I look at her.
She looks at me.
The edges of the basement, all of the people in it drop away for one brief yet elongated second. I pretend in this sweeping break in time that Frida is standing there, painting CoCo and me. That we can belong on her canvas and—
“Let’s go.” Ruben ushers us past the air hockey table and throwback arcade of Pac-Man gobbling Pac-Man bits.
Ruben unlocks the closet door, grinning like I’ve never seen.
“I don’t want to do this,” I tell him. “Seriously.”
“You said dare.” He pushes me into the closet. “Besides, it’s just ten minutes.”
“You said seven—”
He shuts the door fast. The lock clicks into place.
“Ruben!” I wait, staring at the faint, fogging glow of light through the bottom of the door. Nothing.
“It goes by fast.” CoCo’s round, rich voice trails through the darkness. “I’ve been in three times.”
“I don’t like to be locked . . . in places,” I say.
Even if it is with the infamous CoCo.
The flashlight on CoCo’s cell sprays across the ceiling. Steep shadows climb the walls. All around us, shelves and shelves of plastic bins, labeled and stacked. Folded clothes, boxes of sneakers. An entire pallet of toilet paper. Two shelves of detergent. So much—
“I could fit my whole bedroom in here.” She flashes the light along the clear sides of the bin. “The one-stop, bulk-buy treasure trove. Bottled water, black beans, pens, pills, tampons, Tajín. Doritos and Takis for days. If the apocalypse is upon us, we’re ready.”
I grin.
“You have a nice smile,” she says, digging into a bin of chips.
What does CoCo Chamoy know about me smiling? About me and anything? We are shapes shifting, shuffling, mostly rushing through the high school hallways. We are unmet glances during pep rallies, football games, and awkward school dances. She’s the one leading protests against gun violence and kids caged along the border while me? Really, I’m just trying to keep my head above water.
She pops open a bag of Doritos, facing it toward me. “You should do it more. Smile.”
Self-consciously, I turn the right side of my face away from her. Knowing it’s just lying there . . . torcida, muted and dead.
Someone pounds on the door, giggles. The shadows of footsteps soon peel away.
“I wasn’t going to come,” she says, selecting her chip with precision. “Tonight.”
“Me neither. Ruben’s mom made him invite me.”
“Don’t the two of you go back?” she asks.
“A long way back. Now it’s ‘qué pasó’ and head nods like we’re bros. We’re definitely not bros.”
I lean against the cement wall, the coolness expanding across my warm back. I start to relax until I see her watching me, my face. I shift into the shadow of my hair, falling forward. Wanting to be invisible. Wanting this to be over.
“Freshman year,” she says “I ended up in here with Toby Anderson. Ruben’s parents had just moved in, so less snacks. More random boxes piled everywhere. The two of us crouched by the door. We moaned and pounded on boxes. Really over-the-top.”
I attempt a grin. The left side of my face trembles, so I stop.
“Sophomore year,” she says, “I got stuck with some gringo from the Valley. That was weirder.” She pauses. “He was a no-means-maybe kind of guy. I texted Alizae to get me out of here. And she busted in fast. She was like baboso this and pinche that. I think she scared the creep right out of him.”
“I’d believe that,” I say quietly.
“She says you make the best mangonada. At your aunt’s fruitería. Alizae’s kind of a mangonada connoisseur, so I have to think they’re pretty good.”
I shrug.
“She said she didn’t see you there all summer,” CoCo says. “How come?”
I shrug, again because I don’t know what to tell her, but there she is, waiting for me to say something.
“I just wasn’t,” I say.
“Same. I mean, I wasn’t around. I was at my sister’s in Austin. You ever go?”
I shake my head.
“Oh, you have to,” she says. “It’s the best city in Texas. I’m moving there the second I graduate. You can be anything in Austin. Not like here. You know?”
Stabbing quiet crawls between us. I’m in seven minutes in heaven and feeling like it’s ten minutes of hell because I can’t just—
“Did I do something?” she asks.
“I just.” I clear my throat. “I don’t always know what to say . . . to people.”
She returns my shyness with a half smile. “Tell me something. Like . . . what’s your favorite thing on the menu? At the fruitería?”
A trunk of fruits and flavors spills across my mind. A tickle for tangy, tart tamarind wraps half the width of my tongue. The smooth-coolness of shaved ice with pickle juice and tiger’s blood, cucumber slices and watermelon chunks. There’s one thing, though . . . that’s my favorite. I just can’t say it. Not to her.
I wedge alongside crates of Coke and sit down. “Um . . . our corn cups with crushed Flamin’ Hot Cheetos are pretty good.”
The sound of booing spears along the edges of the door. The music changes. Country.
CoCo’s phone chimes. She shakes her head, reading it. “Jorge says I should be careful around you. You might turn me gay. As if that’s how it works, right?”
I don’t say anything. Just rub my thumb over a jagged groove on the floor.
“I think it’s cool,” she says. “That you’re not afraid to be you. To be into girls. To—”
“What?”
“It’s okay.” She closes the bag of chips. “You and Zoe Hills.”
“That never happened. That was asshole homophobes like Jorge making shit up.” I shift uncomfortably. “I don’t know . . . what I’m into.”
