The Truth Is

by Nonieqa Ramos

  I picture my brain like a car about to go on a road trip. In the trunk go the distractors. Nelly first. Then there’s Danny, who’s going to be waiting for me after class—every class, in fact.

  I hear Blanca’s words from the cemetery again: How about you’re skipping over a few things? Like somebody waiting for you in the hall after class? Like you’re drinking water at the fountain, and he . . .

  Shut up, Blanca. He? She? Shut the hell up, me. Gotta adjust my mirrors.

  Maybe Danny will even want to eat lunch together. Hopefully by lunch they’d already have somebody to sit with. Because our first conversation was maybe the best (I feel a pinch—JK, Blanca, second best) conversation I’ve ever had. I’ll only ruin it if we talk again.

  But what would sitting together mean? What would it look like? It’s one thing to be assigned to Danny. It’s another thing to choose.

  And lately, I’m choosing to be an asshat.

  I always saw myself as a “think outside the box” type of person. But right now I’m feeling a weight, like my mother is sitting on the box and I’m poking holes for air. I don’t know what to think . . . I know what to feel, though. I feel uncomfortable. I feel wrong for feeling uncomfortable.

  The mystery of Danny has to be solved. I have to be solved? And this will be accomplished by . . . showing him the bathroom. That would verify he is a he, and I’m not . . . Damn! I feel like a bigot. First that shit with Nelly. Now this.

  I close my eyes. It’s like I’ve thrown a body in the trunk of my compartmentalized car analogy. But that body got its gag off and it’s screaming, You think you might be a lesbian? Are you a LES-BI-AN? I slam the trunk down tight, but I know my analogy is burrowing through the car seat.

  Time for cruise control. The best way to forget about one problem is to freak out over another. There’s my violin recital tonight. And the teacher asking me to explain the quote, “Everything changes but change itself.” Time to accelerate.

  Vroom.

  Made it through class, didn’t get pulled over, no tickets. Afterward I’ve got some questions for Ms. Mercado about our investigation, so I’m kinda late getting out. Danny’s not there, so I rush on to math to beat the bell. Just in time to catch a wave from Danny as they saunter into their class. How does someone who moves so slow keep getting ahead of me?

  Blanca: Because you’re just running in place.

  After frowning at the ceiling aka Blanca, I motion for Danny to wait up as I apologize for my failure as an orientation buddy.

  “It’s all good,” Danny calls out, their voice reaching me through the talking, sneaker skidding, locker slamming. “For the greater good. I got my bearings! See you at lunch.”

  My heart flutters. Not like a butterfly, like a bird when it accidentally flies into your house and is freaking the hell out. Can he stop saying shit like that? Who says shit like that?

  Blanca: Everybody. When they find the right person to say it to.

  Me: Shut. Up. BLANCA!

  Lunch. Everybody who has it fifth period heads for the bathrooms first. This is when the plot thickens. Because I see Rudy stationed at the bathroom, scrolling on his phone, and I know what his dumb ass is up to. The same thing my dumb ass is up to. I’ve got to know.

  I go into the girls’ restroom and wait in front of the mirror. I feel like I’m in Plato’s cave again. Am I seeing myself or shadows? Who is myself? There is the same girl from yesterday. Long, muscular arms just like my mother’s, made for carrying heavy things. Mami always jokes I’m the best daughter and son she could ever have. Blanca used to always be pissed. You do one push-up and you’ve got a washboard stomach. I got to do seven hundred if I eat one potato chip.

  Blanca had major body dysphoria. I loved her body. Everything about her was soft, her heart-shaped lips that broke me when I thought about her kissing Nando, her hair you could actually run your fingers through, unlike my hair, like a tangle of wires on the brink of an electrical fire. Her skin. You couldn’t see veins through it like mine, like I really have a circuit board under my skin. I wish I could be soft like her, not all angles and lines, muscles and bone.

  I rethink my thoughts like I’m rereading a passage in a book I didn’t get. Ay Dios Mio. I sound like a lesbian.

  Some girls from homeroom and their cheap-ass perfume barge in, their reflections crowding me in the mirror.

