Dressed in a well-worn Billabong tee, camo cargo shorts and a pair of old-school slip-on Vans, Danny Lopez follows his favorite cousin, Sofia, as she rolls up on the cul-de-sac crowd with OG swagger.

A bunch of heads call out to her, “Hey, Sofe!” “
Yo,
girl!” “There she is!” and wave.

Sofia waves back, pulls Danny by the arm toward a group of girls sitting on a blanket in an uneven semicircle.
“Oye putas,”
she says. “Yo, this my cousin Danny I was telling you about. He’s gonna be staying with me for the summer.” She smiles big—proud, Danny thinks. “Yo, cuz, these are my girls.” She points them out and rattles off names: “Carmen, Raquel, Angela, Bee, Juanita, Flaca and Guita.”

“Hey,” the girls singsong in unison.

Danny nods with a shy smile, aims his eyes at the asphalt. He feels the heat of their stares and for a second he wishes he could morph into one of the ants zigzagging in and out of tiny crevices in the street. Their little lives, he thinks, totally off the radar.

Danny’s sixteen, a shade over six foot and only a year younger than Sofia, but unless he’s on a pitching mound he feels like a boy. He’s long and thin with skinny arms hanging down skinny thighs—his arm length the reason he can fire a fastball so hard. His shoulders are wide, but his muscles have yet to catch up. Sometimes when he sees himself in a mirror it looks like his shirt is propped up by an upside-down coat hanger. Not a human body. Doesn’t even look real.

And Danny’s brown. Half-Mexican brown. A shade darker than all the white kids at his private high school, Leucadia Prep. Up there, Mexican people do under-the-table yard work and hide out in the hills because they’re in San Diego illegally. Only other people on Leucadia’s campus who share his shade are the lunch-line ladies, the gardeners, the custodians. But whenever Danny comes down here, to National City—where his dad grew up, where all his aunts and uncles and cousins still live—he feels pale. A full shade lighter. Albino almost.

Less than.

“And just so you know,” Sofia adds, “Danny ain’t no big talker, all right? He’s mad smart, gets nothin’ but A’s at the best private school in San Diego, but don’t get your
chones
in a bunch if you can’t never pull him into a convo.” Sofia looks prettier than Danny remembers. Less of a tomboy. Her hair long now, makeup around her eyes.

Carmen clears her throat, says: “He don’t need to talk to give me no deep-tissue massage.” She gives Danny an exaggerated wink.

“Ain’t need no words for us to soak in a nice Jacuzzi bath together,” Flaca says. She reaches out, puts her hand on one of Danny’s Vans. “We can just sit there, Papi. Backs against them jet thingies. Take turns sippin’ a little white Zin and shit. How’s that sound, beautiful?”

Danny gives her a polite smile, but inside he’s shrinking. He’s trying to suck back into his shell, like a poked and prodded snail.

Behind his back he grips his left wrist, digs his fingernails into the skin until a sharp pain floods his mind, makes him feel real.

Angela and Bee comb Danny over with their almond-shaped eyes, devour his out-of-place surfer style like a pack of rabid dogs. Danny cringes at how different he must seem to his cousin’s friends. They’re all dark chocolate-colored, hair sprayed up, dressed in pro jerseys and Dickies, Timberlands. Gold and silver chains. Calligraphy-style tats. Danny’s skin is too clean, too light, his clothes too soft.

“Que putas,”
Sofia says, slapping Flaca’s hand away from Danny’s shoe. “Leave my cuz alone already. He only just got here today.” She turns to Danny, says: “I see my homegirls gonna try and corrupt you, cuz. Better watch it, though, these
heinas
got mad STDs.”

“Say what!” Carmen shouts.

“For real, I seen ’em jumpin’ off like fleas.” Sofia plays like she’s swatting germs out of the air, stomping them on the ground.

Danny sees all the girls are laughing so he laughs, too.

