I Will Save You

by Matt De La Peña

  I was watching them, thinking how they were the kind of pretty you could never actually meet, when Mr. Red’s voice scared me.

  “There he is!” he shouted.

  I spun around.

  He climbed out of his tent yawning and stretching, wearing a T-shirt that said CARDIFF BY THE SEA, which is where we were, and black surf trunks that went down to his knees and no shoes.

  “I see you, Kidd,” he said. “Dawn patrollers have hardly set their boards in the water and here you are ready to mop more sewage.”

  “I’m ready, sir,” I told him, standing up.

  “Fortunately there won’t be any actual mopping today.” He held open his tent flap and out of it climbed a black-haired woman in a long white T-shirt, holding an open duffel bag with a black dress hanging out. She stopped and pushed the dress the rest of the way in and zipped the zipper.

  Mr. Red looked at me and shrugged.

  “Donna,” he said and pointed to me. “I want you to meet a colleague of mine. Mr. Kidd Ellison from Fallbrook, California. Dude would cheat his own grandmother out of a game of speed chess, but he works his butt off around the campsites.”

  “Hi there,” Donna said, smiling at me.

  “Hi, ma’am,” I told her back. And then I turned to Mr. Red and told him: “I never cheated you in—”

  “Come on, Kidd,” he interrupted. “We don’t need to rehash this again. One minute I have you down four pieces, the next you’re knocking off my queen and I’m mated.” He shook his head and turned to Donna. “I’ve played a lot of speed chess in my day, babe. A board doesn’t change that quickly without a little foul play.”

  “I don’t know, Red. Kidd doesn’t look like the cheating type to me.”

  “It’s all an act.”

  They both sort of laughed so I laughed, too.

  • • •

  How I Got the Job in the First Place

  Me and Mr. Red met at Horizons in Fallbrook when he used to come visit Maria, this nice counselor lady who worked there. He’d show up on most Sundays and we’d all watch football games on TV and throw the Frisbee and eventually me and him started playing speed chess and I always beat him and he always said I cheated.

  Then before last summer started two things happened. First, Maria got laid off because of the economy and they only had two counselors working at a time. And second, Mr. Red filled out some paperwork for me to have a job with him for the summer, and even though he said he’d bring me to my counseling as much as they wanted, they rejected him. He appealed and had a meeting with the board of directors and explained how it’d be great experience that I could take into the workforce. But the directors turned him down again saying it was too far from their headquarters and how I was an “at-risk” case and needed closer supervision, at least through the completion of my therapy program.

  Mr. Red came to see me right after, this time without Maria even being there, and told me everything they said and how sorry he was.

  A whole year passed.

  Then at the start of this summer I packed a bag without even asking, snuck out at four in the morning and hitchhiked all the way down to the beach.

  When I finally made it to the sand, the sun was just starting to rise. I sat and watched it for a while and thought about my new life. Then I walked north along the tide with all the morning joggers and people walking their dogs, asking every few miles how close I was to Cardiff by the Sea, until eventually I found the campsites and this lifeguard named Christian took me to Mr. Red, who was eating breakfast on the campus picnic table with a pretty black woman.

  When Mr. Red saw me he stopped his chewing and looked all around like spies might be watching from the bushes. I told him I didn’t want to live at Horizons anymore, I wanted to work, and I’d almost finished my program, and besides I was almost eighteen and on the Internet it says kids are allowed to work as soon as they’re sixteen and they can even be emancipated if they want which means you don’t have to have parents anymore, not even foster ones.

  When I finished talking Mr. Red sat there for a while looking between me and the black woman.

  He smiled and nodded his head, said: “To hell with the system, big guy. Welcome to San Elijo Maintenance.”

  Mr. Red’s Position on Women

  Mr. Red led Donna to the shiny black Jetta parked in front of the coffee shop. I watched them kiss goodbye and her climb in and shut her door and drive off, waving.

