The Years After (46 page)

But he misses the fist coming right at him and I scream when it connects. Max’s face contorts in pain and he almost lets go. Oh my GOD. I
cannot
watch him getting hurt like this. I am sickened by it. For his pain, and for the pain he is inflicting on the other guy.

I run into the house and search for privacy until I find a small, empty, half bath. I sit on the toilet seat and let my tears fall. I hate him. I sometimes hate Max because I just can’t begin to understand him or why he does the things he does. Some are terrible things, like right now, choking another human being!

A knock sounds on the door. Brad? Has he come looking for me? I doubt if he noticed my eye lock with Max. Last I saw him, he was entrenched in the fight. But then, there it is again, our knock. The special knock that only Max and I know. We made it up when we were fourteen. We were in trouble and put in separate rooms. He started tapping on the wall between us, my imaginary jail cell. Like I said, my parents are my jailors. Anyway, by the end of it, we devised this complicated code of taps and knocks that only we knew. We only used it when entering each other’s house or room. And now there it was.

Leaning forward, I rest my elbows on my knees and my face in my hands while I consider telling him to go away. But it’s Max. He’ll just stand there and wait for me to come out, without a word of complaint. He’ll wait five hours if that’s how long I take. I could picture him simply leaning against the wall, his arms crossed… and not a word would he say. He wouldn’t knock again or beg me to come out. He’d just let me stew… and wait. He can be that persistent. I save myself the trouble, get up and unlock the door.

He steps inside. I gasp when I spot the blood on his forehead. His hands are dripping in blood too. He split his knuckles. My stomach turns at the sight. I hate blood. I
detest
that he does this to himself. It repulses me. It sometimes makes me so disgusted, I want to hit him just to try and knock some sense into him.

I stare at him. He stares at me. I am five-foot-one, and one of the few people that gives him the effect of having height. His face is completely expressionless. He is half Latino so his eyes and hair are dark. He holds my gaze. He has balls unlike anyone I’ve ever met before. He is freakishly fearless. He will take on anyone, no matter how much bigger or fiercer than he. He is small, lithe, and scrappy. He is also quiet. So quiet, most people forget he is in a room, or even in their lives. His dark eyes rarely show what he thinks or feels. Because of his ethnicity, and Ellensburg having a high number of transient workers from Mexico, both legal and illegal, to work the farms and ranches of the area, most people think he doesn’t speak English. But instead of correcting them, he almost revels in that mistake. He loves the anonymity. He craves it. He is there, but more as a ghost than a human being.

Sometimes, I feel the weight of Max’s burden on me. I am his voice, and his only connection to the world. I assumed that role by myself, when I was in seventh grade and I first met him. I took him to school with me, and back then, his severe speech impediment made him stutter and slur his words. He’d been mocked and jeered at all his life, while I was well liked and popular. We live in such a small town, that I became a kind of queen bee around everywhere. I kind of claimed him as mine.

He and I are completely different. I am outgoing to almost everyone. I am usually friendly and I hope most people think I’m a nice person. Max is so introverted, like I said, many think he can’t speak English or only broken English. Not true. He can speak perfectly when he chooses to. He remains unfriendly to almost everyone. Except me. Max is always nice to me.

And always… there is Max. Sometimes, he is like this huge albatross around my neck. He never even tries to fit in anywhere. He has no friends. He’ll beat up anyone for no real reason. Another oh so not appealing fact about Max is: he loves to pick fights. I mean to the extreme. He’s been running street fights since he was in the fifth grade. He earned a sufficient amount of money doing so, as he was the perfect hustle, owing to his slight build and stature. I’ve seen him fight. He’s fierce. No one sees it coming. And I hate it. One time, I saw him bring a kid to his knees. I ran from him, afraid and crying, and refused to speak to him for a week. He really scared me. He always scares me when he fights. He becomes a different boy when he goes into what I call his fighting “trance.” It’s creepy. This blank expression comes over him. It’s all-consuming and impenetrable. It’s also lethal. Or at least, almost lethal.

