We Never Asked for Wings

by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

  Letty pulled herself away from the window. The room was quiet, Luna’s body still. Searching the bedroom, she found a blanket and brought it to the couch, wrapping it tightly around Carmen and extracting Luna from her arms.

  She turned out the light.

  “Call me if you need anything,” Letty whispered as she turned to go. She scrawled her number on a piece of paper. “I’ll bring her home. I promise.”

  Carmen turned over to face the wall, her assent barely audible.

  —

  All the lights were on at Letty’s house, a tiny flame against a dark horizon. At first she thought she’d forgotten to turn them off, having left in a rush, but when she pulled Luna up the driveway she saw both Wes’s and Rick’s cars, parked side by side. She hadn’t spoken to either one of them since the Christmas party, but when she got the call about Alex she’d called them both immediately, and now they were here. Before, it would have sent her into a panic, seeing their cars together, but she’d exhausted all her emotions visiting Alex, and then Carmen. Numbly, she followed Luna up the stairs.

  The house smelled like ginger. Not the intense, sticky sweetness of Rick’s ginger syrup, but something hot and wholesome. She smelled onions too, and carrots. In the kitchen Rick stirred a pot of soup; Wes sat at the table, blowing on the top of a shallow bowl and talking into his cell phone.

  When Luna saw Rick she burst into tears. From the moment Letty had picked her up from school she’d sealed her lips in a straight line, holding on to her mother and then Carmen in a display of strength Letty hadn’t recognized until she collapsed into Rick’s arms. He lifted her up, pressing her face tight into his neck and rocking her in rhythm with his stirring.

  “Shh, shh, shh, shh,” he hushed. He pointed to Wes and then put a finger to his lips. “Wes will get him out.”

  “Are you sure?” she sob-whispered.

  “I’m sure,” Rick said, but when he looked at Letty she could tell he was not sure. He was just as scared as she was. Turning back to his soup, he dipped a finger in the pot, rubbing it on Luna’s lips like orange lipstick. She licked it off, opening her mouth for more.

  Letty sat down at the table. Who are you talking to? she mouthed.

  Mr. Everett, Wes mouthed back. He was nodding slowly, tapping his spoon against his bowl. “I know,” he said. Letty listened to Wes’s half of the conversation. “He is, thank you,” and “Yes, I’ll tell her,” and then, after a long silence, he confirmed something on Thursday and said good-bye.

  With a sigh, he set down the phone.

  “Wow,” Rick said, filling three bowls of soup and then sitting down beside Wes. “That sounded intense.”

  “He feels terrible,” Wes said wearily.

  “Well, he should.” It was Mr. Everett who had alerted the principal, when he’d realized that not only had his keys gone missing but his computer had gone from powered off to on in the dead of night.

  “He never would have made the call if he’d known it was Alex,” Wes said. “He would have taken care of it himself.”

  “That doesn’t help us now.”

  “That’s what I told him.”

  Rick placed a bowl of soup in front of Letty. Despite a full day of nausea and feeling like she would never be able to eat anything ever again, she lifted a spoonful of the steaming liquid to her lips. Traveling down, it warmed her mouth, her throat, her chest, and she took another spoonful, and then a third.

  Wes picked up his bowl and drank the rest of his soup before continuing. “He’ll talk to the principal, and he’ll do everything he can to block an expulsion. He wanted me to tell you that. We have to be there on Thursday at eight A.M. for a meeting.”

  “Alex too?”

  Wes nodded. There was a long pause, each of them counting the days until Thursday and trying to determine the likelihood Alex would be released by then.

  “He’ll be out,” Letty said, trying to sound more confident than she felt. “By law he has to be in front of a judge within seventy-two hours.”

  Letty glanced up at Rick, who squeezed Luna and nodded. He would pick her up in the morning and take her to school. Letty didn’t even have to ask. She felt a flood of relief as Rick stood to refill Luna’s bowl, and then Wes’s.

  “Thanks,” Wes said. He took the soup and met Rick’s eyes, and Letty felt something pass between the two men that hadn’t been there at Christmas. Whether they had talked about her before she’d arrived she didn’t know, but what she did know was this: none of it mattered anymore.

