Finn Read online

  Silvia managed to stay fairly calm until I told her to call 9-1-1. I knew she wouldn’t. She’s an illegal alien and paranoid of the police. Instead, she ran to the kitchen and brought me some ice for my gums, which was very sweet of her. Then she told me to take off all my clothes and get in the shower to wash off the radiation. The shower idea was too much. I mean, a shower. What a simpleton!

  When she found out I had fooled her, she was pissed—particularly about the 9-1-1 business—but it didn’t last long. Silvia couldn’t hold a grudge. Besides, I had seen her boyfriend Roberto sneaking into her room a bunch of times, and she knew I had seen him. With something like that on her, I could pretty much do whatever I wanted.

  Truth was, I never would have ratted her out about Roberto, even if I didn’t approve of all the sneaking around, which I didn’t. It wasn’t as if he was repulsive. I suppose you could even call him handsome, in a South of the Border way, if you didn’t mind the odd gold tooth or the armfuls of cheap stuffed animals that came with the package. Silvia liked him plenty. They were always smooching and doing more than that when they thought I wasn’t looking. I’m the first to stand up for people’s privacy, but the way Silvia and Roberto went at it, sometimes I wondered if they wanted to get caught.

  One morning, I saw that Silvia’s eyes were puffy and red, and her cheeks, which were plump to begin with, were all swollen. I asked her if she was okay and she gave me a long hug, squeezing much too hard, the way people do when they’re very upset, and she said, “Oh, Chica”—that’s what she called me when she was feeling particularly tender—“my Roberto is moving to California for his job. I am to be all alone.” Silvia could be very dramatic. I told her that she still had me, and not to worry, because she could save up her money and go out and visit him.

  That’s when I learned something awful about my grandparents. They weren’t paying her! Silvia told me that my grandparents were giving her “room and food,” which meant a lousy basement apartment and a few bags of groceries each week. And they promised not to call Immigration on her. In exchange, Silvia worked twelve hours a day, six days a week.

  I confronted my grandfather about it because he’s notoriously cheap. I figured the arrangement had to be his idea, but he surprised me by saying that my grandmother was the one who “handled the girl.” When I asked my grandmother about it, she got all testy and told me I shouldn’t poke around in Silvia’s business. I told her it wasn’t Silvia’s business I was interested in. I just wanted to know what made someone think they could make another person work so hard without paying her. That’s when my grandmother said, “Silvia’s situation is none of your business.”

  I might have let that go if she hadn’t used the word “situation.” I never knew until that moment that my grandmother was hiding things from me. I thought she was bigger than that.

  Silvia found out she was pregnant two weeks later. I helped her with the test. She couldn’t read the instructions in the box. In her defense, the print was pretty tiny, but I’m not sure she’d have been able to understand them, even if they were in Spanish. I told her what to do while she did the test, peeing into a cup and then testing her pee with a plastic wand. If she wasn’t pregnant, we were supposed to see a minus sign; if she was, we’d see a plus sign. I didn’t get into that with her, because I wasn’t sure how strong she was in math.

  It turns out I didn’t have to explain a thing. A plus sign showed up, which of course Silvia interpreted as a cross—she’s extremely Catholic, not to mention superstitious. She whispered, “Dio mio!” and then she tried to faint, but the bathroom was too small, so all she managed to do was slump down over the toilet. It was funny to watch, but I didn’t laugh because I knew that underneath all the dramatics, Silvia’s life was suddenly a lot more complicated.

  She made me swear not to tell my grandparents. Then she told me some more awful things about them, like what they said about Mexican girls the first time she met them. By now she was sitting on the toilet, rocking back and forth, shaking the pregnancy test like a thermometer, as if she wanted to take it again, just to be sure. “They told me not have any boyfriends, because Mexican girls like to have too many babies,” she said. Apparently, my grandfather also said some very rude things about Mexican girls who sneak into the States just to have a baby here, so it can be a U.S. citizen. That part didn’t surprise me too much. I had heard it before. I had even modified it slightly and used it with Mr. Lynch. But my grandfather went on to say that Mexican girls who did that were no better than animals, and any self-respecting citizen had a moral obligation to send a pregnant Mexican back home to Mexico, where she belonged. So Silvia knew what was in store for her if my grandparents found out.

