The Knife and the Butterfly (8 page)

So she knows me. She has to. She knows me, but what does she know? Maybe she’s the one who’s not talking.

“Know what it means?” Janet asks. She doesn’t look up from the tiles she’s fiddling with.

“No,” Lexi says. “What?”

“I don’t know. Want me to try to find out?”

“Fine,” Lexi says. “Whatever.”

This throws me because I realize that even though it’s my name, I’ve got no idea what it means. Never even thought that the name my crew stuck me with might mean something. When my homies started calling me Azael, I took it on like everything else, no questions. Now I think maybe I should have asked just what kind of shit I was painting myself with.

Lexi scoots the letters in my name closer together then spreads them far apart. After a long time, she sweeps them into her hand and drops them back into the bag.

I’ve had enough of Lexi by the time I finally get back to my cell. Too much. I feel like talking to Tiger, but his cell is empty. Pakmin’s probably got him glued to a chair watching his cousin. It’s some stupid shit they put us through in here.

I’m counting the concrete blocks in the walls when I remember the papers I stole from my file yesterday. I’m such an idiot—who forgets something like that? I listen for Gabe’s footsteps, and then when I’m sure nobody’s coming, I lift the mattress and slide the pages out from under my black book.

First I set aside the blank pages I was supposed to use for notes. I’m thinking these will be good for some practice drawings because I’ve only got one page left in my black book, and I’ve got to save it for something good. Then I pull out the stuff I took from my file. It’s only about three pages, and I’m planning to just read them top to bottom. But then I feel a kind of a lump on the last page, and I pull it to the front of the stack. I know right off from the handwriting that it’s from Becca. The butterfly necklace I gave her is bunched up in the corner and covered in tape.

2 My Forever Azael,

Take your stupid necklace back. I’m so mad at you it’s like somebody gave my heart a fucken hot pepper and then wouldn’t give it no milk. I’m so mad at you for proving my mom right. I’m so mad at you for all the times you kissed my stomach and said all that sweet bullshit, that you was working to change. I’m so mad at you for giving me the buterfly and promising that this time it was for real because it wasn’t. You lied about changing. You turned around and went rolling with your pinche boys toward nothing but more trouble. Javi stinks of trouble but you didn’t bother to sniff. It’s your own fault for going w ith him.

I had all these stupid ideas for us. Just like a girl. I was gonna get my nurse aid certificate one day and you was gonna get your GED and maybe some kind of training. We was gonna have enough for our own apartment, a car, maybe cable. Not the kind of money you thought of, you and your SUVs and rims and fancy fucken kicks. But I was gonna teach you how to be real happy with what we had, not to want more. You know how good I could always satisfy you.

This time you gone too far and nothing you could say can take it back cuz you ain’t gonna be talking to me no more. Like it or not, we’re done. And I don’t like it because I wanted you and you wanted me but that aint good enough in this world. I’m making myself crazy with all this shit and I can’t do it, I got to stop. Who knows if you’ll ever see this. There was times before that they didn’t give you your mail or nothing. But this is a thousand times worse. There’s no way back to what we had. I can never be yours now. It hurts, baby, it hurts, but that’s how it is.

Your once one and only,

Becca

This changes everything. Now I know that things are screwed up real bad. The fucked-up rating of my life is through the fucking roof. Whatever they’re saying I did, whatever Becca heard, it was bad enough that she doesn’t want nothing more to do with me. It has to be something whacked because Becca’s real loyal. She’s no run-scared snatch.

And then it hits me. I’m not the one supposed to inform on Lexi; she’s the one who’s dumping shit on me.

She could’ve been hanging around the park the day of the battle with Crazy Crew. Maybe she got picked up for something, and then the officers came along offering to ease up the charges in exchange for information. Maybe she didn’t want to report on one of her homies, so she decided she’d screw me over instead.

It’s got to be that. Lexi is running some kind of racket here. She has to be lying because I didn’t do anything. Hardly nothing, except for pounding that punk who messed with Eddie. But I saw him stumble away all hunched over; he couldn’t have been too messed up.

So Lexi’s faking that she saw me do something. Probably tomorrow I’ll start hearing her tell lies about me. Just try it, I want to shout. Just try pinning shit on me, white girl. It’ll fly right back into your face, bitch, it will.
Pinche puta
.