  It felt like being inside a movie Maria Elena wouldn’t let him watch. The dark, winding corridors, the armed escorts, the bored, lecturing judge. Statistics say you’ll offend again, he said: don’t. The way the judge said it, Alex knew he didn’t actually care if he did or if he didn’t. The judge was simply reading a script, saying the things that were expected of him, and Alex did the same, Yes, Your Honor, yes, Your Honor, I understand, Your Honor. In the gallery, Letty sat on her hands, the muscles in her jaw clenched. From across the room Alex could almost feel the dull ache in her jaw growing as she willed herself to keep her mouth closed.

  When it was over, and the next court date was set, Letty burst through the low, swinging door and grabbed Alex by the hand. His probation officer wanted a word, but Letty dragged him toward the exit.

  “You can say whatever you want to say under the clear blue sky,” she told him, and both Alex and the officer had to skip to keep up, barely making it into the elevator before she pressed the button to close the doors.

  The outside light shocked Alex’s dilated eyes. There hadn’t been a window anywhere in the entire unit; in bed at night, he had lain on his back, blowing a current of air over his upper lip and imagining a breeze. To calm himself he’d recited the birds in alphabetical order, and now here they were to greet him: a hungry band of rock doves, the incessant knock of a woodpecker in a tall tree. He watched a red-rumped house finch dance around a scraggly nest as the officer reviewed the terms of his release.

  When he asked if they had any questions, Letty demanded Alex’s backpack.

  “He’s a straight-A student,” she said, and even though it wasn’t true anymore—he’d been suspended for five days, and would likely be expelled—he felt a tiny glimmer of hope, that the mistake he’d made, as enormous as it was, might not be the end of life as he knew it.

  “They’ll have it at intake,” the officer said, guiding them back through the main building. “You have to sign for his release.”

  At the desk, Alex took the mesh bag they handed him. It smelled like Yesenia’s perfume, and his stomach lurched, remembering them pressed together in the back of the police car, her long hair fluttering wildly in the blast of the heater and Yesenia unable to push it from her face, her wrists locked behind her back. She’d been pulled from the car first, and if she’d tried to turn around, to wave or whisper, Alex hadn’t seen it. Watching her being led into the girls’ unit, he’d folded in half and heaved onto the hard plastic floor.

  With relief, he watched his mother retrieve a change of clothes from her oversize purse. He couldn’t have survived putting the Yesenia-perfumed clothes back on. She thrust them into his hands and nodded to the bathroom.

  “Go change,” she said. “I’ll fill this out.”

  When he returned, Letty was wearing his backpack. She’d stuck his release forms into the round outside pocket, where the water bottle should have gone.

  “Ready?” she asked and turned to walk away, but Alex shook his head no.

  “I want to see Yesenia.”

  Her name stuck in the back of his throat, a great ball of sadness that made it hard to swallow, and even harder to breathe.

  The young woman behind the desk didn’t look up from her computer. “You talking about that little girl came in with you?”

  Alex watched his mother’s eyebrows lift. He stepped forward to respond, before his mother could.

  “Yesenia Lopez-Vazquez,” he said. “Can I see her? Do you know w
hen she’s going to court?”

  “I know everything,” the woman said. She adjusted her badge and pulled a nail file from a drawer, still not looking up. “But unless you’re her papa, I can’t tell you anything.”

  Letty made a noise of exasperation. She’d spent the past seventy-two hours calling everyone she could think of, she’d told Alex, but hadn’t gotten any further than this. Now she put both hands on the woman’s desk, demanding. “Look,” she said. “It’s a public courthouse. No one can stop us from sitting there all day long.”

  “You go sit there, then,” the woman said. Her eyes darted to the guard by the door, a glance that said something specific and nothing good. He whistled low, and she nodded. “You go ahead and sit, sit, sit.”

