The Go-Between

by Veronica Chambers

  “I’m so sorry, Milly,” I said. I was sorry, and I could feel the shame heat my skin like a fever.

  “I don’t get you, Camilla,” she said. “You hit the jackpot in life. Crazy-talented parents. An amazing big brother. Albita is like a live-in tía who would lay her life down for you. You’ve got everything you need and everything you want. And what do you do with all that privilege? You spend months and months concocting an elaborate lie about how you’re this poor kid of some hardworking maid. I’m a poor kid and my mother is a hardworking maid. All I can tell you, Camilla del Valle, is veta a mierda.” Go to hell.

  The next day we had Tapestries with Smitty, which I was dreading. I sat in a circle of my classmates, watching the candlelight glow, and all I could think was “I’m going to get my ass handed to me on a platter. I just know it.”

  Willow took the stick and looked directly at me. “I’ve been at Polestar since I was five years old. True talk, this isn’t the easiest place to be biracial, half Jewish, African American identified. I got made fun of for having a permanent, albeit awesome, tan. Before I was old enough to get blow-outs on a regular basis, I got made fun of for having tight, curly hair. One of the people who is in this room, at this very moment, wrote something evil about me on the walls of the boys’ bathroom. It was so mean that when my mother saw it, she cried. Then a few months ago, I met this girl from Mexico City and I thought, ‘This is the kind of friend I’ve been waiting for, someone who gets what it’s like to have a permanent, albeit awesome, tan.’ I thought she was my hermana de alma, my soul sister.”

  Duncan called out, “Is this story going to take up the whole period, because I may need to take a nap or pull the fire alarm. I’m so damn bored, I could go either way.”

  Smitty looked over at Duncan, and Duncan stood up and said, “Why don’t I save us some time and send myself to the office.”

  I could feel myself sweating. Not the cute beads of dew that form on your forehead when you’re playing an easy game of tennis. I started to sweat like that “too long in the sauna/100 degrees in the shade/hell is hot and this might be the intro course” kinda sweat. But Willow was not done.

  She continued, “It turned out that everything she told me was a lie, and it feels worse than some asshole writing racist shit about me on the bathroom wall. It makes me wonder, was I some kind of joke to this girl? Was she laughing behind my back the whole time?”

  “I wasn’t laughing behind your back,” I blurted out.

  Smitty asked, “Camilla, would you like the talking stick?”

  I nodded. I stood up, and unlike the first time I held the stick, my voice wasn’t trembling. I didn’t feel like my bones were rattling beneath my skin. I was nervous, but damn it if I hadn’t aced what Smitty had said when I’d first started at Polestar. I felt like I’d found my voice.

  “I would like to apologize to Willow and Tiggy. It’s true, I pretended to be something that I wasn’t. But it’s also true that you guys had a lot of crazy preconceptions about what it means to be Mexican. In the beginning, to tell the truth, I just rolled with it because I was curious to hear what you really thought. Sometimes you were generous because you thought I was poor and my parents were working class. But other times you were straight up racist.”

  Tiggy jumped to her feet and grabbed the stick, “You don’t get to call me racist.”

  Willow stood up and took the stick from her, “As a woman of color, I reject the idea that I can even be racist.”

  I took the stick back from Willow and said, “That’s what I used to think. But before I came to LA, I didn’t even know that being Mexican made me a ‘woman of color.’ These labels are arbitrary, but they have a lot of power. Forget that I called either of you racist. Let’s just say that we all have more power than we think. When we don’t examine our assumptions about people, or when we let those assumptions slide, then we can do some serious harm—to each other and to our culture.”

  Smitty got to his feet and clapped. “Well said, Camilla.”

  Willow looked over at me as if she agreed and that she might, in the not too distant future, want to be my friend again.

  Tiggy rolled her eyes and sat down next to me. As she did, she whispered, “I don’t care what you say. You’re still a lying bitch in my book.”

  In Mexico City, my mother recorded speeches for public radio, and on Octavio Paz’s birthday, she did a special live performance of the Nobel Prize–winning poet’s most iconic work. But in Los Angeles, where her accent was “funny,” the producers were constantly sending my mother to ADR to redo her lines.

  ADR stands for “automatic dialogue replacement,” also known as “looping.” After you film a scene, if when the director goes back to edit it, she can’t hear your lines clearly, you go to an ADR studio to rerecord the dialogue. The producers then edit that into your filmed scene. My mother has no patience for this and she complains constantly.

  “I spend more time looping than acting,” my mother often said when we first moved to California. “Why can’t they understand me? I am speaking English better than any of them can speak Spanish. I bet if you asked the average Latino viewer, they wouldn’t have any trouble understanding me. I want to tell them the problem is not with my speaking, it’s with your listening. It’s your ears that need better, more multicultural training.”

  When I look back to all of my time with Willow and Tiggy, I wish I could slip into an ADR studio, dub myself, and rerecord my lines. The things I said weren’t at all what I should have said, what I meant to say. I would give anything to take it all back.

