by Wiltz, Jenni
“I don’t know what’s so funny,” Rachel said. “In less than twenty-four hours, you’ve managed to alienate your only friends.”
“Is that what we are?” A fierce longing swept through her for the days when she and Greg Rudisil had played together in the fields of their elementary school, running all recess until they were sweaty and breathless. When they got tired, they laid down in the grass and let bees walk on their arms to see who could stand it the longest. In five school years, first through fifth grade, neither one of them had ever been stung.
• • •
She and Elvira were scheduled to play Vu Thi Tran and Mindy Prescott that morning. Elvira waited for her inside the girls’ locker room, hands curled at eye level to inspect her nails. She had fresh gel polish put on every weekend at her cousin’s salon. This week’s color was black with hot pink polka dots.
“Thanks for waiting,” Emma said. “You’re the first friendly face I’ve seen today.”
The smile failed to reach Elvira’s eyes. “No problem, chica.”
“Are you ready to watch Rafael break a sweat?”
Rafael was still Elvira’s favorite subject. Emma found these conversations informative but depressing. From the sound of things, Elvira had already been to third base. Emma couldn’t fathom a world in which she had to deal with both homework and sex. She waited for Elvira’s glossy-lipped smile, usually so quick to flash at the mere mention of Rafael’s name, but it didn’t come. “Are you okay?”
“No.” Elvira gathered her hair into a ponytail and lassoed it with an elastic she kept around her wrist. “Something bad’s about to happen.”
They stepped out from the shadows of the locker room. To their left lay the math portables. To their right, the practice football field. Elvira’s eyes went straight to the field. Emma followed the direction of her gaze and pointed. “What’s going on out there?”
“Cállate!” Elvira grabbed her wrist and pulled it down, watching over her shoulder until Grace Esparza had passed behind them. “Rocio Alvarez and my cousin are going to fight.”
“What? How do you know?”
“Just go to the gym without me. Tell Mrs. Patterson I’m absent today.”
“If there’s really going to be a fight, someone could get hurt. You have to tell someone.”
“I can’t.” Elvira shook her head, swaying the four golden hoops in her ear. “You can’t, either.”
“Why not?”
“It’s for la familia.” Elvira’s skin had gone so pale that the line of her foundation was visible between her chin and jawbone.
“You’re really scared.”
“I know what Rocio can do.”
Emma glanced over her shoulder at the locker room. Mrs. Patterson would be in her office. She’d stop the fight before Elvira’s cousin got hurt. Elvira would calm down and they could play badminton like it was any other day. “We have to tell someone.”
Elvira’s clammy fingers gripped her wrist. “If they don’t fight now, they’ll do it after school, when there’s no one to stop it. Do you know what happens when no one stops a fight?”
Once, in elementary school, she caught a glimpse of Matt South wailing on a younger kid named Eddie. Teachers broke it up a few seconds later, but not before two thick streams of blood stained Eddie’s T-shirt. “No,” she said.
“Someone wins.”
“Why does the gang make girls fight for them?”
“Chica, no one makes them.”
A red ant crawled on the pavement beside Emma’s foot. She watched its antennae strobe as it sensed the obstacle in its path. The man who’d threatened her dad might have been a gang member, too, another soldier in the war. She remembered what Owen had said about his reasons for going to church. She needed to see this. She needed to know what she was up against.
“I’ll stay with you,” she said. “But we can’t go past the tennis courts.”
Chapter Twelve
Wednesday, April 2
A cold wind stretched the slack in the tennis nets. Emma’s palms began to sweat as fear unfurled within her like an anemone. Each tendril, barbed with the possibility of the unknown, stung her where the flesh was already raw and tender. A week ago, she never would have cared about Elvira’s cousin and she never would have walked out of class to watch a fight.
At the end of the tennis court, Elvira put her toes on the line delineating fair balls from foul. Her feet looked small in their canvas sneakers, baggy sweats ballooning over the tongues. “This is what you said, right?”
