Efrain's Secret (13 page)

Gregarious
(adj.)
drawn to the company of others, sociable

My routine is insane. From Monday to Friday, I walk to school with Chingy and go to class. After eighth period, I jet home to check in on my sister (if she’s not over at Rubio’s) and do my homework. When dusk falls, I put away my schoolbooks and grab the train to the Point. I sling till midnight, maybe one in the morning. Sometimes during my “meal break,” I get on Nestor’s cell phone and check in with my mother and sister. Then I go home and crash unless I’m too wired to sleep. On those nights I study for the SAT, sometimes until two, three in the morning. Sleep or no sleep, I wake up at six on Saturday mornings to finish my SAT prep homework before taking the bus to my class at Fordham. After class I go the library and study some more (or take a nap) until Candace comes home from her doctor’s appointment. On Saturday afternoons, we have a standing date. Mrs. Lamb doesn’t let us venture far from the neighborhood, but that’s fine by me because when the sun goes down, I have to grind on that corner, all the while having everyone think I’m working a register at Jimmy Jazz.

With school closed this Monday because of Veterans Day, I pretend to take a day off from the store just to sleep in, especially since I have a practice test in my SAT prep course this Saturday. The extra sleep feels awesome, and I even had some cool dreams. My moms smiling proudly as I give my valedictory speech
at graduation. Me giving Chingy a tour of the Harvard campus. Candace and me … Whenever I wake up, the nice feelings cling to me like the sheets still wrapped around my body, so I just roll over for more.

That is, until my mother barges into my room wearing a housecoat that adds fifteen years to her age. I leap up in bed and say, “Mami, what’s wrong?” She usually works on Veterans Day.

“Nestor is at the door,” she says. Her voice is cold and thin like the films of ice that now cover our front steps.

I start to climb out of bed, but my mother doesn’t budge from the doorway. “Mami, I gotta get dressed.” She huffs and then slams the door behind her. If this is not major, I may have to smite that kid.

I throw on a raggedy sweat suit, slip on my
chanclas
, and bolt out of my room. In the living room, my sister sits in front of the television watching music videos. “Where’s Nes?”

“Huh?”

“Nestor. Mami said he was here. Did he leave?”

Mandy shrugs. “He didn’t come in here.”

As I cross the hallway to the apartment door, I see my mother’s shadow across the floor before me. I open the door to find Nestor bobbing his head to the
reggaetón
on his iPod. “Nes!” I yell, waving my hand in his face to get this attention.

He notices me and pulls the earbuds out of his ears. “What’s poppin’? With school out today, I thought we’d go shopping for some new gear. No disrespect, ’cause I don’t think anything’s wrong with your look, bro, but Snipes kinda ordered me to take you to get a flashier collar to pop, you know what I’m sayin’? Fit in better with the crew.”

“Shhh.” I crack the door in case Moms is eavesdropping from the kitchen. “Lower your voice, kid.”

“My bad,” Nestor whispers. Then dude leans over the threshold and yells,
“¡Hola, Doña ’Lores!”

My moms steps back from the kitchen counter and comes into view. “Hello, Nestor,” she says, barely making eye contact. The three of us have a moment of silence for the conversation that used to follow Nestor’s greeting.
Come in, come in. We have Oreos. Do you want chocolate in your milk? How’s Carmelo? He’s going to be such a heartbreaker when he grows up, that one
. ¿Y Marlene?
I’m worried about that girl, Nestor, I have to tell you. Isn’t your mother worried about your little sister?
Then my mother disappears from our sight.

“Look, we’re Snipes’s representatives on the street. With Hinckley and his boys trying to steal our customers, we always have to look like we’re the ones with the hotness. It attracts customers, impresses the hungry, makes Hinckley’s boys think about switching teams, and all that.”

It sounds like bull to me, but after the Julian incident, how can I dis Nestor? “Fine, but don’t expect me to wild out. Meet me at the pizzeria, like, around two.”

Nestor glances down at his cell phone from where it hangs off the belt loop of his jeans. “Damn, E. That’s, like, two hours from now.”

“Look, kid, I can’t run out of the apartment five minutes after you show up at my door. It’ll make my moms suspicious. I gotta play it off like you just dropped by to say hi and head out much later so she’ll think I’m with Chingy or my girl.”

Nestor stares at me for a few seconds. He finally backs away from the door. “A’ight.” He shuffles toward the staircase like a sad puppy, muttering under his breath how I need to get a cell phone.

I close the door and hustle toward my room, praying that my moms didn’t hear him. But just as I reach my door, Moms comes out of the kitchen. “What did Nestor want, Efrain?”

“He wanted to me to go to the Hub with him, but I said no.” Moms has known Nestor since we were nipping at her knees. She never liked his family but still allowed me to play with him all those years. Okay, usually she insisted that Nestor come over here or that we play outside where she could see us, but Moms never tried to stop us from being friends. So what he sells drugs? He’s still the same Nes. Would it have killed her to invite him inside and offer him some
chocolate?
Dude’s not going to sell herb to Mandy in our living room.

I don’t say a word, though, too relieved that she seems content that I got rid of Nestor quickly. I try to get more sleep, but the whole situation weighs on my mind.

Chaos
(n.)
absolute disorder

I catch a break when my mother goes into her bedroom with the telephone and closes the door. Must be Rubio and it can’t be good. Still, I take this opportunity to creep, grabbing my jacket and telling Mandy that I went to St. Mary’s to play hoops with Chingy.