  And they might not have found out, if it hadn’t been for me. Silvia got very good at hiding the pregnancy. She wore baggy clothes and all sorts of underwear contraptions, and it’s extremely possible that she could have hidden the whole thing from my grandparents, right up to the birth. In the final weeks of her pregnancy, I had been picking up some of the slack, things that Silvia just couldn’t do, like scrubbing the floors and putting the high dishes away. My grandmother asked me if I had seen Silvia eating a lot of sweets lately, but otherwise she didn’t seem to suspect a thing. Silvia had a plan for having the baby, which she didn’t tell me much about, but apparently it had something to do with people from her church.

  This is something that’s hard for me to talk about. It still makes me sick to think I did it, but I was really angry at Silvia because she wouldn’t take me out driving. My grandparents had two cars, a fancy one and an everyday one. So when they ran an errand, or went to one of their thousands of doctors’ appointments, the fancy one just sat in the garage. That seemed like a waste, so I was making Silvia teach me how to drive. I won’t be legal for a few years, but I’m tall and athletic for my age, and I look a lot older, and driving is something I really like to do. If I came home early from school and my grandparents were out on an errand, I’d make Silvia drive us over to the Safeway parking lot. When we got there, Silvia would slide over and fasten her seatbelt and I would walk around to the driver’s side and adjust the seat, since I’m a lot taller than she is. I’d practice driving, mostly in circles. I’d make the tires squeal a few times, just to watch the expression on Silvia’s face. She hated driving with me, but most of the time she couldn’t refuse, on account of what I knew about her and Roberto.

  Until two days ago. It was late in the afternoon. My grandparents had gone out to fill a bunch of prescriptions. I told Silvia to take me driving. Silvia said no. She said that driving the car made her nervous for the baby. She said she could get sent back to Mexico for driving without a license, and besides, she didn’t like lying to my grandparents.

  I don’t know what I was thinking. I’d been having the same nightmare for a week, the one where I’m in the hospital giving birth, and I see the baby coming out, but instead of a baby, it’s my mother’s head. In the dream, the head glares at me and then starts gnawing on the umbilical cord. That’s when I usually wake up.

  So I was practically a zombie from lack of sleep. That’s no excuse, and I’m really ashamed of it now, but I lashed out. I told Silvia she had to do what I said or else I’d tell my grandparents how she was lying to them every day, and that the biggest lie of all was the little brown bastard in her belly. Silvia looked horrified, more horrified than she should have been, even at my saying something like that. “Chica,” she said softly, “look who’s home.” And there they were, frozen in the doorway with their big prescription bags from the drug store. I’d been so worked up that I hadn’t heard them come in. Their eyes were focused like lasers on Silvia’s belly. My grandmother moved behind me and clamped her hands on my shoulders and said, “Oh, Silvia. How could you?” My grandfather waved us away and said, “I’ll handle this.”

  My grandmother took me to my room, and we sat down on the edge of the bed until my grandfather came to get us. We didn’t talk much while we were waiting. My gra
ndmother kept saying, “It’s just a shame, that’s all. She’ll be fine. Just fine.” Meaning back home in Mexico.

  Yesterday morning, Silvia left. My grandfather made a thorough inspection of the basement apartment to see if Silvia had stolen anything. My grandmother waited for him at the kitchen table, stirring her decaffeinated tea and telling me I should learn my lesson from this, that you can never trust “those people,” not even the girls. “Well?” she said, when my grandfather finally came upstairs to make his report.

  “I didn’t notice anything missing, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t steal.”

  “Did she leave a mess?”

  “No. It’s clean. She left some of her religious garbage in the bathroom. But otherwise, no.”

  “Oh,” said my grandmother. She seemed disappointed.

  If the whole thing hadn’t been my fault, I would have been furious with her.

  Chapter Three

  I guess I’m through with sleeping. Ever since I got Silvia fired, I can’t seem to keep my eyes closed. I tell myself that it’s her fault for getting pregnant. And for being illegal to begin with. But whatever she did wrong still doesn’t justify what I did wrong. That’s a rule my father—rest in peace—taught me.