As Sofia switches topics, brings up their annual summer trip to the Del Mar Fair—“Speaking of alcohol, Flaca, which one of y’all’s sneakin’ in the thermos of jungle juice?”—Danny eyes a group of guys playing stickball at the mouth of the cul-de-sac. A wave of butterflies passes through his middle.
His game!
His pitching arm starts to tingle, his right elbow and fingertips, like he’s already gripping the seams of a baseball—a Pavlovian response, he thinks, recalling his psych teacher’s chicken-scratch scrawl on the chalkboard. The guys playing stickball are all Mexican except the one waving the bat around—he’s black. Danny watches one of the Mexican kids lob a meatball down the middle and the black kid smack it over the roof of the house. Watches everybody react. Start dancing around, showing off.

He’d give anything to be out there playing instead of standing here watching. Trying to maintain this smile out of respect. He digs into his wrist some more with his nails. Breaks previously broken skin and pulls away. A smear of blood he wipes away with his other hand, rubs off across his dark jeans. Back home his mom is always on him to stop digging, but that only makes him want to dig more.

Danny looks around the cul-de-sac. Everyone is Mexican. The girls, the guys, the young kids, the mailman—even the mangy chocolate Lab tied to a lamppost, sleeping. He spots a pretty girl chasing a little boy across the cul-de-sac. She’s tall and thin, Mexican like everybody else, but different. She’s lighter, too, like him. Straight black hair past her shoulder blades. White tank top and long flowing green skirt. She calls after the little boy in Spanish, motions for him to stay off the lawn of a neighboring house, but when the boy suddenly plops down on his diaper in somebody’s carefully manicured flower bed, all she does is laugh.

She picks the boy up, brushes off his bottom and leads him back to her beige towel.

Danny gets a strange feeling in his stomach. A knot. He wonders since she’s light-skinned if she has a white mom, too. Like he does. He watches her carry the boy back to her blanket and sit down. Then he turns back to the guys playing stickball, wonders if his dad ever played here. If his dad ever stood on the exact section of cul-de-sac he’s standing on right now. He pictures his dad’s face (like he
always
does) the last time he saw him. They were on the steps outside their old apartment. Three years ago. He wouldn’t look up or say anything. They just sat there together, cars driving by, the sun going down, a beer dangling from his dad’s right hand.

The next morning he was gone.

But the reason Danny’s chosen to spend this summer in National City, instead of in San Francisco with his mom and sis, is because he’s got a plan. He’s gonna save his money and fly to Mexico. To Ensenada. He’s gonna track down his dad and spend some quality time with him. So they can get to know each other again.

“Yo, check my new tattoo,” Flaca says, pulling her jeans halfway down her butt, revealing the letters
OTNC
written out graffiti style.

“Ooh, that’s tight,” Sofia says, gently touching the skin around the swollen letters. “Lo’s bro did it? Bet it hurt right there, girl. It’s all fleshy.”

“Nah, Lo’s older brother’s good, Sofe. I could barely feel the needle—”

“Stop lyin’,” Carmen interrupts. She turns to Sofia, shaking her head. “I was right there with her. She was bawlin’ her eyes out before he got halfway through the
O
.”

As everybody laughs at Flaca, Danny glances over at the guys playing baseball again. Nobody plays stickball in Leucadia. Why don’t white kids play stickball? he wonders. Maybe because they have real baseball fields. Or because the houses are too nice. Or maybe they’ve just never thought of it.

He turns to check on the girl with the kid again, feels the knot rise, then cuts back to the game.

Home Run Derby: Uno’s Time Has Come

Uno steps up to the makeshift home plate again, an overturned metal trash can lid, and waves a duct-taped bat through the strike zone. He stretches his shoulders, hikes his Raider jersey sleeves up his black arms and points, Babe Ruth style, to the centerfield fence—an old two-story house with security bars on all the windows, Mr. and Mrs. Rodriguez’s place.

