Seeing Off the Johns (9 page)

“Good morning. And welcome to the first day of the '98-'99 school year. I hope you had a good restful summer and that you've come back to GHS ready and eager to learn and to take the necessary steps to become a success by the end of the term, the school year, and your respective graduation dates. I know this summer started out in a very strange way. We entered it in a way that has to be addressed here today.”

Mr. Adame appeared to want for a stack of papers to shuffle. He looked down at the podium and brushed off a piece of dust or lint that wasn't there. Beads of sweat gathered on his forehead, just below the brim of his stupid hat.

“So. Here to talk to you is Ms. Salinas.”

Henry blew a scoff through his nose, nodded in the direction of Mr. Adame, and said, “Mas puto que la chingada.”

Henry couldn't write a paragraph or even conjugate most irregular verbs in Spanish, but in decrying a puto, he was Neruda.

Chon laughed and looked to Araceli, but she wasn't laughing. She seemed to dread what Ms. Salinas might say, as if it would call her out as being the integrity flaw on the wall of the tire that blew out on John Robison's Explorer. Chon caught her eyes and tried to give her a nod that reassured her that it would all be okay. He threw his shoulders into the nod however, and it came off as if he were mad-dogging her and giving her the nonverbal
what the fuck?
instead. Thankfully for Chon, she didn't seem to take in what he had done. She didn't regard it and try to make sense of it. His nod was a black cat on a grey sofa that she walked by in a dark room. It was in her line of sight, but her brain didn't catch it. Chon sighed. It was the last four years all over again.

Ms. Salinas grabbed the far corners of the podium in front of her, holding it like she
was standing in a hurricane, and gave a loud “bleh,” in lieu of screaming. Some of the students, mainly freshmen and sophomores, laughed.

“I've been away from here for two and a half months. Too long? Not long enough?” She almost shouted. “I don't know. I mean, I live two blocks away from here. I pass by here to get to Main. So pretty much any day I leave the house, I pass by here. I guess it was about a week ago that I stopped crying when I drove past.” She covered her face with her hands.

A cold electricity filled the room, conducted by a collective drying of throats and chilling of spines and tightening of stomachs. Everyone shifted in their seats—shuffling their feet, straightening their postures, a few people pulling their knees to their shoulders.

“We teachers have been on campus for a week. If any of my colleagues are talking about what happened just less than three months ago, they're not talking about it with me. It's like they thought I wouldn't be able to deal. Even last night, when I laid out clothes and got mentally ready to start a new year with you guys, I didn't think about it. I lied to myself. Right now, standing in front of you all, I can't lie. To myself, I guess, but mainly to you. All week, we will have grief counselors here on campus. They're here to help us, ALL of us, to face what's happened. Because before we can deal with it, we have to face it. Do you understand?”

Ms. Salinas had been looking around the gym at everyone during her speech, but at that moment she fixed her gaze on Araceli, taking with her the eyes of everyone in the gym. But Araceli looked away, up at where ceiling and wall met to her right. She might have been rolling her watering eyes or trying not to cry.

Ms. Salinas clenched her jaw. “And so,” she said, “that option is on the table.” Eyes shifted away from Araceli to the podium. “We encourage you all to consider it. Take your grief seriously. I know there are some of you who weren't close with the Johns”—there it
was— “but regardless of that, death has come into our town and death has taken two of our sons and brothers. You may not have planned on meeting him, but you know him now. That can be a lot to swallow. Talking about it helps.”

Ms. Salinas stood looking hard and wide-eyed at the audience in front of her. No one said a word, their faces all blank. Disappointment trickled down her body, eroding the juts and peaks of eyebrows raised, lips stretched thin in anticipation, shoulders thrust forward as if to embrace. Were these kids too dumb to understand what she was talking about? It seemed they were.

She looked down, then back. She cleared her throat. “Alright, then. Starting with the freshmen, we'll all leave for homeroom. Just follow the teacher at the head of the section, and you'll get where you're going.” She walked away from the podium like a zombie, tired and sad.

