The Go-Between

by Veronica Chambers

  “Ever since kindergarten, there were two Maxes at Polestar,” he said. “They always called the other guy ‘black Max.’ Then around seventh grade, I kinda got woke, and I realized that was ridiculous. So I insisted that everyone call me ‘white Max’ so the other Max wasn’t the only one being identified by his race. Black Max transferred last year to Crossroads, but by now, it’s kinda stuck. Everyone calls me ‘white Max.’ ”

  “That’s weird, right?” I said. It was a conversation that intrigued me because ever since I’d moved to Los Angeles, I’d been distinctly aware that I was not white. In Mexico, I knew that everyone was a mix, to some degree, of indigenous people, European settlers, and other immigrant groups. It was something strange, but something I knew I was going to have to get used to. In Mexico, if someone had Indian or African heritage, they were called moreno or occasionally pardo—though that was a term used mostly by Brazilians. I never thought, “I’m white.” But since we’d moved to the US, I’d come to think that not having to think about skin color was a way of being white—regardless of your skin color. In America, and in Los Angeles specifically, if you were Mexican, you were “brown”—no matter how white your skin was. Whiteness, I came to understand pretty quickly, was something you were given—like a passport or a green card. It wasn’t actually a visual reality.

  White Max smiled at me and said, “Hey, so I hear you tutor people in Spanish?”

  I wanted to say yes, but I shook my head. “Yes. I mean no.”

  He laughed, and when he did, his eyes crinkled in a way that made me want to kiss him, just to see him smile again. “Well, which is it? Yes or no?”

  I thought of Amadeo, in the basement of the university dissecting cadavers, and I felt guilty. But it seemed more and more that there were two of me. One was the Camilla I had been in the DF: serious, sure, a little cynical and sarcastic. Then there was the me who had emerged in the US: a little shady, far more opinionated, way more willing to go out on a limb just to see how far I could go. And the American me cooked. Of all the things I’d heard about immigrating to the US, I’d never thought that schizophrenia would be one of the side effects.

  I stuttered. I never stuttered. “Um, well, I do tutor. But I’m kind of booked up right now.”

  He looked disappointed. “I’m sorry to hear that. I could really use the help in Spanish. And I wouldn’t mind spending some time with you.”

  There it was—pure, unadulterated flirting. But that was the thing. I couldn’t tutor him. I couldn’t hang out with him. Because I felt, in an instant, that I couldn’t lie to him. I couldn’t sit there and feed him the bochinche that I made up like I was a character in a telenovela, some crazy amnesiac who spouts untruth after untruth because of the knock she’s taken to her head.

  I thought about him again that night, tried to imagine how an innocent tutoring session might lead to a kiss, which was crazy because technically I had a boyfriend. But we were on a break. And it seemed to me that if you did not at least kiss another person during such breaks, then what was the point? In Twenty-One Love Poems, the poet Adrienne Rich calls a prospective paramour “a prize one could wreck one’s peace for.” Max was like that. I would wreck my peace for him, wreck this crazy patchwork of lies that I’d put together and called my American self. I could do it, tell the truth and bear the wrath of Willow and Tiggy if he might like me and date me. It would be a relief maybe just to be the new girl, Cammi from the DF. But I was DF—definitely f***ed because Willow and Tiggy wouldn’t just keep it to themselves. They’d make sure that everyone knew that I’d pretended to be cool and hood, when I was just good old Hollywood spawn.

  I was picturing us laughing and having a good time when it occurred to me that what was missing from the equation was my mother. Without my mother and her fame in the mix, there was so much air. I could finally just be me.

  Don’t say it.

  Because I already know.

  “Me just being me” involved copious hours of me just being a crazy liar.

  Don’t think I don’t know.

  Mr. Agrabal told us that as a child, he’d dreamed of being an actor, but his father had insisted that he “pursue the lamp of learning, not the bright lights of the stage.” Every Friday afternoon, Mr. Agrabal closed the shades of his classroom, pulled down the screen, and showed us forty-five minutes of a Bollywood movie. He told us that “the pursuit of true love is the most important chemical equation you will ever solve. In this manner, the instruction in these films will serve you well.”

