Facts of Life (7 page)

"Yes, that's okay
there,
" Rachael argued. "But we're here in America."

"Shallow people in America wear jeans and T-shirts. Get with it."

Rachael was hurt, and it showed in her reddening cheeks. "So it's okay to wear ugly stuff like those stockings of yours? They're cheap!"

"No, they cost quite a bit." Keri gazed at her long legs and adjusted her fishnets.

"Did it hurt?" Freddie butted in.

"Did what hurt?"

"Those things in your face." He pointed.

Keri let out a small barking laugh. "Like, yeah, it hurt." But she contended that she had suffered greater pains in life than what it took to staple her lip, nose, ears, and belly button. She bent over and brought out a small packet from her boot. "Italian coffee—it's the best."

"What's Italian coffee?" Rachael asked.

Keri didn't bother to explain. She went to the kitchen, with Rachael and Freddie following. There she brewed the coffee in a saucepan and strained it into a coffee mug.

"Here," she said, and presented the cup to Rachael, who searched the surface of the hot, steamy brew. She could see her reflection, and suddenly she could see herself with a stud in her nose—something small as dust, something dainty. She then brought the hot coffee to her lips, sipped, and gave her tongue a few seconds to appraise the taste. She then uttered, "Strong."

"You have to get used to it," Keri advised. "If you want, add sugar."

Freddie said, "Let me try." He loaded the coffee cup with sugar and slowly brought it to his lips. He sipped, smacked his lips, and sipped again. "It's good."

Rachael took the cup from Freddie, sipped, and had to admit that it's deliciousness agreed with her.
Is this what Goth-types drink?
she wondered. She drained the cup.

"You know what?" Keri said after they drank two mugs of coffee each. "Rachael, you need to punk out." She went to her coat draped on the couch, brought a small bottle out of her pocket, and shook it. "Let's color your hair."

"No way!" Rachael screamed. She took a step back.

"You can wash it out," Keri argued. "It's not permanent. Come on, be mellow."

"Let me," Freddie begged. His grin revealed what was left of his baby teeth.

"Okay," Keri said. She seemed to weigh the wisdom of coloring the hair of a seven-year-old.

Rachael was amazed when, in the bathroom, Freddie bent his head over the tub and allowed Keri to work the dye into his hair. It lathered into a mountainous, orange frothy concoction.

"Close your eyes tight," Keri warned.

Rachael was worried that Freddie's eyes might turn orange as pumpkins and perhaps grow just as large if they became infected. After all, the dye had been in Keri's boot and there was no telling if maybe some of her foot germs had rubbed off when she opened the bottle. But when his head was toweled off, Freddie fluttered his eyes open. They weren't orange, but his head sure was. Keri then streaked his hair with green gel.

"Cool," Keri crowed as she stepped back to appraise her creation: a seven-year-old punker with scrapes on his elbows!

He's like a parakeet,
Rachael thought.

Standing on a stool, Freddie looked in the fogged-up mirror. He wiped the mirror and judged his appearance after he turned his head at different angles.

Keri next attached a row of screw-on earrings to his earlobes. She dabbed a dark substance under his eyes.

"I look like the dudes in the Raiders Black Hole," Freddie said.

Rachael could picture those wild fans at the Oakland Raiders games. They were hideous and dangerous. "You sure it'll come out?" she asked.

"I'm sure," Keri said. "How 'bout you now?"

Rachael stepped back, her hand on the doorway. "No, thank you. I like my hair the way it is."

"Don't be a chicken!" Freddie sneered. "Before Mom comes home, we can wash it out."

"No, I don't think so." She posted her hands on her hips.

But when they returned to the living room and Keri put Spew Face on the stereo, Rachael had to giggle and join in bouncing to the music. It felt fun; it felt wild. At first she just jumped lightly but then picked up speed when she and Freddie leaped on the couch. He began to jump and touch the ceiling.

"Go, boy!" Keri encouraged over the blare of "Ugly Mom, Ugly Sister." They stopped when the song ended, but got up again when the next song, "Dog Breath Friendship," started with a howling dog and a guitar solo. They were punishing the living room, jumping wildly.

But when Freddie leaped from the couch to the hassock to the end table, he slipped on a doily and went headfirst onto the carpeted floor.