  Los Angeles was supposed to be a fresh start for me. I was going to get away from all of the drama of our life in Mexico, leave behind my failed friendship with Patrizia and all the damage that had been done to my mother’s career as a result. Then what did I do? I came someplace new and I created new drama. I was like the troublemaker character on a telenovela whose only mission in life was to stir the pot.

  I spent the rest of the day pretending to be invisible. I stared down at my notes in chem lab, the class where I’d met Milly. Every time I snuck a glance, she was staring straight ahead. Never once did I catch her eye. In the afternoon, I had Global Social Innovation with Willow. She looked over at me constantly, but every time I caught her eye, she looked devastated and then looked away. It was like I’d killed her dog.

  I texted Albita to ask for a ride from school. I was almost out of the building when Tiggy cornered me at my locker.

  “Just so you know, I’ve been suspecting you for a while,” she said. She scrolled to the notes section on her phone, and there was a list of outfits I’d worn over the past few months:

  March 15: Stella McCartney vest

  March 27: Loewe bomber jacket

  March 30: Alexander Wang track pants

  April 17: Burberry trench

  April 29: Fendi studded sneakers

  “Your clothes are too expensive, you little liar,” Tiggy snarled. “Nobody has that kind of hand-me-downs.” Then she slammed her fist against my locker, which shouldn’t have made me jump but it did.

  As much as I didn’t like Tiggy, we didn’t have to be BFFs, but I knew that I didn’t want an enemy. I had to make it okay.

  “Make it right. Make it right,” I thought. I’d screwed up, but there had to be a way to make it right. It was on me to try to get her to come around. The next day after homeroom, when I saw Willow, I handed her a shopping bag.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “It’s your leather jacket,” I said.

  “I have one,” she said. “Keep it.”

  “But I don’t deserve it,” I said.

  She took the bag from me, and I thought that was going to be it. Then she sniffed it.

  “You keep it,” she said, tossing the bag back at me. “It smells like a garbage bag full of lies.”

  Okay. I probably deserved that. But at least she didn’t hurl the bag at me, so this might mean I still have a chance.

&n
bsp; I did not tell Sergio about all that happened. I couldn’t.

  Every day at lunchtime, I hid myself away in Rooney’s kitchen, but I had totally lost my touch. I put too much sriracha in the sriracha mayo. I overcooked the rice noodles for the teriyaki noodles until they were one big sticky mess. I stuck the caprese skewers in the oven and put the maple bourbon chicken skewers in the fridge.

  After a week, Rooney—who was always so patient with mistakes—let me know she’d had enough.

  “You’re miserable,” she said. “I can taste it in the food. Tell me what’s up.”

  But I couldn’t. I knew that if I told her the truth, she’d lose all respect for me. So I told her what any self-respecting teenager who doesn’t want to discuss her problems says. I told her I was on drugs.

  Rooney wouldn’t let me off so easily. “Not actually funny, Camilla.”

  I’d had everything I wanted. I’d discovered that in a family full of artists and geniuses, I actually had a talent and a mentor willing to help me. I had friends who liked me (even though I lied to them), frenemies who kept me honest (Milly). And I had screwed it all up.

  “Are you firing me?” I asked Rooney, even though I wasn’t actually paid for my cooking services.

  She shook her head. “I’m putting you on leave until you get your act together.”

  I nodded in agreement, blinking back the tears. It was even harder not to cry when Rooney pulled me in for a hug. “You’ll be okay,” she said. “It’s not really high school unless you go through a little hell.”

  Then I ran into a bathroom stall and dialed a number I hadn’t called in a long, long time.

  “Hola, Amadeo,” I said. “Soy yo.”

  His face popped up on my phone, as handsome and familiar as ever. We were on a break. He was my friend, not my boyfriend. But as I crouched in the bathroom stall, listening to him speak in Spanish, his voice was good medicine. He sounded like home.

  Although I could’ve just let them leave me in the exile I so sorely deserved, I knew that I also had to try to fix things with Willow and Tiggy, at least for the sake of peace. And because I was wrong too.

  Finally I got them to sit down with me. I said, “I know you’re mad at me.”

  Willow looked at Tiggy and continued talking as if I wasn’t there.

  “You have every right to be mad.” How to apologize without sounding like I was just defending myself wasn’t easy.

  Willow looked at me as if I’d committed all kinds of atrocities against small, helpless puppies, and Tiggy was doing her best “you don’t exist” face.

  “But this is the thing,” I continued. “If I were to call up the Mexican embassy, they would agree that the two of you have said some effed-up things over the past few months.”

  I raced on. “You talked about how cute my accent was and you assumed that my parents were a maid and a gardener,” I said.

  “That’s what you told us!” Tiggy burst out.

  I shook my head. “Wait a minute. You liar. Don’t manipulate what happened. Why would I come to a new school with the intention of lying about who I was? You threw that stuff out and I went with it, half out of curiosity about what crazy thing you might say next.”

  “I’m black and Jewish,” Willow said. “I don’t say crazy, racist ish.”

  “Weeeeell,” I began. “You behaved better than Tiggy, but not a lot better.”

