Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass (12 page)

There are five of us, and from the corner of my eye, I can see they’re nobody I want to know. There’s a truck-size kid in low pants. His pockets are at the back of his knees, and his face is so blank, it’s scary. There’s a bleach-blond girl with sickly legs and scabby nostrils, shivering in a leather jacket, and a short kid with leopard-print ear gauges whose name, I somehow remember, is Pipo.

After a minute or two, Mr. Flatwell glances at his watch and leads us inside, past the volunteer at the “Shoot Me First” Welcome Desk, who smiles as we file pass. The front office is locked tight and dark, but the Community Programs office is open as usual. An English-as-a-second-language class is meeting at the far end of the hall. Two little Asian kids are chasing each other outside the door, probably waiting for their mothers. The teacher’s nasal voice fills the empty hallway.

“Repeat! ‘May I have the check, please?’”

The class mumbles it back, but it doesn’t even sound close.

Mr. Flatwell unlocks our classroom, which still smells of dust and sweat. I start for the back row, but he stops me as the fluorescent lights flicker on.

“Not today, Miss Sanchez. We sit up front like a cozy family.”

I glance at my companions and slide into the second seat without a word. An empty seat is beside me.

Right away, he unlocks the desk drawer and starts to relieve us of “contraband.” Phones, music, gum — all the no-no’s. Talking is especially not allowed — as if any of us would seriously have something to say to one another.

“You’ll have one bathroom break at ten thirty, and —”

The sound of boots clicking down the hall makes him turn. Someone arrives at the door.

“And here I was thinking you’d forgotten,” Mr. Flatwell says.

When I turn to see who it is, my blood turns to ice. Yaqui Delgado is standing in the doorway. I slump lower in my seat and stare at the board, my mind racing. Didn’t Darlene say she was suspended? Shouldn’t she be rotting in prison right now?

“The bus was late,” she says.

“The earlier one wasn’t,” Mr. Flatwell replies.

She starts to come in, and every hair on my arms seems to bristle. The empty seat beside me suddenly feels like a monster magnet. I can’t breathe.

Mr. Flatwell raises his hand.

“You were ordered to report at eight fifty-five, Miss Delgado. It’s six past nine. You’ll have to serve two more Saturdays now. See me Monday.”

Instantly, I want to hug him.

Yaqui, however, isn’t too pleased. She’s so close, I can practically smell her rage.

“That’s bull. I’m only five minutes late,” she says.

“Eleven,” Mr. Flatwell replies. “Do your addition.” He opens a folder on his desk and starts flipping through pages. “See you next week.”

“I ain’t coming here next week,” Yaqui says.

Mr. Flatwell looks up genially. “Well, that’s
one
choice you could make. But, then, there are consequences to everything, right?”

Her cheeks are red as she turns on her worn heels to go. I sink low, but it’s too late. She spots me sitting there in my dirty Salón Corazón T-shirt. Even with my eyes glued to the board, I can feel her hate as she looks me up and down. Mr. Flatwell notices something fishy, too. He looks from Yaqui to me, a bloodhound onto a scent.

“Good-bye, Miss Delgado.” He moves his body between us. And with that, he shuts the door.

Somebody tried to steal Lila’s purse a couple of years ago. She was walking by herself under the train trestle on 158th Street when two guys pulled up in their car and jumped her from behind. Too bad for them. She started swinging like Oscar De La Hoya and caught one guy in the nose so hard, he couldn’t get to his car before his buddy sped away. She busted him up pretty good.

“I was so scared,” she told us later as she was filing down her broken nails. But that’s the thing about Lila. You’d never know she’s scared of anything.

I’m nothing like that.

For the first hour after Yaqui leaves, I’m shaking. I keep looking out the window as I try to do my assignments, daydreaming about all the things I might have said or done that first day Vanesa found me and gave me Yaqui’s message. I could have shoved her out of the way. I could have told her to kiss my big swaying butt. Could have puffed myself up big and ugly like one of those harmless desert salamanders that fight off rattlesnakes with a bluff.

