The Truth Is

by Nonieqa Ramos

  LumberJane and Baldwin sing-screeching the English part: “All the underdogs in the world. A day may come when we lose.”

  Everybody but me: “But it’s not today! Today we fight!”

  Danny holds my chin. Kisses my nose: “Today we will survive. Together we don’t die.”

  Together we drive around going nowhere, doing nothing, talking shit, and I feel better than I have in weeks. There’s nothing like a full tank of gas and a car full of—friends? I maybe accidentally slip off my shoes because I’m going to maybe accidentally forget them in the car. It’s all good. Till I wonder, looking at the sky, how long have we actually been throwing away our opportunities for college scholarships (shut up, Ma!), exactly? I check my phone. OH. SHIT.

  LumberJane lowers the volume. “So tonight, Underdogs?”

  Baldwin: “Tonight.”

  Sarah and Prisha: “Tonight.”

  Danny raises an eyebrow at me. Starts petting the hand that’s yanking out hair.

  Danny to the crew: “At the farm?”

  Baldwin: “No. Meet at the soul garden. It needs watering.”

  Me: “What’s the soul garden?”

  “Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cemetery,” Baldwin explains, and I wonder if Blanca somehow masterminded this whole thing. “You’re welcome to come.”

  “Uh, thanks. I’ll have to see. . . Can you just drop me off for now?”

  I tell Baldwin where I live, and turns out we’re not far away. (Have we been driving in circles?) Danny and I are now not speaking. I broke the spell.

  14

  “Oh God, pray for me,” I say, glancing out the window as we pull up to my house. My mother is standing on the porch.

  Danny: “Please tell me she’s chopping wood?”

  It’s the chainsaw. I sign the cross and crawl out.

  “Hi, Mrs. Reyna,” Danny says, trying to be all polite to a woman aiming a chainsaw at him.

  Prisha and Sarah have somehow morphed into the back seat.

  “Ma . . .”

  Once I’m by her side, she lowers her weapon. Walks up to the window where Danny is sitting. She takes a survey of everyone. One by one. Finally, she steps back to aim her finger and her curse. “You people,” she says pointing at each one of them, “you don’t come here to my house. To my street again. If I see you around here . . .” She handcuffs my wrist with her ninja grip.

  “. . . I’ll call the police! Do you hear me? All of you!”

  Baldwin clicks his—uh, their tongue and adjusts their glasses. “It’s not really your street, Mrs. Reyna,” they correct her. “This is public—Oh my God!”

  My mother’s chainsaw is making her cheeks vibrate. “My daughter is not for ANY of you!”

  Baldwin peels onto the street. Back inside, she releases my wrist, launching me into the kitchen. It’s going down.

  I look at her. It’s not my mother. It’s the ghost of the woman who hasn’t slept in weeks. Who she was haunts who she is. The hands that once built, soldered, drilled, nailed are now the machine. Her eyes are funhouse mirrors.

  My pocket vibrates with a text. I know better than to check it right now.

  She pulls out a chair and steadies herself with it. “I don’t want to have this conversation. I don’t want to say things you’re not strong enough to hear.” She lifts and slams the chair against the floor. “I don’t want to make this a conversation you’ll never forget.”

  From the time I left for school to the time I jumped in Baldwin’s car, I’ve shrunk and grown, aged and regressed. I am square in the eye with the woman I used to look up to. I’m naked with the woman who taught me to dress. I’m all messed up feeling like I’ve outgrown this house, but I still want so freakin bad to fit inside.

  “But you,” slam, “put,” slam, “me in this position. You make me the monster.”

  From me, silence. All the words in my head are coming out in a language I can’t even understand. No hablo myself.

  “Where,” slam, “are,” slam, “your fucking,” slam, “shoes and socks?”

  I’m barefoot with the woman who taught me to tie my shoes. A stray grain of rice sticks to the sole of my foot.

  “They’re—on Prisha. I think—”

  “Who is Prisha? Where did you meet these people? I don’t know them. But apparently I don’t know a lot of things. Maybe anything. Why weren’t you at school this morning?”