  When he came back to where I was he was carrying his beat-up sombrero in his right hand. He put it on his head and told me: “Another day, another dollar, eh, big guy? How’s it feel to be on an official payroll?”

  “It feels great, sir—”

  “Look,” he interrupted, poking his finger through one of the holes in his sombrero. “We might as well get this out in the open. I’m friendly with a number of women. I understand your loyalty probably lays with Maria. As it should. She was your favorite counselor and a fine Mexican woman.”

  I looked at the ground and pictured Maria, the only thing I liked about Horizons.

  He led me toward the campsite work shed, where we got out our tool belts and he put on his work boots with no socks. “I want you to understand something, Kidd. Everything between her and I is on the up-and-up. We may have parted ways for the time being, but we still talk. Maria’s aware of the other women, and the other women are aware of Maria.” He paused, looking at me, and then said: “And I thought we were dropping the whole ‘sir’ thing.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  He made a face and slapped me on the back. “You want me to lay out my position on females, big guy?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We walked up toward Campsite Coffee, where Mr. Red gets his morning coffee, and he held up a finger and said: “Hold that thought.”

  He opened the door, and we walked in and the woman was already holding a medium cup out for him. “Lea,” he said, taking the cup. “How’s my girl?”

  On my first day Mr. Red told me how Lea was just a year out of business school at Stanford and she and two other girls had bought the campsite store and turned an ugly, boring store into one of the hippest coffee spots along the 101.

  Lea put her hands on her hips and said: “I’m mad at you, Red.”

  “Me?”

  “What happened to our trip to Legoland?”

  Mr. Red squinted his eyes like he was thinking. “Oh, Lea. Last week got really stressful here. Ask Kidd.”

  Lea turned to me, and I shrugged.

  “Me and the big guy were stuck mopping sewage in the girls’ bathroom.”

  “Blah blah blah.”

  “Not a pretty sight. You women are deceiving.”

  Lea rolled her eyes, said: “By the way, wanna know what I overheard?”

  Mr. Red was stirring sugar into his coffee.

  “Some of the girls were talking about your new assistant here. Saying how handsome he is. What are you gonna do if Kidd steals all your women?”

  Mr. Red turned to me. “Hear that, Kidd? Lea just made a pass at you.”

  I looked at Lea and she rolled her eyes and laughed a little.

  “Don’t worry,” Mr. Red said. “I plan to teach Kidd everything I know.”

  Lea took my hands, said: “Be sure to listen, Kidd. Then do the exact opposite.”

  She smiled and let go of my hands.

  Outside Campsite Coffee, Mr. Red told me: “As I was saying, I have a tough time with the whole monogamy thing.”

  He veered us off the road again, toward his tent.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I recommend it for ninety-nine percent of the population. But I’ve been divorced three times, Kidd. Three! I’m only thirty-six years old. Let’s crunch the numbers on that: twenty-seven the first time, add nine, divide by three, that’s only three years per ‘I do.’ A guy can only bark up the wrong tree so many times, right?”

  I shrugged.

  “And it’s not like I don’t explain my position to every woman I meet.”
>
  He stopped suddenly and looked me in the eyes. “Look, Kidd, you’re not some kind of moralist, are you?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Are you affiliated with a fundamentalist church?”

  “No.”

  “Do you sympathize with the banning of books?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever donated money to the NRA?”

  “I never had money.”

  “Good,” Mr. Red told me, and he started walking again. “Way I see it, Kidd, communication is the key. You can be anything you want in this country as long as you’re honest about it.”

  He looked up at the pack of blond girls in the campsite next to his. They waved and he waved back and then he turned to me and said: “Wait a sec.”

  “What?”

  “Kidd … you’re not a virgin, are you?”

  My eyes went wide and I opened my mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

  “I’m staring into the eyes of a damn unicorn.”

  “I was gonna say—”

  He waved me off. “Look, it’s none of my business, big guy. Like Lea said, you’re handsome enough. It’ll happen.”

  I looked at the ground.

