The Truth Is

by Nonieqa Ramos

  Here’s another assumption about math: that it has to suck as much as it does with Ms. Belle. I wish she could teach me right before bed so I could actually sleep. I mean just because she can do some math, she can teach? How can anyone make Zeno’s paradox freakin boring?

  I am slipping into a vegetative state with these math packets. “Oh my God, can you give us some kind of application of this? Architecture? Engineering? Poetry?”

  I mean the poetry of differential calculus. Calculating points in time and space. The infinite movement we make in time, moving forward, but never reaching zero. Integral calculus, where we don’t head to zero—we head to fucking infinity, man. Get as close as we can. But again we never get there. Because in nature we never get an absolute. Absolutes are bullshit.

  I think I am having an epiphany. I think tomorrow I will be wearing a fedora and suspenders.

  The class falls dead silent. Ms. Belle whips open her book and tears a page, which I know, symbolically, is my asshole. “Oh,” she mumbles, “I can give you a problem.”

  Me, a little quieter this time: “I mean Pythagoras—what did people do before textbooks and worksheets?”

  “You know what?” She slams both palms on her desk, looking like she’s going to pounce. “How about you present a brain teaser to open up the class for the next few weeks?”

  “Me? I have enough homework already. I don’t want your job.”

  “That’s it, Verdad.” She spins her chair with maximum centrifugal force. “Outside.”

  I step out in the hall. Without all the warm bodies generating heat, it’s as cold as a tomb. Miss Belle is not in a rush to join me. Being an outsider peeking into the classroom window, I feel like I’m in a dream. Is this what it’s like to be dead?

  The door whips open and slams shut. “I have had it with you!”

  “To be honest,” I say, backing up from her egg-and-bacon-infused wrath, “I’ve had it with me too.”

  Miss Belle rolls her eyes. “Listen! I brought you out here to let you know, I believe you. You need instruction I cannot provide. So, you’re going to cut the crap with the erratic grades. Next semester you’re going into an Honors class.”

  “I am?”

  “Yes, you are. Because if not, I’ve got your mother on speed-dial. And I’m recommending you for the math team.” Miss Belle slaps a folder into my hands. “Here’s the work you’ll be doing to prepare. You can set up your office in the back. That is, when you are not peer tutoring.”

  Ms. Belle takes a breath and, I swear, skips back into the classroom, slamming the door on my fate. Damn it, my mother will be so proud!

  The rest of the morning my schedule is as follows:

  Period 2: Autopilot. (2,4,6,8, everything white people ever did was great!) Danny!

  Period 3: Something, something, something. (Faulkner.) Danny!

  Period 4: Biology. Here I am totally focused. Just not on the biology of the cell.

  Lunch!!!!!!

  I step into the doorway and stop short. Our cafeteria in middle school was a cold, concrete, fluorescent bat cave. This cafeteria is more like a café. We are surrounded by windows and sunlight.

  “Hey, you okay?”

  “Sorry!” I turn around too fast and Danny and I are almost nose-to-nose. “Whoops! It’s just light. And loud. And—”

  “Extremely close. I get it.” He pulls down my hoodie. “We can do this.”

  Danny gently ushers me to the food line where I achieve a plate of tacos. We’re babbling about whether you can have a side of French fries with a taco until we’re drowned out by the scolding going on at the register. A basketball-tall chinito—boy?—girl?—PERSON is getting bawled out by the cafeteria lady. Out of the person’s coat comes bananas. Lots and lots of them.

  I can’t help but stare as I fill my tray with the least offensive mass-produced items: strawberry milk, cheese quesadillas, fruit salad with almonds. “Dude must need his potassium.”

  Danny just looks down, his ears turning red.

  “Now you’re blushing. And I don’t know why but—”

  “You like it?”

  I smirk. More than our lunch is getting put on the table.

  Danny slides in across from me and takes a meat-eater’s chunk out of a massive cheeseburger. I prepare myself to eat, sticking a straw in the milk I would normally chug.

  “So,” he says, chewing with his mouth partially open, then swallowing, “I decided we shouldn’t talk.”

