All about Skin (24 page)

This was how I got Osniel to drive me to school back before I had my del Sol: I'd get up early in the mornings—way earlier than him—and watch for when his light would turn on (because he was awake) and when it would go off (because he was leaving for school). I'd get up early enough so that I was all the way ready—dressed, eye-liner on and not smudged, hair smooth, books in my bag—so that all I had to do was watch and figure out when he'd be coming outside so I could walk by at that exact minute and he'd offer me a ride. Too early and I was on the bus. He made me work for it too, because he went through some stretches last year where he'd just skip all the time—two, three times a week—and I'd have to give up and go because I hadn't seen his light
at all
and I wouldn't make the bus if I waited any longer. But I took good notes and got down even his skipping patterns eventually.

Kneeling there in my room, my knees and calves start to burn, so I shift forward and lean on the sill. Osniel's got to be out with Danny Garcia, because Lazaro's car (a lot easier to see from the window than Osniel's place because he's basically across the street) is in the driveway, and the kitchen light is on, so they got to be eating dinner. His dad's work van is there, too, and that means Lazaro's
got
to be home. Carla had not called me, but I knew she was home; impossible as it sounds, her parents are stricter than mine, so on Fridays she can't go out with Danny Garcia unless I go as a chaperone. Which just leaves Danny Garcia—unless Osniel's out with someone I don't know, which can't be it because we've always rolled with the same people.

Whenever I watch and I start to get tired, or feel my chin go numb from pressing it in the sill, I think about just getting into bed. But I know better. I can't leave the window because the minute I leave, the next second, I know the light will go on in Osniel's room and I'll miss it.

His Civic's engine works like an alarm for me, and I don't know what time it is, but he had finally passed by, home from wherever he was. I lift my head up from the windowsill in time to see him turn onto his street, and maybe two minutes later I see his bedroom light go on and then off again. So I cross out the question mark behind
NOT HOME
in my notebook and draw a dash and write,
Gets home LATE—in bed FAST
. I shove the pen in the spiral and stuff the notebook back under the mattress. I can hear Carlos watching TV in his room—something with a heavy-duty laugh track—and my dad snoring down the hall. My mom interrupts the steady, smooth rumble when she half-yells, “Papi,
please
! Roll over! Dear
God
!” Then I hear Papi grunting back, “I'm not snoring, that's you.” Then Mami laughing, then the smacks and thumps of their pillows as they pummel each other with them to figure out who's right. The snores stop for only a few minutes, and when they come back, they're muffled.

Flopping on my stomach onto the bed, I think, If Osniel is drunk, he's falling asleep face down, just like this.

He never calls that weekend, though I watch him from my window do something—can't tell what—to the engine of his car. It takes him a while, and he keeps having to knock on Lazaro's door to borrow tools from his dad.

In the afternoon, I go out to our driveway, where my dad's just changed the oil on the del Sol even though I've barely put any miles on it. He's put in some new windshield washer fluid that's supposedly better than whatever was in there. I can't see Osniel's house at all from our driveway.

I stand next to my dad and lean over the engine. He's cleaned it up, replaced the original hoses with braided lines—the kind that have steel reinforcements—and he's put in these chrome valve covers and header tubes. The whole thing shines. I think, Who's even going to
see
this other than him and me? Looking at all that chrome, hidden to everyone else when he closes the hood, I shift a little closer to him, but after a second he moves to keep the space between us the same.

“You like it,” he says.

It isn't really a question—he takes the towel tucked in his back pocket and wipes around where the washer fluid goes.

“It's
sporty
,” I say, but I laugh and so does he. And because he seems okay with my joke, I say, “Papi, I think it looks cool, but no one's gonna see it. I'm afraid to even open the hood cuz what if I don't close it right? What if I scratch up the paint?”

He wipes his hands with the towel and says, “Then don't open it. Even though I already showed you how to make sure it's closed, you just listen for it to click—but don't open it, if you're scared. You shouldn't need to open it anyways. And the less you open it, the less chance you have of scratching the paint. The paint people see.”

He shuts the hood, letting it slam, so that any click it made I didn't hear. He rubs the towel over the edge of the hood, over scratches that will never be there.