Emma nodded. “I still don’t understand why anyone would do this.”
“What?”
“Fight for a gang.”
“They’re her family.”
“You’re her family. The one that doesn’t ask her to get beat up.”
“A real family doesn’t have to ask.” Elvira looked sideways at her, through her lashes. “When my cousin was two, my uncle got fired from his job. They moved in with my abuelita, but she kicked him out for stealing from her. He lived on the street with nothing until a Norteño gave him a place to live. He raised his daughter with them. He would have died without them.”
Emma thought of the homeless people on the sidewalk near the YMCA, where her mom used to take her for swimming lessons. They had shopping carts draped with garbage bags and cardboard signs. They didn’t look happy, but they weren’t gang members and they didn’t hurt anyone. “He wouldn’t have died. People wouldn’t just let him die.”
“What people?”
“The people who run shelters. And churches.”
Elvira grasped the pole that marked the edge of the tennis court. “If you’re poor and Mexican, those people just want you to disappear.”
Emma looked away. “I don’t see anyone. Maybe they changed their minds.”
“There,” Elvira said, pointing. Six people strode onto the field from the direction of the parking lot. Two boys and four girls, all dressed in black pants and some form of red shirt—a tee, a tank, a flannel. They walked six wide, arms swinging at their sides. “Monica’s in the middle.”
Monica was the same height as Elvira, minus twenty pounds. She wore her hair in a braided bun, shining with a layer of gel so thick Emma could see the comb marks in it.
“They’re going to get caught.”
Elvira shook her head. “We’re in the gym, Schneider’s class is in the pool, Vega’s is on the basketball court, Hunt’s is on the softball field, and Garcia’s is on the real football field.”
“Look,” Emma said, nudging Elvira with her elbow. Another group marched out from the gate behind the math portables. This group had four members, one girl and three boys, dressed in the same baggy black pants, but with blue shirts. One of them had a bandanna tied around his forehead.
“Sureños,” Elvira said.
The girl, Rocio, was taller than Monica and heavier by a good fifty pounds. She wore black lipstick and a shelf of gold chains around her neck. The green calligraphy of a tattoo snaked above their tangled skeins. The tattoo scared Emma. Anyone who let a needle pierce her neck that many times had a high threshold for pain.
Elvira gripped the fence pole until her knuckles lit up. The two groups met in the center of the field and arranged themselves into curved lines, their fighter at the apex. Emma blinked, trying to remember where she’d seen that shape before.
Cell division, she thought. Mitosis. Anaphase. It was freshman-year biology, enacted before her like a ballet. But instead of continuing to separate, the two lines moved closer together. When they were close enough to touch, they stopped. The fighters circled each other, eyes narrowed and arms held out from their sides.
Then the girl named Rocio bowed her head and plowed into Monica’s stomach. Monica planted her feet, wound her hands in Rocio’s hair, and pulled.
Rocio shrieked, but the Sureños
urged her on. She barreled forward and pushed Monica off her feet. As they fell, Monica pulled up her knee and slammed it into Rocio’s nose. Rocio’s carbon-dark lips split in a shriek of pain. A stream of blood poured down her face.
Quick to press her advantage, Monica launched her right fist into the side of Rocio’s head. Rocio absorbed the blow and rolled to the side, wrapping her arms over her skull. Disappointed clicks echoed in the mouths of Rocio’s supporters.
The clicks seemed to rouse her. Rocio unfolded her arms and raised her head, wiping her bloody nose onto a flannel sleeve. “Pinche norputa,” she hissed. “I’ll fucking kill you.”
“Go ahead and try, sewer rat.” Monica smiled and rolled to her feet. “I fuck up scraps like you every day.”
Emma glanced over her shoulder. On a normal day, she’d be playing badminton in the gym. The world could tear itself to pieces, and unless it happened in one of six classrooms, she’d never know. She wondered if that’s how Piggy and Ralph felt when they stepped out of the fuselage into dense, hot jungle.
