The Secret Side of Empty (6 page)

I walk in from school and into the kitchen. My father is waiting for me at the table. It takes me a minute to figure out what he’s holding in his hands: my spiral-bound journal, open to the middle, exposing my beautiful little stash of earnings.

“What the hell is this?” he asks me, his eyes open scary-wide. I should have known that my “I Have Money” Happiness Train would screech to a halt in You Didn’t Ask Your Father Station.

“Money.” Note to self: Hide journal better.

“Don’t be smart with me. Where did you get it?”

“Tutoring.” I mean, does he want me to be stupid with him?

He snaps his head toward my mother, who is looking grayer than usual. He says to her, “And did you know about this?”

“Well, she said she wanted to help some kids and she needs a computer and—”

He snaps back toward me, a vein popping out of his forehead now. “So you’re begging your friends for money now? Don’t you have any pride?”

“I’m not begging anyone for—” His smack stops me in mid-sentence. Being hit makes me furious. The bone in my face screams out from the impact.

I stay very still, because I have long learned not to give him the satisfaction of reaction or movement. The furious feeling makes its way down my face, to the back of my neck, to my stomach. I bore a hole into the floor with my heat vision and channel all my energy into fantasizing about doing bad things to the hand he smacks me with.

He starts screaming. You never know what’s going to set him off, but you sure know where he’s going once he gets started. He points to my mother. “You! I blame you! She’s seventeen years old! What the hell does she need to be working for! Won’t she have enough years of misery ahead of her? Enough years to be a slave? Is that what you want for her? To be a slave, always taking orders from people?”

“Me or you?” I say.

This makes him livid, and he smacks me again, harder, then again.
Good.
I want to make him livid. It’s the one thing I can do.

“You think you’re so smart! You think a computer is going to make a difference for you! But who are you? You are nothing! You can’t do anything in this country. You hate Argentina so much, but Argentina is your only chance, because in this country you’re dirt, you’re nothing! Serving these losers who think they’re better than you. Do you hear me?”

The Inuit can hear him.

“You need a computer? For what? You can’t get a real job here. You can’t go to college. Stop fooling yourself! And if you ever sneak around behind my back like that again, you are going to be very sorry.”

He reaches into my journal pocket, takes the $175, and slips it in his pocket.

“No little smart-ass is going to keep her own money while she’s living under my roof!” He throws my journal at me, and the things I kept in the little pocket in the middle flutter to the floor: a pressed flower I picked on a walk with Chelsea and a folded copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, which blew my mind the first time I read it so I made a photocopy of it at the library.

I know my money is going toward rent or some other household expense. I’ll never see it again. But I make two vows. One, I’m going to steal my money back out of his pocket from his tip money one dollar at a time if I have to.

And two, I am going to find a better hiding spot for the money I make from now on. I will sabotage and I will carry out stealth actions. When you don’t have armies, you go to guerrilla warfare.

I
am in a supernova fury when my mother walks into my room. I feel the overwhelming urge to throw something at her. In this moment, I hate her more than I hate him. Something about letting all of this happen, and then walking in here wrapped in a cloud of her own powerlessness as her excuse.

“How’s your face?”

I just stare past her, at a spot on the wall where I wrote “Stupid” in pencil about six months ago, which no one seems to have discovered.

“Monse, you just have to learn how to keep quiet.”

This finally makes me look at her. “You’re kidding, right?”

“You disrespect him. He just wants to get respect somewhere.”

I point to my face, where he smacked me. “So this is okay?”

“No, of course it’s not okay. I’m just trying to help you avoid that.”

“So it’s
my
fault?”

“It’s not your fault.”

“But I should keep quiet.”

“It’s just . . . you remember how he used to be?”

“He was always a jerk.” Something feels vaguely off about this statement, like the things you say when you’re trying to win an argument. For some ridiculous reason, I feel my eyes well up with tears.

She looks behind her nervously and lowers her voice as if someone’s coming. “Remember how it was always him and you against me? And I was the wet blanket? And you with your long talks and playing Frisbee on Sundays and watching movies late into the night, always laughing together? Remember? Speaking English so I couldn’t understand?”

“Oh, because I was an idiot when I was, like, four years old makes it okay that he hits me.”

“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying it’s hard for him, too. You should see that.”

“I don’t need to see anything. I need to get the hell away from him is what I need.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’m saying that.”

“Put yourself in his position. He came here a young man with a big dream. And look at where he is now.”

“I don’t care where he is now. Arrested is where he should be now, for hitting me. I wish you’d just leave me alone,” I tell her.

And to my surprise, she does. She walks out of my room like she’s a hundred years old. I fight the urge to throw a pair of balled-up socks at the back of her head.

I get on my bike and go to the library. I have nothing to do, no paper to type or anything due for school. I google “immigration laws” and “immigration amnesty” like I have so many times before. As usual, there is nothing. Nothing good, anyway.

S
UBURBANITES
SURE
DO
LOVE
THEIR
AMBIGENDROUS
NAMES
. The next day, I go tutor Mackenzie, who is a girl, and Cody, who is a boy. Mackenzie is Patricia’s little sister. She can barely add but is some kind of lacrosse star who really needs to pass freshman math. Cody lives two doors down and heard about me from Mackenzie, whom he seems to be crushing on desperately.

In the middle of Mack’s session, Cody walks in, trailed by the maid who let him in.

