"The Flamenco Academy" (11 page)

She had her middle finger in her mouth,
gnawing at the nail, when one of the older clerks asked her, “Where
did you put those small gift boxes?” Her peevish tone accused the
younger clerk of putting the boxes in the wrong place.

“Right where they’re supposed to be.” The
younger clerk pointed at a stack of boxes.

“Small, as in ring box small,” the woman
said, pretending to be patient but actually almost sneering.

“Like she couldn’t have said that in the
first place?” the clerk whispered to me.

“Really,” I said, adding a snort of sympathy
as the girl pivoted away from her post to locate the ring boxes. I
probably wouldn’t have done anything if she hadn’t turned away. I
probably would have walked out of the store empty-handed, but she
did, she turned away. I plucked out the panther bracelet, clamped
it onto my wrist, and slid it up under my sleeve.

By the time the girl turned back around, I
had returned all the bracelets to the tray. Maybe she would have
counted them if the older clerk hadn’t been mean to her or if I
hadn’t told her my father was sick.

“Thanks,” I said, backing away from the
counter. “I’ll think about it.”

“Cool,” the clerk chirped, bending over to
put the tray back in the counter. “Come again.”

The older clerks eyed me suspiciously and
didn’t say “Come again” as I rushed out the door.

Didi was all over me the instant I opened
the car door. “What did you get? What did you get?”

“Just drive!” I screamed. Thank God, Didi
was at the wheel. Because she calmly backed out and pulled away. I
would have been squealing rubber so bad, every shop owner for
blocks would have taken down the license number.

Mrs. Steinberg was just waking up when we
walked into Didi’s house. Curled up in her husband’s old recliner
spooning frozen margarita out of a cereal bowl, she shot a question
at Didi in staccato Spanish. I’d taken Spanish for all three years
of my high school language requirement and, if I could have seen
Mrs. Steinberg’s question written down, I would have been able to
conjugate every verb in the sentence, but as far as understanding
the spoken language, that was Didi’s department. Didi answered in
even more rapid-fire Spanish but never made eye contact with her
mother once as we both hurried through the living room.

Back in the Lair, Didi assembled everything
she needed for our blood sister ritual. She got out the pricker
thing from the kit her father used to use to test his blood sugar,
lighted some patchouli incense, and read a passage from
Black
Elk Speaks
, which didn’t appear to have anything to do with
sisterhood.

“This is going to hurt like hell,” Didi
promised when we got to the blood part of the blood sister
ceremony. She jabbed my finger with the pricker and blood
materialized in a perfect ruby bubble.

Didi turned her back to me and grunted when
she stuck herself, then turned around, holding her finger hidden in
the closed tunnel of her hand and captured my bleeding finger in
it. We pressed our fingers together while she chanted her very own
translation of the Lakota vow. “I take you as my sister. My heart
now knows your heart. Your tears will flow if my blood ever falls.
Your enemies’ tears will flow if your blood ever falls.”

Didi lifted the turquoise cross up from
between her breasts, kissed it, and hung it around my neck. When I
removed the bracelet from under my blouse, Didi squealed with
delight, snatched it out of my hand, and put it on her wrist
herself in a way that made me think of Napoleon crowning
himself.

I didn’t notice until she held my finger
under the bathroom faucet that all the blood flowing had been mine;
her skin wasn’t broken. I didn’t say anything when she put a
Band-Aid printed with stars and smelling of rubber on my finger,
then one on her own. I didn’t even feel cheated. I accepted that
that was the way the ceremony was supposed to go. That the price of
having Didi for my sister was that I would be the one who bled.

Didi and I had survived our senior year. It
was the last day of school. As seniors, we had the week off, but
most of us, like animals set loose into the wild who keep coming
back to the cage even though they’re free, returned to Pueblo
Heights.

The main hallway was jammed. Didi skipped
away from me, jumped up, grabbed a big banner reading SENIORS
RULE!!, ripped it from the wall, and ran outside with a pack of
outraged Abercrombies trailing behind her. I started to follow, but
someone behind me called out, “Cyndi Rae. Cyndi Rae?” No one called
me Cyndi Rae anymore. Not since my mother had left.

