B0061QB04W EBOK (35 page)

“What are you doing? It’s gross!” I said, pushing her off me. I turned my back on her, wiping her saliva off my earlobe. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Forget it,” she said. She turned her back to me. Then in the darkness, I heard her say, “I’m going on fifteen and I haven’t ever been kissed.”

“It’s not a big deal.”

“You’re not even eleven. What do you know? I want someone to like me. I want a boyfriend.”

“You’re not allowed.”

“And what if no one ever loves me? What if my scars gross them out?”

“You can hardly see them.”

“That’s what you think.”

“I hope Papi throws you a quinceañera,” I said as I wrapped my arms around her. “You’d look like a princess with your pink dress.”

Mago didn’t say anything for a while. I thought she had fallen asleep, but then she said, “There’s a boy.”

I turned to face her again. “Don’t tell me you have a boyfriend?” I asked, a little too loud. Mago hit me with her elbow to be quiet. Carlos didn’t wake up, even though he was sleeping on the floor near our bed. I hoped Papi hadn’t heard me, either.

“No. He doesn’t even know I exist,” she said. She went on to tell me about a guy named Pepe she had a crush on. But he didn’t notice her because she was an ESL student, whereas he was a pocho. Even though his parents were Mexican, he had been born in this country and didn’t speak a word of Spanish. He hung out with the popular kids, unlike Mago, who, because she was an ESL student, did not.

“Have you tried talking to him?” I asked.

“Are you stupid? He doesn’t speak Spanish, didn’t you hear me?”

“Speak to him in English then.”

“My English isn’t good enough. It’ll never be good enough,” she said.

On Saturday morning, Papi woke us up at eight as he always did, even though it was the weekend and we begged him to let us sleep
in. Instead, he put Los Tigres del Norte on the stereo and blasted the volume. No matter how many pillows we put over our ears, nothing could keep the music out. “¡Ya levántense, huevones!” Papi called out over the music. Carlos was up and ready to go help Papi with chores before I could rub the sleep from my eyes.

As we were cleaning the bathroom, Mago stopped scrubbing the toilet and said, “I know what I have to do!” She got up and went to the yard where Papi and Carlos were mowing the lawn. “Papi, can you take us to church tomorrow?”

Papi looked at her as if she were crazy. When we first arrived in the U.S., we missed Abuelita Chinta so much that we asked Papi to take us to church because that was what we had done with her. Papi said he didn’t believe in religion. “This is my God,” he said as he raised his Budweiser, and then took a drink from it. We had not asked again.

Papi looked at Mago and wiped the sweat off his forehead. “If you kids want to go to church, you can go, but I’m not taking you.” Then he started the lawn mower and continued his work.

The following day, Mago and I set out to go to church. She wouldn’t tell us why she was going, but I had a pretty good idea. Abuelita Chinta taught us to pray, especially when you want something really badly. There was not a single saint, statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe, or picture of Jesus Christ anywhere at home to pray to. So I knew this was why Mago now wanted to go to church. I wanted to go to church to remember my grandmother and to ask God to give me the chance to make my father proud.

The closest Catholic church was St. Ignatius, which was on Monte Vista Street, but all the way by Avenue 61. Papi wouldn’t be bothered with driving us there because he wanted to enjoy his Sunday drinking and watching basketball on the television, and Mila had gone to visit her children. Papi never went with her. Mila’s family hated my father and would never welcome him into their home. Carlos wanted to stay with Papi, so just as we had done in Mexico, Mago and I walked to church. It took us forty minutes to get there, and we were out of breath, but we did find what we were looking for.

As soon as we opened the door, I became intoxicated with the
smells of incense, melted wax, and flowers. All of a sudden, I was back in Iguala. I was back with my sweet grandmother.

We took a seat in the back pew and listened to mass while surrounded by the saints and Christ, wondering if Abuelita Chinta was at church in Iguala at that very minute, looking up at the face of Jesus, as we were doing now.

Oh, please, tell her we miss her
, I said to Jesus.
Tell her how much we love her.

The next day, I kept wondering if Mago had gotten her prayer answered. When she finally picked me up at Mrs. Giuliano’s house, I demanded that she tell me, tell me, tell me.

Mago said, “When Carlos and I were walking down to the bus stop today after school, I noticed that Pepe and his friends were walking right in front of us. Pepe turned around and saw me. He slowed down until I had caught up to him, and he asked me what my name was.”

“And? And?” I said, grabbing her arm. I closed my eyes and listened to her story, which was better than the soap operas Mila watched.

“All I managed to say was ‘Maggie,’” she said. Maggie? It took me a second to remember she had changed her name at school because even back then she hadn’t liked being called Mago by strangers. She also claimed that her teachers had trouble saying her real name, Magloria, and her history teacher had started calling her Maggie. So now she was known as Maggie everywhere but at home. But there was more to the story than that. It was the beginning of her assimilation.

Mago continued her story: “After I told him my name, Pepe started asking me more questions, and very soon he figured out I don’t speak English well. He caught up to his friends and didn’t look at me again.”

“I’m sorry, Mago,” I said.

“I could
understand
his questions,” Mago told me. “I just couldn’t answer them. And I was so nervous.” She was close to tears.

“Don’t worry, Mago. I’m sure he’ll talk to you again, you’ll see. You’ll get another chance to make a good impression.”

But a few days later, Mago told me that as she and Carlos were walking home along the train tracks that run parallel to Figueroa Street, they ran into Pepe and his friends. To Mago’s surprise, the boys started throwing gravel at them from the other side of the tracks, yelling, “Wetbacks! Wetbacks!”

Mago told me her heart broke at the sight of Pepe laughing and pointing at her and Carlos. She was so mad she had yelled one of the few cuss words she knew in English, “You maderfockers!”

“Ay, Nena. You don’t know how much I wished today that I knew every bad word in English,” Mago said between tears. “And there was no point in cussing them out in Spanish. They wouldn’t have understood the words anyway. And worse, they would have laughed even harder.”

Mago wasn’t the only one who was in love with someone at Luther Burbank Junior High School. Not even a week had gone by after the final episode of Mago’s love story when she and Carlos came home from school and I found out about a girl named María that Carlos was drooling over on the bus. Now Carlos was very upset, and he and Mago were still arguing about it.

“You didn’t have to be so mean to her,” Carlos told Mago.

“What happened?” I asked.

Carlos said, “There’s a girl named María I like a lot. Her last name is González, so I get to sit behind her in the three classes we share.”

“But she doesn’t even know he exists,” Mago said. Carlos looked away and his cheeks turned red. I knew Carlos didn’t have much luck with girls because of his teeth, which was really sad because my brother wasn’t ugly. But his upper lip was too thick and once he opened his mouth, and you could
see his teeth—the two big front teeth and the tiny, tiny tooth in the middle—well, then that was
all
you would look at. “You should have seen him today on the bus,” Mago said as she dropped down onto the couch. “There he is, staring at María from across the aisle, drooling like a cow. It was embarrassing. And finally, this girl comes up to him, really pissed off, and says, ‘What are you staring at me for?’”

“And you didn’t have to be so mean!” Carlos said again.

“What did you tell her?” I asked Mago as I sat next to her.

“Well, what else? I said, ‘You should be grateful my brother is looking at you, since you’re so damn ugly.’”