Salvation (3 page)

The three thousand pounds of football players, now jogging in place, disappeared behind her.

“Okay, we’re outside,” she said. “Now, what was your surprise ASB meeting about?”

Nalani groaned. “Markham wanted to go over all the responsibilities of our new positions. He said Salva has to do the announcements at the assemblies. I only fill in when he’s gone. Kaitlyn has to take the notes. We have to elect a new parliamentarian to fill her old spot. Which is all fine, of course, except Salva didn’t want to be there because he was anxious to get to practice. He and Markham got into an argument about who should be able to schedule meetings and how it’s not fair to hold them without advance notice. Of course, Markham just blew him off.”

Beth tried to fix the uneven shoulder straps on her backpack as she listened.

“It’s a good thing I have such an excellent best friend who’s willing to wait,” Nalani added, smiling at her.

Beth smiled back.

Her best friend kept talking. “But I mean, really, what did Markham expect? It isn’t like he didn’t know Salva is booked after school in the fall; but
oh,
no one else could become president. I mean Salva didn’t want the job. I don’t see why Markham wouldn’t even discuss the idea of me taking Julie’s spot.”

The slide toggles on Beth’s backpack straps refused to adjust. “Did you want it?”

Nalani shrugged.

“I’m sorry, Ni,” Beth said softly, trying to protect her best friend’s feelings. “But maybe this is a good thing. You’re already so busy…” What Beth didn’t say was that Nalani had a habit of volunteering for too much and only following through on about half of it.

“Well, we could have discussed it.” Nalani took the backpack away from Beth, smoothed out the puckers on each of the straps, and corrected the length. The two girls turned the corner, taking a route that led first to Nalani’s, then to Beth’s. Ni returned the pack, raising her voice over a barking hound dog and a whining air conditioner. “It just doesn’t seem fair that Markham thinks Salva is the only one who can do the job.”

Beth nodded in sympathy, though the principal had a point. After all, if Salva had decided to run for president in the first place, no one doubted he would have won.

Ni climbed onto the curb. “I mean, he’s not perfect.”

Beth’s head shot up at that, and a warm blush spread over her cheeks before she could control it.

Her best friend must have noticed. “Sorry…” Ni trailed off.

Was Beth never going to escape the repercussions of one silly junior-high crush?
Everyone has had a crush on him. It’s not like I own the embarrassment.
She cringed to think of herself in the eighth grade: naïve, suffering from the bombardment of braces, two bouts of head lice, and the illusion that Salvador Resendez would one day magically look across the freshman-lit classroom and realize that she, Beth, was perfect for him.

“There’s nothing—” Beth tried to say, but her friend ended the discussion.

“We won’t talk about him.”

It wasn’t him,
Beth told herself.
It was just an image. Middle schoolers fall in love with image all the time.
Though she couldn’t quite push away the image of him today, picking up all her papers before he went on to class.

“Well, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” Nalani said.

Beth startled, having failed to realize they had reached the plastic fence around her best friend’s lawn.

“Unless you want to come in for dinner,” Ni added.

“No…thank you.” Beth looked up at the freshly painted house with the barrage of sunflower stickies in the window. Better to save her invitations for when she needed them.

Besides, she wanted to talk to her grandmother.

Nalani gave her friend a quick shoulder squeeze, then traipsed through the arched garden trellis, pausing to adjust the hose caught on the back of the stone deer decorating the path.

Beth fled, not wanting to regret her choice to turn down supper.

She smiled as she reached the graveyard. “Morbid,” her mother would have said about her daughter’s desire to visit the cemetery, but Beth kicked off her sandals and waded through the fresh-cut grass. The cool strands tickled her ankles, and the sweet scent of late roses clung to the air. Pale yellow, blue, and pink tombstones scattered the green in a pastel palate.

A squirrel rushed across the grass and scurried up an old oak tree, the fluffy gray tail disappearing among the branches. Beth approached, watching to see if it would emerge again, but when it did not, she swung off her backpack and slid to the ground beneath the tree’s outstretched shadow. And beside the slender pink stone with the name G
LORIA
M
AY
C
OURANT
etched in the center.

