by Jaquira Díaz
He wasn’t exactly my boyfriend, and I didn’t love him, but I loved the way he loved me. He talked about us like we had a future, like we had so much to look forward to, saying things like, “Someday, when you’re older, I’m a buy you a house,” or “When you’re sixteen, I’m a take you to Disney World.” He pulled bills from his wallet, handed them over and said, “Here you go, candy girl,” without me even asking.
Candy girl, that’s what he always called me, breaking into song while we waited in line at the movies, or while we skated around the roller rink on Collins Avenue. “Candy girl, you are my world,” he’d sing, pretending he was Ralph or Ricky, so willing to be my man even though I wasn’t even in high school yet.
While I was away, I hadn’t thought of him at all. I had affection for Chris, but mostly, I only thought of him when he was around, when I was staying at my mom’s house. He was someone who took me and my friends out, someone I called to come get me when I was bored, or when there was a movie I wanted to see, or when I wanted new sneakers, or weed, or Wendy’s. I knew there was something off about him being older, but I liked the idea of an older guy being in love with me, buying me things.
Chris and I went and sat inside his car listening to music, smoking his Newports. I reclined the seat and just listened: there was TKA’s “Louder than Love,” but also the sounds of cars and buses driving by, a boy on a bike calling out to someone across the street, viejas out on their balconies yelling at their grandkids.
It had been right in that little Toyota Tercel that Chris had first confessed that he loved me one Friday night. We’d been drinking St. Ides. After he said it, he leaned over to kiss me, and suddenly, I threw up. Yellow vomit, straight down the front of his hoodie.
He’d yelled, “Fuck!” Then he stripped off his hoodie, turned it inside out, and used it to wipe up the rest of the vomit. “Fuck!” he kept saying. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
I was embarrassed, and drunk. “It’s your fault!” I said. “You brought the liquor.”
He made a gagging sound. “Fuck!”
Now, even though it had been just a couple of months, it seemed like that was a million years ago. So much had happened since then. So many fights with Mami, so many nights out on the beach.
“When was the last time you cut your hair?” I asked.
“Don’t remember,” he said, laughing.
We’d hung out in his car for a while, talking and making fun of each other, when Benny’s car pulled into the parking lot. My mother got out, and walked up to Chris’s car as Benny drove away.
Chris rolled down his window. “What’s up, Mami,” he said.
My mother smiled the way she always smiled at my friends when she was about to bum a cigarette. “Hola, Chris.”
Chris rifled through his pockets, like he knew what she was about to say. He gave her a couple Newports and a five-dollar bill.
“Gracias,” she said. “You think I can borrow five more?”
“Mami!” I snapped, then turned to Chris. “Don’t you fucking give her any more cash.”
“You know I’m gonna pay you back,” my mother said, then winked at him.
He pulled out a ten-dollar bill and handed it to her, just like that.
“Gracias,” she said, then headed inside.
She was always like this, learning my friends’ names, getting familiar enough to ask for money, or cigarettes, or drugs. It would be this way into my late teens, when I’m grown, when I’m a woman. It was like I was the only one getting older, changing. But Mami, she was frozen in time as that twenty-year-old who listened to Madonna and thought my father was running around on her, still haunted by those same monsters, and even years after we’d left Puerto Rico, she believed we still owned the house in Luquillo, the liquor store, that we would go back there, pick up right where we left off. That it would all be waiting for us to get back.
“You know you ain’t never gonna see that money, right?” I told Chris.
He looked at me, then turned the engine. “See you tomorrow, candy girl. And fix your damn hair.”
I reached for the door handle. “Get a fucking haircut.”
When I got up the next morning, I listened for signs of my mother. She went out partying almost every night, and I hadn’t heard her come in. When she wasn’t gone for days at a time, she’d be locked away in her room with some asshole, blasting Madonna on the radio, smoking and doing lines of scutter. Alaina and I would be locked in our room—me on the bottom bunk, Alaina on the top—trying to tune it all out. Sometimes I could hear her through the walls, laughing and laughing. If a frustrated next-door neighbor knocked on the door at two in the morning, she’d turn up the volume on her radio, until the cops showed up and broke up the party, which meant her boyfriend would jump out the bedroom window with her stash, and Mami stayed behind talking to the cops.
