All about Skin (22 page)

Michelle was standing further away from me now. Jeanie was clicking the blade up and down. Michelle rolled her eyes at Jeanie. “Nah, no beef.”

Jeanie stared at her, her mouth in a straight line with the box cutter in her hands.

Michelle turned back to me and said, “Bring real money next time or I'ma beat your ass.”

Maybe in rich neighborhoods, girls poison shampoo or put laxatives in your drinks, but in the Bronx, when girls hate girls, they dig their sharp nails into cloves of garlic so that if they pierce the skin on your face, they leave scars that don't heal right. Real hood chicks put razor blades in their braids so that if you pull them, you slice yourself.

At least that's what Jeanie told me at lunch. We started talking all the time at lunch, even though I didn't want to sit with nobody. I was fine solo. I didn't need no extra attention with the white girl on my squad.

I was never pretty, I told her, so I never had to worry about shit like that. Nobody wanted to scar my face or make my short nappy hair fall out. “It don't take much to get people mad 'round here, though,” Jeanie said, using the spork to clean dirt out from under her nails. “You gotta do what you need to do.”

“I don't want nobody to bleed, though.”

“They don't care what happens to you, though, right?”

I just looked at her.

She had a drug dealer boyfriend who went to Clinton. She was wild smart, almost smarter than me, I thought. We would meet up at the library after school and giggle and shit until we got kicked out because they were closing. She slipped some money for food in my book bag a couple of times, too, and I every time I saw her after that, I wanted to give it back but it was already spent.

“Why do you care if Michelle beats me up? You don't know me like that,” I said to her after a couple of months. It turned out that Jeanie lived with her uncle and she said she got the box cutter to keep him off her at night.

“I can't stand a bully.”

“You mean for a white girl,” I said back. And we both laughed.

Jeanie was the one who told me that I needed to get a couple of those razors and braid them into my hair, just in case.

“You crazy,” I just said back. But I was thinking about it. It would serve Michelle right for me to cut her hands one day. She would never fuck with me again after that. Plus, I knew where to get some good, sharp razors.

“I take care of me,” she answered. “You either fight for you or you ain't a fighter.”

Michelle flunked out of C.S. 67, so I never got to test out my bracelet any more on her. I would've been relieved, but bullies are like roaches—you get rid of one and there's always another one that pops up. This one was a chick named Aisha who said she was my friend, which I almost believed until she almost killed me.

Aisha was a beanpole like me with dark brown skin smooth like chocolate sponge cake and soupy eyes. She had a radio with a tape deck and I didn't, so I listened to a lot of music at her house. We would sing along with the radio, her with a brush and me with a comb, then giggle at ourselves for being so dumb. But she stopped being nice when we were in front of other people, like she didn't want people to know she knew me.

We got into it over a bag of Cheez Doodles I was bringing home for dinner. Me and Moms were between welfare checks and out of food stamps. Aisha snatched the bag while we were walking down Tiebout Avenue and said, “Thanks for the chips.”

“Stop playing,” I said, reaching over to get the bag, but she held it above her head, out of my reach. “Aisha, give it back.”

She kept chewing like a cow. I tried to climb up her shirt and shoulder to get closer to the bag, and before I knew it, I fell right on my narrow ass on the sidewalk. Aisha plopped on my chest, to the laughter and cheers of the women around us, like this was the World Wrestling Federation.

I struggled under her weight. “I can't breathe,” I gasped. My Medic-Alert bracelet was scraping the ground. I tried to hold it up so she could see. “Get the fuck off me! I can't breathe!”

She eased up, and when she did, I threw my weight around her neck and smacked her on her face. I don't know how long we were fighting, but she started to cry and one of the ladies split us up.

I ran upstairs, brushing off my clothes and catching my breath. I checked my legs and face with my shaking hands and noticed that my bracelet had popped. A lot of good it had done. I shoved it in my back pocket.

Inside the apartment, Moms was watching TV. I wanted to tell her I had finally stood up for myself, but she didn't even look over at me. Now, my damn bracelet was broke and so was I. In the bathroom, there was a fresh pack of razors. I took five.

