Muchacho (18 page)

“You think you’re all better than everybody because you got a rich girlfriend and you got a couple A’s on your stupid report card!” T.J. yelled. I didn’t say anything, but he kicked me in the leg pretty hard, so I had to get up. While I was
trying to stand up, T.J. pulled a blade out of his pocket. I thought at first that he was just trying to look tough, like guys who flip the top of their cigarette lighters open and shut a bunch of times while they’re talking to you. But he shoved me back onto the bench and stuck that knife right up to my neck and put his foot back up on the bench beside me.

I looked T.J. in the eye to show him that I wasn’t afraid of him even though I was more afraid than I’ve ever been in my whole life up to now. I figured the best thing would be to keep T.J. talking and maybe somebody would come along and see us and maybe they would be the Good Samaritan type who wouldn’t just pretend they didn’t see me getting murdered.

“You’re just as smart as I am,” I said. “Maybe even smarter. You could get all A’s if you want to. You could probably get a scholarship for college.”

T.J. snorted and some little drops of water hit my face, but I didn’t move.

“You could if you tried,” I said. “You could get a regular job and stop dealing.”

“I can’t, asshole,” T.J. said.

“Yes you can,” I said. “You just have to make up your mind and do it.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” T.J. said. He leaned down real close so I could see the little red veins in his eyeballs. “I. Can’t. C. A. N. T.” He stuck that knife into my neck and it felt like I might be bleeding. I was thinking I would have to
try to take him, but then I noticed the knife was shaking a little bit and I thought for sure he was going to slice me then, and I think he would have except he started crying just a little bit and when I saw him crying I felt so sorry for him that I started crying a little bit, too. I always thought he liked being a big-shot badass criminal, but I never thought he might have gotten ambushed by those drug guys who tried to ambush me except I had cousins to back me up and T.J. is a loner for real. If you’re a loner in his neighborhood, you’re fucked. Plus, he’s been dealing since the second grade, so those guys must have went after him when he was only about seven years old. The pros like to use real little kids because they can shove them through windows and doors that don’t open real far, plus if some little kid gets caught, the cops can’t throw him in jail or beat him up to make him squeal.

For about two seconds, I really thought T.J. was going to cut me. Then for another second I thought he was going to kiss me, or at least hug me, but then all of a sudden he jerked his hand back and cracked his fist across the top of my head.

He must have knocked me out because the next thing I knew, I was sitting on that bench and Tío was handing me my books and saying, “What happened?” but I said I didn’t remember. I had a cut on my neck, not too deep, but a lot of blood on my shirt. Everybody thinks I got mugged by some meth addict and they all feel sorry for me except Primo who thinks I’ll look cool with a scar on my neck. But T.J. is the
one I feel sorry for because he doesn’t even know he has a choice. He really believes he has to be a loser forever.

Today, I got my letters from Lupe, so I’m glad I believed in her and didn’t let T.J. put a bad idea into my head. But I still wish I could erase that half of a second when I wasn’t sure.

O
NE MORE WEEK AND SCHOOL WILL BE OVER AND
I’
LL GO BACK
to Rosablanca and my old life. I started to think what if as soon as I get back there, I start messing up again and go back to being a loser. But Lupe says the real losers are the people who are too afraid to try and see what they can be. So I’m going to try real hard because even though there are some advantages to being a juvenile delinquent—like most of the teachers don’t call on you because they don’t expect you to know anything, and some really hot girls like badass guys—you always have to watch your back 24-7. And even though you get a rush from doing stuff like just walking up on the street and asking some old Anglo guy what time is it and he gives you his watch because he thinks you’ll kill him or
something, you get a different kind of rush from having people clap real loud and whistle when you read a poem that you wrote. And when somebody walks up to you after and says, “Dude, that was so hot you’re smokin’,” it feels pretty good even if the guy is a old hippie with a white ponytail and a tie-dye T-shirt. And who could complain about having a bunch of grown-up ladies tell you that you’re handsome and charming and they aren’t even your family.

