by Jaquira Díaz
A few days later, I caught the bus to Downtown Miami, and then the Metrorail to the Mailman Center for Child Development for my appointment with Paula. It was the first time I’d be seeing her in her office—every time I’d seen her, we’d met at the courthouse or the police station or in an office at my school’s library.
“Have a seat,” Paula said as I stepped into her fourth-floor office. I plopped down on the love seat, and she sat across from me in her swivel chair. She wore slacks and a short-sleeved blouse, except she was barefoot, with a toe ring and tattooed forearms, her brown curls messy and frizzy. The whole office thing didn’t agree with her, like her clothes were some kind of costume to hide the real Paula, the tattooed white woman with moonstone and turquoise jewelry and wild hair who probably played the drums in some therapist garage band.
Paula’s office was like a children’s playroom, with small plastic tables and chairs like the ones in a kindergarten classroom. Toys littered the floor: Barbies, Legos, blocks. Board games stacked on short bookcases. There was a set of beanbags by the window, and hanging on the walls were colorful crayon drawings of stick-figure families and houses with yellow suns hanging over them.
“How are you?” she asked after I sat down.
“Fine.”
“Fine?”
“Yeah.” I told her I was back in my mother’s house, skipped over the part about running away, and skipping school, and getting arrested. As far as she knew, I’d been in my father’s house the whole time.
“How was it? Seeing your mom again?”
“Fine.”
“Jaqui.” She pursed her lips, waited.
And waited.
I avoided eye contact, checking out the board games stacked on the shelves. Was that what they paid her for, to play with little kids in her office?
“It was fine,” I insisted. I talked about school, about my music classes, about Alaina, who was staying with Papi for a while, although she mostly lived with Mami and didn’t bounce back and forth from Mami’s apartment in Normandy Isle to Papi’s place in South Beach like I did. We talked about Anthony, who I was in a constant battle with, always fighting, how I sometimes felt helpless around him, and how my father didn’t even care.
She swiveled her chair over to the side table, picked up a box of tissues, and offered them to me. “Is that why you always run away?”
“I’m not gonna cry,” I said, rolling my eyes. “It’s just not fair. Anthony has never lived with Mami. He doesn’t know what me and Alaina have to deal with.”
She studied me for a while, then put the box of tissues on the armrest next to me.
“Can you tell me more about that? What you had to deal with?” It occurred to me that the few times I’d seen Paula, I’d never told her the whole truth about my mother, never mentioned the drugs or the drinking, or how things had been much worse for Alaina because she never ran away. As far as Paula knew, my mother had a mental illness and she was taking her medication.
I tried to change the subject, told her all about Benny, how he bought me Burger King and drove me home, about how I’d be playing bass in a big end-of-year concert. I talked for a long time. Paula just watched me.
“What made you go back to your mom’s house?” she asked after a while.
“I do what I want,” I snapped.
This made her sit up. “So you want to be treated like an adult?”
“Yeah. I can take care of myself.”
“Then why don’t you start behaving like one?”
I looked down at my sneakers, shrugged.
She picked up the small trashcan under the side table, and held it out in front of me. “And get rid of those cigarettes.”
“What cigarettes?”
“Hand ’em over!”
I pulled the pack of Newports out of my jeans pocket, dropped them in the trash reluctantly, which hurt when I thought about how much another pack would cost. “How did you know?”
“You stink,” she said.
I sniffed myself, but didn’t notice any smell.
“I keep telling you, you don’t have to live your life this way. And I mean that. Some things are out of your control, but Jaqui,” she inched closer, put her hand on mine, “some things are not.”
“Like what?”
“Like the stealing, fighting, smoking.” She waited for my reaction, then continued. “Like going to class.” She rolled her chair back toward her desk, put on her reading glasses, picked up a pen, and started scribbling something in a yellow legal pad. When she was done, she ripped out the page. “I have something for you.” She wheeled back over and handed me the sheet.
It was a list of questions. Things like What makes you sad? and What are you afraid of? and What is your happiest memory? and Where do you feel safe? and If you could travel anywhere, where would you go?
