Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass Read online

  “Are you still there?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sorry. At least school just started, right? Anyway, I need to work on this stupid lab report for physics.”

  I sighed. A five-alarm fire wouldn’t get between Mitzi and her homework. Her dad was a doctor in Honduras, even though here he only works in the lab at a clinic. He has plans for Mitzi to be a surgeon. She’ll probably like it, though. She’s the only kid I know who didn’t make naked Ken and Barbie kiss. Instead, she would amputate their limbs with blunt-edge scissors, their putty-colored little feet lined up on the front stoop.

  “What time is it?” she said. Papers shuffled in the background. “¡Ay! I gotta go to practice.”

  “Practice for what?” I asked.

  “I’m playing badminton for school.”

  “The game with the little net thing? That’s a sport?”

  “Yeah, can you believe it? And I suck.”

  “So why are you doing it?”

  “Why else? Mami wants me to make friends.”

  This made us both laugh. Mitzi has always been kind of shy, her mother’s exact opposite. It got really bad when the boys in our class went insta-stupid over Mitzi’s boobs in elementary school. After that, it was me who had to tell the boys to shut their filthy mouths — and ask for the movie tickets and the explanation for the homework, too.

  “You coming to Queens soon?” I didn’t want to say I miss you because she already knew that.

  “The first weekend that I don’t have a game. Maybe we can go shopping for your birthday present.”

  I couldn’t answer through the tight feeling in my throat.

  “Look, Piddy, don’t worry. It’s going to be okay,” Mitzi said before we hung up. “Take it from me. You can’t do anything about moving, anyway, so try to make the best of it. Besides, people always like you. You’re going to kick butt.”

  I was already missing Lila as the three of us packed up our old kitchen a week later. I was sitting at the piano bench, plucking at the stuck keys.

  “Ay, Clara, tell this kid to stop with the sad face; she’s breaking my heart.” Lila taped newspaper around two plates and kissed my forehead. “Your mami’s right. You can’t stay here.” She wiped the lipstick off my skin with her handkerchief and tucked it back inside her bra. “The whole place is turning to dust.”

  Ma looked up and frowned at me.

  “Piddy, stop that racket and help us. And quit moping. You should be thankful.” She yanked tape over a box of pots. “The new apartment’s not far, and — did you see? — it even has a yard.”

  I gave her a stony stare.

  “That patch of dirt?”

  “It has roses,” she said. “You can sit outside with a new friend from school and smell their perfume,” she continued. “That’s good for a young girl.”

  “Ay, Ma . . .” I muttered.

  “‘Ay, Ma,’ what?” she mimicked.

  I sighed.

  Ma is always inventing endless things that are “good for a young girl”— which means, specifically, me. Hemming pants. Washing out underwear by hand because “What decent woman puts her private things in a public washer?” Learning to fry chicken so it isn’t bloody near the bone. Speaking rudimentary French. Cross-stitching pillows — I kid you not — so I’ll know how to stitch my baby’s initials into its bibs someday. All sorts of pointless things that are supposed to improve me “for the future.”

  Too bad I have other plans in mind.

  Ma doesn’t know it, but I’m going to be a scientist. I want to work with animals, big ones like elephants, maybe even live halfway across the world. It’s weird, I know. The only elephants I’ve ever seen were in the zoo. But we have the National Geographic channel, so I know they’re smart and they can feel and hear things people can’t. They can keep a herd’s whole history — all the good and the bad they’ve ever seen — in their memory. If I told this to Ma, her screams would touch the sky. “¿Elefantes?” She’d nag about malaria and the smell of dung I’d never get out from under my nails. She’d ask me what kind of decent girl is interested in elephants. And so on.

  It’s times like these I wish I were Lila’s daughter instead. Not that Ma doesn’t love me — or that Lila likes elephants. It’s just that Lila doesn’t bother me. She’s never had kids of her own, thank God, so she doesn’t have the slightest idea of what’s good for me. She doesn’t ask me if I’ve done my homework or where I’ve been. When Ma works late, we fill up on butter cookies for dinner and watch the good shows that Ma calls trash. If I were Lila’s kid, life might actually be fun.