  I slice triangles of quesadillas into smaller triangles—that I would normally just shove into my face. I catch a triangle before it flies off the plate. “Okay.”

  Danny lifts an eyebrow as he watches me almost shove the straw from my drink up my nose. Because I’m cool like that.

  “Yeah,” he says, licking mayo off the side of his lip, “that way we don’t have to think anything up.”

  “Mmm hmm,” I say, watching Danny pause and examine my utensils. He picks up a knife and fork and starts chainsawing his burger.

  I crack up laughing. “Dude, no offense but what are you doing? Who does that?” I say as I’m eating strawberries with a fork.

  He laughs. I laugh.

  “I’ll lay down my weapons if you lay down yours. One, two, three!”

  At the same time, we both lower our forks and knives. Both pick up our respective hamburger and quesadilla and take a bite. Both laugh and manage not to spit out most of our food.

  Somehow our silence becomes a mixture of mirror-me and pantomime. We don’t talk the whole rest of the meal, but we laugh the entire time. By the time the day ends and I go home, I’m laughing at things I couldn’t explain to anyone but Blanca. At things she could only tell me, before Fernando came along. I laugh to myself the whole way home. As it turns out, this is a great way to get everyone on the bus to sit somewhere else.

  I don’t sleep that night, but for different reasons than the usual. The usual being, feeling cold, weightless. Irregular. On an indeterminate point in time and space. My mother is Zeno trying to solve my irregularity—with her insertion of box after box after box of prepackaged notions of success. Subtracting my irregularity to get me as close as she can to something determinate, quantifiable.

  I still felt weightless. But this time I’m not hovering, lifeless. This time I feel like I’m flying.

  10

  I wake up before my alarm and even make my bed. I still dress basic but decide to add a bright blue bow tie. I chug OJ from the container and actually taste it going down. Ahhhh. Toss some bread into the toaster and sit at the table. Maybe I’ll even read the news. My toast pops up.

  “Don’t even think I won’t, muthafucka!!!”

  I topple off my chair. “Ay Dios Mio!”

  From my mother’s door frame: “Verdad?”

  Whimpering from the floor: “Mami?”

  Unison: “Oh shit!”

  Unison: “What are you doing up?”

  Me: “Why do you have a chainsaw?”

  My mother’s hand lowers the chain saw with one hand, her other is across her palpitating heart.

  “I mean the bat was one thing!” I lay my hands on the table, breathe in deep, and try to get my bearings. Look up. “Does that chainsaw even work?”

  Chainsaw: Vvvvvvvvvrah Vvvvrah Vvvvra Herrrrr!

  My whole body is shaking down to my molecules. “Cortar la mierda! Para!” I ease myself back into my chair. My throat is thin as a drinking straw. I don’t need to duck, I don’t need to run. “Where did you get that?”

  She lays the chainsaw by the coffee pot. “Home Depot. They were fifty percent off.”

  “You want to tell me why a chainsaw?” My scar throbs like a rabbit heart.

  “There’s been homeless people seen in the neighborhood.”

  “Damn. And you were going to build them a home?”

  “Verdad, Roberta Chavez said she saw them casing the neighborhood.”

  Because of my moms I know how to plaster a hole, drop a ceiling. But I guess there’s
a big difference between making someone a table and inviting them to sit at your own. “Jesus, I hope I’m never homeless.”

  “Verdad!”

  “I meant it in prayer.” I kneel. “Dear Jesus, I hope—”

  Steaming coffee in hand, my moms retreats into her bedroom, aka the weapons arsenal, mumbling about El Diablo. I butter my toast. Retreat to my room. Spend more time than I care to say smoothing and securing my hair into braids. Untwining and unintentionally frizzing my hair. Thinking I probably split ends doing it. Cutting to undo the damage in my hair, in my brain, in my life.

  ……

  Can’t remember the last time I felt happy like this. I know I shouldn’t be. Feels like if I’m happy, I’m dissin Blanca.

  Blanca: You dis me thinking like that. I want you to smile. Smile like when you got to try on the jacket of one of the Sharks in our production of West Side Story. You spun in front of the mirror singing, “Boy, boy, crazy boy—Get cool, boy!”

