We Were Here (15 page)

His eyes.

On mine.

And then not.

Against the dark cave wall those twenty seconds played like a movie. A video some teacher was showing at school. And I just sat there in the back row watching it. This surge of aloneness rolling through my entire body, numbing the tips of my fingers and making my skin sweat even though I wasn’t moving, and everything trying to push itself out from the back of my eyes.

And I know how people say you should just let it all out, even a guy. But what the fuck do
they
understand? ’cause all I know is the only way I could go on living for even one more hour is if I kept everything exactly where it had to be. Inside. I clenched up every muscle and held it there with all my strength. Like I’d done every other time. I shoved it back down my throat. Gagged on it. Swallowed it back into my stomach like poison.

And right then I decided something: I didn’t care if I
ever
left this cave—like Rondell said, only different. I didn’t care if
I ever really made it to Mexico. Or if I met another cool girl like Mei-li. Or even if I lived or died. I didn’t care about nothin’ or no one and I never would again. ’cause I didn’t deserve to. And just like what Mong said to the store worker earlier, I had nothing left to lose. Those weren’t just words he was saying, they were the truth.

It took me being in the bottom of a cave to truly understand what he meant. In the middle of the night. The middle of nowhere. I really had nothing.

I dreamed about me staying in the cave for the rest of my life. Eventually starving to death. How years from now a couple adventure-type kids would find my bones. How the news channels would all do a story about the mysterious skeleton found at the bottom of a cave. Who was it? Why’d he just stay in a cave until he starved to death?

After a while, though, I took a deep breath and wiped my eyes with the back of my hands.

I squeezed my own arms hard as I could to show I was still real. And then I climbed out through the mouth of the cave and went to go help Mong and Rondell do the food.

When they said they had it covered I went to my bag and got my journal out. I went a little ways down, closer to the water where I could see better, and wrote and wrote and wrote. And now I think I’ve said every single thing that’s happened since Mei-li told her story about those two people in China.

July 19

Me and Rondell killed about five hot dogs each, mowed through half a pack of beef jerky, some donuts and were working on our second six-pack of beer. Mong, on the other hand, he’d hardly touched a thing. He claimed he wasn’t hungry
because he was thinking about how we were gonna get to Mexico, but that was BS. Twice I watched him sneak down the beach and I’d put money down he was throwing up. I didn’t know what was wrong with dude, but it wasn’t no regular stomach flu or food poisoning. I felt bad, too, ’cause of how I’d used my mind on him. I mean, we weren’t best friends or anything, and he was mostly a psycho who I was definitely gonna part ways with the second we got to Mexico, but still. People should never wish medical stuff on other people.

We stayed sitting around the big pile of glowing charcoal, talking—me and Rondell mostly. Us drinking beer, Mong sipping a can of Coke. We talked about Juvi and the way Jaden called everybody “bro” and how it might be down in Mexico. We talked about old girls we’d known and the racist store worker and if because of him the cops would be out looking for us tomorrow. We said how if we had our pick we’d all live in houses right here on the beach like this, where you could hear the waves breaking on the sand and smell the saltwater air coming in through your bedroom window when you climbed your tired ass into bed at night. And then I don’t even know how but we got to talking about what made us scared.

Rondell said the devil. Sometimes, he explained, the devil came right up into his head, at the weirdest times, made him do things he’d never think of on his own. He told us about the time he beat up some man in a suit standing outside a church. For no reason. The devil just went into his head and twisted his thoughts around as he was walking toward the guy. Next thing he knew he was wailing on the guy’s bloody face. Right there on the sidewalk, in front of everybody. Took three cops with billy clubs to finally pull him off. The suit guy ended up spending four days in intensive care with all kinds of injuries, including a fractured skull. It was the first time he ever got arrested, Rondell said. He was only eleven.

I stared at him after he was done telling his crazy-ass story, thinking how maybe that’s the reason he carried a Bible around everywhere he went. Maybe he thought it would fend off his imaginary devil problems.

“Now I’m scared like hell of hearin’ the devil,” Rondell said. “I never know when he’s just gonna come runnin’ up in my head and mix everything up.”