  This morning at school, I must have looked awful because Ms. Bellows came up to me after first period and asked me if I needed to lie down. I said no, not really. I almost told her about Silvia, but then I didn’t, because I knew that telling her would make me feel better. I didn’t want to feel better, at least not yet. Ms. Bellows said that I should try to get some fresh air—they’re very big on fresh air at the Field School—and I said okay, because I really was having trouble keeping my head off my desk.

  I went outside for a while, but the sound of the younger girls playing depressed me, so I went back in to find Marian. I found her in science lab, off in a corner by herself, as usual, roasting the cap of her ballpoint pen over a Bunsen burner. I had to hand it to her—she looked great, even in a white lab coat. She was wearing a pair of antique safety goggles that made her look like Marie Curie. Little details like the antique goggles made me believe the rumors I’d heard about her being rich.

  Marian almost blew it by saying, “Why, Chloe! What a lovely surprise,” as if I had just walked into her kitchen. I told the science teacher that the principal had an urgent message for Marian. He went out of his way to believe me. The Field School likes to make its students feel like “Responsible Citizens.”

  Marian and I went up to the Hollow, our hangout at the high end of the school grounds. To get there, you follow a dirt path behind some boxwoods to a little nook. The ground there is dry and covered in pine needles. The hedges form a nice thick wall between you and the school. But the best part about the Hollow is the gap in the chain link fence. You could squeeze through it, if you wanted to, and be right out on the sidewalk. Free as a bird. Marian and I hadn’t done that yet— we preferred to lean back against the gnarled roots of the hedges and people-watch—but the possibility of escape made the place feel extra secret.

  I thought it was going to be hard to tell her about Silvia, but even before we were settled in, I was blurting everything out like a baboon. Marian sat there, outlining her lips with a knuckle, as if she were applying my story like lipstick. When she finally said something, she sounded almost like a normal person—a very rare phenomenon, I can assure you. She was at her most serious.

  “Chlo,” she murmured, “you have to fix this.” I knew she was right, but I wasn’t ready to admit it. I pointed out that Silvia wasn’t exactly innocent, since she had started the whole thing by: a) being illegal and b) getting herself pregnant.

  “She couldn’t help it,” Marian said. “Latins are hot-blooded.” I waited for more, but Marian was laying it on pretty thick with all the silence. Finally, she asked me what my intentions were. I said I was still working on them. She told me not to think about it too long, because the streets could be very cruel. “You’ve read Dickens?” she asked.

  I resented the Dickens comment, because, in fact, I had read some Dickens, and I knew that horrible things always happened to the characters in his books when they got booted out, even if everything worked out in the end.

  Marian could tell I was annoyed. “I think you need some time alone with your thoughts,” she said.

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “Ciao, bella,” she said. Then she put on her Marie Curie goggles and left.

  I sat and sulked in the Hollow for a while. I wondered how long it would be before Ms. Bellows started to worry about me. I imagined what it would be like if first Ms. Bellows, and then everyone else, one by one, deleted my existence from their minds. It was a perfect, melancholy thought. I lay back. The hedges waved their stiff arms over me. The sun lit up the veins in the fluttering leaves. The occasional jet sliced silently through the high clouds. Sleep was finally catching up.

  I must have rolled a little during my nap, because when I woke up, my feet were where my head had been. My face was full of sun. A man was shouting at me, but the more I woke up, the quieter his voice got, until it was almost like a whisper, as if I was a baby and he had moved me to my crib and was trying to talk me back to sleep. The man was standing over me, whispering. He wore a wool hat, which was out of place because it was May and already warm. He was big and fat and he had one of those tiny triangular beards on his chin that they call a “soul patch.” In my groggy state, I imagined that he was freeing my arms, which seemed to be tangled in the gap in the fence. But then the metal bit into my arm, and the pain woke me up completely and I realized he wasn’t freeing me from the fence at all.

  He was dragging me through it.