  “Forget smelling flowers,” Lila said. “A pretty girl like you? Boys will be sending you roses of your own!” Then she wiggled her eyebrows. “The good news is you’ll have your own room. Just think, now you’ll have privacy. Every sixteen-year-old girl needs that.”

  “She’s not sixteen yet,” Ma muttered.

  “A few weeks . . .” Lila said, winking.

  I looked around at the packed boxes and felt my throat go dry. I already hated the new apartment and Daniel Jones High School. I hadn’t felt this bad since Mitzi’s moving van pulled away from our street.

  But I held my tongue. Getting my own room was the only shining piece of good news in this whole thing. It meant I wouldn’t have to share a sofa bed with Ma, who snores and takes my covers. Still, the “pretty” part was ridiculous. I’ve never been one of the pretty girls. Mitzi’s the good-looking one, all curvy like a guitar. I’m tall and skinny. My eyes are wide set and the color of mud. Joey Halper says I look like a toad, presumably now one with a booty. Sometimes he croaks ribbit from his window when he sees me outside and wants to say hello.

  “That’s right,” Ma said. “Your own room. No more lumpy sofa bed.” She paused over a bowl with a melted rim. “Maybe now you won’t slouch.”

  Through the window, I could see the empty lot next door and the bowl of milk I had left there that morning. I moved the jade elephant on my chain back and forth nervously. Sometimes the sound of my necklace makes me feel calm.

  “What’s going to happen to the kittens?” I asked. The mother tabby I’d been feeding near the cellar had been roaming with a low belly for days. She’d grown to the size of a raccoon. The litter would come any day. I thought of what could happen without me: dogs, the cold, rotten kids, even the super with a shovel. He’s an idiot that way.

  “Cats are wild at heart, mi amor. They figure out how to survive.” Lila came to the window and closed her hand around my cold fingers. “Now, give me a hug. Good things are waiting for you, Piddy. I promise.”

  My key is stuck in the lock. Again. At the old place, Lila had a spare key whenever I needed it. Here I’m on my own. The weather turned cold today, chilly enough outside to make my nose run and my fingers feel stiff. It takes me five minutes of jiggling and pushing to get the lock to release.

  Mrs. Boika watches me from her perch behind her kitchen window as if I’m a burglar. If she didn’t blink every so often, I’d swear she was already dead and stuffed, like one of Lila’s customers did to her pet Chihuahua, complete with glass eyeballs and everything.

  The steps to our apartment are right beside the old bat’s back door in the hall. It takes all I’ve got not to give her door a good kick.

  “Hello, Mrs. Boika,” I call, just to point out her rudeness. She doesn’t respond.

  I climb the steps and unlock our door. Nobody is home, of course. It’s Friday, and Ma will be at Attronica until nine tonight. She works in the shipping department, where lifting flat-screen TVs is killing her. A person’s back can only take so much, she says. Tonight I’ll have to rub her shoulders with Iodex until the whole apartment smells of wintergreen and my hands are shiny with oil. If this isn’t a pathetic life, I don’t know what is. I can’t even talk to Mitzi to tell her what happened and see what she thinks. She’s trapped at her cousin’s house in New Jersey until Saturday, so I text her instead.

  Having an ass problem, I type.

  ?? You
have an ass? Call me Sat pm! Gotta go.

  The apartment is still cluttered with half-emptied moving boxes that I kick out of my way to get to the kitchen. Ma and I work at unpacking every day, but somehow it’s like new boxes spring up overnight, and we never seem to finish. Who knew we owned so much junk? Worse, nothing is labeled. That was Lila’s job; we should have known better. She got distracted and forgot. “I can’t think when I’m emotional,” she explained. So now everything we unpack is a surprise. When we need something, we arm ourselves with a box cutter and go hunting as though we’re at the flea market on a Saturday morning. Two nights ago, I found my old CDs mixed with my winter coats in the bathroom. Ma unearthed the teakettle in her bedroom.

  I grab a cereal bar from the kitchen and head back to my room, music piping through my headphones. It still smells of roach spray and fresh paint in here, compliments of the landlord. I prop open the window with my wooden ruler and throw myself on the bed. It’s all I’ve got in here besides the ugly dresser that Ma and Lila dragged home on Large Trash Day.