Ramona even asked me did I want to join a writers’ group where her and some other people meet at the Black Cat and share the stuff they are writing and tell each other what sucks and what’s good, but I’m not sure I could do that. It might feel too weird to let people read my poems before they’re done and what if I couldn’t write any more good ones? But sometimes it’s good to do things that feel weird because after you do them a little bit, they feel all right, like if you have to wear hard shoes for a wedding or something at first you miss your tennis shoes but after a while you forget about your feet and you can dance better because those hard shoes are more slippery plus if you got a killer suit to wear you could wreck the whole thing and look so lame if you wore some old dirty sneakers. So if I lived here I probably would try to be in the writer’s group and see if it started to feel normal after a while except it would probably still feel weird if I told some old person that their poems sucked. I wouldn’t say
sucked
, I would say they stunk or something nice like that, but it would still be weird because they’re an old person and you’re supposed to
respect them if you can. But I couldn’t join that group anyway because I’m going back to Rosablanca which is where I belong at least for right now.

I almost wish I could stay in T or C, even though I miss Lupe and Jaime and my family because I got used to writing a letter to Lupe every day and getting a letter from her every day, too. And I got used to how quiet it is with no TV so you have to go outside and appreciate nature instead. Some days when I walk by the river I get a feeling like I
am
the river,
El Rio Eduardo
, and I flow from here to
México
, full of fish and broken sticks and ducks and plastic bags and soda cans that the tourists throw into me because their brains are on vacation, too. I’m going to miss the river and that blue heron and even the weird food that I got used to. Tío taught me how to cook a couple things like brown rice and stir-fry vegetables so I can make the same food like he does. He bought me a wok for a going-away present. I bet I’ll be the only Mexican kid in town who has his own wok. I can even eat with chopsticks, too, and now I know why Jenny Chu is so skinny.

I’ll miss going to the Black Cat, too, and talking to Rhonda and letting Mr. Poe eat my shoelaces. But I’m going to keep working on my poems so when I come visit Tío I’ll have something real good to read. I need some real good poems because now I got a new reputation to maintain. Last Sunday, I got up way early in the morning and went down to the river and wrote a poem in my new journal that Tío bought me for another going-away present. I thought it was a
pretty good poem so I took it to the Black Cat except I chickened out and didn’t sign up to read. I just sat there holding my journal with my poems in it, thinking that maybe next year I would come back and read something. But all of a sudden, the guy with the goatee said, “We have a new reader this week and his name is Eduardo Corazon. So please give him a warm welcome.”

Everybody started clapping and looking at me and I felt like running out the door but I was sitting too far away and there were so many people I would have to jump over them or step on their feet. Ramona was sitting beside me and she put her hand on my arm and said, “Don’t be mad, but I signed you up, honeybun.” She touched my journal. “I could just feel whatever you got written in that there little book is burning up the pages, trying to get out into the world.” Then she stood up and held out her hand and after a couple seconds I took it and she walked me up to the front and leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “That’s for good luck.” When Ramona kissed me, this old guy named Gino who wears a hat like Columbo hollered, “I need some good luck, too!” and took off his hat and put it over his heart.

“Let’s hear it, kid,” Gino said, and everybody got real quiet. It’s a good thing I had my journal because my hands were shaking so much that if I had my poem on a piece of paper it would have rattled so loud nobody could hear me. My journal shook a little bit but it didn’t make any noise, so my voice came out real loud and it didn’t squeak even once like
it always used to do which is why I never read out loud in school. While I was reading my poem, in the back of my mind I was surprised because my voice sounded real deep and low, just the way my father sounds. My poem is mostly English with a little Spanish mixed in to spice it up, and it has a bilingual title:
“Veinte-Veinte
Vision” which means “Twenty-Twenty Vision” in case you only know English.

When I finished reading my poem, the old hippie with the white ponytail stood up and whistled and everybody clapped and clapped so loud that my ears are still full of that noise, like the sound of a blue heron flying right up past your head into the sunrise until it is so high you can’t hear it anymore. You just see it floating in the air like a giant gray feather while
el sol
smiles down on the cactus-covered banks of the Rio Grande and makes
todo el mundo
shine like gold.

Ay te watcho.