by Josh Farrar
My Secret
“Haitian, Haitian, go back to your nation,” Jenna chants (again! Can’t she think of anything new?) as she and Angela pass me, Mary Agnes, and Maricel on our way to the Clark Street station a few minutes after school on Thursday.
I keep my mouth shut. Nothing good can come from responding to a crazy person, and my week has been bad enough already.
“I guess even Alex wants you to go back to your nation now, eh, Haitian girl?” Jenna asks. She and Angela turn around now, blocking our path. We’re right in front of St. Christopher’s, which I suppose is Jenna’s idea of the perfect place to have a fight. “Nobody wants anything to do with you at all.” Except your annoying boyfriend, I think.
Everyone in school has seen the video by now, and there’s no way for me to feel any more embarrassed or stupid than I already do. So what does Jenna want now? Doesn’t she have anything better to do? Mary Agnes and Maricel come to the edge of what is now a small circle, watching this confrontation between Jenna and me. The smirking Angela is here, too, showing her fool friend support.
“Why are you doing this, Jenna?” I ask. Because I’m new? Because I wouldn’t be your friend? Because your boyfriend likes me more than you?
“There doesn’t need to be a why. Because … I just don’t like you, that’s why.”
“Let me ask you a question,” I say. “Where is your family from? Because you have a West Indian look, don’t you?”
“I’m Bushwick born and bred, girl,” Jenna says. “They don’t make ’em more Brooklyn than me.”
“So you are, what, a Native American, then? Your ancestors were here before George Washington?”
This is going to be easy. Jenna Minaya may be mean, but she doesn’t have the brains God gave a cow.
“Mis padres come from the Dominican,” Jenna says. “And being Dominican’s something to be proud of. We’ve got beautiful beaches that celebrities go to. We have our own celebrities, too. Best baseball players in the world come from the DR. It’s not like Haiti over there, with nasty shantytowns and vodou dolls and people dying of crazy diseases.”
I notice that a few girls have gathered around Angela. I suppose they want a front-row seat, where they can see all the action.
“I didn’t live in a shantytown, Jenna. I lived in a villa. And Maman and I had a servant there, a sixteen-year-old Dominican girl called Blanca. She doesn’t speak very good French, or Kreyol, but she’s very sweet. She looks a little like you, actually.”
“You’re saying I remind you of your maid?”
“Yes, there’s quite a resemblance, especially around the eyes. She’s prettier, though, and more intelligent. We used to give her a nice big bonus every year, when we’d send her back to her parents.” I tilt my head to the side and pause for effect because I’m enjoying this. Enjoying it more than I should be, considering how many more important things are happening right now in my life than my fight with this silly girl. But I can’t help it; with all the hurt I’m feeling right now, why not share a little of it with her?
“Hey, maybe your parents are friends with hers?” I ask. “Maybe they all grew up together, in the slums.”
“Ooooh,” the crowd of girls moan, including Angela (so much for loyalty). If this were a boxing match—and perhaps it is—Jenna would be bleeding from her mouth, her nose, her eyes.
But I still haven’t delivered my knockout punch. “Why don’t you be a good girl,” I say, “and go get me a tub to wash my feet.” When she does nothing but stand there with her jaw hanging open, I say, “Go on! When I tell you to move, you move!”
Jenna Minaya does not move an inch. She closes her stupid, gaping mouth and narrows her eyes. Then she smiles: a sick, satisfied smile as if she, not I, is the one in control. She looks as strong as ever, more confident than a girl should be after what I’ve said to her.
“Bijou, about that villa you supposedly lived in with your precious maman,” she says. “Who lives there now?”
I don’t say anything. It’s not a question she wants me to answer, anyway. She’s going in for her own knockout blow now.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see others watching this showdown: Rocky, Trevor, Nomura, and even, at the far edges of the circle, him. Get out of here, Alex, I want to scream. Leave me alone, forever! I hate him for seeing this.