Me and Mong sat there a sec, nodding, letting Rondell’s words have a little space. We all sipped our drinks and stared at the glowing charcoal. I considered how Rondell was more messed up than I even thought. Maybe even as messed up as Mong if you looked at it a certain way.

But what’d that shit say about me, then? I mean, I was right there with ’em.

“What about you, Mexico?” Rondell said.

I took a sip of my beer and pointed the can at him. “Don’t laugh,” I said. “I’m serious. But it’s damn spiders.”

Rondell looked at me with his eyes all bugged. “Spiders?”

“Spiders.”

He slapped his jeans-covered knee and put a fist to his mouth. “Nah, Mexico,” he said through his laughter.

Mong gave me a weird look like I had to be just playing, but I wasn’t.

“I promise, man. Those little bastards freak me out. Bring on a damn panther or cobra snake, put me in a ring with a big-ass bull, I don’t even care. But if I catch a daddy longlegs creeping across my bedspread one night—yo, I put this on everything, I’ll go crash on the living room couch for a week.”

Rondell threw a piece of seaweed at me, still cracking up. He took a swig of his beer and said: “You’s a scaredy-cat, Mexico. I let spiders crawl all on my hands and arms.”

“You also let the devil crawl all over your brain,” I shot back.

Rondell’s face went dead serious. “Wha’chu mean by that, Mexico?”

“What I just said, Rondo.” I glanced at Mong, then went back at Rondell. “Dawg, you gotta take a couple Q-tips to those ears, man. You got mad wax buildup.”

“Just what’d you tell me, then?”

“Spiders freak me out.”

“Oh.”

“That’s all I’m sayin’, Rondo.”

“Why didn’t you just say it then, Mexico? You don’t gotta bring up me and the devil like that. It’s blasphemic.”

I smiled. “Uh, you mean ‘blasphemous’?”

“Wha’chu think I just said?”

I shook my head at the poor kid, told him: “Lemme ask you somethin’, Pope John Paul, what do you think that word even means?”

Rondell sipped his beer and looked at Mong, then he looked back at me. “Means when someone brings in the devil when they supposed to just be talkin’ ’bout spiders.”

I spit out a mouthful of beer I laughed so hard. I pumped my fist and told him: “Rondell, man.”

“What?”

“You my man, dawg. For real.”

At first he tried to be serious, like maybe I was still messing with him, which I was, but then a smile slowly came over his face and he said: “But that’s just what it means, Mexico. Don’t play like I ain’t never knowed what ‘blasphemic’ is.”

Even Mong was chuckling now.

When we all finally stopped laughing I asked him the question, too: “Yo, what about you, man?”

Mong shrugged, said: “Nothing.”

“Come on,” I said. “You gotta be scared of
somethin’
. What about terrorists or earthquakes or herpes.”

He shook his head and looked at the label of his Coke can. “I think we’re all just passing through in this life. We’re only temporary. When I learned that I realized there’s no reason to be scared.”

I nodded for a little while, staring at the sand by Mong’s feet, feeling the alcohol warming my insides. I looked up at him. “I’m not gonna lie, man, you kind of lost me a little. And if you lost
me
that means Rondo over there probably thinks you’re talkin’ about the devil again.”

“Wha’chu sayin’ with me and the devil?” Rondell said, shooting me a dirty look. “That shit ain’t right, Mexico.”

I waved Rondell off and turned back to Mong. “How long you thought that way?”

Mong shrugged. “I just woke up one day and realized it. Like I told that guy in the store, I have nothing to lose because nothing belongs to me.” He paused a sec, picked up a stick and spun it around in his fingers. “I don’t even know what it feels like to be scared anymore. It’s complicated.”

Me and Rondell stared at him, confused. But at the same time I believed him too. Maybe it explained some of the crazy things he did. And how calm he seemed even when we were in a fight.
Nobody
looks that calm during a fight. Not even Diego.

As we sat there in the sand, me and Rondell finished another beer each, cracked open a couple fresh ones. I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol since the last time I chilled with Diego on the levee, so I was buzzing pretty hard. It felt nice and warm and mellow. It made me feel like us three were on some kind of important journey to save America from evil. Like a brand-new kind of war. No fighting or bombing or invading other places, just living out in the open, on the beach. The opposite of being in jail. We were totally free. People think they’re free just being in this country, but it’s more than that.

