The Truth Is Read online

  Me: “All I’m saying is I don’t want to be lumped together.”

  Nelly: “Lumped? No, Maquina, it’s called united. Dónde está tu abuela, girl?”

  Me: “Uh, what about my grandma?”

  I charge up the row toward Nelly. She climbs out of her desk, stumbles on a backpack, and crashes onto White Girl 1. White Girl 1 shoves her off and Nelly smashes into a desk, sending the Mexican girl in it running for cover. Nelly regains her balance and charges, but White Girl 3 trips her.

  I freeze. The beef she’s got with those girls has superseded whatever was about to go down with her and me.

  White Girl 4 headlocks Nelly, but she isn’t having it. Nelly bucks and they both crash onto White Girl 1’s desk. Boricua 1 pins White Girl 1’s arms and drags her out of the desk. She and her girls hold back White Girl 1 from joining the fight. Meanwhile White Girl 4 yanks Nelly’s hair. Nelly backs into her and head butts. White Girl 4’s nose explodes with blood. Nelly spins on her knees and adds a complimentary shiner. White Girl 3 pounces on her back.

  The door flings open and a security guard magically marches in, drags Nelly to the front of the class, and hurls her into the air like a crash test dummy. She slams against the wall, all the beads in her braids rattling.

  Black Guy 1, standing up: “Don’t touch her like that!”

  Security Guard: “You better sit down, son. All of you. Right now.”

  We sit. We’ve been told. When you see blue, do what they tell you to.

  Black Guy 2 in the sweater vest: “Nelly didn’t do nothing. It was them,” he says, pointing to the White Girls 1, 3, and 4. “And her,” he says, pointing to me.

  A posse of black kids stands up and forms a circle around Black Guy 2.

  White Girl 3: “Oh! So you’re all gonna gang up on us now?”

  Black Guy 1: “What, so we a gang now just because we’re standing together? Just because we’re black?”

  Ms. Perez, charging in from the hallway: “Be quiet!”

  Nelly, still pressed against the wall: “Get off of me!”

  Miss Kim, standing beside Nelly: “Take a deep breath, Nelly. How about Officer Smith lets you go and Ms. Perez walks with you to the office?”

  Ms. Perez backs everybody up to the side of the room by the windows and gets on her radio. A minute later the nurse comes in and sits with White Girl 4 aka Brooke. Helps her up and escorts out.

  “Everybody to their seats now! Take out your textbooks!”

  Five minutes after Miss Kim situates us in the Revolutionary War, I hear my name over the loudspeaker. “Will Verdad De La Reyna please come to the office?”

  3

  I go to Ms. Perez’s office thinking of how I can keep my mother and the Lord Jesus Christ, who will inevitably be invoked, from being involved in all this.

  “You got suspended?” Mami will shriek, making water rise out of the sink of dirty dishes like Poseidon raising a storm. “I hope you know this goes down on your permanent record . . .” (Wait. That’s a line from a Violent Femmes song.)

  Because a suspension is equal to a prison sentence in my house. Brings me one step closer to mediocrity, which leads to community college, which leads to me getting a low-paying job, which leads me to the ghetto aka hell.

  The VP’s office is plastered with awards and photos of smiling teachers. I imagine what the corkboards would be like if all the kids who sat in my chair were photographed. More like mug shots. “Have a seat, Ms. Reyna. Verdad. That’s a beautiful name. What’s the story behind it?”

  My mother named me truth. Apparently, I’m the farthest thing from it. My answer: “I don’t know.”

  “I need your account of events, Verdad.”

  “It all happened so fast. It’s hard to remember.”

  “You too? I could call Sheriff Donahue in here to jog your memory, if you’d like.” A Cheshire Cat smile spreads ear to ear. “He seemed to be successful jogging everyone else’s.”

  “No. No. I mean, Miss Kim was out of the room. I remember that. Maybe if she were in the room, you know, things would have turned out differently. But she was with you, right?”

  “Thank you for that observation.” Lots of shiny teeth under her plastic Invisalign, but no more Cheshire Cat smile. “How would you say this all started?”

