Muchacho (16 page)

“Should I be jealous?”

“No,” I said.

“You sure?”

“No. For reals.”

“Then why did you just ask me if I’m the jealous type?” When Lupe gets a question in her head, she doesn’t let it go until she figures it out and she can always tell if you’re just making up an answer, even if you make up a real good one that your parents would believe. She probably gets that from watching her father the killer lawyer.

“I just wondered. That’s all.” I looked Lupe straight in the eye so she could see I was telling the truth. She studied me like a book for a couple seconds and then she said, “Do you want to know why I’m not jealous, Eddie?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer but I knew if I said never mind, I’d be in big trouble because I’m the one who brought up the whole subject.

“I’m not jealous because I’m really smart and I’m not bad-looking and I really really really care about you,” Lupe said. “I’m a wonderful girlfriend to you. And if you didn’t appreciate me enough to be faithful, then you would be too stupid to have for a boyfriend.”

When I told Primo what Lupe said, he was smoking a cigarette and he cracked up so hard I swear I saw smoke coming out of his ears.

“Man!” he said in between choking. He slapped me on the back real hard. “You got your hands full, Primito.” He choked some more and then he said, “Does she got any sisters?”

I wish Lupe did have a sister because that would be so cool if she had a sister who liked Primo, except I don’t think a sister of Lupe’s would like Primo because he’s too slick, or at least he thinks he is. If he really was slick he wouldn’t be sitting in jail right now, waiting to find out whether he’s going to get three years or life on account of he’s on his third strike.

I
DON’T LIKE TO GO TO A JAIL EVEN IF
I’
M ON THE RIGHT SIDE
of the bars because I always think the cops could just come up and throw me inside and how would I ever get out. But I couldn’t leave Primo sitting there thinking everybody finally gave up on caring about him, like his parents who washed him off their hands.

In the movies they always have a little phone booth with a window to talk through, but the Rosablanca jail just has a big room with some cheap tables and plastic chairs where the visitors can talk to the prisoners while some real big guys with guns stand around and pretend they aren’t listening to every word. Primo didn’t have much to say, though, after he said, “Wassup?” He looked at me for about half a second and then
he looked in some other direction to give me a chance to check him out and get over it. He didn’t want to see me looking at him.

I never visited Primo before when he got busted because my parents wouldn’t let me, so I never saw him without his cool clothes and his hair all combed just right and his designer shades. Even those dumb jail clothes couldn’t make him look ugly, though, because he’s the kind of guy who looks good no matter what. From across the room, he looked pretty much the same. But when he started shuffling over to the table where I was sitting, with handcuffs on his hands and feet, I felt kind of sick to my stomach because I could see he lost his attitude. Primo always wears his attitude like a coat he picks up and puts on whenever he goes out the door.

I leaned down and scratched my ankle for a second so I could get my face straight and after that I kept it straight the whole time, no matter what I was feeling inside.

After he finally sat down I said, “Hey, ’Rique, I sent you a book, but they sent it back.” And he said, “Yeah, you got to send books straight from the publisher. They’re afraid you’ll dust the pages with cocaine or heroin or something.”

“What kind of stupid idiot would mail drugs to a jail?” I said and he said, “You’d be surprised,” which I probably would because I bet a lot of people are that stupid or at least a couple people were or the cops wouldn’t have made up that rule.

I told Primo I didn’t know how to get a book from a publisher but I would see if I could find out and he said, “Don’t
waste your time.” I told him it wouldn’t be a waste of time because the one I sent was a real good book, one of the best books I ever read, and it was real short but it could change your life. The whole time I was talking, Primo sat there shaking his head, back and forth, real slow, looking down at the table or up at the ceiling.

“What?” I said. “It’s a good book. I’m telling you.”

“I bet it is,” he said. He kind of smiled at the wall, but not happy. Then all of a sudden he looked me right in the eye and pinned me to my chair. “I never read a book in my life.”

I didn’t say anything for a minute because what can you say to a person who just told you they never read a book in their whole life and you can tell they aren’t joking or lying or trying to look cool? After a couple seconds, I started to ask him why didn’t he like to read, and then I stopped because I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew it. Primo never read a book because he can’t read.

