All about Skin (23 page)

Papi kind of snorted and said, “Sure, sure. But I'm okay with it, mi'jo.”

Papi pushed his chair back and stood, taking another forkful of cake to go, and said to me, “Is Carlos outside?”

“Yeah, showing off,” I said.

“Sounds
sporty
,” Papi said.

He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed it as he passed behind my chair to go outside, leaving me there with Osniel. Papi's flat feet made little sucking sounds on the tile on his way to the front door, and he held his lower back like it hurt, or like he was pregnant. He yelled for my mom to come help him get rid of all the party people.

“Mami! Come help me get rid of all these people! Jesus Christ already!” he said.

She dried her hands with the bottom of her T-shirt as she walked over to him and said, “It's not even ten o'clock yet!” When she got close enough to him, she wiped her hands on his chest even though they were almost dry. He said, “Hey, C'mon!” and slapped her butt. She pretended to squirm away from him, saying in a fake squeaky voice, “What? What I do?”

Osniel came around to my side of the table, dragging his pointer finger right across the top of the cake this time—right through the word
Felicidades
—scooping another finger-full of frosting. He sat down next to me in Papi's chair and looked at the fluff of merengue balancing at the edge of his finger. Then he smiled at it.

I grabbed him by the wrist and said, “Don't you even
think
about it.” He wrestled with me, and I screamed high like a stupid girl. Then he pulled the frosted finger away from me, getting his hand as far from me as he could.

“Okay, okay, you baby,” he said.

I smoothed out my hair in case it had gotten messy just then, tucked it behind my ears. Osniel's shirt said
Polo Sport
in graffiti letters and I was trying to think of a joke to keep him paying attention to me. I had known Osniel since before I could talk, but now in high school we were in different levels of English class, so I had to be careful not to sound too nerdy.

Then he said, “Aight, I'm out, Mercy.”

“Huh?” I looked up from his chest.

“I'm gonna take off, girl.” He stood and leaned toward me, kissed me on the top of my head while I sat there. “Happy birthday,” he said. Then quick, he slid away but moved his hand in close and smeared the frosting on my nose—almost
up
my nose—and he stuck the rest in his mouth as he ran toward my front door. And before I could even get up to try to catch him, he turned back around and cracked up, pulling at his belt with one hand to keep his baggy jeans from sliding down as he ran, the finger from his other hand still in his mouth.

Since then, Osniel messes with me every day at school about Hialeah's Finest. He makes this bad joke about me doing my
Civic duty
every morning in homeroom—he's not even
in
my homeroom, he just comes by to tell me before showing up late to his. The only class I have with him is Spanish. We're actually in Spanish II, which is where they put people who
already
speak Spanish but are stuck because the county requires you to take a language to graduate, but our school
only
offers Spanish. We sit next to each other and ignore Mrs. Gomez hardcore. She's super old and yells all the time about us speaking Spanglish and that everything's being lost. But she's got enough kids in there that are right off the boat to keep her happy—I swear most of them got here like last week, their Spanish is so perfect.

Today, during Mrs. Gomez's class, I super casually asked Osniel to grab food with me, just us two (though my del Sol only fits two people, so I don't know if he knows that I
want
it to be just us, or if that's just the way it is because it's not like there's
options
). But once we were in my car, he started up with the same noise about Hialeah's Finest. The car did look amazing—my dad had detailed it himself. He'd even cleaned parts of the display and the ridges on the stereo's volume knob with a toothbrush, all before I woke last Sunday.

“Damn, Mercy,” Osniel said, running his hand across the black ArmorAlled dash. “When are you gonna hook up with us?”

I felt my hands get really sweaty on the steering wheel because he said
hook up
but I had a decent joke ready that time.

“Why do I have to hook up with anyone? Why can't I just be independent, like in politics?”

He blinked. Then he said, “
What
?”