I stare at him, and his facial expression doesn’t change.

He is usually my best friend. I mean like my
real
best friend. Not the BFF you hang out with at the lunch table, or exchange idle gossip with about who hooked up with whom. No, Max and I go much deeper. We just are. Always. Best friends. I love and trust him. My aunt and uncle adopted him shortly after he and his brother came to Ellensburg. They were escaping from a really bad life in California. After that, we were officially cousins, so I spent all these years mostly with him. He tagged along everywhere I went, even when no one else really wanted him. Not that anyone dared to be mean to him in front of me. He didn’t even try to defend himself against idle gossip or rude kids. He only fought to make money. I was the one who, more than once, ripped into someone for mistreating him, or assuming he didn’t speak English. Some even tried speaking louder to him, implying that his reluctance to speak indicated he was a moron.

I break our silent standoff. “You’re bleeding again. Sit down.”

He doesn’t comment, but sits on the closed toilet seat. There are no towels. I find a roll of paper towels under the sink and pull several sheets off, which I run under the faucet before approaching him. His eyes never leave mine as he watches my movements. His distrust is high. His fight or flight instinct is ever on alert. Except it’s usually turned on to fight. I lean over and gently touch the paper towel to his bleeding cut at his hairline. It looks like a ring or watchband sliced the skin. He has dark skin, darker than his brother even. No one knows for sure if his father was the same father as his brother, Derek.

I leave the wet paper towel there for several long, silent moments. Yes, still quiet. We often do that. We do not communicate like any other couple or friends in the world. Everything we say comes through our silences with each other. He knows how upset I get. I talk to everyone, all the time, and sometimes I prefer being with Max because I don’t have to talk or be happy, or really be anything. I can just be Christina in whatever form or mood I feel like at that moment. And stranger still, Max usually senses whatever mood I am in.

I step back and throw the wet towels in the trash before ripping off some more. This time, I drop to sit back on my heels. No way am I letting my knees touch the dirty floor in the bathroom, but I lean forward to grab his hand and bring the wet, cool towel over his bleeding knuckles. He jerks back at first. I tug harder. I lift my face to his and glare at him. He hates to be touched. Anywhere. Yet he willingly tolerates guys who are much older and bigger than him to slam their fists and feet into his vital body parts. Stupid thing to do. Stupider still, that he is afraid of
my hands
being on him. I can count on one hand how many times during the five years we’ve been best friends that I’ve actually touched him.

“You’re bleeding. Let me.” I hold his stare. He is stiff now. His back is straight and his jaw clenched. I tug his hand back towards me and touch it with the wet towel. I don’t mean to, but the sight of his bloodied knuckles causes tears to come to my eyes. I sniff and try to hold them in. It is just so wrong. He does this to himself, and yet he won’t even let me hug him. I am not able to hold his hand or…

No. I spent too much of my adolescence wishing things about Max that could never be. Things he doesn’t feel for me. Things that could include touching.

“Why are you crying?” His tone is soft, and his eyes are genuinely confused. He lifts a finger as if he’s about to trace the tears or wipe them, but he hesitates, as always, and drops his hand, as always. I lower my gaze as his usual rejection stings just as much as the first time.

I shake my head. “Why do you do this? Why do you bloody yourself like this?”

He shrugs. “I didn’t know you’d be there.”

“That doesn’t change what you did! Or what you do. I thought… I thought you didn’t do this anymore.”

“I try to make sure it doesn’t get back to you guys.”

“So you still do it? Don’t you dare lie to me. This wasn’t just a fluke, was it?”

He drops his gaze and tugs his hand from mine to wrap his other hand around the wad of paper towels. I stare at his entwined hands and feel the loss from my own. He still, after all these years, and all our times together, hates my touch. “No. Not a fluke.”

I drop my hands to my lap. “I hate you doing this. Why? I just don’t understand why.”

“I like the power,” he mutters.

