Efrain's Secret (16 page)

“Nah, nah, nah,” I say, pulling her back toward me. “Spill it.”

“I’ll tell you some other time.”

“No, tell me now.” I lean on the wall, and Candace presses herself against me, burying her face in my chest. Despite all the drama around me, at this moment, my life couldn’t be more perfect. Nestor, Chingy, Rubio, GiGi—nobody exists but Candace. I wish I could freeze us in time.

She looks up at me and gives me a smile that would melt ice. “So, you’re still having trouble in physics, right?”

Freakin’
bochincheros
, man! “Who told you that?”

Candace looks at me as if I’m kidding. “You! The same day we became friends. You said you were worried about how it would affect your GPA.” I totally forgot about that. I said all that to Candace on Day One? Damn. No wonder Nestor teases me. She
nuzzles her face into my collar. “That’s another thing I like about you, Efrain. You won’t settle. A lot of boys go all out when playing sports or video games, but for the things that really matter, they’re content to just coast. Not you.”

We lean against the wall, holding each other and feeling each other. I mean, really feeling one another. Does Rubio feel like this with every woman he has been with? Is this why he sticks and moves? Is he hunting for this feeling? Candace and I haven’t done anything except kiss, and I’m feeling her in a way I’ve never felt anyone. Imagine what it will be like when we take it to that level. No, Rubio couldn’t possibly feel this way. If he did, he would never be able to leave.

All I can say is, “Thanks, boo.”

“You can come over to my apartment, and I can help you with physics.” Candace pulls her head from my chest and looks up at me. “I promise, I won’t tell anyone.” Her deep brown eyes remind me of the staurolite I learned about in elementary school geology. The girl has got me all poetic.

I kiss Candace on the temple, lift her chin with my finger, and then kiss her again on the lips. If I should be embarrassed that my girlfriend can tutor me in science, I’m not. And I can’t lie. A part of me hopes that Candace is borrowing a page from GiGi’s playbook. Except with Candace, I don’t feel stupid or manipulated. Just mad lucky.

Dissent
(n.)
disagreement

I fiddle with the timer as Candace grades my practice exam for the physics Regents. Without looking up from her calculations, she mumbles, “Efrain, please.” She jabs the eraser of her pencil into the keypad and starts over again.

“Sorry.” I put down the timer and drum my fingers on the table. Candace reaches out and slaps her hand over mine. I turn my hand to curl my fingers around hers. That keeps me until she finishes adding up my score. Candace puts down her pencil. “So?”

“Efrain, even though you won’t learn some of this stuff until next semester, I’m surprised that you just skipped the questions. Why didn’t you at least guess?”

“Because I’m not supposed to,” I say. “The SAT penalizes you for guessing. It’s better to leave the answer blank and get no points than to guess wrong and lose a quarter of a point.”

“But this is not the SAT, babe, it’s the Regents.”

“I know, but that’s what I’m learning in my SAT prep class. It took me forever to squash the impulse to guess. I’m afraid if I fall back into my old habit of guessing, I won’t be able to switch gears when I have to retake the SAT at the end of January.”

Candace shakes her head. “It’s a stupid test.”

“Word!” I throw up my hands. “Who ever heard of punishing someone for trying to solve a problem?”

“Especially when they always say you should at least try.”

“Like that stupid poster in Mrs. Colfax’s office.”

“The one that says ‘You’ll always miss one hundred percent of the shots you don’t take’?”

“Yeah, man. It doesn’t say anything about losing a quarter of a point if you miss.” Candace laughs. Man, I must sound like such a baby. “I don’t mean to be whatever. I just got to suck it up and train myself to guess the answer when I can and to skip the question when I shouldn’t.” I barely catch the sweetest expression on Candace’s face. As soon as I notice it, she goes sad, and I don’t know what to make of the sudden change. “Hey.”

“Hey.” She turns back to her French textbook.

“What’s the matter, boo?”

She shakes her head. “A year from now, you’ll be sitting at a table somewhere at Harvard or Princeton … probably with another girl.” Candace’s eyes glisten even in the fluorescent light of the kitchen.

I reach across the table and take her hand in mine. “Maybe we could go to the same college.” This is the first time the thought enters my mind, and it fills me in this indescribable way. Katrina cost her a semester, so I would have to wait for Candace, but I’d do it gladly. When I’m grinding to keep up with my classmates from Andover and Exeter, knowing someone I care about is coming to be with me will get me through that first year.

“You probably have a better chance of getting into Harvard than I do,” I laugh.

“Or you could go to Dillard.”

“But, ma, if you had a chance to go to a school like Dartmouth or Brown, why would you pass on that?”

“Because just as much as you want to go to an Ivy League school, Efrain, it’s important to me to go to an HBCU. You know, a historically Black—”

“I don’t need you to explain
HBCU
to me,” I interrupt.

“Don’t interrupt me,” says Candace. “I hate when boys do that!”

Oh, so like that I’m just another boy? “I’m only saying that I know what a historically Black college is. Howard, Morehouse—”

Now Candace interrupts me. “You obviously don’t know enough. Even though only three percent of the colleges and universities in this country are HBCUs, most Black professionals—doctors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, whoever—graduated from them. In fact, one out of four African Americans with college degrees went to an HBCU. Ever had a Black dentist or teacher, Efrain? Chances are that person went to an HBCU and not one of your precious Ivy League schools.”