“So I’m supposed to answer these?” I said.
“For next week’s session. Think of it as an exploration.”
“You mean homework?”
She sighed. “Jaqui.”
When I got home later that afternoon, I could hear Madonna’s “This Used to Be My Playground” coming from Mami’s bedroom, the hallways foggy with cigarette smoke. As I walked into my bedroom, I heard laughter, Mami’s first, then a man’s. My mother, laughing and laughing, and then, over the cacophony of the song ending and DJ Laz on Power 96, Chris. My Chris. His voice in my mother’s bedroom.
I dropped my backpack on the floor and stepped out into the hallway. Had I imagined it? Would Chris do this? Would Mami? I made my way slowly toward my mother’s door, then stood there, waiting, listening, waiting. And then, there it was again. Chris and my mother, laughing together, their voices familiar with each other. They had done this before.
Suddenly, without thinking, I turned the knob, threw the door open, the two naked bodies scrambling to cover themselves, my mother with her bedsheets wrapped around her, and I wanted to scream but all I could manage was an exhale, a long, drawn-out breath like all the air was being squeezed out of me. How could you?, I wanted to say. But then, the smoke beginning to clear, the naked man in my mother’s bedroom pulled his pants on, and they were not Chris’s pants but Benny’s, and it was Benny standing there, avoiding my eyes. Benny bending to pick up his shirt from the floor. Benny’s voice. Benny’s laughter.
“Jaquira!” my mother yelled. Not Jaqui but “Jaquira.” Not Please close the door but “Who the fuck do you think you are?!”
I pulled the door closed again, not sure why it had been so easy to imagine Chris with my mother, to hear the sound of his voice in my mother’s bedroom, his laughter. I’d felt betrayed not because I loved him, but because I thought I’d lost him. It would be years before I could see it clearly: I was a thirteen-year-old girl. Chris was twenty-one. A man. Maybe I thought of him the same way Mami thought of Benny. I was, after all, my mother’s daughter. My mother, who was thirty at the time, who’d had me when she was just seventeen. Maybe, back then, she’d been exactly like me. An ordinary girl.
It was a morning like any other when I got the news. I’d missed school the day before, and I hadn’t been expecting it. It was Chanty who told me. She was waiting for me in front of my homeroom when I got to school, five minutes before the first bell.
“Nena, have you seen it?” she said as soon as she saw me. She looked skinnier than the last time I’d seen her, small and pale, her hair in that sad ponytail that had become her go-to style. She grabbed my arm, pulling me along the hallway toward the front office.
“Seen what?” I asked.
She started laughing, hopping around on the balls of her feet. It had been so long since we’d had a real conversation, and I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed her until this moment, how much she’d changed. When had she lost so much weight? When did she start wearing her boyfriend’s ratty T-shirts, three sizes too big? Was this the same girl I’d sat next to during all of fourth grade? The same girl who ran around Flamingo Park with me all summer? I realized I didn’t even
know what to say to her, or how to say it. We stopped right in front of the office, and she pointed to the bulletin board where they posted announcements and photographs. Canned food drives, awards ceremonies, jazz band recitals, intramural sports teams . . .
“You weren’t here yesterday when they made the announcement,” she said. “You were skipping, you fucking nerd!”
I hadn’t been expecting this. I’d just turned in my homework and then forgot about it. But there it was, my essay, printed on a page of the Miami Herald, thumbtacked to the bulletin board, my words for all to see.
Chanty explained that Mr. Williamson submitted it to some writing contest for South Florida students, that the Herald was collecting stories about Hurricane Andrew, and mine was selected from all the students in Nautilus.
I almost cried right there in that hallway, almost cried as I took off, leaving Chanty standing there, as I sprinted to my class when the bell rang. And later, almost cried as we all sat in Mr. Williamson’s classroom and he congratulated me, handed me a copy of the paper, and told the class all about it. China sitting next to me, smiling, Boogie in front of me, her body half turned to me as she joked, “Girl, I didn’t even know you could read, let alone write!” and everybody laughed, including me. I pretended everybody else laughed because of the obvious—I was in an Honors Language Arts class, so of course I could read and write. But I knew the truth: nobody thought I belonged there.