  It’s not that I hadn’t thought about girls before. Or that I didn’t like them. It’s just at Horizons I never had enough time by myself to actually talk to one. And I wasn’t brave like Devon, who snuck out late to meet with them.

  “Okay,” Mr. Red told me. “Maybe I chose a drastically different path when I was your age. I mean, I knew dozens of girls by the time I was your age. But that doesn’t mean my way’s the right way. Apples and oranges, big guy.”

  Mr. Red dipped into his tent and came out with two ripe bananas. “Speaking of fruit,” he said, and handed me one and we both peeled them and started eating as we walked down the long campsite stretch. He said since there wasn’t a whole lot that needed fixing before his lunchtime surf session he’d give me a tour of the campsites.

  We walked past every campsite plot and he told me the best and worst things about each of them and how much they cost per day and how they held a drawing to determine who got which spot. He explained that most people stay a week or two, but that some groups, like the blond girls across the road from his tent, keep a campsite all summer. The girls and their parents come and go throughout the day since they all live in the neighborhood. Sometimes they sleep at home, he said. Sometimes they’re gone for chunks of time because they go on real vacations to Hawaii or Europe or the Caribbean. But throughout the summer they always have a place to crash at the beach.

  Me and Mr. Red walked along the fence by the edge of the cliff and up and down all the staircases that led to the beach and he told me how many steps each one had and which sections would eventually need to be renovated and what materials we would use and which finishes hold up best in oceanfront conditions. We passed a scraggly-looking dog laying in the dirt near the shed and Mr. Red told me his name was Peanut and how nobody knew exactly when Peanut showed up or how old he was or what breed he was; he’d just become part of the campsite setting, like a mascot.

  Peanut raised his scruffy head and looked at me and then lowered his head back onto his paws and closed his eyes again. I’d never seen a dog so old and tired-looking.

  Then Mr. Red led me to his favorite place to check out waves, a hidden patch of fence behind two thick bushes. You wouldn’t even know it was there unless you thought to duck under this overgrown bush. He told me he kept it wild like that so it would stay his secret spot, and how he’d even stashed a couple beach chairs so he could sneak back here at night to watch the sunset.

  “Well, look at this,” he said under his breath, staring out over the ocean and nodding his head. “Surf’s picking up.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to look where he was looking.

  Then Mr. Red went quiet.

  I looked back and forth between him and the ocean, trying to figure out what you were supposed to look at when you checked out waves. All you could really see were a few people out in the deep part sitting or laying on their boards, waiting, spread out from each other, not talking. Sometimes small swells of water would roll in slow from way out and lift the surfers slightly and set them back down. The swells would gain momentum as they went closer to the sand, rising up at the last second and crumbling into whitewash and spreading over the beach like a blanket and then sucking back into the ocean. Other times the swell would be bigger and it would rise up earlier and one or two of the surfers would face the shore and paddle to catch it and spring to their feet and slash back and forth on the face of the wave as whitewash crumbled behind them like it was chasing after. And at the end of their ride the surfers would crash or just dive off on purpose and turn around and start paddling back out to where the rest of the surfers were still waiting and looking out over the back of the ocean.

  We stayed there for a long time, me and Mr. Red, and he never took his eyes off the water. I thought about telling him thanks for showing me around and giving me this job in the first place and telling me his advice about girls, but he looked so focused on the waves I decided to just be quiet and let him look.

  … Mom promised Dad again and again she didn’t have any money and how she couldn’t even afford to pay bills, and he stood back up and pointed a finger in her face and called her worthless and a whore, and when she brushed away his finger he yelled at her so loud she started crying. He said as a matter of fact he saw her in La Jolla walking with some guy in a fancy suit who got into a BMW. She promised it wasn’t her, but that just made him more mad. He told her to shut up and when she pushed his finger out of her face again he gritted his teeth and did something you’ll never forget for the rest of your life.

  He punched Mom in the face with a closed fist.

  How a guy would hit another guy.

