The Go-Between

by Veronica Chambers

  “I’m very proud of you,” I told her. “You are a star in two languages and many countries. How many people can say that?”

  “Gracias!” she said, wrapping me in her arms. “How about when the show goes on hiatus, you and me take a girls’ trip to a spa?”

  “Sure,” I said. I sensed that the puzzle piece that was my mother would continue to be a tricky one. My mother was so big and so bright, and I had to share her with the world. But as I swam laps with her in the pool, our favorite Låpsley album wafted like stardust from the backyard stereo system. I realized what a gift it was to have these moments when I had my mother all to myself. She was, first and foremost, my mother. I wondered if my relationship with her would benefit if I could create a space where she could enter my life as Mamá first and actress second.

  Despite the fact that I’d spent a good part of my first year in the US being a complete pendeja, I’d actually learned a few things. I’d learned that being from another country—even one with a financial safety net—is like having all the pieces of your life cut into shapes that are entirely unfamiliar to you. Your job, as a New American, is to put the pieces together. No one gets to carry his or her puzzle whole across the border. You cannot keep being the same person you were in that other place. The very act of migration throws all of the pieces into the air. Up there, high above any place you can easily reach, the pieces are scrambled with elements you can’t always divine or control—language, geography, race, class, and opportunity. There are X factors that play a role, things like luck and friendship, support and love (which is another kind of luck). The pieces come back to you, sometimes so quickly that they knock you over with their strength and speed. Sometimes it feels like a piece of you—a piece that you knew, loved, and treasured back home—is lost forever. You wait for it, patiently at first, and then impatiently. There’s a hole in your heart where this piece belongs, and if the piece does not return, you must carefully search for a new one to take its place.

  By the end of my school year, I had enough of the pieces that I could recognize myself, even though I knew I was changing. It’s like what my dad told me when he first taught me how to do puzzles—if you can find the corners, you will eventually be able to fill in the rest.

  I had four corners. In the upper left, there was my heart, my North Star—my brother, Sergio. I couldn’t wait to spend the summer with him in Mexico. It would be good to be home.

  In the upper right, I had Milly. She was my hermanita homegirl, my sister from another mister. I never would’ve thought that all the drama could make us closer, but it did. And now that I knew what it was like to not have Milly’s friendship, I treasured it even more.

  I wouldn’t have guessed when I first met Willow and Tiggy that they would make up one of my American puzzle corners, but they did. We were so different—all three of us—but in our differences, talking-stick style, we had created this connection built on a foundation of curiosity, affection, and respect.

  My fourth corner was Rooney. In addition to being an amazing chef, she was also a total soccer geek. As my brother put it, she was “the perfect woman.” On any given Saturday, I could find Rooney and Sergio—home for the summer—on the sofa watching soccer and drinking Mexican Coke. Rooney had heard about this social innovation soccer ball that these college girls had invented. Kids play with this soccer ball all day, and while they play, the ball collects kinetic energy. Then at night, the ball can be connected to a lamp for the kids to do homework. It even has a night-light setting. Rooney and Sergio were going to Mexico City at the end of the summer with a thousand balls to give out to kids in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. I was going with them. I couldn’t wait to show my friend and mentor my hometown.

  Back home in Mexico, I’d always had this idea that I would go to college and study art history. But the longer I stayed at Polestar, the more I began to believe that the path for me was anything but clear. I didn’t need to pick one topic and one safe place where a good girl from a good family could forge a career. My mother once told me that the beauty of telenovelas was their over-the-top grandiosity. “Our novelas show the world as this crazy place where anything can happen. Our viewers, both the women and the men, love us for the romance, the luxurious settings, the houses, the cars, the clothes. But what really speaks to them, what wraps our stories around their hearts, is the sense of possibility. Novelas are fairy tales. They show us that there should not be ceilings on our dreams.”

  I was beginning to think that Polestar—despite all the lies I’d told, or maybe in part because of them—was my novela. It was the place that had helped me lift the ceiling off my dreams.

  And no teacher had helped me see life differently more than Mr. Agrabal. One Friday afternoon, after Mr. Agrabal had shown us a Bollywood movie, I stayed after class. I explained to him that my mother was an actress and that in Mexico she had starred in these television series called telenovelas. I explained that the novelas reminded me of Bollywood films. I asked him if the following Friday I could stay after school and show him one of my mother’s telenovelas. He said he would love to see it. He also said I could invite a few friends.

  When the big day arrived, Mr. Agrabal was dressed to the nines in a mint-green suit with a crisp white shirt and a khaki tie. I’d debated about which film to bring and had decided finally on the romance histórico, Mundos sin Fronteras, my mother’s first novela. I was joined by Tiggy, Willow, and Milly. I invited Smitty too, because while he took a lot of guff for his class and the whole Native American council vibe, I liked Tapestries. It had given me a chance to say what I’d needed to say, and to offer apologies when I’d totally screwed up.

  Mr. Agrabal had just lowered the shades and pulled down the screen when my father arrived.

  “Am I late?” he asked innocently, as if he’d shown up for a tailgate party in the parking lot of a football stadium.

  He held up a small cooler. “I brought Mexican colas.”

