I nod. “Guess so. See you.” I head back to my dad’s car. Then turn around. “Nelly!”
“Yo.”
“One more thing. Those words you said to me—Dónde está tu abuela? Why’d you say that? I looked it up—there’s that song about people hiding blackness, sending their black grandmas to the kitchen when company comes, but . . .”
“You Puerto Rican. Which makes you Taino Indian like my aunty. Taino is Indian. Black. Act like it.”
“Nelly, how’d you get so—so—”
“Woke? I got two sisters in college.”
“Wow. They made it.”
“Yep. With scholarships.”
“Damn!” I notice that Nelly’s hoodie is from Notre Dame. I point at the emblem. “Is that where you going?”
“I don’t know. Whoever it is got to woo me.” She rubs her thumb and pointer together.
We laugh.
“What about you?”
What about me? That is the question. “Maybe everything needs to stop being about me for a while.”
She nods. “Well, good luck figuring it out. I do worry about you.”
I’m taken like far aback. “Why?”
“You book smart. But emotionally—challenged. I’ll pray for you, my child.” Nelly starts walking backwards. “And you’re welcome, but it’s not my job to change your world. It’s my job to change mine. Bye, Maquina.”
“Verdad. It’s Verdad.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
19
“You do what you needed to do?” my dad asks as I climb into the passenger seat. “Do right by that girl?”
I close the door and buckle up. “I’m working on it.”
“Then I’m proud of you, mija.”
I text Danny on the drive to school. He is waiting for me at the top of the steps. I bundle up, pulling on my hood, but toss the gloves Simone loaned me. My dad waves and I know he’ll wait in the car until I walk inside the building.
Danny grabs for my hand and stops short. “Can I?”
“Hold my hand? Aren’t we a little past that?”
“No, I mean.” He nods at all the kids trotting past us. “Here.”
I hold his hand, pull him to me, and take a breath. Hug him. We hold on too hard and too long. His clothes and hair waft bonfires, minerals, and leaves. He shivers because of course, he doesn’t have a coat. I should’ve brought him the gloves, damn it. Our lips meet the way a stone and stick do when making fire.
We come up for oxygen and I realize we’ve just gone viral. Pics have been snapped.
“Can you walk me to the office?” I say, warming Danny’s hands with mine. “I feel like I’m walking the plank.”
“It’s just a tardy slip, babe.”
He called me babe. Can I call him babe back?
“I know, babe.” He doesn’t blink! “It’s just—tardies, detentions, skipping school . . . That didn’t used to be me.”
“Yeah. Didn’t used to be any of us either.”
I’m slightly freakin irked. “Right.” We’re in the office at the computer terminal, signing in. “Beyond that, it’s been rough. I’m sure Baldwin got you up to speed?”
He nods but honestly looks bored.
I try again: “Baldwin told you I got thrown out, right?”
Another nod. “Is your dad a perv? Sarah’s dad is. So going home—not an option for her. Or any of us. The rest of us.”
“Do you always have to frame things that way? Us and them? With me being them?”
“It’s just that I’m protective of the Underdogs. They’re my family.”
“And I’m not?”
“Gross!”
I snort-laugh despite myself. Secretly calculate that this must mean he and Prisha did not hook up. “Seriously, Danny. What am I then?”
“Oh, you’re doing the girl thing. Making me define our relationship.”
“Ew.” And eh?
He turns away from the computer terminal with a sigh. “Look, the night in the graveyard—was intense. You didn’t just write on my skin. You wrote on my heart. But you also offended the shit out of me. You were so oblivious.”
“Like you are to my feelings right now,” I point out. “This is not a contest. I need to be who I am and feel what I need to feel, every bit as much as you do.”
My words are like a visible smack across his face. He’s probably had to say the same thing so many times.
“You’re the last person in the world I want to fight with,” I tell him.
“Same.” He pulls me to him. “Did we just get real?”
“Completely.” I bury my face in his chest. “I want to kiss you.” I look up. “And punch you in the face.”