Living with Mami had become so unpredictable that Alaina and I started sleeping in our clothes—T-shirts and shorts, even jeans sometimes, sneakers and socks always ready in case we had to grab them and jump out the window. We were always in survival mode, always on the lookout in case somebody called the cops on Mami, in case Mami was having a 2 a.m. breakdown, in case one of her drunk boyfriends tried to come into our room in the middle of the night.
I slipped on my chancletas and went out into the hallway. In the living room, I found a mess: half-empty beer bottles, a pizza box left on the coffee table, the couch cushions on the floor, men’s clothes tossed all over the place. A pair of faded blue jeans, a white T-shirt, white Nikes, balled-up tube socks.
As I headed back toward the bathroom, I heard the toilet flush, then the door swung open and there he was, in the hallway between the bathroom and my bedroom, standing right in front of me in nothing but boxer shorts. It wasn’t Benny.
It was J.R., a kid I went to school with. A kid who’d tortured me since we were sixth graders at Fisher. He’d tried to kiss me once while we stood in line at the bumper cars on a field trip to the Miami Youth Fair, and I’d thrown my frozen lemonade at his head, and a week later he started a rumor that I was the one who’d tried to kiss him, and a week after that he tried to trip me as I was getting off the school bus.
J.R. beamed when he saw me, didn’t say a word as he stood there, in my house, almost naked. He looked me up and down, and suddenly I was the one who felt almost naked, in my Bob Marley T-shirt and cutoff shorts, no bra. I crossed my arms across my chest.
J.R. chuckled, then marched past me toward my mother’s bedroom like he knew the way. I leaned back against the wall, almost fell over.
He went to school with me.
What the hell was he doing partying with my mother?
And he didn’t even wash his hands.
When he got to my mother’s door, he knocked three times. “I gotta go, dog,” he said to whoever was in my mom’s room. “I’m out in five.” He strutted back toward me, and I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. I stood there almost frozen as he walked past.
In the living room, J.R. was throwing on his clothes when my mother’s bedroom door opened and out walked a guy I didn’t know. He was older than J.R., maybe in his twenties, in a white undershirt and paint-stained cargo pants, like he’d come straight over from work. I’d never seen him around the neighborhood. He nodded as he walked past.
And then the two of them, leaving the mess behind in the living room, walked out the front door.
Once I got to school, I stomped through the hallways in my baggy jeans, combat boots, and a Malcolm X T-shirt Chris had bought me at Flea Market USA. I ignored the boys, their stupid braces, their baseball jerseys, the girls with their ponytails bouncing as they pranced down to PE or Civics. Everywhere I looked, I saw new faces. Hurricane Andrew had hit us so hard that the school was overcrowded with kids from Homestead, kids who’d moved up to Miami Beach because their families had lost their homes, their schools closed. When I got to my Honors Language Arts class, my classmates straggling in and filling all the desks around me
, I found some empty seats in the back. I kept my eyes on my notebook, doodling in the margins, trying to make myself invisible, until my friends Boogie and China walked in. And then, for a while at least, everything was okay.
Boogie, China, and I were best friends, like sisters. We’d known each other since we were in Ida M. Fisher Elementary, and they were the only ones who knew where I went when I ran away. Sometimes I slept over at one of their houses. Sometimes we took off together and stayed at a boyfriend’s house.
China sat in the seat next to me, and Boogie sat in front of me. Before the bell, I told them about getting arrested, about spending hours in the police station before my mom picked me up.