  Chapter Four

  I flailed my arms and legs and screamed “Rape!”, which was what I thought you were supposed to do when a strange man was grabbing you, but there were only two people nearby, a bicycle courier with dreadlocks sitting on the sidewalk next to his bike, and a businesswoman clopping along in high heels and a fancy suit. The bicycle courier was watching what was happening very closely, and even though he didn’t get up to help, I at least got the feeling he considered it, unlike the businesswoman, who looked at her watch, pretended to remember something important, and took off across the street. I could almost forgive the bicycle courier. I’ll bet his legs were aching and this could have been his only chance to rest all day. But the businesswoman really bothered me, not so much for being a coward, which was understandable, but for that phony glance at her watch. What a hypocrite!

  Soul Patch wasn’t helping my case by shouting “Come on, Chloe, now stop it!” at the top of his lungs. Strange as it may seem, I wasn’t too surprised he knew my name. After all, he had touched me while I was sleeping, which was so intimate. Soul Patch was saying other things which struck me as truly bizarre, like, “Haven’t we talked about this?” and “Is this how I taught you to behave?” as if we were having a conversation. No—as if I was family. I suppose it made good sense for him to say those things—strictly from the point of view of a kidnap-per—because it gave people like the bicycle courier or the cowardly businesswoman the excuse they needed not to get involved. It helped them imagine that my screaming “Rape!” and flailing around were things that a spoiled brat would do to embarrass her father—who, when I finally admitted it to myself, was the person that Soul Patch was most trying to sound like.

  The fact that he was trying to sound like my father really set me off, because if I made a list of the people I loved most in the world, my father would occupy the number one spot, even though he’s been dead for a long time. And to have someone as disgusting as Soul Patch pretend to be my father while snatching me out of school and forcing me into a big van painted up with barbarian women in bikinis—let’s just say it gave me a new burst of energy.

  Soul Patch quietly apologized as he clamped his sweaty hand over my mouth. He was wearing one of those fingerless gloves that bicyclists wear. I was glad of it, too, because even though the leather was damp and
a little rank, I imagined that the palms of his hands were a thousand times worse. He was being very formal for some reason, asking me to please watch my head as I stepped up on the van’s running board, and, after we were inside, wondering if the duct tape was too tight as he wrapped it around my hands. He apologized for it being so hot in the back of the van, since most vans didn’t have air conditioning, at least not for the cargo area, and his van didn’t have any at all, not even for the driver. The formality didn’t exactly make me feel comfortable, but at least I wasn’t quite so scared when he climbed back out and slid the side door shut. He said, “Watch yourself, now,” as he slammed it, which struck me as funny. It was something a soccer Mom would say.

  The van had a metal mesh wall blocking off the cargo area, so I couldn’t do very much in the way of eye-scratching, ear-biting, or crotch-pounding, which were three other things I heard were good in a crisis. Soul Patch strapped on his seatbelt and brushed his sweaty hair straight back with the tips of his thumb and forefinger—he was strangely careful about keeping the bicycle glove away from his hair, as if he had heard that human hair sweat destroys even a good pair of bicycling gloves—and then, when he was all strapped in, he heaved a big sigh, as if we had both just narrowly escaped an ambush, and said, “So, are we all set?”

  He seemed to be asking the question as much for himself as for me, but I answered by holding up my arms, so he could see the long red curves where the fence had scratched me. I guess he had been focused on trussing me up, because he was genuinely surprised to see the blood. The cuts were pretty shallow, so it’s possible that they hadn’t started bleeding when he was taping me up. Now, though, there were some nice thick red lines—no big deal, really. I’ve had a lot worse. Still, I thought he was going to pass out when he saw it.

  He said, “Oh, man!” His head drooped as if he was going to put it between his legs, the way you do to avoid fainting. I couldn’t be sure, but it was completely possible that the sight of the blood on my arms actually did make him feel faint. That’s how totally not threatening he was. When he squeezed the bridge of his nose, the Velcro flaps of the bicycle gloves—he didn’t fasten them, I think, because his hands were too fat—brushed his unshaven cheeks and made a scritching sound. Then he turned to me. “You’re okay, right?” he said. “I mean, you’re not going to need stitches, are you?”