Authors: Heidi Ayarbe
“It’s a good high,” he says.
I shrug. “So is having a nice bank account.” Which I would, if it weren’t for the fact I have a few credit cards I need to pay off. I look down at my Old Gringos. Maybe three hundred was going overboard. But they’re pretty sweet.
“You like the sidelines, huh? Don’t play the game.”
“Watching you guys suffer is entertaining enough.” I don’t know if this is a challenge, an observation, or him just being a total
pendejo
.
“Suffer with me.”
“Are you for real?” I head to the building, Josh matching my stride. “What is that? Suffer with me? I mean, hello. Did you get that from some soap?”
Josh bursts out laughing. “Yeah. Can’t blame a guy for trying.”
“Trying?”
“Anyway, we can watch the game together this weekend. At Bully’s.”
I shake my head. “Nah. I’m good.”
“Wish me luck, then.”
“It’s bad luck for a bookie to wish somebody good luck.”
We walk into the building, a wave of heat with the familiar sweat socks/school caf burritos smell blasting us.
“See you soon,” Josh says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Like in ten minutes in Creative Writing.” I watch him walk down the hall, talking to practically everybody he walks by. He turns around and sees me watching him—too late for me to turn away. He nods and shouts, “Play the game.”
It bothers me that he already knows about my sideline life.
Doping: High School Sports and That Chick Who Smells Like Testosterone in Geometry Class
Valuing Diversity? Yeah. Right. Our Fragmented Student Body
I TUCK
PB & J
UNDER MY ARM.
It looks like Seth and his underground paper are back in business. Seth walks by and nods, shoving
PB & J
into everyone’s hands, slipping it in lockers. He’s probably already papered everybody’s cars in the parking lot. I hope it doesn’t snow.
PB & J
had to go
way
underground for a couple of months because around November, Seth wrote an “unconfirmed” article about an unidentified fungus in the locker room. The Health Department made the school rid the locker rooms of fungi that may or may not have been there.
It cost the district about five grand.
Kids call Seth “WikiLeaks.”
I weave my way through various crowds of students. The theater group is doing a scene from
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
in the courtyard in the alleyway that links the two buildings of classes. From an architectural point of view, the place looks more like an oval-shaped, two-story mall than a high school. They’re trying to promote their spring production, as if high school alone weren’t dramatic enough.
I inhale. I smell like Clearasil. Maybe I should invest in a good perfume. It’s hardly likely Josh, or any other guy for that matter, will find Clearasil sexually stimulating.
Josh: not even the same league. Good six-word memoir.
When I open my locker, an avalanche of books falls on top of me. I pull out my wrinkled Government report and try to iron it on my thigh. The bell rings. The hallways begin to clear out. Mocho heads toward me, disbanding from the sea of blue and khaki, looking almost normal alone, instead of like a cliché—the way he looks when he’s with the pack.
We practically grew up together, living in the same trailer park. Pre-Cordillera, Moch wanted to be a pro baseball player or be like Sy Hersh—some Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. We had an aluminum can–collecting business. Moch bought a mini tape recorder with his earnings to conduct lengthy interviews with the people from the neighborhood. I usually just bought candy. I wonder if he still has those tapes.
Funny that Moch and I both went illicit.
Mocho helps pick up the pile of papers, books, and magazines. I blush when he flips through my dog-eared copy of
Cosmo
that was inconspicuously tucked into my Government book. He hands me the magazines. I shove them into my locker, pile the books, and keep them balanced until I can slam the door shut without all of them falling out again. “Thanks for helping me out.” The books thud against the locker door. “I could’ve been buried alive.”
“Uh-huh,” he says. He looks away, absently picking a Yoda sticker off some kid’s locker.
My back and ribs hurt from falling off the bleachers this morning. I pull out my Creative Writing folder and write my two memoirs along with one about a sideline life. Falling off the bleachers and oxygen deprivation have made me downright prolific.
Just call me Proust.
I kind of laugh to myself.
Mrs. Brooks is on a memoir kick. Every day we’re supposed to write six words that sum up a feeling, a moment—anything that tells her what our day has been like. Every day I scramble to write six words that will get me a passing grade. Today I’m compelled to write:
Oops. Got off at wrong life.
