The Truth Is

by Nonieqa Ramos

  “What Danny looks like—who Danny is—ain’t a costume!” I feel like I’m lecturing my mother as much as myself. “Open your mind—”

  “This isn’t about Danny.” She reaches behind her and turns off the stove. “This is about you and your future. No one else. I know who you can become. And it’s not gonna be some dyke. It was bad enough with boy-crazy Blanca putting all kinds of ideas into your head about romance. But this?”

  “First of all, Blanca did not put things in my head. My head isn’t just a hole.” No. Blanca expanded my mind. Mapped the unchartered terrain in my hemispheres. We were two girls on the moon. Fuck gravity. “Second, ‘being some dyke’ is not an idea.” (I don’t think.)

  Mami grabs my hands, looks at the ink, leads me back to the kitchen table. Sits me down. “I’m sorry. Sorry for Blanca. Sorry for your father. I can’t fix those things, but I can fix this. Mija,” she says, dropping my hands and squatting in front of me. “You got enough shit on your plate. It’s gonna be one year in a few days. You don’t need any more complications.”

  “I need to be happy. Happiness is the best complication there is.”

  “That.” She points to my room. “Whatever that was all about is not going to make you happy.” My mother rises, goes back to the sink. She rinses a colander of beans in the sink. Whatever hope I have of changing her mind goes down the drain. She pours the rinsed beans into the pan. Turns her head and throws enough shade to goose-pimple my arms. “Never again, Verdad. Not in my house.”

  Her house. I head to my room. Which is really my mother’s room. My heart feels homeless.

  11

  I think I actually slept last night. It felt good to submerge. I don’t remember dreaming. It’s like my thoughts are too hard for my subconscious mind to decode, my reality a symbol of a symbol making everything mean everything and everything mean nothing.

  Morning comes and I waste way too much time staring into a clouded mirror. I rush to throw on deodorant and dress when I start hearing a beeping coming from the front of the house. Somebody’s alarm’s probably going off. Shit. I’m going to miss the bus. The beeping comes again, and out of curiosity and annoyance I look through the peephole of the front door.

  My tía Sujei is standing on the stoop about to impale the doorbell with her long pointy claws. Shit. My moms called a family intervention.

  A badge showing her position as a professor at the community college flutters on what can only be called a bosom. A red scarf she picked up in Spain trails from her neck like a flame.

  I grab my backpack and open the door. We kiss, we hug, we say what the fuck. I roll my eyes and follow her to the sidewalk. Slide into the passenger seat of her car.

  “This is overkill, no?” I shift my seat back to make room for my sprawling legs and buckle up. Her seat is almost up to the steering wheel, her legs are so short.

  “Escúchame!” She pulls the car off the curb and onto the street. Bonk. “I personally do not share the same position as my sister. You can be a lesbian. I don’t give a shit. But date a girl in remedial everything? A girl who has no one wondering where they are at night?”

  Shit. Titi Sujei is a spy.

  “Danny is a guy.”

  “Danny has a vagina.”

  I blush three shades of red. “So what?”

  Sujei adjusts her heavy black glasses so her eyes can bore into my soul. I assume her third eye is the one paying attention to the road. “Don’t you want a family? Children?”

  “Jesus. For real? Not right now! And hold up. I’m so confused. All my life my mother tells me ‘Don’t get pregnant.’ Now suddenly it’s ‘Don’t I want to have a family’?”

  “Your mom wants the best for you. Your mom—” She interrupts herself and sings to Old time Jose Feliciano crooning his eternal love out her stereo. “Your mom worked two jobs to get you from Section 8 housing into the projects. From the projects into your little house. All so you could be safe. So you could have a chance. Despite her sacrifice, giving up pursuing her own career, her own dreams, September 15 happened. She almost lost you. Not just to bullets.”

  Sujei grabs my hand and holds it. It has been pulling out my hair. A clump of it falls onto the seat.

  “And here we are a year almost to the day.” She kisses my hand and releases it. Flips the finger to someone who honks at her. “Life throws enough punches. You don’t need to punch your own self in the face. You’ve been through so much already. It’s hard to be a Boricua. A woman. Smart. And you want to add lesbian—or whatever—to that?”

