Muchacho (5 page)

Being a good example is hard work but at least it makes me feel like I’m doing something and not just taking up space. I’d like to take up a real big space someday, so big that people would have to stand back when I walk into the room, but I would act like I didn’t even notice they were looking at me. That way, people wouldn’t feel embarrassed and they could take a good long look at me and maybe they would see something in me that is so good I can’t even see it myself.

Y
O
, I
FINALLY GOT A GIRLFRIEND.
A
REAL ONE, TOO, NOT THE
kind you have to pay just so you can touch her. And I didn’t even have to use any of the pickup lines Primo made me practice for two weeks after Angela turned out not to be my girlfriend.

“You got to act like you notice a woman,” Enrique said, “and you got to let her know you think she’s fine, but not so fine that she could have you just like that.” He snapped his fingers and stuck his chin up in the air. He thinks that makes him look like a
chingón
movie star but it really makes him look just like that little bobblehead Chihuahua he glued to the dashboard of his Camaro.

Anyway, I didn’t have to say anything cool or walk like a
panther or flash my new cell phone or anything. All I did was sign up for ballroom dance. I could have signed up last semester when Beecher tried to get a bunch of us guys to sign up, but back then I thought ballroom dancing was too gay for a guy like me.

“You can get the fine arts credits you need to graduate and you’ll meet lots of girls,” Beecher told us. “And let me tell you, girls love to dance. They don’t care if you don’t dance very well. They will like you just for trying.” But we still wouldn’t do it. At first, T.J. Ritchie said he was going to, so some other guys said they would, too, but then T.J. snorted and spit a big wet one into the trash can and said, “You pussies have a good time,” so nobody signed up.

This semester, I decided to give it a try after I watched one of those dance shows because I was thinking, Yo, look at those dudes—they’re touching those girls. And all the girls on that show looked so fine. I didn’t think the girls at Bright Horizons would be as fine as the girls on television, but at least they would be real live girls and I would get to look at them up close and hold their hands while we were dancing.

There was only three guys in the whole class and twenty-three girls. At first, I was thinking I would just ask for a bathroom pass and never come back, but the teacher was standing way on the other side of the gym and I didn’t want to walk across that whole floor and ask to go to the bathroom with all those girls watching me because you know how girls are. They were standing real close to each other and giggling and
grabbing each other and pretending they were interested in what each other was saying when all the time what they were really doing was checking out the dudes. All except this one girl who was sort of standing off to the side by herself. Not like she was stuck-up or shy. Just like she was the kind of girl who could stand alone and not care about it.

I was so busy looking at the girls that I didn’t even realize I was walking until I got halfway across the floor to where the teacher and the girls were standing. Then I got close enough to see that all-alone girl’s eyes and she was looking right at me and not even pretending she wasn’t. I stopped walking and just stood there looking at her, and I’m not kidding, the lights in the gym brightened up like the sun was shining down from the basketball hoop. And the sunlight sparkled on that girl and made her shine like an angel. Just like in the movies. I always thought they made up that romantic shit but I guess you just think that if you never got struck down by love.

Finally, I noticed that everybody was looking at me, even the teacher, who was this little
gordita
lady with her red hair in a bun and a real tight stretchy black shirt and pants and black high heels with little pink socks just like the ones Letty wears with lace around the tops.

“Welcome to ballroom dance,” the lady said. “I’m Mrs. Martinez.” She looked down at the clipboard she was holding and then looked at me. “You must be Eduardo Corazon.”

“Eddie,” I said. I could hardly make myself stop looking at the girl and look at the teacher, who turned out to be
Mexican. From far away, you couldn’t tell because of her red hair, but up close you could see that she was born with black hair. But she didn’t look like one of those
mexicanas
who change their hair to make themselves look Anglo. She just wanted to look special. I could just see her standing in the back of the Dollar Store, choosing those pink socks and humming a little song and smiling, doing a little cha-cha on the way to the cash register.