  Bollywood Fridays quickly became the highlight of my week. I fell in love with the over-the-top story lines so much, like the novelas I’d grown up with. I loved the critique of colonialism of the cricket-playing Indians in Lagaan. In Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, the Swiss mountain setting of two Indian kids falling in love on the slopes made me think of Sergio. I couldn’t wait to show it to him to see if he recognized any of the places, or if it reminded him of any of his friends and the girls they chased.

  A lot of us wanted to petition the school to have Mr. Agrabal teach a film class instead of chemistry. But this, he insisted, was “not a wise idea.” Then he showed us the montage he’d created in which he’d Photoshopped himself into a dozen pictures of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, one of the most famous Bollywood actresses in the world. “I think she’s stalking me,” Mr. Agrabal said with a grin.

  As part of our midterm project, Mr. Agrabal assigned us lab partners. Because life was perfect and fair, I got assigned to the one girl at Polestar who seemed to have hated me on sight.

  “Hi, I’m Camilla,” I said.

  She didn’t look up from her notebook. “I know who you are.”

  I thought maybe if I spoke to her in Spanish, I might get some authenticity points, so I said, “Así vas a decirme su nombre, o sólo va a tener yo estoy aquí como un idiota.”

  Which translated meant “Are you going to tell me your name or have me just standing here like an idiot?”

  She looked up finally and said, “If the shoe fits.”

  I asked her, “Por qué eres tan mal educación?”

  She glared at me and said, “Don’t speak to me in Spanish. You don’t know me like that.”

  I kept talking to her in Spanish because, well, I’m a little sister. When I figure out that something is annoying you, I’m liable to keep it up. “Well, you’ve decided that you hate me when you don’t even know me like that.”

  “Because those girls you hang with are mad dumb,” Milly said after we’d introduced ourselves. “I’ve known who you were from jump.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “I can read.”

  She took out a copy of People en Español that I had totally missed. The headline read:

  Carolina del Valle Coming to America!

  Rumor has it that Carolina del Valle is eyeing a move to Hollywood and has taken up residence in a quiet cul-de-sac in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Brentwood…

  “It’s Beverly Hills, not Brentwood, but whatever,” I mumbled.

  Distraught over the love of her life, Ivan Sancocho, Carolina says, “I just want my daughter to have a normal life.”

  And there it was, the photo that would never go away. Me, age eight, in a sparkling sequined one-shoulder jumpsuit at my one and only gymnastics competition. Staring at the vault like the torture device I knew it was, I look like a little bushy-eyebrowed demon.

  “Nice photo,” Milly said, grinning.

  I kept speaking to her in Spanish. “Can you please put that away?”

  “Tranquila, chica,” she said. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “But why aren’t you busting me if you know?”

  She shot me the iciest stare that I’d ever seen, and my mother is a telenovela actress. “Because I don’t care. Busting you would imply that I think you are anything more than a waste of space.”

  “Fine. Gracias. You’re pretty, you know. Despite all the tattoos. You should enter a beauty contest
, one that gives points for personality. Miss Congeniality.”

  If she was going to treat me like a “waste of space,” then I was going to speak to her in Spanish and make sarcastic comments all class long.

  She looked up at me and said, “Stop yapping, Chihuahua. We’ve got work to do.”

  I was shocked that chemistry became my favorite subject. Mr. Agrabal was hilarious, and as for Milly the Monster, despite the fact that she hated me, I kind of liked her. It was actually relaxing to be around someone who knew the truth about me. It was great to spend an hour every school day with someone who spoke my language, even if she only answered me with insults, burns, and barbs. I didn’t even mind that she called me Chihuahua, because when I got to speak Spanish to someone who actually understood every word that I said, I was like an excited little puppy. I never realized how much I missed home until I got assigned to be lab partners with Milly. I loved that she understood everything I said and where I was from, but at the same time, she totally was someone I would have never met at home. One day, I just said to her—in Spanish, of course—“You know we’re going to be friends, so you might as well stop fighting it.”

