Efrain's Secret (31 page)

That same feeling comes back to me now as Mandy buries her head into my chest. “You’re so stupid, Efrain!” She tightens her grip around me, pressing her forearm against my wound. The pain is excruciating, but I take it. She sobs and repeats, “Why are you so stupid?”

Even as I wince, I reach up to stroke her hair as she cries. “I know, kid.” Inside I thank Mandy for sharing my bloodlines, for releasing me from the obligation to put on a brave face, for giving me the permission to break. She keeps calling me stupid as she wails into my chest, and every time I kiss her head, I sob, too. “I know.”

Condolence
(n.)
an expression of sympathy in sorrow

“Hi, Efrain.”

GiGi walks into my hospital room. She has on no makeup, and like a true Halle, she doesn’t need it. In fact, she looks so much prettier without it. No tight jeans or high heels either. Just a pink sweat suit and simple tennis shoes, all with no brand name I recognize. For the first time, GiGi looks like a girl who is pacing herself toward eighteen rather than racing toward twenty-five. She wears her true age well.

“Hey.” She starts to sit down on the chair by the window, but I say, “No, come here.” I pat the bed beside my knee. “Just promise not to move around a lot, okay?”

“Okay.” She comes over and eases herself onto the bed. “Do you need anything? Water or something?”

“No, I’m good, thanks.”

“Man, I’m so rude. I didn’t bring a card or flowers or anything.” She seems genuinely embarrassed. “I’m so sorry.”

“That’s all right. I don’t need any of that. You’re enough.” I reach out and pat GiGi’s hand as we allow her tears to flow. We sit there for a few seconds, her gentle sniffles occasionally seeping onto the silence. “You and me, we have a lot in common, GiGi. That’s why we should be friends. I know there was a time you wanted more, but I don’t know … You kind of scared me.”

“Me?” Her shock surprises me. Don’t girls like GiGi know
they’re scary? I thought that knowledge fueled all their sway. But then again, if GiGi knew that about herself, she wouldn’t have been so hurt when I distanced myself from her. “Why would you be scared of me?”

“I’m not sure, to be honest with you.” It seems like one of those things that takes experience to understand, never mind explain to someone else. “On some level, I just knew that Candace was the better girlfriend for me and Nestor was the better boyfriend for you. Not because he was street or anything like that. Just because Nestor, for whatever reason, wasn’t afraid of all who you were. I mean, he could appreciate it in a way that I don’t think any of us—not me, not Chingy, none of us at school-were grown enough to even see.”

But GiGi just looks down at her hands, smiling to herself. She probably understands better than I do. Maybe that’s why she came to see me low-key, leaving all the makeup and gear at home. “Nestor loved you like a brother, you know that, right?” Her words switch on my tears, so I just nod. “Before we got together, I had bumped into him at the Hub, you know, and I told him that I had seen y’all on Fulton Street, shopping for clothes or whatever. He said that he lied to you about your boss wanting him to take you to get some new gear. He said,
I just wanted to hang out with E. You know, off the block. When we were all broke, E., Chingy, and me, we’d go to the Hub and look through the windows all the time.”
GiGi giggles. “I told him that was no big deal, but he felt so bad, Efrain. So when he asked me out, I said yes. I figured
He’s friends with Efrain, right? He can’t be bad.”

Then she brings her hands to her face and starts to sob. I just lie there, staring at the stained tiles on the ceiling of my room. GiGi eventually wipes her face and clears her throat. “What makes this so hard is that we almost did it, Efrain.” I don’t think this is something I can stand to hear right now, but I can’t stop her.
“Between you and me, I think we could’ve saved him. Nestor told me about how you guys talked about getting an apartment together once you graduated from AC. He was so excited about that, Efrain. And I said to him,
Well, don’t think you’re going to move in with E. and still be slinging while he’s going to college
. And he said,
I know
. But then Nestor said maybe y’all shouldn’t bother ’cause in a year you’d be transferring to another school and moving to Massachusetts or Connecticut or someplace like that. So I said to him,
Maybe if you and me are still together when Efrain moves, I can move in when he transfers. But you know, Nes, we’re not going be together if you’re still working that corner
. I mean, why go to college if I want to live like that, right?”

“No doubt.” I truly had GiGi all wrong. A lot of us guys did, Nestor included. Funny how I judged her in the same ways I never wanted anyone to judge me even when I made the choice to live down to the stereotype. I say, “Thanks for coming to see me, ma.”

She squeezes my hand. “That’s what friends are for.”

Atone
(
v
.) to repent, make amends

Just when I accept that he’s not coming to see me, Chingy shows. He bops into my hospital room as if I lived here. “S’up, son?” Then he tosses a bulky knapsack onto my bed.

I ricochet into a seated position.
“Ow!”

“That’s what you get for almost getting yourself killed.”

“What you got in here, kid?”

“Your books, fool.”

“Oh.” I had hoped that Candace would bring them to me, but she still hasn’t so much as called my home to ask my mother about me. “Thanks.”

