The neighbors downstairs—or maybe it was upstairs, it was hard to tell—began to bang on the floor, or ceiling. Jade’s mom became a wild dog then, barking at Jade’s father as she clung on to his back. In my essay I said that she actually looked like a human backpack. It was true. Oh, and her black hair flung around like a mop.
I could tell my mother didn’t know what to do. Her eyes pleaded with me. Get up. She couldn’t leave with the babies and leave me inside the apartment with this monster. I was so scared, but I couldn’t leave Jade. How could I?
“Jade! Come with us!” I begged. Now her mother was the one who was clawing—clawing at Jade’s father’s eyes. He circled and punched at the air, at anything in his way. Jade had just wiggled past him, racing for the door, when he suddenly kicked out. Jade went sprawling, falling right onto the glass coffee table. Shards flew everywhere. Blood flew everywhere.
I couldn’t believe how shiny the blood was.
“Jade!” her mother yelled. Both mothers ran toward her.
More knocking sounds.
Jade was drenched in blood and glass. Seconds later cops burst through the apartment door. Then it seemed like everyone was screaming in Spanish. The rest was a loud blur.
On my final page I wrote about everything that happened once the police showed up. How they immediately called for backup and an ambulance, how the sirens grew louder and louder until they stopped right below the apartment window. The sound suddenly stopped, but the orange and white lights still swirled like a disco ball, hitting every surface of the living room, including the framed photo of Jade and her parents that had been taken at Sears. I knew it had been taken at Sears because our family had been next in line, waiting for our turn. In the photo, Jade’s father looked like a totally different person. He still had his ponytail, but his skin was softer, his teeth so clean and white as he smiled into the camera. The three of them were dressed in plaid—red, white, and black.
I described how the cops handcuffed Jade’s father and told him to “Shut the eff up!” (I thought I might get points taken off if I used an actual swear word.) I described how the paramedics placed Jade onto a white stretcher, how I could see that Jade had a hundred bits of glass speckled across her skin and sticking out from her T-shirt. The paramedics gave her an injection of something they said would make her feel better. After that Jade’s father was deported (I know that now, but at the time I just knew he had been taken away), and Jade’s mother had a nervous breakdown and started using drugs and hanging out with even sketchier dudes.
Jade’s grandmother had raised Jade ever since. Her father was still in Honduras as far as I knew.
I wrote until my hand hurt. And at last I was done. Mrs. Grew noticed, because she came over and asked if she could read my pages. “Sure,” I said with a shrug. She took them to her desk while I read the syllabus front to back, trying not to watch her. When she was finished, she remained seated, looking into the distance. It was not an A for Your Essay look. Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned the police? I stared at the prompt written in green marker on the board. Describe one of your worst fears… overcame it… Oh, wait. I hadn’t written about that. I had written about a time when I was afraid, but not a time I overcame it! NOT the same thing. Ugh.
I felt so relieved when the bell rang. My classmates zipped backpacks and bolted out the door, one guy asking another, “Dude, what’d you write about?” The other answering, “Not making the traveling team. I was so afraid I wouldn’t make the cut, so we hired a private coach for a month before tryouts.” What the—?
Mrs. Grew stood up at last and handed me back my essay.
“Liliana. I hope this is fiction.”
My throat tightened. I managed to nod.
She squinted as if suddenly seeing me through a new lens. Just then another teacher interrupted us—thank God! I escaped into the hall. On my way out I crumpled up the pages, then slammed the wad into the nearest trash can. No, it wasn’t fiction. So what? So this happened to my best friend. And yeah, I was fearful. So I didn’t exactly follow the prompt, but I mean, weren’t writers supposed to write about the worlds they knew? I blinked hard, fighting back tears. No way I was going to let anyone see me cry.
I checked to make sure Dustin wasn’t in the hall. But then I wanted to see him. Maybe that’d make me feel better. I reached for my phone, sent him a text: hey.
He wrote back right away: finishing up lab. Want some cat intestines?
I replied: all set thx . At least he put a smile back on my face.