I close my schoolbooks and stack them on the table. Nothing I can say to that. Look, I understand being proud of your culture and history and all that, but even if there were HPRCUs or HDCUs or even HLCUs, I wouldn’t go to one. There, I said it, okay? To be the Pedro Albizu exception instead of the Nestor Irizarry rule, I need more than my culture and history can provide. Real talk. I want to be a credit to my culture, a highlight in our history, not just another statistical stereotype. What’s so bad about that?

Candace watches as I slide my books into my bag, leaving behind the paper she had written for that class that eventually led to her being expelled from Mott Haven High School. “Efrain, I’m only trying to make you understand that just as it’s important to you to go to Harvard or Yale, it means a lot to me to go to an HBCU down south. If I can respect your reasons for wanting to leave home, why can’t you respect mine for going back?”

I can’t answer that either. It feels too much like one of those no-right-answer questions girls ask, like
Does this make me look fat?
or
My best friend is so pretty, right?
And this question is much worse because the answer actually matters. College means so
much to both of us, which just makes this argument that much more ironic and even dangerous.

I stand up, grabbing my bag and pulling my jacket off the back of the chair. Candace just watches me without saying a word. I know she doesn’t want me to leave but won’t ask me to stay. Candace follows me to the door, then watches me as I walk out of the apartment and down the hallway to the elevator. Only when it arrives does she finally say, “I can’t believe we’re arguing over something good that we both want.” Then she closes and locks the apartment door.

Funny, I was thinking the same thing. But there is more to this than getting a college education. This is about wanting to be with each other. I thought we both wanted to make this last, to stay together as long as possible. This is what I get for thinking that.

Consolation
(n.)
an act of comforting

I walk into my apartment and find my mother in the living room watching a rerun of a Jennifer Lopez romantic comedy on television. She usually watches TV in her room when my sister is home and is surprised to see me home so early. “Efrain!”

“Hi.” I stand in the doorway of the living room. “Mandy’s still at Rubio’s?” My moms laughs. “What’s so funny?”

“That you call your father ‘Rubio.’”

“That’s what everybody else calls him.”

“Efrain …” She shakes her head at me, then asks, “What are you doing home so early? I thought you were going out with Candace.”

I walk into the living room and sit down on the sofa. “We got into a fight.”

“First one?” I just nod. “About?”

“College.”

“Doesn’t she want to go?”

“Yeah. In New Orleans.” I was going to leave it at that, but my mother points the remote at the television to turn down the volume. “I thought she might want to go to the same school together, or at least close to one another, but she’s dead set on going back to Louisiana even if it means breaking up.”

“That’s understandable, Efrain. After all, that’s her home.”

“I’m willing to leave home.”

“Yes, but no one is forcing you to go.” A sad look comes over
my mother’s face. She knows that I’m mostly applying to colleges outside of New York City, but I guess I never spoke this plainly about wanting to leave. “If Candace had her way, she never would’ve left New Orleans.”

“I know I’m young and new at all this romantic stuff or whatever, but I thought if you found something good, you were supposed to do whatever you can to keep it going,” I say. “That you’re supposed to compromise.”

“And what compromise did you offer?” Moms waits for me to answer, folding her arms across her chest. “So, compromise means what Efrain thinks is best for Efrain even if it may not be what Candace thinks is best for Candace?”

“No, nope, sorry!” I didn’t think of it like that at all. That’s some Rubio-type selfishness. “How can going to an Ivy League college not be best for Candace? I mean, New Orleans …” I almost say
New Orleans will always be there
, and a heavy blanket of shame envelops me. Damn, my moms just caught me out there!

But instead of shaming me, my mother strokes my hair. “Sometimes what it takes to keep a relationship going is too much to ask of one person,” she says. “Would it be too much of Candace to ask you to sacrifice your Ivy League dreams to go to a college down south?”

I kick off my sneakers, put my feet up on the couch, and lay my head against my mother’s lap. I don’t want to think about that. “If there’s such a thing as too much to ask, then maybe it wasn’t meant to be.”

“Honey, relationships are not so cut-and-dried, least of all romantic ones,” she says. “That’s why even the best ones are hard work with no guarantee that they’re going to last because of your efforts.”

I expected her to say something like
There’ll be other girls, Efrain
, or
Your education has to be your priority
. Good moms say
those kinds of things even when they know it’s the last thing you want to hear. Great moms keep it real.

Sometime later my mother shakes me awake. “Efrain, telephone.”

“What?” I fell asleep on her lap.

“The telephone’s ringing.” I sit up, and she motions for me to go to the kitchen. “Since you’re up …” Moms got jokes. I push myself off the couch, groaning like an old man. “You’re much too young to be so tired, Efrain, and it’s probably for you anyway.”

I shuffle into the kitchen and take the phone off its base. “Hello?”

“Hi.”

Candace.

“Hey.”

“Listen … I know you probably have plans with your family, but you want to come over on Thanksgiving? Maybe after dinner with your family, you can come here to have dessert with mine.”

“Yeah,” I say, grinning from ear to ear. “I’d like that a lot.”

Cleave
1. (
v
.) to stick together firmly 2. (
v
.) to divide into parts