But I didn’t do any of that. I took it like a sap, and now I can’t help but feel like I made a mistake. There’s no going back and redoing my rep. All I can do is watch as she closes in.

Concentrate
, I tell myself as I start working through the stack of work I’ve brought with me. The heat is too high in here, though, and it makes me feel thickheaded. Pipo must think so, too. He keeps nodding off as he works through the assignment that Mr. Flatwell provided to the kids with no work. It’s multiple choice from some standardized test Pipo will probably never pass. Every once in a while, Mr. Flatwell shakes his desk to wake him.

I force myself to plow through my work, subject by subject, trying to calm my nerves. My assignments have piled up worse than the time my appendix nearly killed me. Grades close this week, I remind myself. If I turn everything in, I might avoid an ugly exorcism at Ma’s hands. Then again, who knows if I’m going to make it to the end of this week?

I figure out my geometry as best I can in all this heat and answer four pages of questions about plant and animal cells for biology. English is last on my list. I pull out the extra-credit sheet and scan the assignments. Ms. Shepherd is the only one of my teachers with a heart big enough to offer save-your-neck extra credit. Naturally, she’s dreamed up something in the Halloween mood — not surprising, considering the fake cobwebs all over her classroom for the past week. We can read
Frankenstein
or
Dracula
and take a quiz, but it will be due Monday, and I’ll never finish that much reading — even if I can find the book in the library. Maybe the essay is a better idea. I wipe the sweat from my eyes and read her prompt:

Monsters have long been part of literature. Whether snake-headed women, vampires, or aliens from outer space, monsters have always represented the dark side of human nature. If you could invent a modern-day monster, what would it look like? Describe it. What would it represent?

I shiver, even though my shirt is plastered to my back. The steam is hissing through the pipes as I let my mind wander, filling it up with Yaqui’s hateful face. Soon my pen is scratching along the paper, the sound like mice digging in the dark.

“Miss Sanchez?”

Mr. Flatwell is standing over my desk. I look up and rub my eyes. It’s 11:59. My fingers are cramped around the pencil, and my papers are rumpled and damp from where my head has been lying on them.

“You’re free,” he says.

When I look around, I notice that the others have already left. On my desk are six pages of my messy handwriting that I shuffle quickly into a stack.

“English paper?”

I shake my head and shove the papers away fast. Has he been reading my stuff ?

“Just an essay.”

He puts on his coat and cap, not a bead of sweat on him as I collect my things. His desk is as spotless as when we arrived.

He clicks off the lights and walks to the door to wait for me. “What’s the topic?”

I sling on my backpack, suddenly embarrassed.

“Nothing. It’s just . . . nothing.”

Dread is building in my stomach as he walks down the hall with me. What if Yaqui is waiting for me outside? The last of the ESL students are leaving and I slow my pace so they can go first. Finally, it’s just Mr. Flatwell holding the door for me.

“Something the matter, Miss Sanchez?”

Sunshine is streaming through the open doorway. I ought to be happy to be through with detention, but the thought of what could be out there cements my feet. I have to force myself to edge past him to get out.

I don’t bother to put on my coat. Instead, I start jogging for the corner.

“Miss Sanchez,” he calls.

I turn around, but my feet don’t stop moving. My head is still thick from the heat, and I’m scared to walk home. The cold bites into me, deep like a vampire. My courage is draining like blood.

“I don’t expect to see you here again,” he calls.

I break into a panicked run for home.

“You look beautiful,” Lila tells me. It’s my birthday, and we’re out for dinner with Raúl, so she’s fixed my hair, loose around the shoulders. She also lent me a pair of heels to go with the African-print dress I bought with Mitzi.

Ma scowls. She’s still cranky about my hickey, and now this dress just adds to her ever-lowering opinion of me.

“Can’t you smile, at least?” Ma says to me. “What’s the matter? A bad day at Corazón?”

Smile? It took me all day to calm down after seeing Yaqui this morning.

Lila hands Ma a menu fast. “What looks good?” she says.