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Must be a short circuit. Anyway, my mom will pick us up from track . . .”

  Anyway. Anyway makes me invisible. Anyway gives me license to be—myself? The girls talk without consonants reapplying their lipstick. Compare shin splints. Discuss IcyHot and bacne, exit.

  Am I attracted to these girls? I didn’t think I was. Time for answers. I google: How do you know if you are a lesbian?

  Google’s response: The Ten Ways You Know You Are Going To Hell.

  It sucks when you believe in hell more than you believe in heaven.

  Blanca: You want the answer to who you are to be multiple choice, fool? The answer is a three-part essay question. And remember, there is NO time limit.

  By the time I step outside, everyone is in the cafeteria. Everyone except Danny and Rudy, who is leaning casually against the wall like the neighborhood drug dealer.

  “You emerged from the cave,” says Danny. “Your hair looks—”

  “Crazy, girl,” Rudy says, making a circular motion in the direction of my pelo negro with one finger, texting with another. “You ain’t got no accessories like a brush and comb?”

  Without realizing it, I’ve pulled every strand of hair out of my braid.

  “Natural,” Danny interrupts. “Extremely—natural. I like it.”

  I attempt to contain my hair with my hood. Like one of the grow capsules you submerge in water, it’s grown to three times its size. “You should see it when it’s humid.” Tendrils crawl out of my hood like Jumanji vines.

  “So, I already ate,” Danny says, acknowledging my lengthy bathroom visit, but not blinking at its strangeness. “I brought you a banana. It was the only thing I could get out of the cafeteria.”

  “I know. The cafeteria ladies previously worked in the FBI, I think. No butter roll gets past them. You must be pretty talented.”

  “At stealing plantains? A total phenomenon. I’m auditioning for America’s Got Talent.”

  “Ha!” I say, a grin escaping my face like a prisoner dodging a bullet of the tower guard. “I could audition my amazing expanding hair.”

  “Damn, I want to touch it, but I know better,” Danny says, smacking their hand. “We could be a duo.”

  “What, like I could be a decoy and hide the plantains in my hair? What are you trying to say?” I ask, all mad, even though I’m just playing.

  “I’m sorry. Is that—insulting? I only meant—you could be a distraction. Because your hair is—beautiful.”

  Cheeks is blushing.

  Someone is stomping. We both turn toward Rudy, who’s waving his phone in the air. “Ain’t you gotta go to the bathroom already?”

  “Uh,” I say, shooting Danny a WTF look and throwing Rudy side-eye. “No, I’m good.”

  “Not you!”

  “Dude,” says Danny. “Do you normally monitor that sort of thing?”

  “I mean,” I say, “that’s like sexual harassment, right?”

  “Me? No. I—sexual what?” Rudy hitches up his backpack. “Why everything got to be sexual harassment?” He struts off muttering, “And what sex am I harassing anyway?!”

  I turn back to Danny. “So, where are you headed?”

  Danny hands me their schedule. “PE.”

  “PE!” The locker room cannot be avoided. I will have answers! “I have PE. I’ll walk you to the locker rooms. The boys side is on the left . . .” I avoid their eyes.

  Danny looks straight into mine. “Et tu, Brute?”

  Now it’s my turn to blush. “Oh, no. I—” Can’t talk with my big-ass foot in my mouth. Somehow in the minute that I’ve known
Danny, I’ve befriended and then betrayed them. “I’m so embarrassed.”

  Some random dude: “You should be. Hanging out with that.” The dude shoulder bumps Danny and walks down the hall.

  Danny regains his balance and grabs their schedule back. “I know where I’m heading, Verdad. Do you?”

  7

  The day finally crawls to its conclusion, flails, and dies. I can’t decide if I left for school one person and returned another, or if the real person I am was just exposed.

  Fast forward to the violin recital. Behind heavy burgundy curtains, I’m waiting backstage, finally in a space where I control my reality, where precision, practice, and planning matter. If only life were an instrument you could master with the right balance of control and improv.

  The lights are being adjusted on the stage. Kids are talking smack around me and adjusting their outfits: white blouses and black skirts for the girls, white collared shirts and black slacks for the guys. I ignore the mal de ojo I get from the director when she scans my black slacks.

