B0061QB04W EBOK (45 page)

Finally, it was time for the waltz I would dance with my father. The DJ didn’t have “El Vals de las Mariposas” so my father and I danced to a classical song. But I didn’t feel those overpowering emotions I
thought I would feel when I would finally dance with my father. My heart wasn’t racing, my palms weren’t sweating, my head wasn’t spinning. I didn’t feel a thing. I smelled the alcohol on his breath and I kept turning my face away from his. Always, my eyes returned to my sister, who was standing by the door looking at me proudly.

And I knew, I
knew,
that I should have been dancing this waltz with her.

17

I
N
N
OVEMBER OF
my junior year at Franklin, I received the good news that I had been accepted into the All City Honor Marching Band, which was composed of students from sixty high schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District. In order to get in, I had to switch from the sax to bells. The All City Honor Marching Band only accepted brass and percussion players. I was glad I had taken a piano class at Burbank, but it was with great sadness that, at the beginning of my junior year, I gave up my saxophone and switched to the beautiful—but extremely heavy—marching band bells. The tinkling sound was so sweet that even after practice was over, I could still hear
it in my head. It was like having a fairy in my ears, although it didn’t occur to me that one day that sweet, but very high-pitched tinkling sound would be the cause of my partial hearing loss.

I was not the only one who switched instruments. Axel temporarily gave up his clarinet to play the trumpet so that he could also get into the All City Band. Soon after, we found ourselves riding on the school bus on Saturday mornings. I was happy to know that he and I would be marching in the 1992 Rose Parade together.

As usual, my father hadn’t said anything about me getting accepted into the All City Band. But since he didn’t say I couldn’t be in it, even though it would require me to be out of the house every Saturday, I told myself that inside he really was proud. I hadn’t had the chance of being a flag bearer back in Mexico, like Mago, but marching in the Rose Parade in front of millions of people was even better!

Every Saturday, we were taken over to Dodger Stadium where we practiced the songs we would be performing in the Rose Parade. My favorite was “La Malagueña.” Later in the day, all one hundred–plus band members lined up to practice marching around Dodger Stadium. It was a six-mile march. By the end of each practice, everyone’s feet were hurting and our bodies were sore.

Axel and I started sitting on the back of the bus together. I knew he liked me and I definitely liked him, but he didn’t want anyone to know about our romance. Even after we shared our first kiss in the bus, he didn’t want anyone to know. He was ashamed to be with me, that I knew.

Ever since I started at Franklin, I had earned a bad reputation. Perhaps “earned” is not the right word. Earned implies something added, like a bonus, a plus. “Cursed” was a better word. Yes, cursed with a bad reputation. Since summer practice of the previous year, the girls in the marching band started whispering things about me, saying that I was conceited just because I didn’t hang out with them and kept my head buried in a book. Later, when the school year started, and we began to attend football games and parades, I was still too shy to make friends. I didn’t know how to. This led to even more talking until it got to the point where I couldn’t look at any girl without feeling despised. Even to this day, people still misinterpret my shyness for arrogance.

One day something snapped inside of me, and I began to rebel.
I was getting enough hassle at home, to also be getting it at school from complete strangers. An anger I had never felt bubbled up inside of me, and I lashed out. I pretended I didn’t care what anyone said or thought. I began to answer back to my drum major—who was a girl quick to say bad things about me. Once, as we were practicing our formations at the field, she asked everyone to bring their instruments even though we weren’t going to be playing them. I decided to leave my bells in the band room because my back was hurting, and they were too heavy to be carrying around if I wasn’t going to be using them. When the drum major saw me without my instrument she said, “Reyna, go get your instrument. Now!”

The field was on the opposite side of the band room, on the other side of the bridge that connected one side of the school to the other, and I tried to tell her that it made no sense for me to have the bells on if we weren’t going to play that day. She kept insisting, so I ended up yelling at her, “If you want the bells, then you go get them yourself!” After that, she hated me even more for being defiant in front of the whole band.

The only ones who weren’t mean to me were the guys, but that was because they only wanted one thing from me, and that was something kids at school called “a scam.” It meant making out with someone, but when I looked it up in the dictionary the definition was different, more appropriate to what was really happening—I was being swindled, cheated, tricked. When the kissing was over, the boys would go on their merry way without another glance. I was left feeling the same way I felt when my father would glance at me without really
seeing
me. I was left feeling as if I didn’t exist. As if I didn’t matter.