“Stay over at my house if you want,” China said. Out of the three of us, she was the only one who lived in a two-parent household. Her parents owned and managed a restaurant on South Beach, and she worked there after school almost every day. We’d often stop by for free milkshakes and burgers. Even though her parents worked at the restaurant every single day, from morning until night, worked their asses off just to stay afloat, China never seemed poor because she was so generous with everything she had. If you were hungry, she’d make sure you knew you had a standing invitation to eat with her family. If you didn’t have a place to stay, she’d make sure you knew you could crash at her house, sleep in her bedroom. She took care of us all, always thinking more about others than herself.
We’d been friends since fourth grade. Two years later, Boogie came into our lives, the new girl, who all the boys started crushing on the second she walked through the door of Ms. Bregman’s sixth-grade classroom.
Boogie pulled a bag of Doritos from her backpack, then turned to me. “Want some?”
I picked up a couple and started crunching. We weren’t allowed to eat in class, but Boogie usually did whatever she wanted. We both loved to break the rules, except I was the one always in trouble. Boogie was loud, with a hot temper and a smart mouth, but she could sweet-talk her way out of anything. I was the girl who flung pre-algebra textbooks across the classroom at the teacher, the girl who climbed onto the table in the cafeteria and threw creamed corn in order to start a food fight, the girl who dove headfirst into a giant water barrel when we were supposed to be bobbing for apples during Field Day, the girl who got into a fistfight with a boy at the top of the bleachers in the gym, then tumbled all the way down with the boy in a headlock. There was no sweet-talking my way out of any of that shit, so I didn’t even bother trying. In our group, China was known as the shy one, the one who was quiet but tough when she needed to be. Boogie was the flirt. And I was the wild girl, the one who had fought half the girls, and some of the boys, in our school.
My friends would often throw down with me, if I was getting jumped, if there was more than one girl, if it was a brawl. But I never expected them to. Fighting was my thing and we all knew it. Sometimes they’d see it coming, the way I mean-mugged girls at the bus stop, in the mall, on the boardwalk, the way I refused to move out of the way when somebody was trying to get by in the crowded hallway on their way to class, just itching for a fight, begging for it. The open palm to the face, the two of us crashing against the lockers, the searing pain as we stumbled and my knee hit metal, and the rage, that unstoppable force, all those years of beat-downs barreling against me, the adrenaline rush as all the other kids gathered around us to watch, the confidence that I would win, even when I wouldn’t, even if in the end I’d wind up slumped over in the locker room, or on the PE field, or on the dance floor. Then, at least, there would be the certainty that I’d gotten exactly what I deserved. Years later, after I’m a grown woman, after I’ve stopped throwing down, when I can’t remember the last time I actually hit someone, a friend would ask, “Do you need it, all that shit, in order to write, in order to be who you are?” He would mean the fighting, the chaos, the rage. I would say no. And of course that would be a lie. And of course he would not believe me, because even all those years later, as much as I tried to hide it, he could see it, my whole body clenched like a fist.
China leaned over, and between the three of us, we polished off the Doritos.
“Chris came over yesterday,” I told them.
China gave me a look, raised one eyebrow. “That guy?” she said.
“What?”
“Don’t you think he’s too old?” China didn’t like Chris—she thought it was creepy that his little brother went to school with us, and that Chris sometimes picked him up from school, according to her, just so he could check out the girls.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I said. “We’re just friends.”
Boogie laughed. “Yeah, okay,” she said. Boogie had her own opinions. Most of her boyfriends had been older, with their own cars, jobs, even if they lived with their moms. She wasn’t worried about me—she knew I could handle myself, and she was also not interested in any boys our age.
China was worried though, I could tell. She loved her friends, and kept us all close. Her quinces was coming up in a few months, and her family was planning a huge birthday party, an old-school quinceañera with puffy ball gowns, fifteen couples dancing to Chayanne’s “Tiempo de Vals,” a DJ, a three-tier birthday cake. China’s mom and tías were into this whole big production because they wanted to keep us all busy, off the streets, spending time with boys our age, where they could keep their eyes on us. Two days a week, we all went to China’s house for rehearsals, all of us partnered off according to height, and I tried not to die of humiliation as one of her cousins twirled me around in the yard, as he placed his hand on my back, dipped me, and looked into my eyes like he was trying to be Antonio Banderas. I was dreading the idea of wearing a dress. I was always in baggy jeans, baggy T-shirts, and sneakers or combat boots. And now I was supposed to wear a magenta bustier-topped monstrosity with a giant ruffled skirt. It was some Rican Cinderella shit, all of us prancing around like La Cenicienta.
