14
Reyna and “RoboCop”
MY FIRST LOVE was a forbidden love.
My first love had velvety eyes the color of the mountains in Iguala. They reminded me of home.
My first love was a boy on a bicycle. From the corner of my eye I saw him riding lazily down Avenue 50 on the opposite side of the street. He didn’t pedal but let gravity pull him down the street. In this way, he kept pace with me as I made my way to the liquor store to buy Papi a bottle of charcoal lighter. As I went into the store, I turned to look at him. He waited there at the corner on his bike. I knew he would still be there when I came out.
The boy I loved was named Luis Gómez, and he was from El Salvador. Two weeks before, my friend Phuong, whom I had met in ESL class, had pointed him out to me during lunch. She’d said, “Do you see that boy there, the one with the green eyes?” When I spotted him among the other boys he was with, I nodded at Phuong. She said, “I love him. Go talk to him for me.” She pushed me toward him, but I didn’t move. How could I go up to a complete stranger to talk to him about my friend? She said that Luis had just started ESL class and didn’t speak much English. Phuong didn’t speak a lot either, and that was why she hadn’t passed to regular English as I had.
Mago had passed, too. Now at Franklin High School, she didn’t hang out with any ESL students. She moved in “better circles” now that she’d gotten a good grasp of the English language. Carlos was in regular English, too, but he liked the ESL kids, and those were the friends he had at Franklin. I was following his lead. I was not ashamed, as Mago was, of people knowing where I came from.
Phuong wanted me to act as her messenger, and she would tell me what to tell Luis in Spanish for her. She said, “Reyna, you and me are sisters, you need help me.” Phuong said we were like sisters because I looked Asian, just like her. Sometimes teachers and students would think I was Chinese, or Filipino, or Japanese, or Thai. I’d never even heard of those nationalities until I came to this country, and I hated the fact that I was being stripped of my Mexicanness. I would tell people, “I’m Mexican, from Mexico,” but sometimes they wouldn’t believe me. I would later find out that Mexico’s history includes many immigrants from different places in the world, such as Asia. And this was the source of my features.
I finally gathered up the nerve to go talk to Luis during lunch the following day, and I told him my friend Phuong loved him, just as she had told me to tell him. Luis laughed and said she hardly knew him, so how could she love him? I didn’t know what to say to him then, because as he looked at me with those green eyes of his, I knew that I—just like Phuong—was a goner.
Every day I would deliver messages to him from Phuong, but that only took a minute or two and after that he asked me questions, not about Phuong but about me. Phuong wasn’t stupid. She wasn’t able to speak Spanish and couldn’t really understand what we were saying to each other from where she waited, but by the end of the week Phuong wasn’t talking to me anymore. She said, “You are bad sister, Reyna Grande,” and then turned and walked away.
I guess I wasn’t meant to be anyone’s Cupid.
I came out of Barney’s Liquors and Market with the charcoal lighter, and I knew I should hurry home because Papi was making carne asada on the grill and was waiting for me to come back. But Luis waved at me from across the street and motioned for me to come over. The light wasn’t even green yet, but my feet were already pointed in that direction, and I took a step onto the street. The light had turned green by the time I was halfway to Luis and his emerald eyes.
He said, “Let’s go for a walk,” and he got off his bike and walked alongside me. He didn’t talk much, and I didn’t either. Ours was a silent love. I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. He had curly hair, curlier than mine, and it was the color of crushed brown sugar, like the kind Abuelita Chinta would put on boiled ripe guavas to make them syrupy. Luis said, “Have you ever been kissed?” and I shook my head, feeling the ground turn into mud beneath my feet. I felt a rushing in my head, and I looked into his green eyes. I thought of the vacant lot by Abuela Evila’s house, of Carlos, Mago, and me driving the old car toward the Mountain That Has a Headache. Except now it was the mountain that was moving toward me, and I got lost in its velvety beauty.
Papi said, “Where the hell have you been?”
I glanced off into the distance, and in my dreamy haze I handed over the charcoal lighter and walked past Papi. I wondered if Luis was thinking about me and about the kiss we’d just shared. My lips were still throbbing.
Papi whacked me on the head with his hand. “Answer me,” he said.
“They didn’t have any lighter fluid at the liquor store, so I had to go to the store on Avenue 52,” I said.
He said he wasn’t stupid. He knew I was lying. He said, “As long as you live under my roof, you aren’t going to lie to me, girl. Now where were you?”
I couldn’t tell him about my first kiss. He would beat me for sure, ruin the whole memory of it. And why couldn’t he just let me be so that I could replay the most important moment of my life again and again without disruption?
“Answer me now!” he said, putting a hand on his belt.
“I don’t have to live under your roof if I don’t want to,” I said defiantly, thinking about the kiss. In my euphoria, all I could think was that he couldn’t treat me like a little girl anymore. “Whenever I want, I can go live with my mother.”
I turned around and headed to the gate. I walked toward the corner of Avenue 50 as if I were on my way to catch the bus. I didn’t really mean to leave, but I was tired of Papi always making me feel as if he were our only option. Maybe he was. Mami had never once told us to come live with her. How would we have fit in that tiny room of hers? But Papi didn’t need to know that.
Luis and his friends were sitting on the block wall surrounding the house on the corner. He lived on the other side of Granada Street. He was sitting there, and he and his friends whistled at me. Luis shouted something at me, and I didn’t hear what he said, but the next thing I knew my hair felt as if it had caught on something and was tearing right out of my scalp.
“Hija de la chingada, you’re not going anywhere!” Papi said from behind me. He pulled me back to the house by my hair, and I yelled for him to let me go. Luis and his friends whistled louder, and I thought I heard them laughing. I couldn’t see Luis through my tears, but I knew he was there, witnessing my shame. Papi took me into the house, and Mago and Carlos begged him to let me go, but he took off his belt and whipped me with it. I thought about Luis and his green eyes, and soon, I didn’t even feel the sting of the belt.
On Monday during lunch, I went in search of Luis. I wondered if he would ask me to be his girlfriend now that we had shared a kiss. But when I came up to him and his friends, Luis glanced at me and then turned around as if I weren’t there. His friends pointed at me, and Luis shook his head and didn’t turn to look at me. Farther down the hallway, I saw Phuong with her Asian friends. She smirked and then turned away from me, and it hurt me to know I had lost my friend for a boy who was no longer interested in me. Was I a bad kisser? Is that why he didn’t want to talk to me? Or was it that Papi had humiliated me in front of him? Did he think I was still a little girl because I got beaten by my father? I touched the right side of my thigh where Papi’s belt buckle left a raised tattoo. Maybe Luis thought like my father and like my mother. Maybe, it was just too easy to leave me.
I returned to my favorite spot—the steps that led up to the band room. Mr. Adams wasn’t there so I sat on the steps and took out my V. C. Andrews book because she, at least, was still my friend.