B0061QB04W EBOK (41 page)

When I read
Heaven,
I immediately related to the poverty the children lived in, although the setting was rural West Virginia, not Guerrero, Mexico. In
My Sweet Audrina
, I knew firsthand the longing Audrina felt for her father, that desperate desire to be loved by him.

Another thing I liked about V. C. Andrews’s books was that they made me feel better in a way. True, my life was very difficult, but in no way as bad as her characters’ lives. Abuela Evila didn’t feed us much, but at least, as far as I know, she never tried to poison us!

I read so much that sometimes I would hide under the covers with a flashlight and not go to sleep until I was finished with my book. When I got my first pair of eyeglasses later that year, Mago said, “Now you look like a librarian,” as if to insult me. But it only made me love books even more.

Halfway into the school year, I found out that Burbank was having a short-story competition. My English teacher encouraged all her students to enter. I thought about the story I wrote at Aldama Elementary. I was afraid of my writing once again being rejected. Yet part of me had something to prove.
I am in regular English classes now, aren’t I? With the exception of my pronunciation skills, my English is almost as good as the native speakers’, isn’t it? I might have a chance this time, right?

And what if by some miracle I did win? Wouldn’t Papi finally be proud of me? I didn’t allow myself to think that he might not be. So far, making my father proud had turned out to be impossible. He’d never once come to my band concerts. And I wasn’t the only one trying to get his attention. Carlos had joined a soccer team, but Papi wouldn’t go to his games. Mago had taken an interest in modern dance, performing at basketball games during halftime and at other events, but Papi wouldn’t go see for himself how good a dancer she was.

So what chance did I have of making my father finally take notice? Probably none, but I wanted to try.

Because of the influence of
Sweet Valley High,
I wrote a short story about identical twins—Beverly and Kimberly. But in my short story, when the twins were very little, they were separated when their parents divorced. The mother kept Beverly, and the father took Kimberly. One day when they were teenagers, the twins were reunited by chance, and they had to struggle to recoup all that lost time and find a way to overcome the separation. Looking back on it now, I realize that first short story of mine would set the tone for all my other stories—stories of broken families, absent parents, and siblings that were separated—for that was the world I lived in, the world I knew.

I turned in my short story, and, for the following two weeks, I was anxious about the results. By then I was beginning to fall in love with writing. In my writing, you couldn’t hear my accent, which is why playing the sax, writing, and drawing were my favorite ways of expressing myself.

When the time came to find out the results, they were given through the PA system during homeroom. “Congratulations to all the students who entered the short-story contest,” the principal said over the speaker. I held my breath and put my head between my hands. “Remember, that even if you didn’t place, you’re still a winner.”

She started off with the honorable mentions, but my name wasn’t one of them. Then she announced the third-place winner. It wasn’t me. Then the second-place winner. It wasn’t me, and by now tears were starting to form. “And the first-place winner is—Reyna Grande.”

I looked at the speaker. Had I just heard my name? My homeroom teacher clapped and said, “Congratulations, Reyna. I’m so proud of you.” All the students looked at me, and for the first time, they weren’t looking at me to criticize me, but to congratulate me.

When I went to my English class, my teacher had the competition prize for me. In front of the whole class, she handed me a blue ribbon that read “First Place” and my prize, which was two tickets stapled to a brochure. A picture of a beautiful cruise ship was on the cover of the brochure.

Had I just won two tickets to go on a cruise? My heart started to race.
Won’t Papi finally be proud of me when he finds out that I’m taking him on a cruise!

“These are tickets to go to the
Queen Mary,
” my teacher said.

“The
Queen Mary
?” I asked. I glanced at the picture of the cruise ship. What a beautiful name for a ship. But I’d never heard of it before.

“Where is it?” I asked my teacher.

“In Long Beach.”

I didn’t know where Long Beach was either, but I was so excited just thinking about the adventure I was going to have on that cruise and how much fun it would be to share it with Papi. Maybe we could have a father-daughter moment when we could finally bond, when we could finally overcome the gap our separation had created. I thought of us standing on the deck as the ship pulled away from the harbor. I pictured us holding hands, and not letting go as we became surrounded in azure.