“Like the parties—political ones—when you register? To vote? The Democrats and Republicans—because there's sides—not that there's sides with car clubs, but I mean, you gotta pick—you gotta register as something, but you can be independent, too—or, I mean, instead.”

As I said this,
explained
this, I wanted him out of the car so I could whack my head against the steering wheel until I blacked out and forgot how to speak. He looked at me with his eyebrows scrunched up and his head tilted sideways, like either
I'm
the biggest idiot in the world, or
he's
the biggest idiot in the world. His mouth kind of opened a little and I'm thinking, Please just don't say anything please don't please.

“Oh. Kay,” he said. He was trying not to laugh.

He turned completely in the seat, looked at me. He had the longest eyelashes. I was so close to his face I could see the dark brown dots of hair growing in thick all around his mouth and on his broad cheeks and I had to clutch the steering wheel
so
tight to keep my hands from rubbing up and down the hairless blank lines between the mustache and chin, like my fingers could make the connections grow somehow.

“Taco Bell? For lunch?” he said.

Whatever you want, I wanted to say. I love you, I wanted to say. I wanted to grab his face, kiss him so hard right there in my car, and then never get out of the driver's seat—sleep there, even, to keep him kissing me in my head.

I smiled—I think—shrugged, and backed out of the parking space.

We hit the Taco Bell drive-thru.

“For $2.99 you eat like a king,” he told me. I laughed even though he says this every time we get Taco Bell.

Power 96, the only hip-hop station that also plays Spanish hip-hop and some trance, plays my favorite Freestyle song, “Love in Love,” every day in the Power Lunch Hour MegaMix, and it came on just as we pulled into a spot to eat our food. I convinced him the dining room was packed with people we don't want to deal with, but really I just wanted us to be alone. I covered it up by warning him he better watch my interior and handing him like fifty napkins. Then he did the kind of thing that keeps me watching his house from my bedroom window all the time, one of those moments that I replay in my head so many times that it makes me cry because I start to worry that I made it up, it's so perfect. One of the things he does that makes me go, This
has
to be more than hanging out, more than just my car.

The song came on and Osniel, halfway through his first burrito, grabbed the second one still wrapped up and started
singing
into it like a microphone, doing this jerky side-to-side dance that looked like one guy doing the wave by himself.

“
Love in love, we are so on fire. Love in love, yeah I'm talkin' 'bout me and you
.”

He was really singing this to me, opening his mouth wide to show me his food and making gagging noises in between the verses. I had to pretend I was all grossed out by the ball of beans and cheese and sauce and spit he made dance on his tongue.

“
Cuz you're just the way I want the thing, because I know my girl is you
.”

These were not the right words (Osniel's got the words mixed up—the main guy in the group sings,
Cuz it's just the way she does the things, sometimes I worry love's untrue
), but I didn't care, because I liked Osniel's words better anyway. I didn't want to point out he sang the wrong thing because then he'd tell me, So what, he was just joking. He started scratching an imaginary turntable and shoved the wrapped burrito in my face for me to sing the back-up echo parts (
On fire, on fire, in love
).

The song ended (we both yelled,
Miami Freestyle in the house!
—the very last words) and we laughed big time—the kind that's so hard you don't even make a sound—and he smacked the dashboard a couple times, leaving a sweaty print of his whole hand on the Dad-cleaned dash. I grabbed a handful of napkins and tucked them under the bar of the emergency brake, so that I remembered to rub the hand off before my dad could notice.

I wiped under my eyes and said, “Thanks for the serenade—that was beautiful.”

“All for you,” he said. He winked and reached over toward my arm and at first I thought he was trying to put his arm around me, or maybe tickle my side. But instead he pinched me, hard. I swear he twisted the skin—it made my eyes water. He did this as he took another bite of burrito. Some red sauce dripped from the corner of his mouth.

