Muchacho (10 page)

That book burning made me so mad for two reasons. One, I know so many little kids who never even owned one book of their own and if you gave them one they would wrap it up in a cloth when they weren’t reading it so it wouldn’t get dusty. And number two, if you burned even one little corner of a page of a book in school they would expel you for good. I know that for a fact because there was this kid named Corey who lit his math book on fire one day just to show this girl he would do it and they kicked him out of school so fast and wouldn’t let him come back because he wouldn’t tell them why he did it. They accidentally labeled him an arsonist just like they accidentally labeled me a sex offender, except they
didn’t kick me out of school forever. But the school psychologist said Corey was dangerous and they expelled him for good. So when that preacher burned those books, I thought for sure they would kick him out of the church and make him go be one of those warehouse preachers who has like six people in the audience and they are all family. Maybe they would even arrest him. But they didn’t arrest him or even yell at him and they didn’t kick him out of the church. They just let him keep on going around talking about Jesus like him and Jesus were best friends or something.

That preacher talks too much if you ask me. He should stop talking about going to hell all the time and just go around acting like he is Jesus. Not wearing a white dress and Birkenstocks all the time, but like if he had one of those families in his neighborhood who lives in a falling-down trailer with no electricity and all kinds of junk in the yard, he wouldn’t sell his house and move to a nicer neighborhood. He would just go down real quiet to the electric company and pay to have that family’s power turned on and he would take them some bags of real delicious food and not just a cardboard box full of canned beans and peas with dust on the top because people had them in the back of their cupboard for ten years before they donated them to the food bank. Or if he saw that crazy lady who sits outside the library with all her stuff in a bag, he would go over and give her a hundred dollars and say a prayer for her and hug her even if she stinks a little bit. And he wouldn’t tell anybody he did that stuff. He would just
do it nice and quiet. And he would adopt a little orphan from some poor country. Not a movie-star-looking orphan, neither, but a real ugly kid that nobody would want, and he would bring the ugly kid home and feed it good and raise it up right and send it to college so it could be a doctor or a teacher or a judge someday.

And if he saw a gay teenager that nobody liked who always hung out by himself, he wouldn’t wish that kid was dead or think about killing him or tell him he is going to burn in hell forever. Even if that gay kid was the preacher’s own kid, he wouldn’t say he wished the kid had never been born so he would feel like killing himself. He would be nice to that gay kid and he would love that kid even if the kid was against his religion.

I don’t know why people have to fight so much about religion and God. You should just be allowed to think what you want and it’s nobody’s business. Some days I believe in God but some days I don’t. Primo says you should pretend you believe in God even if you aren’t sure because if you believe in God and you die and there isn’t one, then you were just stupid when you were alive. But if you don’t believe in God and then you die and there he is, you’re in big trouble. I don’t think it would do you any good to just pretend to believe in God because if God is so smart he would know you were just faking it. But if you said you were sorry, then he would have to forgive you for faking it because that’s not a Ten Commandment. But Primo says no way. If God catches you faking it, he’ll get real pissed and you’ll be sorry.

Now I know why
mi abuelita
won’t let people talk about religion when we’re eating except to say a prayer at the beginning because everybody would get indigestion from yelling at each other. Everybody has an opinion about God but nobody can go look it up in the encyclopedia to win the bet and make the other people pay their ten dollars for being so stupid like
mi primo
Enrique always does.

A
COUPLE WEEKS AGO
, M
R.
M
C
E
LROY WROTE THE WORDS
ARGUMENT
and
fight
on the board and then he drew a line through
fight
and said an argument isn’t a fight with a winner and a loser, it’s just people exchanging ideas—which is exactly the kind of thing that teachers say and you wonder if they can hear how stupid they sound and do they really believe all that crap. I never heard anybody have an argument where they exchange ideas like old baseball cards. If it’s my uncles, they start out trading jokes and then insults and then punches. If it’s me and Papi, we skip the jokes and the insults.