  I smile despite myself.

  Until I see that security is circling the campus.

  Nobody is huddled up outside, warming their hands and talking and vaping before class. My eyes register the track team running toward the school gym but my brain processes kids running away from gunfire. I crouch in the middle of the sidewalk because if I don’t, I’m going to hyperventilate and pass out.

  The security guard circles again and pulls over.

  “Young lady,” he says, jogging over. “You okay?”

  I nod because I hate that question. Admitting I’m not okay makes me feel sicker than not actually feeling okay. My mother goes to work if she hasn’t slept, eaten, or recovered from the plague.

  I will get up. Eventually.

  The guard radios for the nurse. I’m escorted to a gurney in the nurse’s office and hydrated with Gatorade.

  “You feeling better, honey?” Nurse Xu asks. “You look green.”

  “Yup. Just. Must have a bug or something. Just need . . . some ibuprofen—” Like a robot, I reach in the backpack I’m still wearing, pull out a giant bottle, and watch my shaking hands drop the entire thing on the floor. The red circles spray like blood. I stare, trying to will them back to being pills.

  My eye twitches. A nerve like a loose wire vibrates under my skin. Like curtains, I close my eyes to darken my mind and just breathe.

  I feel a pressure on the gurney. The nurse is beside me.

  With my eyes still closed: “I hate medical offices of every kind.” I got the flu really bad about eight months after Blanca left me. My moms had to carry me kicking and screaming to the doctor.

  I don’t want my history interpreted. Don’t want to be asked if I’m suicidal. Don’t want some doctor judging me because I have a bullet wound like I was the one who shot the gun.

  But the nurse just sits there. “I understand. Maybe you could just use a minute.”

  I turn toward the voice of Nurse Xu and I blink in surprise because I realize I have never seen a chinita(?) lady up this close. I mean there are plenty of chinitos in the barrio, but the only other one I’ve ever met was that shop owner chasing me and Blanca out of the Hello Kitty store.

  Me and Blanca were always jerks to that lady in the Hello Kitty store and, really, all Asians. We used to pretend to work in a nail salon with heavy Korean/Chinese/Asian? accents.

  If you only meet one person, and say that person is a Korean, and say that person is an asshat, than that’s why you think all Koreans may be asshats. Pero like it is statistically ridiculous to think one asshat means everybody else who looks like them is an asshat. Your sample is flawed. You need like thousands of people to realize what was obvious to begin with. You are being the asshat. Or more to the point: I. AM. AN ASSHAT. I decide we need more math. Statistics will save us all from being racist asshats.

  “I have to go.” I slide off the table. I am covered in sweat. For the first time, I thank God for PE because I know I’m not the only one who’s gonna smell ratchet.

  “You think maybe we should call someone?”

  Hell to the NO. If I was going to interrupt my mother at work something better be broken or vomit better be involved.

  “You know what,” Nurse Xu says. “Maybe you could talk to someone here?” She pats my hands again. Her skin is soft and cool. “We’ve got a new counselor now! Ms. Quinones . . .”

  “Nooooooooooooo.” That’s all I need right now. Mami thinking I’m losing it. When I was a kid we didn’t have no mental health. Work hard. Go to college. Then you can have all the mental health you want.

  I chug the rest of the Gatorade bottle and head out past the office. Past the reason the security guard was circling the building.

  The office gossip explains the security guard.

  Annie and Brooke—White Girls 1 and 4—threw down. A beef over the rally for Nelly. Annie went to the rally.

  I make a mad dash for my locker. I don’t want another subplot now. An obstacle to my happiness. I am not asking for fairytale happiness either. I just want to sit in the cafeteria and have lunch with—a friend? a crush?—and not on a toilet.

  Is happiness just bait to lure you through life? Can happiness have longevity? Or is it like bubble gum? You chew on it, suck all the sweetness out. Someone bursts your bubble, or you blow too big a bubble and end up with it stuck all over your face.

  In homeroom, Nelly’s chair has been removed. Everyone is bunched in groups and the gossip is flying. Ms. Moore is not jotting her agenda on the board, but instead leaning on the lip of the board, watching and waiting like a lifeguard after a shark sighting. Danny is, of course, not here and I’m feeling like the fish with the hook stuck through its lip. Blanca’s desk is way in the back by the closet.