He pulls away and motions toward the secretary, who’s just come out of the back offices and seems to want my attention. “I guess you can make that determination later?”
“Miss Reyna. Can you sit and wait here for a minute?”
What now?
Danny heads to class. Like ten years later: “Miss Reyna. Head on to the back. Ms. Quinones, the counselor. She’s been hounding me for days to get ahold of you. Third door on the left.”
I instantly plot my escape.
But Ms. Quinones, who’s apparently been stalking me, heads me off at the pass. She’s pretty but has a hard look in her eye. Like she’s been there, done that, heard it all. “Ten minutes, Verdad. That’s all I ask. I’ve got Malta. I’ve got Takis.”
I roll my eyes.
But the Takis are “fuego” and the Malta is ice cold. Blanca grabs a Taki and starts touching everything on Ms. Quinones’ desk. Just like that, Blanca is back in my life. The prodigal BFF has returned.
Ms.Q’s office is lit dim like we’re about to have a séance. Stuffed with fat, fluffy aqua pillows, bean bag arm chairs, and a cushy couch, I suddenly feel the urge for a nap.
I plop down on the couch with the Malta I’ve accepted. Like Goldilocks, Blanca tries every chair. She could never resist a spinny one. Once we raced them down a hallway and almost fell down a flight of stairs. Her idea, of course. “So why am I here?”
“You’re here”—she stands up and grabs a file from her desk—“because I want to apologize.” Planting herself beside me on the couch, I notice old scars on her arms. Holy shit. She was a cutter. “I’m sorry we are meeting today and not the first day you set foot in this school. I don’t know if you’re aware there’s a shortage of counselors in the entire district. But there should be a counselor for every grade in every school so every kid—”
I am, of course, not listening. I’m staring at the cuts. She’s ignoring me stare. Will there be a day when I’m not pulling my hair out?
“I’m sorry for what happened to you and your friends last year.”
I can’t see Blanca, she is spinning so fast. Just a blur. My hand instinctively grabs my hair like a skydiver grabbing the rip cord. “You know about that.”
“Yes. Hard to forget a mass shooting happening so close to home.”
I shake my head. It was a blip in the news, even right after it happened. The only reason it got any attention at all was because of the shooter. What brought him to make this decision. He had a family. Held down a job. Yeah and he was white. “Tomorrow is the anniversary.”
She places a silky balloon in my right hand. The fingers on my right hand enjoy kneading the flour inside.
“That word is strange. Anniversary. Anniversaries should be for weddings. Not mass shootings. What is that even supposed to mean?” The fingers on my left hand comb my hair. Get stuck in tangles. Tear them out.
“Doesn’t matter what it’s supposed to mean.” Ms. Q places another silky balloon in my left hand. “Just matters what it means to you.”
“It means every year I have to remember.” Flour. Is. Everywhere. “Whether I want to or not.” The bullet that ripped a hole in my thigh and a hole in my life, through which Bambi and Fernando left and didn’t return. A hole in which Blanca lingered that night after the shooting, s
uspended between two worlds, and has ever since. “Every time I think about it, I relive it, it’s like”—the shooter, whom I will never dignify aloud with a name—“he pulls the trigger. Takes us all out again.”
“He doesn’t deserve to have that kind of power, Verdad. Does he?”
“Fuck no. And it’s not . . .” My chest is tight. “It’s not how I want to remember Blanca.”
“I checked with your middle school. They don’t have anything planned but—”
“Nope. They don’t. There’s shootings in my old hood all the time. I wish we could leave an empty desk for every kid who dies that way.” I can’t stop the tears, the gasps for air. The sobs. “Blanca’s abuela died a few months ago. Blanca had no one else. I’m the only one who really remembers her now. The way she should be remembered.”
“How should she be remembered?”
I am covered in flour and tears and my scalp burns. I rub my hands over a trash can, freeing my fingers of bloody hair. “Ten minutes is up, Ms. Q.”
“It is. But your time here never really runs out. Will you come see me again?”
“I can’t make any promises.” Promises are dangerous. Maybe I don’t break a promise to you. But someone with a gun does it for me.
