Emako Blue (5 page)

“And you too, Monterey. You have a good voice too,” I added.

Monterey remained silent.

“See ya,” I said, and turned to go.

“Peace,” was their reply.

I caught my bus just as it was pulling away from the curb, and sat down for the long ride home. I thought about Monterey and wondered if she would ever talk to me. She seemed even more shy than me. Maybe I should ask her for her phone number. What if she said no?

I shook my head. I had more important things to think about. It was my senior year and I couldn’t wait to graduate. I had gone to summer school three years in a row to graduate early.

I couldn’t wait for my future to become my present, for the present to become my past.

I couldn’t wait to be in college and away from the streets that had taught me to watch my back, day and night, the streets that had caught my only brother, Tomas.

Tomas.

He was incarcerated.

His body was covered with jailhouse tats.

Me, I was clean, the joy of my mother, my father’s hope.

The bus came to a stop and some loud kids from middle school stumbled down the aisle and sat down. I gazed out of the window as the bus began to crawl through streets cluttered with cars, horns honking, women holding the hands of children who could barely walk, pulling them across the streets, lights turning red, orange hands flashing DON’T WALK, sidewalks buckled, gray concrete pushed up by the roots of rebellious trees. An ambulance screamed by and the bus stopped. I thought about Monterey again and smiled because she was kind of shy, like me. Then a car backfired and I jumped. L.A. was making me nervous.

“Hortensia?” I called when I got in the house.

“What?” my baby sister yelled from her room.

“Just checking,” I said.

She peeked through her door. She was little and pretty, like my mother. “Checking what?”

“To make sure you’re okay,” I replied.

“You worry too much. Like it’s your job to worry. You need to get a new job.”

“Shut up. You’re only saying that because you heard Mom say it,” I said.

“It’s true,” she said, and closed the door to her room.

I looked in the refrigerator. “You want something to eat?” I yelled.

“No!”

I glanced up at the clock. My mother will walk through the door any minute, I thought, and then she will wash her hands and start to cook. The house will start to smell good.

I closed the refrigerator and checked the mail. There was another letter from Tomas. That meant tonight my mother would read it and cry. I took the letter into my room and put it in a drawer. I didn’t want her to see it. I was getting tired of her tears for Tomas.

Emako and I were getting tighter and tighter. At least once a week she was at my house or I was at hers, and we always ate lunch together.

The day before Thanksgiving, I was standing at my locker when Emako grabbed my arm.

“You comin’ with me!” she said. It was a statement, not a question.

“Where?”

“To Melrose.”

“On the bus?”

“Yeah, on the bus.”

“I havta call my daddy,” I said, loading my backpack with books.

“I’ll be outside,” she said, and began to walk away. She stopped and turned around. “It’s vacation, Monterey. What’s with all the books?”

“I gotta study.”

“Ain’t it a shame,” she said, waving her empty backpack.

I stopped at the pay phone and called my daddy to tell him, really to ask him.

“Yes, I have enough money for a taxi if it gets too dark. . . . Yes, it would be a good idea if I had my own cell phone for emergencies. . . . Yes, I remembered to bring home my books to study.” He was getting on my nerves.

We got off the bus and strolled down Melrose, passing shops where they sell see-through bell-bottoms and thong bikinis, and my eyes were wide open like a tourist’s. A transvestite passed us wearing six-inch silver heels, a skintight lime-green spandex dress, a waist-length red wig, and rhinestone earrings. We laughed ourselves into a small jewelry shop.

I picked up a bracelet with little dangling moons and stars. “This is dope, huh?”

“Yeah, it’s kinda sweet,” Emako said, looking at the tiny price tag. “Thirty-five dollars,” she said, squinting.

I put down the bracelet, opened my wallet, and counted my money. “I only have twenty dollars,” I said.

Emako counted her money. “I only have nine dollars.”

I looked at the bracelet once more. “Maybe it’ll still be here the next time we come.”

“Yeah, maybe,” she replied.

We went back onto the street just as two tattooed men went by, both wearing leather vests and spiked blue hair.

“Freaky, huh?” Emako said.

“Yeah,” I replied.

We kept going down Melrose until Emako stopped in front of Johnny Rockets. “You ever eat in there?” Emako asked.

“No,” I replied. “You?”

“No,” she answered. “You hungry?”

I looked at her and smiled. “Yeah.”

We strutted in, sat down in a window booth, and I felt like I was grown.

That Saturday, Emako and I were sitting in my room, listening to CDs.

My daddy knocked on the door. “What kind of pizza do you kids want?”

I looked over at Emako, who shrugged her shoulders.

I replied, “Thin crust, pepperoni and sausage, no tomatoes, and some Mountain Dew . . . and we’re not kids, Daddy,” I added.

“Sorry,” he said through the cracked-open door.

Emako picked up a copy of
Vibe
magazine. She held it up in front of me and pointed to a picture of a handsome brother. “He kinda looks like Jamal, huh?”

“Kinda,” I said, and turned on the TV. “So, what’s up with you and Jamal anyway?”

Emako fixed her eyes on me and hesitated, as if there were a right or wrong answer.

“I know you are not tryin’ to get in my bizness, Monterey,” she replied.

“I sure am,” I said.

“That’s only becuz you don’t have no bizness of your own to be in.” Emako laughed.

“You ain’t funny. That’s okay, Emako, go ahead and laugh, but it’s Saturday night and here you are, sittin’ up in here with me, getting ready to eat take-out pizza. So, like I said, what’s up with you and Jamal?”

“Ain’t nuthin’ ro-man-tic. Besides, he has this girlfriend who goes to private school and lives in the hills and, according to Savannah, him and . . . Gina—that’s her name—are wrapped up too tight. At least that’s what Savannah tells me. She says she doesn’t want my feelin’s hurt.”

