anything to interrupt our flow.
“I guess we should . . .”
“Yup,” I say, pulling back a step because as much as my body is purring, this ain’t going down in the bathroom. “We should . . .”
“So yeah,” Danny says, backing out the door, “math. Off to be remediated.”
“I can help you with that.” I shuffle my feet. “Math. Tutoring. Not that you asked.”
“No thanks.” Danny grins, nodding yes.
……
My moms won’t be home for dinner. Wouldn’t you know it, Danny will. We take the bus together, Danny carrying his skateboard under his arm.
A paper grocery bag sits on the kitchen counter. Danny uses the restroom while I unpack the Goya cans of red kidney beans, green olives, the chicken bouillon cubes, the box of Sazon packets into the already overflowing cabinets.
“When the fit hits the shan, we’ll be ready,” my moms will say whenever yet another can of tomato sauce erupts from the cabinet onto my big toe. Tía Sujei says Mami shops for Armageddon because she spent her childhood with an empty refrigerator. She’ll never go without Goya again!
I’m in the mood to cook the sofrito myself. Oh, the liquid-gold olive oil drizzling into the pan, the sizzle of onions out-gleaming any diamond, crisp green peppers that poetry-snap if you break ’em in half, fresh garlic from our porch garden! Danny returns and munches on the banana chips I set out on the table.
“So is that your room?” Danny inhales the crumbs and licks sweetness off his thumb with a flick of a perfect tongue.
This is where I’m supposed to escort his ass to the living room. Not follow him into my room and close my laptop to shut down screensaver Jesus. #Don’tJudgeMe. I trip over Danny’s Vans because he slipped them off without missing a beat.
“Wow. Your room. Is backstage. I’m backstage.” Danny shakes his hoodie off.
Danny is backstage on so many levels.
His silky blond hair hangs down to a jutting chin on one side; it’s shaved on the other. I need to braid those hairs! He grabs a fedora off an antique hat stand and smiles at the flaking gothic mirror that still reads Who’s the Fairest of Them All?
Danny makes a beeline to my bed and knee-crawls across my covers. My covers. The place where I was just imagining him lying beside me last night. They reach to the baroque shelf above it. “Is this the instrument?” His long slim fingers, fingernails bitten to the nub, run over the length of the case.
“Yes,” I say, leaning over him and gently locking the clasp.
Danny faces me and we’re almost nose to nose. “Oh! It’s like that. I understand.”
“No offense.” My violin, I decide, is the ONLY thing he can’t touch.
“None taken. To be that good at something—that’s sacred. I respect that.”
Danny props up my pillow and leans back, eyes whirling around my room. It’s like he’s in the museum of me. I sit down cross-legged on the opposite side of the bed and watch his eyes trace the billows of scarves on my ceiling, mushroom lamps lit with LED lighting in the corners of my floors. The path of Danny’s gaze reminds me of everything I ever loved enough to pin to my walls: a psychedelic poster of an Alice in Wonderland production we did with hula hoops and rollerblades, my favorite quote by T.S Eliot—Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?—on a mobile of coffee spoons, ruby slippers Blanca handmade dangling from a doorknob that we used for The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, black and white cast photographs.
All things bright and beautiful that have managed to become just background to me. Invisible before, now back in full Technicolor.
“Is that her?” Danny zeroes in on a pic pinned to a cork board behind my computer. Three of us are in black T-shirts and jeans, smiling because we don’t know our fate.
I nod. “That is her. Blanca. And Fernando. He painted sets.” I’m smiling at Blanc
a; he’s smiling at her. He was always asking to paint her. Just like in one of her romance books.
Danny’s brow furrows. He gropes under my pillow. He holds up a cover from which spills rubber-banded chapters. “Shit. Sorry!”
“No worries. Blanca did that.”
She gave me that book for Christmas. I opened the gold wrapping paper to find a book cover and one chapter inside.
“Um. Thank you. And huh?”
“This is my gift to you. So you don’t read ahead. So you read page by page. Chapter by chapter. No cheating. No rushing to the end.”
“Thank you, Master Blanca.” I stood and bowed—which was pretty racist now that I think back on it. But funny. But racist. #Mindfuck. “For that valuable lesson.”