  “Blanca,” I mutter. “I thought she was missing, but she was hiding. Playing hide and seek. She hid and wanted me to see—”

  “Blanca wanted you to what? Verdad. It’s time to come to terms with reality, let go of the delusions. This past year I feel like I’ve been holding onto your ankles. You’re so light, you could blow away. You just won’t carry the weight of it.”

  “The weight? The weight of what?”

  “The weight of sadness. Blanca is gone, Verdad.”

  I see myself holding Blanca by the ankles like holding a string of a balloon. I think I have the balloon. But then bang bang! it pops.

  “Say it, Verdad.” My mother’s eyes are watering. “Let her go!”

  “This from the woman who still sets a chair for Abuelo?!”

  “Abuelo comes and goes as he pleases. Blanca is trapped. So are—”

  “By me? What?”

  The chair slams again. Again and again till the table rocks. “I’m not going to do this. You’re standing at the edge. I’m not going to push you over. The issue with school. We’ll say you were sick. That school. It isn’t right for you. Where we live. It’s better but not good enough. I’m going to figure some things out.”

  “Figure things out? I am not an equation. You can’t solve me.”

  “Chica, you better watch your tone. This situation is a problem and we will solve it.” She looks away and talks to herself. “Yeah. I could pick up another shift. I’m already halfway there with a down payment.”

  “Are you effin kidding me? You’re solving me with suburbia?”

  “You’re not making the same mistakes I did—”

  “Danny is not a mistake. And if it’s not Danny,” I say, realizing this argument is way beyond him, “it’s gonna be somebody else. Somebody I want. I choose. You can’t tell me how to feel.”

  How do you go from being a stranger one day to being a lover the next? How do you go from being a mother and daughter one minute to combatants the next?

  “I can’t tell you? You who got a roof over her head, warm food on the table, and somebody to provide for your every need. Those clothes, I buy. Those white teeth. I pay. And where is all the fucking damn toothpaste?”

  “What are you saying, Ma? Really? Since we’re not having delusions no more.”

  “I’m saying not under this roof. You gotta learn to earn. You gotta follow my rules. One day, when you have your home, you’ll have rules too.”

  “There’s no rules for love!”

  “Yes, there are. Boy loves girl. All the rest is against my rules. God’s rules. I ain’t raise you to be—to be no dyke.”

  “A dyke? Definition, disgusting. Do I disgust you, Ma?”

  “No. You’re my daughter. The daughter I raised, the daughter I love doesn’t disgust me.”

  “Because that daughter isn’t a dyke.”

  “You are not a fucking dyke.”

  “Yeah, I guess not, because Danny’s a boy.”

  “That ain’t no boy. There’s Adam. There’s Eve. That. Is. It.”

  “No,” I say, feeling strong. “There’s God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit—and Mary who got demoted by the patriarchy.” I mean I don’t know who wrote the Book of Love, but I do know who wrote the Bible. Dudes.

  Moms signs the cross. “What kind of crap are they feeding you at that school? That shit is against evolution and God’s plan.”

  “God didn’t plan for a lot of shit then.”

  I can tell she’s not even hearing me anymore. “This shit is a phase. A phase, a fad, a way of coping. In two days, this will all pass. We’ll go on with
our lives.”

  “I don’t want to go on with my life. I want to have a life.”

  Moms sits down heavily in the chair she just did her best to break. “I’m tired, Verdad. You’re fifteen, what do you know about life? As long as you’re living it under this roof you will go to school, and you will come straight home until I know I can trust you again.”

  “Trust me?” For the first time I don’t trust my mother. Add that to God, and that pretty much means in nobody does my ass trust. Is that when adulting starts? When you realize you can’t trust anyone?

  “I need to get some sleep so I don’t end up in a car crash. Go to bed, Verdad. Pray.”

  ……

  For the first time in months, I do pray. I grab my fedora, add a clip-on cravat to my outfit and another pair of sneaks my moms bought my undeserving ass, and all the cash I still have left from my fourteenth birthday that my tías wouldn’t let me spend on books—gracias mis tías! Heading to the living room, I pray hard.

  That I won’t get caught.

