Chapter 2 - Dead Leaf

AUGUST 27

On a floating shelf inside my mom’s empty room, a photograph of my grandfather rests alongside a depiction of the Virgin Mary. It’s the only one I have of him. The only one I need. Within it, five deep-brown men pose in front of a field that spans yards and yards, farther than the frame can capture. The sun isn’t in the shot, but you can tell how hot it is just by looking at their shiny, gleaming foreheads. These five men are my mom’s brothers, and their smiles are the first thing you see.

But I see my grandfather, alone. He works a spade into the field like a ghost in the background, looking unwaveringly into the earth, casting his sweat and his labor over a mound of dry soil.

Anyone could miss him. I like to think that not even the person behind the camera notices and that my grandfather could give no shits about being eternally captured in sepia. I am the way my grandfather was in that picture, minding his own goddamn business and knowing that nobody can, or should, help you but yourself. 

And today, I'm reminded, with dust caked over my legs and all.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I’m awake, phone. You can stop now. 

Beep. Beep. Beep.

I've paid my debts with the hundred I spent to repair you. Don't do me like this.

The alarm on my phone doesn't stop, but imagine how wonderful it would have been if, by some unseen force, the noise spared me the ache of waking up in the morning. After a whole night of loud cars zooming by and my half sister's screeching in my dreams, I could use real magia negra, black magic, the kind that I loved practicing in my tween years to permanently scare the holy ghost out of myself. 

Hell knows I’m going to have a hard day today without some magic. I don’t even need to open my eyes to predict it.

When I do open my eyes, though, I see the unflattering mosaic formed by the different degrees of rust caked onto the ceiling of my van. I placed stickers on the mess over the summer, but one of them – a winking black widow – keeps falling away and landing beside me, and if I don’t pick it back up, when I least expect it, the sticker will be on my ass.

People already think I get my kicks out of being the least aesthetically pleasing thing in the room, and they’re right, I do, but there’s a balance I keep, and a spider stuck to my butt tips it.

There you go. I smack my hand on the blue (blue? rust blue? Lookin' kinda green.) ceiling and smooth the edges until only a tiny leg refuses to stay down. 

“Look at that. Lovely sunshine," I say. 

My window reveals the morning is murky grey today. In Houston, that could literally mean anything, from rain to a whole morning of grey clouds. I’m hoping for the former so that I won’t have to take a shower at home, but deep in the roots of my sweaty hair, I’m pretty sure that’s pushing the hygienic limits.

My phone says it's seven in the morning, and class starts in forty-five minutes. If I factor in Houston traffic, I'm screwed.

“A la chingada.” I shove my blanket aside, crawl nearer to the center console, and dump my legs half-hazardously over the armrest and into the driver’s seat. 

My fingers dig inside my back pocket for the key, which is not an easy feat when those pockets have barely enough space for your pinky finger. Side note, what the hell is the point in having pockets the girth of a single post-it note? There isn’t a point. Goths deserve better. Quit playing.

When I’m settled in, I place my left foot over the clutch and my key into the ignition. Then, I pray. I haven’t gone to church since I was five, and I know the pleads of a non-believer tend to go unheard. But I pray for the magic and the miracle of life in severely outdated technology. 

“C’mon!”

My wagon roars awake in the absolute loudest, most undesired way in this relatively silent area, but I sigh in relief, placing my forehead on the steering wheel to feel the warm vibrations caused by the engine. “That’s it, Granny. We’ll live for another day.”

Granny was a gift, not a traditional one, the opposite of a shiny, sleek, car with a red bow on top typically given to sixteen-year-olds. Two years ago, some dude kicked the bucket and their next of kin took one look at poor Granny and decided she needed to be put down. I ultimately convinced the new titleholder that the vehicle had been used for the local "trade" and that the small holes on her side caused by years of rust were bullet holes. ("Someone's probably looking for that car, vato. I can take it off your hands.")  

I've had her ever since, and she's never abandoned me.

I back out of an unpaved road into a long residential street, passing large lawns and pretty houses I could never afford as I do. And before anyone can peak out of their windows and report a suspicious van to the police, I shift gears and high tail it out of there and into the nearest main road.

Maybe I’ll get to school on time. Maybe I won’t. But I’m going to get there regardless. I need something, anything, to pass the time until I search for work or go to the after-school curriculum I no longer have.

If you're the kind of person that achieves success worthy of recognition by your academic institute, I think you should know that I'm not your people. You're more than likely stressed out by classes in a way I'll never experience. People have expectations for you. I don't know what that's like, and I don't hold your judgments about me against you.

I go to school because of clubs, to be away when I can, to lay my head down and be alone. I'm fully aware that to some this makes me a waste of air, resources, and an asshole. Some being my half-sister. Trinidad Alejandra Ruiz helped me embrace being simply, unabashedly dislikable in my pursuit of a comfortable and unassailable life.

I turn the car onto a lane going by quick, leaving behind a couple of vehicles getting too close to boxing me in.