“Nobody does, right, Bijou?” Jenna asks. “Because while you’ve been running around here for the last two months talking about ‘Maman this’ and ‘Maman that,’ she died in the earthquake, didn’t she? And your old grandfather was getting too sick and old to take care of you anymore.
“You didn’t know I knew that, did you? I heard my mom talking about it on the phone, weeks ago. She’s the parent rep on the board this year, so she knows all about you.”
“You’re a liar,” says Mary Agnes, stepping from the edge of the circle and pointing her finger in Jenna’s face. “And you’d better shut your mouth right now.”
“My mom told me to keep quiet about it,” Jenna says. “But I don’t see why everybody shouldn’t know the truth.”
“Don’t do this, Jenna,” Mary Agnes says. “Just stop.”
“At first, I actually felt sorry for you. I tried to be friends with you, but you were so rude to me.” Then she turns to Angela and says, “Except for Maricel and Mary Agnes, who don’t even count, Bijou has barely spoken a word to any of us. Am I right?”
No one says a thing, even Mary Agnes. Even me.
I want to yell at her, to fight back. But I feel like I’m in the middle of a nightmare, the kind where you try to scream, but not a sound comes from your mouth.
“But now that you’ve been here for over two months,” Jenna says, “you should get real and admit it: you don’t have a maman. Not anymore, anyway, and not ever again. So stop pretending, okay?”
“That is so weird,” Angela says. “This whole time, she was trying to fool us? Why not just be honest?”
I say nothing. What is there to say? I can never hurt Jenna the way she has just hurt me. She has not seen enough of life to feel this kind of pain.
That is when I fall. Not a loud smack on the sidewalk concrete, but a soft crumble into the arms of Mary Agnes. I see Maman, as she was the last time I saw her, early on the morning of January 12, 2010. She looked me in the eyes, nuzzled my nose with hers, kissed me, and said, “À bientôt.” See you later.
But later never came.
Mary Agnes and someone else, someone taller, help me to my feet. The crowd parts, letting us pass. Jenna looks at me one last time, no longer hateful. Angry. Sad. About to cry.
But why? Is she so filled with hate, she can’t enjoy her victory for even a moment?
31
Strange Silence
“Yes, I took the videos, and yes, they were uploaded to my YouTube account,” Ira says to a blank-faced Mrs. Eagleton. “But I didn’t edit them. And I didn’t upload them, either.”
“Then who did?” Eagleton asks. Ira is silent. And of course, so am I. “It’s unlikely that Mr. Schrader would, given that everything he said violates the ethics code. What exactly were you thinking, Alex? This is not what we stand for at St. Chris’s. And honestly, we’ll be lucky if my colleagues at St. Catherine’s don’t cancel the Musicale and the final dance of the school year.”
Great. One more reason for the entire population of both schools to hate me.
Eagleton is staring me down, and I don’t know where to begin. I’m thinking more about what not to admit, and whom not to rat on, than how to explain this disaster away. And Ira is as tight-lipped as I am. Does that mean he really didn’t upload the video, though? It’s hard to imagine him doing it, but Nomura thinks Ira was right to be mad at me. The question is: Is Ira mad-mad, or wackomad?
“Well?” she asks. “Neither of you has anything to say for yourself?”
“It was a joke,” I say. “I didn’t mean for those things to sound the way they did, and I definitely didn’t mean for them to wind up on the Internet.”
“A joke?” Eagleton asks, astounded. “I’m not going to dignify some of the words you used by repeating them, but I do hope you realize that way of thinking, and of expressing yourself, is no laughing matter.”
“I know that now, ma’am. And I’m really, really sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too,” says Ira. “I don’t know who took my camera, or why, but I’ll find out.” I kick Ira’s shin, invisible under Eagleton’s desk, and he chokes a cry of pain.
“Well, I’ll be looking into that issue myself, rest assured,” she says. “And as for the two of you, I’ll be placing a call to your parents to explain the situation. They have to know, of course. And while I will not be suspending you—the last thing you deserve is a vacation from your classes—you will not be permitted to participate in Musicale, or the dance.” She gives one last sorrowful shake of her head. “If either event does indeed take place.