“Hello, Grandma,” said Beth. “I’m sorry I’m late.” She explained about Nalani’s meeting. “You know she always has something happening. I’m sure you aren’t surprised.” It felt right to be here. Grandma had always expected Beth to share about the first day of school, a ritual that Beth hadn’t wanted to stop now.

“It was a pretty good day,” Beth went on, “for the first, you know. I’m not sure I’ll survive trigonometry; but I thought the same thing about algebra II, and it turned out all right. All the answers are still in the back of the book, so I’ll know when to ask Nalani for help.” She knew Grandma would remind her that Beth’s final math scores had outpaced Ni’s all the way through school. But grades, and confidence in math, were two different things.

A robin hopped down onto the grass about twenty feet from the pink tombstone. Beth stopped talking so that she wouldn’t frighten him. He pecked his way closer, hopping four or five inches at a time and up onto the mound of turned earth. The grass there had not quite grown in yet. The robin preened,
raising his chest and showing off, then disappeared in a sudden rush of wings.

Beth’s head swam with the questions her grandmother had always asked.
Do you like your teachers? Did you make any new friends? Were you on
time
for everything?

Obediently, Beth answered the questions, though she skimmed through her problems with being late. She told herself the aversion had nothing to do with crashing into Salva Resendez, though Grandma would have wanted to hear about him so she could repeat the story, for the hundredth time, about how she had dropped her cupcake during her granddaughter’s third-grade Valentine’s Day party, and Salva had given her his.

The sun continued to shine as Beth talked. And talked and talked, letting her tongue flow as easily as her pencil when inspiration struck. She kept talking even when her throat grew dry and she had to clear it every few seconds. But then her stomach began to growl, and she realized it must be dinnertime. She’d forgotten her watch, of course. It seemed silly to wear a watch in a building where every room had a clock timed down to the exact second.

Reluctantly, Beth reached for her backpack. “I should probably go. I’m on my own for supper tonight. Mom’s taking classes after work and attending meetings.”

Grandma would be happy with that, though she wouldn’t have said. She didn’t like to encourage false hope. Still, she would want to know.

“Love you ever.” Beth stood, then wound her way once around the oak tree, her eyes peering up to check for the long-lost squirrel. No tail flashed so she turned her attention down, slid back into her sandals, and headed for home.

The weeds had grown clear up to the trailer. She should mow them, but it seemed a waste now that no one stayed here during the day; and soon it would be fall, the season defined by nature’s refuse. She picked her way along the path of flattened cheatgrass and tugged on the screen door.

It stuck. She rattled the latch and jerked harder, until the door swung free with a bang.

The trailer smelled of sour milk from cereal bowls. Beth sighed, letting her backpack obey gravity, then she stepped from the worn carpet on the right half of the room and crossed to the peeling linoleum on the left.

The sink was disgusting. She forced herself to reach into the scum-covered water to retrieve a frying pan and wooden spoon, then turned over the dishpan and watched the cold liquid disappear down the drain. Beth flipped on the faucet, letting it run while the hot water decided whether to work.

She detoured to the fridge and yanked open the freezer, too fast because a paper slid off the door. Eagerly, she reached into the open Popsicle box. One left. She grinned and tugged out the treat.

The clear wrapper peeled away, and she tossed it into the garbage can, along with the box.

Back to the sink to test the water.
Hot.
She slid the dishpan under the faucet, poured in the soap, then tasted the Popsicle. It was red, the flavor a bit like children’s medicine, but at least the treat was cold.

Suds in the dishpan threatened the rim, and she turned off the water, then caught sight again of the fridge. And frowned. Her eyes swooped to the floor, where they spotted the fallen paper sticking out from beneath the stove. Quickly she scooped up the sheet, held it straight against the freezer door so the paper would be easy for her mother to read, then secured the Alcoholics Anonymous pledge with a bright pink-and-green butterfly magnet, Grandma’s favorite.

The hot evening air blasted Salva in the face as he swung out of the school’s main doors and stepped into the parking lot. His chest felt numb and his arms and legs like they had been drained. That happened after ten extra laps.