Rocio grunted and charged, windmilling her right fist into Monica’s stomach. Monica wheezed and dropped to her knees.
Rocio pounced, jumping on top of Monica and pummeling her head with both fists. Monica turned from side to side, trying to wriggle out from under the hail of blows. Her heels dug into the ground, trying to get enough leverage to dislodge Rocio. It didn’t work. Rocio’s fists swung faster, hitting their target with greater force each time. The blood from her broken nose dripped onto Monica’s arms.
Monica’s kicks grew weaker and then stopped altogether.
“Fuck.” A tear carried glistening specks of eyeliner down Elvira’s cheek. “I have to help her.” Her hands curled into fists and she rocked forward on the balls of her feet. “They’re going to kill her.”
“No!” Emma said, reaching for her arm. “Don’t go.”
Monica tried to roll her upper body, but Rocio was too heavy to shake. Suddenly, Monica’s hand shot out and latched onto Rocio’s chains. Monica jerked Rocio down to her eye level and rolled. They lay next to each other, entwined like lovers, until Monica slammed her forehead into Rocio’s.
Monica’s friends clapped and hissed. She scrambled to her feet, blood pouring from a cut over her eye. She held out her arms for balance as she kicked Rocio in the stomach, the ribs, and the neck.
Rocio groaned and moved her hands toward her face. Monica launched a boot into her wrist. It flopped against the ground, useless. Four kicks later, Rocio’s head slumped sideways, dark blood still oozing from her nose. Monica spit on Rocio’s body and contorted her fingers into a gang sign, held high above her head. Then she picked up the tail of her shirt and wiped the blood from her face.
There were more insults and curses, all in Spanish. Two of Rocio’s companions bent to pick her up, draping her arms over their shoulders. Her nose was a pulpy mess, and a lump bulged above one closed eye. Monica’s friends taunted them as they retreated in the direction of the math portables. Rocio’s limp toes scraped the ground as they hustled her out of sight.
Emma closed her eyes to block out the image of Rocio’s battered face. All that blood used to be blue when it was in her veins. Now it was red, staining her skin, her clothes, and the ground itself. Weren’t those the colors the gangs fought over? They’re the same thing, Emma thought. They’ll turn each other inside out before they realize it.
“We should get out of here.” Elvira wiped the tears from her cheeks and led Emma back to the locker room, where they shut themselves in adjoining bathroom stalls and perched on top of the toilets to avoid detection. Emma rested her head against the cold metal, covered in etchings that preserved the names and lackluster wit of girls who thought a toilet stall was a good place to leave their mark on the world.
After a few minutes of silence, she realized there was something she had to ask. She tapped her fingernail against the partition. “Why didn’t the others help her?”
Elvira sniffed. “I don’t know.”
“Is it against the rules?”
“Maybe.”
“Then that isn’t family.”
Half an hour later, when they snuck out of the stalls amid the rush of girls returning from the gym, Emma thought of something else. The women in the gangs fought like their lives depended on it. What did the men fight like? She thought of her dad, asking questions those men didn’t want to answer, and ran back into the stall to throw up her breakfast.
• • •
That night, her mom made tostadas for dinner. It was one of her “easy” meals — no baking, no simmering, nothing but grating cheese and chopping up veggies. Her dad preferred casseroles or meat, with salad and vegetables on the side, but she and Mattie liked the easy stuff better: tacos, hot dogs, BLTs. Emma had no idea what her mom’s favorite foods were.
As soon as they said grace, Emma bit into her tostada. The shell cracked in half, dumping lettuce and diced tomatoes onto her plate. Most of their food came from the dollar store these days, and cracked tostada shells were just one of the casualties.
“Damn it,” her mom said.
“It’s fine, Mom.”
“It’s not fine.”
“Anyone want hot sauce?” Her dad tilted the bottle, sloshing the thin red liquid inside.
