Seeing Off the Johns (8 page)

FALL
FALL

School started on a Wednesday. Chon woke up early, not as tired as he should have been. Sammy Alba was taking advantage of the last days of Chon's daytime availability and had scheduled him to work open to three on both Monday and Tuesday. Rocha was taking advantage of Chon working that shift on Tuesday too because he didn't show up the night before. He called Sammy, and even Art in San Antonio, he claimed, but neither answered. Chon tried getting hold of Ana, but she didn't answer, as had become her practice on her days off, especially now since Chon had stopped coming over. Chon did some half-hearted sulking and moaning to himself during his second shift at The Pachanga, but couldn't get into it as, in the dead minutes and hours between customers, his mind wandered constantly to Araceli and the excitement of seeing her the next day.

After the floors were swept and mopped, the cash in the register dropped into the one-way slot in the floor safe, his paperwork slid under the office door, Chon turned off the lights and locked the store up for the night. At home, his sleep was uneasy, restless.

When he woke up the next morning, though he had already done so the night before, Chon showered. This was unlike him, and his parents noted it.

“Pito's not even this excited about his first day of school,” his mother said.

Chon ignored her, hoping that the real reason he was so excited wouldn't be
apparent to his parents or his brother—and certainly not to his classmates. Because what would that make him in their eyes? A predator? An opportunist? Chon wasn't ready to recognize that in himself, much less in the angry, judging eyes of everybody within the walls of Greenton High—from its students to its teachers and administrators, to even its two janitors and three lunch ladies.

He put on the new clothes his parents bought him and the Polo boots and Seiko watch, plus a dab of the cologne he had bought on a trip the family took to the mall in Laredo. He looked at himself in the mirror. The pricey acne medication he had also bought on that trip was working. His face was clearing, pockmarked and scarred, but no longer oily and red. The bedroom push-ups, backyard weight lifting, and daily glasses of chalky whey protein shakes he'd been drinking were bulking him up, little by little. On a good day, like this one, Chon could see the image before him in the shiny glass and let himself believe that he wasn't too bad looking.

Maybe, just maybe, there was a chance.

Chon left the bathroom and made three tacos of the chorizo and egg his mother had woken up early to make. She didn't do this often. Chon usually got breakfast on the way to school with his own money. Usually Pito was planted sleepily on a chair at the family dining table with a bowl of cereal in front of him and the morning's news playing on the TV. This was a big day however. It was Chon's first day of his senior year of high school and Pito's first day at Greenton Junior High.

Chon wrapped the tacos in a paper towel and walked to the door. Pito though was only halfway through his breakfast.

“We leave now, or you walk,” Chon said.

“Concepcion.” His mother only ever called him by his proper name in reproach. “Be nice.”

“Yeah, Concepcion,” Pito said, mocking.

“Guadalupe, you listen to your brother,” their mother said, getting up and meeting the boys at the door. “I love you guys.” She gave each of them a kiss on the cheek. “Be good.”

Chon and Pito sat, letting the Dodge-nasty's engine warm up. Pito interrupted Chon's reverie.

“Do you think today will be weird?” Pito asked.

“It's just another day at school. Only you're at a bigger campus with lockers and bells ringing every period and dressing out for gym.”

“No,” Pito said. “I mean at your school. This will be the first day of school after it happened. It'll be the first time everyone sees Araceli. Don't you think that'll be weird?”

Foolishly, in all of Chon's planning and scheming over this day, he had never factored in what he knew had to be waiting at school, even though the frenzy had died down a bit. The church had stopped sending its statue of the weeping virgin from house to house so that every believing, willing family would say a novena for the Johns.
The View
, Greenton's weekly, five-page news circular was no longer running stories about the Johns or at least had begun relegating them—now mainly responses to letters to the editor—to the back page of the paper. While folks were still coming into The Pachanga and buying John stars, they no longer did so weepingly or out of grief, but acquisitively and in line with the trend running through town.

Pito was right though. This was the first day all the teenagers in Greenton would be in one place—within the walls of the high school which were adorned by so many trophies and banners won by the fallen heroes, where they had walked and studied and presided as the ultimate alpha dogs, held in high esteem by even the teachers and administrators.