  I make it a point to give everybody a searing mal de ojo as I drag the desk back to its spot, making a horrendous screech the whole way. Everybody looks away except Frida. Pink-haired girl taps on Frida’s shoulder and they both get involved in a private convo. I know from their side-glances, it somehow involves me.

  Once I sit down next to Blanca’s desk, I expect the familiar vibration and hum of comfort, as if she’s the driver, I am the passenger, and we’re sitting in the fine leather of a two-seater—and anybody else can just take the bus. I remember Fernando and Bambi talking about getting their driver’s licenses so they could pick us up at our front doors. Where has that memory been buried till now?

  “Imagine me pulling up to Blanca’s house in a Porsche! I’d honk the horn, and she’d come running.”

  “My dude, that’s terrible. You don’t make a girl come running. You got to be suave.”

  “Okay, Mr. Suave, lay it out.”

  “Aight. I’d put on like her favorite song, let the car idle. Knock on the door and walk her to her ride so she hears the lyrics as she comes down the steps.”

  “Okay, that’s suave, breh.”

  Blanca and me overheard those dorks talking in stage crew. Blanca made me casually mention her favorite song so he’d be playing the right one in the fantasy, even though ain’t none of us had cars in reality.

  The memory threatens to run me over, but it’s like the thought of Danny jumps out and pushes me out the way. Danny makes me step outside myself. Or outside my suffering? Do I have a self without suffering? The truth is, the memory and me are both me.

  I feel eyes on my neck. I don’t know if I’m hearing the words “crazy” and “freak” because someone is whispering it or my own consciousness is accusing itself. I know how people see me. I know I should be humiliated at how I act. How I lose control. I should be embarrassed. I once took a selfie of myself pulling out my hair so I could shame myself into stopping. But shame isn’t a cure for anything.

  The bell rings. The bells. My body stands up like I’m operating heavy machinery on Benadryl. Danny being absent has plummeted me to the pit of hopelessness even though I know how stupid that is to think a person I just met is responsible for my happiness. Especially a dude(?).

  The thing is, what would life
be like if, IDK, I just shaved my head? Maybe I’d cut phantom hairs. What would life be like if I sat in one chair?

  I know the answer. No matter how much I blink and reset the channel, there Blanca will sit sipping her never-ending slushy, sprinkling cherry juice on herself like always.

  You could do an exorcism for a bad spirit. But a good one that’s not ready to leave or you’re not ready to let go, can’t be banished. If I banished her, I’d banish me. Blanca is my phantom heart.

  Period 4: The Genius Hour! Once a week in biology we get to work on a project of our choosing that integrates science with another subject like philosophy (Moms: “You know why all them philosophers in those pictures is wearing sheets? Because they can’t afford no clothes, mija!”) and poetry (“Well, it’s a good thing you know how to play the violin. Pero you can have a big case for people to toss quarters when you’re living in the street.”)

  I am obsessed with the concept of change . . . #irony. In physics, the law of the conservation of energy states that the total energy of any closed system remains constant—“conserved,” or unchanged over time. My love for Blanca was a constant. Science calls it a closed system, I call it paradise. But with middle school, the system was opened, with Fernando Zarrin, Bambi Lopez, and a night out that made it night forever.

  Ms. Mercado is sitting on her desk. “Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It transforms from one state to another.”

  Knowing that there is a science to love consoles me. What greater energy is there than love? Especially the love between friends? “But what about hate?”

  Ms. Mercado: “What is hate?”

  “I’ve seen hate.” Hate, I learned afterward, was six-five, 180 pounds, blond hair, blue-eyed. “I’ve heard hate.”

  The sound of gunfire is coming from the movie playing in the adjacent theater. Right?

  The screams sound so real.

  “Can hate be transformed into love?” asks Ms. M.

  “People always talk about hate being an inverse of love. You know, light is love and dark is hate. But that’s colonial bullshit. Hate stands in its own category. Its own genus. Hate is not an inverse of love. It’s an absence.”