Which is a lie. I know exactly what I’m into. What I think about, ache for. I look at CoCo. Her eyes see through me. Kind of like Frida. Only now there is nowhere to go—to hide.
“I made out with a girl,” she says, sitting down.
I chuckle. “On a dare.”
“No. We hooked up after a rally in Austin.”
I gulp. Can’t believe she’s serious.
“I liked it,” she says. “How soft her lips were. The way her hands held on to my waist. It’s just different. You know?”
I don’t know, because kissing and touching have only been sketched in the wildness of my imagination.
“Then why are you with Jorge?” I ask.
“He’s not a bad guy.”
“He’s not a good one either.”
“Why can’t you say if you like girls?” she asks.
I wait for her to answer for me, but she doesn’t.
“When I told my mom I made out with a girl . . .” She pauses, then: “She just said, ‘Ay, mija. That’s such a hard life.’ But the next day, she said, ‘I love you.’ Asked if I was okay. That was it. No big drama. No burning in Hell. No anything bad. Just ‘I love you. Are you okay?’ That’s how it’s supposed to be, you know? That simple.”
“Five minutes!” Ruben shouts through the door.
“What did your mom say when you told her that you’re into girls?” she asks.
“I didn’t say I was.”
“You didn’t say you weren’t.”
“Why is this, like, so important to you?” I ask. “It’s not as simple as do I like girls or guys or whoever.”
“That’s fair. I mean. Love is political. Faith, war, gentrification, fucking dress code is political.”
“I don’t know that I’m trying to be political—make a statement.”
“Your existence is a statement, Dani. There’s no one person like you in this
town. You don’t assimilate to fit the mold. I wish I were more like that sometimes.”
I laugh.
“What?” she says.
“You’re Marisol ‘CoCo Chamoy’ Hernández. Junior class president. State finalist in debate. You lead protests. You challenge racist, misogynistic teachers like Mr. Reynolds, knowing he’ll tank your grade for it. Pues, for real, that’s making a statement. I couldn’t do that.”
She doesn’t say anything. Just sits there, studying me. I want to ask her what she’s thinking—what are the images and the sounds. ¿Qué colores? What is the brush she paints me with?
“Now I feel like I said something wrong,” I say.
CoCo crawls over, sits across from me. The tips of her boots press against my sneakers. It’s electric, the energy of her proximity. I don’t know what to do with it—with her—so close.
“Imagine you’re at the movies in the city, okay?” she says. “Big stadium theater full of people, and it catches fire. Flames screaming up the walls. Now, do you sit there and just watch it burn?”
“No. I do something. I . . . get people out.”
“What if they hate you—fear you?” she says. “Just for being you.”
“One, that’s stupid because everything’s on fire, right? They don’t got time to hate me. And even if they called me Taco Bell Mexican because of my pale-ass skin, I’d help ’em. You can’t just let people burn.”
“Exactly.” She leans forward. “See, you get it. How many of them on the other side of the door even notice the walls are burning? Like, really see it? What’s happening in our community? This country? The systems in place don’t just make space for racism. They perpetuate it. In school. Along the border. But we come to Ruben’s parties on the last day of summer. We cannonball in the pool or jump on the trampoline. We spin the bottle so we don’t have to think.”
“It’s a lot,” I say. “Sometimes it’s just easier to Snapchat and scroll for people. There’s only so much you feel like you can do.”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I feel like if I just scroll and click out—I’ll burn with the walls. Like with my brother. He used to see how things were connected. How injustice was connected. Now he’s like, ‘My back ain’t wet. They’re not coming for me.’ He’s nothing but ash. I don’t want to be like that. Turn my back on my culture—on what’s real. Just . . . disappear.”
“Pues, you could never disappear, CoCo. It’s kinda like with clouds, right? Even if they filled up the whole sky, tornado dark, you always know the sun is right behind them. Waiting.”
Her face softens, her eyes lighter. “So I’m like the sun.”
I drop my eyes to the floor. “You’re like a dozen of them.”
I tip my head toward her, unable to hold more than a glance. My stomach twists, travels to the bottom of my feet.
“How come we’ve never talked before?” she says. “Just . . . talked.”
I grin. “We did. Once. Kind of.”
“When?”
“Third grade,” I say. “I’d broken my leg in two places. It was so bad. I came to school with this cast way up to my crotch almost. I couldn’t really do anything at recess but sit. Watch everybody. You came by. Asked me where I broke it. I pointed here.” My lower leg tingles. “You drew this little cartoon monkey.”
“Chango.” Her smile pries open my heart. “I made him up when I was a kid. I used to draw him on everything. Make these little comics. Aventuras de CoCo y Chango.”
“You said he would look out for me. That he always did for you. So when they cut the cast off,” I say, “I asked if I could keep that part of it, but they sawed him down the middle. Split him in half.”
Something quiet and serious settles into her.
“Dani . . . what happened? With your face.”
I immediately want to sink into the floor.
“I’m sorry, I—” she says. “You just . . . seem so uncomfortable.”
I can’t look at her. I can’t run from her. I’m just here. Stuck. Nowhere to go when she touches my knee.