These same adolescents would focus all of their collective sadness on Araceli. Chon realized he would never get her attention, never get her away from the watchful gaze of almost a tenth of the people in town.

“Whatever. They can get over it,” he told his little brother.

“Yeah, but they won't get over it today,” Pito said. “It seems like no one ever will. They were—” he stopped here, either because he couldn't put into words what the Johns meant to the town or to him. Or because he knew Chon wasn't listening to him.

Chon dropped Pito off at the junior high, a WPA-era building erected to look like a fallout shelter and a factory for the crop-cut future GIs who would come up in the last pure, pre-rock 'n' roll era of American youth. You could almost hear Hank Williams tunes hanging in the air of the parking lot of what was initially Greenton High, with its vomit-hued green and pink tiles and cracked speaker box intercom system. At least it had windows, which is more than could be said for the new Greenton High, built like a high-security prison with cinderblock-walls and fluorescent lights.

When he got to the high school parking lot, he sat for a while behind the wheel of the Dodge-nasty, day dreaming. The loud mock-childish whine of a DJ in some cramped booth in Laredo coming through the radio snapped Chon out of his trance. He killed the ignition and got out of the car, not bothering to lock its doors or even roll up its windows. He saw two girls in front of school break down and cry at the sight of each other and rush into an embrace right there in the student parking lot.
Ohhhh
. It was going to be a long year.

The crying girls walked into the school building, arm in arm. In front of the school, the sun had only risen partially in the eastern sky, but the lack of trees or buildings to block out its rays made the day bright and already hot. Chon saw only his own reflection in the glass doors at the entrance. He readied himself for chaos on the other side—a
building full of people falling all over each other, seeing who could wail the loudest or who had the best story about the Johns—but there no one to be found. In fact, the entrance hall, which was flanked on either side by the school's main office and library, was barer than Chon had ever seen it. So too was the main hall. A note was taped to the office door: an assembly in the gym would start at 8:50 am.

Every student in school was there, sitting on one side of the gym bleachers. Teachers were standing, doing the business of corralling students and having them sit in sections according to grade level. Each grade had about sixty students, except for the senior class, which had only fifty-two. They had started out with sixty-seven, but eight had moved away, six had dropped out to work or dedicate their lives to various drugs of choice, and one had been arrested trying to sneak a few pounds of weed from Mexico through the Sarita checkpoint just up the highway.

Chon had gone to school with most of these kids since kindergarten. He would know them forever. He just hoped that he wouldn't have to spend the rest of his life with them.

Chon scanned the rows of seniors as soon as he entered the gym. Only Araceli was missing. Chon took a seat next to Henry, who was sitting alone, only two ass-lengths away from the nearest person—close enough to make small talk, but not close enough to commit himself to any clique or conversation.

“This is gonna be a fucked up year, man,” Henry said, giving Chon a pound on the shoulder when he sat. “It's all going to be this day, just a little different, for the whole year. I guarantee it.”

Chon nodded his head in agreement, looking around the gym at all the teenagers in town. Seeing the home side of the gym barely halfway filled, Chon had one of those moments—
God, Greenton was small
.

On the floor was a podium, no mic. They didn't need a mic. Behind the podium stood two veiled frames on easels.

“Oh Lord, did they do portraits or something?” Chon asked.

Henry shrugged and turned to say something to Chon. When he saw Chon scanning the rows of students and looking anxiously at the gym doors, he rolled his eyes.

“She's coming, man.”

The door to the gym opened. Everyone turned to look. Araceli walked in wearing a new pair of jeans and a plain pink T-shirt. Her hair was pulled back. She wore no makeup or jewelry. All the other girls in the gym were decked out in clothes some of them had worked all summer to buy just for this day—not too low-cut blouses, summer skirts and dresses, new shoes and sandals. They had woken up very early that morning to wash and primp and preen. By comparison, Araceli looked like a girl who had shown up without a pencil to take a test that she didn't know was being given, in a subject she hadn't studied, written in a language she couldn't read.

