The Knife and the Butterfly

by Ashley Hope Pérez

  Greñas jerks his chin at me as he charges toward two of their guys. “They brought a bitch? Pinche posers,” he laughs. Then he starts throwing punches.

  “You think this is a game?” I say to her. “We’re not fightin’ you. Get out of here.”

  Over her shoulder, I see Cucaracha break away from the guy he’s fighting. There’s blood streaming from his nose, but he swings a chain, and the tall dude backs off.

  Cucaracha points at her and shakes his head. Drops of blood fly in both directions. “A fuckin’ ho?”

  “You shits don’t know who you’re messing with,” she shouts at him. Then she turns to me and lifts her left fist. She’s holding a double-bladed knife by the handle in the middle. Part of me is thinking, that’s the knife I drew. Part of me is thinking, only a fool would open both blades. Because like that, even when you’re pointing the knife at somebody else, a blade is pointing back at you.

  Then she starts swinging it through the air in sideways figure eights. The knife looks meaner in motion, the sun catching on its blades.

  Another car pulls up on the Crazy Crew side of the field, and a skinny guy runs toward us, dodging Eddie and weaving between my other homeboys fighting on that side. “You’re not supposed to be here, Lex!” the guy shouts. “This ain’t your business!”

  I open my eyes. I’m shaking all over from the remembering. “I never fought a girl. We don’t fight girls,” I say. “I didn’t hurt her, I swear. I didn’t hurt her. And the other guy—I didn’t—I haven’t—I never killed nobody.”

  Pakmin is shaking his head. “You still don’t understand.”

  The way he looks at me, I think he knows that I’m lying. I killed Pájaro, didn’t I? He wouldn’t be dead if it wasn’t for me. I shake the thought away.

  “You’re running out of time,” Pakmin says. “You’ve got to keep going. Your eyes, you need to close them.”

  I do what he says. And as I close my eyes, I feel that I’m also obeying something inside of me. It’s like at the same time that Pakmin’s across the table from me, he’s also in me. He’s making me remember from the inside.

  She turns, and her hair whips around her face. “I don’t need your help, Cartoon!” she screams. “I got this!”

  While she’s looking away, I give her a little push with the bat. She almost loses her balance, and one of the blades scrapes against her arm. It’s a shallow cut, but blood beads up in a line on her tan skin. I think, fuckin’ fool ho, one little shove and you cut yourself. I hear Eddie laughing from somewhere.

  She stares at me, licks the blood from her arm, then laughs. Her mouth twists around words. “You’ll regret that,” she hisses. There’s a drop of blood at the corner of her mouth.

  “Not my fault, puta. You cut your own self,” I say, laughing. “That’s the problem with toy knives and bitches who don’t know how to handle them.” Then I turn to meet the fool coming my way. Him and his crew are the reason I’m here, not some girl. He has a chain, but my feet are planted, and the bat swings easy and smooth. I’m ready.

  “Get this bitch under control so we can fight like fuckin’ hombres,” I shout.

  He ignores me. “Give me the knife, Lexi, and get the hell out of here!” He grabs her arm, but she pulls away, kicking at him.

  I toss the bat on the ground to prove that I’m not fighting till she’s gone. “This is a joke,” I say. “She’s the best you got?”

  Then I hear Eddie shouting, and I’m spinning around to see if he needs me. I’m done with these two, anyway, ready to leave them to their puppy-love fight when—

  I lurch forward and puke. It’s like Pakmin knew this was coming because the trash can is already right there between me and the table. There’s no food in my stomach, and the vomit burns the back of my throat. I’m cursing all the times I thought I wanted to get my brain straightened out, to get this DVD to quit freezing and skipping. I don’t want this. I don’t want to know any more. But I can feel the pain spreading from the center of my chest all the same, a pain that wants to take over. A pain that is its own kind of knowing. I throw my head down toward the trash can and spit up another stream of stinging acid.

  When I look up, Pakmin meets my eyes. “It’s normal,” he says quietly, handing me a paper towel. He gives me a second to mop off my mouth then says, “I can’t give you much more time, Martín.”