  If I say it started with me, it would end me, right here. I’m not going to ruin everything I worked for, for the sake of some kids who don’t even know my name. “I would say I got up to write on the board like everyone else. And maybe that was misinterpreted. But I wasn’t involved in the actual fight.”

  “What if I told you that’s not what everybody else is saying?”

  “I’d ask you, do I look like I even broke a sweat? I had nothing to do with that fight.” I mean, I was about to get in Nelly’s face. But all the other shit? Really, it was the backpack’s fault. And ultimately society’s fault. “Other than hearsay, there is no evidence to the contrary.”

  “All right, Ms. Reyna. You can go back to class. But I want you to know that we’ve met. That I know you.” She taps a file on her desk. “I suspect we’ll meet again.”

  I have too much in my head to handle. For the rest of the day my invisibility cloak malfunctions. Everybody’s mal de ojo is on me, and everybody has an opinion. To keep sane, I go numb, to power-saver mode. If God made sense, He would have given every teenager the ability to camouflage.

  Going to lunch woulda been like voluntarily going to the guillotine. I spend it at the library hiding in the reference section. I mean, adults can’t even handle this #blacklivesmatter #alllivesmatter shit, but we have to make sense of it? We are all little snow globes that are getting shaken too hard. We’re getting unglued. Cracked. The water is spilling out and none of us know if we can breathe actual air.

  ……

  After school, I go to coding. Nobody cares if I don’t talk in there. Most of the kids are working on this architecture program where you can simulate your dream house. I’m working on building apps. On Stanford college applications, one of the questions they ask is have you invented anything. So by the time I’m eighteen, I have to invent shit, take every advanced placement course there is so that by the time I’m in college I’m finished with college, stay on the Dean’s List, win scholarships for being “Hispanic,” play the violin like Paganini, and somewhere in all that shit eat and sleep (and shit).

  I want an app that fast-forwards my whole life to getting my college degree. Because the in-between—as in, my life—is all about getting to that point. Delete today and every other day of destruction that seems to be the default in my life. Don’t even keep that shit on the C Drive. I’m okay with amnesia.

  I need to free up space. I need Blanca.

  I head to the graveyard before I catch the bus home. Pretty crazy, all this neighborhood has is fast food, liquor stores, Lotto shops, and a graveyard—and yet, most of the people around me work fifteen hours a day and can still barely afford their rent.

  Like cogs, they head to White Castle, McDonald’s. They are the people in your neighborhood we learned about in kindergarten—service workers, transportation, construction. We dressed up as them on Halloween. The same people we are taught never to be by middle school.

  Just a year and a half ago I ran these streets with Blanca. We tried on all the clothes at Rainbows and posted pictures on Instagram. We probably brought in tons of customers, but the owner didn’t show us any appreciation. “I mean, you should be giving us a discount or something,” Blanca shouted from the sidewalk. We ran before the cops were called. Death at Rainbows was not how we were going out.

  The train above my head carries the weight of people and their dreams. People walk by with the force field of their phones. Me, I have my armor too. My book. That stupid trope where nerds crash into things because they’re reading is bullshit.

  I stop at our favorite food truck, Lechonera. “A bag of maduros and another of tostones, please. And one of those.” I point to the Malta in the bucket of frosty
beverages. I take the steaming paper bag of sweet bananas and my senses absorb all of it, the homemade warmth, like holding your mother’s hand. The island smell in my nose takes me to where I have never been. If my brain don’t get being Boricua, my stomach does. Bananas are like nectar to the PR gods and me.

  My humanity is temporarily restored. And my throne beckons.

  I down half the Malta and head toward the Hello Kitty store. The giant pink chair sitting on the sidewalk has a “Please don’t sit here” sign. The closer I get to it, the closer the owner gets to the window. Ever play Marco Polo in a Hello Kitty store? Blanca and I did once.

  Owner of the Hello Kitty store (a chinito with purple reading glasses, hanging over us like a bee over a can of coke): “Can I help you?” Five seconds later: “Can I help you?” Five seconds later: “Can I . . .”

  Blanca (running her hand all over the trinkets, pencils, and erasers): “Hey, let’s split up. You go this way. I’ll go that way. She’ll have to chase us both.”

  Me: “You’ve been watching Scooby Doo again with your little cousins.”

