Jesus Land (38 page)

It’s a girl. In one photograph, she poses in an elegant red gown and sparkling earrings, her long brown hair piled atop her head. In another, she stands with her arms flung around two friends, beaming mid-laugh at the camera. In another, she’s a little girl taking a bubble bath.

She’s lovely and I covet her beauty, even in death. I lean down, lit match in hand, to read the metal plaque on her coffin:

Gloria Hilda Váldez Martínez

Nacio el 8 de Julio 1963

Fallecio el 2 de Abril 1982

She was ninteen, just two years older than us.
What killed you, Gloria?

“Whoa, she’s hot!”

I jump. David’s beside me, eyeballing the pictures. I elbow him in the ribs.

“Have some respect for the dead.”

He glances at his watch, then pulls my arm.

“Come on, I wanna show you something.”

“What?”

“You’ll see.”

I blow out the candles, and we leave Gloria’s and walk along the cemetery wall past a section of busted-open honeycombs.

“Looks like they unburied someone,” I say, motioning at the wall.

“A whole lot of someones,” he responds. “Maybe they weren’t dead yet.”

He leads me to a back corner of the cemetery that is vacant but for large sheets of plywood lying on the clay ground. Here the stench of rotting pineapple is strong, and I plug my nose.

“It stinks,” I say in my plugged-nose voice.

“Just help me out a second,” David says, kneeling beside a board.

“Help you do what?”

He grabs the edge of a board.

“Move this.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to see what’s underneath,” he says.

I unplug my nose and kneel beside him. We both push the board, grunting with effort, and it skids over the ground, revealing a deep pit. We sit back on our haunches and squint down into it, but it’s too dark to see anything.

David gets on his belly and lowers his head into the hole.

“I see something! . . . like a branch or something,” he says.

He scoots forward until his shoulders are underneath the plywood and I grab him by the waistband of his jeans as he wiggles around.

“Got it!” he shouts.

I stand to get out of his way as he drags himself backward from the pit. He leaps to his feet, holding his arm triumphantly over his
head. In his hand is a human femur. A thighbone. I recognize it from Biology class at Harrison. Only the Harrison one belonged to a white plastic skeleton that hung in a corner next to the chalkboard, and this one is dark and cracked and wet like an old dog bone. Only that one was fake, and this one is real. I scream.

David lowers his arm and stares at the bone for a horrified second before heaving it away; it clatters onto a piece of plywood.

He scrubs his hands on his jeans, over his own femur. “Get off! Get off!”

“David, let’s go! Let’s get out of here!” I yell.

He’s too busy erasing death from his hands to hear me, so I grab his arm and yank him toward the cemetery exit.

As we wind through the tombs, we pass a young couple standing next to a tiny cement box. A child’s grave. They are dressed in black, and the woman holds a single white rose in her hand.

She lifts her head as we sprint by, and in the moment our eyes meet, I glimpse a desolation that chills me to the core. Although her dark eyes look directly into mine, they see nothing beyond the hell at her feet.

At least the dead no longer suffer.

The next day during kickball, when Susan stubs her toe and the P.E. teacher calls a time-out, David saunters up to me. A few kids look in our direction, but they’re too far away to eavesdrop.

“I know where that leg came from,” David says, pretending to tie his shoe. “Those wall spaces are rented, and if your family falls behind on the payments, the cemetery owner busts you out and throws you into that hole to rot alongside the other people who can’t afford it.”

Down the field, Susan limps back and forth in front of the P.E. teacher, who frowns and crosses his arms. People are always faking injuries so they can sit out the game and rest.

“And what makes you so smart?” I say, still watching Susan’s lame performance. Her limp has no rhythm; she’s totally faking it.
Wuss
.

David stands.

“Sam told me.”

Sam’s a fourth ranker in David’s house. He’s standing in the middle of the field right now, chewing on a piece of grass and gazing up at a bank of dark clouds rolling into the valley.

I whip around to face David.

“What’d you tell him for?” I ask loudly.

A couple of kids glance in our direction and David waves at them.

“Shhh . . . ,” he says. “Sam’s my bud.”

“Your
friend?
” I struggle to contain my voice. “What happened to ‘trust no one’? You know what Susan did to me.”

The P.E. teacher shakes his head at Susan, and she slowly walks back onto the playing field, limp gone. David looks at Sam still staring up at the sky, and grins.

“Shoot, Sam won’t tell no one. He’s my friend.”

The P.E. teacher blows his whistle.

“Friend indeed,” I say, before turning to rejoin my team.

Ted’s waiting for us at the edge of the field when P.E. ends. While the other kids murmur and shoot glances at his looming presence, Sam bounces the kickball off his knee, pointedly ignoring him.
Fucker
. I give David the stink eye when Ted calls our names.

As we follow his wide back through the courtyard, David worries his bottom lip, his face contorted with panic and confusion
and disbelief. Despite everything, he still believes in the goodness of humankind, that our parents will someday welcome him home with open arms, that his friends will not betray him. That’s the fundamental difference between us. He needs to trust, and I don’t. I narrow my eyes at the back of his head as we walk into Ted’s office.
Life would be a lot easier for you, David, if you stopped being so damn optimistic.

“So, I hear we had quite the adventure yesterday,” Ted says once he’s got us alone. He leans back in his chair with his hands behind his head and grins as if he were in on a joke. “Let’s talk about it.”

He doesn’t invite us to sit on the metal chairs in front of his desk today, so we stand stiffly behind them. Sweat trickles down my ribcage under my T-shirt, tickling my skin, but I keep my eyes locked on Ted’s; adults tend to believe you if you look them in the eyes while you lie.