But none of the other girls' attempts brought them any closer to the perfection Araceli achieved without trying. She was the essence of what Plato would have imagined if he tried to quantify the highest form of beauty. At least she was all Chon could imagine when he tried to do the same. It was the moment Chon had longed for, seeing Araceli walk back into Greenton High and back into his life. It was too brief, a moment that Chon couldn't focus on and savor like he would have wanted. His attention was diverted by the looks on the faces of his classmates and the anger he felt at the groups of students, pockets of them in all grade levels, obviously and tackily leaning over to whisper their speculations and theories, some of them even pointing as Araceli made her way to the other side of the gym.

When she started up the bleachers, her fellow cheerleaders began making room for
her. They flashed big smiles her way, conveying with their eyes their deepest sympathies. Each one of them thought they shared a close bond with her because—unbeknownst to each other—they had all slept with John Robison at various points over the last few years. Araceli gave them an unsmiling, indifferent wave as she passed them by. They made no attempt to hide their shock. They turned around fully in their seats, watching her walk away with looks that towed the line between hurt and contempt.

Araceli continued up the bleachers, getting bigger and sharper and closer to real life as she drew nearer, the entire student body of Greenton High making her a show and a spectacle. Chon didn't know if he was angrier at them for doing this to her when she had already gone through so much or because the hungry look in their eyes implicated him so greatly. They looked ready to pounce, wanting to be her friends, her lovers, to be close to her.

But they didn't want her like Chon did. Chon believed that. They just wanted to get close to celebrity—as much a celebrity as Greenton had right then and would maybe ever have again. But he wanted the girl, a girl he had wanted for so long, who was no different now for having lost her boyfriend or for having left Greenton under cover of night.

Araceli walked past the last group of students sitting on the bleachers. Choosing to sit alone on the top row of bleachers would baffle everyone writing the narrative of the return of Araceli Monsevais in their heads. It would be endlessly discussed at school and reported to curious parents and siblings at home who had as much invested in the storyline as anyone else.

Walking balance-beam style on the lowest unpopulated bench, she cut a path over to where Chon was sitting. His heart rate quickened. The muscles in his arms and legs grew tight. All the thoughts about Araceli in his dreams crashed in the face of Araceli in the flesh. He felt the distinct sensation of being pulled back down to earth, one which
felt strikingly similar to realizing that you are full of shit. What could he ever really say to her? What profound and insightful statement could he make to cut to the core of her soul and endear her to him forever? What cool, funny quip to make her laugh or smile? What squeak, cough, or bark could he utter, just then, to let her know he existed?

It didn't matter. She stopped one person short of him—one big person—sitting down next to Henry, giving her cousin a more sincere hug than Chon had ever seen her give. That hug transformed Henry in Chon's eyes from his goofy best friend—someone Chon regarded as something of a sidekick—into a man in his own right. Chon was awed, as was everyone else in the gym (except Henry), at the power Henry was given by Araceli grabbing him and then falling into the embrace he gave her.

Down on the gym floor, Mr. Adame tried to get the gym's attention by tapping on the podium, then knocking on it, then finally pounding it with the heel of his hand. He had been the principal for the last seven years. He was thirty-three years old.

“Ladies and gentlemen, your attention,” he said.

“Would you look at this goofy fucking asshole?” Henry said. Chon and Araceli laughed and looked at each other with smiles.

Mr. Adame really did look like a goofy fucking asshole. Formerly a three-piece suit kind of guy, he stood at the podium in a pair of nut-hugging Wranglers, a bolo tie and pearl-button shirt, a twenty-gallon black felt hat, and an out-of-the-box pair of ostrich skin boots. He was raised in Houston, had come to Greenton fresh out of graduate school in College Station, going straight from a bachelor's program in secondary education to a master's program in school administration. Greenton High was the only principalship he could find that required no teaching experience. Though he believed wholeheartedly in the power and necessity of a good education, he hated children. No one—the students, their parents, the staff—had warmed to him over the last seven
years. But this year was the year he had decided to connect with his students and the rural community they lived in.