  She looked at me seriously and said, “I don’t want to be friends if that means you’ll be lying to me like you lie to your other so-called friends. Come clean with those chicas, and you and me can hang.”

  I felt my whole face go red. “Well, I’m a little deep into it right now.”

  “So when do you plan on fessing up?”

  I said, “Summer vacation. I’ll send them an e-greeting.”

  “Not cool, Camilla,” she said.

  “Why do you care?” I asked. “They’re just a bunch of tontas.”

  She looked at me, and for once she didn’t seem angry or annoyed. She just seemed real. “The life you’re pretending to have is real to people like me. Do you watch the news? Are you paying attention to this election? We have a bunch of right-wing lunatics who want to make it impossible for all the undocumented kids who were born here to go to college and improve their lives. You’re an educated Mexican who came here with buckets of cash. You could change the minds of kids at this school who think we’re all one stereotype after another. Maybe those same kids would go home and talk to their parents. The parents at this school have influence. They get it done. But instead of being a force for good, you’re fake slumming it and perpetuating stereotypes. So we can’t be friends until you kill that noise.”

  I wanted to. I knew it was time. So I started in the place where I felt safest of all—the kitchen.

  I’d never lied to Rooney. It had been more a sin of omission. Because I’d fallen in love with cooking and Rooney was the person I admired most at Polestar, I figured that telling her about my family was a good start.

  One morning, early before school started, we were prepping Cuban sandwiches for the afternoon lunch. We laid out each ingredient, chopped and ready to go, so every sandwich would be ready to be hot pressed in the panini maker at lunchtime.

  I said, “Hey, Rooney, there’s something I wanted to tell you.”

  She looked over at me. “Sure, Cammi. Shoot.”

  I said, “Well, you know, you probably thought I was a Mexican scholarship kid.”

  She didn’t blink. “I never thought that.”

  I was surprised. “Really?”

  Rooney looked back at me. “Yeah, why would I assume that?”

  I said, “Well, there’s a little more. My mother is actually a famous actress in Mexico City.”

  Rooney kept on slicing portobellos for the vegetarian Cuban sandwiches. Her knife skills were off the hook.

  “I knew that too,” she said.

  Wait? What? “How?” I asked.

  “Because I have access to the Internet, Cammi,” she said. “I Googled you. You show up in the middle of the school year. You’ve got amazing clothes and flawless taste and clearly are not intimidated by any of this. I spoke to your father, and his English is exquisite. He sounds like British royalty. Then you wanted me to teach you how to cook, and it’s clear that you’re a sixteen-year-old Mexican girl who has never so much as fried a tortilla before. I figured there had to be a story there, so I Googled you.”

  I didn’t know what to say. After a few moments of silence, I said, “Do you think the other kids know?”

  Rooney looked over at me. “Do you want them to know?”

  Then I did the thing that had been so hard for me for months on end: I told the truth. “I didn’t before. But now, I think I should keep it real.”

  Rooney shrugged. “Then you’re probably going to have to tell them, just like you told me. People don’t tend to go looking for things they can’t imagine to be true.”

  It took a while, but finally I wore Milly down and she started talking to me.

  “Tell me about your mother’s new role on American TV,” she asked, and I didn’t even mind that she asked about my mother. I’d had a nice vacation from the fame bubble.

  “She plays a maid,” I said. “But she’s actually an entrepreneur, nueva Latina mogul in the making.”

  Milly touched her nose, then pointed to me. On the nose. “Well, my mother is a maid in real life, so if your mother protrays a stereotypical maid on TV, then you can expect me to write a letter to the studio,” she said.

  I nodded. Fair enough.

  “So what you doing after school?”

  Milly shrugged. “Homework. Lab notes for chemistry class since this crazy girl from the DF ran her mouth the whole period and I got nothing done.”

