Accidental Love (12 page)

"To the ocean. Or maybe to somewhere it snows."

Rene embraced and kissed Marisa. "That would be okay with me."

"Wouldn't it be cool if that seagull got really, really big so that we could sit on it and fly away?" Marisa became dreamy as she envisioned both of them clinging to the neck of the seagull and flapping along at cloud level.

"It's possible," Rene said. "One day it's going to happen."

"What do you mean?"

"Gene research. In a decade scientists are going to be able to increase the size of animals. You just watch."

"Maybe you'll be one of the scientists."

Marisa expanded on the dream of flying away on the back of a seagull. They would live on an island, drink coconut milk, and skewer fish on sticks and roast them over an open fire. She told Rene that when their clothes shredded to nothing, they could weave themselves hula skirts and make sandals out of tree bark. And if they got sick, they could lie on the beach and let the sun heal them.

"What about the kitten?" Rene asked.

"We'll take her with us." Marisa tickled the kitten's chin. "Huh, silly? You'll go with us to a faraway island. There will be a boy kitty waiting for you."

"What should we name her?" Rene asked.

Marisa was quick with an answer. She liked the name Sammy, short for Samantha, but didn't explain that she had
seen
the name with a heart drawn on the chalkboard in the storage room. She didn't divulge the story about the girl who had died and was forgotten.

They were late for their first classes and walked hand in hand, as if they were handcuffed, into the principal's office.

But the principal had no time for them. The secretary presented them with tardy slips and shooed them out the door. There was an emergency. One of the students in art class had sliced his wrist and showered blood all over the classroom. By first break everyone was talking about Cody, the boy who had taken a shard of glass and raked it over his wrist.

"Do you know him?" Marisa asked as they hurried across the field toward the baseball diamond.

"Not really," Rene answered. "I just remember
him from fourth grade. He put a crayon up his nose, and they had to call the fire department to get it out."

"Nah!"

"I'm serious. They had to call the fire department."

Marisa pictured a red crayon sticking out of the kid's nose. She couldn't help but think that had been a sign of worse things yet to come—red nose, red wrist.

They found the kitten asleep on the bench in the dugout.

"Sammy!" Marisa called. She bent down and picked up the cross-eyed cat—it had been sleeping and was still groggy. She cradled the kitten in her arms but handed it to Rene when her cell phone rang.

"Yeah," Marisa said. It was Priscilla calling from somewhere on campus.

Marisa was excited to share the secret about the kitten. But Priscilla had a secret of her own. She said that a boy—a good-looking one, too—was shadowing her. Their faces had almost touched when they bent down at the water fountain at the same time. And he had been two places behind her when she was in line to get a
churro.
Didn't that mean something?

"You go, girl!" Marisa exclaimed. "The stars are
aligned and coming together. You were meant to be a couple!" When Marisa was younger, she had followed her horoscope closely and believed that the moon and the stars had an effect on mankind. (She was a whimsical Sagittarius, given to flights of fancy and temper tantrums.) She had never, however, read, "A nerd will come into your life." Some events were inexplicable, like the discovery of the kitten, which was now on top of Rene's shoes throwing jabs at the laces. Neither could Marisa explain why Priscilla had already forgotten Aaron, but she was glad about it.

"Even the cat doesn't like my shoes," Rene joked.

"They are ugly,
muy feos,
" Marisa agreed. "It would be better if you went barefoot."

"I almost am." He stood storklike and lifted one leg to present with pride the bottom of one of his shoes—there was a small worn hole in the sole.

When the bell rang, Marisa stroked the kitten good-bye and promised to return. She and Rene hurried across the baseball field but slowed to a stop when they heard Adam and Brittany, Romeo and Juliet in the play, arguing viciously. Adam was calling Brittany self-centered and Brittany, her face just inches from his, was calling Adam a thoughtless brat for not remembering her birthday.

Marisa had not known that they were a couple.
It was one more surprise for the day—a kitten that belonged to them and then a spat between boyfriend and girlfriend. She could tell right there, in center field where many a baseball had been caught and dropped, that this Romeo wouldn't die for his Juliet—not a chance. As for Juliet, she wouldn't chug down any poison for this lover boy. Life was too precious.