Ma is dressed up, too, which almost never happens unless someone has died. She’s wearing her black dress with fake pearls. She’s even wearing pointy-toed pumps. She looks so different that I almost forget it’s really her — except for when she talks, of course. I think she feels the same about me. I keep catching her looking at the neckline on my dress — and the fading hickey.

That’s not the only thing that’s different. This is also the first time Lila has brought a date along on an outing with us. I don’t know what to think. She said it was actually Raúl’s idea to celebrate my birthday here. When she told him I love roast pork as much as he does, he said, “Oh, I’ve got the
lechón
place for her.”

At first Ma said no.

“Why not?” Lila argued. “Piddy’s older now. A sweet sixteen is a special night for
americanas
like Piddy. We’re not doing a party. It’s not like we can take her to the zoo anymore, Clara.”

To be honest, I sort of miss the zoo. But I know I’m too old for it. So, instead, we’re at El Rincón Criollo, in Jackson Heights. I’m not much in the mood for celebrating anything tonight, not even my sweet sixteen. Ma was more excited about last year — my fifteenth, even though I didn’t do a
quinceañera
, the way some people do. That would have meant rhinestone tiaras and poufy dresses like you’re a doll in a box.
No, gracias
very much. Ma didn’t have the money, and I didn’t have the
ganas
. Living through Mitzi’s was bad enough. Her mother planned a big party at Leonard’s of Great Neck Banquet Hall last year, but Mitzi is so shy that her mother had to beg people to be in her court. It was horrible.

“Kill me now,” Mitzi said when I zipped her into her satin dress. She was miserable the whole night, surrounded by kids she barely knew.

I wish Mitzi were here tonight, but she’s not. Her badminton team went to finals someplace out in Riverhead. She was all excited when she told me yesterday. I could hear her new friends in the background.

“We’ll celebrate next weekend,” she promised in a rush. We didn’t even talk long enough for me to tell her the homo-locker detention saga.

It made me mad. She claims she never got my text about Yaqui ripping me off, but I don’t know. Would Mitzi lie? I have so many things to tell her, but it’s getting harder. She doesn’t know about me and Joey and the hickey, which she will never,
ever
, believe. She always thought he was cute, but so are grizzly bear cubs, and no one is dumb enough to get into bed with one, she’d say. But lately, every time I call, she’s been busy, and I wonder if maybe she doesn’t really want to know about me and my problems anymore.

I try to concentrate on the positive, like the fact that we’re eating somewhere fancy for once. From the outside, El Rincón Criollo looks like a dive with blackened windows. But inside, it’s a different story. The hostess wears a dress and high heels, colored lights glow in the silk palms, and good music pipes through the speakers. The whole dining room smells like garlic, cumin, and melt-in-your-mouth pork chunks. I’m in heaven.

“This place has class, right?” Lila whispers to me. She waves at Raúl, who is chatting at the bar. He knows the owner, and his good friend José moonlights as the bartender. A few young guys are looking our way, probably at Lila, although one of them actually smiles at me. I turn around to make sure he isn’t looking at somebody else.

It takes forever for Ma to look over the menu, even though I’m sure she can hear my stomach growling. “Let’s split something,” she says.

“But I’m hungry.”

“These places serve too much food. You’ll never eat it all. It’ll be a waste.”

Lila purses her lips. “
Ay, Clarita
. It’s her
cumpleaños
. Let the kid eat. Raúl will pay.”

Ma looks alarmed. “
De eso nada
. Absolutely
not
. I’ll pay for us, or we’re not eating.”

I sigh.

“Fine,” I mutter. “I’ll split it.”

“Here you go, ladies.” Raúl puts down two
mojitos
and winks at Lila as he slips in beside her. Tonight I can see what all the fuss was about at Salón Corazón. Raúl is tall, and he’s got muscles everywhere, even in his jaw. His short hair is spiked, and he has light-brown eyes, just like his skin. He smells like spicy aftershave, too, which is nice. Ma complains that he’s too fussy about himself — never a good sign in a man, she says. Fussy or not, though, he’s cute, and, besides, you always feel safe with a guy packing a Glock.