After the bell rang, Mr. Williamson closed the door behind him and started talking about Hurricane Andrew, which didn’t seem like whatever we were supposed to be talking about in our Honors Language Arts class. Usually, it had to do with Greek mythology or The Legend of Sleepy Hollow or Edgar Allan Poe. But we stopped paying attention. Instead, we passed around a compact mirror and fixed our hair, our makeup, checked for orange Doritos in our teeth. China admired her hair—like always, it was perfect. She had thick brown ringlets, like my sister’s, almond-shaped eyes, and plump, heart-shaped lips that she filled in with dark lipstick. I would spend half my life crushing on her, and hating every dude she ever dated. None of them would ever be good enough.
Boogie had straight brown hair that she always colored either auburn or honey brown, depending on her mood or whatever she found at the drugstore. She was smart as hell, and could sing her ass off. I was madly in love with her then, but would never, ever tell her. I didn’t know what it was about her, but there was something. The way she always smelled like Violeta body spray, the way she was brave like I could never be, the way she loved her curvy body, always wearing skintight Brazilian jeans or miniskirts, how she was fiercely independent, even at thirteen, all the ways she was strong, but also vulnerable. Her parents let her do whatever she wanted, stay out late, date older guys, and didn’t really pay attention to her. She wanted, more than anything else, to be loved. And I wanted, more than anything else, to be the one who got to do it.
“Do you understand?” Mr. Williamson asked. When I glanced up, he was standing right in front of my desk, looking at me. Not Boogie, not China, not anybody else. Me.
“What?” I said. Everyone laughed.
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “If you’re having trouble listening, maybe you’d like to sit up front, next to me.”
The dunce seat. An empty seat next to Mr. Williamson’s large desk, facing the whole class, where everybody would be looking at me like I was some kind of idiot. Hell. No.
“I’m okay,” I said, then quickly picked up my pen and pretended to write, not looking up t
o meet his gaze.
Mr. Williamson turned and walked to his desk, picked up a stack of papers, and started passing them out. It was a homework assignment. We were supposed to write an essay about Hurricane Andrew: our experience, how our families planned for it, how we survived it, and the aftermath of the storm. Mr. Williamson explained the assignment in depth, and then walked over toward my desk again.
“Do you have any questions?” he asked the class.
“No,” everyone said in unison.
“Jaqui?” He waited.
“No,” I said.
“Good.”
When the bell rang, I threw the paper, my notebook, my pen, everything into my backpack, determined to slip out fast, but he caught me. “Jaqui,” he said sternly as I headed for the door.
I stepped up to his desk. “Yeah?”
He stood with his arms crossed, and I noticed that his lip was quivering a little, like he was more nervous than I was. “I expect you’ll have your homework assignment when it’s due. Tomorrow. Not the next day, or the day after that.”
“Yeah,” I said. Boogie and China waited for me by the door, listening in.
“What happened to you this past week? You weren’t in school.”
“I was sick,” I said.
He looked at me, sighed. “I hope you’re feeling better. I’m looking forward to reading your essay.” He pointed to the door. “See you tomorrow.”
After Mr. Williamson’s class, we split to our separate electives. Boogie and China took off down the hall, and I headed toward the music room. As I passed the girls’ bathroom and the water fountain, I bumped into Chanty, another old friend from Fisher. We hadn’t talked in a while, and she looked messier than usual, wearing a baggy T-shirt half tucked into her tight jeans, her brown hair pulled back in a messy ponytail. She came right up to me, gave me a peck on the cheek and a quick hug.