“All right,” she finishes, waving us away like houseflies. “Off with you. Back to class.”
We turn a corner and get into every subject we weren’t able to cover in Eagleton’s office.
“I’ve been trying to tell you, but you’ve been impossible to get hold of,” Ira says. “On Tuesday, somebody broke into my locker and ripped off my camera. By Wednesday morning, it had been returned, but this new video, the edited one that went on YouTube, was on it.”
“Ira, you said you were going to delete it.” I try to remember back to the movie, right after we’d left the bathroom. Hadn’t he erased it then?
“I did, I swear. They must have looked in the trash … Rocky and Trevor.”
“So you know it was them?”
“Who else would it be?”
“And what about that footage of me and Bijou holding hands?” I almost shove him but think better of it. One of the few things that could make this worse would be a second visit to Eagleton’s. “What was that about?”
“I don’t know,” Ira says. “I was mad at you at the time—you were being a real jerk that day—but that’s not why I shot it. I shot it because Terror Lake was lame, and I was bored. But I wasn’t going to do anything with it. And I didn’t think anybody else would, either. I have hundreds of random videos of people doing all kinds of meaningless stuff.”
“That’s pretty weird, Ira.”
He shrugs, helpless. “If I’d realized something like this could happen, I never would have left my camera lying around like that.”
“Wait,” I say. “Did you say hundreds of random videos?”
“Yeah,” Ira says, confused. “Why?”
Ira and I are just forming the beginnings of a revenge plan when we see Bijou and Jenna Minaya circling each other in front of St. Chris’s. And I literally mean circling, like gladiators in the ring. At first, I can’t even follow the conversation. Something about Dominican maids and Haitian villas. I have no idea what they’re talking about, but I can practically see steam coming out of their nostrils. This is not going to be pretty.
At least I get why Bijou still hasn’t written me back. If this girl fight is any indication, she’s got plenty of other stuff on her mind right now.
When Jenna says that Bijou’s mother is dead, that Bijou’s been pretending, at first I don’t believe a word of it. There’s no way, I think, that she could have kept that a secret, especially from nosy Mary Agnes.
But then Mary Agnes gets right up in Jenna’s face. “You’re a liar,” she says, almost screaming. “And you’d better shut your mouth right now.”
Jenna doesn’t even try to deny it. She doesn’t need to, I realize, because she’s telling the truth. I can see it all over Bijou’s face: the stunned, helpless look of someone whose last secret has been uncovered, someone who finally has nothing left to hide.
And I feel ashamed. Ashamed for not knowing before, and ashamed for knowing now. And ashamed for caring so much about whether Bijou liked me that I couldn’t see how much pain she was in.
Then she faints, and Mary Agnes does an amazing job cushioning the fall. But Bijou’s too heavy for her to handle alone, and she struggles to keep her upright. Before I have time to consider that I’m probably the last person Bijou would want by her side right now, I rush toward her.
But somebody beats me to it: Trevor.
I’m only a step or two away from Bijou when he puts his right arm up to block my path, then slyly slides his left arm around Bijou’s waist. Then he helps Mary Agnes, who seems too focused on helping her friend to object to Trevor’s gallant-seeming move, to carry Bijou up the steps and into school.
Really? Trevor? If it had to be a guy, couldn’t it have been Nomura, or Ira, or anyone but him?
What’s even harder to believe is that Bijou seems to actually like him being there. She certainly doesn’t push him away, anyway, and before they’re even halfway up the steps, she lets her head fall on his shoulder. What, are they going to be a couple now? Are my chances with the best girl I’ve ever known totally over because Trevor Zelo beat me to her side by a half second?
But if I’m devastated, at least I’m quiet about it. Jenna, on the other hand, is absolutely beside herself. After Trevor and Mary Agnes disappear with Bijou, she lets out a hoarse shriek and, after that, starts crying hysterically. She’s like a human puddle, her chest heaving sobs. I never would have thought somebody as mean as Jenna Minaya could break down so completely.