The heat of my anger cracks against the icy silence in my heart where I used to hear Becca’s voice. I picture those sad eyes of hers, so big and brown you could disappear in them. No way can I believe she could mean that it’s over. I never would’ve done this to her. I swear if I’d got her knocked up, I would’ve married her and taken care of her forever. She can’t mean it. Then I look back down at the words written out in her careful girly handwriting. I see the necklace there. Proof that she’s done with me.

It’s not that I was lying to her about changing. I just should’ve done it faster.

I pull the pencil out from under the mattress and grab one of the blank sheets Gabe gave me. I’m going to draw something for Becca to make her see that she’s wrong to quit on me.

I start working out a butterfly in gray spirals across the page. I draw Becca in the corner sitting with her face in her hands. I put the butterfly on a leash that goes all the way to the other corner. I draw myself there with my best apology eyes.

I’m feeling good about my work until I take another look at the butterfly. When I see what I did, my hand slips, and I break the tip of the pencil.

There it is, twisted inside the butterfly along with all the spirals: LEXI.

I rip the drawing in half and shove everything back under the mattress. I lie down on top of it, but I can’t get her name out of my mind.

CHAPTER 18: THEN

It was maybe ten in the morning, and me and Pelón’s older sister Maribel were stretched out right on the kitchen floor, listening to Mega 101 and trying to stay cool. The temperature was already in the high 90s, and the AC was busted again.
Pinche
Bel-Lindo, everything
chafa
and broke. We were going back and forth about the question, could you really ever change your life? I thought maybe, but Maribel said yes, all you had to do was decide. She wanted to get a tattoo of a butterfly on her wrist so that everybody could see that she was changed. Transformed, she said. She wanted it right there so she could take a look at it any time and remind herself, too.

Maribel was the one who gave me the idea for the butterfly necklace. I needed something for Becca’s birthday anyway, and Wal-Mart had a couple. I picked the shiniest one. It was silver with little diamonds at the corners of the wings and all along the center. When the lady who opened the display case went to help somebody else, I palmed the butterfly necklace and slipped a cheap-o piece from one of the racks into its place. I was out the door before anybody noticed what was up. Anyway, I was changing for Becca, for myself even, but not for Wal-Mart.

I couldn’t wait to give it to her. Even though Becca’s birthday wasn’t for another week, I went to find her at the mall. She was working in this shoe store, and I grabbed her hand and took her over to one of those little angled mirrors that make it easy to see how your shoes look even when you’re standing up. I made her sit down on the floor in front of it, and I told her to close her eyes.

“Don’t boss me, Azz,” she said. She acted tough, but she closed her eyes and tilted her chin up like a little girl waiting for a kiss.

I gave her a sweet one with just a flick of tongue, and then I swept that curtain of shiny straight black hair forward over her shoulder so I could fasten the chain around her neck. “Go ahead,
mamita
. Open your eyes,” I told her.

She blushed like crazy. “What’s this for?” she asked. “How’d you get it?”

I just told her, “Now you gonna be reminded every time you put this on that I’m changing for you, baby. ’Cause you’re my world.”

She made sure her boss wasn’t out in the front of the store, then she kissed me long and hard. After that she kicked me back out into the mall.

“Before I lose my job, Azzie,” she said. She was smiling.

CHAPTER 19: NOW

When Gabe comes by this morning, he makes a kind of surprised grunt. I guess he saw that I didn’t eat my dinner last night.

“You all right, son?” he calls from the hall.

I don’t move. I have the blanket over my head and I’m not planning on doing anything but lie here for the rest of the day.

“You sick?” he tries again. When I still don’t say anything, he starts to walk away. A second later he stops. “If you make me come in and check on you, I might have to search your cell, too. For contraband.”

Shit, now Gabe’s blackmailing me? I make a lot of noise sitting up on the cot so he’ll know I heard him. Last thing I need is more trouble.

I guess he’s satisfied because he starts walking down the hall. He’s humming again, and I could swear I know the song. Screw him, messing with my head.

I make myself get up off the cot. I don’t want to think about Becca, but I can’t help it. I pull out the papers and sit back against the wall, right under where it says WELCUM HOME FOOL.

I’m scared shitless of what I’ll find out, but I’ve got to know what they say I did. What was so bad that even Becca quit on me? I lay out two pages cut from newspapers. At least I guess they’re from newspapers. It’s that kind of super-thin paper, but one piece is totally blank except for the name of the newspaper and a date, June 16, 2011.

The other page is whacked, too. I can tell it’s an article about the rumble in Montrose, but whole chunks are blacked out with a fat marker. I turn the page all different ways, even look at it from the back, but I can’t see what the marked-out words say. What I can read is enough to make my stomach flip.