We Were Here (25 page)

“Miguel,” Jaden said. “I want to ask you something—”

“Do you surf?” I said.

“Wait, what?” He paused for a sec and then said: “Yeah, I surf. Or at least I used to when I was a kid. Why, bro?”

“Me and Rondell were watching these guys surf yesterday. Do you think Mexican people surf?”

“Absolutely, bro. I knew a guy growing up. Jesse Avila. He was probably the best in our group, actually.”

I pictured myself out there at Venice. On a board. Dropping to my stomach when a wave was coming. “Only one guy takes a wave at a time,” I said into the phone.

“Look, Miguel,” Jaden said. “What’s your plan from here? What’s past is past, okay? But what you guys do
now …
”

“Anyways, I just wanted to tell you we’re still alive.”

“Good. I’m happy, bro. But listen—”

I hung up the phone and turned to Rondell.

“Why you callin’ there, Mexico?”

I shrugged. “I don’t even know.”

Rondell didn’t say anything else, and neither did I.

We walked back to the bus station waiting room and sat in a couple plastic chairs, slipped our bags underneath us. I looked around at all the other people sitting with us, wondered if any of them were going to Mexico too. If any of them were going to resorts there, not to work but to vacation. But it didn’t seem like any of them were.

Then I looked up at the board, waited for information to come up about our bus to San Ysidro, the last vehicle we’d ever be on in America.

July 27—more

Soon as the bus let us off, we hurried through the crowded station, cruised right up to the border of America and Mexico and stood with our faces pressed against the towering fence looking into Tijuana. Me and Rondell, side by side, holding our group-home bags and gripping the chain-link with our free hands, staring in. Here we were, the two remaining escaped Lighthouse kids, tired as hell from another long bus trip, from sleeping outside in the cold, from eating as little as possible and always having to look over our shoulders.

But we made it.

Nobody caught us.

We were as far south as two people could get without leaving America. All we had to do now was join the line to our right, walk across the border with everybody else, and we’d be free. It was that simple.

I peered through the fence. Somewhere on the other side
were me and Rondell’s brand-new lives, and I wanted to catch a glimpse before we walked into it.

What Mexico Looks Like:

It was mad weird seeing across the border for the first time in my entire life, taking in the country where my grandparents were born. Where my pop used to go to visit his aunties and uncles and cousins every month before he got married, moved to Stockton and had kids. The day I was born he hung a huge map of Mexico on me and Diego’s wall, and it’s still there, but I’ve never actually looked at it. Not really. Once I remember pulling up the bottom corner and tripping out on how much whiter the white paint underneath was. But mostly it just hangs there in the background, hardly visible, hardly registering in my mind. Mostly it just blends with the rest of how our room’s always been since I can remember.

And now here I was, standing just outside the actual country. Only inches away. Studying all the little plywood shops along the roadside where people who looked like my grandparents sold oversized stuffed animals and colorful straw chairs and rolled-up Mexican rugs and ponchos and churros and street tacos and blown-up smiling Disney characters and every size, shape and color piñata you could even think of. Little Mexican kids darted in and out of all the cars stuck idling in traffic, selling packs of gum and cigarettes and shaved ice and batteries. And they were all brown like me. Everybody was. A hundred different shades of brown hair and brown faces and brown eyes and brown arms and legs. But not just the people—all of TJ seemed brown. The ghetto-looking boards that held up fruit stands. The dirty streets and sidewalks. The mangy dogs laying along the sides of stock-looking buildings, sleeping. The street signs written in both English and Spanish. But at the same time it was colorful, too. What
they were selling. The rugs and chairs and ponchos and piñatas. It was like they were brown people living brown lives in a brown place who made bright colors to sell to America.

“Hey, Mexico,” Rondell said, tapping me on the shoulder. He set down his bag and stared at me.

“Mexico,” he said again.

White people sat in cars facing us, waiting. The traffic lined up as far as you could see. Everybody inching along, trying to get back home. Get back to America. Back to where it was clean and safe and their houses waited for them on quiet streets with locked doors. Sometimes they’d buy a souvenir. Or a drink with a straw. Or a pack of gum. Sometimes they’d roll down their window, pull in something colorful, place crisp American bills into brown hands and then roll their window back up. But mostly they just waited. Eyes focused straight ahead.