“Big tragedy, huh?” he said, with that same weird smile, so I knew he knew what I was thinking. He usually does. He might not be able to read a book but he can read my mind so fast, almost as fast as I can read it myself.

“Yeah,” I said, because it really is a tragedy in my mind. I tried to think about what my life would be like if I didn’t read so many books, like what I would do if I couldn’t open a book and just disappear inside it when I needed to.

“Hey, lighten up,” Primo said. “I was kidding. It’s no big deal. Books are boring, compared to real life.”

I was going to argue with him, but then I decided not to because even if I said the names of some real good books, he wouldn’t believe they were good. And even if I won the argument, what would I win? Nothing. Just like it said in that article that McElroy made us read.

“Hey, don’t let me be a bad influence on you,” Primo said. “I know you like school, dude, and that’s okay. You just keep on studying and go to college or whatever because if you get stupid and decide to get married, you’re going to need a good job. If your little girlfriend really does get to be a doctor someday, you can’t be going around mowing people’s lawns.”

I don’t just mow lawns. I started to tell him about all the other things I do, like plant seedlings and build rock walls to prevent soil erosion and prune trees to their best shape, but Primo held up his handcuffs.

“Dude, it doesn’t matter how much work you do. It matters how much paper you got. If you don’t got a college degree, then you mow lawns for a living. If you go to college, then you’re a landscape architect. No difference in the work. Big difference in the paycheck.”

“Yeah,” I said, “well if you’re so smart, why don’t you go to college?”

“I never said I wasn’t smart,” Primo said. “Shit, I’m probably some kind of genius.”

He probably is a genius, just like Harvey Castro. Every time
mi tía
Carolina comes over to drink coffee with my mother, she asks how are me and Letty and Juanito doing in
school so she can brag about how Enrique was so much smarter than the other kids that they skipped him out of first grade right up to third grade.

“So, at least get your GED while you’re in here, Mr. Genius,” I told Primo. “Don’t they got those programs?”

Primo sat back hard in his chair. “Teachers are a pain in the ass. Besides, reading gives me a headache. So, let’s change the subject, okay?”

We changed the subject and talked about
nuestra familia
and what was going on, but my brain kept thinking about what Primo said, that reading gives him a headache. And that reminded me of when Beecher first came to our class and Jaime kept sneaking his sunglasses on whenever Beecher wasn’t looking. Most of the teachers would confiscate your shades or send you to the office, but Beecher just walked over to Jaime and took his sunglasses right off his face and handed him a blue plastic page that you could see through.

“Try this,” she said, and Jaime just looked at her, so she opened his book and put the plastic over the page. “Just try it, okay?”

Jaime always used to say he was allergic to reading. I must have tried to get him to read a hundred books since the time we knew each other, but he never read a single one. When Beecher put that blue plastic on his book, Jaime looked over at me but I didn’t help him out because I was on Beecher’s side that time. I wanted him to try it, too. So, finally he did. He read for a couple minutes and then he looked at Beecher
again but not like she was crazy, more like she was a magician or something.

Beecher left that blue sheet on Jaime’s page and told us about how there’s a lot of kids who everybody thinks they’re dumb but they really have some kind of problem with the lights in school because they aren’t the right color. Like if girls put on makeup it looks good at home but when they get to school, their face looks yellow or blue because of those lights. And Beecher said some kids always want to wear sunglasses or hats pulled way down over their eyes and they hate reading and sometimes they end up in special ed or juvi because they act so bad whenever they have to read. Beecher handed out some clear plastic pages in all kinds of colors—red and purple and blue and gray—to all the kids who hate reading, so they wouldn’t get a headache.

“They won’t let you wear sunglasses in school,” Beecher said, “but there’s no rule that says your book can’t wear sunglasses.”

Probably half the kids in that class started using those plastics and a lot of them stopped hating to read, and Teeny White asked Beecher why didn’t the school just change the lights if they gave so many kids a headache. Beecher said our school system is a bureaucracy and it isn’t that easy to change things in a bureaucracy, plus some people didn’t believe the plastics could work so easy because they weren’t scientific enough.