  I don’t do skirts.

  I own my scar, and nobody is allowed to question or interpret it but me. I used to have this nightmare about cutting it out of my leg. But then of course I had a bigger nastier scar. At the end of the dream, all that was left of me was a scar. If I keep following this train of thought, I’m gonna wreck . . .

  Blanca: You never liked skirts anyhow. Remember THE DRESS MANIFESTO?

  I smile. Blanca used to get so embarrassed when I went off: If girls gotta wear skirts, why don’t guys? Why I gotta wear a bra or I’m a slut? I’ve seen plenty of dudes who could use support bouncing around the track at PE. Why don’t guys gotta worry about being raped ’cause they running around without a shirt? My moms always tells me to close my legs like a lady. But those pendejos on the subway sitting with their legs spread over two seats?

  But back to reality. And thank you, Blanca.

  We all get in our positions on the stage. I scan the props of the production in progress. Blanca and I were the backstage crew at all our middle-school productions. When we did The Wiz, she and her abuela created all the costumes by hand. My moms and I did the sets. Mami kept saying I should audition because, por supuesto, it would show college admissions I was well-rounded. I answered her by eating a big-ass bag of Takis and smacking my culo. Blanca knew my secret though.

  I had auditioned. I tried for the part of the Tin Man. Why shouldn’t the Tin Man be a girl? (Why did I choose the machine? What would I do if I could feel . . .) But my chickenshit self couldn’t get a word out onstage.

  “Take your places, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Ladies. Gentleman. And Danny, I think as the curtain opens and we see all the parents seated in the audience. While the music director does her spiel on the importance of music and where they could send their donations, I think about how Blanca’s abuela used to sit in the audience taking pictures with this ancient camera, filling roll after roll of blur. Her abuela died a few months after Blanca, from a broken heart.

  My violin instructor announces, “Verdad will be playing ‘E Major Partita’ by J. S. Bach—E Major first movement solo.”

  I step into the spotlight that isn’t big enough for my greatness, according to my moms. She’s sitting in the first row, scowling at the arrangement of violin players seated on the stage. Specifically, at who sits in the first and second chair. In middle school, Blanca used to be first chair, me second. Funny but you wouldn’t know there was any white people in this school unless you looked at the violinists. They fill every seat but mine. I guess we POCs are just supposed to play the bongos or something. Not that I have anything against bongos—I love you, Tio Ray! #justsayin.

  Back in middle school, Blanca and I were first and second chair. We were so proud to make the music director choose us. Yes, make. “It’s unavoidable,” he said, sighing. “God, the calls I’m going to get from parents.”

  What little clapping there is dies down. With my bow, I do what I can never do any other way: feel. Like skin is supposed to do. I can’t even get a paper cut without overanalyzing it. Does this hurt? It would hurt most people, so I can determine that it is painful. Therefore, I should react. Freakin ow.

  According to my mother, there is nothing I can’t do. But I know better. I can do quadratic equations, but I can’t figure out how to be a human. Except like this, holding my violin. The violin, like the coffin, is hollow, empty inside, but the emptiness is integral to its purpose.

  Emptiness is space of such sacred design that only death and music can fill it.

  Blanca: Not speech. Speech is just clutter, thoughts scribbled sloppily by the tongue.

  Thank you, Blanca. Note to self: Write that shit down.

  The audience is silent, surprised. I can never cry through my eyes, but I can do it through my fingers. Sadness is something I read like sheet music.

  The auditorium is full, but as always, I play for the empty seat in the house. My father’s. This fact, I know, breaks my mother’s heart. I mean imagine that shit. You bust your ass as a single parent, and your kid treats the absentee parent like a rock star. But love is like water and it slides over the smooth places. Sinks into the cracks.

  My father not showing up is probably better than the real thing. This way the father I imagine high-beams a smile and sheds a tear on cue. He apologizes for not being there for every show, for every moment my mother tried to fill, but only a father could. Emptiness is the fullest thing there is.