Danny carefully slides the book back under the pillowcase. He sits beside me and a whole bunch of good scents swirl together, like when I took Mami’s magazine as a kid and wore every one of the samples inside at the same time.
“You just smelled me.” Danny laughs.
I giggle and nod. “No.” I look in Danny’s eyes and see myself reflected in them. The only mirror I’ve enjoyed looking into in a long time. How am I going to tutor without a freakin brain?
Danny crawls over and sets his chin on my shoulder. The tickle of breath warms my neck and I’m tingling from my head to my toes. My body is a slave and my heart is a beggar.
“You smell good, too,” Danny whispers. “Like cloves.”
His lips move against my skin and I feel every part of my body, separate and whole, light and heavy, my thighs soft and my nipples hard, between my legs warm and wet.
He lifts me onto his lap and I wrap my legs around him.
Danny brushes my hair from my shoulders and I know I won’t cut a single hair he touched. “Like cardamom.”
Those lips, kiss by kiss, slide across my chin up to my lips. “And honey.”
We’re leaning into each other hard now, our mouths both open like we were drowning and just coming up for our first breath of air. We kiss harder and deeper like we’re starved, so long marooned on the islands of ourselves. Our bodies and tongues intertwine and there’s no way to know where his ends and mine begins. The more we take in each other, the more starved I get. We are pressed—breasts to breasts—heart to heart. There is no left or right. Black or white. He lays me back and starts to unbutton my jeans, but I grab his hand.
“Sorry,” he says in my iron grip. “I should’ve asked. We can slow down.”
“It’s not that. It’s just—” I rebutton my jeans. “I’ve got this—scar.”
“Okay.” He takes a deep breath. Sits cross-legged on the bed. “Can you tell me about it?”
Can I? “I’ve been wearing jeans year-round. That heat wave this past summer? I sweated out half my body weight.”
Danny nods and says, “You know, I’ve got friends who’ve had surgery. I might one day. I can’t speak for anyone else’s scars, but I can’t wait for mine.”
I shake my head, choke out, “The scar is a bullet wound. It’s the ugliest part of me.”
His eyes widen. He clasps my hand in his. “Maybe it’s a tattoo. Of survival.”
“I hate it. Whenever it’s visible I feel like it’s forcing me to put my heart on my sleeve.”
Quietly Danny says, “Every day I walk out into the world, my heart is on my sleeve. A target.”
Shit. By that measure, no matter what burdens I’m carrying, he’s always going to be carrying something heavier. I feel all guilty and irritated at the same time, and then guilty for being irritated.
We both lie on our sides and face each other.
“I really know how to sabotage a moment, don’t I?” I say.
“I don’t see it that way. I mean, I grew up with two parents, but it was my mom who raised me till—the split. I’ll never forget what I heard through the wall. Her not wanting to. Him wanting what he wanted . . .”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, on the upside it taught me how not to be with a woman. We can leave the jeans on, you know.” He kisses me. Presses against me and slips his hand inside my panties . . .
It feels good, but I’m overthinking everything: my body and his. Is it my turn next? What do I do? But he squelches all that. Holds my wandering hand and kisses it.
The outside door unlocks and there’s the unmistakable sound of my mother’s keys.
We pull apart and the chair in front of my desk is still spinning across the room with me in it as my moms walks into the room. Weeeeee!
“Ay!” My moms holds her heart. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry about that.” Danny stands up.
“Ay!” She takes a breath. “Christ.”
I stand up. Lesson 1: How to lie to your mother who can smell a lie like a fart in a car. “Mom, this is—my friend—”
“Danny,” he says, reaching out a hand.
“Danny.” She steps forward. Shakes his hand for a very long time and studies it like a palm reader. Looks into his eyes like an ophthalmologist with a penlight.
“Ma!” I swear she’s about to frisk him.
She finally releases him and pats him on the shoulder.
I stand beside Danny. “I am tutoring Danny,” I remember triumphantly. “In math.”
“Math.” She purses her lips and folds her arms. “Okay. You know what? I came home because I forgot my badge. But I’m feeling a little run down. I’ll help you two set up in the living room where you could get some work done. I got a card table you could use. Danny, you help me carry it.”
My mother calling in sick? My mother has gone in to work in a blizzard with the flu. The only time she’s ever taken off is for a funeral and once she tried to Skype in (in her defense it was her third cousin).