And then it hits me: Jenna wrote the notes. The whole time, I’d been looking for a guy, but it was Jenna all along.
I sneak away before Nomura or Ira approaches me and manage to catch the subway before any of the other kids who witnessed the scene reach the platform. And I realize I’ve been doing it again, thinking about Trevor being closer to Bijou than I am, about Mary Agnes being closer to Bijou than I am. I’ve got to stop thinking so much about myself all the time. If I’m ever going to be friends with her again, I need to learn how to think about Bijou without always sticking myself into the equation.
The whole way home, I think about Bijou and her mom, and the strange silences that always seemed to follow the word “maman.” The way Bijou got quiet whenever I asked about her mother. The faraway look in her eyes every time Port-au-Prince was mentioned. Maybe I didn’t want to see how sad she truly was. At least now, I’m doing just that: seeing.
My mom told me that Bijou might have post-traumatic stress disorder and that there might be things about her experience that I wouldn’t be able to understand. Maybe it’s time to admit she might have been right about that one after all.
Mom also told me there’s no difference between lying and omitting the truth. But in Bijou’s case, there must be. I try to imagine what it might have been like if I’d lost Mom, then been sent to an entirely new country after my grandparents had gotten too old to take care of me. Would my mother’s death have been something I’d want to discuss with a bunch of kids I’d only just met?
No, if I’d been in Bijou’s shoes, I would have stuck with the strange silences, too.
32
A Boy in My Life
Pierre and Marie Claire haven’t said a word about it, but I know it must have been Headmistress O’Biden who called a few minutes after dinner. After Tonton Pierre hung up, I could hear them from my room while I tried and failed to concentrate on my homework. Have you ever noticed how loud a whisper can be? It must be the least secretive way to have a conversation, like saying to anyone in the house, Put your ear to the door and listen hard to every word we say.
I hear only broken phrases from the living room.
Marie Claire: “What video? What boy?”
Pierre: “… send her to a girls school, and all they do is put them with boys? … not what I pay good money for …”
Marie Claire: “… the girl misses her mother … only natural …”
Pierre: “… and what business is it of these children whether she’s alive or dead …”
That’s when Pierre begins to cry. Without seeing it, I can picture what is happening. Marie Claire is kneeling now,
by the chair her husband spends half his life sitting in. She is hugging him, comforting him.
I haven’t cried in front of them. Not once since I arrived. My memories are my only comfort.
And now, a knock on the door. Marie Claire checking on me, asking if I need anything, a little something to eat, though we finished a large meal of malanga only an hour ago. Is your homework going okay? Do you need any help on it? Neither my aunt nor my uncle has ever offered to help me with homework. They did not go to school in this country, so how could they?
I tell her, No, I’m fine, Auntie, and she takes my chin in her hand, kisses my forehead. I know, she says wordlessly. I know you are fine.
The matter will never be discussed openly between us. That’s not the way things are done in our family. Pierre and Marie Claire will treat me very gently for a few days, and then, hopefully, they will forget about it.
And so will I. You see, having people find out about Maman is not the worst thing that has ever happened to me.
It is not even close.
Doucet. Maman’s name, and mine, too.
When friends and relatives of my mother meet me for the first time, they are so surprised by our likeness, they do not know quite what to say. They take a step back and hold a hand over their heart.
Doucet. It comes from the French word for “gentle.” The French word for “sweet.”
They say that I act like her, too. That I think before I speak, that I am careful and precise. We are the sweet ones in the family, the kind ones, the ones with the delicate features; everyone says it’s true.
But they did not know Maman like I knew Maman. And they do not know how strong we can be. Strong as stone. Tough as leather. Prickly as barbed wire.
Maman knew how to survive. I am her daughter, and I know, too.
My uncle falls asleep in his chair most nights. As the weeks and months and years without Maman have passed, he still does not know what to say. But I don’t blame him.