  The crack so loud it hurt your ears and you felt it in your bare feet through the floor and your body got paralyzed and your mind stopped thinking and all you could do was stare at what was happening.

  Mom crumbling to the living room floor without sound, her body slumping against the wall, blood coming from her nose and mouth and trickling down her chin and her eyes going in the back of her head. You were so scared looking back and forth between them that pee went down your pajama legs warm and darkened the rug by your toes and you couldn’t move or breathe or think.

  You were only nine on that night, but you’ll never forget.

  Dad turning around to leave, him crying, too, like he was already sorry, and then him looking at you, looking down at your pee. His chest going in and out and in and out and yours not moving. When he looked up at your face again his eyes stayed stuck on yours for the longest time—even now, all these years later, with you in this campsite tent on the beach, in this new life of freedom, the sound of the actual ocean outside and your pen scribbling in this philosophy of life book.

  Sometimes it feels like his eyes are still on you. Exactly how they were that night. The last time the three of you were in the same room. Dad’s chest breathing and yours not moving and Mom knocked out against the wall and then later the paramedics would rush her out on a stretcher and put her in an ambulance that had its lights going but no sound. And later when the doctor stood over her in the hospital room reading her chart and asking questions and writing things down in a file and sometimes looking at you.

  When Dad finally turned to leave the apartment that night you concentrated on how the back of his head looked walking away ’cause you knew you’d never see him again and you never did.

  Dreams from Solitary Confinement

  There are dream voices in here. That’s something I never would’ve thought, but it’s true. Or maybe it’s a real dream. But it doesn’t feel like a dream.

  I’ll just be laying here and I’ll hear a voice start going, sometimes a man and sometimes a woman. I don’t always understand what they’re saying because they sound far away, like if I’m in one room and whoever’
s talking is down the hallway or on the other side of my cell wall.

  But mostly I swear it’s a girl saying the words from my philosophy of life book. Like I was just hearing the words I put about my dad hitting my mom and him leaving and me and my mom going to the hospital.

  When I hear something from my book I stay super still and listen, pretending it’s Olivia’s voice and that we’re laying together on the beach in the middle of the night. I pretend she’s reading to me ’cause she’s knows the police didn’t put the book with me.

  I can’t really tell who the voices are, though, ’cause they keep it so pitch black in solitary confinement.

  You know how after you’re done using the bathroom in the middle of the night and you flip the lights back off and everything goes so dark you can’t see? You always have to wait like five or six seconds before a few shapes slowly come into view. Then a few seconds after that you can see enough to walk back to your room and climb in the right bed.

  Well, in solitary confinement it’s like those first few seconds of dark, except it’s all the time.

  You can’t see shapes no matter how many seconds you wait.

  You can only hear dream voices.

  What I Know About Devon

  How he’s lived in group homes and foster homes ever since I’ve known him and since he can remember. Twice he even got sent to juvenile hall, though he didn’t have to stay long.

  He swallowed a whole bottle of sleeping pills when he was fifteen. In his group-home bathroom. Passed out in the tub. His counselor found him and called 911 and the ambulance rushed him to the hospital where they charcoaled his stomach and saved his life. And when I visited he wouldn’t look up or say what happened or even why he did it.

  This one time in an arcade in Fallbrook when a big Samoan guy said it was his game, not ours, and shoved me out of the way and put in his quarter. Devon smacking him on the top of his head and everybody stepping back and watching the big Samoan sock Devon in the side of the face and throw him into the wall. Devon getting back up and the Samoan socking him in the mouth, lines of blood going down Devon’s shirt and him out cold on the floor. But Devon got up and laughed and charged the Samoan again, and the Samoan smacked him in the ear. Everybody telling Devon to just stay down, the Samoan was gonna kill him. Even the Samoan said to stay down. But Devon kept getting up, over and over, smiling through bloody, broken teeth, charging this guy he knew he could never beat. He didn’t stop until the cops came running into the arcade with their clubs raised.