  I’m so scared I don’t even tell him to call me Azael. I just fall back into the remembering. And the pain.

  I’m turning away from them when I see a flash of red. Somehow she’s in front of me, and something explodes in my chest. I step back, stumble.

  For a second, she just stands there, staring at me. “You fucked up,” she says. “You really fucked up.” She tosses her hair like we’re at the mall, but the knife is still clenched in her fist.

  One of the blades is halfway folded in and dripping with blood. I watch the red slide down toward the handle. I think, she cut herself. I think, that’s a lot of blood.

  Then I touch my chest.

  When I pull my hands away, they’re covered in blood.

  “What?” I start to say. “What?” Then I can’t speak. My hands go back up to my chest, trying to fix what’s messed up, because parts of me that are supposed to stay inside are up against the world, the air, the park, all this. My blood is escaping, and the world is climbing into me through my chest.

  I give up on keeping my insides safe. I hold a hand out, taking a step toward her. I want to ask her something, but I can’t. I grab her arm. When she pulls it away, it is streaked with blood.

  Then she turns and runs. The red of her shirt pulses. The knife blades flash in the sun as she pumps her arms.

  All of a sudden everything is too bright, and I need to close my eyes. When I do, the pain in my chest is the only thing that’s real. The pain is a room that I walk into. I stand inside it. I am six years old, waiting at a broken window and calling for Mami, then Eddie, then Mami again.

  I open my eyes to the unbearable brightness one last time. I see my hands covered in blood. These are my hands. This is my blood.

  I feel myself start to fall.

  “No!” I cry out. “It’s not true!” I pull up my shirt to show Pakmin my chest. No scar.

  “You don’t need me to tell you,” Pakmin says.

  “How’d you get this shit into my head?” I’m trembling. I still feel the ache in the center of my body like when I had my eyes closed. I stare at him, almost begging now. “What is this place? What the hell is this place?”

  “You decide, my friend. But you’d better be fast.” He stands up, and I know he’s done with me.

  Back in the cell, I drop onto my cot. I’m still shaking. I grab the breakfast tray and throw it against the wall. Globs of oatmeal dribble down the concrete. The orange juice carton lands with a thud by the sink. Did they pump last night’s applesauce full of some crazy no-taste, fake-memory drug? They could, right? They can do anything. Or am I still sick, tripping from a fever? Are they trying to poison me?

  The questions skitter like cockroaches through my head. They don’t stick around long enough for me to make sense of anything. I feel like I might puke again, so I press my forehead against the clammy cinder block wall. Once the feeling passes, I reach down and pull my black book and the papers out from under the mattress. Reading is better than thinking, even if I’ve read it all before.

  Only it turns out that I haven’t. Because when I look at the article that used to have shit blacked out, the one from June 12, the words that were missing before jump out at me. I read the first sentence. “Martín ‘Azael’ Arevalo, 15, was stabbed in a gang fight yesterday in a Montrose-area park.”

  I stare at the words, but they don’t make sense. I think of that explosion of pain in my chest when Pakmin made me close my eyes, but I can’t get the words to connect up with what I felt. Stabbed? The word is like one of Regina’s stickers after she played with them too much. When I try to press it onto what I remember, the edges of th
e word just curl up, and it falls off.

  I choke back more vomit and keep reading. “Gang violence broke the peace yesterday around 2:00 p.m., leaving fifteen-year-old Arevalo dead on the sidewalk, with a four-inch stab wound in his chest.” I want to flush the newspaper clipping right down the toilet, but I stare at the words instead, trying to make sense of them. This is some kind of trick. A game. Because I’m right here. They can put all kinds of shit in print, but that don’t make it true. Somehow they made it look like this happened to me so they could put me in here.

  Then I unfold Becca’s letter. I can never be yours, she said. Never. I throw the letter down, but it’s too late. When I see NEVER there in Becca’s girly handwriting, I just know. Even though it doesn’t make sense. Even though this is all wrong. I know what I know.

  Becca didn’t quit on me. I quit on her.

  I reach for the newspaper page that was blank before. While I look at it, while it’s right there in my hands, real as anything, words start to appear. A picture of me, too, one I took of myself with Pelón’s cell phone.