Everyone stood up. The classes started moving around and talking and acting like teenagers despite having met Death in all his uncaring dedication to the business he held most dear. Mr. Adame stepped back up to the podium.

“Now if you'll all wait, I have one more announcement to make.” Everyone slowed down without stopping, talked out of the corners of their mouths instead of just being quiet. “Students!” he said louder, shouting.

“There will be an unveiling in front of the office after school. You're all invited, encouraged, to stay.” He punctuated the last word with no cadence, left it hanging. He looked hard at the students he was paid to manage, the takers of tests whose results would make or break his career.

Feeling better for having made them wait, he dismissed them. “Have a good school year.”

*

Chon felt like he could never approach Araceli after that assembly—not to give her his love and ask for hers back, not even to ask her for a pencil or sheet of paper to borrow. It wasn't like he was trying to steal her from her boyfriend, as had been the, in retrospect, hopeless plan before Chon's and Greenton's existences had been forever changed by a blown-out tire and a car with an unsafe center of gravity and weight placement. What he wanted to do was a good and right thing: love her, save her, help her. He'd just have to wait to do it until he could look her in the face without being dwarfed by all of her young, tragic wisdom.

They walked out of the gym together or, more accurately, each walked out with Henry—one on either side, each needing something different from him, each asking almost too much in their separate ways. Chon noted Araceli going into a government class down the hall from his world geography class. Afterward, he followed her to her trigonometry class. He had physics that period. Chon hurried out of his class and over two halls to see Araceli leave trigonometry and head for her next class, which ended up being in the same room he had just left. The physics teacher—a man who was noted in some history books and encyclopedias for having snuck into Viet Cong camps under cover of night and slit the throats of scores of men—also taught French. Chon had Spanish that period, his classroom clear on the other side of the small campus. As soon as the bell rang, Chon rushed out, walking as fast as he could without looking suspicious and made it over to the science hall in about a minute and a half. But Araceli was nowhere to be seen.

When he walked into his fourth period English class, Chon was thinking about how at least he knew what class Araceli would be in the period after—cheerleading, which met in the cafeteria—and how he could even go out of his way to walk by there before
heading for his car and work at the Pachanga. He was so lost in his plans that he didn't notice until he had chosen a desk that she was there in the same class. Lost in his forest of hypotheticals and improbables and baseless wishing, Chon had missed an opportunity to sit next to Araceli, who was four rows of desks away.

Could he get up and move near to her? Of course he couldn't. She was too far away. So he sat watching her. She didn't look up at anyone filing in. She was done catching up with kids she'd known her whole life. There was nothing that they did this summer that was any different from what they did any other summer—except for having buried their false idols. But they didn't seem done with cozying back up to her. Chon knew they wanted to hear Araceli's stories of loss and pain, of her world being totally different and unbearable. They wanted front row seats to the breakdown.

Or maybe it was more than that. Maybe they were all like Chon. Maybe they all felt the desire to do something after a summer of hopelessness. Whatever the reason, they all sat staring at Araceli like she was some miracle they'd read about in the Bible but could never have imagined to be so wonderful and terrible and real.

Then Henry walked in. He looked at Araceli like she was his older cousin (by two weeks) and over at Chon and smiled. It was going to be a fun semester. He took the seat by Araceli and called Chon over to join them.

Chon sat behind Henry.

“Oh my god,” Henry said. “Is it May yet? Shoot me in the face. Nine more months of this bullshit?”

“It'll get you ready for the world, Henry.” Henry had addressed both Chon and Araceli with his complaining, so now Chon addressed them back. “You can pad your GPA with electives and your resume with extra-curricular activities so you can get into college and get a good job and never have to come back to Greenton.”

There was something about talking to Henry that always made Chon mask with sarcasm what he thought or felt.