“Oh, are you guys still working? I thought you were coming over my house at four-thirty,” Cody says. This is the third week he’s done this.

“No, we said five o’clock, remember?” I point out, annoyed.

“It’s okay,” says Mackenzie. “We were just about done anyway.”

We weren’t, but the lesson is now officially over. Cody says something inane and Mack giggles and doodles spirals on the edges of her notebook. I still have to explain simplifying algebraic equations to her, but I’ve lost her. If she messes up on her math test, her parents might start to think that tutoring is not paying off and call in the big guns. Stupid Cody.

“Focus, Mack. Let’s just get through the simplification process before we stop.”

Mackenzie rolls her eyes. “I mean, seriously, am I ever going to need this in real life?”

“Mackenzie, passing math
is
real life. C’mon, look here. Can you simplify this problem further?”

Mack plays it off like she’s going to try, but Cody is throwing little bits of rolled-up paper at her head. I look up and try to keep my patience. In the kitchen, which I can see from the family room because Mack and Patricia’s house is what they call “open concept,” Mackenzie’s parents’ housekeeper is slowly shining a granite countertop that is already so spotless it’s blinding. It blows my mind that she is actually wearing a maid uniform. Did Mackenzie’s parents buy it or does the maid wear it for kicks, being all retro about it?

Mackenzie sees me looking over at the kitchen and mistakes the look for interest in food.

“Yeah, I’m hungry, too,” she says. “Marta, we need a snack.”

Marta looks up and blinks a little, clearly confused.

“Hell-o. Anybody there?” She waves her hand in a slow and exaggerated way. “Marta, snack-o?” Mackenzie rolls her eyes. “Ugh. This one is new. Margarita, who I loved, just moved back to Guatemala, who knows why. Why would anybody go back there? This one’s English is nonexistent.”

“Please bring-o el snack-o.” Mackenzie’s having fun with this now, miming. My guts twist a little and I’m suddenly not hungry at all.

“No, it’s okay, Mackenzie, we’re fine. I should get over to Cody’s.”

“No, it’s not okay that she won’t get me a snack when I need one.”

Marta is coming over, misunderstanding what Mackenzie is saying.

Not wanting to see this go any further, I blurt out, “
Ella dice que si nos puede traer algo de comer
.”

“
Ah, sí, algo de comer. Como guste
,” she says.
As you wish
. She turns toward the pantry full of bags and boxes of every imaginable processed food on the planet.

“M.T., you’ve really been paying attention in Spanish class, huh? I should get my parents to pay you to come over every day after school and translate for the maid.”

All of a sudden my eyeballs are pounding. “Okay, so, look, I’m going to Cody’s now, but you should work on problems eight through twenty-two. And watch nineteen, it’s got that twist we were talking about before. Remember.” I’m slamming books and getting my stuff ready.

Marta puts down a bowl of popcorn and a plate full of Fruit Roll-Ups on the table in front of us.

She turns to me and says, “
Gracias, mi hijita, pero es que yo no hablo mucho inglés todavía.   Y tú de dónde eres?
” Where am I from, she wants to know. I don’t look like her kind to her. To her I look like Mackenzie and Cody’s kind. But that’s not what I am either.

I ignore her, my face burning. I know I’m being rude, but suddenly I have to get out of here. I heave my four-ton backpack on my back. “Cody, we’ve got to go.”

Mackenzie slips me an envelope. On the upper left-hand corner it says, “Phillips, O’Connor and Jones, P.C., Attorneys at Law,” with an address on Park Avenue in the city. Jones is her mom. Her dad owns some kind of business. I’ve never actually seen either of them. I take the cash out of the envelope on the way out, crumple the envelope up, and throw it in their recycling bin.

M
ACKENZIE
’
S
AND
C
ODY
’
S
MONEY
FEELS
HEAVY
IN
MY
POCKET
.
I don’t want to go home. My dad is working a dinner shift, which means he won’t be home until after 11:00. I told my mom I’d be at Chelsea’s until 6:00, which is now, but I don’t have any way to call her and let her know I’ll be late since our phone got cut off a week ago for nonpayment.

After Mackenzie’s and Cody’s spotless granite caverns, the thought of being in my apartment makes me almost vibrate with energy I can’t keep inside.

I pound on my bike pedals, past lawns and hills, water fountains, columns, the freaking Coliseum, Japanese sculptures, a picture-perfect wooden fort. It’s too early for most of them to be home from the city, where they all work, the owners of these homes. Their enormous homes all sit empty, except for the Martas polishing them, waiting for the owners’ return.

I pedal harder.

Finally, a right turn and a left and I’m on the strip, on the Ann Taylor side. I prop my bike up against a streetlight made to look like an old-time gaslight. I don’t have a lock since I usually only bike to people’s houses.

That’s what I’ll get, a bike lock. I know I want to save for a computer, but suddenly the thought of spending my sixty dollars feels amazing, like I’m a little lighter. A better me.

I walk into the pharmacy superstore and get a basket. There aren’t many bike lock options, but the more expensive one looks better, sturdier, so I throw that one in the basket. Next I head over to the makeup aisle. I’m not much of a makeup wearer, but maybe I need to change that. I hover around the eye shadow. They’re like paints in art class—dark, light, shiny, flat. I want them all. I settle on a shiny forest green and a sparkly beige for my eyelids. Maybe if I put on green eye shadow, my eyes will look greener. Anything would be better than my dark, small, ugly brown eyes.