I still have the dime-sized bruise on my arm because I saw it the day after, and I thought, That's what he's like on me. And when it starts to fade, I pinch myself in the same spot just as hard or harder. I don't stop twisting that soft spot on the back of my arm until I cry from how much it hurts because that's the only way I know I'm doing it hard enough to make it colorful again. Every day before getting in the shower, I stand in front of the mirror and lift my arm over my head and stare at it—a greenish yellow kiss. I press into it with my thumb to make it throb. I close my eyes and let my hand fall, tracing the rest of me, imagining my body covered with all these little spots, watching Osniel push them into me one by one.

Once the song finished, once I'd parked and locked the doors, he said to me, “Mercy, for real, when you gonna come around to me?” and I swear I almost died right there until I realized he really meant joining the stupid-ass car club. But I was good—I threw my keys in the air and caught them (very smooth) and when I tucked them in my backpack, my hair tumbled down over my shoulder all dramatic like in some Spanish soap opera. He even reached over and tugged on it.

“Whatchu getting into this weekend?” he said.

“Whatever,” I said. “No real plans—I have to call Carla.”

My backpack started to slip off my shoulder, but he was looking at the ground right then and didn't notice how it pulled my tank top weird across my chest, shifting my boobs so that one looked higher than the other. I hoisted my bag up before he noticed.

“We should hang out,” he said.

Like on a date? I wanted to say. But I just kind of nodded, the car between us.

“Aight, I'll call you then, to see wassup,” he said.

He jingled his keys in his pocket.

“Yeah, okay,” I said. But he had started walking away to his car.

He had parked a few spots down, but still in the part of the lot close enough to the school to be safe. Get too far into the public lot and your ride will be on blocks when you come out. Lazaro used to park out far to keep people from keying his Integra. I told him the best way to stop that was to quit pissing people off, but he just laughed and made fun of me for trying to be on everyone's good side all the time. (Carla didn't talk to him for two days for saying that to me.) And then one afternoon, we came out for lunch and the back two rims—I swear he had them on the car for like an hour, they were so new—were just
gone
, just two concrete blocks holding up the ass of the car. He wanted to beat the crap out of the school security people, but even
they
know better than to mess with people so set on getting some rims. Osniel told my dad about it, and ever since, Papi warns me every morning while I'm backing out of our driveway to park close to the school. The safest place for the car, Papi says, is in our driveway, locked behind the chain-link fence. Which is where it will sit all weekend, while I watch the phone.

Mom jokes I'm praying to the cordless, I'm so all over it. I carry the receiver to the bathroom with me, resting it on a towel on the toilet while I shower.

“No one uses this phone,” I announce to my family Friday night at dinner, pointing to the cordless sitting between the picadillo and the congrí on the table.

Papi has no idea what's with me and says, “What's with her?” to Mami. Mami shrugs and then winks at me when Papi looks back down at his food. Carlos ignores the wink and launches into his list of reasons why Ricky Alviar's bullying might force him to drop out of sixth grade. Through the glass table I see Mami's toes wiggling, tickling Papi's ankle. He smiles at his rice then stomps on her toes with his heel. She stomps right back. They keep playing this game until Carlos says, “Listen! He's trying to destroy me!” and moves around to their side of the table to show Mami what he claims is a pencil lead stuck in his palm.

I tell myself that if by nine he hasn't called, he's not going to. So at nine-thirty, I really give up and go to my bedroom, to my window. I shut the door and turn off the lights, and at the window I close the blinds but leave them raised about two inches from the bottom. Then I crouch down on my knees to look, my fingers and nose pressed to the cold tile on the windowsill. This is where I watch him from.

If I push my face into the window and look hard to the right, I can see the back of his house. His is the corner one, three down and across the street, facing the opposite side of the road that intersects mine. I know which room is his, and I can see his window—it faces my house. I can see when the light goes on and off. It's off right now, so I stand up again and get the notebook with the red pen hooked into the spiral from under my mattress and write on the next line,
Friday, 9:30. NOT HOME (?)
.

And then I wait. And I watch, and I don't move just in case he's looking back from the bottom of his own window (even though I
know
he's not).