Except that Fito didn’t show. I worried about that guy.
I’d met Fito’s mother only once, and she didn’t seem like she was actually living on this planet. His older brothers had all dropped out of school in favor of mood-altering substances, following in their mother’s footsteps. When I met his mother, her eyes had been totally bloodshot and glazed over and her hair was all stringy and she smelled bad. Fito had been embarrassed as hell. Poor guy. Fito. Okay, the thing with me is that I was a worrier. I hated that about me.
Sam and I were walking back home after our forgettable first day at school. It looked like it was going to rain, and like most desert rats, I loved the rain. “Air smells good,” I told her.
“You’re not listening to me,” she said. I was used to that I’m-annoyed-with-you tone she sometimes took with me. She’d been going on and on about hummingbirds. She was all about hummingbirds. She even had a hummingbird T-shirt. Sam and her phases. “Their hearts beat up to one thousand, two hundred and sixty beats per minute.”
I smiled.
“You’re mocking me,” she said.
“I wasn’t mocking you,” I said. “I was just smiling.”
“I know all your smiles,” she said. “That’s your mocking smile, Sally.” Sam had started calling me Sally in seventh grade because even though she liked my name, Salvador, she thought it was just too much for a guy like me. “I’ll start calling you Salvador when you turn into a man—?and, baby, you’re a long way off from that.” Sam, she definitely didn’t go for Sal, which was what everyone else called me—?except my dad, who called me Salvie. So she got into the habit of calling me Sally. I hated it. What normal guy wants to be called Sally? (Not that I was going for normal.) Look, you couldn’t tell Sam not to do something. If you told her not to do it, ninety-seven percent of the time she did it. Nobody could out-stubborn Sam. She just gave me that look that said I was going to have to get over it. So, to Sam, I was Sally.
That’s when I began calling her Sammy. Everyone has to find a way to even up the score.
So, anyway, she was giving me the lowdown on the statistics of hummingbirds. She started getting mad at me and accusing me of not taking her seriously. Sam hated to be blown off. WOMAN OF SUBSTANCE LIVES HERE. She had that posted on her locker at school. I think she stayed up at night thinking of mottoes. The substance part, well, I got that. Sam wasn’t exactly shallow. But I liked to remind her that if I was a long way off from being a man, she was an even longer way off from being a woman. She didn’t like my little reminder. I got that shut-up look.
As we were walking, she was carrying on about hummingbirds and then lecturing me about my chronic inability to listen to her. And I was thinking, Man, when Sam gets going, she really gets going. I mean, she was really jumping into my shit. Finally I had to—?I mean, I had to—?interrupt her. “Why do you always have to pick a fight with me, Sammy? Look, I’m not making fun. And it’s not as if you don’t know that I’m not exactly a numbers guy. Me and numbers equals no bueno. When you give me stats, my eyes glaze over.”
As my dad liked to say, Sam was “undeterred.” She started in again, but this time it wasn’t me who interrupted her—?it was Enrique Infante. He’d come up behind us as Sam and I were walking. And all of a sudden he jumped in front of me and was in my face. He looked right at me, pushed his finger into my chest, and said, “Your dad’s a faggot.”
Something happened inside me. A huge and uncontrollable wave ran through me and crashed on the shore that was my heart. I suddenly lost my ability to use words, and, I don’t know, I’d never been that angry and I didn’t know what was really happening, because anger wasn’t normal for me. It was as if I, the Sal I knew, just went away and another Sal entered my body and took over. I remember feeling the pain in my own fist just after it hit Enrique Infante’s face. It all happened in an instant, like a flash of lightning, only the lightning wasn’t coming from the sky, it was coming from somewhere inside of me. Seeing all that blood gush out of another guy’s nose made me feel alive. It did. That’s the truth. And that scared me.
I had something in me that scared me.
The next thing I remember was that I was staring down at Enrique as he lay on the ground. I was my calm self again—?well, not calm, but at least I could talk. And I said, “My dad is a man. He has a name. His name is Vicente. So if you want to call him something, call him by his name. And he’s not a faggot.”
Sam just looked at me. I looked back at her. “Well, this is new,” she said. “What happened to the good boy? I never knew you had it in you to punch a guy.”
“I didn’t either,” I said.
Sam smiled at me. It was kind of a strange smile.
I looked down at Enrique. I tried to help him up, but he wasn’t having any of it. “Fuck you,” he said as he picked himself up off the ground.
Sam and I watched as he walked away.
He turned around and flipped me the bird.
I was a little stunned. I looked at Sam. “Maybe we don’t always know what we have inside us.”
“True that,” Sam said. “I think there are a lot of things that find a hiding place in our bodies.”
“Maybe those things should keep themselves hidden,” I said.
We slowly made our way home. Sam and I didn’t say anything for a long time, and that silence between us was definitely unsettling. Then Sam finally said, “Nice way to begin senior year.”
That’s when I started shaking.
“Hey, hey,” she said. “Didn’t I tell you this morning that we should kick some ass?”
“Funny girl,” I said.
“Look, Sally, he deserved what he got.” She gave me one of her smiles. One of her take-it-easy smiles. “Okay, okay, so you shouldn’t go around hitting people. No bueno. Maybe there’s a bad boy inside you just waiting to come out.”
“Nah, not a chance.” I told myself that I’d just had this really strange moment. But something told me she was right. Or halfway right, anyhow. Unsettled. That’s how I felt. Maybe Sam was right about things hiding inside of us. How many more things were hiding there?
We walked the rest of the way home in silence. When we were close to her house, she said, “Let’s go to the Circle K. I’ll buy you a Coke.” I sometimes drank Coke. Kind of like a comfort drink.
We sat on the curb and drank our sodas.
When I dropped Sam off at her house, she hugged me. “Everything’s gonna be just fine, Sally.”
“You know they’re gonna call my dad.”
“Yeah, but Mr. V’s cool.” Mr. V. That’s what Sam called my dad.
“Yeah,” I said. “But Mr. V happens to be my dad—?and a dad’s a dad.”
“Everything’s gonna be okay, Sally.”
“Yeah,” I said. Sometimes I was full of halfhearted yeahs.
As I was walking home, I pictured the hate on Enrique Infante’s face. I could still hear faggot ringing in my ears.
My dad. My dad was not that word.
He would never be that word. Not ever.