Everybody was surprised, including me. I was not that girl. I was the girl who kept getting arrested, who missed school and got suspended, the girl Chanty’s mother didn’t want around her daughter.
I looked at the paper again, right there in my hands. It was proof of something, I didn’t know what. That I would be a writer someday, that I would be something, somebody who mattered.
Chris was back a few days later, like I knew he would be, with a bag of Twizzlers and a two-liter Pepsi. I let him in because I was hungry and bored and alone. We hung out in my room for a while, listening to Power 96, whacking each other on the head with Twizzlers and sipping soda from a big plastic cup. Then, out of nowhere, he got all serious. He put the half-empty cup down on the carpet by the bed, took my hand. “You know I really care about you, right?”
“Sure.”
“I mean like for real. I really care about you. I love you, and I want you to be my girl.”
I took a deep breath. “Ok.”
And that was that. He was my boyfriend. And less than an hour later we were undressing, the Twizzlers on the floor, the apartment empty except for the two of us. He pulled off my jeans and T-shirt and when my panties didn’t slide down fast enough he ripped them off, tossed them aside.
“What the fuck!” I said.
He pulled his shirt up over his shoulders and tossed that aside, too, and for the first time I noticed the hair on his chest, a skull tattooed over his heart, a Puerto Rican flag that wrapped around his shoulder and upper arm. He was muscular and sweaty and smelled like cologne and cigarettes and I could not think of a single thing I actually liked about him. Not one.
Once he was naked, his dick hard and pressing against my thigh, I said, “Let’s just get this done.”
“Ok, mami, whatever you say.”
I closed my eyes and thought about Boogie, the girl who sat next to me in homeroom, that first girl who kissed me, that beautiful boy, Devin, who went down on me but didn’t fuck me. As Chris tried to push himself inside me, I kept thinking of Devin. Why couldn’t this be him? And then I changed my mind.
“Wait,” I said. “Stop.”
Later, in my thirties, telling the story during a late-night drinking game with friends, I would leave out the parts about how I said no, how I pushed him, sliding sideways and backward trying to get him off me, how I banged my head against the top bunk as I was trying to get away, his hand yanking my hair, and then, his lips against my ear, how he kept saying, It only hurts for a second, and then telling me to shut up shut up shut up. I would leave out all the blood, a large smear that covered almost half the bed. Or how a couple of years after that night, in high school, I ran into him while walking into Burdines on South Beach. How he smiled, like he knew something about me the rest of the world couldn’t see, and that smile was so disarming it turned my stomach and I almost threw up right there by the women’s shoes, and then when he said, Damn, girl. You just gonna walk by your first love and not say hi? how his voice took me right back to that night, the moonlight filtering in through the mini-blinds, the wooden beam of the top bunk almost splitting my head open, his breath sour against my face, how I kept thinking, It’s almost over, almost over. How after he was gone, I ripped the bloody sheets and the mattress cover off the bed, rolled them up, tossed them into the dumpster out back. How Mami came home the next day, found me sleeping on the bare mattress, asked what was wrong, and when I said I felt sick, she brought me water, sat on the edge of the bed and watched me drink. How she put her hand to my forehead, brushed the hair from my face, and when she looked into my eyes, I could tell she was looking for something. But whatever that something had been, I knew, it was already gone.
Months after that night with Chris, after I’d left my mother’s house, on my way home from Paula’s office, I would take the Metrorail, sit by the window, check out the commuters during rush hour. Doctors and nurses leaving the university hospital buildings, the courthouse staff headed to their cars, the Miami-Dade County corrections officers in their uniforms, all of them crowding the parking lots and Metrorail platforms. When most of the passengers had gotten off, I’d lean all the way back, put my feet up on the rear-facing seat in front of me. I’d get off at the Government Center stop, transfer to the bus headed to Miami Beach, to Papi’s house. Downtown Miami would be jam-packed with people, like it always was in the afternoons, with all the tourists shopping in the boutiques or headed toward Bayside Marketplace, the Miami Dade Community College students headed to their jobs. After dark, Downtown Miami would be dead, except for the packs of squatters, the homeless lining up for beds in front of Camillus House, scutterheads and tweakers panhandling under the bridges. And then, somewhere in all that darkness, my mother. She would be there, night after night, her whole life spilling out of a single backpack, her glass pipe tucked in the outer pocket.