After she retreats to her room, I tutor Danny for so long, it’s possible he can now do advanced calculus. Every plus sign adds to our hope. Every minus sign subtracts consequences we don’t want to face. But the knob of Mami’s bedroom door twists and the time comes.
“Danny. It’s late.” She looks at him the way she looks at stray dogs. She’ll throw them a bone. Make a donation. But ain’t no dog going home with us. “You got anyone you want to call? Or I’ll give you a ride home.”
“No. No, thank you. I’ve got wheels.” Danny motions to his skateboard by the door. Pins like Vagenda of Manicide and Pussy Strikes Back and Girl Mans Up clink as he organizes our notes and packs notebook and pencils into an otherwise empty backpack.
I am compelled to think about vajayjays. I mean, my moms calls her period her “friend.” Like “my friend is visiting” when she’s got her monthly. But the vagina? Like Voldemort, Mami and I don’t speak Her name.
I can feel my mother flashing me the mal de ojo. I pretend I’m picking lint off my pants and not inner monologuing with my genitalia.
My moms clears her throat. She stands up to her full height and motions to the door. Her robe is no longer from Target. It is now the garb of a priestess mid-spell. “I’ll walk you out.” Translation: Flaca, don’t let the door slam you in your skinny little culo.
My moms returns to her kitchen to finish the meal I completely forgot about. She grabs a knife as if to begin a ritual sacrifice to sanctify her spell. With each chop of her onion, she carves her will into the cutting board.
I dash out in front of Danny, shield him against her incantations. Outside, we stop and stand facing each other on the stoop.
“Danny, I’m so sorry.”
Danny cracks up. “I’ve never done so much math in my entire life. My brain!”
I massage his temples. Danny grabs my wrist and kisses it. “Nice tats.”
“Uh?”
“Tats, you perv. Your hands.”
My hands. The ink on my thumb reads, I Dare Me.
Danny whispers, “I dare you.”
I lean in and kiss Danny. I am thirsty. And among Danny’s lips and tongue I find a saltwater swimming pool and I could hold my breath for hours. In my nos
e blooms the bouquet of Polo, Versace, whatever Danny musta jacked from his daddy. The smell of Mami’s onions creeps through the door cracks, poisoning an otherwise perfect kiss. I pull away. Unlink my arms from his waist.
“I have to go. Face the music.”
“I’m sorry you’re facing it solo.” He cradles my chin and leans in for another kiss. “Here are my digits.” Danny writes his number on my wrist. “Later.”
I close the door behind me, picturing Danny looking toward the window, his eyes lingering for a glimpse of my shadow.
Back in the kitchen with my mother’s onions, I get stage fright. Chop, chop, chop. Mami’s ambidextrous so she could cut ’em with her left and cut me with her right. An onion rolls across the counter like a head from a guillotine. Forget facing the music.
“I’mma go to bed.” I stretch and yawn. And make a mad dash for my room.
“Sit your ass down.”
I sit.
Chop chop chop. “I can’t even.” The pan hisses as my mother uses the knife to slide the peppers and onions off the cutting board. My eyes water from the onions. Hers never do.
I take a deep breath. Turn the chair toward the stove. Sit with my arms wrapped around the chair’s back. “Mami.”
“What do I do?” she says to herself. She stirs the vegetables in the pan so hard some peppers fly out onto the floor. “Call Sujei? Call Padre Gomez?”
“Call a priest?”
My mother whips around with a wooden spoon in hand. My arm gets burned by tiny drops of oil. Behind her the pan steams and sizzles. “She is never to be in this house again!”
I stand up. “He.”
“He? He is on the wrong path. And you’re not gonna follow him down it too.”
“Being who Danny is is not a path!”
“I don’t care what you call it. Shaved head. A blanquito wearing earrings like un negrito? What is with that cultural appropriation shit?”
“How could you be so woke and so ’sleep at the same time? How can you not appreciate his struggle?”
“That so-called struggle is self-inflicted. That kid has decided that school, God, family are less important than playing dress-up. This face,” she gestures to her cheek, the unmistakable Taino cheekbones, the unquestionable African roots of her hair, “is who we are. We can’t take this off.”
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