I flipped back a few pages and read:
This is Newark, Delaware.
Delaware is 3,333 kilometers from home.
I feel the same today as I did yesterday.
I handed the notebook back to her. “What happened?” I asked.
“What?”
“Was it a car accident?”
“When?”
“Sorry. I mean, what happened to you?”
“I fell. I was on—” She stopped. “It’s long.”
“It’s a long story?”
She shook her head. “A long thing. Of wood.”
I racked my brain. “A bat?” I hated it when I didn’t know what she was getting at. I wanted to show her that I could follow her. I wanted to be the one person that it was easy for her to talk to.
“A ladder,” she said finally.
“Oh, a long thing made out of wood. Right. You were up on a ladder?”
“I broke two”—she held up two fingers—“of my ribs.”
“And you hit your head?”
She lifted a flap of hair and showed me a scar, pink and waxy like a gummy worm, behind her ear.
“Does it still hurt now? Like, can you sleep on it?”
“I get headaches.”
“So that’s what the sunglasses are for.”
“Yes.”
“Do you even remember it?”
“I was on the …”
“Ladder,” I filled in.
She nodded. “And then I was in the hospital. I don’t know where I went in between.”
“Well, someone must have taken you to the hospital.”
“I mean … I lost myself. In between.”
“Oh,” I said, and then I just sat there, because something about that idea—that you could be one person in one moment and then wake up and be completely different—punched me in the gut.
“You don’t ask me how I’m feeling,” Maribel said. “I hate it when people … ask me that.”
She’d told me that before, but I didn’t point it out. I just said, “It probably gets old, huh?”
“I want to be like everybody else.”
“Yeah,” I said, because I knew just what she meant. I’d spent my whole life feeling like that. Like everybody else was onto something that I couldn’t seem to find, that I didn’t even know existed. I wanted to figure it out, the secret to having the easy life that everyone else seemed to have, where they fit in and were good at everything they tried. Year after year, I waited for it all to fall into place—every September I told myself, This year will be different—but year after year, it was all just the same.
I didn’t say anything in response to Maribel that day. We moved on to another topic. But later that night, when I was lying in bed, I realized what I should have said, because for her at least it would have been the truth: “You shouldn’t want to be like everybody else. Then you wouldn’t be like you.”
ONE DAY I walked back from her place to find my dad sitting on the couch, watching television. He had his sweat-socked feet up on the coffee table and a bottle of beer in his hand. Usually he didn’t get home until later, so both of us were surprised to see each other.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
He sat up, startled. “The diner closed early today. Not enough customers in the afternoons anymore. Aren’t you supposed to be at soccer?”
I tensed. “I was,” I said.
“You’re not wearing your soccer clothes.”
“Yeah.” I scrambled through excuses in my head. “My clothes were dirty, so I borrowed someone else’s stuff.”
“This is someone else’s? This? What you’re wearing?”
“Well, I had to give it back after practice, so I changed into my regular clothes again.”
“You gave dirty clothes back to someone?”
I nodded.
“Who?”
I said the first name I could think of. “Jamal Blair.”
My dad pushed out his lips. He was sitting on the couch, twisted to look at me. “I never heard that name.”
“He’s good. He’s a midfielder.”
My dad squinted like he was studying me with X-ray vision. I tried to stand as still as possible.
“When’s the next game?” he asked, like he was testing me.
“I need to check,” I said.
“You don’t know?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You don’t know?” my dad asked again, his voice booming this time.
This was how things went with him. One minute you were having a conversation and the next minute he was blowing up.
There had been one other time that my dad had mentioned wanting to go to a game, but the fact that his work schedule wouldn’t allow it had saved me. It was basically the only thing that had been saving me all along. By the time he came home each day, I just said I’d been at soccer and he didn’t know the difference.
But it was over now, I thought. He’d finally seen through me.
My dad raised his beer bottle and angled it toward the light. “Gone,” he muttered. He held the bottle over the back of the couch. “Get me another.” From where I stood, I could see four empties lined up next to the sink in the kitchen.
I took the bottle, and my dad slumped back down in the couch cushions.
Was that it? Were we done now?
Then from the couch my dad yelled, “Celia!”
I heard my mom’s footsteps move through their bedroom and down the hall. “Are you calling me?”
“You can’t keep up with the laundry?”
She walked into the living room, shaking her head. “What are you talking about?”
“Mayor’s soccer clothes. He says they’re in the laundry.”
My mom looked at me, confused. I just stared at her, trying to look as innocent as possible. But then her face changed, and for a split second I thought that maybe she had figured it out. But if she had, she didn’t give me away.
Instead she said, “Sorry. I’ll do laundry today.”
“?Carajo!” my dad said, and that was the end of that.