McElroy made us read this whole article about how to argue the right way, like you have to stick to the topic of your argument the whole way. You can’t bring in all the stuff
you’ve been saving up to nuke the other guy with. So, if some dickhead got drunk and ran over your dog, you had to just say how sad you were to lose your pup and not bring up the fact that the same guy borrowed your lawn mower and brought it back with a broken starter or came over your house to watch the Super Bowl and drank seventeen beers and then never even invited you over his house to watch his new plasma TV.

You have to just stick to that dead dog. And you can’t do all the normal argument stuff like call the other person names, or break some dishes, or scream your guts out, or take off and don’t come back until tomorrow, or turn up the stereo so loud you can’t hear the other person and you both get brain damage. You can’t even do little shit like say the other guy is a liar and a freaking loser who can’t even afford his own lawn mower. You have to say everything from your point of view, like instead of saying, “You’re a selfish dickhead for borrowing my shit and bringing it back broken,” you have to say, “I feel like you don’t value my friendship or respect my property.”

I totally forgot all about that argument crap until Lupe got so mad she almost broke up with me. It’s not like we never had a fight before, but usually we just have those little kinds that you can get over pretty fast if you go out and eat some good green chile enchiladas in a dark place that has a little candle on the table so you look real handsome, or if you rent a movie and sit on opposite ends of the couch with the soles of your bare feet touching each other for the whole thing
even if you feel like grabbing each other’s
nalgas
halfway through.

But this time nothing worked even though the whole thing seemed pretty lame to me. Lupe got so mad just because me and her have a whole different idea about time. We got different kinds of clocks ticking in our heads. Like she thinks
a little while
means two minutes or even two seconds, and I think
a little while
depends on what I’m doing right now. Like if I’m changing the oil in Papi’s truck, a little while is probably thirty minutes. If I’m taking a shower, it could be anywhere from two minutes to twenty minutes, depending on certain things.

Anyway, Lupe called me last Wednesday night and asked me did I want to walk down to Caliche’s and get a frozen custard with her because she needed some chocolate custard with chocolate sauce and chocolate chips or she would lose her mind because of some hormone imbalance that I didn’t want to hear the details about, so I told her to hold on and I would be over her house in a little while. I hurried up and finished my chores but I had a lot of extra work on account of I sneaked out the night before to help Henry Dominguez steal his little brother’s bicycle back from the creep who stole it and Papi caught me coming back in at 3 a.m. He didn’t hit me or yell at me, but he didn’t argue good, neither. He just shook his head and went back in him and Mami’s room and shut the door real quiet. In the morning, Mami looked at me real sad and told me all the extra chores Papi put on my list.

By the time I got done with everything, it was about two hours until I got over to Lupe’s and by the time we got to Caliche’s, they just turned over the CLOSED sign. Lupe stood there staring at the door, looking so sad that I thought maybe the owner lady who was standing inside would feel sorry for her and open up for five more minutes, but she didn’t. For a couple seconds Lupe looked like she was going to cry. Then she looked like she just stepped on a goat head in her bare feet. Then she looked at me real hard and closed her eyes and sat down on this little cement bench and hugged herself with both arms and just stared at her knees. When I sat down and put my arm around her, she just about knocked me off the bench and said, “Leave me alone,” and she meant it.

I didn’t try to put my arm around her again, but I sat back down and said, “I’m real sorry, Lupe, but I had a good reason for being late.”

“You always have a reason,” Lupe hollered. “You’re always late and you always have a reason. But you’re the only one who thinks they’re good reasons. I think they suck!”

I whispered that maybe she shouldn’t holler so loud, but she hollered even louder, “What’s the matter? Don’t you want anybody to know that you’re too dumb to tell time? And you don’t even care enough about me to look at your watch?”