  That’s nineteenth century cross-dressing lesbian Boricua to you, I want to say. Yes, my fedora is in my backpack. And maybe a cravat.

  “You know, I hate to point this out to you, but what if you’re not a lesbian? You’re only fifteen. What do you know? But once you cross that line everybody is gonna think they know you. Before you even know yourself.”

  She does have a point. I’m not sure I’m ready to call myself a—dyke. Dyke is the closest word I can come up with to explain me to me. What does that word even mean? I google the origin of dyke.

  Dyke: Unknown origin. Dike. Earthwork, trench.

  Dyke is a dumb word. How is that even an insult? Why not just call someone an end table? You fucking end table! Don’t be an end table.

  “I mean what’s with the cross-dressing?” says Sujei. “I get gay, but a gay girl can still look like a girl. A gay guy can look like a guy. Unless you’re in a rock band, what’s with the makeup? Why so fucking complicated?”

  I don’t have an answer. Is Danny experimenting with gender? Am I? He the control, me the variable, and vice-versa. Could he decide tomorrow that he’s a she and she is—a lesbian? Which would make me a lesbian. Right now he’s a guy, so he is like—heterosexual? In which case, even if he has a vagina, that still makes me heterosexual?

  Though the truth is my heart fell for Danny, and for whatever body he’s in, before my brain or anyone else’s had a chance to mess with it. I start picturing Danny in different outfits—dresses, pants, a frock coat—and he’s a snack in every single one. If he turned out to just be a girl who dresses (insert covert googling) “androgynous,” or some other gender identity—the internet offers up gender variant, gender fluid, nonbinary, bigender, pangender—I’d still be into Danny. This convo with Titi Sujei is not about who Danny is, it’s about who I am.

  Sujei turns the volume on Jose way up. Corazón corazón corazoooooooooooooon! How do you uncomplicate your corazooooooon? “What I’m saying is KISS.”

  “Huh?”

  “Keep it simple, stupit. KISS. You know. K-I-S . . .”

  “I get it.”

  We pull up across the street from the school. Sujei puts the car in park and lets the motor run.

  “Bottom line is your mom loves you.” Sujei puts the car in gear. “I’ll light a candle.”

  I grab my things and climb out. Walk over to the driver’s side and kiss my titi good-bye. She blinks and hands me a Tic Tac. I back up and cover my mouth. “I couldn’t find the toothpaste this morning.”

  “Here,” Sujei says, popping one into her mouth, “take the box.”

  Jose breaks into another ballad that I can still hear as she rolls up the window and bonks off the curb into the street.

  I chug a few more Tic Tacs as I cross the street and step onto school property. Two black girls walk by and whisper “cunt” under their breath. Nelly’s friends.

  I throw my backpack down. I’m feeling righteous about cunts right now.

  The girls turn around and stare me down. The one with the BLM tee says, “Oh. So you gonna fight us?”

  “Traitor,” the other one spits like a racist-seeking missile.

  “I. am. not. a traitor! I didn’t do nothing!”

  “Exactly.” They both walk off in the direction of righteousness while I pick up my backpack and my dignity. I feel the words I hurled at my mother last night boomerang back in my face: “How could you be so woke and ’sleep at the same time?”<
br />
  What a spectacular way to start the day!

  ……

  You’d think that the obvious solution to this mess is to avoid Danny all day until he corners me just outside the bathroom. Then have an awkward convo about how we can just be friends. We’d go our separate ways, Danny to the world of remedial everything, me to the world of the normative-college bound track.

  The problem is the freakin cave. Once you step out of the darkness and see the light, how do you step back in? How do I sit in class and focus on the words in front of me when words like bisexual, pansexual, gender fluid, nonbinary, pangender, genderqueer are filling up the new dictionary of who I might be? How can I focus on one voice when there are fifty in my head? My mom, Tía Sujei, Nelly’s friends, Danny.

  The one voice that I’m missing—Blanca’s.

  I head to the exit, texting Danny with the number he tattooed to my wrist.

  His response: Meet up at 11? with an address—the bowling alley in my old neighborhood.

  So the plan: Mami’s cell doesn’t work well at the hospital(s) so she generally ignores it until she gets home. While she showers, I can jack it, delete the message from the school alerting her to my absence, and forge a sick note.