“Hey,” she says.
“It’s, um . . . this thing. Bell’s palsy. Basically your face just . . . freezes. On one side.”
My exhale is shaky.
“Does it hurt?” she asks.
“No. I mean, mostly not. I get tired sometimes because the right side doesn’t move. My right ear kind of bugs me. Sort of like an earache that doesn’t go away.”
She stays quiet. Polite quiet. Freaked quiet. Some kind of quiet that reminds me of my mom when we went to the ER and first found out.
“It’s supposed to go away,” I say.
“Okay.”
“That’s what they keep telling me. The doctors—that it’ll go away.”
“That’s good.”
I pull my knees to my chest, rest my chin against them.
“Can you feel things?” she asks.
“Not on the frozen side.”
“That would scare the shit out of me.”
I laugh. “Yeah. It did. It still does sometimes. I never thought about my face before except how much I hated it. My mom always trying to take pictures of me, and I was like, ‘Stop already.’ Now I just . . . What if doesn’t go back? Like before.”
“But they think it will?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“What about your mouth?”
“The part that’s numb feels heavy. Like fat or something.”
She reaches out. I flinch at first, but then watch her gently brush her fingers against my lips. My heart races as she stumbles across them.
“They don’t feel heavy or fat,” she says, stopping. “They feel like lips.”
Fists pound against the door. “Two minutes!” Ruben shouts.
CoCo stands up, lifting bin lids, digging through several of them before sitting back down. She uncaps a Sharpie, turns over my palm, and pauses.
“Azul?” she says, looking at my hand.
Traces of dry ocean-blue paint pour from a crease between two of my fingers.
“I was painting,” I say. “My aunt’s spare room.”
CoCo’s hand lingers just above mine before her fingertip follows the longest line of my palm. Not holding my breath is so hard because this feeling—of her touching me—it’s nothing like I would’ve imagined. Real touch feels exciting and scary and amazing.
She reaches the bottom of my palm and pauses at my wrist.
“Let’s pretend”—she steadies the tip of the marker along my skin—“that Chango and I are on an adventure.”
My eyes trail along the black lines taking shape. Quickly, they become eyes, ears, a nose—their alignment out of sync because Chango is winking. My own eyes follow from my hand and beyond the sacred heart medallion floating in midair around CoCo’s neck, past the smallest of scars along her chin to her—
“What do you think?” She tilts her head, eyeing my palm.
She’s still holding my hand when I look back down at it.
“Y-yeah,” I stammer.
And there we are. Me looking at her. Her looking at me. Where all the noise on the other side of the door fades. Where all the fear inside me cools. Where I imagine Frida standing in the corner, painting us dreaming in sapphire—in nothing but bold blues.
“I really think you have a nice smile,” she says.
My heart has now joined my stomach at the bottom of my feet. The contraction of air between us—the push, the pull, the expansion of shallow light and deep shadows narrowing.
Her lips part, and before I can say something, the door swings open.
Our hands drop.
“CoCo,” says Jorge. “Let’s go.”
Her pained eyes reach inside my chest and hold on so tight. I fight the urge to look away, trying to find a way to make this moment with CoCo last longer.
“He’s yours,” she says. “Until you wash him away.”
She gets up, and before I can manage words into a sentence, she’s gone. I stare at my open palm. At the blue line of paint running along Chango’s face. Splitting him in half.
I never want to wash him away.
TELL ME A STORY/DIME UN CUENTO
by XAVIER GARZA
MY NAME IS DOLORES
by GUADALUPE RUIZ-FLORES
On the first day of school, I trembled as the teacher walked toward me. Her clunky shoes made a loud noise on the worn wooden floor. I clutched my brand-new red tablet to my chest. All eyes turned toward me.
She came closer. I stiffened and drew back as she bent her full figure over my desk. Everyone called her Mrs. Collins, so I knew that was her name. Her face came within inches of mine, so close that I could smell her perfume. Words formed on her lips. English words that I didn’t understand.
Her hair was combed back into a neat, tight bun, reminding me of Aunt Celia. It shimmered like gold. I wanted to reach out and touch it. Instead my fingers gripped the tablet even tighter as she asked me something in a language I didn’t speak. The words came so fast, my mind reeled.
¿Qué dice, Maestra? I blurted out in Spanish before I could think. What are you saying, teacher? She tilted her head to one side, as if confused, her eyebrows coming together over the bluest eyes I had ever seen.
The night before, I had asked Papi, “What do I say when the teacher speaks to me in English? I won’t understand.”
“You will. You’ve picked up a few words of English over the summer,” he said.
I frowned. “Just a few. But what if she asks me something really hard?”
He paused momentarily, deep in thought. “Just say, ‘I don’t know. My name is Dolores.’ ”
I looked at him blankly.
“She will probably only be asking for your name, that’s all,” Papi assured me.
“What if she asks something else?”
“You just repeat what I told you,” he said. “She’ll understand that you’re still learning the language.”
“But, Papi, what if I need to use the toilet?”
“Just say ‘Bis’cuse me, please,’ ” he replied. “That way the teacher will excuse you.”
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