On my phone, I have about fifteen hundred text messages reminding me why school is my safe haven, even if it can never be the place I realize my potential. 

Trinidad and I are like night and day, and like night and day, we don’t coexist at the same time nor place. We may have the same mother, and it’s customary to see each other as full siblings, but I can't. She's a whopping thirteen years older than I am, and in a nutshell, she’s the perfect model minority—the visa earning, faith having, documented Latina who will never make a ruckus because according to her, our deeds reflects onto the whole of our community. I’m the born U.S citizen with the privilege to be a pendeja, and she won’t let me forget it.

My fingers bunch into fists around the steering wheel, sweaty and stiff. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve fought over the same damn things – my clothes, my hair, my piercing, my future, my jobs, my beliefs, my life. Over and over. I imagine this is how divorce happens among spouses, but you can’t divorce blood. 

You bare it.

When I get off the highway and turn onto my street, the contrast between my neighborhood and the one I just left is as clear as oil and water. The roads are unsmooth, the white and yellow lines barely visible even in broad daylight. Abandoned rubber from popped tires litter the sidewalks, and the sidewalks are constantly under construction or overgrown with weeds. There are no houses around, just brown and beige apartments that advertise free rent for a month with barely enough space for a family of two. Home sweet home.

I live in one of these apartment complexes with Trinidad. Las Palmas de Luz. The rent is cheap enough, and I only have one other choice: living out of my van. And well, I’ve been making that other choice recently. 

Nothing would elate Trini more than telling the neighbors that I finally got a steady job with a law-abiding boyfriend, even if it meant lying through her teeth. She’ll get to lie to them soon.

By some unholy miracle, Trinidad’s car isn’t in her designated parking spot this morning. This means that the moment I get out of my van, I kick the driver’s side door wide open and jump out. Normally, I’d have to be super careful not to scratch the black Honda she drives to the bank where she works. And she’s real good about parking inches away from the white lines. One day, I got my ass belted for a scratch I gave the neighbors car trying to avoid hers. This was back when she still believed in corporal punishment. She doesn’t anymore because her church pastor thinks all hits manifest into twenty acts of disobedience.

A bit too late for that, shit. I’ve got a backed-up queue for my acts of disobedience.

Give or take, I have ten minutes to shower and race to school. (I could make it five, but my faux hawk is greasier than my neighbor’s gorditas.) Luckily, the small alleyways leading into the center of the apartment complex are devoid of obstacles, and the actual square where the pool is supposed to go (it was filled in ages ago with dirt, and now the kids use it as a field to play fútbol.) is locked up. The summer is officially over.

Our apartment is on the ground level, and above us lives an old Dominican lady who makes no noise apart from when her grandchildren come to visit. Whenever Trinidad and I encounter her, she doesn’t say anything, even when Trinidad puts on the neighborly citizen voice. 

That’s why my upstairs neighbor is one of the few people that I respect. She don’t care. I don’t care.

She sits on her veranda now, paging through something that I can’t see, stopping every so often to look deeply into it. I pass underneath her and into my empty porch, but her voice catches me off guard.

“Guacha, ven pa’ ca.”

My boots scrape to a stop.

I turn around slowly. My heart beats like drums. I pop out from under her veranda, anticipating the condemning eyes of an old woman ready to give me advice I don’t want or need. They never come. Instead, I see a grey kitten. She meows, rubbing against my neighbor’s leg as the old woman pets her head. “Qué bonita guacha,” the woman says. What a pretty orphan.

My head lowers. 

I should really get going, so I do.

Our living room is a mild mess, the only kind of mess Trinidad makes, unsurprising considering yesterday she invited her whole devil's circle over. There are greasy paper plates on a Walmart coffee table, some napkins strewed about, and all our pillows are bunched up on one yellow sofa. She probably expected me to come home and pick after her little party, a punishment for being a no-show for the whole week, and the week before that, and the week before that. 

To hell with her chores. I’ve got my own dirt to look after.

Ten minutes later, I’m walking through the apartment with a towel on my head, a fresh set of clothes, and a printed schedule in my back pocket. 

"Let's see. Make it quick, girl." I say to myself and look around.

Cornflakes and milk don't sound like much, but I place both in a plastic airtight bin. The only thing I need is a pen and a pencil, which I find on a table next to the apartment phone. I'm about ready to leave.

But before I can turn around and disappear, I see the little red light flashing at me. A message has been left in our voice-mail.

Beep.

All I hear is the rustle and the breath of a person on the other end. They sound exhausted. The recording ends with them hanging up the phone. I check the caller ID.

The area code is from El Salvador, left yesterday. Trini must have known where it was from because, otherwise, she would have deleted the whole inbox. I don’t know why she doesn’t just discard it. The person who calls never leaves a message for me anyway.

Whatever. 

I hit the trashcan button, take two pens and two pencils from the little cup we keep beside the phone and then leave.