Leticia searched for images of Salvation Mountain. The trippy, neon-colored monuments were straight from a hippie’s dream. So seventies and beautiful. I wanted to live there, to sleep besides the man-made folk art. I bet my dreams would become Technicolor too.
It was Leticia who’d found Salvation Mountain. She’d heard that the owner had recently died and that the art installation would soon die too. “Who’s going to take care of it?” she’d asked, and I’d called her stupid for worrying about fake mountains so far away. Leticia swore her superpower was empathy. She claimed my superpower was being a total bitch and that was why we complemented each other.
She stared at the phone. Her fingerprints smudged the screen.
“We should go,” she said.
“What if it’s closed or something?” We could waste a perfectly good tank of gas for nothing. She typed on her phone and searched the ’gram. So many wannabes posing in front of the gigantic art installation. They wore their Coachella uniforms—cutoff jeans, fake flowers in their hair, ankle boots covered in dust. A fact was a fact: we didn’t belong there. Not us dumb girls from El Monte with our ratty black T-shirts and our skinny jeans and our rolls of fat bulging out.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Why not? You want to do something. This is what we can do,” Leticia said. “We fill our water bottles and grab a couple snacks. We make sandwiches and head out right now. It will take about two and a half hours to get there.”
The film was showing the part when Thelma and Louise are at a honky-tonk bar and people are line dancing. Cowboy boots pounded the floor in rhythm of the music. Leticia waited for me to respond.
“Okay, let’s go,” I said.
“Yesss, bish. We going fishin’!” Leticia screamed at the top of her lungs, doing a poor imitation of Thelma. Or was it Louise?
* * *
The first time I met Leticia, she offered me half of her tamale. We were both seven years old. It had been my first day of school, and I hadn’t liked the school lunch so I’d refused to eat although my stomach growled loudly like a dog. Leticia didn’t exactly offer the tamale, she thrust it at me, firmly telling me to eat like a mother would a child.
It didn’t take long before Leticia and I were inseparable. We formed a barrier that no one could penetrate. Secrets told under bed sheets converted into tents. Shared meals and jokes. Of course, there was the one and only time we’d gotten pissed off at each other. We were twelve back then. Leticia had started to hang out with the girls who wore lipstick already, and I got angry. Those girls wanted to grow up way too fast. Eventually Leticia abandoned them and we were back on track, battling our days together.
Her parents worked in Vernon at the Farmer John factory, where they slaughter pigs. One time my parents and I drove past the factory, and it smelled like death. A truck had pulled up alongside of us and there they were, large pigs about to be driven to their annihilation. Their snouts poked out from the slits made for them to breathe. Leticia said the smell never left her parents’ clothes. It was encrusted in their hands no matter how many bottles of perfume or cologne she gifted them for Christmas.
Every morning I tuned in to the news before heading to school to see how bad things were for Leticia and her parents. Green cards, citizenship interviews, documentations. Leticia was scared for her mom and dad, and I was nervous for Leticia. They’d left Guatemala so many years ago. They struggled to make a good life here in California like everybody else.
Still, when the man in the White House used the words drug dealers, rapists, and animals, Leticia didn’t shrink. Her chest grew larger. We both stood tall and waited to see if anyone would repeat them words. One boy tried at school. He wasn’t even white, just another brown boy like us. Angel. We cursed Angel out, both of us using the same words the man in the White House used. Others in the classroom joined in, and that felt good. We felt safe.
“If Angel thinks I’m an animal, I’ll rip him apart like one,” Leticia had said, and I’d believed her.
It was easy to scream at Angel when he used them hateful words. But the real fear came when we heard about families being ripped apart, even people we knew being rounded up and taken away. Curse words wouldn’t protect Leticia and her family.
* * *
Although it was my car, Leticia claimed the radio. She was our DJ for the two hours until we reached Salvation Mountain. The bag of snacks stuffed in the tote bag rested by her feet for easy access.
“Let’s listen to Ariana Grande,” Leticia said.
We sang Ariana at the top of our lungs, the windows wide open, carrying our loud, out-of-tune singing voices to the cloudless blue sky.
“Why can’t your car be a convertible?” Leticia asked. She tapped the Puerto Rican flag hanging off the dashboard. The flag was the symbol of my origin story: Puerto Ricans who ended up in California and so far away from the island. As for the car, it was a hand-me-down from my older brother, who’d practically run it into the ground.
“It nearly is. You don’t see that?” I pointed to what looked like a bullet hole. My brother swore it was just a fluke, a rock that somehow penetrated the exterior of the car. I didn’t believe him. “Don’t complain. At least we have a car. I don’t see you driving anything.”
“When I have money I’m going to buy a convertible like the one Louise drives, and I’ll get license plates that says Browngrlz 4ever.”
“That’s too many characters for a license plate, stupid,” I said. Leticia snort-laughed, which made me laugh too.
The traffic slowed down a bit, and a man who looked like someone’s tio in the car driving alongside of us stared, so I did what I did.
“What are you looking at?” I yelled.
“Mind your business, you ugly piece of...” Leticia added and we snort-laughed some more while the tio returned his attention to the road. We felt fearless. Bold. Like we could say and do whatever we wanted.
The first hour went fast. We could track the time from the albums we sang along to (Ariana and Bad Bunny) and the amount of snacks we ate. We talked about the dreams we had (I don’t ever dream; Leticia’s dreams are always about flying), and we talked about the best red lipstick ever made (Wet N Wild Cherry On Top). We didn’t talk about the future, because that meant stress and I didn’t want to invite stress into the car with us. More and more raids were occurring in Vernon, where her parents worked. Every day we wondered if the man in the White House would round up all the “maybe citizens” and lock them away. This was our constant fear. It forced us to create contingency plans. My parents’ garage could shelter a family for a while, but a better idea would be to find a white family to hide them. We talked for hours, figuring out what we could do if the worst happened.