“Yo, put one in your boy’s wheelhouse,” he says as Chico moves toward the pretend pitching rubber, a section of curb to the left of the Rodriguezes’ crumbling driveway.

Chico pulls a couple more tennis balls from the mailbox and shoves them into the web of his glove. He pimps his Dodgers cap to the side a bit, says: “I’m gonna put it right down the middle,
vato
. But I ain’t so sure ’bout you havin’ no wheelhouse.”

“Already got four dongs to your one, Chee. Wha’chu want, baby?”

“But you ain’t no finisher, Uno.” Chico turns around to the eight or nine neighborhood kids spread across the front lawn behind him, says: “Least that’s how I heard it from some of my homegirls at the mall last night.”

Everybody laughs.

Uno straightens up. “You ain’t gotta go to no mall to investigate that shit, Chee. Ask around the house, homey—both your sisters know how I got it.”

Everybody breaks up again, including Chico, who shakes his head and taps a heel a couple times against the curb behind him. He grips the first tennis ball and lobs it toward home plate.

Uno watches it travel through the air, takes a wicked swing and connects. But he gets a little underneath the sweet spot, and instead of sending it over the roof like he did the last two, he lifts it high into the sky—like a firework, pre-explosion.

All the neighborhood Mexican dudes on the lawn spring into action. Some have mitts, others just their bare hands, but they all call for the ball as it begins dropping back down to earth a few feet in front of the nativity scene Mr. Rodriguez keeps up all year round.

“I got it,
ése
!”

“Yo,
aplacate
! That’s me!”

“This one’s mine,
vato
! Clear out!”

The tennis ball’s headed straight for Big Raul’s open mitt, a baby-fat seventeen-year-old rap wanna-be from down the block, when his best friend and biggest nemesis, Lolo, swoops in at the last second and snatches it with a bare hand. Lolo raises the ball up over his head as he turns to a disappointed Raul. “Ha,
bola de pan
! I catch so easy! You no fast enough!”

Lolo’s five-ten and lanky. The youngest son of separated Mexican immigrants. He’s got a shaved head and ridiculous homemade tattoos running up and down his forearms and shoulders—the price he’s had to pay for having an aspiring tattoo-artist big brother who needs an occasional practice canvas.

“Why you always be fightin’ fools for the ball?” Raul shouts back. “He ain’t any more out if
you
catch it!”

“You mad ’cause you no fast enough,
croqueta
.”

“Whatever, man.”

“That’s one down!” Chico shouts toward the lawn, extending an index finger toward the blurry summer sun. “Time to send this Uno fool packin’.”

It’s another home run derby Saturday on Potomac Street in old-town National City. The neighborhood kids all competing in baggy jeans and oversized white tees or throwback jerseys for the hat stuffed full of one-dollar bills and hanging off the faded bird feeder. At the outset of every derby each guy tosses two bucks into the pot, like an entry fee, and before the first pitch the kid with the best grades, usually Skinny Pedro, tallies up. Launch the most tennis balls over the Rodriguez house and you go home thirty, forty bucks heavier in the pocket.

Night before last, Uno put some thinking in before he closed his eyes in bed. This summer’s derby was his to dominate. He easily had the most power. These days he hardly even recognized himself in a mirror. He’d be toweling off after a shower, and he’d stare at his upper half—seemingly overnight he’d gone from skinny-ass mess-up to a six-foot-two seventeen-year-old with crazy cuts. Like the fading pictures he keeps in his sock drawer of his old man, Senior, back when
he
was young. Not only is Uno the only black kid in the neighborhood—or
negrito,
as the old Mexicans call him (even though his moms is Mexican, too)—he’s also stronger, quicker, taller, a better fighter. It’s his time. This summer he’s gonna clean fools out.

