Downtown gave way to houses, colorful and cluttered. During the day, the paletas man would trudge through the neighborhood with his cart, ringing his bell, selling Popsicles and bags of churritos, crunchy pinwheels of pork fat with chile. Women with children would vend plastic cups of fresh melon slices, pepinos, pineapple. Some of their husbands and brothers would stand at the freeway’s edge to sell flowers and bags of oranges.
Once, in the Valley, a man had stood in a parking lot selling a single orange. Gabe had been waiting for Bianca across the street in his truck, but she insisted on stopping to see what that man was about. He’d sliced the orange in half and to every person who passed he offered this one piece of fruit. Why this orange? Had he picked it from some nearby tree and chose to sell it rather than eat it himself? And who would want a halved orange, cut by a stranger in a parking lot? After she’d climbed into Gabe’s truck, she’d realized she should’ve bought the orange from the man. He’d had a need. To fill that need, he’d offered his fruit. He’d sliced it open, so Bianca could see it was good, it was ripe and would taste delicious. She wished she could’ve been so open with her own need, so ready to slice her gift and offer it, with no pretense, no artifice. Simply a woman with an orange.
Santa Ana reminded Bianca of licking the lemon and chile from her fingers with Lily. The two girls would sneak the lead-filled Mexican candy Mama had warned Bianca not to eat or it would turn her blood black. Still she and Lily had pushed the sweet-spicy goo through the holes of the pop-top like worms, then squished it onto their tongues and spread it across the roof of their mouths until they went numb with heat. Bianca could handle it until she couldn’t. Like her BFF’s candor. For all her badass behavior, Lily could be chile-sharp. Bitter. Bile in the back of the throat. Driving away was milk, a salve to Bianca’s memory. Leaving was bread in a burnt mouth.
Even leaving her Lily of the Valley.
The apodo fit her blond-haired, blue-eyed, porcelain-ivory-CoverGirl-foundationed best friend forever since junior high. Lily, no regular white girl. She ate chiles like pepinos, and not just the kind in the bag with onions and carrots, but the really hot kind they put into the blender for salsa. Lily could do the washing machine Selena-style like nobody’s business and understood what a busticaca was. And in junior high, Lily had lined her lips with a darker brown than even Bianca had dared, when they were going through their chola phase. Lily still preferred the tangy granules of the candy called Lucas, like the boy’s name, rather than a chocolate bar. And when they were kids, Lily poured lime crystals into her hand, sucking her palm then waving it all “Wáchale” at passing cars as they sauntered down Rio Vista shaking their hips (because that’s how junior high girls walked anywhere) meaning both “Check me out” and “Watch it, man.” She would bawl out anyone who tried to holler at them for real though, anyone who slowed the car too slow and rolled down the window. Lily would curse a storm and scare them off while Bee giggled and rolled her eyes, then her friend would link her arm through Bee’s elbow and say something like, Don’t forget how that one girl ignored a guy’s catcalls so he tracked her down and killed her. You can’t mess with these scrubs. To Lily’s way of thinking, she was slaying dragons. She had protected them like that. Had understood she’d needed to protect Bianca. La Dreamer. La Empath. La Heart on Her Sleeve. Bianca had needed a practical Lily to pin her feet to the ground so she didn’t go fluttering off into el cielo.
But Lily dealt in truths like lead around the neck and the ditchwater rising. Bianca couldn’t stand her friend right now. She’d promised to text her when she was safe at Matty’s. “Stay at my house, Bee,” Lily had insisted. “Don’t just take off in the middle of the night.” But Bianca had to get away. She’d made up a story about not burdening her. A lie. No, she couldn’t handle listening to Lily’s shit opinions wrapped as tough love, callous dronings on what Bee should’ve done instead. What difference would it have made?
Or maybe she was afraid to show her Jubilee.
Matty’s porch light shone against red bricks at the end of Woodland Street. The natives of Santa Ana pronounced it like the guitarist Santana with a Spanish accent, all one word. But the streets had English names like Baker, Treeline, or Moss. Names that conjured up forest images, though there were no state parks in Santa Ana. At Tía Lydia’s in the ritzy beachfront section of Orange County called San Juan Capistrano, twenty miles away, all the street signs were in Spanish, and Tía’s friends pronounced them funny, making Campanilla sound like “camp vanilla.”
Bianca’s legs ached, but not from driving her stick-shift all night. She pitched into the driveway behind Spacedog—Matty’s nickname for the silver Nissan Sentra he shared with Handro. She yanked the parking brake and released the clutch, forgetting she was still in first gear. The car lurched, then died. Shit. She hadn’t done that in years. Not since Dad had taken her out to the country beside the irrigation ditches and vegetable fields and taught her how to drive a stick because a girl should be able to do that kind of thing for herself. Exhaustion settled like powdered dirt onto her chest and shoulders; she fought to keep from resting her head on the steering wheel.
What would Matty think?
She pulled down the visor and checked her face in the mirror. Her forehead and cheeks glimmered fever-pink, slick and shiny with sweat. The bluish pool of bruises had yellowed to soggy pears across her cheeks and chest. Her dark hair matted in frizzy curls around her face. Her ass and inner thighs throbbed; the pad in her chonies clung hot and sticky against her skin. Her stomach hurt. But she was at Matty’s. He would take care of them. He always had.
She glanced toward the house. She wasn’t afraid, despite Santa Ana’s reputation. The neighborhood was safe, though most people assumed otherwise. “You live in Santa Ana?” people asked, wide-eyed. “Isn’t that dangerous? Especially for you guys?” Matty and Handro shook their heads. When they’d moved in, the handyman across the street had welcomed them, offering to fix up the place. Did they need help pulling weeds? With plumbing? Could he park his work van in the double driveway they shared with the neighbors since the house next door was vacant? Matty and Handro were fine with the firecrackers every holiday, the mariachi music weekends, and the avocado tree lobbing its fruit onto the grass in their backyard. And the neighborhood was fine with them, the mariposas in the redbrick house at the end of Woodland Street.
Bianca pressed chanclas to cement; a shockwave of cramping curled her over. Knees buckling, she hunched, hands to thighs. She could’ve been a leaf in an electrical storm, crinkled and burning.
Once the painful jolts released her to the dull, steady drum that had replaced her body, she pulled the handle, and the front seat swung forward. She reached back to unbuckle Jubilee, pink and fuzzy in a bunny-eared romper. Kanga cocked her unclipped ears and wagged her stump of a tail. Earlier that morning, back in the Valley, Bianca had balanced atop a lawn chair on the backyard porch of her empty girlhood house, then wrapped a cord around her neck and hung the slack around a patio post. She’d stared at her dog. She’d willed herself to kick the chair. To do something besides stand there, wobbly in bare feet, with the cord dangling down her chest. She’d closed her eyes and prepared herself to fall. But Kanga had barked and barked until Bianca climbed down and knelt on the slab of unfinished patio cement, still bleeding between her legs.