It was Nita Carabajal, the girl who’d been
assigned to be my lab partner when I first started at Pueblo
Heights. Because we had absolutely no other friends, I had clumped
with Nita in those lonely weeks before I met Didi. I say “clumped”
because we sat next to each other at lunch and shared physics notes
but were never actually friends. Nita was a Jehovah’s Witness so
she didn’t do many “things of this world” like Christmas or
pledging allegiance to the flag or shaving her legs or pits. She
seemed to be a natural to hang with the Christians, but Nita
alienated even them by informing anyone who wore a cross that Jesus
had died on a stake.

She held her yearbook and a pen out to me.
“Sign it, okay?”

I’d managed to avoid Nita since Didi entered
my life, so of course she didn’t know that my mom had gone off to
live at HeartLand HomeTown, and I’d moved in with Didi.

I took the yearbook Nita offered to me.
“How’s your father doing?” Her eyes were two pits of gooey
sympathy. She didn’t know about Daddy either.

“Same. About the same,” I mumbled as I
scribbled
Have a great summer!!!!
My fingers had gone icy
cold. I shoved the book back the instant I was done without even
asking her if she’d like to sign mine. Nita darted away and was
immediately swallowed up by the crowd, just another floater, one of
the invisible ones who pass through high school as unnoticed as
possible, bent beneath an overloaded Target backpack, hurrying to
catch the bus, slipping through the halls like a wraith, scanning
the cafeteria for a friendly or at least a tolerant face. Nita
Carabajal was who I would have been if Didi hadn’t saved me. I
caught my breath and ran outside to find her.

Since Didi declared the few graduation
parties we were invited to “major dorkfests,” we had our own
celebration that evening at Puppy Taco, where we spent most of our
shift giving away tater tots to anyone who would yell, “Whore-nuts
suck!” Between customers, Didi read the apartment-for-rent ads.
Catwoman had sold most of Mr. Steinberg’s albums and all of his
memorabilia and Didi figured the house wouldn’t be far behind.
Didi’s mom still didn’t exactly speak to me. I wasn’t even certain
that she realized I was living in her house, but, like a cat, she’d
gotten used to my presence.

“I mean,” Didi asked me, “what does she have
to stay in Albuquerque for?”

It was an odd gift that Didi never held any
delusions about how important she was in her mother’s life. It was
harder for me. I actually missed my mom and, in spite of
everything, was hurt that, in the few letters she wrote, she
sounded so happy with her new 1890s life. That bothered me more
than her little reminders that I’d be burning in hell for all
eternity unless I renounced Satan. She did send small checks,
enough for clothes and makeup and to contribute to groceries at
Didi’s house. She always ended her letters saying that whenever I
put the Devil behind me, I would be welcome at HomeTown. She didn’t
make any other effort to convince me to come. Not that I ever would
have.

To celebrate our last day of high school,
Alejandro gave us two quarts of his mother’s red chile and a short
shift so I was Cloroxing Puppy Taco’s counters by quarter of five
when an old Econoline van pulled up to the closed take-out window
and honked. I held up the yellow latex gloves to show Didi that I
was occupied and she roused herself enough to shuffle to the window
and shove it open. “When the light that says DRIVE-UP OPEN goes
out, boys, that means it’s closed. Okay, I know it’s pretty
complicated, but you all got that?”

I smiled at Didi’s sarcasm imagining the
carload of horny boys she was deflating. I waited for a
high-pitched, honking answer from whatever puberty-ridden boy she
was talking to. Instead an accent came over the loudspeaker that
was the odd blend of English and hillbilly that people from places
like North Carolina have.

“You’re Dirty Deeds, right?” the voice
asked. “The Black Crowes told us you were cool.” The Crowes were
some band Didi had groupied a few months back. “We’re here with the
Whatevs.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Wanna come to a party?”

“What kind of party?”

“An after party after the concert.”

Didi joined the mechanical laughter that
came over the loudspeaker. “Where’s this party going to be?”

“Right across the street at the Ace High
Motel.”

“Ohmigod! I love the Ace High!” Didi
said.

“So the Crowes told us.”