At first, Mrs. Martinez made the boys stand in a line across from the girls so she could show us how to make a frame with our arms so we could guide the ladies firmly and smoothly through the box step. She made us dance with her, one at a time, so she could make sure we didn’t have noodle arms. Then everybody had to count out loud and do the steps. One and two three. One and two three. The girls all got it right away and so did I. It was real easy, just like doing the
cumbia
in a square, but the other two boys were Anglo and they acted like it was harder than algebra. So Mrs. Martinez called me to the front to demonstrate the steps. I thought she was going to dance with me, but she picked up her clipboard and said, “Now I need a young lady to be your partner.” Before Mrs. Martinez could even look at her clipboard, that all-alone girl just walked out and stood in front of me, face to face, so close I could smell her hair which smelled exactly like an angel.

“Why, thank you, Lupe,” Mrs. Martinez said, and she smiled like the
viejas
at church when they catch you having
lustful thoughts when you’re supposed to be listening to the priest. When Mrs. Martinez told Lupe to put her left hand on my right shoulder and told me to put my right hand on Lupe’s waist, my inside self started jumping up and down and screaming, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” but outside, I just smiled and stood up as tall as I could to make a good frame for Lupe.

After we did the box step about ten times, Mrs. Martinez clapped her hands and everybody had to find a partner and practice. The girls started giggling again and a couple of them grabbed those Anglo boys real quick while Lupe and I just stood there, holding our frame and our breath, waiting to see if Mrs. Martinez would make us change partners. She didn’t make us switch right then, but after we practiced a little bit more, she clapped her hands and said, “Change partners!” and we had to because she was standing right beside us.

Before that class was over, I danced with every single girl. Twenty-three. I touched more girls in that forty-five minutes than I touched in my whole life up until that day. It was one of the best days I ever had, and the best part was that as soon as class was over, Lupe asked me did I know where Mr. McElroy’s room was. She just transferred to Bright Horizons, which is why I had never seen her around before. I had been wondering because I would have noticed Lupe even if there had been a million girls at school.

I told Lupe I was going to McElroy’s class, so I could walk her over there, and for a minute I even thought about holding out my elbow like when you have to help the
viejas
get
down the aisle to their favorite pew. I walked down the hall so proud beside Lupe. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and a little piece touched my cheek and I wished I could put my whole face in her hair and breathe her right inside of me, where I would take care of her forever.

When we got to McElroy’s room, he didn’t even yell at me for being late because I brought Lupe, but he made me sit in the empty chair in the front row where you have to sit if you get busted for sleeping or passing notes. I didn’t even care, because he put Lupe at the desk right behind me. Every couple minutes, I turned just a little bit so McElroy wouldn’t notice, until I was sitting sideways and I could see Lupe out of the corner of my eye. And that was the first time I wished English class was longer. I could have sat there forever.

At lunch, I asked Lupe why she was at the alt school because she looked real smart and she didn’t dress like a gangbanger or anything, and she said she got kicked out of Rosablanca High because there was this one girl named Cheyenne who kept starting fights with her. I knew exactly which Cheyenne she was talking about. Cheyenne used to be in my class when I was in special ed because she flunked first grade for not being able to read and then the next year she kept banging her head against the wall whenever the teacher asked her to read.

“I don’t even know her,” Lupe said. “She would just come up and hit me. And she would send her friends over to hit me, too, and then they would tell the teachers that I started it by
calling them retards, so nobody believed me. Even when I had witnesses. Finally, I told my father to just pretend he believed them so they would transfer me over here.”

I told Lupe that me and my cousins would go and beat those girls down, but she freaked so bad she almost started crying. “No!” she said. “Then they would say I instigated that, too, and I would get in more trouble. I just want to go to school and do my work and graduate so I can go to college.” She’s going to go to college and be an obstatician so she can help women have babies that don’t die from bad nutrition.