They sped off when Juliet started to jab a fingernail into Romeo's shoulder. She was making a point that Marisa didn't care to know.

It was enchilada night at home, and after dinner it was Marisa's duty to bust the suds on the pile of greasy plates and pans. She loved her enchiladas, especially red cheesy ones, but also hated those evenings. She often changed the water twice to get the plates to come clean.

It had been a heartbreaking day, too. When she and Rene returned after school to claim the kitten, it was gone. Marisa's eyes had become moist, and her lower lip trembled for Sammy. The seagull was gone as well. For a moment as they walked across the baseball field, hand in hand with their heads bowed from their loss, Marisa had imagined that the kitten was on the back of the seagull and headed somewhere nice.

"Mom," Marisa called softly.

Her mother was searching the pantry for a can of tuna for the next day's lunch. She came out with a can of SPAM. "What?" she asked.

"Are you going to come to see
Romeo and Juliet?
"

"
Claro.
I'll be seated right up front." She nudged her daughter away from the sink to rinse the top of the can. She dried the can on her apron and asked, "Who's this boy you like? He comes over here to play chess, but you never talk about him."

Marisa's face reddened, not from the steamy dishwater but from her mother's direct question. Had she dropped clues about having a boyfriend? Maybe her mom had guessed from Marisa's sudden weight loss. With nowhere to turn in their small kitchen, Marisa had provided her mother with the truth: Yes, she had a boyfriend and, yes, it was that boy who had come over—Rene, the certified nerd.

Her mother gazed at her daughter, measuring the truth.

"You're not going to do anything serious with him, right?" she finally asked.

The directness of the question shamed Marisa. "No!" She liked holding hands and hugging and taking his breath away with kisses. But she was not ready for anything riskier.

Marisa's mother studied her for a minute, then turned away without offering a lecture about boys and girls. She mumbled something about misplaced black olives as she began to look in the refrigerator.

"Is Dad coming, too?" Marisa was eager to change the subject.

"¿Cómo?"
her father called from the living room. He was seated in his recliner for the evening, a hand on the remote in order to mute the volume when a commercial began to blabber.

"Dad!" she screamed. "Do you want to see me in
Romeo and Juliet
?" She had set the last pan on the dish rack.

"¿Cómo?"
he brayed.

Marisa finished by wiping the counter, and she and her mother joined her father in the living room.
Monday Night Football
was on, and her father was resting his bones while the players on the screen were throwing themselves at each other viciously.

"The play's this week. I don't have a speaking part, but I'm in the chorus."

"You're in a play?" her father asked in disbelief.

Marisa remained patient. "In
Romeo and Juliet.
Remember? I told you over dinner, and you said you had a girlfriend, before Mom, named Julieta?"

Her father turned in confusion to Marisa's
mother, who said, "
Viejo,
you're going to a play. And you never had a
novia
except me."

Her father smiled and said, "Oh, that's right." He had the recliner leaned back like a dentist chair but worked a lever on the side that brought him sitting straight up.

"You gonna be in a play?" he repeated after a while. "I can't believe it—an actress." He drummed his fingers on the arm of the recliner.

By the goofy smile on his face, Marisa could see that he was proud of her. She had sat down with her mother on the couch but suddenly stood and announced, "I'm going to sing my part for you." She positioned herself in front of the television, muted for her performance, and began to sing as her father once again reclined, eyes shut, feet moving left and right to the rhythm of the song. There was a smile on his weary face, and every now and then he would open his eyes—she realized that he couldn't help it—to take a peek at the game. "He's a good father," she told herself. She sang the chorus part and then moved aside a few inches. One of her daughterly duties was to not get in the way of a father and his football game.

"My mom pinched me right here." Rene stopped their hand-in-hand trek across the baseball field to unbutton his long-sleeved shirt so Marisa could see the bruise. Eventually it would fade, but then it stood out dark and sore. It was early morning before first period. They were on their way to do one more search for Sammy.