"Ahhhh," he cried, hand on top of his head. Between his fingers, blood bubbled and rolled down his wrist.

Rachael's eyes widened. Were her little brothers brains—his one important possession, because she had to admit that he wasn't cute—about to come out? She should have known that dancing in close quarters to a group called Spew Face would bring them to disaster. His hair was now a psychedelic mixture of orange, green, and red.

"You'll be okay," Keri said without emotion.

But Rachael could tell that she, too, was a little nervous. Was he really going to be okay? Freddie was leaping around the living room again, and for a moment Rachael believed that he was still dancing to the music. But he was leaping from pain, or fear, or both. The earring fell from his nose, and the black under his eyes began to crawl like fingers down his cheeks.

The dance party was over. "Is he going to die?" Rachael asked.

"Of course not!" Keri led Freddie to the bathroom, and started to bathe his head.

"It hurts." Freddie bawled.

"It's not that bad," Keri said. She washed his head gently with a bar of soap and then started to scrub when the dye didn't rinse out. "The orange isn't coming out." She examined the washcloth and could see the green gel, the black from under his eyes, and pinkish blood.

"Mom's going to be really mad," Rachael predicted. "I told you you shouldn't have."

"Well, he wanted it."

"But you said it would come out."

Keri stood up, her chest heaving. "Well, sorry, it doesn't. What's the big deal?"

"What about the cut on his head?" Rachael asked.

"It's no biggie. It's already stopped bleeding."

Rachael parted Freddie's hair and probed the wound with her finger. It was a bloodless slit, which made her wonder whether all the blood in his head was gone. She looked at her brother, who seemed pale as he stood up, a stream of water rushing down his neck. Was he about to faint, or "succumb," a grown-up word she had learned meant to die?

"Are you sure you're okay?" Rachael held Freddie's shoulders. "Do you feel like you're going to ... succumb?"

"No, I'm not going to throw up," he answered.

Rachael left it at that.

"It just hurts a little," he said, sniffing.

But his tears stopped when Keri brought from her boot a Butterfinger candy bar. She unwrapped part of it, and said, "Here." He bit into it, a flake falling from his lips.

They all went to the living room, where
Finding Nemo
was muted and Spew Face was blaring. When Keri turned off the music, the house became suddenly silent. She bent down and picked up the earring.

"What are we going to tell my mom?" Rachael asked.

Keri shrugged.

They sat watching the final scenes of
Nemo.
When the credits began to roll, Rachael suggested that she and Freddie go to bed. Any other time, Freddie would have fought such a proposal, but he rose without complaint and shuffled off to his bedroom. He didn't bother to say good night.

"What do you think my mom's going to say?" Rachael asked.

"Jeez, I said I'm sorry. What else do you want me to do?" Keri brought a fingernail to her mouth and chewed.

"Sorry might not be good enough."

Keri began to work on another fingernail.

Rachael went into the kitchen, where the exploded pizza still hung from the microwave. She cleaned up the gooey mess, washed the grease-spotted floor, did the few dishes in the sink, and went to brush her teeth.

I'm going to be normal,
she promised herself.
I don't care if I wear jeans and T-shirts. And what kind of band has a name like Spew Face?

Rachael didn't bother to say good night to Keri. She went to her bedroom, dressed in her pajamas, hopped into bed, and closed her eyes. But she couldn't sleep. She thought of her mother on the dance floor. She pictured her mother's earrings swinging on her lobes as she danced to a nice singer like Céline Dion. Rachael tossed and turned, punched her pillow, thought of Keri on the couch eating her fingernails, then recharged the image of her mother on the dance floor. She imagined her mother's earring flying into the air, and she imagined a nice man bending to pick it up.

"Come on—go to sleep," she mumbled. She was tired of the day—let it be over!

Rachael then remembered the coffee she had drunk. It was keeping her awake, she figured, and maybe she would never sleep again!

"Sleep!" she scolded herself as she rolled onto her belly. But Keri's face kept reappearing with more things pierced in her nose, including—would this be possible?—a large lock.

"Sleep, I tell you," she scolded her body.

Rachael turned over in bed, listening to the house creak, and held her breath when she heard the front door open—her mother was home. She got up and quietly opened her bedroom door, listening for voices.