“Um, you do know what the
Queen Mary
is, right?” my teacher
asked, interrupting my reverie. When I shook my head, she told me a brief history about the
Queen Mary,
except that I stopped listening when she got to the part that the
Queen Mary
didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t ask why in the world the school would give me tickets for a cruise ship that didn’t go on cruises. I went back to my seat, and for the rest of the day I couldn’t stop thinking about the adventure I thought I was going to share with my father.

Despite the disappointment about the cruise, I went home that day feeling proud, and I couldn’t wait for Papi to come home to give him the news.

As soon as he opened the door, I ran to him and told him about getting first place in a competition. I showed him the prize and my short story. Papi glanced at the tickets. “What the hell is the
Queen Mary
?”

I told him it was a cruise ship, but I hated admitting that it didn’t go anywhere.

“So what’s the point of going to see it?”

“Because I won!”

“I don’t even know where it is.”

“It’s in Long Beach.”

“Long Beach is a big place,” he said. “I don’t want to get lost.”

“Couldn’t we ask for directions?” I asked. But I already knew what his final answer would be. Papi didn’t go anywhere unless he knew where he was going.

Without another glance, Papi handed me back the tickets and short story. I put them and the ribbon inside a little box where I stored my keepsakes. I told myself that the prize wasn’t important. It was the fact that my writing hadn’t been rejected that mattered. I took out my notebook from my backpack, found a clean page, and I started to write another story.

14

M
Y FIRST LOVE
was a forbidden love.

My first love had velvety eyes the color of the mountains in Iguala. They reminded me of home.

My first love was a boy on a bicycle. From the corner of my eye I saw him riding lazily down Avenue 50 on the opposite side of the street. He didn’t pedal but let gravity pull him down the street. In this way, he kept pace with me as I made my way to the liquor store to buy Papi a bottle of charcoal lighter. As I went into the store, I turned to look at him. He waited there at the corner on his bike. I knew he would still be there when I came out.

The boy I loved was named Luis Gómez, and he was from El Salvador. Two weeks before, my friend Phuong, whom I had met in ESL class, had pointed him out to me during lunch. She’d said, “Do you see that boy there, the one with the green eyes?” When I spotted him among the other boys he was with, I nodded at Phuong. She said, “I
love him. Go talk to him for me.” She pushed me toward him, but I didn’t move. How could I go up to a complete stranger to talk to him about my friend? She said that Luis had just started ESL class and didn’t speak much English. Phuong didn’t speak a lot either, and that was why she hadn’t passed to regular English as I had.

Mago had passed, too. Now at Franklin High School, she didn’t hang out with any ESL students. She moved in “better circles” now that she’d gotten a good grasp of the English language. Carlos was in regular English, too, but he liked the ESL kids, and those were the friends he had at Franklin. I was following his lead. I was not ashamed, as Mago was, of people knowing where I came from.

Phuong wanted me to act as her messenger, and she would tell me what to tell Luis in Spanish for her. She said, “Reyna, you and me are sisters, you need help me.” Phuong said we were like sisters because I looked Asian, just like her. Sometimes teachers and students would think I was Chinese, or Filipino, or Japanese, or Thai. I’d never even heard of those nationalities until I came to this country, and I hated the fact that I was being stripped of my Mexicanness. I would tell people, “I’m Mexican, from Mexico,” but sometimes they wouldn’t believe me. I would later find out that Mexico’s history includes many immigrants from different places in the world, such as Asia. And this was the source of my features.

I finally gathered up the nerve to go talk to Luis during lunch the following day, and I told him my friend Phuong loved him, just as she had told me to tell him. Luis laughed and said she hardly knew him, so how could she love him? I didn’t know what to say to him then, because as he looked at me with those green eyes of his, I knew that I—just like Phuong—was a goner.

Every day I would deliver messages to him from Phuong, but that only took a minute or two and after that he asked me questions, not about Phuong but about me. Phuong wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t able to speak Spanish and couldn’t really understand what we were saying to each other from where she waited, but by the end of the week Phuong wasn’t talking to me anymore. She said, “You are bad sister, Reyna Grande,” and then turned and walked away.

I guess I wasn’t meant to be anyone’s Cupid.