Didi laughed. “I don’t know,” she said.
“I’ll think about it. But only if my friend will come.”

A chorus of male voices implored me,
“Friend, whoever you are! Come, okay? Come to the concert. Didi,
we’ll leave a plus one for you at will call.”

“Whatev, Whatevs.” Didi laughed and shut the
window. The Whatevs honked wildly and roared off.

“Why did you say I had to come to their
party? I never go with you to after parties. Besides, they’re not
even with a band you want to meet.”

“I don’t know. It’s our last night of high
school. We should stay together.”

“Yeah, but—”

Didi cut off my objections with a quick,
“Let’s think about it over a trip to Le DAV.”

I snapped off the gloves even though I
wasn’t completely finished with the counters. Most of our major
great clothes scores had been made at the Disabled Veterans Store.
At the thrift store, I always followed in Didi’s wake since she
could scan a twenty-foot rack of castoffs in hardly more than that
many seconds, dismissing bales of career separates and zeroing in
on the one garment with potential.

Le DAV was housed in a huge building that
had once been a roller-skating rink. Still, some days it didn’t
hold a single garment worth looking at. But that day, our last as
Whore-nuts, was a lucky one.

“Here, take this,” Didi said, handing me
what was clearly the prize find of the expedition: a scarlet,
fitted ladies’ Western shirt with collar points.

“Are you sure?” I asked, already putting it
on over my clothes.

“It was made for you.”

“But you saw it first.”

“I always do,” she said, moving on to a
fabulous Mexican skirt with a matador swirling a red cape in front
of a panting bull painted on it.

We each filled a large shopping bag, handed
over a twenty for our combined finds, and got change back.

In the parking lot, we threw our bags into
the trunk of the Skankmobile, paused to flip fingers in the general
direction of what was now our alma mater, Pueblo Heights High
School, then headed north. We took a left, and the instant the
tires hit Central Avenue, Route 66, we started singing about
getting our kicks on Route 66.

No matter how we goofed on the song, on the
road’s tackiness, we loved our stretch of Route 66 stretching out
toward all the infinite possibilities our lives held. Though we
pretended to believe that Central Avenue embodied everything that
was most tacky about our hometown, we loved to drive it at the
exact moment right after the sunset finished its warm-up act when
the Sandias were fading from pink to granite and the neon started
to vibrate against a darkening desert sky. That was when the tires
of the Skankmobile soaked up every dream of every traveler who’d
ever headed west to start a new life out where the slate was clean.
For that moment, it was us, Didi and me, who were going to drive
through the night and see the sun come up over the Pacific Ocean
and do things so amazing that future generations of Whore-nuts
would talk about them.

Didi sang words she made up and set to the
irresistible “Route 66” beat. “Now you go through Puppy Taco. Get
your Big Red and your nachos!”

I joined in. And AlbuKooKay is mighty
pretty.”

“Don’t forget Winona, Kingman, Barstow...”
Didi started before segueing into a musical inventory of every
cheesy store and flophouse motel we passed. “Round-up Motel.
Pussycat Video. Winchester Ammunition. And, ohmigod!” Didi stopped
singing. “The Ace High Motel!”

It was too early for the band to be back at
the motel. I thought Didi would drive to the Journal Pavilion so we
could watch the Whatevs’ concert for free. But the only reason Didi
ever went to concerts was to meet the bands and since she had
already done that, she skipped the concert and we drove up Nine
Mile Hill. Graduating seniors from every high school in town were
there partying, stumbling around the West Mesa, bobbing in and out
of the glare of headlights. When it was late enough to arrive in
style, we drove back into town.

As we passed the Palms Trading Post, I
asked, “Could you just drop me off at the Lair, please?”

“What? No. Rae-rae, you have to come. It’s
the night of our last day as Whore-nuts.” Didi shifted gears and
the panther bracelet on her wrist gleamed in the dim light
reflected from the dashboard. She hadn’t taken it off since the
blood sister ceremony. I’d never taken the turquoise cross off
either.

“Naw, I don’t think I’m up for it
tonight.”

“Please, please, please.”

“Since when did you ever need me?”

“Since when
didn’t
I need you? Of
course I need you. You take care of the details.”