Efrain's Secret (27 page)

Harvard has a free tuition program?

When did this happen?

Do other elite colleges have programs like this?

Why did no one tell me?

Why did someone have to, kid?

I reread the letter, trying to remember the Efrain Rodriguez that Señorita Polanco describes. My memory of him is hazy, but I
do recall that I like this guy, too. In fact, I like him way more than the other dude floating in my psyche even at his best. The Efrain in Señorita Polanco’s letter feels like someone I can trust, and I can’t understand how I fell out of touch with him.

I carefully put away the recommendation and see if I can go find him.

Resolute
(adj.)
firm, determined

I scan down the Web page on the library’s computer monitor, trying not to cry with euphoria. According to the press release, I’d still need to get a work-study job and take out a student loan, but it’s all good. The only thing I have to do to go to Harvard or Princeton and Stanford—ain’t Ivy League but no school to turn up my nose at—
is to get in!

So I spend the next three hours practicing SAT questions. When I get a wrong answer, and the voice inside me says,
This is all for nothing
, I visualize running Chingy’s admissions software
and inputting
2200
all across the
SAT2
line and watching my probability of getting into each school leap by double digits. This works a few times, but reality eventually takes hold. No amount of studying is going to make me bust out a score of 2200 next month. I finally accept it. The best I can hope is that a considerable improvement in my score will make an elite college give me a second look. Maybe all I need is to score 2000. Or just 1800.

That is, if my arrest doesn’t impact my application. As much as I dread the answer, I have to find out if it does. There’s no other way to silence Scout until I know.

Without bothering to reserve it again, I jump onto a computer and log on to my account on
commonapp.org
. Using the online Common Application to apply to college is the one piece of good advice that Mrs. Colfax gave me. The problem is that I had finished the main part of the application over Christmas break, and clicking on the Submit button is no different than sealing the envelope and tossing it in the mailbox. I can look at my responses to the questions, but I can’t change them. The best I can do is hope that my answer to
that
question is still true. I page through a couple of screens, and there it is:

“Yes!”

The librarian gives me a sharp
Hush!

“I’m sorry,” I say, still a little too loudly. I can’t help it. When I completed the application, the answer was no. It’s
still
no. I haven’t been
convicted
of anything yet. I still have a chance of getting into every college I applied to, including my dream schools.

I smell jawbreaker breath coasting down the back of my neck.
“You finished?” I look up to see a wannabe gangster hovering over me. He wears a Giants cap with the bill to the side and drops an X-Men drawstring bag on the table beside the monitor. “I’m signed up for that computer now.” His buddies scurry to the computer stations around me and log on to MySpace.

I shake my head, feeling mad old. For a second, I wish I could turn back the clock five years to when my biggest concern was where to hide my issue of
King
. Then I remember that wasn’t my biggest concern then. It just should’ve been.

“It’s all yours, Little Man.” I stack up my files, slide them into my backpack, and rush out of the library. I may not have Chingy’s admission calculation system to run algorithms for me, but I make some quick calculations on my own as I head back to Nestor’s apartment. With or without Rubio’s salary, I probably qualify for free tuition. The first order of business is to get admitted. The SAT prep course is making a difference in my performance, and I have stellar recommendations. Miss Avery says she has a good chance of getting my charges reduced and even my record expunged. All I have to do is ace the SAT when I take it again in a few weeks and keep my nose clean.

I go to tell Nestor that I quit.

Inextricable
(adj
.) hopelessly entangled

I get back to Nestor’s apartment to find a new twist on the usual commotion because now the drama is about me.

Marlene throws open the door and hollers over her shoulder, “Here he is,
estúpido!”

Then, as I step into the apartment, Claudia pushes past me while shaking a few drops of baby formula onto her wrist. She says, “Efrain’s home now, Nestor, so you can shut up and give me the baby.”

Nestor darts out of the living room, bouncing Claudia’s crying baby in his arms. His eyes cut into me as he hands off the baby to his sister. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Who are you?” I ask. “My father?”

We notice Marlene standing beside me, hands on hips, lips all pouty. “Mind your business, Marlene,” shouts Nestor. “Go do your homework.”

“You ain’t my father either, Nestor!”

“That’s right, I ain’t Papi. And you lucky, too. He would’ve given you a
galletazo
across that smart mouth of yours by now.”

“Whatever.”

“E., I need to speak to you in private.” Nestor starts down the hallway toward his bedroom, and I follow. He hurls a few curses at the hole where his knob used to be and slams the door behind us. “Where the hell have you been, man?”

“What do you mean where’ve I been? Where I always am. In school.”

Before I can correct myself, Nestor beats me to it. “I heard you got kicked out this morning.”

“Not kicked out. Suspended. Yo, who told you that?”

“Never mind who told me. They said you had some beef with stupid-ass Lefty and got thrown out of school around ten o’clock. Where you been all this time?”

“Not that it’s any of your business—”

“No, you wrong about that, E. It is my business. It’s totally my business.”