“I can,” says Ms. Quinones. “I will be here whenever you need me.”
……
I autopilot through class. I don’t know if Nelly communicated with her girls, but they’re paying me no mind. A pic of me and Danny shows up on the group message right before lunch.
@ShutUpU2: I don’t know how I feel.
@frodown: Who cares about how your dumb ass feels?
@ShutUpU2: It ain’t sexy.
@frodown: Why do they have to be sexy for you, perv?
@Rican_Havok: It’s disgusting.
@frodown: Calm down, Carlos
@Rican_Havok: Obscenity, Obscenity, Obscenity, that I will need therapy for, for the rest of my teenage years.
@frodown: Yr canceled
I turn my phone over. Man, it’s just like Sujei said. I’ve now added a reputation as a “disgusting dyke” to the list of shit I have to deal with.
“Jesus, Verdad.” Danny sits beside me. Right beside me, so our knees touch. “Your hair.”
“I’m disgusting.” I poke at my tray of who-the-hell-knows-what with a side of WTF. “This is disgusting.” I fling a pea across the room. “Everything is disgusting.”
Danny rubs what I know is flour from my cheek. “No. None of that. You just need—”
“You.” I stand up.
“Okay.” He stands up.
“I want to go back to the cemetery, but I know Blanca isn’t there.”
“Okay.”
“The theater. I have to go to the theater.” My hands are shaking. “But I can’t go alone.”
“Uh . . . okay.” He grabs my hand and cradles it.
……
Danny and I cut school and hop the bus. “I’m a delinquent dyke.”
Danny nuzzles my ear. “That’s a delinquent end table.” He hugs me hard. “My delinquent end table. Shit, your skin is so cold. Are you okay?”
“I am trying so hard to be okay.” But I am rocking in the familiar sea of anxiety. My throat is dry and my armpits are wet. I am freezing hot and burning cold. “But I’m not.”
Danny holds up my chin. “Don’t try to be anything when you’re with me, okay?”
I nod and lay my head on his shoulder. Memory Lane has fast-forwarded past every place Blanca and I have ever been to every place we never would be. What Blanca planned for her quince became her funeral. The church was decorated in pink balloons, gauze, and ribbons. Blanca was dressed in her pink sequined dress, so poofy it didn’t fit in the coffin. She looked like a doll in a box. A gift to be opened on Christmas, not buried on a cold, shitty day in September.
Blanca’s abuela had her playlist on speaker. Our playlist. Every song we ever danced to, karaoked, laughed to, cried to. Every song from the musicals we worked on. Basically the soundtrack to both our lives. Now songs I could never listen to again.
That wasn’t even the worst of it.
“This. Our stop,” I mumble.
I swear I get off the bus throwing up next to the same drunk. This time, though, somebody is holding my hair. Danny ties it into a sloppy bun.
“I got you.” Danny rubs my back.
The worst part was I was supposed to get up and speak to honor Blanca. But all I did was stand there frozen and silent. Melt into tears.
I full-out hurl.
The drunk hands me his AA card. “You really need to get some help.”
“Thank you.”
“God bless you.”
I spit into the gutter. “I can’t do it.” I sit on the sidewalk and sob.
Danny just sits there beside me. “So let’s not do it.”
I sob louder.
“I mean. Let’s not you do it alone. I mean let’s both of us do it!”
Through a waterfall of tears, I look into Danny’s extremely confused and gorgeous eyes. And I can’t help it. I laugh. “You have no fucking idea what is going on.”
“No. I do not.” He stands up. “But whatever it is. The thing. We should do this thing!”
I hug my knees and craugh hysterically. Get over myself and point across the street. “The theater. It’s where Blanca died.”
He looks across the street at the theater. Which was the ’Heater. And is now the ’Eater.
Blanca: Laugh. It’s funny.
Me (laughing): So you’re back to take me down the black hole.
Blanca: It’s not a black hole. It’s a cave, stupid. Don’t you know nothing about philosophy and shit?
“So we need to go to the theater. To . . .?”