The more time I spent with Jeanie, the bolder I got. I started wearing my braids in a ponytail, like hers. Just a few weeks before I started at another new school, and Moms got wild again, sweating and pacing in the kitchen. She wanted to know if I was running the street with boys. “I was just with Jeanie,” I said, and curled up in bed, watching wind move the sheets she'd nailed to the wall instead of curtains.

I had been braiding razors into my hair like Jeanie told me to, and I reached up into my ponytail to find a couple, flat and sharp against the back of my head.

Moms shuffled toward the bedroom. When she planted herself in the doorway, I was facing her in the fetal position, looking up without saying a word.

“What are you staring at?”

“Don't hit me,” I said, my voice shaking.

“I brought you into this world … ,” she said, getting loud, barreling at me like a cannon. I moved back and she was writhing around in the sheets like a dolphin in a net.

“I'm not gonna let you hit me no more.”

Her eyes got wide. “I'll do what I want. I pay the bills, don't you talk back to me! I hate you!” she yelled. “I will fucking kill you in here!” She lifted her right hand to hit me and before I could stop myself, I opened my mouth and bit it.

Her blood was in my mouth. I was as stunned as she was, but my mouth moved into a smile, like I was drunk.

“Don't you ever in your life raise your hands to me,” she said, muttering as she stumbled back to the kitchen. She used her left hand to call 911. She stopped wheezing long enough to tell the cops she was bleeding.

My heart was beating loud and uneven in my chest. Moms started to sob, and sunk down to the floor, holding a washcloth over the bite. The moon outside was gone. The streets were silent, no music and no cop cars. Quiet like it was never quiet in the Bronx.

There was a time when I would have gone over and told her it was going to be OK. But after she said that one little word—kill—something in me broke.

“You won't hit me again,” I said slowly. I didn't look her in the face. I was looking at a spot between us on the fake linoleum.

“I made you,” she whispered huskily, now heaving herself toward me. She looked beached, a tired whale lugging along the floor. She threw her weight on me again, grabbed me, and then began to drag me back along the floor by my hair. Her screams suddenly sliced the silence, as a warm spattering of her blood, like drizzle, fell on my arms. The only thing louder than her screams were the sirens, which had finally come to save me.

Jennine Capó Crucet

T
he day I got my Honda Civic del Sol—almost two months ago, for my seventeenth birthday—Osniel was over
that night
. And yeah, he talked to me, sang happy birthday and ate cake and pastelitos and whatever, but I caught him later, talking to my dad about what else but Hialeah's Finest. Papi's the reason Osniel ever even talked to me way back in the first grade, because Papi had insisted—
insisted
, Mami says—that they name me Mercedes (If God won't give me a son, the
least
he can do is give me a Mercedes!—he tells the story all the time and without fail on my birthday, like a present I can't return), not realizing that I'd get picked on by boys, the first one ever, after Papi of course, being Osniel.

The night of my birthday, my little brother, Carlos, had put himself in charge of the car hype—he smiled, opened the doors, and ran his hands over the frame like trying to sell it to my cousins and friends. I was letting him do all the talking so that he'd feel like a boy, even though it was my car; even Papi told him, when Carlos had asked when
he
could drive it, that first Carlos would have to ask him, then me. When my brother tried to get everyone to lie on their backs and look underneath the car at the suspension (all my girl cousins refused, but Lazaro from across the street was unbuttoning his shirt), Carla elbowed me and whispered that Osniel wasn't out in the driveway with us anymore, so I went inside.

I found him sitting across from Papi at our dinner table, a little less than half the cake still between them, Papi picking at it straight from the box with a fork. As he chewed, he stared at Mami, who was still at the sink rinsing plates. Her back was to us; her waist looked narrow compared to her butt, which was kind of huge, square-shaped, jutting toward us like a shelf. I could tell Papi only half-listened to Osniel as he watched Mami from his grin, betraying himself and showing a few crooked teeth. Papi didn't have a shirt on, just his blue shorts, and yellow crumbs sat in the wires of his chest hair. I brushed them off for him, onto the floor. He looked down at my hand, stared at his big stomach for a second, sucked his teeth, then just kept eating cake and running his tongue over the whole fork, licking off frosting while Osniel talked.