But my lie pours out in a squeaky gush.

“We tried to teach those kids ‘Take Time to Be Holy,’ but the lyrics were too hard for them, so instead we . . .”

“That’s not what I’m talking about!” Ted roars.

He drums his fingernails on the metal desktop and glowers at me, and then at David, before swiveling around to a tall bookcase behind him. I turn to glare at David—
this is all your fault
— and he frowns at the floor and chews his lip.

Ted pulls several thick books from the bookcase, then walks around the desk and stands in front of David.

“Hold your arms up at your sides,” Ted commands, towering over him.

David glances at me before slowly raising his arms.

“Palms up,” Ted says.

He places a World History textbook and a Child Psychology manual on David’s right forearm and a Teen Devotional Bible
and a Spanish-English dictionary on his left forearm. David curls his fingers over the covers to keep them from falling, his head listing to the side with the effort. He looks like some modern art project:
Black Jesus, Crucified with Books
.

I can’t see the names of the books Ted piles on my arms, but I can sure feel them. I press my elbows into my hipbones to counteract their weight and Ted barks at me to straighten my arms.

“You’re going to hold those books until someone tells the truth,” he says. “Drop them, and it’s back to Level 0 for both of you.”

When Ted turns to sit back down, I curse David with my eyes and he apologizes with his. Ted drums his fingernails on the desk and watches us with a bored expression.

After a couple of minutes, I can no longer stand the pain screeching up and down my shaking arms and I gasp sharply. The books on my left arm shift and I dig my fingernails into them, but still feel them slipping in slow motion.

“Yes, Julia?” Ted asks.

Bitter tears dribble down my cheeks and my face burns with shame at them. I shake my head at Ted and blink at the green felt banner hanging over his head. On it, two hands clutch a red bowl. “I am the Potter and You are the Clay” it says in gold letters beneath the hands.

“It’s not her fault!” David suddenly cries. “It was all my idea!”

I turn to him; his face is also glazed with sweat, his arms also shake.

“David, don’t . . .”

“Silence!” Ted bellows. “Let him talk.”

“She didn’t want to go,” David continues, panting out the words. “But I convinced her.”

David looks at me, and his face is so full of bravery that I begin to sob. My arms collapse and the books bang to the floor,
their crisp pages crushed against the cement. I bend to pick them up.

“Get out of here, Julia,” Ted says. “I’ll deal with you later.”

I take one last look at David before backing out the door. He’s trembling under the weight of the books, but his eyes shine with determination. He gives me a tight smile.
Everything’s fine
. I sprint uphill to Starr and don’t speak to anyone for the rest of the afternoon.

I know that if I open my mouth, there will be no way to stop the venom pooling in my mind from spilling out.

My punishment: a week scrubbing floors. I spend every evening on my hands and knees scouring tiles during Free Time.

David’s punishment: He’s booted back to Level 0. This despite telling Ted the truth.

And once again, we are forbidden from communicating.

Unable to use words, David and I hold entire conversations with our eyes. In a glance, he tells me the state of his mental health, and I reassure him that we’ll be okay. I tell him that I will always be his big sister and take care of him and love him. I tell him these things with my eyes that I’ve never told him with my mouth.

But as the days wear on, I watch hope fade from his warm brown eyes. He’s no closer to leaving The Program now than he was when he entered it, a year ago. He’s the lowest ranker at the school, outranked even by Boy 0.

I cringe when I see him slumped in a doorway waiting for permission to move, or hunched over the TKB picnic table waiting for scraps as Sam stuffs his face across from him, enjoying his recent promotion to high ranker.

I should be on 0, too, but once again, I’m the privileged one, the white one. The white daughter who sleeps upstairs while the
black sons share a room in the basement. The white student who slips unnoticed through the halls of her new high school while the new black student is assaulted. The white girl who breaks a rule and is slapped on the wrist while the black boy who commits the same transgression is shoved back to the starting line.

What am I supposed to do about it? Hate myself for being the same color as the people who hurt him? I can’t help being white.

Sometimes when no one’s looking—as I run past him in P.E. or skirt his picnic table at lunch—I sneak out a hand to touch him, in an attempt to reignite some fire in him. But he won’t react, won’t even look at me. And it makes me wonder if he hates my whiteness and if I can be a true sister to him without sharing the trauma of his skin color. If we can ever be more than black and white, more than the surface of our skin.

The Sunday David starts his second week on Level 0, I obtain Fourth Level, becoming Starr’s second-highest ranker. Janet reached Fifth and was sent home, so only Tiffany ranks higher than me now.

Some of the other girls are mad because I’ve only been here four months and have ascended so quickly. But I’ve worked hard to get where I am, fronting my ass off and getting good grades. And I haven’t stooped to narking on anyone. I’m going to get the fuck out of here as soon as possible and nobody will stand in my way.

Except David.

How can I leave him alone down here?

I can’t.

This becomes perfectly clear to me one afternoon after yet another Group spent kneeling before abortion posters. I’m trudging back up the hill with the rest of Starr when there’s a commotion behind the school. I turn and see David. Jay, the economics teacher, is screeching in his face. Jay’s got his back to me,
but it’s clear that he’s worked himself into a frenzy; his arms thrash at his sides and his hands are balled into fists.

I stop walking.

I can’t quite make out the harsh torrent of words spewed from Jay’s mouth, but I know they are wicked from David’s bowed head. Jay is notorious for hissy fits. For the slightest perceived offense—an “irreverent” look or attitude—he’ll have you doing suicides while he lectures you about respecting authority. Escuela Caribe is full of his type: adults who seem to hate teenagers and enjoy making them suffer.