  Blanca: “Shut up. Thanks. Now I have an earworm.”

  Me: “Scooby Dooby Doo!”

  Blanca (covering her ears, her hula-hoop-sized hoopies dangling): “Damn it.” (Untangling her earrings from her huge-ass head of hair.)

  Owner: “Can I help you?”

  Me: “I’m in! How about a game of . . .”

  Blanca (running): “Marco!”

  Me (eyes closed, banging into a life-size Hello Kitty): “Polo!”

  I walk up the path to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cemetery. For all the ugliness on the outside—the spray-painted rock wall that leads to the highway, the uneven gravel mixed with crushed asphalt, glass shards, and trampled weeds, plastic lids and flattened straws, the torn parachutes of grocery bags—the inside is always beautiful. The entrance is an arbor intertwined with jasmine. The exhaust and the exhaustion of the city is overcome by these tiny flowers. Trees surround the cemetery guarding against the ugliness outside. Bright autumn wreaths of orange, yellow, and gold sit like crowns on some graves, on others bouquets, some buds of white roses with sprays of yellowing baby’s breath, some blue forget-me-nots shaking off petals in the wind.

  Blanca sits on her tombstone the way she always sat on tabletops. Her legs swing like a little kid’s: #shawtyproblems. Her Homegirl Red nails are painted perfectly. I could only paint my nails on my right hand. The left always got smeared and screwed up unless Blanca did it. She’s wearing a pretty black ribbon choker and white jumpsuit. Her hair, a thick bushy brown mane, floods over her shoulders.

  I toss her the remaining half of the Malta and her tostones. She likes salty. I am a sugar addict. I pull some tiger lilies from my backpack.

  Me: Mami picked these from her garden for you.

  Blanca: I love Mami!

  Me: She says hola.

  Blanca and me always used to joke that we were separated at birth. Her abuela was like my abuela, even though it was all she could do not to break a hip keeping up with us. My mother was always Blanca’s mother—at least until Blanca went boy crazy. Even then, Mami gave us the same lectures: Remember, girls. These guys, the only deposit they make is when you sleep with them and after the kid comes, their checkbook is empty.

  I plop on the grass and chow down on the sweet bananas.

  Blanca smiles. Her braces shine black and blue in the sunlight. She taps her cracked, taped-up cell and plops down beside me.

  Blanca: You’re late.

  Me between bites: Coding.

  Blanca (talking with food in her mouth): Invented the app for world peace yet?

  Me (talking with food in my mouth, because if we stopped to close our mouths and chew, we would forget important shit): Try starting a race riot.

  I run my hands through my hair so hard I pull some of it out.

  Blanca: Say what? And gurl, stop that shit with your hair!

  Me: Okay!

  I shove more maduros in my mouth. I give her the synopsis.

  Blanca (punching me in the arm): No, no, no! You’re supposed to be telling me about how you’re hanging out with such-and-such who’s dope, but she could never replace me. You’re supposed to be telling me about all the papi chulos. Tell me again about the brotha in the sweater vest.

  Me: I don’t know. He’s in a bunch of my classes—homeroom and history and PE. He’s—wait! What the hell does that have to do with—

  Blanca: No, no, no. Don’t stop. Stick with Guapo. You need to fall in love. That’s the solution.

  Me: Nobody needs to fall in love. We all need to fall in—like.

  Blanca: Uh? C’mon. You and the Brooks Brother in PE. You could be chasing the ball in soccer and trip like you always do and he—

  Me, licking the sticky stuff off my fingers: What? You know me. I don’t chase balls of any kind.

  Blanca (wiping her hands with a napkin, practically begging): Isn’t there anybody you’re crushing on?

  Me: Blanca, think about the word crush. Does this word not alarm your ass? It is assumed that at least one of the two people involved in the relationship is being flattened.

  Blanca: That’s one way to look at it. Or, you know. Crushed. Flattened. Flat on your back.

  Me: You are a prevert.

  Blanca: Pervert, you dummy.

  Me: Prevert. Because the only person you’ve kissed is me and you’re already talking smack about losing your virginity.