“You just have to be careful,” he says. “You won't scratch it if you don't play around—it's not a toy. I didn't buy it for you to play games.”

He swirls the towel over the same places he's just wiped. He leans down close to the hood, squints, blows at some speck, squints again, then wipes at the spot with the towel wrapped around his pointer finger. He presses so hard it sounds like a squeegee. I fold my arms across my chest even though it's very hot and we're both sweating.

I say, “I'm careful. I'll be careful.”

I worry he thinks I don't like the engine, so I add, “You want some water or something?”

He grabs my arm, so hard he might bruise me, his rough hands scratching my skin. He kisses me on the top of my head, a loud, smacking kiss. Then he pretends to bite my head, making fake growls, and I can feel his crooked top teeth digging into my scalp.

“Let go,” I pretend cry.

He holds me out away from him, squeezing my arm even harder, grinning and growling at the same time.

When he finally frees me, I can make out every finger of his hand, glowing red on my upper arm.

“Yeah, water,” he says, and he pushes me on the shoulder toward the house and I pretend to stumble.

“Tell Mami to make me café,” he yells when I grab the doorknob. I look back at him, and he wipes his hands with the towel again and smiles.

As I pull the door closed behind me, there on my outstretched arm is Papi's handprint, still clear but starting to fade. The red parts had turned white; now it looked like all he'd left was an outline. I stare at it for a second and then decide not to shut the door all the way. I leave it a little open so I can hear him, even if he'll yell later that I let mosquitoes in the house.

Mom is already walking into the kitchen.

“People three blocks away can hear when your father wants café,” she says.

She hugs me and gives me a kiss on the cheek as she walks past me to the sink. I grab a clean glass from the cabinet and stand next to her, waiting for the water to run colder so that I can be lazy and not have to refill the ice trays.

We watch my dad pace around the car from the kitchen window. He looks hard at all four tires, then opens the driver's side door and reaches in, and the hood of the car pops up a little. He comes back out, leaving the door open, and grabs the edge of the hood with his hand, which is draped in the towel to prevent finger prints.

“Is that one of my
kitchen
towels?” Mom says. “Dear God, give me strength.”

I watch Papi open the hood, then close it, softly, bending down a little with his ear to the car. Then he goes back to the driver's seat and pops the hood again. He does the whole thing over again. As Mami keeps staring, I say, “Let me make the café, huh? I can do it.” But even though the car's hood barely makes a sound, Mami doesn't hear me.

“What is he doing?” Mom says. “Your father and his games.”

She packs the coffee into the cafetera, fills the bottom with water, and sets it on the stove. I fill the glass with water, and when I look up from the sink, Papi is on his fourth shutting of the hood. From outside, he gives me a thumbs-up. He even winks and says, “It clicks—you barely hear it, but I hear it—click!”

“Clickclickclick!” Mami says like a bratty kid. “I bet you that glass of water he loves that car more than us.”

But she doesn't know what Papi is talking about, and he doesn't let her in on it, at least not then. Right then, me and him are the only ones who know what he means.

I yell through the crack I left in the door, “Hey, Papi, how much ice?”

On Monday, Osniel talks to me in Spanish class like nothing happened, like it's not a big deal that he said he'd call but didn't. I went to bed the night before so pissed that I didn't even bother to wake up early to watch his light come on that morning.

“What's up your ass, Mercy?”

I don't even look at him.

“Nothing. Why?”

“You so quiet with me today, I dunno.”

“Hmm.” I shrug.

I curl my fingers around the edge of the desk,
into
the desk—my nails could cut the fake wood (if I
had
any nails). I grind my teeth and I almost listen to Mrs. Gomez. But I can't take my hands and teeth feeling so tight, and a minute later I turn toward him and ask him what I want to ask him.

“Osniel?”

“'Sup?” he says, pointing his chin at me and smiling.

“How come a guy says he's gonna call you but then doesn't?”

He sits up and looks around our classroom. He squints at Danny Garcia, on the other side at the back of the room, who is trying to get Carla to sit on his lap. He squints at Lazaro, who's asleep on his desk.