Border-patrol cops leaned into every car, talked to every driver, scanned tires, backseats, popped open trunks, checked under hoods. Sometimes they’d wave a car over to the side for further inspection.

“Mexico,” Rondell said, holding his hands out. “Hey, Mexico. I’m tryin’ to tell you somethin’.”

I locked eyes with this one Mexican kid, about me and Rondell’s age, and I felt like I was lifting off my feet, floating into the air. He was leaning against a big wooden stand full of clay suns. The kind Mexican people like my gramps hang on the front of their houses to bring good luck and welcome guests. And he had every kind of sun you could think of: big ones, little ones, smiling ones, laughing ones, mean ones. All of ’em made of orangish-brown clay and hung on a warped wall so you could get a good view as you sat in traffic waiting to get back to America.

But nobody stopped at his stand.

No American people wanted his suns.

As me and this kid were staring at each other, thinking our own thoughts, something clicked in my head. For the first time. I was Mexican. Like him. Like my pop and my gramps and all the people me and Diego picked berries with that day in the fields of Fresno. Me. Miguel Casteñeda. I was the same as this kid selling suns. We were both tall and young and skinny. We both had short brown hair and bony elbows and the ability to stare without blinking.

But at the same time I felt like a damn poser. ’cause why was he on the Mexico side of the fence, and I was on the American side? How’d it happen like this? If our country’s really so much better than Mexico, like everybody says—’cause we got more money and better schools and better hospitals and less people get sick just by drinking the water—then why should I be here and not him? Why was I on the better side of this big-ass fence? Just ’cause my moms is white? ’cause of the story my pop always told me, how gramps snuck through a sewage drain, crawled in everybody’s piss and shit, just to make it to America? But that’s nothing to do with me.

What did
I
do?

And what did this kid selling clay suns
not
do?

I stared into the Mexican kid’s eyes. And he stared right back. Neither of us looking away. Or even blinking. But really I was floating into the air. All the way up past the birds, past the clouds. We were the same, me and this kid, but we weren’t the same at all. Exact opposites, even. He was real, and I was fake. It all had to do with what side of a fence you were born on. And the fact that I was on the better side made me feel sick to my stomach.

Rondell waved a big-ass black hand in front of my face and shouted: “Yo! Mexico!”

I turned to face him.

He shook his head and turned his palms up at me. “We goin’ in there or what?”

I looked back at the kid selling clay suns, but he was looking somewhere else now. He was concentrating on the people passing him in cars.

“Are we?” Rondell said. He grabbed my face and turned it so I had to look him in the eyes again. “What’s wrong with you, Mexico?”

I shook out of his grip, said something I didn’t expect: “I can’t, man.”

“Wha’chu talkin’ ’bout?”

“I can’t go to Mexico.”

He frowned. “Wha’chu mean by that?”

“I don’t deserve it.”

Rondell looked at his shoes. He picked up his bag and hung it on his shoulder, then looked at me again. “Why not? You
from
there, ain’t you?”

“No, I’m not,” I said, looking back to the kid selling clay suns. He was sitting down now.

I looked all around TJ, at the ghetto buildings and the narrow bridges and the run-down shops and beat-up roads. I felt something strange happening inside me. Like when you watch your favorite team play a basketball game on TV and you want their asses to win so damn bad. Almost to the point that you can’t even watch. ’cause if you watch you might jinx ’em, might make ’em lose. And if that happened you’d never forgive yourself.

I turned back to Rondell. “I can’t explain it, man. I just know it ain’t right for me to go there yet.”

Rondell stood there for a sec, staring at me while I stared at Mexico. “But we was all three of us supposed to be fishermans.”

I picked up my bag and looked at him. “I’m sorry about this, Rondell. But I really can’t do it.”

Rondell started playing with the zipper on his sweatshirt again. He looked at Mexico and then back at me. “I could still go, though, right, Mexico?”

“Hell yeah, Rondo. You can go.”

“’cause I wanna go be a fisherman.”

“I know. And you’ll be the best damn one, man. I guarantee it.”