  A best friend can’t fill the emptiness, but she can carry it with you. And Blanca would go the distance, even uphill. Blanca shows up and plants herself in my dad’s seat. She and her bow she’s using as a conductor’s wand, her big-ass cherry slushie that’s splattering all over her leotard and white off-the-shoulder fuzzy sweater. Blanca.

  She was the black swan, the swaggering ballerina. She could play the violin like an electric guitar. She danced hiplet. She pissed every teacher off because she refused to follow directions. She was a trial-and-error kind of person. She broke shit. But when she figured things out, she understood things better than the person trying to school her. She was intuitive. Everything I could never be. Now I play for her. For Blanca.

  The air is a low tide and the notes of my violin stud the sand with whorls and wings of shells. The audience scoops up sea glass with their buckets. But Blanca dives in after the elusive conch. And disappears. Someone walks out of the waves and takes her place. I blink.

  My posture, the position of my bow, fingertips, my elbow, tell you nothing. But if you measure my heart rate, my brain waves, you know something happened. That people got up out of their seats to make room for someone who showed up late. That someone is Danny, sitting in their cave listening to the music coming from mine. Really listening. Not the kind of listening most people do where they say, Damn, I wish I could do that. Or Damn, I never knew that loser could do that. Or That girl is on the right track for college. The real kind of listening. The kind of listening that makes you come out of your cave. Danny’s hoodie slips down.

  I blink. I bite my lip, but my fingers don’t waver. They continue to play mathematically, solving note after note. Even when I do the unthinkable: I look through the force field of blinding purple lights straight into Danny’s eyes. For a moment, I play for them.

  By the time I play Bouree, autopilot ends, and I return to my body. I finish Gigue, flourish my bow, and take a bow, squinting in hopes that I can see a reaction from Danny. He is the only person not clapping, though. Not moving. The next violinist prepares her sheet music and Danny stands up. Like dominoes in reverse, people stand up one by one and let them through.

  Why is Danny here? Doesn’t Danny hate my homophobic guts? Could you be a homo and be homophobic? Wait, should I even be thinking the word homo? Queer, is that the right vocab?

  The show ends. We bow. The audience starts clearing out through the clapping. I secure my violin back in her case and make my way to my biggest fan.

  Hot du
de I pissed off the first day of school: “Wow, Maquina, that solo was lit.” He holds out his hand for some dap. I raise my hand in a lukewarm wave. Hot guy forms my hand into a fist and bumps it against his.

  Random girl to random guy: “Can a violin solo be lit?”

  “Verdad,” my moms says, waving her phone in my face, “say hi to your tías! I had them FaceTime in.”

  By the time I am done FaceTiming with my tías, Sujei and Matilde and Clarissa, and mis primos, the auditorium is empty. My moms takes the cell back.

  “Yeah, Sujei. I know. First chair.” Blah blah blah blah. We’re going to be here for at least ten minutes before Mami moves on to the cookies and lemonade in the cafeteria. I want me some nom noms, damn it.

  Two lady custodians wheel a squeaky cart out of a closet. I smile at them and they smile back. I wonder how they’re not scared to death working here at night.

  A minute later I catch something in my peripheral vision. Did someone—Danny—slip into the custodian’s closet?

  I motion to my moms that I’ll be right back and she waves me off. All sorts of racket is happening in the there. The screech of a shelf drags across the tiles. Brooms fall over. It suddenly occurs to me—what if it isn’t Danny?

  I glance at my moms. She’s giving the play-by-play about my dad and tuition. I flag her, but she waves me off. Maybe in the past year I’ve taken the whole “see something say something” drill a bit too far? But this time could be different.

  The custodians are long gone. I’m gonna have to handle this. I approach the closet door. I snap open my violin case and extract the bow.

  “Aha!” I shout, I’m not sure why, as I whip the door open and brandish my bow back and forth.

  “Ow ow ow!” Danny shrieks, taking a step back.

  I lower my bow. “I’m so sorry! I thought—”

  “Just for clarification. You came in here armed with a violin bow?”

  “Don’t judge me.”

  “I won’t as long as you don’t judge me.” Danny grabs a roll of toilet paper, checks if the coast is clear like in a cartoon and bolts out the door into the hall.