“Why is Savannah all up in your life?”

“She said she was just tryin’ to be nice.”

“Savannah ain’t nice. Even I know that,” I replied.

“I know, but I kinda feel sorry for her,” Emako said.

“Why?”

“Savannah don’t seem very happy. You know . . . like, she never smiles or laughs.”

“If I looked like her, I wouldn’t be smilin’ either. . . . Savannah is too ugly,” I said, and changed the channel to BET,
Rap City.
Busta Rhymes was out of control. I got up to dance.

“Sit down, Monterey. You dance like a white girl.”

“Hey!” I said. “Why you wanna diss me like that?”

“I’m just clownin’ with you,” Emako said.

I sat back down and turned the channel to MTV. “What you doin’ tomorrow?” I asked.

“Drivin’ up to Wayside to see my brother Dante. It’s visitin’ day. Once a month we go up there, sit around for a few hours, talkin’ and laughin’. Don’t misunderstand me. It ain’t like some picnic in the park, but Mama misses him.” Emako looked down. “When he first got sent there, I used to tell everyone that he went to Kansas to stay with my auntie, but everybody knew that I was lyin’. They knew where he really was. Besides, we don’t even know nobody in Kansas. So I just started telling the truth. ‘He’s at Wayside. ’ I figured that if anyone had a problem with that, then I had a problem with them.”

“What’d he do?” I asked.

“Gangbangin’, ballin’, got busted for dealin’ dope and carryin’ a concealed weapon and got two years. I figure he’s better off there. If he was still home with my mama, he’d be in the ground. Mama said he’s gonna get rehabilitated. She thinks he’s gonna get out, go to some trade school, learn to be a plumber or something, and his past is gonna stop following him around, but I know it won’t. Boys round our block won’t let it. He’s in too deep, so I know that he’s just gonna get out and get shot or sent up again. Dante . . . he’s got bad karma.”

We stopped talking and watched television for a while.

My daddy knocked. “Pizza’s here.”

We sat down on the floor and opened the pizza box.

“I got a job at Burger King. I start next week.” Emako smiled as she picked up a can of Mountain Dew.

“For real?” I asked.

“Yeah, for real . . . the BK that’s right around the corner from my house. I put in a application at Popeye’s Chicken too, but they wouldn’t hire me because I didn’t have no experience. Can you believe that? I spoze it’s easier to learn to fry hamburgers than chicken. Anyway, it’ll feel good to start putting a little change in my mama’s pocket. She’s been strugglin’ since my daddy left.”

“Where is he?”

“Gone,” Emako replied.

“Gone where?”

“Just gone, Monterey. Been gone so long, my mama calls him Been Gone Bobby Blue. I think he’s dead, but my mama said no. She said he’s just another invisible man who knows how to get lost and stay lost unless he smells money. Then you turn around and see him walking down the street toward the house, wearing a suit, smilin’ like he just got back from a vacation in Hawaii. And then, when the money runs out, he’s gone again.”

I looked down at my pizza. I didn’t know what to say.

“Why you gotta look so sad? It ain’t the end of my world. Besides, you wait and see. When I’m famous and livin’ large, he’ll show up with his hand out, ready to be my daddy, and you know what?”

“What?”

“I’m gonna tell him to get out my face.”

Emako took a bite of her pizza and changed the subject. “So, what’s going on with you and Eddie Ortiz? I always see you lookin’ at him. I could ask Jamal to hook you up.”

“You must be kiddin’. Eddie’s a senior.”

“But he’s only sixteen and you need to stop bein’ so shy around him.”

“I get nervous,” I said.

“Next time he tries to talk to you, just act normal. A’ight?”

“A’ight.”

“He’s tryin’ to get early admission to college, at least that’s what Jamal told me,” Emako said.

“Someone told me he’s real smart,” I added.

“I’m serious. I could ask Jamal to hook you two up and then we could go somewhere, the four of us.”

“My parents won’t let me. Not until I’m sixteen.”

“How come?”

“I dunno. They treat me like I’m still a little kid. Like I don’t have good sense. Like they’re afraid something bad’s gonna happen. This summer I want to get a job, but they’re sending me to some SAT summer camp.”

“I’m sad for you, girlfriend. Real sad,” Emako said, “but they seem kinda nice . . . your mama and daddy.”

“I never said they weren’t nice, but I still can’t wait to get away from ’em.”

I had been trying to get tight with Emako, calling her almost every night, but she was always talking about the friendship thing. All I kept thinking was that I didn’t need any more friends, at least not friends who looked like her.

It was a Saturday night, a couple of weeks before Christmas. I had picked up Emako after she got off work and we were riding, just riding through L.A., and somehow we found ourselves in Beverly Hills.

“Beverly Hills sure knows how to do Christmas,” Emako said as we drove.

“Wanna walk around? We could stroll down Rodeo Drive, scare the white people.” I laughed like the devil.

She tugged at her Burger King uniform and gave me a look as if to say, Dressed like this?

“Ain’t nuthin’, just Beverly Hills,” I said, and parked.

We got out of the car and walked along the crowded sidewalks toward Rodeo, two dark faces in a sea of white.

“I got a question,” I said.

“What?”

“Why in the hood do they say
Ro
deo like the rodeo where they ride wild horses, and in Beverly Hills they say Ro-
day
-o like it’s a different country or something? I mean, what’s up with that?”

“You crazy, Jamal.”

We stopped in front of a jewelry store where the diamonds glistened like ice under the lights, and I took her small hand and held it. I said to myself, I think I’m in love.

“You gonna buy me some ice, Jamal?” Emako asked.

“It could be like that one day. After I start producin’ my music and all that.” I gazed deep into her brown eyes. “C’mon, let’s go inside,” I said, pulling her toward the front door.