I could see why a girl would want to beat Lupe down, especially a big ugly stupid girl. Lupe looks kind of like Salma Hayek and her hair shines even more than Beecher’s and she has those perfect round
chichis
that are the exact fit for my hand and a nice fat little butt that looks exactly like an upside-down heart. She looks just as good from the back as she does from the front. Plus, she’s probably the smartest girl in class, and maybe even smarter than Harvey Castro.

“Where are you going to college?” Lupe asked me, and I told her I wasn’t sure. I didn’t tell her I won’t even graduate unless I start going to after-school tutoring and even then I’ll probably have to go to summer school, too. I told her I was still considering my options and she said, “Good. The more education you have, the more options you have.” She sounded just like Beecher, which only proves that Lupe is smart enough to be a teacher even if she’s only sixteen. In fact, she’s smart enough to figure out how to get out of Bright
Horizons and back to the regular high school if she wanted to, but when I told her that, she said she’d rather stay here where she can work in the computer lab and go as fast as she wants to and just take the final exam after she’s done learning something, instead of always having to wait for all the immature obnoxious children who still think school is a big joke.

“You mean like me?” I said and Lupe laughed. “No, not you. You aren’t obnoxious. You’re just confused. But you’re smart.”

“How do you know I’m smart?” I said, and Lupe said, “You were smart enough to pick me out of all those girls in ballroom dance class, weren’t you?” And she smiled at me because we both know that Lupe is the one who did the picking and I’m the one who got picked.

“Men just think they run things,” Lupe told me when we were eating lunch. I was real hungry and for a minute I forgot about making a good impression. I had just shoved half a burrito into my mouth and it was too full of beans and cheese to argue with her.

“Women just let men think they’re in charge because it makes you happy,” Lupe said. “And you’re so cute when you’re happy.”

Right then,
mi primo
Enrique sneaked up and smacked me on the back which made me spit little bits of cheesy beans all over the cafeteria table. I started coughing and Primo kept pounding me on the back and saying, “You want me to do the Hemlicker on you?”

Every time Primo said, “Hemlicker,” Lupe said, “It’s Heimlich,” and Primo said, “Whatever.” After the third time, he gave Lupe such a mean look that I pointed to my watch and pointed toward the door so she would just leave and not be late for class. She asked me was I all right and I tried to say, “I’m fine,” but that made me cough again.

“See what you did?” Lupe said to Primo. He just balled up his fists and walked away. I didn’t try to stop him because he’s not even supposed to be on campus on account of he’s twenty-five and a bad influence on minors. But sometimes he still comes to check on me and make sure I don’t need him to beat somebody up, even though I been telling him for like six years now that I can take care of myself. If he gets caught, he’ll probably get arrested on account of having a record, but he’s pretty good at not getting caught, plus the principal who kicked him out of school retired and the new principal doesn’t know him.

The next time I saw Primo after that, he told me I was whipped and I shouldn’t be so nice to Lupe because women don’t respect men who are too nice to them. I told him that me and Lupe respect each other and he was just jealous because Lupe was so much smarter than him. He said, “Oh yeah? If she was smart, she would of played you a little bit instead of just jumping into your arms. Besides, if she’s so great, she would of already had a boyfriend.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of love at first sight?” I asked him, and he said, “Haven’t you ever heard that guys like the
hunt better than the kill? Everybody knows that us guys want what we can’t have. If deers just walked up and let people shoot them, nobody would go hunting anymore.”

“Yeah, well, I hate hunting,” I said. “And I like Lupe and she likes me. And she didn’t have a boyfriend because she’s serious about school. And besides, she wouldn’t pretend not to like somebody that she did like. That would be stupid.”

“Whatever,” Primo said. “But I still say you’re whipped.”

I don’t think I’m whipped, but even if I am, I don’t care because I’m happy. I don’t want what I can’t have, except if I couldn’t have Lupe I would still want her. I wouldn’t just forget about her like I forgot about Angela and all those other girls I used to want before I realized it’s stupid to want somebody who doesn’t want you back. I don’t care if all the other guys want what they can’t have. I want what I have and I have what I want. I got Lupe.