  Am I really cutting school? No, I tell myself. Today, I’m going to the School of Life. Subject: Identity.

  I wait to catch a bus to the cemetery, thinking about what I would do if Kanye/asshat and I crossed paths again. I’d end up getting into a brawl, and me and my fedora and cravat would be driven back home in a squad car. The bus comes and I climb on, keeping my head down until I find a seat. I unzip my backpack and unleash my fedora. Attempt to stuff The Entity inside. I get looks.

  “Ven aquí, mija,” a viejita in a diva white pantsuit says. She beckons to me and I cross the aisle and sit next to her. “Pero, like this.” She takes off the hat, shapes it with her slim, smooth hands. Cocks it to one side. “There. Maybe you get some cornrows. There’s a place on . . .”

  I hop off the bus at my stop. The sun shines underneath clouds like a Kool-Aid spill that someone left the paper towels spread over. The trees are like lightning planted in the ground. The stones welcome me, sinking under my feet, as I walk up the path to the headstones. Flown by invisible pilots, newspapers and flyers whizz around me.

  Today I have no flowers. I have no offering. I realize I am, for the first time, empty-handed. I make my way past a grave laden with potted yellow mums, buttery candle wax bubbled down the sides of the tombstone. Blanca’s grave is clean, well-kept, but empty. The smoke of burning brush wafts past me as I sit and hug my knees.

  A squirrel scrambles across the neatly trimmed grass. I wish I were the squirrel. The squirrel can’t be anything but a squirrel. It can’t be a giraffe. It doesn’t want to be a damn giraffe.

  I laugh. “I need to be a squirrel!” I write on my left arm, I’m just a squirrel in the world. I draw a squirrel looking like it’s ready to jump from one finger to the next. Okay. I cap my pen and stick it in my hair. Time to get down to business.

  “You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here in the middle of the day.” I lean back on my elbows. “I don’t even know. I just have questions. I need to know who I am. You’re the best one to tell me.”

  Tktktk Tktktk, the squirrel chitters.

  “Hello?”

  The wind has shifted the clouds. Freed, the sun floods the stage of sky.

  I sit up on my knees and visor my hands on my forehead. Way back in the distance the caretaker drives a golf cart filled with rakes and chugs across the field. I wonder how many times he’s seen me and said nothing. How many people he sees in a day, how many words to the dead he’s heard spoken. How many answers.

  A couple rubs a cloth over an aging stone. A bearded man in a soft, kittenish gray and black suit carries a teddy bear through a maze of withered tulips.

  “Blanca.” I knock. Blanca’s always home. “Blanca!” I stand up. “Blanca, where you at?”

  Everywhere is where Blanca usually is. She’s been everywhere I’ve ever been. Seen everything I’ve seen, tasted everything I’ve tasted. Cried every tear with me, laughed every laugh. There was never an echo; we were always a harmony, in sync. Until the end.

  I wonder what high school would’ve really been like if—Would we have joined all the same clubs again? Had all the same classes? I turn in all directions, a broken compass. Where the fuck is my north star? “Blanca!” A berry bush of annoyed birds answers back. Another bush of pissed off birds answers them.

  “Shut up, nature!”

  Nature. All around me nature is in-betweening, transitioning out of fall into winter. Would Blanca be cool with me no matter how I changed? I have a science flashback: Change is the only thing that stays the same. But what is change? The trees are still trees no matter what the fuck goes on with their leaves. That caterpillar butterfly shit? No matter what, it’s a bug.

  “Blan—fucking—ca!!!!” Fuck. I’m screaming into the wind and expecting it to answer back. I grab air and except something to hold onto.

  A car pulls up the gravel road. The golf cart is no longer in the distance. Somewhere that squirrel and its squirrel homies, twitter.

  “Where are you?” I’m walking backwards toward the road. My best friend is missing. I am missing.

  It’s so bright now, all I can do is squint. Through the light I can see dust, shadow, then the familiar bobbing bun, strands of hair streaking behind her like comets, her chanclas thwacking down the gravel road, scattering stones. The birds sing for her as she heads toward the outside world, the street.

  Blanca runs toward my bus stop; is she going back to school? No. She veers north and leads me uphill. My muscles feel tuned as I run up one block, then two, chasing a shadow.