Hey, meet at outside bleachers for lunch?
My stomach dropped. In the best way. K , I replied. I was about to text Genesis next, ask her what was up with Mrs. Grew, but up ahead I heard kids laughing. They were surrounding Rayshawn, who somehow had a blazer (teacher’s?) over his hoodie and was sashaying down the hall, tossing out pink detention slips and letting them fall like confetti. Kids were dying-laughing. As I walked past them, someone said, “Yo, Rayshawn! Do it again!” And so Rayshawn did it again. And everyone laughed again.
A teacher in the hall actually clapped before taking the pink pad from Rayshawn and saying, “That’s enough. Thank you for the performance, brother. But keep that energy for the court. Season is just getting started. All right. Now get to class.”
Whoa. Did that teacher (white) call Rayshawn “brother”? Rayshawn either didn’t hear or pretended not to hear. But he must have heard it! Others moved on to their classes. But it all really… bugged me. As I walked to my next class, I tried to figure it out. Aside from a white teacher calling Rayshawn “brother,” it was like… Rayshawn was their entertainment and they held the remote control. Yeah, it bugged me.
I texted Genesis. Hey girl. Where r u? Immediately she wrote back: theater club… all ok? I responded with the brown-skinned thumbs-up emoji. But what’s the point of having a METCO buddy if they’re never around? So I texted her again and asked: what play are u in anyway? She replied: the Emperor's New Clothes—which I thought was mad random. She read my mind because she added: i play one of the spoiled daughters lol. I sent her an emoji with stars in its eyes and stuffed my phone back into my pocket. Good for Genesis.
After checking my hair in the bathroom mirror, I walked to the field, and sure enough, Dustin was sitting in the top row of the bleachers. He waved his sandwich in the air—ha. I had mine too. Ham and cheese. His was bleeding purple, so PB&J. “Hey,” he said when I got to the top. “Table for two?” He took a little bow. Aw… We sat so our thighs touched, even though there was space for like, a thousand more people. And I tried, tried, tried not to obsess over whether or not I had a piece of ham stuck in my teeth. But I couldn’t. So I talked mostly with my hand over my mouth. I told him about Mrs. Grew. He said not to worry about her. That she was officially now Mrs. Ew. I laughed. Took a sip of water. Screwed and unscrewed the cap about fifty times. When we finished eating, he gently pulled my sleeve, and I scootched up and sat even closer to him. He put his arm around me and we sat like that, tucked into one another, the half hour wrapped around us, the fresh air on our faces, until the bell rang.
9
When Mom asked me how school was, I said that it was whatever. No way was I telling her about Dustin, hello. She muttered something about how it would get better, but then went back to staring at the television. She was beyond obsessed with the news (understandably, hello), in Spanish and English. She watched all the channels and brought home three different newspapers, hunting for information on what was going on at the border. She didn’t even watch her telenovelas at night. And she hardly left the apartment anymore, and never at night. If we ran out of milk, too bad, the boys ate their cereal dry in the morning.
One of the top stories on the news: a rival gang shoot-out at a nearby park. A bystander had been killed. We knew the gangs did their thing, and we knew not to wear certain colors in excess, but still. Knowing this happened just three blocks away wasn’t exactly comforting. Then, as if that weren’t bad enough, the news switched to
an image of the president and “the wall” on the southern border, like between the US and Mexico. Whaaat? An actual wall? For, like, hundreds of miles? Mom began praying superfast in Spanish, her eyes screwed shut.
I draped a wool blanket over her. “Can I get you anything?”
“No thanks, mija.” She didn’t take her eyes off the TV.
“You hungry?”
She shook her head. I didn’t bother asking if she’d made dinner; she’d never even gotten out of her pajamas. Dang. That meant she took the twins to school like that. Double dang. I checked in on them. No surprise, they were playing video games, firing their remote controls, making gun sounds, pat-dat-dat, pat-dat-dat. I told them to turn down the volume, but they only lowered it a little.