A little smile came on his face. “Why do you think I’ll be so good?”

I shifted my bag to my other shoulder and told him: “’Cause for one thing, man, you’re patient as hell. You can just sit in one spot for hours. And second of all, I saw you play ball, yo. You got natural talent for shit like that. Just trust me, man. You could be whatever you want.”

He nodded his head and then laughed a little. He put his hand on the fence and watched the people filing through the border on foot a few yards away. “Hey, Mexico,” he said, turning back to me. “Maybe I could just go there tomorrow, though. I don’t wanna leave just yet. Is that okay?”

“You ain’t gotta ask my permission, man.” And then this thought came in my head and I smacked Rondell on the shoulder with the back of my fist. “Yo, I got an idea. What if we go get us a fat meal somewhere. A place with waitresses and cloth napkins and all that gourmet kind of shit. You feel like some steak, man?”

“I’m hungry as hell, Mexico.”

“Bet you ain’t never had no filet mignon, though.”

“Nah,” Rondell said, shaking his head. “What is it?”

“Yo,” I said, “I hear that kind of steak is sick, Rondo. It’s supposedly like
this
thick.” I held up my thumb and finger, as far apart as I could get ’em.

“And it taste good?”

“What I just tell you, man? It’s the best steak you could buy. It’s what all the rich people eat.”

Rondell nodded and scratched his head. A huge smile came on his face. “I bet I could eat like three of them mignons, Mexico.”

“You a straight lie, Rondo!”

“Watch. Let’s go right now.”

I smacked him on the shoulder again, said: “Yo, check this plan. We go track down the best filet mignon in San Diego, right? And then we crash on the beach tonight, like we been doing. And then first thing tomorrow morning we’ll buy you a map of the streets in Mexico, and then we’ll come back here. And you can go across and be a fisherman, and I’ll stay here until I figure some shit out. That cool with you?”

Rondell nodded, excited as hell, and we both looked back toward America, for where all the fanciest-ass restaurants in all of San Ysidro might be.

July 27—more

After the most amazing meal we’ve ever had—we both got filet mignon and these huge baked potatoes and dinner rolls and asparagus shoots and then cheesecake for dessert—me and Rondell walked along the border until we made it back down to the beach. It’s crazy how they do the fence when it gets to the water, by the way. Thick rusty posts, curling toward TJ, going all the way into the ocean. The waves break right around ’em. And you can see them perfect ’cause they got these border-patrol vans parked right there on the sand, shining their headlights over the border part of the water.

One thing you figure out quick is America doesn’t play when it comes to letting Mexicans sneak in their country.

Me and Rondell leaned against a couple posts in the sand, outside of the vans’ line of vision, and rested our hands on our full stomachs.

I took out the leather petty-cash envelope from my bag and counted the cash we had left: $386. Then I counted out half of it and held the cash out for Rondell.

“What this is for?” he said.

“Tomorrow, man. When you go to Mexico.”

He stared at it for a few more seconds and then a look of understanding went onto his face, like he just remembered what he was doing tomorrow. “Oh,” he said, smiling. “Thanks, Mexico.”

The guy was just holding the money in his hand, like he didn’t know what to do with it next so I told him: “Go on and put that shit away, man. You better not lose it either.”

“I won’t, Mexico.”

“Or waste it on no hookers.”

“I won’t.”

“Or on one of them donkey shows.”

He looked up at me, confused. “Wha’chu mean a donkey show?”

I cracked up a little and waved him off. “Nah, man. You don’t even wanna know. I’m just sayin’, you gotta make that last until you find a way to get more.”

“I could make it last,” he said. He folded the bills in half, pushed them into his bag. Then he thought better of it, pulled them back out and slipped them in his jeans pocket. “Wha’chu gonna do with yours?” he said.

“I was just thinkin’ about that at the restaurant,” I said. “How much we start with? Like seven hundred fifty, right?”

Rondell shrugged.

“I think it was seven fifty. Anyways, I’m gonna find a way to pay it all back, man. I don’t know how yet, or if it’ll take me forever, but that’s what I’m gonna do. And then I’m gonna mail it back to the Lighthouse.”