“Señor,” he said, looking down all shy (and calling Papi “sir”
in Spanish
because Osniel's
such
a suck-up). “Señor, you know how it is—it's not just about cars—it's la comunidad, Señor.”

My dad had been in a car club when he was our age—Osniel knew that, as did everyone in our neighborhood. A lot of other people's dads had been in some sort of car club or gang before we came along. Osniel had heard enough stories about it from Lazaro's and Danny Garcia's dads (who, between the two of them, made up almost one whole dad for Osniel, whose dad nobody—not even Osniel—had ever seen or met) to figure out he could get to
my
dad if he did it through cars. But Hialeah's Finest is as local as a car club can get, basically just this neighborhood—nobody from
East
Hialeah is even in it yet. The guys who founded it (Lazaro from across the street, two houses down, and Danny Garcia, my girl Carla's boyfriend of eleven whole months) have no aspirations to go countywide. I joke to Osniel that Hialeah's Finest is made up of guys whose cars aren't hot enough to get them into Miami E.L.I.T.E. or Xplicit ILLusionz (Osniel's right that they're tacky, but still, they're big, and picky, even if it's in a tacky way). But to be fair, Hialeah's Finest doesn't have those mad fees that the other ones do, so members can put that money into their cars instead. At least that's what Osniel says, but if you ask me, Osniel talks
too
much, especially to my dad.

“Forget it, Osniel,” I said, smiling.

“Girl, you don't even know what we're talking about.”

He leaned back in the chair and winked at me because Papi was focused on his frosting. Mami warned Papi three times a day that God would send him diabetes if he didn't watch himself. She'd said she would
not
cry when God sent him a heart attack; what else could God do with a heart full of fried platanos? Papi would just laugh and ask for more of whatever he was eating, and Mami would bring it. And if it was dessert, she'd bring two spoons.

I said, “What else do you talk about besides Hiale—”

Papi put his hand up flat in my face, stopped me from finishing, didn't even look at me. Then he leaned forward, his belly pressing onto the glass tabletop, and carved out another hunk of cake too big for the fork. He sat back in his chair.

“You think a Honda del Sol is car club material?” Papi said toward the surviving cake. “Ha, shit!”

“Come on, Mr. Reyes. Seriously, Hondas are hot right now. They're
sporty
.”

If I'd been allowed to talk, I would've agreed with him. The Civic del Sol is a '95, used but in good condition, black on black with red trim. My dad had spent weeks looking through Auto Traders to find one with decent miles on it. Papi finally picked out a hard-top convertible, super cute, and he told me it was fun to drive—he test drove it while I rode shotgun. The car definitely
looked
sporty. And according to 95 percent of Hialeah High, Osniel's car was supposedly the shit; he'd been bragging about his Civic since tenth grade, even before he got his learner's permit. When we were in Driver's Ed together, he'd talk up his new hi-gloss paint job, or those chrome spider rims, so much that he'd miss when the teacher called for his row of drivers to drive. He
never
paid attention and failed the weave twice.

“That's a four-cylinder engine, Osniel. What type of sporty is that?”

Papi laughed, and so did Osniel.

“It's all about looks now. And with that loud-ass muffler? Besides, Hialeah's Finest doesn't race.”

They don't do much of anything
, I wanted to say.

Papi laced his fingers behind his head. Little flakes of deodorant coated the ends of his armpit hairs. It looked like powdered sugar. Osniel raised his arms and did the same thing, but his sleeves didn't let me see if he even
had
armpit hair.

“A car club that
doesn't race
? Well, shit,” Papi said. “At least it's safe then.”

Yeah right, I wanted to say.

“I'm just putting it out there, Mr. Reyes. No fees or
nothing
.”

Osniel leaned forward and stuck his finger in the yellow icing at the corner of the cake and pushed a whole big chunk of it in his mouth, pulling his finger out real slow. Then he looked at me and said, “But I guess it's really up to Mercy, right?”