“—but I came over here first, and nobody answered the door.” I feel like an idiot for even telling him that. Since when do I answer to Nestor?

“Bullshit. They finally sprung me about eleven, and I’ve been here ever since. Not once did I hear the buzzer.”

“Well, that’s not on me. Maybe you were asleep.”

“Damn right I was sleeping. I just spent almost thirty-six hours in jail.”

“Oh, and I didn’t have to sleep in a cell?”

“At least you got to walk—”

“Walk? This might ruin everything I’ve been working my whole life for!”

“—without posting no bail. My daddy didn’t come rescue me.”

I shove him. “Fuck you, Nestor!” Then I punch him in the chest. “At least your father didn’t beat the shit out of you. Your mother never put you out in the street. Why the fuck do you think instead of being home with my family, I’m here in the middle of you people and your never-ending bullshit?”

Nestor looks down at his chest and places his hand where I punched him. We just stand there heaving, and the entire apartment is frozen in a rare stillness. Then he walks over to the lounge
chair and eases himself into it. “E., I’m sorry I came out of pocket like that, but you gotta understand that this isn’t a good look, okay? Not for me, not for you—”

“What the hell are you talking about already?”

My question chases away his momentary calmness because he jumps up and screams again. “I’m talking about you not showing up on the block just hours after we got arrested!” Nestor throws up his hands. “Damn, E., if you’re so freakin’ smart, why you make me explain every little thing to you? Use your common sense, bro. Do you know how that looks? The cops have all this intel about things getting hot between Snipes and Hinckley, and everyone’s wondering who’s snitching, and guess who’s Suspect Number One?”

“Me?” My stomach does somersaults. “I didn’t know a damn thing about Hinckley to be flapping to nobody, let alone the police. Why ain’t they looking at Lefty? I ain’t down with Snipes like that.”

“Wrong again, Efrain. First of all, that shit with Lefty happened a ways back. Second, I’m down with Snipes, and you’re down with me. I brought you into this—”

“Don’t remind me.”

“—because you asked me to!”

I know he’s right, but with the stakes at an all-time high, I can’t bring myself to just cop to it. “Don’t front now like you weren’t stressing me.” And then all these feelings I had when Nestor tried to recruit Chingy come back to the surface. “You weren’t always checking for me like that. You only stepped to me because you figured that when I get to college, I could hook you up with some students, and you could stack more paper and climb the ranks or whatever.” It burns so much to say aloud that I expect steam when my words hit the air.

Nestor lowers himself back into the leather recliner and rubs
his hands over his face. After a long exhale, he finally looks up at me. “You got it twisted, E. I always wanted you to be down with me. But when Chingy shut me out, I wasn’t trying to lose another friend.” He breaks eye contact but keeps saying his piece. “I ain’t got too many of those left, you know. I mean, bona fide friends who truly got my back ’cause it’s
my
back, you feel me? Not because they want something from me or because it’s good business. Just you, E. I know that you’re down for me whether I’m on the corner slinging or making pizza down the block or whatever. That’s why eventually I did step to you. I needed at least one person in all this bullshit that knows me like
that.”

“Nestor, man, I gotta quit.” It feels so selfish to break this to him now, but I know this is the right thing to do, and doing the right thing should never wait. “I never meant for this to become my way of life. I only got involved because I needed the money for school, and now the only thing I ever wanted from all this is the very thing that’s on the line. I can’t risk it.”

Nestor exhales again, leaning back in the recliner, folding his arms behind his head and closing his eyes. A minute later, he sits back up and plants his feet on the floor. “I hear you, E. I really do,” he says, his voice soft and heavy. “But I don’t think you’re hearing me. You can’t quit right now. Forget about college—”

“Forget about college?”

“There’s something way more important at stake, E. Snipes called a meeting tonight in an hour. I know that you didn’t know anything about what’s going down between Snipes and Hinckley. You didn’t need to know. Didn’t
want
to know.
I
didn’t want you to know for your own protection, but all that’s irrelevant. If you don’t show your face tonight, you ain’t showing it at Harvard in September. You ain’t making it out of AC, you hear what I’m telling you? And since I’m the person who brought you into the organization, if you go down, you take me with you.” Nestor
leans back in the chair, propping an ankle on the opposite knee like a Corleone. “Now, I ain’t afraid to die,” he says with a quivering voice that betrays his gangster lean. “When I got involved in this, I didn’t fool myself into thinking that I’d be some kind of exception to the risks and pitfalls. But you and me, for all our different goals, ambitions, or whatever, we’re not that different, least of all now.” His eyes travel toward the closed bedroom door, which barely muffles the endless chaos that marks his people. Marlene and Melo arguing over the television remote. Claudia singing along with Rihanna on the radio to her babies. And in a rare appearance, we can even hear their mother yelling in Spanish for all of them to quiet down. Nestor says, “Just like you, the main reason I got into this whole thing is the very thing that’s on the line right now.”