"Mom said again that she doesn't want me to see you." Rene confirmed her suspicions—his mother feared that she would drag her son down. Marisa presumed that in Rene's mother's eyes she was nothing but a low-class
chola.

"I'm not a bad person," Marisa insisted. As she began to fill with meanness, she checked herself and defused her anger against Rene's mother. Yes, she thought it was unfair. Rene's mother didn't know anything about her. How did she know Marisa would get in the way of her son's progress? He might go to Harvard or Stanford, but she might tag along with her own stupendous grades and test scores.

"Do you want to break up with me?" Marisa asked. Her eyes flooded. She had to wonder if they would remain flooded through first period and beyond. The night before, in bed, she had cried about the loss of Sammy and, for comfort, had brought out from her bottom drawer her old stuffed unicorn with the bent horn.

"No," he answered. "If I did, who would tell me what kind of pants to wear?"

She latched her arms around his waist and kissed him, her very own personal nerd. For her he was superior to a
cholo
boy any day. Before she had come to Hamilton Magnet, her anger would have flashed like a struck match and she would have closed her hands into fists. Now she felt not anger but a sadness that was deep as a river. She couldn't explain why Rene was the way he was, including that honking laugh of his. She would take him with his awful-looking clothes, his nerdy friends, his schemes of tutoring others in search of money. But she had to wonder if maybe he would be bolder if his father had been a part of his life. She conjured
up the
vatos
at her old school parading their badness. Rene, she concluded, needed a little of their juice, a little of their bravado.

They didn't find the cat or the seagull.

"She's gone," Marisa cried.

"I'll find another kitten," Rene promised. "A really pretty one. Just you watch."

All morning Marisa couldn't concentrate on her classes—she worked a pen quietly across her binder, her mind drifting. Then, during first break, Priscilla introduced the boy who had been following her—it was the skateboarder who had taunted Rene.

"Hi," said the skateboarder, whose name was Erik. Marisa could tell that he remembered her. He might even have remembered Marisa's outburst when he had called Rene a doofus. Erik was wearing fingerless black gloves, and his skateboard, pasted with stickers, was under his arm. His hair was still dyed green.

"We gotta go," Priscilla said. She looked up at Erik, blushing, and all indications were that she liked him a lot.

"She's picked a grungy dude," Marisa told herself. They disappeared among the crowd, and from that same crowd appeared Rene.

"I just saw Priscilla," Marisa said. "Remember that guy who called you doofus?"

"No, I don't remember." They were heading toward the secret room in the abandoned part of the gym.

"What do you mean? He was riding his skateboard and we were sitting over there." She pointed to a bench, where three girls in long leather coats and net stockings sat polishing their fingernails black.

"People call me names all the time," Rene explained. "Or they used to. I can't remember them all." He changed the subject and took her hands in his. He began talking rapidly about the debate team that was forming, but Marisa was not listening. She loved Rene more than ever, all because he appeared helpless. She knew that usually the guy protected the girl—or at least that was what she had salvaged from the story lines of teenage romances. But their roles were reversed. It was she who opened the door to the gym, she who held his feet when he did sit-ups, she who spotted him when he lay grunting on the bench press—he could now lift sixty pounds.

He did three chin-ups, legs bicycling as he struggled to get his chin up to the bar, and followed that with a set of bench presses and a single set of curls for his biceps. For Marisa, her exercise was to lift
him into her arms and carry him out the door. She let him slip from her arms when they got outside.

"I think—really!—that I've gotten stronger," Rene remarked.

"I noticed some little hills in your arms." She asked him to show her his biceps, and she squeezed his small, round muscle. It wasn't rock hard, but neither did it feel like a water balloon. There was some muscle beneath the skin.

After school Rene, giddy with excitement, coaxed Marisa aside and said, "Look at this. I did this in calculus."

When he started to roll up his sleeve, she thought that he was going to show her another bruise. She was ready to chant a litany of bad words and sting that mean mother for hurting her boy. Instead, Marisa saw her name inked on his slender forearm. Her name was in a heart, and her mind leaped back to the chalkboard with the heart around the name
Samantha.