Everything felt so cramped all of a sudden. The rooms, the walls, the apartment building, the streets. Even the air. Which was weird, because you’d think the place would feel bigger with one less person in it. But it was as if Dad’s absence was sucking up all the oxygen. Thing was, if Dad had been home right then, he’d probably be wrestling with my brothers. They capital L Loved to wrestle. Dad would pull one of their mattresses into the living room, and then the three of them would really go at it. The boys would jump from the couch onto the mattress, aiming right for Dad’s chest. They got all kinds of wild. Drove Mom bananas. She’d have to leave the apartment and go do laundry or something because she was sure that one of them was going to get hurt and then we’d be spending the rest of the day in the emergency room. I thought it was pretty funny. Sometimes I even recorded it on my phone, and then we replayed it in slow motion. That was really funny.
Huh. Probably my brothers were playing so many video games now because Dad wasn’t around to play with them.
“When’s dinner?” Christopher asked. Good question. I went into the kitchen. The sink was full of dirty dishes. Great. But I washed and dried them and put them away. Then I stared into the cupboard. Cooking… wasn’t exactly my strength. I had only ever made rice once before, and it had come out more like soup. Mom said I had added too much water. See, my parents never followed recipes. They always just eyeballed amounts. I’d tried to do the same. But ended up with rice soup. So this time I measured and timed and stirred, and twenty-five minutes later, the rice was done. It looked like rice! Until I tasted it. Bland-o! It wasn’t savory like when Mom made it. Then I remembered that Mom put onions and tomatoes and other stuff in there. Bouillon? Garlic? Salt! I could add those things now.
I took the pot off the stove, cut up a tomato and an onion, and stirred them in. Then I opened a bouillon cube and mashed it using a fork. Why are those things in cubes, anyway? Ohhh! They’d make good little presents if I made a Christmastime miniature room; I’d have to remember that. I got out the big container of salt and was sprinkling some in when Benjamin burst into the kitchen, shouting “You need to sign my reading log!” He scared the heck out of me, and I accidentally poured way too much salt into the pot.
“Benjamin! You just made me spill it!” I tried to scoop the cloud of salt out, but it was already sinking, dissolving into the rice.
“Me? It’s not my fault you can’t cook.”
I gave him a dirty look.
“So, can you sign it?” He waved a green paper at me.
I scanned it. “Did you actually read for thirty minutes?”
“No.”
“Then I’m not going to sign it. Go read.”
“You’re such a—”
Beep! Beep! Beep! What the—the smoke alarm! Christopher barreled in with his hands over his ears, followed by Mom, the blanket around her shoulders. “What’s going on? Liliana!”
“I was making rice—” I looked around frantically. Damn! I’d never turned off the stove. I switched it off, grabbed a dishrag, waved it at the alarm, and braced myself to get yelled at.
But Mom was peering into the pot, an enormous smile on her face. Then she took a bite. “Oh, Liliana.” She gave me a Thanks for your help; this rice stinks look. And so it was worth it—the annoying smoke alarm and all. Mom opened the windows and the door that led to the basement stairway. She even opened the refrigerator! Then she spooned out the top layer of the rice—where, according to her, most of the salt would be. She added more water to the pot and a bunch of frozen chicken thighs from the freezer, and she set it all to simmer. “Come get me in half an hour,” she said, heading back to the living room. “Don’t forget.”
“Okay,” I said, turning toward Benjamin. “You can start reading now. And don’t stop until I say.”
He put on a protest pout, but got his backpack and sat at the table. “You know,” he said. “I am taking a cooking class. So I could help you with the rice next time.”
“Now you tell me?”
He grinned and opened his book. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I also thought of something you could use for the barbed wire above the panadería you’re making.”
“Yeah?” He was actually thinking about me outside his universe of video games and reading logs? Aw…
“The inside of a pen. You know, for the spirals. Just pull it loose a little bit.”
“Benjamin! That’s a great idea! Thanks!”