  Danny texted me to be ready for pickup at ten. I dump my backpack out and repack it book by book. Me without a book is like, is like—I have my books and my poetry to protect me. I am shielded in my armor! I don’t know why but I pack up my violin. I want to feel grounded with the weight. Centered. Also, attention asshats: I have a baseball bat.

  The baseball bat doesn’t fit in my bag. But I have a grand realization that I own a pirate costume for our middle-school play The Jolly Roger. So I dismantle and engineer the scabbard to fit my baseball bat like only a stagehand could, so I could look like a complete lunatic.

  Nothing is stopping me from leaving except me. I close the door behind me. The distance between the porch and the sidewalk is the distance between starlight and a star. Night is everywhere. Light has its limits but dark reaches everybody and everything.

  I haven’t been out this late at night since . . . that night at the theater. The chill in the fall air snaps at me, goose-pimpling my arms. But I’m hot. I’m fire and ice. The backpack carries a history too heavy to hold. My shoes are prisons. My hat is a coffin for every thought I wish would die.

  I squint and look up the block. Headlights flash in the distance. On. Off. On. Off. Then I hear the music. The Underdogs.

  The lights turn off. The music silences. The car rolls toward me. Idles.

  Fate is walking me like a dog, dragging me by the leash. I take a step off the porch.

  “Jump in, baby.” Baldwin adjusts the mirror and a shard of glass falls off. “The water’s fine.”

  I climb into the passenger seat. Baldwin’s hair is wet as if they really did just come out of a pool. “Where’s everybody else?” Specifically, where’s Danny?

  “Watering the soul garden. Danny sent me to get you. He didn’t want to leave the girls alone. He’s real protective.”

  This hurts my brain a little. LumberJane is six-two. Could she not protect the girls? Does this mean Danny is taking on the traditional machismo role and Jane the submissive? Or am I being the dick assuming that because Jane is large she can fight? Or wants to?

  On goes another chinito song I can’t identify. I can’t understand the words, but the music is beautiful. The perfect soundtrack for a journey to the soul garden.

  “You look ready for battle, Verdad. And, I might add, a performance of the Pirates of Penzance.”

  “You look like you just came from battle. And, I might add, a swim through the Hudson.” Their hair is dripping wet. A crack jeers from Baldwin’s glasses. I reflect on Danny’s bruised eye, Prisha’s jacked shoes.

  Completely ignoring my comment: “How long till your mom knows you’re missing?”

  “Under these circumstances, she’ll probably call the school tomorrow morning to make sure I get there on time. She’ll have me paged on the intercom so everyone knows I’m missing. She’ll request campus police and dyke-sniffing dogs, but all to no avail. My tías will be called, including the ones in San Juan. Titi Sujei knows the barrio like the back of her hand, and when she finds me, she will slap me with it.”

  Baldwin laughs in Morse-Code ha ha ha haha ha ha haha. “So midnight’s at about nine tomorrow morning?”

  “I guess you could say that.”

  “Then I better get you to the ball, Cinder-ella.” Baldwin says it as Cinder-eya. Even though I am prepared to use the baseball bat against Baldwin in case they pull a Jekyll-Hyde, I like their style.

  Baldwin parks the clunker in a grocery parking lot. “Just gotta grab some snacks.”

  “Is this place chinito?” I ask.

  Baldwin wrinkles their nose. “Chinese? No.”

  “I mean . . .” What did I mean? Chinito doesn’t just mean Chinese. It means—pretty much—all Asians. My cheeks burn up. I flash to complaining to my moms about everybody assuming all Latinx was Mexican. And here I am assuming all Asian people are the same.

  “Sorry. That was rude.”

  “AF.”

  I want to ask what their background is, but I know that would be rude AF too. Nobody does that shit to white people, do they? Like hey, you eat spaghetti and meatballs? Are you Italian?

  “Totally,” I say. “Forgive me? Snacks are on me.”

  “Then I absolve you in the name of the Baldwin.”

  “I like that name,” I say. “For James Baldwin?”

  “Yeah. I’m still test-driving it. Might land on something else. I knew who I was this morning—”

  “But I’ve changed so many times since then.” I smile, finishing the quote from Alice in Wonderland. Books can do that. Make friends out of people who, two seconds ago, were peripheral. Strangers. “Great British accent by the way.”