But I don’t think that’d get me a passing grade and would probably get me a trip to see Mrs. Valencia, the feel-good counselor who has made everybody read
The Secret
. “Attitude, attitude, attitude, sweetheart. What you seek is right before your eyes.”
It feels like every time I look for something, it’s back at what could’ve been if Mom were around.
I write:
Wanted: Happiness. Lost in Great Basin.
Moch is picking the sticker out from under his nail.
“Were you out there this morning?” I couldn’t see across the field without my glasses, so the entire group looked like a smear of blue and tan—smudged chalk.
“Yeah.”
“So when somebody pushes me off the bleachers, you just sit tight. Is that what happened when Pacho got his jaw broken by Garbage Disposal? You just sat tight?” I say. “Thanks a lot, Moch.”
He cocks his head to the side, thick eyebrows drawn together in a deep scowl. “I never leave a
hermano
.”
I know what he’s saying is true because last week, after Pacho was beaten badly, Moch came to school with bandaged hands. But it bothers me that I don’t count. Pacho does.
Mocho glares at me with glassy eyes. I shift my weight from foot to foot. Silence falls over us, like we’re in a bubble.
It’s been a funky morning. I feel a lump in my throat.
Moch bites down on his lower lip and grunts.
I swallow back the ache. “Moch,” I say, looking around the hallway, “you know it’s totally okay to string words together in a coherent sentence. It doesn’t make you less scary.”
He glares for just a second, then cracks a smile. His teeth have more gold than the Vatican, but he still looks ten years younger than he probably wishes he does. “Don’t say that kind of shit, Michal. You could get real messed over for that.” His scowl is gone and he looks worried. “You okay?”
“I’m fine. Thanks.” I can feel Nimrod’s thick fingers on my shoulder.
“Walk to class together?” Moch asks.
I nod. Moch, though he tries to hide it, is one of the best in Creative Writing. He writes six-word memoirs about everything you wouldn’t expect. He writes about papaya sunsets and shaved coconut snow, childhood mud pies like bubbling pots of mole—a spicy chocolate life.
Then one day he wrote about the way blood congeals on the floor. Mrs. Brooks hasn’t called on him to share since.
Plus he’s gone a lot lately. A lot. I refrain from reading the obituaries most days because I’m afraid before long he’ll be there and his poetry will be gone, too. Most of us could write his memoir:
Bang! Wasted life. Anger turned cliché.
“What are you doing hanging with Ellison?” Moch asks, interrupting my thoughts, doing his limp-walk, swagger thing.
I wink at him. “Do you have some kind of hip dysplasia or something?”
“Michal, c’mon.” He stands a little taller, though. His eyes are smiling. It’s nice to see he’s still Moch somewhere under there.
I liked him a lot better when we collected aluminum cans but don’t think this is the right moment to take a walk down memory lane. I’ve already pushed my luck to the limits this morning.
“Josh Ellison? He’s a client. He’s in our Creative Writing class. Nice.”
“Rich,” Mocho says.
“He drives a Prius, yeah. Probably not destitute.”
And just placed a hundred-dollar bet.
“He could buy Nevada and sell it tomorrow. His dad’s the one who brought in Ellison Industries,” Moch says.
“
That
Ellison? Save-Nevada-from-bankruptcy Ellison? Job-creator, tax-paying model-citizen, next-governor Ellison?”
“He’s just a trust-fund tool, probably getting an airplane for his eighteenth birthday.”
“So what?” I say. I don’t imagine Josh and his family have ties to the Carson City gang scene. And Josh doesn’t look like a meth head.
Before the bell rings, he says, “Ma asks about you. Come by the house for dinner this week.” There’s something behind the invitation, something he’s not telling me.
“You okay?” I ask.
Moch shrugs. “Come by. Okay?”
“Okay.”
We walk into the classroom. Josh is sitting where he’s sat ever since he came—three chairs from the back in the third row.
Yeah. I’ve noticed.
He smiles when I pass him. I nod in his direction.
Moch glares at Josh, then me, returning to his monosyllabic gang persona.
Mrs. Brooks asks who wants to share a memoir, her hand hovering over the seating chart to pick at random. I look around the class, a little desperate for somebody to volunteer. Mrs. B’s bony finger circles the paper, then descends like a vulture. The entire class is waiting in dread anticipation. There’s no telling who’ll be crucified. “Seth Collins,” she says. “Six words. Go.”
