When Dad gets home, he isn’t drunk, as I’ve been dreading, but he is in a foul mood. Dad doesn’t yell or anything when he’s mad. He just won’t talk to anyone. Not a word. When he walks in the door, he doesn’t even say “Tadaima” to announce himself. Ha. Serves him right.
“Dō yatta? Umaku itta?” Mom asks him. Silence. Dad stalks to his room without telling Mom how it went (not well, obviously) and without looking at me. I hear him opening and closing drawers; dropping his change, his keys, and his phone on the dresser as he goes through his jacket pockets; opening and closing the closet door. “Nan’ka nakush’tan?” Mom calls from the kitchen.
As if he’d tell her what he’s lost. I imagine coming out of my room with the box in my hand and asking innocently, “Is this what you’re looking for?” and then, “Is it a present for Mom?” But the only possible outcome would be a huge confrontation, a lot of tears, and the humiliating collapse of our family. So instead I say nothing and stay awake all night wondering what to do.
Mom and I had an argument at breakfast about whether I could go and get a pedicure this afternoon with Reggie and Janet, which ended in her threatening to ground me for the whole weekend, including today, Friday, which shouldn’t count—more evidence that she’s in a bad mood, because she never grounds me. I wonder if she knows about the earrings.
The varsity team is running in the Stanford Invitational tomorrow, and the rest of us, including Reggie, Hanh, and Elaine, were all going to drive up to meet them and hang out in downtown Palo Alto afterward, so that’s another missed opportunity to be with Jamie. On top of it all, I didn’t sleep last night because of the earring thing, so I totally bombed my physics test.
And now, I’m having an uneasy lunch with Jamie, Arturo, JJ, and Christina, in case I can’t hang out with them—well, with Jamie—tomorrow.
“School doesn’t care about me,” JJ is saying. “Why should I care about school? Teachers all just think I’m a lazy Mexican, anyways, so why should I do shit for them?”
“They think you’re a lazy Mexican because you don’t do shit, bruh. That’s what lazy is,” Arturo says, laughing.
Jamie adds, “You can’t just walk in and expect teachers to care about you. You want them to give a shit, you gotta give a shit . . . two shits.”
“Forget two shits. If you’re Mexican you gotta shit gold,” says Arturo.
“Naw, doesn’t matter how much I try. They’re gonna be racist anyway,” insists JJ. “They look at me and they think ‘dropout.’ ‘Cholo.’ They don’t want to get to know me as a person.”
“Well, duh,” says Jamie impatiently. “But you can let them believe the stereotype or you can work against it.”
“I shouldn’t have to work against it, that’s my point. It’s bullshit.”
Suddenly, I’m filled with impatience for this boy who could be so much more than he is if he would just stop blaming others for his problems in school. I hear myself saying, “Aren’t you listening? Teachers don’t assume anything about you. You have to take some responsibility for getting their respect.” There’s a pause just long enough for me to realize I’ve said something wrong.
“Um, actually . . .” says Jamie slowly, “actually, they do assume things about you.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Are you kidding me?” says Christina. “Were you not there with us at the 7-Eleven last week?”
“Okay, yeah. But it’s not true at school. All you have to do is work hard.”
Christina gapes at me, then appears to collect herself. “Some Asian nerd-boy misses a few assignments, and the teacher’s all, ‘why aren’t you doing your homework, is everything okay at home, here’s a chance to make it up.’ A Mexican kid doesn’t do his homework, and that’s that. The teacher doesn’t say shit. Just lets him fail.”
“Maybe that’s because so many Mexican kids don’t do their homework.” Oh, no. I can’t believe that just came out of my mouth. It’s true, though. I mean, it’s probably true. Besides, Jamie said not to take any crap from her.
“Oh, now you’ve got a Mexican girlfriend, so you know all about Mexican kids. How do you know we don’t do our homework?”
“Well, I don’t see how you could get bad grades if you were working hard,” I say. I’m keenly aware that I’m screwing up, and scared of where this argument is going, but I don’t know how to fix it, and it’s too late anyway.
“You guys,” says Jamie, frowning.
But Christina’s fired up. “You think we don’t work hard. You think we’re lazy.”
“No. I don’t think you’re lazy. I just. I just think you could work harder if you really wanted to.”
“You think I could work harder?” Christina’s voice swings up, incredulous. When she speaks again, it’s low and steely. “I know I’m not the sweetest person and all, so you probably won’t believe this, but I’ve been trying to be friends with you. I’ve been trying to be nice. But you keep judging me, even though you don’t know anything about me. You cooking your family’s meals? You helping to pay the rent? You been working thirty-two hours a week bagging groceries at Safeway ’cause your dad started chemo the day before school started and had to stop working?”
I swallow. That would explain why she was so upset the first day of school. “No.”
“Did you know I’m getting straight A’s right now?”
“No.”
JJ’s giving me some curious side-eye. Jamie’s just standing there with her arms crossed, looking uncomfortable. I’ve obviously just dug myself a hole, but I can’t see how it happened. I mean, I can, but how was I supposed to know about Christina’s dad? And I never said Christina was stupid. Everyone knows that the Mexican kids get bad grades. Stuff like that is always in the news, so it had to be true, right? And a third of the students at Anderson are Mexican American, but Jamie’s the only one in any of my Honors classes. They can’t all be working thirty-two hours a week.
Something inside me squirms uneasily, poking and jabbing, but I squash it down. Surely if I can just explain myself, everything will be better. But to my horror, the very accusations I hate hearing from Mom come streaming out of my own mouth. “Okay, so you don’t have as much time to spend on your homework. And you’re getting good grades. But—but it’s not just about how much work you do, anyway. It’s about attitude. People don’t just judge you on your grades. It’s how you act. It’s how you dress.”
You know how if a drowning person can’t swim, the best thing they can do is stop trying to swim, and just float? But instead they panic and flail, and the more they flail the worse it gets, and the worse it gets the more they flail? Right now, that’s me. Flailing. Thrashing. And making things worse. “If you dress like a thug and act all hard,” I continue, “what are people going to think? No wonder teachers assume you won’t work hard. No wonder you get followed around in stores. No wonder my mom and my friends don’t want me to hang out with you guys. You look like thugs, you act like thugs, so how can you blame people for thinking that you are?”