But Uno knows the derby’s about more than just making some cash or building a rep. It’s also about groups of neighborhood girls scattered around the cul-de-sac, gossiping, sipping ice-cold Kool-Aid out of old Gatorade bottles. It’s about the two or three crews of young bucks,
los ratas,
hanging out on stolen bikes, pulling drags off stolen cigarettes. The few non-athletes walking from group to group like social free agents. It’s about Uno’s fifteen-year-old stepbro, Manuel, sitting on the open tailgate of Mr. Rodriguez’s Ford F-150 with a half-peeled orange in his lap, cheering: “Hey, batter, batter! Swing!”

Doesn’t matter
who’s
at the plate, Manny’s cheering.

Everybody shows up to check out the action on the lawn, sure, but they also come to chill, to shoot the shit, to draft game plans for nighttime activity.

Uno knows his derby facts better than he knows the stuff they teach in school. Is he solid on his Civil War dates? Nah. But he knows Mr. Rodriguez is a retired fireman. Mrs. Rodriguez, a retired special ed teacher. Knows they’ve hosted the derby for going on ten years now—their own son, Marco, having started the Potomac Street tradition back when
he
was coming up. Knows Marco is now a first-year resident at some hospital for kids in Albuquerque—the derby continuing on in his absence.

Some of the faces change each summer—new kids show up, old kids disappear—and many of the rules morph and evolve with each new generation, but three things have remained constant since that first summer:

1. There’s always a hatful of one-dollar bills on the bird feeder.

2. There’s always somebody interrupting the action on the grass to crack on somebody else.

3. And every kid who participates in even one Saturday derby during any given summer shows up to help repaint the outside of the Rodriguez house, top to bottom, the week before school starts back up.

Chico lobs in another meatball, and Uno takes another vicious whack. This time he kisses yellow felt with the sweet part of his bat, sends the tennis ball rocketing into the sky. All anybody on the lawn can do is watch as the two-week-old Wilson Titanium sails high over the roof for Uno’s fifth dinger of the afternoon—more than double the next highest tally.

Uno megaphones a black hand around his mouth and makes fake crowd noise as all the little Mexican boys race around the side of the house to retrieve the battered ball.

The only person celebrating more than Uno is Manuel, who springs to his feet on the tailgate, gripping the last couple sections of his orange, and calls out in a warped Mexican accent: “Going, going, gone! Going, gone! Ahhh yeah, Uno!”

Manuel may be a little slow in the head—that’s how the white social worker explained it to Uno the first time he visited his stepbro at Bright House—but Uno couldn’t care less about that mess. Manny’s his people for life. It doesn’t mean nothing to him that they aren’t even blood. That’s why he breaks into a little chicken dance around home plate. Manny goes crazy for his chicken dance.

Some of the neighborhood girls point at Uno and laugh. One of
los ratas
does a wheelie as he cuts through the middle of the playing field on his BMX. All his boys crack up, wait for him to circle back, and then they ride away together.

Chico pulls another ball out of the mailbox and waits for Uno to end his made-for-Manny dance. “Yo, you need to act like you been there before,
cabrón
.” He takes a short walk to his bag, pulls out a towel and wipes a glaze of sweat off his brown face.

“The derby ain’t just about winnin’, Chee,” Uno says, stopping abruptly. “You know that. It’s about winnin’ with style. Puttin’ on a little show for the peoples.” He waves a hand toward all the groups of kids scattered throughout the cul-de-sac. “You just pissed ’cause your boy’s always the main attraction.”

Chico makes his way back into pitching position, impatiently watches as Uno leads his little bro through an elaborate home run handshake.

Only thing that gets Uno to stop dancing is when he spots Sofia watching, some light-skinned Mexican skater-looking kid standing by her side. What’s up with
this
pretty boy? he says in his head. Sofe gots a man now?

For some reason, this thought stops Uno’s dancing mid-step. It irritates him, though he couldn’t tell you why.

He picks up the bat and steps to the trash can lid again. Waves through the strike zone a couple times and waits on Chico’s delivery.

BOOK: Mexican WhiteBoy

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