“Shit, maybe for you two assholes. My dad's already looking at buying a new truck, a four-door dooly with running lights on the roof and a brush guard on the grille. So now he can fit me, him, and her fatass father in the same truck.” Henry pointed at Araceli, who smiled—because Henry and his father were both fatasses too.

The Monsevais brothers, Saul and David, worked as welders, serving the ranches around Greenton in mending gates, fences, chutes, and car parts as well as making barbecue pits and sheds and pens or anything else out of metal. Henry had been around it most of his life. When his mother died, he would accompany his father and uncle to jobs during the summers. He spent his last summer as a helper/apprentice, taking his uncle's place in his father's pickup truck because his uncle was often too hung over and despondent to face a day of work—getting to know intimately, no longer just as a spectator, the tanks and valves and hoses and motors that occupied the truck's flat bed, eating meat grilled in the small pit on the back of the rig or sandwiches heated toasty with the torch.

“They're going to move the rig onto the new truck and have a Tres Reyes logo printed on the doors. So I guess it's good that I'm here because it means a few more months before I have to ride around in that truck and become an old bastard like our dads, listening to shitty music and living out of a truck for twelve hours a day.”

“You don't have to do that,” Araceli said.

Henry flashed eyes at Araceli that anyone could read as saying
yeah right
, but there was something else in the look that Chon couldn't read but understood to be a Monsevais-ism.

“Well, you can always go back to school when you've made all your plata and have other people do the welding for you,” Chon said.

Henry and Araceli both gave him the same look of surprise, each expressing the slightest annoyance at Chon's interloping. He barreled past them.

“But whatever. You're here on vacation. Just do all your work, cause if you don't you'll spend all your time making jokes and slowing the rest of us down.”

The natural order of Chon and Henry was restored when Henry gave a
pshh
and said, “I've been carrying your fucking ass all through high school. Good luck without me in college, bitch.” Mrs. Salinas walked into the room.

“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, loud like a kindergarten teacher. Almost too loud. “This is the second to last period of the day. You've survived most of the first day of school. I congratulate you, but I also ask that you do your very best not to fall asleep. I know that many of you have spent the entire summer waking up at around this time. It is approximately one o'clock. You are only three hours away from a nap, some of you even just an hour and a half. Be strong.”

Her speech done, she looked over the students in class. The fourteen young faces in front of her made up the last fifth of the class of 1999.

“I must tell you, like I told the rest of my classes, that I am sorry for the state I was in this morning. Like I said then, it's been a hard summer. But we're all here right now and we can move on together. I'm here to talk to you and help you if you need it, just like I know all of you are here for me. In this town and in this school, we're all one big family. And that's what families do.” She shut her eyes for a minute to collect herself.

Chon felt like he was watching a drunk uncle rambling because he forgot the next word he'd planned to say and couldn't remember the last one he'd slurred. He hated being forced to sit there. Mrs. Salinas was reckless like a fool, with all the self-righteous earnestness of a person who thinks they need to teach you something.

Chon looked over at Araceli. To anyone else who might have seen her, she was
just another seventeen-year-old kid trying her best to ignore the horrors of a nervous breakdown as they unfolded in front of her. But Chon's eye was trained in the many faces of Araceli Monsevais. He could detect something just beneath the surface—Araceli upset, hurting, but trying to be strong. She was looking directly at Mrs. Salinas, trying to flag her down with her eyes.

Mrs. Salinas ran her fingers through the coal and silver curls that framed her face, and dragged them back across her head. When she opened her eyes again, Araceli caught them.

Chon watched the women interact. Araceli smiled warmly and patiently at Mrs. Salinas like she was saying it was all okay, like she was hurting too, like she was giving this lady almost thirty years her senior permission to feel this bad and, eventually, to feel better. Mrs. Salinas closed her eyes again and a pained smile came over her face. She shook her head in agreement, seemingly with herself. She opened her eyes and clapped her hands.

She was a new person. Or at least she was ready to try to be one.