by James Frey
“And what kind of girl are you, Alicia? What would you prefer to do?”
“How about talk?” she says. “You could tell me about yourself.”
He shrugs. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“You go to school?”
“Sure,” he lies. “Who doesn’t? Junior year’s a bitch.”
“SATs, picking colleges, all that, right?” she says.
He nods like he knows what she’s talking about. Jago’s life doesn’t resemble that of the teenagers he sees on TV. He’s been homeschooled for his entire life, taught by tutors and physical trainers behind the walls of his family’s gated estate, trained not for a life of college and banal employment but for duty, sacrifice, courage, and, eventually, rule.
“I’m thinking about, uh, law school,” he says, wondering if that will impress her.
“Bullshit.”
“Excuse me?”
She stands up. “Do you think I haven’t figured out who you are, Feo? You must think I’m pretty stupid. And I don’t date people who think I’m stupid.”
“Wait! Please!”
Jago stops. Composes himself. All over the restaurant, heads are turning. He can’t afford to be seen like this, begging. Tlalocs do not beg. When he speaks again, it’s with imperious scorn. “What is it you think you know about me?”
“I know you’re Jago Tlaloc, that you’re part of some kind of mob family, and you’re the heir to it all. I know this whole city’s scared of you.” Her voice softens, almost imperceptibly. “And I know you’re a terrible dancer.” She shrugs. “That’s about it. I came here tonight because I wanted to know more—not because I want expensive champagne and jewelry. You can’t buy me, Jago. Not with a fancy dinner, and definitely not with a bunch of crap lies about your life. That’s not who I am. I didn’t think that was who you were.”
“It’s not,” he protests.
“Then prove it,” she says. “Show me who Jago Tlaloc is. The real one. The one I fell for the first time I saw him.”
“You . . . you did?” He doesn’t understand. No one could fall for him, just from looking at him. His face is not designed to melt hearts; it’s designed to freeze them.
“Of course I did,” she says. “I told you: I’m not stupid.”
They ditch the restaurant. Jago takes Alicia to his favorite street vendor, an old man who grills up anticuchos and picarones just north of the city center. She tries a bite of everything, and the way her eyes light up at her first taste of choclo con queso makes the whole night worthwhile. They sit on the edge of a crumbling brick wall overlooking a vacant lot and stuff themselves, licking the grease off their fingers and kissing it off each other’s lips, passing back and forth a frothing bottle of Pilsen Callao, and all the while, they talk.
Jago tells Alicia about his life, his real life. He doesn’t speak of being the Olmec Player, of course—that secret is as sacred as the oath he swore to protect and serve his line. But he tells her what it’s like to be a Tlaloc, to grow up in privilege surrounded by poverty. To be loved and loathed in equal measure, to never know whether the people around you are freely giving of themselves or obeying out of fear. Jago has his parents and his siblings; he has José, Tiempo, and Chango, three boys he grew up with who he can trust to the ends of the earth. But beyond that, he has minions, underlings, hangers-on, colleagues, enemies.
Sometimes, Jago admits, his enemies feel like the truest thing in his life. At least he always knows where they stand; at least he knows the passion they feel for him is real.
Jago tells Alicia about working his way up, learning the ropes of the family business when he was just a child. Going out on protection runs, defending territory . . . He lets her believe that he would wait in the car, because to explain that he was a black belt in several martial arts by the time he was eight and spent far more childhood hours with guns, knives, and bombs than he did with cartoons and teddy bears—that would raise questions he can’t answer.
But he doesn’t lie to her.
When she asks if he’s broken the law, he says yes.
When she asks if he’s hurt someone, even killed someone, he hesitates . . . then says yes.
She doesn’t run away.
He tells her he doesn’t like it, hurting people—that he does it because it’s necessary. And she touches his scar again with those soft, careful fingers and says, “I believe you.”
When she asks if he’s ever imagined a different life for himself, turning away from what his family wants for him, choosing his own path, he doesn’t hesitate. “That’s not an option for me,” he says. Being a Tlaloc, being a criminal, being the Player, these things are inextricable for him, and none are choices, any more than breathing, or living. It’s a joy for him, serving his family and his people, living up to their expectations. To be the Olmec Player, to be the Tlaloc heir, these things define him, no matter how ugly or difficult they may sometimes be. “And even if it were . . . it’s not all pain and crime. My family does good things for Juliaca. We’ve built hospitals; we have several charity foundations. We make sure none of our people starve. We give to the poor. We only steal from—”
“The rich?” She laughs. “Okay, Robin Hood. You’re a hero of the people. I get it.”
If you only knew, he thinks, wishing that he could tell her the whole story, explain that he’s sworn to protect his people against an attack from the sky, against the end of the world, that he would sacrifice himself for the survival of the Olmec line—that he has already sacrificed so much.
And then he remembers that she is not Olmec. That if Endgame comes, he will not be fighting for her.
“I am who I am,” he says quietly. “Who my people, my family, need me to be. That’s all I can be. You wouldn’t understand.” He watches TV, he knows what life is like for people like her, who live sequestered from their own poor, who have infinite choices and no greater worries than alarm clocks and acne.