  “Thank you.”

  We wave to ourselves on the video camera as we scope out the store for sustenance. I am digging these strawberry-flavored biscuit sticks covered in chocolate. Baldwin grabs two banana milks.

  “You have to try this.”

  “That sounds so so good.”

  We bring our goods up to the counter. Baldwin veers off to a case of steaming buns stuffed with juicy slices of meat.

  Mmmmm. “I can smell the pork!”

  “Oh lawd, and they have smashed cucumber salad!”

  At Baldwin’s direction, I buy a box of matches and two pork buns. We step out of the store and into the parking lot and agree to trek the rest of the way on foot. For the past year, my whole existence has been in the dark. Now I’m a bat flying in it. Free at last.

  The soul garden needs watering. “I could walk to Our Lady of Perpetual Help with my eyes closed.”

  “Prove it.”

  Baldwin pulls a bandana out of their pocket like a magician. We cross the street and they blindfold my eyes. I step forward and stretch out my arms to make sure they’re still there and not messing with me.

  “That was my left nipple.” They slurp their Coke. “I mean we just met so let’s take it slow.”

  My turn to snort. Thank God a beverage isn’t involved. “Sorry.”

  My brain reboots. I am the bat, nocturnal, knowing my place by sound.

  “Here comes my favorite Lady of the Night at ten o’clock.” I can tell Baldwin says this while walking backward as I walk forward. “Avoid the lawn chair to her left.”

  “Kinky,” the Lady of the Night says of our game.

  I walk two paces and stop, my toes just popping over the curb.

  “Not bad. All clear. Walk.”

  Baldwin Mother-May-I’s me across the street.

  Beside me, the strip holds echoes of my past that speak of the hearse and the horsepower it took to carry the weight of a rhinestone tiara, petticoats from Perla’s Party Palace, private jokes, unmade plans. Nobody wanted an invitation to that party. We all stood around strangers, not knowing ourselves. We ate food we couldn’t swallow, drank from never-ending Styrofoam cups of tears. Blanca, she’s a genie locked in the bottle of my brain. On this very sidewalk, Blanca and I talked about when we would get our driver’s licenses. How we
would cruise by the bus stop, roll down the windows, flip the bird to all the boys, blast out those bus-taking fools with “Sorry: Sorry, I ain’t sorry! Sorry, I ain’t sorry. I ain’t sorry. No no hell nah!”

  “Ew. Overturned trash can, ten o’clock.” Baldwin coughs at the stench. “Pothole, twelve o’clock!”

  “Not pothole. Crater of the moon.”

  Baldwin claps. “Yes. We are astronauts.” They walk all trippy like the gravity is gone.

  “Yup. AstroNOT. As in, I’m not ready.”

  Silence.

  “I get it.” Baldwin slurps up the bottom of their drink. “As in, I’m not cisgender. Not binary. Not a figment or a fraction. Whole.”

  The atmosphere is toxic with cigarettes. “Not a robot.”

  “Not a sin. Not going to your hell.”

  From a bunch of white boys crushing beer cans, “Hey, can we play?”

  I pull out my bat. “Depends on the game.”

  Baldwin airlifts me and my bat off my feet. “Not now not ever, boys. Not toys.”

  I’m back on my feet.

  “Doodoo, twelve o’clock, one o’clock, two o’clock!”

  “Shit!”

  “Out of luck. Inevitable.”

  “Foul! Which foot?”

  “Left.”

  I drag my foot against the sidewalk. Mother May a few paces then stop at the smell of incense. “Church.” All the candles of my memory are lit at once, but I blow them out one by one, camouflage in the smoke.

  Baldwin holds my pinky and leads me through a crowd of churchgoers, choir members; some humming under their breath, some singing. One lays her ringed hand on my head before she passes. I can feel her hands sign the cross.

  After a couple more uneventful blocks: “We’re here.”

  Baldwin takes off the bandana. We’re at the foot of the gravel road. Aquila the eagle, Cygnus the swan, Hercules, twinkle; their stories hover over us.

  “How often do you guys come here?”

  “All the time. Second only to the movie theater.”