  “What? What happened to her?” Everything he’d been trying not to think about hit Alex at once; the girls behind these walls, most of them locked up for violence, and Yesenia among them. Anger and frustration propelled him toward the desk, his face so close he could smell the grease in the woman’s hair. In one swift motion, Letty pulled him back. When he looked up there was genuine fear in her eyes, and he thought about what the judge had said about him reoffending. From the moment he’d been arrested he’d felt like a different person. The worst had already happened. There was no reason to try to be good ever again.

  Letty looked at him hard, as if searching for the Alex she knew. He stepped back and closed his eyes, trying to calm himself.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I apologize.”

  The woman looked up then, surprised, and she might have said something, if another PO hadn’t stepped out of the storage room just then. Alex recognized her from his unit—she’d been working the desk when Letty came to visit, and she held his mother’s gaze as she led Alex swiftly to the door.

  “She isn’t here anymore,” she said quietly. She pushed the door open and stepped outside. “I’m sorry. ICE came for her days ago.”

  —

  Alex didn’t even have to ask her. Letty ran so fast to the parking lot that he struggled to keep up. Clicking Rick’s car unlocked, she jumped in and backed out even before Alex had closed the passenger door, one eye on the rearview mirror and the other on Alex’s phone. She’d looked up the address for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in San Francisco and was trying to find directions as she pulled out onto the road.

  The street around the courthouse was clogged, food trucks lining up on the curb and pedestrians crossing the traffic for snacks. Letty wove in and out of the lanes without ever taking her eyes off the directions.

  “Where is she?” Alex asked. Letty’s urgency made him start to panic. “What’s happening?”

  She thrust the phone into his hands and accelerated onto the freeway. “Look up immigration attorneys,” she said. “We need one today.”

  “But we don’t have any money.”

  “We have money.” Unless his mother had won the lottery in the three days he’d been locked up, that wasn’t true, but Alex didn’t argue. It was true that they were at that very moment driving a new-model Highlander and would go home to their house in Mission Heights. They might not have money, but they were now the kind of people who could find it in an emergency. And this was an emergency.

  Alex typed immigration attorney SF into the search field. “There are millions in San Francisco.” He held up the phone while Letty scanned the list.

  “Try the first and keep going until you find someone available now.”

  Before he could dial, the phone began to vibrate in his hand. He didn’t recognize the number. “Someone’s calling.”

  Letty nodded, and Alex accepted the call, holding it up to her ear.

  “Hello?” A noise came through the phone, loud and high-pitched, that Alex could hear all the way from where he sat. “Hello?” his mother said, louder. “Hello? Who is this?”

  She grabbed the phone and pressed it harder into her ear, so that whatever it was the person said next Alex couldn’t hear.

  “Slow down,” Letty said, and then she said something in Spanish, and Alex knew it was Carmen.

  He shook Letty’s shoulder. “What’s happening?”

  Letty swatted his hand away, a look of complete concentration on her face. She was in the fast lane, but they were slowing down. Honking cars passed her on the right. Without looking over her shoulder she changed lanes, one and two and then three, slowing until she sat idling on the gravel shoulder. She said something else in Spanish that Alex couldn’t understand, and then hung up the phone.

  Leaning her head onto the steering wheel, she set off her own horn, but she didn’t lift her head.

  Alex pulled her back.

  “Tell me what’s happening. What’s going on?”

  “Yesenia called Carmen.”

  A flood of joy was replaced almost immediately by fear. “How is she? Where is she?”

  Letty exhaled, long and slow.

  “I have no idea how she is,” she said finally. “She’s in Virginia.”

  —

  He’d taken a horrific situation and made it exponentially worse. Instead of being bullied, Yesenia had been picked up by la migra. All the way back to their house, Alex fought the urge to throw himself out the car door and into oncoming traffic. He’d done this to her; it was one hundred percent his fault. Through a silent dinner he tortured himself by thinking about all the things he should have done instead: he should have made her tell her mother what was happening to her; he should have told Letty, or Wes, or Mr. Everett. He should have insisted they move back to the Landing, so that he could go to school at Bayshore High with her. He tried to imagine himself walking through the low-ceilinged, dirty halls of the cinder-block buildings, Yesenia’s protector. But he’d loved his science class almost as much as he loved Yesenia. As much as he wanted to help her, he’d never seriously considered giving up his education.