  I know exactly what’s in front of me. An obit. And it’s mine.

  MARTIN “AZAEL” AREVALO, 15

  June 16, 2011

  Arevalo died as he lived: in the streets and separated from his family.

  The 15-year-old was stabbed to death last Wednesday, June 11, in a gang fight that broke out in a Montrose dog park around two o’clock in the afternoon. Numerous members of both gangs have been questioned. Police have taken a 17-year-old white female into custody.

  Arevalo is survived by his brother, Eduardo; sister, Regina; father, Manuel; and other relatives. His mother Rosa died shortly after the birth of his sister Regina, and his father has lived in El Salvador since being deported from the U.S. a year ago.

  Arevalo and his brother seem to have slipped through the cracks of Houston’s social system. After federal agents arrested their father, CPS failed to bring the boys into state custody. The boys lived on the streets, occasionally staying with relatives, but usually drifting between friends’ apartments. They both became involved in Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, a Los Angeles-based Salvadoran street gang.

  Friends and family remember Arevalo as “sweet.” His girlfriend Becca Ramirez said, “He was trying real hard to go straight. He’ll never be forgotten.”

  Arevalo’s body was transported to El Salvador for burial because his father is not permitted re-entry into the United States. Services will be held for Arevalo at noon on Saturday in the Iglesia de Santa Lucía, Santa Ana, El Salvador.

  I want to cry or scream when I see my name there. I want to, but I can’t. Because now that I know, I feel like I’ve known all along, like Tigs was telling me, like Gabe’s crazy blue eyes were telling me, like Pakmin’s mustache was telling me, like the wall of the cell was telling me, like Lexi’s pen was telling me. It was all there.

  I slide down onto the floor of my cell, shaking even harder now. My knee knocks against the concrete. I think I might be crying. I don’t want my name spray-painted on the sidewalk. I don’t want any “R.I.P. AZZ” messages that will just get canned over.

  But I can’t do anything about that now, can I? Can you change anything once you’re dead? I think of Pakmin telling me, “If you don’t find a way to move on . . .” All of a sudden I’m feeling every bad thing I ever did like lead in my shoes.

  I’ve got to do something before it’s too late.

  I grab the pencil from under my mattress. I clench and unclench my fist around it. What can I do? No way am I going to write some message warning my homeboys about how they can end up, because they already know. I knew, too.

  Words are no good for me, anyway. So I pull my black book out and turn to the last page, the one I’ve been saving, and start drawing. Not thinking, just drawing. Not thinking that probably by now every wall I canned has been buffed out or sprayed over with somebody else’s tag. Not thinking that I ain’t never going to touch Becca’s skin again. Not thinking of Regina and Eddie and Pops burying me in the El Salvador I never got to see. Not thinking about Pájaro or whether he’s in a cell like this somewhere. Not thinking about Lexi lying on a courtroom stand and turning my name blacker than it was already. Not thinking none of that. Just drawing.

  First I draw Lexi. Her face is angry but also afraid. Like she was losing everything at the same time as me, like the knife between us was changing everything for her, too. The sketch is in gray because all I’ve got is pencil, but in my mind I see color. The red of her shirt and the fleck of blood on her lip, the grass in clumps of scorched brown, the shiny blue of Eddie’s football jersey.

  Then I draw Lexi’s knife, but as my pencil flies over the page, the knife comes out different. The double blades tilt up and spread into wings like some kind of crazy street butterfly. The same thing happens when I try to draw chains and pipes and bricks and knives into the hands of my homeboys in the field. The weapons all turn into butterflies. My boys are surprised, pissed even, but they start to look up into the sky as those butterflies get away from them. Maybe somehow that means they’re thinking of me. Not the me that’s lying on the sidewalk with Eddie grabbing my shirt, his hands shiny with my blood. Not that split-open body, but the me that’s already gone from it. Maybe my boys will think of me as they feel their hands go empty. Maybe they’ll give up on the rumble. Or maybe they’ll just think, shit, and start fighting with their fists.