Monica’s knee slamming into Rocio’s nose.
Emma shivered.
“I’ll have some,” Mattie said.
“You never have hot sauce,” her mom said.
“I’m trying new things. Martin puts hot sauce on everything.”
“I don’t think you’ll like it.”
“Mom, please.”
Her sister took the bottle from her dad’s hand and unscrewed the cap. She shook it over her tostada and a few drops of red splashed against the sour cream and lettuce.
Rocio’s fists pummeling Monica’s head.
Emma put down her tostada.
“Em? Everything all right?” Veins, forked like lightning, traced the whites of her dad’s eyes. It was the same pattern as the cracks in the driveway she noticed last night.
“I’m full,” she said.
“But that’s only your first one.”
She couldn’t tell them that her stomach was still raw from throwing up earlier, that the smell of the moldy grout and unflushed toilet in the far locker room stall wouldn’t leave her nostrils. “I’m not hungry.”
“But you love tostadas,” her mom said.
Monica’s foot connecting with Rocio’s stomach.
“Dad, how do you fix cement?”
“Depends what needs to be fixed.”
“Those little cracks . . . the ones that spread out like split ends. How do you fix them?”
Her dad patted his mouth with his napkin. “You can’t, not really. I guess you’d have to repave it. Why do you ask?”
“Once you start looking, they’re everywhere.”
• • •
After dinner, Emma went straight to her room. She sat cross-legged on the floor, Lonesome Dove open on her lap. She read one paragraph and reached onto the bed for her stuffed beagle, Wellington. She stroked his head with her left hand, turning pages with her right.
Ten minutes later, the phone rang. Her dad’s footsteps shuffled down the hallway, ending with a knock on her door. “Come in,” she said.
Bleary-eyed, woken from a nap, he clutched a blanket to his chest and held out the portable phone. “Don’t talk too long. It’s already after nine.”
“I won’t.” He smiled at her and closed the door gently behind him. “Hello?”
“Hey, are you studying?” Via asked. “You weren’t online.”
“I’m reading Lonesome Dove.”
“Guess what. The black man dies and the last word is whore.”
“You could have prefaced that with a spoiler alert.”
“Like you actually care what happens? It’s a book.”
“After you stormed off earlier, I wasn’t sure you were ever going to talk to me again.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“What made you pick up the phone?”
“I need the pre-calc homework.”
Emma tightened her grip on Wellington. Of course, she thought. She slid open her desk drawer and reached for a small spiral-bound notepad. The first three pages were filled with hundreds of tiny hash marks, front and back. Emma added one more and reached for her backpack.
The completed problem set had the chapter and section number written at the top of the page. Her eyes unfocused and the numbers swam before her eyes. Reading them wrong, even a little, would be so easy.
“Are you there?” Via asked. “Hello?”
“Yeah.” She blinked and the numbers solidified on the page. Her dad would never give someone the wrong information just to teach them a lesson. He would never hang up the phone because he didn’t feel like walking all the way to her room to tell her she had a call. I can’t do it, she thought. “Chapter 12. Problems 1-3, 5, 9, and 12.”
“Thanks.”
“My dad wants me to get off the phone now.”
“By all means, obey the patriarchal structure that gives an old white male control over your life,” Via said, and hung up.
Emma carried the portable phone back to its charging cradle in the spare-room-turned-office. Her dad was asleep in a chair, his grey hair blending with the dusty slipcover. His mouth hung open in a snore, as if he were screaming in space and she couldn’t hear the sound.
Unwanted images flashed before her eyes of blood and bone, calligraphy and chains. Red, white, green, and gold—all the colors of the Mexican flag.
Chapter Thirteen
Thursday, April 3
“The Missouri Compromise,” Mr. Parker said, “was an attempt to regulate the spread of slavery as America headed west in pursuit of Manifest Destiny. The goal was to balance the number of slave states with the number of free states. Now, how many of you have siblings?”