And what if I don’t matter? What if that is the reason why I can’t have a boy like me for longer than a day? For more than just a scam?
I would ask myself many times. I didn’t know then just how much my relationship with my father would affect my relationship with other men. I didn’t know that my need to be loved by him—and his inability to show affection—would make me desperate to find it elsewhere. The more he denied me his love, the more I would seek it in the boys I would meet.

Yet, I thought Axel was different from the other boys at school. Even though he was from Guatemala, and not Mexico like me, I had a connection with him that I hadn’t had with any other boy. His parents
had left him to be raised by his grandmother, just as I had been raised by my grandmothers a lifetime before. I understood Axel and the pain he felt at his parents’ absence. But he, too, just wanted to kiss me in the school bus on our way to and from Dodger Stadium, yet when the bus pulled over in front of Franklin, our romance was put on hold until the next weekend.

Finally, the day of the Rose Parade arrived, and Mago was the one who got up with me at five in the morning to help me get ready. She walked me over to Franklin and waited with me for the school bus to pick me up. Later, she hitched a ride from a friend and met up with me in Pasadena, where she walked the parade route alongside me with a borrowed video camera. I would glance at her from the corner of my eye, and once in a while I would lose her in the crowd, and I would think she had gotten tired of the walk, but later she would reappear up Colorado Boulevard with the video camera aimed at me. My father and mother were not there. But Mago was. And her presence, as always, filled the void of my parents’ absence.

When the Rose Parade was over and there were no more weekend bus rides to Dodger Stadium, Axel and I would only see each other after school and hang out in places where we wouldn’t be seen.

“Why can’t we just be like a normal couple?” I would ask him.

“I’m just not ready yet,” he would say. I wished he weren’t so afraid of what people might say.

One day after school, while we stood outside the band room waiting for Mr. Quan to arrive and start practice, I overheard the clarinet players say that Axel had asked a cheerleader to the prom.

“And what did she say?” one of the girls asked. I leaned closer to listen, but just then Mr. Quan arrived and we went inside the band room. I glanced at Axel from across the room, and I wanted to go ask him about what I’d heard. I wanted him to tell me it wasn’t true.

“Hey, Axel, I heard Marlene said yes,” one of the trumpet players said. Axel nodded and then looked at me. I looked down at my sax, pretended that I was busy putting it together. I felt my throat tighten and my teeth clench in my mouth. I didn’t know how I was going to be able to get enough air to blow into the sax and play.

“I’m sorry,” Axel said after practice. I shrugged my shoulders and pretended that I didn’t care.

I went home and told Mago about it. She said, “Forget him, Reyna. He’s not worth it.”

I wanted to tell her that she was wrong. It was me who wasn’t worth anything.
Why else would Papi treat me the way he does? Why else would the guys at school treat me the way they do?

The day of the prom, I spent the better part of the day listening to music from
Les Misérables,
especially “On My Own.” I would close my eyes and imagine my
s
elf walking by myself on a rainy night, thinking of Axel, wishing he was with me.

“Come on, Nena, let’s go,” Mago said, turning off the music.

She was taking me dancing to distract me. Carlos didn’t want to come because he didn’t like the same music as Mago. He preferred dancing to Mexican music like quebraditas and norteñas, whereas Mago liked house and techno. I didn’t care either way. Since I was a band geek, I was into marching and concert music because that was what we played in band.

We headed over to the Riviera Club in Eagle Rock in Mago’s Toyota Tercel. The car smelled of new plastic and coconut, and for a second I felt a pang of sadness to know what this car had cost my sister. Three months earlier, Mago and Papi had gone to the dealership on Figueroa Street so that she could buy herself a brand-new car. Papi cosigned for her, but he regretted it soon after. A brand-new car comes with a big monthly bill. Not long after buying herself this car, Mago felt the burden of her debt and found a full-time job in the classified department at
La Opinión,
a Spanish-language newspaper. It was a good thing she had found that job. Mago had accrued too much debt from all the pretty clothes and shoes she was buying. It was as if she were trying to make up for all those years in Mexico when we had only rags to wear. I would go with her to May Co., Robinsons, and the Broadway to make payments on her credit cards, but she would never manage to pay them down. She said she was sick of the old ladies’ clothes Mila would bring home to us from Kingsley Manor. She said she wanted to dress her own way, develop her own style. She’d flick
her hair, which was now dyed a dark brown with golden highlights, and tell me that never again would she wear hand-me-downs. Her friends in Mexico would never recognize her now.