That year on my eleventh birthday, I didn’t get my cake. Mom didn’t want to order it from Miss Griselda after all that, so we had a sad sponge cake covered in white meringue, Agogó candies for sprinkles, and a candle shaped like the number eleven. Mom promised me that I would have the most spectacular cake in the world for next year, and I started picturing a super tall, super blond Barbie with a crown and a pink princess dress with silver ruffles, all made from layers of cake with caramel in the middle. Miss Griselda would make me the most beautiful Barbie cake in the world. I could already see it, so perfect, in the center of the table. My classmates would die of envy. Bam, bam, bam. One after another, like cockroaches sprayed with Baygon.
That Christmas was brutally hot, and half the neighborhood was already out on the street when we heard the gunshot. Boom. Like a thunderclap. Bats took off with terrifying squeals. Dogs started barking. Everyone crowded in front of Miss Griselda’s house, but no one dared go inside.
Some police officers brought her out wrapped in a white sheet that was getting soaked with more and more blood, the stain only growing.
“What did Doña Griselda do?” my mom cried. “Or what if it was her daughter?” Miss Martha gasped. And they covered our eyes and sent us home, but none of us went. We just stood a little farther away. The lights from the police car went round and round. Everything was red. In the distance Christmas firecrackers were going off. And the stain kept growing, growing, growing, and a hand escaped from under the sheet. Just one hand, like she was saying, “Ciao, you guys have to stay here.”
A few days later a truck came to take away all of Miss Griselda’s furniture and a bunch of boxes of her stuff, the cake binders too, I guess. Her daughter left the neighborhood that same day. We never saw her again.
I had shitty round cakes for my birthday the next few years, but honestly, I didn’t give a damn about cakes anymore.
NAM
She’s getting naked. Something either very bad or very good is happening. Happening to me. Whatever it is, my parents can’t find out. I’m at a friend’s house. Nothing strange there. But my new friend, halfgringa, half-Ecuadorian, is taking off her uniform, her sports bra, her thong, her shoes. She leaves on her socks, short ones, with a little pink ball at each heel. She’s naked, her back to me, staring into her closet.
It’s awkward and dazzling. Painful. My head down like an ashamed dog, an ugly, short-legged dog, I try to look the same as I did a moment before, when we were both dressed, when that image, the one of her body, hadn’t exploded like a thousand fireworks in my brain. Diana Ward-Espinoza. Sixteen years old. Five-foot-nine. Star player on her high school volleyball team in the United States. Green cat eyes, radioactive. The bright white smile of the people from up there.
Diana, pronounced Dayana in gringo, talks and talks, always, nonstop, mixing English and Spanish or making up a third language, hilarious, making me squeal with laughter. With her, I laugh as if there were nothing wrong at home, as if my dad loved me like a dad. I laugh as if I weren’t me, but some girl who slept peacefully. I laugh as if cruelty didn’t exist.
She repeats the words the teachers say like tongue twisters, and never gets them right. Maybe because of this, because they think she’s dumb, or because she lives in a little apartment and not in a majestic house, or because her mom is the English teacher at school and so she doesn’t pay tuition, or because she jogs through the neighborhood in tiny shorts, blue with a white line that makes a V on her thighs—because of all that, or because of some obscure hierarchical logic made up by the popular girls, no group has accepted her. She’s blond, white, she has green eyes, her tiny nose is dotted with golden freckles, but no group has accepted her.
They haven’t accepted me either, but with me it’s the same as always: fat, dark, glasses, hairy, ugly, strange.
One day our last names are paired up in computer class. One right next to the other. It’s everything. I learn that BFF means Best Friends Forever.
Then we’re best friends forever. Then she invites me to her house to study. Then I tell my mom I’m going to spend the night at Diana’s. Then we’re in her tiny room and she’s naked. She turns around to cover her cream-colored body with a denim dress. She turns on music. She dances. Behind her, a gigantic American flag on the wall.
Covered in a fine white fuzz, her skin has the appearance, the delicacy, of a peach. She talks about boys (she likes my brother), about the exam we have the next day (philosophy), about the teacher (he’s funny, but what the fuck is being?). About how she’s never going to understand things like I do, about how I’m the smartest person she’s ever met, and about how she, okay, let’s be honest, she’s good at sports.
She stops in front of the mirror, less than a few feet away from me, on her bed, pretending to be absorbed in our philosophy textbook. If I wanted to, and I do, I could reach out my index finger and touch her hip bone, sliding down to where her pubic hair starts (I’ve never seen golden pubes), and find out if what glimmers there is wetness.
She ties up her Mary-had-a-little-lamb ringlets, she smears her lips with a gloss that smells like bubble gum, and she complains about her hair, her ears, a pimple I say I can’t see. But I can’t look at her, and she notices, and she pouts: “You’re not even looking at me, stop studying, you already understand what being is.”
She grabs my chin and raises my face to make me look at her. I smell the bubble gum on her lips. I hear my heart beating. I stop breathing.
“See this pimple? Here? Do you see it?”
My tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. I swallow sand. I nod.
We have lunch with her brother Mitch, her twin, who is so handsome that my jaw falls open when I have to talk to him. He was just at soccer practice. He takes off his sweaty shirt and doesn’t put on a new one. We eat alone, like a family of three. Diana sets the table, I pour the Coca-Cola, and Mitch mixes sauce into a pot of pasta.
I suppose that their parents, both of them, are working. I know that Miss Diana, their mom, my English teacher, has another job in the afternoon at a language school. I don’t know anything about their dad. I don’t ask. I never ask about dads. They tell me that Miss Diana leaves food for them in the morning, that she isn’t a good cook. It’s horrible. We smother our plates in Kraft parmesan cheese and laugh hysterically.
Mitch has an exam too, but he doesn’t want to study. In the dining room, which is also the living room, there are photos on the walls. Mitch and Diana, little, dressed as sunflowers. Miss Diana, thin and young, in front of a house with a mailbox. A black dog, Kiddo, next to a baby, Mitch. The kids at Christmas, surrounded by presents. Miss Diana pregnant. Diana, in white, at her First Communion.
There’s something sad in these photos, something in the lighting, typical of gringo photos from the seventies: maybe too many pastel colors, maybe the distance, maybe everything that isn’t pictured. I feel a sadness that doesn’t belong to me. Mine is still there, but this is a different one. This life—the sunflower children, the beautiful baby beside the black dog, everything that looks so perfect—isn’t going to turn out very well. No. Despite their blond heads, their athletic bodies, their pink cheeks, and their bright eyes, it’s not going to turn out very well.
There’s something desperate, somber, about Diana, about Mitch, about me, about this little apartment where three teenagers are sitting on the floor listening to music.
We play records: the Mamas and the Papas, the Doors, Fleetwood Mac, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, the Moody Blues, Van Morrison, Joan Baez.
Diana tells me how her parents went to Woodstock and she pulls out a photo album where, finally, there’s a picture