Too bad Primo didn’t get to be in Beecher’s class, because
she probably could have made him like reading, just like Jaime. I didn’t tell Primo about the lights and the plastic pages because I knew he wouldn’t believe me. It sounds like some kind of fishy story that you have to see it to believe it. But the jail has the same kind of lights as school, so I decided to show Primo instead of tell him. I decided to get one of those pages and send it to him so he could try it out with nobody watching him so he wouldn’t have to act all cool, but the jail would probably send the page back if I mailed it, and besides, I wasn’t sure where to find one.

So I decided I’m going to ask Beecher to get one of those plastics for Primo because the cops would probably let her give it to him because she’s a librarian who used to be a real teacher. And if they won’t, she’s smart enough to figure out how to get one for him. And I’m going to ask her how to get a publisher to send a book to somebody in jail, too. I have some money saved up, so I can send him a lot of different books, but nothing too easy because then he’d just get pissed off. I think the first book should be
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
because the kid in that book is really smart except everybody thinks he’s stupid so Primo could probably relate.

Primo might not open the packages. And even if he does, he might not read the books. But he’s smart, so I know if he makes the intention to learn how to read, he can do it. I wish I could make the intention for him, but it doesn’t work that way. And if I bug him about it, he won’t do it just to be
stubborn because he hates when anybody tries to tell him what to do.

That’s probably the worst thing about being in jail. He’ll probably get used to crappy food and a hard bed and having to live with a bunch of weird people and some of them might try to kiss him but he’s smart enough to figure how to play that one out. But I don’t think Primo could ever get used to having somebody else tell him what to do and how to do it and when to do it all day long every single day. He’s going to have to figure some way to keep from going crazy. And I’ll keep on visiting him and writing him letters and sending him books, except when I visit him I won’t ask him about the letters or the books. I’ll just sit there and let him read my mind.

I
F
N
EW
M
EXICO DIDN’T HAVE SUCH LAME LAWS ABOUT DRUNK
driving, the guy who already had six DUIs would have been in jail instead of on the road where he crashed into Lupe’s mom and killed her and broke Lupe’s heart. And if Lupe and her dad didn’t move to Rosablanca to try to make a happier life, and if Crazy Cheyenne didn’t beat up Lupe so many times, Lupe wouldn’t have transferred to Bright Horizons. And if that mean teacher didn’t twist my ear and make me so mad that I started hating school, I probably would have been hanging with Harvey Castro at the regular high school and trying to be a valedictorian instead of a juvenile delinquent, so I wouldn’t have gone to Bright Horizons, neither. And if Beecher didn’t tell us guys that we would probably get
girlfriends if we signed up for ballroom dance, and if Mami didn’t tell me how romantic it was when Papi used to take her dancing, then I wouldn’t have signed up for dance class. And if I didn’t, then I probably would never have met Lupe or if I did meet her, I would have been doing something like pounding somebody into the ground or getting dragged out of English class by the cops for shoplifting or some other thing that wouldn’t have impressed her so much like I impressed her by being able to waltz.

But maybe if all those things didn’t happen, I still would have met Lupe anyways if I decided to like myself enough so I could make the intention to find a wonderful girlfriend. I’ve been reading a lot of books about energy and the law of attraction and karma and all that woo-woo stuff. Some of it makes sense but some of it makes me laugh so hard, like I’m reading a comic book.

I thought if I read enough books, I would figure everything out, but the more I read, looking for answers, the more questions I have. I wish there was somebody who had all the answers to the questions—somebody I don’t know, because if you’ve been talking about normal stuff with your parents all your life, like can you borrow the car and why can’t you stay out past eleven on school nights and why do you have to eat broccoli, you can’t walk up to your mother one day and say, “Do you think that all the energy in the universe is connected?” because she’ll think you’ve been smoking weed or something. And if you asked your father does he think you
keep getting sent back to Earth in a human form so you can learn enough lessons so your soul can go flying around enjoying itself instead of worrying about all these problems, I don’t know what he would do, but it probably wouldn’t be good and I’m not going to ask Papi and find out.