At sixteen, after the depression got to be too much, after dropping out of school and getting my GED, after I stopped talking to Chanty for good, after I stopped taking music lessons, stopped playing the piano and the bass, after I forgot what J.R. and Benny and Paula looked like, I would try to forget the sound of Chris’s voice when he sang New Edition. Candy girl, you are my world. And after I turned eighteen, after the playground equipment in Normandy Park was replaced, the blacktop resurfaced, after all the people who’d lived in the neighborhood ten, twenty years were gone, I would leave Normandy Isle for the last time. Alaina would be in high school, and Anthony would be a bartender at a nightclub on South Beach, and I would work nights as a pharmacy technician at a drug store and come home to an empty studio apartment and I would think of my mother, adrift in that city, alone. How she descended into madness, sometimes sleeping on the steps of the Miami Beach Post Office, sometimes in the hallway of a friend’s building. I would remember how she detached herself from me, piece by piece. How I lost her, slowly, until one day she just didn’t come home.
Ordinary Girls
We started talking about dying long before the first woman jumped. What our parents would do once we were gone. What Mr. Nuñez, the assistant principal at Nautilus Middle School, would say about us on the morning announcements. How many of our friends would cry right there on the spot. The songs they would dedicate to us on Power 96, so that all of Miami Beach could mourn us—Boyz II Men’s “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” DRS’s “Gangsta Lean.” Who would go to our funerals—boys who’d broken our hearts, boys whose hearts we’d broken.
She was a French woman, the first jumper, that’s what people said. She didn’t live in Southgate Tower
s—Papi’s high-rise apartment complex, where he also worked as a security guard—but her boyfriend did. According to the boyfriend’s neighbors, they’d been having problems—she drank a lot, he drank a lot, they fought. That night, the neighbors told Papi, she’d been banging on the door for a while, calling the boyfriend’s name when he wouldn’t open it. My father was in the security booth outside the lobby when he started getting calls from some of the Southgate residents. They thought they’d heard a crash, something falling from the sky, the air conditioning unit on the roof maybe. Or maybe someone had flung something heavy off their balcony. Nobody had expected it to be a person, least of all my father.
Our planning started way before the French woman jumped, during a four-month stint living with my mother in Normandy Isle. For a few weeks, Alaina spent the weekends with Papi and Abuela, or next door at Titi Xiomara’s, while Anthony was living lovely with Abuela cooking for him, cleaning up after him, and doing his laundry.
One day after school, Boogie and I were on the swings, rocking back and forth, digging our sneakers into the dirt and kicking off. We talked about how we’d do it, imagined we could make it look like a tragic accident. We’d get hit by a Metrobus while crossing the street, which would be easy since nobody expected a girl to just step in front of a bus in the middle of the afternoon. The park would be alive with people—ballers on the courts, kids on the merry-go-round, boys riding their bikes on the sidewalk, hood rats on the corner waiting for who knows what. We’d smoke one last stolen cigarette, flick the butt before we jumped the fence out of the park. Then we’d take care of it, the business of dying.
Some girls took sleeping pills and then called 911, or slit their wrists the wrong way and waited to be found in the bathtub. But we didn’t want to be like those ordinary girls. We wanted to be throttled, mangled, thrown. We wanted the violence. We wanted something we could never come back from.
Ordinary girls didn’t drive their parents’ cars off the Fifth Street Bridge into Biscayne Bay, or jump off the back of a pickup in the middle of I-95, or set themselves on fire. Ordinary girls didn’t fall from the sky.