She threads her fingers through his, holds tight. “You’d be surprised.”
She tells him that she’s been taking ballet lessons since she learned how to walk—that her mother is a former prima ballerina who had to retire when she got pregnant, and who has never quite forgiven Alicia for ending her career. “She’s never forgiven me for being more talented than her either,” Alicia says, without modesty or bitterness, and Jago likes her all the more for it.
For thirteen years, Alicia has done almost nothing but dance. “Morning, afternoon, night,” she says. “I was homeschooled for a while; then I got into the academy, where classes are a joke—everyone knows nothing matters but dancing.”
“I bet you’re a beautiful ballerina,” he says.
“I was,” she says, again without modesty. He notes the tense.
It’s hard not to stare at the unfathomably long line of her neck, the graceful way her arms arc and wave as she makes her point. Every move is graceful, efficient, almost as if she were a fighter, like him. And maybe they’re not so different after all. The hard work, the oppressive training schedule, the tunnel vision for a life oriented around a single goal . . . he recognizes all of them, and wonders whether this is the magnetic field that draws them together, this singularity of purpose.
“I’ve been to Paris, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Cape Town—name a city, and I’ve danced there,” she says. “Danced, and nothing else. No sights, no culture, certainly no local foods. Nothing that would get in the way of the training regimen. No distractions whatsoever.” She peers at him through lowered lashes. “Definitely no boys.”
“It can’t be as bad as all that,” he says. “You’re here.”
“Exactly. Because I quit.”
“What? You said dancing was your life.”
“It was my life, and what kind of life is that?” She steals the rest of his anticuchos, gulping them down with relish. “I couldn’t handle it anymore. I just did one plié too many, you know?”
He shakes his head. Tries to imagine walking away from his life, from any of
it. Declaring independence from everything he’s ever known. There’s such a thing as too much freedom, he thinks. Freedom from everything can leave you with nothing.
“My father was cool about it, but my mother?” She shakes her head. “Freaked. Out. I finally convinced them to send me down here for six weeks, kind of a trial separation from ballet, you know? I’m supposed to be ‘thinking about my options.’” She curls her fingers around the words, and it’s clear that she hopes to do very little thinking while in Peru. “I’ve basically missed out on the first sixteen years of life, Jago. I plan to make up for it, starting now.”
“That’s a lot to catch up on in six weeks.”
“I’m very efficient,” she says. “It only took me four days to find you, didn’t it? And about ten minutes to catch you?”
She’s so sure of herself—so sure of the two of them, even though they’ve spent less than a few hours in each other’s presence. “You think you caught me, huh?” he teases her. “I may be more slippery than you expect.”
She puts her arms around him, pulls herself onto his lap. “Just try to get away,” she whispers in his ear. “I dare you.”
Summer school isn’t like real school, especially in Juliaca. Alicia has plenty of friends to cover for her, and the teachers and guardians at the study-abroad program don’t require much covering. There’s no one to care if she spends all her time with Jago.
So she does.
It’s different than it’s been with other girls: she doesn’t want him to buy her anything; she doesn’t care about his power, or the things he can make people do. She likes to hear the details; she finds it fascinating, the contours of power, the things he knows, the strings he can pull. She likes to hear about corrupt officials—who gets paid off and how much—about how you can learn to attune yourself to the smell of weakness and cowardice, about how to sniff out an Achilles’ heel, and exploit it.
She likes it, but he doesn’t like telling her, because he can see the judgment in her eyes, hear it in her voice. She’s fascinated . . . but she’s also repulsed. “I just think there’s something better out there for you,” she says, whenever he talks about his family and what they do, or what they expect of him. Or, sometimes, “The police really just look the other way? No matter how many laws get broken? How many people get hurt?”
She always phrases it that way. Not “when you break the law.” Not “when you hurt people.” She thinks he’s different from the rest of his family, different from this entire city, perhaps, and he knows he should resent that.
She makes him ashamed of the things he’s always been most proud of, and he should probably resent that too.
But it’s not resentment, the thing that burns in him when he looks in her eyes, when he speaks her name.
It’s a thing that has no name, that’s too big and powerful for words.
But if he had to pick a word, it would be love.
He likes her because she doesn’t want anything from him, because she doesn’t want him for his power or his money or his family name. But the bigger feeling, the one that wakes him up in the middle of the night, sweating and gasping from a nightmare in which he’s lost her—the all-consuming feeling that, as she once put it, has swallowed his life—that’s not because of what she wants. It’s because of what she sees.
She looks at him and sees a person he didn’t know he could be. Not Feo, not the Player, not the heir to the Tlaloc fortune. She sees Jago, the boy she loves, and this boy feels both like a stranger and like the truest version of himself he has ever known. He loves her because she sees not simply what is, but what is possible.
She asks to hear the stories of his scars. She wants to know who’s hurt him, she says.
“You should see the other guy,” he said the first time she asked, but she didn’t laugh, and he knows she understands the meaning behind his words.
“It’s not like I enjoy it,” he added quickly. “I don’t hurt people for fun.”