I looked up at Mong and Rondell all inspired as hell and said: “Yo, I gotta go write in my journal, man.”

When I stood up I realized I was more than just buzzed. I was drunk.

“Why you always writin’ in there for, Mexico?” Rondell said.

“Well, Rondo,” I said, swaying a little, “maybe it’s ’cause a court-appointed judge told me I
had
to.”

“Yeah, but, Mexico,” Rondell said, “that judge ain’t gonna be with us down in Mexico.”

I stood there looking at him for a few seconds. I couldn’t believe it, Rondell had actually just stumped my ass. I almost wanted to tackle the guy into the sand and get his big head in a vise grip for saying something that actually made sense. Instead I just swayed in the wind and sipped my beer, thinking how beer had the exact opposite effect on us two: it made me all dumb as a rock and him halfway literate.

I waved them both off—the big black, drunk-ass Einstein and the little Asian Buddhist psychopath. I scooped up my bag and pointed at Rondell. “Maybe I just still wanna do it. You ever think about that, homey? Maybe someday I’ll bury my journal somewhere in Mexico and hundreds of years from now some archaeologist will come along and dig it up and people will know how we all lived in this era—or at least you, me and Mong. And when they read about you, money, they’ll find out how the devil twists your thoughts and how you eat hot dogs by leaning your head back and dropping the whole damn thing into your big-ass mouth and how pretty much all you do when you’re not eating is piss and shit and sleep and say, ‘Wha’chu mean by that, Mexico?’”

Rondell and Mong both grinned a little, and then Rondell shot back: “You gonna tell ’em I’m handsomer than you, too, Mexico?”

Mong actually laughed out loud after Rondell said that one, which made Rondell think what he just said must’ve been the funniest thing in the history of mankind, and he laughed so hard he actually fell over into the sand.

“I already did, Rondo,” I said.

“Did what?” Rondell said, sitting back up, still laughing.

“Said how handsome you are.”

His face got a little more serious. “You really said that about me, Mexico?”

“Hell nah, I didn’t say that, Rondo! This shit I write in here ain’t fiction. It’s true to life.”

They both laughed a little more, and I shifted my bag from one shoulder to the other and spun around and left.

I walked through thick sand and giant clumps of fly-infested seaweed to try and find a spot with enough light that I could see what I was doing.

I cruised all the way back out to the street, sat on a rock underneath one of the few streetlights and pulled out my journal. Every few seconds I’d look for cop cars even though we were a long ways from the store and I supposedly didn’t care.

I stared at the cover of my journal, thinking about what Rondell had just said about no judges being in Mexico. The guy was right, technically I didn’t have to write in here anymore, but for some reason I still
wanted
to. Maybe it was ’cause I’d already started or ’cause I thought we should have a record of us getting to Mexico. Or maybe it was ’cause of all the books I was reading. And how much I liked ’em, and how me writing in this journal was really just a way for me to make like I was writing my own book—except everything that happens in it is true instead of made-up stories. And I don’t wanna waste time saying a bunch of shit about how I
feel
and
how everybody
else feels
, like a damn girl’s diary does. Maybe I just wanna put what happens. And what people say.

Miguel Castañeda: author.

Yo, you better recognize.

Actually it really doesn’t matter
what
the reason is. Or what anybody else thinks. Or how I do it. I just wanna keep going with my journal.

So I am.

I didn’t end up writing in my journal right away, though. I set it to the side of my bag and pulled out Mong’s, Rondell’s and my files instead, the ones they had no clue I even had. The three folders had gotten pretty messed up in my bag, all folded over and crushed by clothes and some of the food we’d swiped. I smoothed them out, picturing Jaden and Lester sitting in their offices, sipping coffee and reading about us. Deciding who we were just based on what it said.

I opened Mong’s first and read it cover to cover. And I was completely shocked about what it said:

Under education: Mong attended private schools through junior high school, all in Santa Monica, ranked top five in his class with a GPA of over 4.0 at the time of his parents’ death. After being sent to live with extended family, enrolled in a public school in Guerneville, California. Severe drop in grades, attendance and behavior. Held back in ninth grade. Teachers labeled him: “aloof,” “withdrawn,” “violent,” “at risk.”