Seth exhales. He’s a light bettor, mostly to get the scoop on sports for
PB & J
and
Carson High Tribune
—the “legit” paper he edits. I’m a little surprised he didn’t go this morning. He clears his throat and says, “‘Sanctuary. Pleasure. Pain. Cash up front.’”
Mrs. B taps her chin. “Cash up front?” she echoes. “What a rich phrase—so open to interpretation.”
The class is laughing, heads buried in their notebooks.
I can feel the heat rise to my cheeks and slump in my chair. A few others volunteer, satiating Mrs. B’s need to tap into the affective domain before plunging into an activity on meaningful thesis statements.
I close my notebook, hiding my memoirs—glad Mrs. B doesn’t ask me to read out loud because I don’t want Josh or Moch or anybody else to know I don’t have poetry.
Others’ bets. Others’ lives. Silent observer
.
JANUARY 11 IS ALWAYS A
sucky day. It doesn’t make sense to celebrate somebody’s birthday when they’re already dead. But I’d rather remember my mom alive than dead. Kind of silly missing someone after all these years. I hardly knew her anyway.
I brush the thought away. It’s probably a mix between Josh and Moch and Nim. The tingle of the morning bets and almost getting caught by Randolph was long gone by the time I had to turn in my Creative Writing memoirs.
I stand in the middle of the hall, holding my books, and watch as everybody streams around me, undisturbed, like I’m a giant stone in the middle of a river. The river changes course.
I stay the same.
The halls clear out and I’m still standing there—untouched. Invisible.
I watch the parking lot clear out. I sit at the tables in front of the media center to finish all my homework so that I can take care of business at home—have the weekend free.
For what?
I should feel alive with a backpack full of bets and Wild Card Weekend coming up, four games and a list of hopes—yards run, yards thrown, sacks, winners, losers, you name it. But I don’t.
I don’t care who wins or loses—ever. It’s Deism. I set the bets in motion and sit back to watch how things turn out. It’s like having control because it doesn’t matter how the game ends—I’ve already stacked the bets the way I need them to make the money I need to make. So I watch my clients—how they suffer, cry, feel like they’re invincible because of one day of good luck.
That’s the thing. I watch.
My life feels vicarious.
“I’m home!” The house smells like burned cheese and melted plastic. “Lillian?” I follow the smell to the kitchen, where Lillian is scraping charcoal off generic-brand toast, plastified cheeselike substance dripping from the sides of the bread. “I got fish tacos from Super Burrito,” I say.
Lillian stops midscrape and looks up at me over her thick-rimmed glasses. Her
THE PERSONAL IS THE POLITICAL
T-shirt, threadbare and faded, slips off her bony shoulder, the collar stretched out into an amorphous top. I blush, a little embarrassed she leaves the house like this. I set the table with the rarely-been-used dishes I got for Lillian for Christmas and wipe off the layer of dust. I place a half-burned candle on the table.
“You don’t need to be spending your salary on food for us. You need to be saving for college next fall,” Lillian says. She thinks I get my spending money by working at the school financial office in the afternoons. She doesn’t know I have four bank accounts.
“It’s TTIF (Thank Tacos It’s Friday), two for one,” I lie and look at the sink, dotted with the burned cinders. “Thanks for making dinner, though. It’s nice to eat together.”
At least she made an effort. When I first moved in, she set two alarms, one to wake me up, and the other to let me know when I needed to go out and catch the bus. After living just a couple of months with her, I was in charge of washing my own clothes and making my own breakfast, lunch, and usually a microwave dinner.
I was eight.
Lillian was in college majoring in biochem—the first girl in her family to study in the U.S. When she got pregnant with Mom, her parents pretty much disowned her because good Catholic girls, good Mexican Catholic girls, get married.
She didn’t. She said good-bye to her family and Mexico.
She finished a nursing degree at night, started working at clinics, and never looked back. Over the past thirty-five years Lillian has left Mexico behind; she took the trill out of her
r
and has spent her time fighting for women’s rights—specifically, sexual rights. My mom kind of got forgotten in the midst of Lillian’s politics, picketing, and pamphlet pushing. It’s easier to love a cause than a person. Causes are perfect. People aren’t.