“I would never think that. It’s just . . .” She kissed the scar on his face. “I don’t care what you’ve done in the past, Jago. What you’ve done doesn’t have to define you. What your parents want doesn’t have to define you. Who are you now? Who do you want to be?”
“You say that like I get to pick.”
“You think this ugly life is all you can have, Jago, but you’re wrong.”
He wishes he could tell her the truth. That his aunts and uncles train him for more than the family business. That the reason he spends so many hours in the gym or at the firing range, the reason he speaks so many languages and knows how to make a computer do whatever he asks of it, isn’t simply for commerce and brute force. For all his life, being a Tlaloc and being the Player have seemed two parts of the same whole. Yes, he divides his time between training for Endgame and helping the syndicate. Yes, sometimes he wields his weapons in defense of the Olmec people and sometimes to preserve his family’s turf. But he’s been taught that these are the same: that Playing is a sacred family duty. That in return for their centuries of Playing, for the sons and daughters they’ve sacrificed to the cause, the Tlaloc family deserves compensation—they deserve respect and power.
But now, he wonders.
Perhaps he’s mistaken two duties for one. His family, his business, his bloodline . . . is it possible these are extricable after all, that commitment to one doesn’t necessitate commitment to all?
Alicia doesn’t like what she knows of his duty, because she thinks it’s about intimidation and corruption, greed and crime.
If she knew who he was beneath that, the solemn oath he’s sworn, the harsh gods he serves, she might think differently.
Or, he considers, she might not. Endgame is still about violence—war and blood. Alicia has no love for such things, and doesn’t want them for him, in any form. She wants to make his life beautiful.
She introduces him to Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev and Stravinsky, to the love poems of Pablo Neruda and the folktales of nineteenth-century Russia, all beautiful things she’s learned to love through ballet. He asks her, “How can you say ballet has blinded you to the world when you’ve seen so much?” and she says, “I want more.”
He plays Mudra for her, and Almas Inmortales and Sanguinaria and Hand of Doom, all his favorite metal bands.
“Ugly,” she pronounces the music, her word for anything she doesn’t like.
But for love of him she listens, watches carefully the look on his face as he turns up the volume and thrashes to the beat of the noise. It is ugly, and full of rage, and this is what he likes about it. This is the music that plays in his head and heart; this is the sound of his life.
“There’s no room for bullshit in this music,” she muses. “Nowhere to hide.”
“Exactly.”
She gets it; she kisses him, and though he is supposed to have left for the gym twenty minutes ago, though he’s already missed his last three weight-training sessions, he kisses her back, and knows he’s not going anywhere, not anytime soon.
So what if he’s neglecting some of his duties? Alicia’s only in Peru until the end of the summer. Everything else can wait for three more weeks.
Even Endgame. He hopes.
No one approves.
“Look who’s coming—it’s the invisible man!” Tiempo crows, as Jago joins his friends for a game of dudo, which he hasn’t done since he met Alicia. She’s taking an exam in her Spanish class—he spent all night helping her study, but still, he misses her for the two hours she’s not at his side.
“We thought you disappeared on us, Feo,” Chango says, shaking his cup of dice. Everyone in Juliaca plays dudo, from the little kids on the street to Jago’s great-grandmother. Jago has been playing it with his buddies ever since they were young enough to be betting with chocolate coins. Now they use real ones, and Jago almost always cleans up.
Once in a while, he suspects his friends of letting him win. They’ve known each other for more than a decade, yes, but he’s still a Tlaloc;
their parents work for his. He tries not to think about it.
“Finally ditch la gringa?” José teases.
Jago scowls at them. “Don’t call her that.”
José holds out a cup of dice for Jago. “You blind? That’s what she is, Feo.”
“She’s Alicia,” Jago says. “And I’m not ditching her.”
“She probably ditched him,” Chango says. “Or she’s getting ready to.”
Jago has been looking forward to this afternoon, imagining that he would tell his friends how everything looks different now, how the world has changed—but now that the moment is here, he doesn’t know what he was thinking.
Chango, Tiempo, and José have fought with him—they would die for him—but they’re not interested in hearing about his feelings.
“How come you never bring her around, Jago? She embarrass you?” José asks.
Chango elbows him. “We embarrass him.” Chango has always been the smartest of the three.
“No way is that true,” Tiempo says. He, on the other hand, has always been the most loyal. “Tell him that’s not true, Feo.”
“That’s not true, Chango.”
“So you’re keeping her your dirty little secret because . . . ?”
“If you ever found a girl who could stand your ugly face, you’d know why Feo wants to keep her to herself,” Tiempo says. “See, little boy, when a man and a woman really like each other—”
Chango rears back. “Shut your mouth, cojudo, or I’ll ram these dice down your throat.”
Tiempo only laughs. This is how they talk to one another, this is how they have always talked to one another, and Jago never saw anything wrong with it, until now.
Or, not wrong, perhaps; just less than. They know one another so well, love one another so much—why can they only communicate in jokes and insults?
“So what does Mama Tlaloc think of your gringa—sorry, Alicia?” José asks.
Jago shifts uncomfortably. “She doesn’t know about her.”