“There’s no power in pain. Just stupidity,” I snap as I rise up to my feet. His gaze follows me. I can feel his burning, black eyes digging into my skin. He can handle any insult in the world, but he hates it when I call him stupid.

For years after coming to live here, Max stuttered and struggled to even make a single, normal sentence. He underwent intense speech and occupational therapy. He’d come so far, but still rarely spoke to anyone outside of our family. He mostly only talked to me. But I didn’t totally know him or understand him either. Even after all these years, and all the days I invested in trying to simply talk to Max. I’ve tried so hard to get to know Max, and still I realize that I don’t know him.

But sometimes, his actions are just so damn stupid.

I feel the barest touch on my knuckle. I glance down as if the appendage didn’t belong to me. There is Max’s index fingertip on my knuckle. I stare in wonder at the unusual sight of his dark skin against my pale skin. I want to clasp his hand in mine. I want to lean on my knees and wrap my arms around him and press my head against his chest and have him reassure me. Because when he does those things, that crazy fighting, it really scares me. I worry about what could and might still happen to him if he continues putting himself in those situations. And what if he ends up getting really hurt? I cannot handle it. He is part of my everyday life. The best part on most days. But it’s so hard to accept he might get hurt; especially when the cause would be his own
stupidity.

But right now, he’s willingly touching me. My breath catches inside my throat and I keep my lips pressed tight. I can’t move my hand even a hair’s breadth, or he will jerk his hand back. He will turn his face away from me in near disgust and it will be over. Like smoke into the atmosphere, this moment will vanish.

“I do it—” I wait. I am dying to hear what excuse he can possibly have to act like this. “Because it’s the only time I feel heard.”

I didn’t expect that. I lift my head up and again, our eyes meet in a long moment. I want so badly to lean closer and press my forehead against his and say,
I understand
. I wish I could say that to him. I want to show him how much I understand him. How much his pain means to me. How much I care that he hurts so much.

I only know bits and pieces of how Max Salazar came to be a part of my life. I know he grew up in rough neighborhood in Northern California. I know the brother he cares about, Derek, sold drugs for their older brother in order to keep Max out of the family operations. I know from Derek that Max spent years without saying a word. He was only three when that started. He also witnessed Derek, who was then only eight, shoot their father who tried to hurt them. I know his mother was mean. I know they were hit regularly and mistreated and lived in filth and squalor. I know when help finally came, they found Max alone, in a junky apartment. He reeked and was street fighting to make enough money to eat. I know now he can’t stand to be dirty. His clothes. His car. His hands. His school backpack, all have to be pristine at all times. I know Max’s silence results from a lot of anger, and a lot of rage. I know his fights are how his rage comes out. And that is why, perhaps, they so terrify me. When I see that look in his eyes, like I saw tonight, I don’t know Max anymore. He isn’t the Max who I ride home from school with, or lounge around either of our houses, doing homework, or eating junk food. In the midst of fighting, he is totally lost to me. He is gone. I am no longer the one person who knows him best. And when I lose that connection with him, it makes me feel like he cut out my heart. I want to run under a table and cover my ears and squeeze my eyes shut as if to keep it from happening.

As if I could block out the pain inside him.

I shake my head and tears fill the bottom rims of my eyes. “You make me hurt. I hear you, Max. I hear you every day. When I don’t hear you, is when you do
this,
” I whisper, shutting my eyes on the images of Max. He looked like he wanted to kill that drunken, out-for-a-good-time, college freshman.

As always, his answer to me is silence. Finally, he asks in a more normal, conversational tone, “What are you doing here?”

He’s done. He pulls his hand off mine, or I should say, his teeny, tiny, fingernail-width touch, as if my skin suddenly started radiating toxic fumes. His eyes go blank and dull, back to Max not understanding anything. Or sharing anything. I slip my hand under my other arm as if he bruised me. I shake my head and stare him down. I wish I could hurt him as much as this insanity of his hurts me. Instead, I grab the doorknob and open it, saying over my shoulder, “Having sex. Get home safe.”

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