  Willow flipped out. “You think we can agree that we’re all a little racist and it will be better, but it’s not. People have been talking about my skin tone, my hair, my nose, my lips, and yes, my very African American booty for as long as I can remember. I wasn’t trying to put you down, Camilla. I really wanted to know what your life was like and how I could help. And yes, I did assume you were on scholarship.”

  I thought of the tutoring job she had created for me, the gifts, the way she’d tried to shield me from her more extravagant hangs with Tiggy. She hadn’t been culturally perfect, but she really had tried. Plus, she also had to deal with prejudice and racist comments from everyone her whole life too.

  Tiggy looked back and forth between us. “So now I’m the only racist one because I’m white. That’s some BS.”

  She was so apoplectic that as she stood up she knocked her Diet Coke all over the table. She looked at it a second; then she just started to walk away.

  “Tiggy,” Willow called out. “You made a mess. Aren’t you going to clean it up?”

  Tiggy turned back and said, “Surely between the two of you, one of you is skilled enough in the fine art of housekeeping. You can do it.” Then she stomped off.

  Willow and I just looked at each other, stunned.

  “Is she kidding?” I asked Willow.

  I walked over to get some napkins to clean the mess.

  “I’ll help you,” Willow said, grabbing some napkins too.

  “Tiggy really is awful—white or pink. She’s a spoiled, rich, racist brat,” I muttered.

  The Diet Coke had, at that point, seeped over the table and onto the floor.

  “How does one can of soda make so much mess?” I wondered.

  “It’s Newton’s law of spilled fizzy liquids. They expand in mass depending on the velocity with which they’re knocked over,” Willow said.

  “Is that true?” I asked as we wiped off the table and the floor.

  “No,” Willow said. “But it sounds good, right?”

  Once we’d gotten the mess cleaned up, Willow said, “Let’s grab an espresso before class.”

  We took our cups to the common area and sat underneath a big cherry tree in bloom.

  “I’m beyond pissed,” Willow said. “Tiggy is mad because she hates taking on all the worst of what whiteness can imply in this country. My dad gets that way too. When some racist mess goes down, my dad is always quick to say he couldn’t possibly be racist because he’s a persecuted minority too. Being Jewish for him wasn’t easy. Still, it’s totally something else if your skin is any shade of brown. We know that.”

  I nodded. “I wanted Tiggy to know that plenty of what she said was out of line and she needs to stop being a rich brat.”

  “She knows,” Willow said. “She’s surrounded by people who echo back this crazy distorted rich-white-kid worldview.” Willow gestured around the Polestar lunchroom. “She was just as excited as I was when we became friends with you and it was like, finally, someone who’s not so cookie-cutter privileged.”

  “You could have been friends with Milly before I arrived,” I pointed out.

  “Milly never looked like she wanted to know us. We were just rich Polestar brats to her, or so we thought,” Willow said. “When I saw you working in the school cafeteria, I thought, ‘There is a girl who needs a friend, and God knows we need some different kinds of friends.’ ”

  “I wasn’t working, actually,” I explained. “It was more like a culinary internship.”

  “I get that now,” Willow said. “Tiggy will come back around and she’ll apologize.”

  “She’d better,” I said. “She’s got some nerve and temper.”

  Willow paused, then said, “Pretending for five months that your mother was a maid and your dad was a gardener is nervy too.”

  “True that,” I said, nodding.

  “I gotta go,” she said, and started to walk away.

  “Willow! Wait up!” I was surprised to see she was no longer mad. She was crying.

  I pulled her into a big bear hug. I needed one as much as she did. “Willow, I’m so sorry about all this.” Much to my relief, Willow gave me a small smile.

  “How about this: I’ll forgive you for pretending—for five months—that your mother was a maid and your dad a gardener if you’ll forgive me for being effed up and saying racist ish.”

  “Deal!” I yelled. I was so relieved. I gave her another bear hug.

  “Can I ask you something?” Willow asked, as she pulled back from me.

  “Sí, anything.”

  “What are you going to do with tha
t bus pass you bought?” Willow asked as she laughed. “I can’t believe you went that far, crazy,” she said, incredulous. “You should donate it or something.”

  She was, of course, right. Donating my bus pass would be just the start.

  A few days later, I came down to breakfast to find my father in an unexpectedly cheery mood.

  “Qué pasó?” I asked him, breaking our English-at-home rule. Then, correcting myself, I asked, “What’s up?”

  He smiled. “The good news is that we have family coming to town.”

  I jumped up. “Sergio?”

  My father nodded. I did a little victory dance. I loved our FaceTime talks, of course, but I hadn’t seen Sergio since Christmas. That was before we had moved to LA. It had been just six months, but it felt like forever. Not only is Sergio coming, but everything is good with Willow. Though there was still trouble with Tiggy, and I still had to make things right with Milly, I started to feel like everything would be okay.

  My father agreed that I could cook a welcome-home dinner for my big bro. I couldn’t wait to go to school and ask Rooney for advice. I wanted a totally modern but really Mexican menu. She smiled when she heard my concept. “You know I’m on it,” she said. The next day she handed me one of her giant index cards. I actually felt honored. The whole Polestar kitchen and menu were organized on those cards. Her handing me one meant that she was taking me seriously.