  We had just started the first episode of Mundos sin Fronteras when we heard a knock at the door.

  “Did somebody order popcorn?”

  I heard her before I saw her. It was my mother, and she rolled in one of those old-fashioned popcorn machines. A gift, she explained, for a true film fan, Mr. Agrabal.

  When she went over to introduce herself to my chem teacher, I thought he might faint. “You are so beautiful,” he said, kissing her on the hand.

  “I take after my daughter,” she said, winking at me.

  I hugged her and thanked her for stopping by.

  “I am not stopping by,” she said. “I was able to change my shoot schedule. I am staying.”

  “Where do you sit?” she asked, and I showed her. She sat down in my classroom seat. My father sat next to her and grasped her hand.

  “Hey! No making out!” Tiggy teased.

  “Yeah, keep it clean,” Willow added.

  Then Mr. Agrabal dimmed the lights and the series began. Rose after rose opened up, bloomed, and then fell away, until finally the action began. There was my mother, both on-screen and in real life. In real life she was holding on to my father, who I loved more than I loved myself. On-screen my mother was just eighteen years old. She was just a couple of years older than I was. She would make mistakes. She did not have all the answers. But she was confident that she would find her way. Everything, I mean everything, was just beginning. I wasn’t in a telenovela, but for the first time, as I watched my mother on the screen, I thought I knew exactly how she must have felt. For me, things were just beginning too.

  In The Go-Between, my goal is to tell a story that every first-generation American knows well. It is a story about remembrance and reinvention that gets to the heart of the questions every immigrant family must wrestle with: Who were we back there? Who are we here? Who does everyone think we are here? Who might we become here, under the best of circumstances and the worst of circumstances? And how do we meld all those selves together in a way that is graceful and seamless?
/>   I’ve used the word immigrant in its broadest sense, because Camilla’s family had a home they could return to. I was born in Panama and lived my early childhood in Northern England, then moved to the US when I was five. Throughout my childhood, it seemed that every personal introduction had a story, and sometimes a story underneath that story. This is Juan, who is your father’s cousin’s husband. He had another family in Nicaragua. Those children don’t live here. This is Belén, who does hair. But in Panama, she was a nurse and her father was a doctor.

  In this book, I’m drawing from the worlds—television, Los Angeles, first-generation teenagers—I know well. Not everyone has parents who are actors, but I think the themes are universal: one parent working, one parent not working and the tensions therein; class differences between close friends; and the gulf between who you were at one school and who you are perceived as being at a new school.

  I wanted to write a book in which the heroine was Latina, but not working class. I felt that it was important, not just as a fantasy, but as a representation of the spectrum of reality. I didn’t grow up enjoying wealth like Camilla’s, but her story does reflect the lives of privilege of Latinas I know and love. It felt almost more dangerous to play with class than it did to take on issues of race. I grew up in hip-hop culture, where “keeping it real” is the ultimate compliment. But I think, as Camilla learns, you don’t have to be poor to keep it real. And conversely, the struggle for a sense of self and place for Latinas in this country is real, regardless of your wealth or class.

  My main character has a mother who plays a maid on TV. This choice was directly related to the famous comment made by the first black Oscar winner, Hattie McDaniel, that she would rather play a maid than be one.

  The challenges of the main characters in The Go-Between speak to how everyone seeks to find their own place, and while Camilla’s circumstances are extraordinary—her mom is a telenovela actress, after all—all the teens in the book are on a similar path, trying to work with what they’ve been given while trying to make sense of what it means to grow up and find your place in the world.

  I hope that teen readers of all backgrounds find that Camilla’s journey of “faking it until you figure it out” is one that feels both fresh and familiar.

  I am so grateful to my mother, Cecilia Ortega, for braving the unknown and bringing me to America, and to my stepfather, Antonio Ortega, for his encouragement and support. Beverly Horowitz is the best editor a girl could hope for, and I’m grateful to Rebecca Gudelis for answering a gazillion emails that said “Just a few more days” with aplomb. Thanks as well to Kimberly Witherspoon, Monika Drake, and the whole Inkwell team.

  Gracias a mi Aunt Diana and Uncle Buster for always believing and to my prima hermana Digna as well. Jason Clampet makes me laugh and brings me empanadas. Thank you to Jerry and Mary Clampet for Flora care so I can write. Isabel Rivera and Mai El-Khoury are good friends who understand my immigrant heart. Flora already knows that cada verano tiene su historia. Querida, this one’s for you.

  Veronica Chambers is a prolific author, best known for her critically acclaimed memoir, Mama’s Girl. Most recently she was the editor of as well as a contributor to The Meaning of Michelle: 16 Writers on the Iconic First Lady and How Her Journey Inspires Our Own. She has written more than a dozen books for young readers, including Plus and the Amigas series, and has cowritten New York Times bestselling adult memoirs with Robin Roberts, Eric Ripert, Michael Strahan, and Marcus Samuelsson. She was cowriter as well on Samuelsson’s young adult memoir, Make It Messy.

  Veronica lives with her husband and daughter in Hoboken, New Jersey. Visit her online at veronicachambers.com and follow her on Twitter at @vvchambers.

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