  And now Yesenia was gone, and he’d lost it anyway.

  —

  At seven the next morning, Wes knocked on the door. He was wearing a suit and tie. Alex had rarely seen him in anything but scrubs, and it made him even more nervous, the care his father had taken to prepare himself for their meeting with Principal Daniels. Avoiding his father’s eyes, Alex tucked in the too-small white shirt he hadn’t worn since the last day of eighth grade and ducked around his embrace, sinking into the backseat of Wes’s car.

  He stared out the window as Wes drove them all to Mission Hills and parked in front of the school. The first bell had already rung, and Alex kept his head down as he led his parents through the halls to the principal’s office, afraid to see anyone he knew.

  In the office, Letty signed in and the secretary ushered them into the waiting room. Alex was surprised to hear Mr. Everett’s voice. He should have been in class, but instead he’d left his students to work alone. Jeremy’s lead scientist this hour, Alex pictured him saying as he walked out the door. Sadness lodged in his throat as he imagined all the other kids in the classroom, hard at work on their projects without him.

  The door to the principal’s office was cracked open; his parents sat side by side on the bench in the waiting room, but Alex got as close as he could to the door without being seen.

  His teacher was pleading. Before he could make out any of the words, he could hear it in his voice. Alex leaned closer, listening.

  “It’s an expellable offense,” Mr. Daniels said. “More than one, actually. Theft, breaking and entering, tampering with data. I just don’t see how I can not expel him, politically.”

  “What do you mean politically? This isn’t about politics. It’s about a kid’s future. A good kid.”

  “I believe you,” Mr. Daniels said. “But I’ve been fielding calls from concerned parents all week—and most of them are parents of kids in your honors class.”

  “Mrs. Burke.”

  Mrs. Burke was Rachel’s mom. Rachel’s project on processing style and standardized test scores had won fourth place. If Alex were eliminated, Rach
el would compete in his place. Of course Mrs. Burke would be “concerned.”

  “She wasn’t the only one.”

  There was a rustling of papers, as if Mr. Daniels was looking for his call log, but Mr. Everett stopped him. “You don’t need to tell me the others. Ahmed, Chen, Coker—although Jeremy didn’t have a chance, and he knows it.”

  There was a long silence, punctuated by a sigh and then Mr. Daniels’s voice. “I’ll be honest with you. I don’t want to expel him. But the kid has broken the law. He needs to understand the consequences of his action. If I’m going to recommend to the panel he not be expelled, I need to come up with another way to make him suffer.”

  “There’s something else you can do.”

  Alex’s stomach dropped, waiting, as Mr. Daniels waited, for Mr. Everett to continue. Finally, he spoke.

  “Force him to withdraw his project from the science fair. Believe me, he’ll feel the pain. And the parents who are pressuring you will back off.”

  Alex stood stunned, his knees weak, unable to believe the words he’d just heard. How could Mr. Everett do this to him? He’d rather be homeschooled and continue to work on his project than withdraw. It was the only thing left for him to care about. Inside the office, the conversation continued, something about additional punishment—a suspension, community service hours, tutoring—and then Mr. Everett walked out.

  Without thinking, Alex started to run. Mr. Everett called after him, but he kept running, out the office door, down the hall, through the quad, and all the way to the gym before Mr. Everett caught up with him. He was yelling Alex’s name over and over, and when Alex wouldn’t stop Mr. Everett grabbed hold of his white collar and pushed him against the wall. He held him there with both hands on his shoulders, and Alex didn’t realize he was crying until he felt his teacher’s breath on his wet face.

  “Jesus, Alex. Stop.”

  Alex wiped his face, embarrassed. He knew he was overreacting. But it wasn’t just the science project; it was everything.

  “Get off me,” he said, pushing Mr. Everett away. He ducked behind a fire escape, wedging himself between the wall and a metal ladder, away from the curious eyes of the passing students.