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OUTSIDE, THE AIR felt charged and hot. It was only the first week of May, but I was already sweating buckets in my itchy school uniform. Before we moved up to Vermont, I’d always heard that the winters here were bone-chilling and the only hope of summer was a few weeks in August. Maybe those were just stories, though. I still had yet to experience a real blizzard or build a snowman. We’d had a few ice storms and some flash floods up here, followed by our current drought, which was in its second sweltering year. Even today as we walked to school, it had to be eighty-five degrees, and the wind was so strong it stung my eyes. The streets and sidewalks were splintering; the forests that used to cover the mountains around us were singed from all the wildfires. It was like a town built out of shadows.
Nothing to see here. Nothing to say or do or change.
Not that Southboro, Vermont, had ever promised to be some great metropolis or even have more than one street that could be called “downtown.” That was the whole reason Mami had relocated us up here from San Diego almost seven years ago. Everything we had was gone. Papi was gone. Our home was gone. Our sense of security and promise were gone.
Mami’s little sister, Tía Luna, didn’t want us to leave California. She found a man who for the right price married her and gave her papers. She told us to come stay with her a few miles away in Imperial Beach, where she was a housekeeper. And we did for a while. But we still felt the “cleanups” and riots amping up around us. I was a mess—peeing my bed and beating my fists into the floor. Trying to knock out that image of Papi on the ground, purple and lifeless.
When we lived in Imperial Beach, every day there were new Presidential proclamations about how “illegals” were trying to ransack and ravage the country. The economy was in danger. The land was in danger. Everybody’s taxes had to triple because there were evil foreigners lurking everywhere, ready to pounce on innocent Americans and take everything they’d worked so hard to achieve. The Great Wall, which had started in San Diego, now had to be extended across all the southern states that touched the border—Arizona, New Mexico, Texas.
Still, the President reminded America, nobody was safe from “the immigrant infestation.”
So Mami did the thing that Colombia had taught her to do—
Run.
When they are coming for you, run.
Run faster than them. Run smarter than them. Just run.
She looked up agricultural towns as far away from San Diego and the border as possible, and found McAuley’s Dairy Farm near Southboro, Vermont. With the help of Tía Luna’s savings, Ernie, Mami, and I got on a plane to the other side of the country. We said goodbye to the amusement park with the dolphins and the lemons in Tía Luna’s yard. To the last places we had been when Papi was still alive.
I remember Ernie being so excited about our first trip in an airplane. We shared a bag of cheese crackers and I pretended not to notice the motorcades of tanks and cranes down below as we flew over the expanding Wall construction.
I knew Mami had moved us up here to protect us and hopefully start over. I knew she thought that here, in this pocket of quiet she had created and prayed for, we could find some peace. Colombia couldn’t give it to us. California couldn’t either. Maybe a ho-hum unextraordinary town like Southboro, Vermont, could. As soon as we got here, there was a new rule from Mami: we could only speak to each other in English. Even though there were ID scans in schools and government buildings, the public parks and stores were left alone. For the most part, we were able to live here without feeling afraid.
But would that still be true after what we’d seen last night?
“Vali,” Ernie said now, elbowing me as we approached his school’s gates. “I said bye!”
“What? Wait.” I felt the overwhelming urge to hug him and hold him, but I knew he wouldn’t abide by that this close to his school, where his friends could see him. Or maybe I could impart some wisdom or warning about being aware and alert and the frailty of our existence. I couldn’t form any of these frantic feelings into a sentence, though. So instead I said something random just to keep him there a moment longer.
“Um, did you pack your lunch?”
“Yeah. You watched me do it,” he answered, rolling his eyes.
“Did you brush your teeth?”
Instead of answering, he just breathed on me so I could smell his breath. “Anything else?” he asked. “Or can I go now?” I couldn’t tell if he was amused or annoyed by my stalling. Either way, I was going to make us both late for school, and that wouldn’t help either of us stay under the radar.
“Nah . . . that’s it,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. “Just . . . go straight to the soccer field after school and . . . yeah. I’ll meet you there!”
“Okay. Bye!” he yelled over his shoulder as he ran toward Southboro Elementary’s entrance.
I watched him step through the first gate and get his wrist scanned without a single glance back. Then he showed his school ID to the nearest security guard and skipped through an open door. I felt myself wincing as I stood there. I was grateful Ernie could sail into school without fearing he’d get stopped or questioned. I really was. But I was also incredibly jealous. I rubbed my finger over that lump in my right wrist. I could still remember my first few years of elementary school, in California, when there were no guards outside of schools. Also, teachers weren’t armed at all, and students could read whatever they wanted. I could also remember when I first got my fake chip and Mami said, “These won’t last forever, but . . .”
That dot-dot-dot at the end of her sentence hounded and haunted me every day. The government still hadn’t figured out a way to track down all these counterfeit chips, but it was only a matter of time. If someone had taken on the identity of a dead person, the death records caught up with them. Or if there was a real, live Amelia Davis out there, scanning her wrist at the same time as me, what then? We’d heard about people being taken away by ICE because their fake chips got detected or somehow malfunctioned. When that happened, the scanner made this horrible chirping noise, like a carbon monoxide detector that had run out of batteries.
I knew that noise all too well, because I heard it one day last year. It was the worst day of my life since Papi disappeared.
Mami was going into Town Hall to pay our water bill. Ernie and I usually just waited outside because it smelled like hot floor wax in that building. But we heard Mami say good morning to the ICE officer in the doorway, followed by the scanner chirping once, then twice, then over and over again in rapid fire.
We ran toward the front steps of the building, but he was already escorting her into a back alley behind the parking garage.
“Wait!” I called out after them. The officer turned around and glared at me. He looked like he’d just woken up, his face sagging with a bushy mustache and thick jowls. Mami refused to make eye contact with me, though. Instead, she raised her pointer finger ever so slightly at me. As if to say, Stop. Do not cause a scene.