“
Who
said they were gonna call you?”

He sounds almost mad. He leans forward in the desk quick, like a reflex. He holds himself there, his eyes darting around my face, just
inches
from me. He's closer to my mouth than the day we went to Taco Bell together, closer than he's ever let himself be to me. I smile and look down so he can't see me trying not to smile.

“I'm just asking,” I say.

He shakes his head no. “Mercedes Beatriz Reyes,” he says. “Mercy. You know how we do. It's all part of the game, mama.”

I say, like an echo, “The game.”

He just has this big-toothed grin on his face. I let go of the desk. I look down at my hands—my nails chewed on and weak. They're so short, pushed so back into my fingers that I bet it would hurt to open the hood of my car. There isn't even any white part left to bite off. Something clicks for me, in my head—I can barely hear it. So I ask.

“Osniel,” I say, “Hialeah's Finest? Is it really about the car? Or is it about me?”

He sits there quiet for one second too long, and then says, “Pshh,” and forces a laugh. He leans back in the chair, yanking his face away from mine. He puts both arms out, his palms flat on the desk, raises his shoulders a little, and locks his elbows. He doesn't look at me, but looks straight ahead like Mrs. Gomez had just called on him. He wrinkles his eyebrows like he did that day we went to lunch and he sang to me.

Osniel finally looks at me straight in the face.

“Why would a car club be about anything other than cars?” he says.

I turn back toward the front of the class and I hadn't noticed until then that I'd been holding my breath. From across the room, Carla says, “Danny, stop it,” and up at the board, Mrs. Gomez yells, “Por Favor! Atención, mis hijos.” And I stare at her to keep from looking back at Osniel. When I start breathing again, I know I'm going to puke or cry, so I grab my bag and go up to Mrs. Gomez and ask for a pass to the bathroom. I don't even wait for her to fill it out all the way. I tear the yellow slip from her hands and rush out of the room, and Carla's screaming, “Osniel! What the fuck did you say to her? What the fuck is wrong with you?” The door shuts behind me, and down the hall I still hear Mrs. Gomez—“Asientos! Todos, take your seats!”

I run past the girls' bathroom, past the lockers and down the stairs, out past the portables where the freshmen have classes, out to the parking lot. I walk up to Osniel's car. It's so red and he has the perfect rims—complicated webs of chrome, almost impossible to keep clean, every right to brag—and he's got the official Honda seatbelt shoulder padding on both the driver
and
passenger sides.

In all the time I've known him and this Civic, I've never seen the engine close up—no clue what it looks like, what he's done to it. I wonder if there's any chrome under the hood, whether he'd show it off to me or not. I didn't need him to see it; I could break into his car, lift up the hood myself—my dad had taught me to pick locks when I was little, in case I ever lost my house key. When he was Osniel's age, my dad could hot-wire anything. Mami still tells stories about Papi siphoning gas from cars parked in front of house parties, about showing up at her school—ditching his own classes—so they could sit together in his Chevy Challenger during her lunch period. He'd refuse to unlock the door and made her late to fifth period so many times that the teacher had called her house. Once, in the middle of the night, Mami's neighbor caught Papi pouring sugar in his son's fuel tank, just because the guy'd sat next to her in the cafeteria three days in a row. Mami never admits how all this hurt—or helped—Papi's chances with her. She says she tells me these stories to warn me about guys like Papi, to stay away from them because they only do damage. And when I said, “Yeah, but you married that guy,” she said, “Mercy, please, Papi is different. He's your father, he loves you.” And from the way she avoids looking at me when she says this, I sometimes think she's bragging.

I reach into my bag and get closer to the car. I pull out my keys, hold them firm, out from my thigh, and walk past the car, down the length of it. The metal scraping metal sounds quieter than I'd thought it would. I scrunch my eyes at the screech anyways, a skinny ribbon of red paint peeling off, then turning to flakes as it falls away from the car, away from my keys. I don't look at the car as I do it—I can't—because I don't want to get caught like Papi did with the sugar. So I wait until I'm done keying Osniel's paint, and a few feet away, before I look back at the damage.