“To . . . I don’t know. To—to make it not just the place where she died. Where part of me died.”
Danny nods. Basically carries me and his skateboard up the street. Across it. Right in front of the theater.
Fuck, I get the whole creation myth thing where rivers and lakes are created from tears. And snot. Danny dabs at my wet nose with his sleeve, I wish I were crying like somebody from the movies, but I sound ugly and weird, like a congested raccoon. At some point, some viejita hands us a pack of Kleenex. I run through the Kleenex, surrounding us with bunched-up snot wads. I soak Danny’s shirt. My stomach hurts like I did sit-ups.
I finally look up. And as if I’m looking through a window of rain, I see it. The booth where the pervert handed us our tickets. The cisgender misogynist porn (Baldwin would be so proud) is weathered beyond recognition.
“Do you think the booth is unlocked?”
Danny throws me an impish look and holds out his hand.
The booth is locked, but Danny has acquired a few talents living on the street and we’re inside in minutes.
“What happens now?”
I look into his eyes. “You know what’s supposed to be happening now? I am supposed to be ripping out my hair. I’m supposed to be in pain. That’s what the shooter wanted—to punish us. He thought all those Indian kids were Muslims, terrorists. The rest of us—he called us immigrants, dirty Mexicans.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You know what else the shooter wanted? Not just to kill us. To destroy our souls. To make it so whoever survived would only see hate and blood and horror. I want Blanca and Bambi and Fernando back every minute of every day. I don’t think the pain will never leave me. But the ugliness—it doesn’t belong to me. To us. Blanca was beautiful and good. I need the ugliness to leave me.”
Danny dries my tears with his sleeve.
“And it does with you. I’m happy I’m with you. Every minute I’m happy, I stop a bullet. From killing my soul.”
“You make me happy too.”
My mouth is salty and hot when we kiss. We’re kissing in a broke-down ticket booth, not sucked back into the vortex of time, but propelled in the now of each other’s bodies.
Between kisses: “You taste mmm.”
<
br /> “There’s more where that came from, V. Yeah, I went to a shelter and showered.”
I laugh. I want to touch him, all the parts that make him the person he is. I’m not afraid of duality. I want his halves, his thirds, the whole fucking pie. But Danny stops me when I try to unbutton his shirt. “Not yet.”
“Why?”
He kisses my fingers. “It’s complicated.” He looks away and mumbles, “Different than—what you’re used to.” His eyes meet mine. “If you . . .” He closes his button. “You wouldn’t be touching me.”
I lift his hand and kiss it. “Then show me how to touch you. PS, you’re the only person I’ve ever touched. So . . .”
I like seeing Danny shy. He guides my hands and my lips and I learn him bit by bit. We take turns. I moan as Danny’s cold hands slide under my shirt, goosebumping my skin, and it’s like it’s summer and I just dove into the pool for the first time. He makes my body feel tight and loose, warm and wet in all the right places. I let him shimmy off my jeans. Kiss my scar. When his hands slip inside my panties I feel a buildup, for the first time in months, of ecstasy, not pain.
After, we dress each other like dolls. I sit between his legs, and we’re laughing. He’s smoking a Newport and I’m smoking a pretend cigarette, because it was that good.
“This place”—I exhale fake smoke—“I want to do more.”
“Really?” Danny unzips his pants.
“No! I mean yes! But no!”
Danny is cracking up. I smack him.
“Like, I mean—this theater is a tomb. I want to do something about it.”
I look away as Danny googles the shooting.
“It’s just been abandoned,” he says, scrolling. “The previous owners went bankrupt. The city keeps it boarded up, but me and the crew have broken in before to escape the snow.”
“What does it look like inside?”
“Cleaned out. Except for the chandelier. Too high up for anybody to get their hands on that.”
In my mind I see an idea like a diamond from that chandelier. “Even before the shooting the theater wasn’t a safe place. What if we made it one? What if it were a community center or something?” I tip my head back and kiss his chin. “Or a shelter just for teens. Both?”
“That’s ambitious. I’m just happy I showered.”
The Truth Is Page 16
