“Eyelashes?”
“Jesus, Ash.” She paused and took a deep breath. “So… I have something big to tell you. Huge, actually.”
“All right.”
She’s so dramatic.
“I got married… I mean, it just kinda happened.”
“You don’t just kinda get married, Jo. What about Mom and Dad? What about me?”
Jo and I aren’t as close as we could be, but I always figured I’d be her maid of honor and tell a funny story about us as kids or whatever as I toast the marriage. Or, like, at least be there.
“Are you pregnant?” I blurted out.
“Excuse you. No,” she huffed.
“Sorry.… Congratulations,” I eked out.
“Thanks. So, like, don’t tell Mom and Dad.”
“What the fuck, Jo?”
We didn’t talk that much for the rest of our drive after that. She took me only to the edge of Malibu and back, and we didn’t stop or anything. I called her once to see if she would take me out to practice driving again, but she said, “Have Lucia do it. I’m kinda busy right now.”
I probably shouldn’t have asked if she was pregnant.
* * *
Jo is smart and very sad, and secretly I think it’s easier for my parents that she’s gone, even if nobody wants to admit it. At least fighting about her is easier than fighting with her. How do you raise a sad black girl?
Every emotion is so combustible with Jo, every feeling at full volume. I feel like I’ve got all these emotions just on the tip of my tongue, but it’s like I’m in the doctor’s office going ahhh and there’s that sad Popsicle stick without anything sweet pressing the feelings down.
“We aren’t living the blues,” my dad yelled once, after Jo barricaded herself in her room to cry about nothing, far as the rest of us could tell. “Not here. Not us.”
Lucia says, “Your parents don’t know what she’s so sad about. Sadness for them is a cause and effect, not simply a way to be.”
* * *
Concrete and billboards and people waiting for the bus. Furniture stores and fast food and gas stations and thrift stores. The longer we drive, the dirtier and grayer the city gets and the browner the people get, carrying shopping bags and pushing strollers and carts across crosswalks. A man with a Moses beard rolls his wheelchair right into the street and holds up a yellow sign that says JESUS IS COMING!
Lucia slams on the brakes. “¡Pendejo!”
After all that business with the cop, I’m late getting home, so Lucia brought me an outfit in which to meet my sister’s new husband, like I gotta dress up to see my own sister. Except she’s accidentally grabbed one of Jo’s dresses.
“That’s Jo’s dress,” I say.
“But you wear it all the time,” Lucia says.
“She doesn’t know that,” I say. “I’ll just wear what I’m wearing.”
My foot is still in pain, and my legs are still covered in dust.
“Don’t you wanna look nice?” Lucia says.
“I don’t care,” I say.
“Yes, you do,” she says.
“Fuck Jo,” I say.
“Don’t say that,” Lucia says. “One day your parents will leave you and you’ll just have each other.”
Lucia’s from Guatemala and has twin sons close to my age, Umberto and Roberto, whom she visits once a year. I can’t picture her tiny body carrying a single baby, much less two at once. She had to lie in bed for two months before they were born, she said. Everything hurt and got swollen, and when she pressed her fingertips into her skin, they left little indentations, like when you press into the sand before the tide comes back in; she was that full of water and baby. Even though she says they’re the loves of her life, she also says, “Don’t have sex, mija.”
I wonder if she felt better leaving them, thinking that at least, even without her, they would move through the world together, tethered by their twindom.
The distance between my sister and me is fifteen songs. The first few songs are in Spanish; then there’s some Madonna; then “Tears in Heaven,” which is a pretty song by a racist about a baby falling out a window. Then “Under the Bridge.” The Red Hot Chili Peppers went to Fairfax High School, and Heather’s friend Jeannie’s big sister says she sucked one of them off, which I guess makes them feel a little bit more real.
“Undadabrigdowtow is where I threw some love,” Lucia wails along.
I don’t think those are the lyrics.
Lucia loves music more than anybody else I know, a fact made almost tragic by her utter lack of musicality. Lucia’s room is downstairs off the family room and a little bit smaller than mine. Her records are in a stack right under her nightstand, like at any time she might need to reach over in the middle of the night and listen to “Se Me Olvidó Otra Vez” or “Thriller.”
After the song, the radio DJs open the lines for calls. “What do you think the verdict’s gonna be, fam?”
“Fam” makes it sound like the whole city of Los Angeles is one great big dysfunctional family, and maybe it is.
“Guilty.” The caller wheezes through his sentences. “Ain’t nobody in their right mind wouldn’t find them dudes guilty. We got that <beep> on video!”
“Not guilty,” the next caller says. “The system’s rigged against us. It was built that way, know what I mean?”
“We’re here,” Lucia says.
The buildings in my sister’s new neighborhood have bars on the bottom windows, like somebody took the idea of picket fences and crafted them out of the stuff of weapons. Lucia says this is how you can tell a neighborhood is good or bad in this country: whether the fences are on the ground or on the windows.
Jo’s apartment building is next to a 7-Eleven and a car repair shop and a chicken place; the air around the building smells like fried gasoline. I like the smell of gasoline. It’s the smell of motion. The sidewalks have cracked and buckled in spots from some earthquake. Lucia parallel parks in front of one of them that looks like the game you play when you’re a little kid—“This is the church, this is the steeple”—except the church is broken concrete and the people are the exposed roots, I guess.
For Heather’s tenth birthday, all of us went down to her vacation house in La Jolla the week of the Fourth of July. We mostly spent our time running between the beach and the kitchen for meals, until the house itself was the sand beneath our feet. We boogie boarded and buried each other and built sand castles that we kicked down like little-girl Godzillas. At night we settled into the living room in our sleeping bags and held flashlights under our chins in order to better tell stories about dead people. In the morning the ground jolted underneath us, and we scrambled into the doorway together, knelt down, and held our hands over our heads and touched our elbows together so that we looked like hearts.
“It’s the Big One!” Kimberly yelled.
“We’re gonna die!” Courtney yelled.
“Shut the hell up!” Heather yelled. And then we started laughing because we were scared, but not that much. Still, we pressed our bodies against one another just in case. Best friends are the people you laugh with as the world around you shakes. Or at least they were then. I don’t know now. Seems sometimes like growing older means the ground beneath you starts to shake and you keep trying to find the right structures to hide under, the right people to huddle with, the right roots.