  Blanca couldn’t stand the idea of not knowing what we were doing when we had our first kisses. And kissing our hands was out of the freakin question. She said she thought of Thor when she kissed me. (So maybe I cracked her head a little on the landing.) I thought about sex. Like how I wished I could just get sex over with a friend so it wasn’t this momentous deal I had to dread for the next five years. Guys get to wait with anticipation. They get lucky, they get street cred. What do we get? Bloody sheets and a rep. My moms says that hasn’t changed and it never will.

  Blanca (shaking crumbs from the paper bag into her mouth): It’s not smack. It’s reality. It’s gonna happen one day. I mean you are in high school now.

  Me: What is the point of sex in high school? If you’re lucky enough not to be date-raped you’re outed as a slut . . .

  Blanca (leaning back against the tombstone): Damn, Verdad! You’re such a romantic!

  Me: Romance? Okay. So I become a couple with some dude, and maybe we go to the prom. Prom, one of the stupidest inventions of high school, BTW. Anyway, then inevitably we’re planning for college and I want to take a year off and my dude wants to go to the military, so we just end up breaking up.

  Blanca: Gurl! You think you’re maybe skipping a few things? Like somebody waiting for you in the hall after class? Like you’re drinking water at the fountain, and he bends down to drink too just as you come up for a breath . . .

  Me: You got this all thought out, huh. But look, if I know a book has a stupid ending, I’m not going to waste my time reading all the shit before it.

  Blanca (smacking her hand against her forehead, rubbing her temples, and taking a breath): Maybe life isn’t a novel all the time. Where we’re always trying to see what happens in the end. Maybe sometimes it’s poetry. Every syllable of living counts.

  Me: Shit. That was like profound. Like, wait. I gotta write that down.

  I do. In pen on my arm. This annoys the living shit out of my moms. Why can’t I just put my thoughts to paper? she asks. One, I have too many thoughts too fast and if I waited to get to paper, I’d forget it all. Two, the only reason my moms wants me putting thoughts to paper is because she wants me to enter them in an essay contest and win a grant or scholarship. And this is the reason I’m generally covered in ink head to toe.

  Blanca (smiling high beams): You got all that down, girl. And write this too: Sometimes those syllables got to be like ooooh, Sweater Vest brotha, mmmmm—

  I throw a maduro at her. She pinches my ass, hops up, and takes off. I chase after h
er weaving through tombstones. Running backwards, she makes crazy porn faces at me. I flip her the finger and trip. Whatever physical activity I do involves a possible trip to the emergency room.

  Regaining my balance, I stand up. Damn! I’ve lost her.

  This is the way it happened in real life.

  In middle school. We were chasing each other through the halls. She slammed into an actual guy. Fernando with the lips you couldn’t help but watch as he talked. That’s the way Fate happens. She sees that the plotline is happy and she’s like Bam! Take this rising action! Smack! Take that turning point.

  I stand still and watch the clouds from Blanca’s footsteps settle into minerals and dust. The sunlight interrupted by leaves breaks into shards on the grass. She was always two steps ahead of me. Blanca was never afraid of what comes next.

  4

  My mother’s “Mercedes” is in the driveway. It’s our private joke to call that broke-down piece of shit Toyota Camry a Mercedes. What isn’t a joke is that how much Mami works should have got her an actual Mercedes but didn’t.

  The familiar base pumps through the walls. In my casa, we got music playing 24/7. Partly because then the assailants will think, Hey, Bad Bunny is playing, better let them enjoy their jam, and hit the next house. I prop open the screen door with my backpack, use three keys to unlock the door, and hear over the music, “That bastard!”

  “Mami?”

  I check the photographs on the entertainment center in the living room. My eyes scan past the framed photos of titis, tios, and primos, to the photos of Rita Moreno, Celia Cruz, Daddy Yankee. J Lo, Felipe Andres Coronel aka Immortal Technique, Benicio Del Toro. A couple years ago Lin Manuel-Miranda joined the family.

  When I was little, I thought they were all my familia. Let me express how much it sucked to tell all the kids at school that Tio Daddy Yankee wasn’t coming to my birthday at the roller rink.

  Yup, Mami is pissed. There is a sticky note over my dad’s face, in the one pic of him that she keeps for my sake. My mother is even organized in her rage.