"Was everything okay?" her mother asked.

"Yeah," Keri answered.

"Liar," Rachael whispered, then closed the door. Wait until morning! She imagined Freddie walking into the kitchen with his orange hair—maybe bloody from his reopened wound!

Rachael returned to bed. She still couldn't sleep. The clock on her chest of drawers glowed 12:24. She squeezed her eyes, then relaxed her eyes. She rolled onto her stomach, her back, and her side. Nothing worked to make her fall into a slumber.

"I shouldn't have drunk it," she mumbled. She began to realize what made adults so grumpy: the coffee they threw down their throats every morning. They drank that horrible stuff, and at night they couldn't sleep. They rolled around in bed and revisited the scenes of the day. How many times had her mother told her of insomnia?

Toward dawn Rachael had a dream about flying, and woke with the feeling of anvils on her eyelids. She sat on the edge of her bed, sighed, and slid her feet into her slippers.

"I feel tired," she moaned. She assumed this was how adults woke up every day: tired but hankering for more coffee to straighten them out.

She passed her brother's bedroom and peeked in. There he was, asleep, with his orange hair. She shook her head, closed the door, and decided not to worry.

Her mother was in the kitchen reading the newspaper. Her dark hair (dyed black, Rachael knew) was wild. Her eyes were puffy as if she, too, hadn't slept.

"How did you sleep, little princess?" her mother asked.

"Okay." Rachael sat at the table with her mother.
Soon shell know,
Rachael thought.
Soon Freddie will appear from his bedroom.
For now she didn't care. No, she wanted to be like her mother.

"Mom." Rachael exhaled.

"What, girl?" her mother asked as she turned the page of the newspaper.

"Mom, I want a cup of coffee."

Although she was only ten, she felt she had become a grown person. She had not slept well and she had a burden she couldn't quite explain. She hoped a dark brew, with cream and sugar, would wake her up.

LAURITA MALAGÓN SPUN the globe in the library. As it squeaked on it's axis, she closed her eyes and dragged a finger on it's glossy surface until the globe slowed to a stop.
This is where I'm from,
she told herself. Her eyes fluttered open. Her finger had stopped near New Zealand and a ring of islands in a vast blue ocean.
Is that where they have coconuts?
she wondered.
Or is it penguins? Or maybe it's the place where they play the ukulele.

Summer school was reading, drawing, and folk dancing from Texas and Ireland, which were both far away for eleven-year-old Laurita. Summer school was also math, done on a calculator, and singing, which made her cheeks bloom like red poppies.

She wasn't able to dwell long on New Zealand. Her teacher, Mrs. Moore, was calling everyone to hurry up. They were on their weekly visit to the school library to scout for fresh books. Several sixth graders would enter the library at a time, choose a book, and leave as quietly as mice. That was the rule.

New Zealand,
Laurita reflected, with enough dreaminess in her heart to make her stride lightly from the library.
That's where I'm really from. I'm from an island so far from any continent that birds can't fly there, or people get there, unless they board a ship or a plane. I'm exotic.

Exotic.

She had learned this word when a friend described a fruit drink she had drained in twenty seconds in Orlando, Florida.
Exotic
was the flavor of the week. The drink came with a tiny umbrella, as if it's ice cubes needed shade; it came with a plump cherry and a sprig of mint. Models in magazines wearing hoop earrings were exotic. A flower with a pinwheel of tropical colors was exotic. A poodle with a ball of fur at the end of it's tail was exotic, plus kind of cute.

Laurita knew full well she wasn't from New Zealand. Her father and mother spoke Spanish, and a few phrases in English: "It's really hot." "Oh, doggone it." "That's too much, my friend." Like parrots they could say words—"shoes," "milk," "bed," "bargain"—but couldn't easily connect them into sentences. Her parents, both of whom worked at Big Lots as janitors, remained mostly monolingual.

Monolingual.
Laurita had learned that word in second grade. A big person had asked, "Are you bilingual?" To this she playfully shrugged her shoulders. The person then asked, "Are you trilingual?" She added an embarrassed grin to her shrug. Then the person said, "Oh, you must be monolingual."

Laurita had shrugged, grinned, and kicked a toe at the ground. She answered in accented English, "I speak two languages." She unfolded two fingers and held them up.