Dios, ayúdame.

Salva’s father was in the parking lot. There was no mistaking that battered green pickup with its strips of duct tape along the lower half of the cab.

His father’s words rang out the open window. “You are late.”

Salva let his head fall back and his eyes rest on the still brilliant blue sky.
Would this day never end?

He hauled his backpack and sweaty football clothes across the lot and up to the driver’s side door, then waited for the inevitable question of why he was the only football player still here.

It didn’t come.

He peered into the cab and saw the reason. Señora Mendoza, her hair up in a scarf, her lunch box on the dash, sat beside the passenger door. His father and Char’s mother must have come straight from work—Salva checked his watch—which meant they had been waiting together for half an hour.

“I’m sorry.” He didn’t bother to point out that he hadn’t known they were coming or to explain that the reason he was late was because Coach Robson and Markham didn’t see eye to eye on when it was important for Salva to be at practice.
Papá
would have sided with the principal.

Señor Resendez descended from the cab for his son to enter.

Salva deposited his stuff in the pickup bed, careful to avoid the patches of grease, then climbed into the cab and greeted Señora Mendoza, whose response was terribly polite for a woman who had spent an extra thirty minutes in a pickup after a twelve-hour shift. She worked under his father, so her schedule was subject to his. And Señor Resendez, despite—or maybe because of—being manager, always accepted the longest hours.

“¿Cómo fue tu primer día?”
Papá
asked about his son’s day.

Salva shrugged. As first days went, it had pretty much sucked. No phys ed. AP English. Markham’s surprise meeting, for no reason.

Salva’s father didn’t need to know any of this.

“You have homework?” came the next question as Señor Resendez steered out of the parking lot.

Twenty pages of
Paradise Lost
to read for the Mercenary, but
Papá
didn’t need to know that either. “It was only the first day,” Salva replied.

He expected a complaint about how every school day should be used to the fullest, but the actual response was a surprise.
“Bueno.”
Señor Resendez grinned over his son’s head. “Señora Mendoza and I think you should teach Charla to drive.”

¿Qué?

“You have time tonight. Is still light for more hours.”

No, no, no, no, no.
His father knew Char didn’t have a license. She wasn’t legal, unlike her younger brother, and she couldn’t get a permit without documentation, so it hadn’t been safe for her to take driver’s ed.
Though, of course, that’s why she needs the lesson.
Salva needed a reason to refuse that his father might actually accept. “
Mira,
this pickup
es imposible.
” Salva pointed at the wires springing from the dead stereo and at the open glove-box door that refused to shut. “You can’t expect her to learn to drive in this…”
Hunk of junk.

As if to prove the point, the vehicle chose that moment to stop in the middle of the road and jerk up and down before returning to forward motion. His father relaxed the gas pedal and crawled past cop corner at about fifteen miles per hour.

“You see,
Papá
. It barely obeys you.”

A decent argument. One that might have worked with someone else, but his father had an ulterior motive. “You are intelligent,
hijo.
You can help her.”

Salva was not so sure. He hadn’t managed to help Char learn her multiplication tables or memorize the names of all the countries in Europe. And he certainly hadn’t been able to help her pass the state’s high-school standardized test.

“But
Papá
”—this time the protest was weak—“where would we practice?”

His father sobered. “Take to her to the Fentzsen place. Mr. Fentzsen no will mind.”

Salva felt his chest go cold. He hadn’t been to the Fentzsen farm since
Mamá
’s death four years ago.

The pickup shuddered to a halt outside the Mendoza home, and Salva and his father bailed from the vehicle so that Char’s mother could climb out. The door on the passenger side hadn’t worked for years. She exited, then hurried inside to suggest the idea of the driving lesson to her daughter.

What were the chances Char would turn it down? Though she had never liked studying with Salva, even when they were dating. Maybe she wouldn’t care for this either.

But the brief grasp at hope departed as Char emerged from the front door. Her hairstyle had changed since lunch, the ebony strands tied back instead of sculpted with spray, and she had exchanged her too-tight jeans for a pair of very white, very short shorts.