  I can’t get Yaqui Delgado out of my mind. Plenty of girls shake their junk. How is that enough to make somebody hate you? It’s crazy.

  I turn up the music to chase Yaqui out of my head, and dig out my English notebook. Naturally, I can’t find a pen to use for my homework. I’m sure there are some in a box somewhere. Time to go hunting.

  Boxes are stacked everywhere on the upright piano and its bench to form a kind of mountain. Not that it matters. Ma is the only one who can play, and she says she never has time. Still, she gave the moving guys fifty bucks extra to drag it up these stairs.

  “If you don’t play it, why should we bring it?” I asked.

  “A piano makes a house looks classy,” she snapped.

  I grab a box from near the foot pedals and find Ma’s old handbags and shoes, even a little beaded evening bag I’ve never seen before. The next box has old phone and rent bills folded neatly inside plastic bags. It’s Ma’s extensive bookkeeping, down to the last penny. Then I find loose photographs. For a minute, I don’t reach for them. Looking at old pictures sucks me in — and not in a good, nostalgic way. Most people feel happy looking at old photos. Me? I just feel lost and jumbled. For all of Ma’s organization and bookkeeping, she’s never figured out a way to keep pictures straight. Pictures are supposed to tell your story, but our story looks like it doesn’t make sense. I dig my arms in almost up to my elbows and pull one free. Ma and Lila toasting Cokes to the camera. They’re young and laughing. You can see they’re good friends. I dig in again and pull free a class picture: Mitzi and me in Mrs. Resnick’s class, me with oversized front teeth, standing by our diorama, the best one in the class. Another dig and I pull free a fuzzy shot of us at Rockaway Beach under a striped umbrella with Mr. and Mrs. Ortega. Again, and I find an old one of me in a high chair with smashed-up tamales on my cheeks.

  I play this game for way too long; it’s almost dark by the time I stretch my legs and stand up. If Ma knew what I was doing, she’d be mad. “What are you looking for?” she’d snap, even though she knows the answer: a picture of my father. Ma and Lila made sure there was no evidence left with the help of a Bic lighter. I could dig to China, and I won’t find any photos of him. It’s like he never existed at all.

  I close the box and give it a little shove into the corner. Then I smash my fingers along the piano keys as loudly as I can. Hello, Mrs. Boika! Like the tune?

  The pens, I suddenly remember, are in the box with the Ajax beside the bathroom.

  “The trouble probably isn’t your ass. I’ll bet it’s a guy.” Mitzi holds up a shirt. We’re shopping on Sunday. She’s got thirty dollars, she says, enough for my birthday present — elephant earrings! — and a new shirt if she’s careful. “My God, I’m so sick of my uniform, and it’s only October,” she mutters, putting the shirt back.

  Almost as soon as she got off the N-16 bus this morning, I told Mitzi what Vanesa said and about the lunchroom tables. I even walked ahead of her down the street so she could tell me the truth about my walk. On a scale of one to ten, she gave me a seven in shake. I stare over the rack and wrinkle my nose.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You ever wear knee-length polyester all day?”

  “Not that. What do you mean ‘a guy’? There are no guys in this picture.”

  “Yeah, sure. That’s what you think.” She sounds a little sad when she says it. A boy hasn’t looked Mitzi in the eyes for years. Their eyes stay glued to her chest. “I’ll bet her boyfriend noticed you or something stupid like that. But if that’s what happened, you’re done.”

  “That’s not my fault. Jesus, I don’t even know what she looks like.”

  “So find out.”

  “Creep on her?”

  “Exactly.”

  “How am I going to do that?”

  Mitzi cocks her head and gives me a look.

  “¡Por favor! Use your brain. Nobody’s a match for that.” She pulls out another shirt. This one is loose and roomy the way she likes. “Ooh. Now we’re in business.”

  We share a dressing room. I try on a clingy blue dress in an African pattern while she tries on the shirt. The whole time I’m thinking about the boys at the lunch table. Maybe Mitzi is right. Maybe one of them actually noticed me. Stranger things have happened.

  “What do you think?” I say, stepping out and circling in front of the mirror. It’s not a little-kid dress, that’s for sure. Ma would take one look and say something about short skirts and immorality.