I was thinking to holler back that why would I look at my watch if I was too dumb to tell time, and just because she had cramps didn’t mean she had to act like a you-know-what, and if she wasn’t such a spoiled little daddy’s girl, she wouldn’t
expect everybody to do what she wanted every single second, but right before I started yelling, I remembered that argument article which is probably the only reason that Lupe and me are still together. Instead of saying all that mean stuff, I said real quiet, “I’m sorry I disappointed you by being late today. I’m sorry that you have cramps. And I will try to be on time in the future because …
yo te quiero.
”

I actually said it. I had thought it a bunch of times but I never told Lupe before that I loved her. Then I just shut up and waited like the article said, to give the other person a turn.

Lupe didn’t say anything for a long time. She just sat there with her lips pooched out like a mad baby, and she breathed real noisy a couple times, and then she started crying.

“You love me?” she said and I said, “Yeah,” and she said, “Me too,” and then she stopped sniffling and we decided that we would stop saying things like “a little while” or “later on” and we would say an exact time like 2:15 or 3:45 and if I was going to be more than ten minutes late, I would call her cell phone.

For a couple seconds I felt the same as when my mom says I have to call if I’m not going to be home by a certain time, like how come people have to try to tie you up like a dog or treat you like a baby. Then Lupe scooted over on the bench and put her hand on my leg and touched it real soft up and down with her fingertips. And she leaned her head on my shoulder and I
could smell her hair which really does smell like an angel, and I didn’t care if I had to call her every minute for the rest of my life because if something doesn’t really hurt you but it makes somebody you care about real happy, you should just go ahead and do it.

That’s the kind of stuff they should be teaching us in school. It’s okay to learn algebra and biology and grammar and all that stuff, but you could always learn that stuff from a book all by yourself. They should teach us the stuff we really need to learn—like how to make somebody really love you, and how to turn off that little voice in your head that tells you what a loser you are, and how to teach your dog to pee where it’s supposed to, and how to get over being sad when your little cousin dies, and how to talk to your father without both of you getting so mad. But they probably couldn’t teach us stuff like that in school even if they wanted to, because if they teach something in school they have to give you a test to make sure how much you learned.

They need to stop giving so many tests in school because they’re making everybody hate school, even the kids who used to like it. If they have to give so many tests, at least they could give the kind where you have to make up your own answer and not just guess which one is right. Primo says a monkey could pass a multiple choice test fifty percent of the time and he’s probably right because one time T.J. Ritchie got everybody in our math class to put down all C’s or else all B’s for the test and then take a little nap for the rest of the test
period. T.J. got busted for being the mastermind of the whole thing but they didn’t expel him because the kids who put all C’s passed the test, including me. In fact, that was one of my best math grades ever which was probably pretty embarrassing for the math teacher who made up that test.

“They got the whole thing backasswards,” T.J. said when we were sitting outside the principal’s office waiting for his mother, who was inside promising to take him straight to church to talk to the preacher when they got home. I didn’t have to be at the office but I was sitting there anyways. Sometimes I sit there because the secretaries don’t bother you. They think you’re sitting there waiting to get yelled at, not just sitting there because even staring at a blank wall is way more interesting than math class.

“They keep giving all these tests because half the kids in New Mexico flunk out of school because they can’t read or do fractions,” T.J. said. “But they keep teaching the same stupid shit. That’s why they keep getting the same stupid test scores.”

He grabbed my notebook and drew a picture of a dog. He drew a giant pile of steamy crap behind the dog’s tail and a big bowl in front of its head that was filled with schoolbooks. T.J. draws real good, almost as good as Primo who could probably have been a professional artist but he flunked out of art class because the teacher said he had to draw pictures of a chair and a vase and a bowl of oranges instead of lowriders and couples dancing the tango and sexy girls with tattoos on their
nalgas.

“You keep feeding the dog the same crap,” T.J. said, “you get the same shit. You can test that shit and test that shit and test that shit and it’s still going to stink because
mierda
is
mierda.
”