  Sticky caramelized clouds of grilled mango escape with the open and close of La Cocina Boricuas’ doors; somewhere in the back garlicky arepas fry in oil, bitter coffee boils. It’s a competition outside a hair salon where morning cigarettes, hibiscus shampoos, and chemical dyes battle for dominance, where Rihanna competes for attention over the voice of gossiping stylists. I pick up the pace like I ate an arepa, like Rihanna was singing for me. I ain’t even out of breath. I’m still chasing Blanca; chasing myself.

  Up ahead, the bus arrives and Blanca gets on. Shit. I sprint to the bus and climb in just before my culo gets slammed in the doors. Flash my bus pass and can barely elbow inside it’s so jam-packed.

  Damn. What bus am I even on? To where? How am I going to tell when Blanca gets off? And crap, what time is it, because Danny . . .

  Only ten. Good. We’re driving outside of familiar territory to some residential areas my moms threatens to move us to when she clones herself to make more money. Don’t none of these freakin people own a coffee maker? It’s house, Starbucks, house, house, Starbucks.

  The coffee shops end and the block is taken over by another century. Giant spiky medieval buildings cluster together and windows are made of stained glass. Behind high iron gates, dozens of white girls in navy-blue polyester skirts and blazers stomp their black rubber-heeled shoes onto a courtyard. My mother has threatened to send me to Catholic School whenever she gets to talking to her ladies about the heathen kids of today and their cafeteria Catholicism—you know, I’ll take a heaping plate of salvation, a side of answered prayers, but go light on the hellfire. A herd of red-ribboned ponytails follows a chapel bell. All except one girl. The girl without the ponytail. The girl I see look up because she feels me watching her as the bus pulls to its next stop. Nelly? Oh, shit. This must be the school she goes to now.

  I’m lost for the next few stops, watching for Blanca to take the back exit, my mind getting off at Guilt Street.

  We stop at a deli, and my stomach demands a tripleta—chicken, ham, and beef slathered with ketchup, mustard, mayo, topped with thin, crispy fried potato sticks. I squeeze my stomach in to shut it up and lean back. The windows are a filmstrip of my past.

  My past with Blanca. There’s the de
ntist where Blanca got her braces, the dress shop where Blanca and I already had her dress picked out for her quinceañera—she chose white like a bride, and I told her Blanca, you’ll have slushie stains on that in five minutes, white picks up everything . . . That’s my life. A white dress.

  We round a semicircle to drop people at a transfer station, and I feel like Blanca has blindfolded me in a game of Pin-the-Tail on the Donkey. At least I’m not the donkey. Right?

  The adrenaline of the chase is wearing off. I’m tired. I’m hungry. I’m guilty. I’m confused. I’m panicked. My moms is gonna get volcanic if she finds out I skipped school. Instead of solving my problems, I’m just adding more. I need Blanca to laugh everything off.

  9

  But the problem is my moms, I text Blanca.

  She’s in the eighth-grade honors math with me, at our old school, and she’s had way too many Skittles so she’s giddy. Giddy because of sugar, her sensitivity to food dye, and our plans for tonight. Blanca’s all the way across the room because we get in trouble for talking. The teacher jokes that she’s gonna have to move Blanca’s desk into the closet because for real, the girl can hold a conversation with a rock. Even the autistic kid with headphones who only talks by holding up a whiteboard will talk to her. Shit, if Blanca met Helen Keller, she’d manage to hold a convo.

  The problem is you always got a problem, Blanca texts back. We’re just gonna have fun. Don’t make graphs and charts out of the fun. Just have it.

  But what if she finds out?

  She’s going to do what? Ground you? You’re not allowed to go anywhere and do anything now.

  Blanca speaks the truth. Anything past seven o’clock is past my bedtime. (Anything not related to academics. Part of the reason we joined stage crew was to get permission to be out late.)

  Blanca, the boys, and I are going out to whatever ancient movies are playing at the Dollar Theater. Everything’s a dollar. The popcorn dunked in artificially flavored butter swimming with trans fat, the igneous Junior Mints malformed from melting and solidifying a few times, Blanca’s Skittles which, with the Twinkie and the Ho Ho, could survive the apocalypse. The cherry slushies Blanca and I love because of the brain freezes and cherry lips.