  “Perfect,” she says.

  “You ladies finding everything all right?” the store manager asks, smiling. He’s pretty old — like thirty or something — but he’s cute. Mitzi flushes and stares at her shoes.

  “We’re fine, thanks,” I tell him.

  Mitzi grabs my arm as we head out a few minutes later with our bags. The manager waves through the window.

  “Behold the devastating power of your new booty,” she tells me, sighing.

  I give her a shove. Laughing, we run all the way down the street.

  I read somewhere about a mathematician who said he could solve difficult equations in his sleep. He claimed that his subconscious could figure out problems he couldn’t solve when he was awake.

  I’m not a genius, but it must work like that for me, too.

  When I wake up on Monday, I have a perfect plan for stalking Yaqui.

  “Where are you going so early?” Ma asks as I zip up my sweatshirt at the door. “I made you eggs.”

  “School,” I say, holding up the cereal bar I snatched for my pocket. “There’s a club meeting.”

  Ma looks so happy, I almost feel bad about lying. The truth is that the only people who get to DJ early are the ones eating the free breakfast. Me? I won’t spend a minute more at school than I have to. In this case, though, it’s better that she thinks I go to a school like Mitzi’s, where people practically live full-time.

  “What club?” Ma asks.

  “Library.” I hustle out the door before there are any more questions.

  Nobody much is in the school yard when I get there, except for a few guys hanging near the fence. I recognize a couple of them from the forbidden Latin lunch table. I walk fast, trying not to be noticed, but, of course, they have to go out of their way to call me out.

  “Move that junk, mami!” one of them calls, making squeezing motions with his hands. I don’t turn around to give him the finger, though I probably should. Instead, I hurry up the steps two at a time.

  The library looks deserted as usual. The only time I’ve seen kids in here is when their teachers bring a class, and even then they look like zombies. I head to the nonfiction stacks, my eyes scanning for my target. If I weren’t in such a hurry, I might browse. I actually like libraries. Not this one, of course, but the fancy ones like New York Public on Forty-second Street, where everything is marble and wood — and free. Mrs. Resnick took our class there once when Mitzi and I were in elem
entary school. We went to hear story time, and then we ate hot pretzels on the big steps near the lions. I threw big chunks of mine to the pigeons. But what I most remember is all those little lamps on the tables and that scary quiet that let you hear our squeaky sneakers as we walked through the reading room, fingers to our lips. Mrs. Resnick whispered, “You can learn anything you want in a place like this.”

  We’ll see.

  “Can I help you?” The librarian’s voice startles me. I turn around slowly and find a tiny, round lady looking at me over her glasses. She looks shocked to see a living, breathing person in here. Maybe she thinks I’m a spirit.

  “Just browsing,” I tell her, heading around the corner to the next set of stacks.

  It doesn’t take too much longer to find what I’m really looking for. It’s on one of the top shelves in the reference section. It’s the collection of school yearbooks, back all the way to the 1960s. I find the most recent volume, slip it under my arm, and head for the front desk.

  “Sorry, that’s noncirculating,” the librarian tells me. Her hawk eyes are fixed on the words stamped on the inside cover: NOT FOR CHECKOUT.

  My lightbulb goes on just in time, and I flash her my brightest smile.

  “Oh, sorry. I’m new here. Mrs. Gregory in the guidance office sent me to borrow it,” I say. “Just to see the clubs I might join. You have a library AV Club, don’t you?”

  I know: Genius.

  “Seats, everyone! We have a lot of ground to cover.” Ms. Shepherd rushes in with a pencil stuck behind her ear and a planner crammed with ungraded papers. As teachers go at DJ, she’s good. She still decorates her room like we’re little kids and brings snacks on Fridays. She calls us the “bright spot in her day.”

  I take my seat in the last row near the windows, far enough away from her to be safe. That’s my favorite spot in all my classes these days, unlike Darlene, who likes to sit up front, where she can see in the teacher’s grade book.

  Ms. Shepherd scans the room. Today our Julius Caesar projects are due. Mitzi helped me sew my toga before she went home Sunday. We braided silk-and-plastic ivy into a wreath. “Who’s first?”