And once the rice and chicken were done, and I’d eaten a bowl and a half—it was pretty good, and only a little too salty—I knocked on my window three times for Jade. She wasn’t home. Thought of texting Dustin, but then remembered he had a game. So instead I went right to work on Yoli’s Pasteles y Panadería. I took apart an old pen and used the silver spiral just like Benjamin had suggested. It was perfect.
10
With Mom watching news nonstop (which made me worry about Dad nonstop), school was almost a relief. On the ride in, I noticed there wasn’t a single pastelería in Westburg, only Starbucks and one bakery on Main Street called—you guessed it—Main Street Bakery. And it sure didn’t advertise sillas y mesas for rent on a handwritten sign in the window like at Yoli’s. I guess Westburg customers didn’t need to rent any tables and chairs. And that, folks, was my takeaway on that morning’s bus ride to school. Oh, and Dustin texted me eleven times, just sayin’. He really wanted me to go to a game. I really wanted a different mother. Joke, joke. But…
In third-period World History—I couldn’t believe it—we were starting a unit on Central American immigration. It was part of a larger unit on immigration as part of a yearlong theme of Reading Like a Historian. Guess who finally read that syllabus? I noticed that this school gave unique names to their courses, instead of the basic English, art, math, history, etc. Like, there was one senior English course called American Rebels and Romantics. And yeah, Central American immigration. But ugh, why couldn’t we just study the Civil War or the Vietnam War or some other war? There were enough of them. At the same time, I was kinda curious. Maybe I could learn more about, I don’t know, how my family got here—about Dad? At the same time, I didn’t want the extra attention on me, because, sadly, it didn’t seem like there were any other METCO kids in the class. So I knew the attention would be on me. Because, yeah. Double ugh.
Our teacher, Mr. Phelps, started things off by holding a class debate. First he projected this onto the whiteboard from his computer:
The United States federal government should substantially increase its legal protection of economic migrants in the United States.
He read it out loud a couple of times. All I could hear was the hot hum of his laptop. Why was he showing us this? Because of the president’s Build a Wall obsession? What kind of wall, anyway? And who would actually build it? Okay. If getting our brains spinning was his goal, he’d succeeded.
As if he’d read my mind, Mr. Phelps tapped his keyboard, and up came a picture of the president wearing a blue suit and red tie and speaking into a microphone. A speech bubble said:
We want a great country. We want a country with heart. But when people come up, they have to know they can’t get in. Otherwise it’s never going to stop.
WTF?! I glanced around, but no one else seemed as
outraged as I was—or else they had freakin’ good poker faces. Next Mr. Phelps played a short clip from a documentary about child migrants trying to flee Central America to the US by climbing cargo trains that traveled up through Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. In the clip, two teenage boys were lying on top of a massive train, the wind flattening their hair, the sun in their eyes, as they tried desperately to hang on tight as the train blasted through a tunnel in a mountain. I gasped out loud. The clip ended right before the train moved into the darkness.
This time everyone moaned. Someone shouted, “Oh, come on! You can’t do that! Play the rest of the video!”
Mr. Phelps looked all smug, like his unit “hook” had worked. Well, it had. We were interested. Invested. Sitting up.
He then explained how the debate would work. We would argue for or against these quotes. Simple. Hands flew up left and right. Not mine! One kid said, “Who can’t get in? You mean immigrants? Look, we’re all immigrants. Seriously, we should just give the country back to the Native Americans.” I nodded. I mean, she had a point.
“Yeah, but… then what happens to all of us? There are like, half a billion people in the United States. Where are we all supposed to go, huh?” a girl in the front row asked.
Another student raised his hand. “Well, those quotes you showed kind of raise a good point. If people think they can just, like, keep getting in, then yeah, it’s never gonna stop. You know what? We should build a wall.”
A guy in the back—I’d seen him hanging around with Dustin—jumped in next. “Well, I don’t know about the wall. And I’m not against immigrants or whatever, but they should come educated, and like, without any diseases.”
Diseases?!? Wow. Dustin had some whack friends.
“Totally,” two other guys joined in.
Don't Ask Me Where I'm From Page 7