But when I get to the pizzeria, Nestor’s nowhere to be found. The counter guy says he hasn’t even seen him. I have a slice while I wait, but Nestor never shows. I’m halfway back home when something makes me head over to Nestor’s building. It’s been so long since I’ve been to his apartment, it takes two wrong guesses to remember which buzzer is his. Finally, I hit 3E, and one of his sisters comes over the intercom. “Who?”

“Efrain.”

“Who?”

“Efrain!”

“Efrain?”

“Yeah, damn!”

She finally buzzes me into the building, and I bound up the steps two at a time to the third floor. As I near the apartment, I hear several voices chatter over the bass line of the hip-hop blasting on the stereo. Some things never change, I guess. I bang on the door, knowing that no one’s opening it until I almost kick it in. That’s just the way Nestor’s family gets down.

Nestor’s older sister Claudia opens the door. She’s twenty-two, twenty-three now with two kids. When Claudia has a boyfriend, she and her kids move in with him. When the relationship goes sour, she moves back here. By the way she’s dressed—stained baby tee, faded pajama pants, and torn
chancletas
—she must be between baby daddies. And to think Chingy and I used to fight over who was going to get with her when we grew up. It’s not that having kids has made Claudia less pretty. Some of the baby fat she got while pregnant lingers in all the right places. But after having two kids with two different cats, neither who’s worth a damn, Claudia’s bitterness hangs off her like an ugly suit.

“Oh my God!” Claudia peers at me. “Is that Efrain?” She squeals and hugs me as if I were Nestor’s older brother Leo come home from his second tour in Iraq. No one believed he had enlisted until he sent us a picture from basic training wearing his desert camouflage gear. Then it really sank in when they shipped him out to the Middle East for the first time. Can you believe that crazy dude volunteered to go again? “Come in. Marly, turn down that freakin’ music already!”

With only two bedrooms for seven heads, Nestor’s apartment has always been mad cramped, but now it’s just a mess—half-broken toys everywhere, old store circulars piled on tables and the floor, clothes on the backs of the chairs. I take three steps into the corridor when I stub my toe against a stroller blocking my path. “Is Nestor here?”

“Yeah, he’s in his room.” Claudia makes no move to get him for me, so I ease by the stroller only to bump into a walker. “So, how’re you doing, Efrain?”

“I’m good.” I don’t want to be rude, but the moment I crossed the threshold, the chaos sucked up my patience like a vortex. Claudia’s baby cries from the master bedroom. She mumbles that his nap was way too short and that he’d better sleep through the
night. I almost joke that it’s too quiet for him and Marlene should blast the radio again, but maybe Claudia won’t find that funny.

I run an obstacle course, including hurdling over a playpen, to make it to Nestor’s room. The stainless steel lock on it looks out of place in this old tenement apartment, probably the only lock inside the place. I knock on the door. “Nes, open up. It’s E.”

After some shuffling from the bed to the door, the lock turns. Nestor throws open the door and pulls out his earbuds. “E.!” He gives me a pound and an ’ug and motions for me to enter. The place looks like it belongs in another apartment altogether, with all the technology and tidiness. “Man, you have this place all pimped out, son. Why bother going through all this trouble with Claudia and the kids going back and forth all the time?”

“Enough was enough,” Nestor hisses. “I permanently relegated their behinds to the living room.”

I drop myself onto the leather lounge chair, which gives heat
and
massage. I reel in the remote by the cord and turn on both. The rollers start to wave up and down either side of my spine. “Your moms back you up on that?”

Nestor sits on the edge of his bed and winds his earbuds around his iPod. “C’mon, man, what choice did she have? I pay the bills up in this piece. How’s the man of the house going to sleep on some lumpy-ass sofa bed with an eight-year-old?”

On the one hand, I feel what Nestor’s saying. If he’s the only one maintaining the apartment, it’s unfair to make him camp out in the living room like some overnight guest. But, on the other hand, it seems kind of foul to force Claudia and her two babies to sleep on some hideaway. “So where does Melo sleep?”

“In here with me, but he ain’t allowed in here when I’m not around. I don’t want him jacking up my stuff.” He doesn’t want Melo to find any “business-related items” either, I’m sure. That’s the true reason for the lock on the door.

It makes no sense to me, though, since the kid should be sleeping while Nestor’s hustling, but where do I go overanalyzing another man’s business? I say, “Yo, I thought I told you to meet me at the pizzeria.”

“The way you was frontin’ back at your crib, I didn’t think you would show up.” He stands up, ready to roll. “So, you down to go to Brooklyn? The Fulton Street Mall?”

“I don’t know, man,” I say, leaning back into that leather slice of heaven. “I’m feeling this chair, kid. I may have to go
mimir
right here.” I shove my thumb in my mouth and pretend to sleep.

“It’s hot, right?” Nestor laughs. “Word is bond.”

“It’s
born
, not
bond.”
We fight about this all the time. “How many times do I have to tell you that it’s a biblical thing? God created everything just by naming them. He said,
Let there be light
, and
boom!
There was light. Then He said,
Let there be land
, and
bam!
There was land. On the power of His word, everything in nature came into existence or was born. That’s why sometimes heads will say
Word to life
’cause word is
born.”

“Uh-uh.” That’s all the dude has in response to a brother’s lengthy reasoning. “It’s
bond
. Short for
My word is my bond.”

“Born.”

“Bond!”

“I’m telling you, kid, it’s
born!”

Our age-old debate is interrupted by a timid knock on the door. “Who?” yells Nestor. Who, who, who … Them Irizarrys are a bunch of Puerto Rican Whos like out of Dr. Seuss. And they all short, too. I laugh at my thoughts. Nestor gives me the
What’s so funny?
look.