  I’m drawing so fast now that my hand aches. Then the ache starts to melt away into something else, an even bigger pain throbbing from the center of me. It turns out that being dead is a lot like being alive—the harder you think about it the less it makes sense.

  So I draw. I draw without worrying about what difference it’ll make; I draw because the pencil is in my hand. I draw, and I feel all the Azzs I’ve been, all my choices nested together inside me like the layers of an onion. My pencil is flying because that’s how it is: you choose and you choose and you choose, and that’s your life. That’s what you are.

  Lexi and me, we’re not that different. I picture her buying the knife, and I know just how it is. You take that knife like it’s nothing. You choose the knife, but you always figure that you’ve got time left to choose the butterfly later.

  The pencil is still in my hand, but I’m not drawing anymore. The scene is just about finished. We’re all there—Lexi, me, Eddie, Pelón, all the others. Stupid as shit, but alive and free under these clouds of butterflies.

  As I stare at the drawing, time changes from something that moves to something that’s pressing in on me hard, holding me still. It’s getting harder and harder to move. All I do is blink, but it takes forever for my eyes to open again. The moment stretches on and on. I close my eyes again, and the cell disappears, not just out of sight for a second, but erased by darkness. Darkness and a throbbing silence. No knives, no butterflies.

  Somehow I know that this dark stillness could be it for me. It’s not so bad, kind of calm and safe. But to break free, to climb out and see what’s next, that’s something, too. I make one final effort, open my eyes, and sign my name to the last page in my book.

  I let go of the pencil, and my eyelids fall shut. The darkness isn’t so heavy now. I think I smell cinnamon. Cinnamon, and something sharp and clean. Spray paint? I don’t know for sure, but maybe being out of pages doesn’t mean I’m done making a mark.

  EPILOGUE

  SURPRISE COURTROOM CONFESSION IN ALLEN TRIAL

  September 27, 2011

  Houston, TX – Yesterday’s surprise on-thestand confession from 17-year-old Alexis Allen stunned listeners in the courtroom—including her own attorney.

  Allen is on trial for the June 11 murder of Martín “Azael” Arevalo, a 15-year-old member of the gang MS-13. Although Allen admitted to stabbing Arevalo at the time of her arrest, her counsel has maintained that she acted in self-defense.

  But when defense attorney Lucas VanVeldt asked her to describe what happened the day of the stabbing, Allen apparently br
oke from the script. After a lengthy pause, with her eyes shut tightly and her hands clasped as if in prayer, Allen said, “I knew what I was doing when I stabbed Azael. He wasn’t trying to hurt me when I did it. He wasn’t even holding the bat.”

  Even as her own lawyer was objecting to her testimony, Allen continued her tearful account. “I wanted to prove to my homeboys that I was strong. It happened so fast. I never thought I could kill someone. My mind was blurry from the bars I took [“bars” is the street name for the sedative drug Xanax], but I know what I did. I went against God and everything that’s right, and I killed him. And I am so, so sorry.”

  When she finished speaking, Allen opened her eyes and looked straight at a woman who was later identified as her grandmother. Allen smiled shakily, then began to sob.

  Allen’s confession represents a major upset for the defense. Her attorney insisted that Ms. Allen was not well at the time of her testimony. The judge agreed to adjourn court for two days, and Allen is currently undergoing a psychiatric evaluation.

  The lead prosecuting attorney, Michelline Camacho, spoke to the press as she exited the courtroom yesterday. “There’s no doubt in my mind that jurors will find her guilty,” she told reporters. “What we have here is a case of conscience at work, and I’m deeply grateful for the family of the victim that the truth has finally come to light. That the defendant herself told the truth, well, that makes it all the more meaningful.” When asked about the possibility of a plea bargain, Ms. Camacho shook her head.

  Allen’s counsel turned down two no-jail plea bargains prior to going to trial.

  Irving Griggs, a law professor at the University of Houston who has been following the case closely, explains that while Allen’s confession will likely lead to a guilty verdict, jurors are sure to be affected by her words. “You just don’t see that kind of sincerity on the stand, not when speaking the truth means putting your own skin on the line. Nobody in the courtroom breathed while she was talking. It was unbelievable.”