  I smiled. “Want to come over to my house?”

  “Okay? Going to kill the lying with those two girls?”

  I assured her, “The wheels are in motion.”

  But the truth was, that was a delaying tactic.

  When we got home, my father was in the kitchen listening to the Hamilton sound track, which had become his obsession since we’d all gone to see the play the week before.

  He was singing and rapping at the top of his lungs when I came in with Milly.

  “Papá, please!” I called out. “We have company.”

  “It’s okay,” Milly said, and then quoted a line from the musical: “Immigrants get the job done!”

  Then she shook my father’s hand. “Mucho gusto, Señor del Valle.”

  I could tell that my father was taken with her.

  “The pleasure is all mine, young lady.” They went back and forth in Spanish for a few minutes, and then my father switched back to English. “Your Spanish is so beautiful. Were you born here?”

  “East LA, but Chicana through and through. You know what they say: hardly home, but always repping.”

  “I hear that,” my father said, giving her a high five.

  He even complimented her on her tattoos, even though I was fairly certain he’d never let me get inked.

  I gave Milly a quick tour of the house, and she said, “Basic BH Fab. I like it. Some of the houses are just over-the-top ostentatious.”

  I knew what she meant. When we were first house hunting, our Realtor, Digna, took us on an informal tour of the tackiest houses in LA. There was the house with not one but twenty-four replicas of Michelangelo’s David sculpture on the front lawn. There was the house with a landing strip on either side of the mansion, because you know door-to-door service is what airline travel is all about. And then there was the famous party house that’s used for all the OTT music videos. “That house has thirty bedrooms and fifty bathrooms,” Digna said. “And I guarantee you that no matter how many times it’s been cleaned, you don’t want to run a black light over any of the surfaces there.” Our house was nice but not cray-cray.

  When we were done with our homework, I invited Milly to go for a swim in the pool, but she had to leave. “Next time,” she said. “My dad works security, and he’ll be getting ready for work just as my mom is getting home. I should go help make supper and take care of the little ones.”

  I found out that Milly had three little brothers, a
ll under the age of ten. “I’m the oldest,” she said. “Sometimes it’s a pain in the butt, but those little monsters look up to me. And that’s kinda cool. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded, thinking of Sergio.

  It had been one thing to live in Mexico without my big brother. It had been hard moving to another country without him. My bro—hardly home, but always repping.

  This is the thing that any spy worth her salt can tell you—it’s easy to tell a convincing lie for a couple of hours, or even a few days. But once you get into the realm of weeks and months, then you’re always on the verge of getting busted.

  One day I took an Uber to the Grove, and I thought I was in the clear because the driver left me in the parking lot of the natural grocery store, which was blocks away from the fancy stores where Willow and Tiggy liked to shop.

  I hung back and followed along as they purchased hundreds of dollars’ worth of clothes. Back in Mexico City, I used to shop like that. I didn’t even have to carry cash or credit cards. The stores would let me charge whatever I wanted to my mother’s account. The thing is, I never really wore most of the stuff. I’d found that it was actually more fun not to buy clothes and to “shop” in my mother’s walk-in closet instead. Sure, I was tempted sometimes to buy something. Willow bought the sweetest cropped leather jacket by Alexander Wang, and it felt like my credit card was burning a hole in my pocket. I wanted so badly to whip out my card and buy my own, screaming “Twinsies!” the way I used to when Patrizia and I bought the same thing. But I knew I didn’t need the jacket. It was like waking up in the middle of the night craving a cheeseburger. The feeling would pass.

  We were getting smoothies at the Jamba Juice when Tiggy looked over at me and said, “Did your dad get a new job?”

  “Nope,” I said, slurping down my Gotta Guava smoothie.

  “Really? Because I could’ve sworn I saw you get out of a Cadillac Escalade.”

  The guava drink nearly came out my nose. I had given up so many luxuries to support my little charade, but Uber Black was my weakness.