“On top of everything, you’re not going to drop out,” says Chingy. “Messing up my senior project…”

Yeah, I’ve been lying here thinking about the Rashaan Perry College Admission Probability Calculation System when not agonizing over the fact that Chingy hadn’t come to see me. “Well, stick to that 1650 I got on the SAT in October. I was supposed to retake the exam the weekend after I got shot, so …” I try to imagine myself back at school. I see the eyes of the other students staring at me in class. I hear their whispers as I limp down the hallway. Before my first crack at the SAT, when I would go to bed at night after studying, I would fall asleep to visions of myself wearing my cap and gown and giving the valedictory speech at graduation. I can’t see any of that anymore.

Chingy doesn’t know what to say, but I’m not mad at him. He points to the backpack. “There’s some other stuff in there, too. Cards and notes and stuff from the teachers and kids at school.”

“Yeah? Thanks.” I unzip, then reach into the bag. The first thing I pull out is my civil rights textbook. I had used Candace’s paper as a bookmark, penciling checks in the margin next to facts I wanted to cite in my own project on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “You’ve seen Candace around?”

“Just at school.”

“How’s she holding up?”

Chingy sits on the edge of my bed. “She didn’t come to school for a day or two, and I didn’t see her at Nestor’s funeral.” The wound in my side burns at the reminder that I missed my chance to say goodbye. Did Snipes pay for it? I bet LeRon and the others represented even though none of them have come to see me. “Then she came back, and people had a lot of questions, thinking she would have the answers, but they meant well, though. Not like last time, when, you know—”

“I got arrested.”

“Yeah. Things did get a little hectic today. Leti was sweating her.
You gotta know something. Your man got shot, and you don’t know nothing? Why don’t you tell the truth?
GiGi even told Leti
Back up off of Candace already
, and you know Leti’s her girl, so … Anyway, I’ve just been hanging out with her. You know, walking with her to school, taking her to class, just to make sure nobody bothers her.”

“Leticia’s going to start saying that you tried to off me so you could hook up with my girl.” I remember seeing Chingy and Candace so cozy after school that day.
Let it go, E. Let it all go
. “Good lookin’ out, though.”

After a few seconds of silence, he asks, “Have the cops talked to you yet?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Everybody. That’s how I found out what happened to you, bro. They just showed up at my place asking questions.”

“They probably went over to Candace’s, too.” No wonder she hasn’t come to visit me. Any love the Lamb matriarchs had for me is dead.

“Well, I had nothing to tell ’em, but they didn’t believe me. Not that I care what the po think.” Chingy pauses, then asks, “They asking you to give up the dude who shot y’all? Do you even know who did it?” I nod. “So …” I hesitate to respond. “Man, I know you’re not even
thinking
about letting that fool get away with what he did to Nes!”

Chingy’s reaction would knock me off my feet if I weren’t already laid up in this hospital bed. I expected him to be lackadaisical about it. To say cold things like
Nestor reaped what he sowed
. But here he is telling me to snitch on Julian. “I don’t know, man…. You know the code of the streets.”

“You’re not from those streets, and you never were!” he says. “Nestor snatched your life back from those streets.” He paces like running water refusing to freeze. “You need to man up and stand tall for our boy, E.” Chingy finally stops, and, for the first time since he arrived, he looks me straight in the eye. “Streets or no streets, code or no code, cred or no cred. Nestor would speak up for you. E., please.” I realize how much Chingy needs to convince me. Justice for Nestor is atonement for him. But it could mean death for me. He may never have done any time on the streets, but Chingy knows how much this is to ask of me, and yet ask he does.

I knew Nestor. He wouldn’t want me to give him up because
of all the trouble it would cause me. Yet Chingy’s right. If Julian’s bullet had found its target, Nestor’d do it for me. And no one would have stopped him from coming to pay his last respects to me. Not Snipes, not the police, no one. So while I’m happy that it will bring Chingy some peace, I will do this for Nestor. But then I’m going to have to go away for a very long time.

Cultivate
(
v
.) to nurture, improve, refine

It surprises me how often Rubio comes alone to see me. The first time he shows up without my mother, I expect him to try and play father. Lecture me, guilt me for breaking my mother’s heart, remind me that I have to be a role model to the other kids, and all that stuff I don’t need Rubio to tell me. But, instead, he brings me coffee and
tostada
from a Dominican bakery and a few hip-hop magazines.

“How they treat you here?” he asks. “Good?”

“Yeah.”

“You tell me, okay, if they don’t treat you good.
Condena’o
HMOs. When you mother pregnant with you sister, they wanna push her out so fast, she almost have Amanda in the rrebolbing door.”

I bite my tongue to keep from laughing. I don’t want Rubio to think things are settled between us. Laughing might give him permission to abandon me again.

But Rubio returns. In fact, he comes every day, sometimes twice. At first, he tries to talk to me about baseball. I tell him I don’t know the first thing about it. He asks me what I’m into. I say basketball. He shakes his head. I don’t know if it’s because he doesn’t follow it or because he’s disappointed that I’m not into baseball. “What’s wrong with your people anyway?” I say in Spanish. “Living in New York City, then rooting for the Boston Red Sox. Y’all crazy.”