“My family is from Bayamon, but we moved to Los Angeles. Silly, right? We should have stayed near the beach.” I spoke too fast. His name tag said Ortiz.
“Where are you from?” I asked. Beside me Leticia shifted. Her leg bounced nervously.
“Mexico,” he said. A patrolman led the dog around my car. My gaze went to Ortiz’s badge and the revolver that clung to his hip.
“You’re an Ortiz. That’s my mother’s name,” I said, clearly becoming more and more like ditzy Thelma. “We could be related.”
“No,” he said with finality, and he was right, because he had the gun and all I had were my stupid words. We smiled at each other. “So, you’re not even really Puerto Rican. You were born here.”
And I joked, “So?” But he shook his head, because I’d failed his test. The cop who stood behind him didn’t grin at all. His hand rested on his belt buckle. I continued to talk. Tell jokes. Flirt.
“And you?” he asked Leticia. She looked straight at me, her smile intact.
“I’m from Bayamon too,” she said. “We’re cousins.”
He stared at her for a long moment. My hands still clutched the wheel. My knuckles turned white.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to El Monte,” she said. “We’re going home.”
The patrolman with the dog finished his inspection. He stood alongside the others. No smile. No recognition at all. The man with the Ortiz name tag did the head nod, alerting us we were free to go. I shifted the car from Park into Drive. Leticia didn’t turn the radio back on. We continued in silence. I watched the roadblock recede behind us.
My heart was pounding so hard that my whole body seemed to shake with each beat. So many things raced through my head, words I should have said or not said. Had I smiled too much? I must have looked like a fool, like a parrot spouting nonsense. I couldn’t even look at Leticia, because I could feel it. I could sense her fear, and it was bound to explode.
“Puerto Rico. Do I look Puerto Rican to you?” she asked. Venom underscored her tone, and I understood why.
“What? Would it have been better for him to figure out you’re Guatemalan?” I asked. “I didn’t know what I was saying. I just wanted him to let us go.”
“His stupid face. His stupid grin. The way he talked like all he had to do was ask for ID.” Her voice trembled a little, because she was angry, like me. So angry that I wanted to cry.
“He didn’t though. He let us go, so we beat them. We tricked them.”
Leticia shook her head. “It’s so easy for you. You can come and go. You never have to worry,” she said. Her words stung.
“It’s not my fault I’m Puerto Rican,” I said. Puerto Rican means nothing, just ask the reality show host living in the White House. Just ask my family back on the island, who worry about their jobs and keeping their houses. But Leticia was right. I could move around. We’d left the island and found something better. Leticia’s family had left Guatemala with the same hope, and yet a simple checkpoint could mean the end for her.
“I was just trying to get us out of there,” I said. “Did you see the way they were looking at us? How the dog was looking at us, like it knew?” I said this loudly, because she needed to believe me. I hadn’t noticed how my foot was pressing down on the gas pedal. I was speeding. I thought about that time she’d told me about her cousins having to duck down in the car to avoid getting pulled over. How they wouldn’t travel to San Diego or anywhere near the border.
“I’m tired of hiding, of my parents having to pretend everything is fine while people around them think California is safe,” Leticia said. “I’m tired of having to look down at the floor when a cop talks to me.”
“But I have to look at the floor too,” I said, needing to defend myself. “We’re warrior sisters, aren’t we? We are in this battle together.”
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she said. “It’s easy for you. My dreams aren’t of flying. They are nightmares of being locked away in a windowless cell.”
I rubbed away tears, but they kept flowing.
“I hate this life,” she said. “We can’t just get in a car and be free like Thelma and Louise. A stupid movie about white women.” She took off her bandana and tossed it out the window.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt ashamed for flirting with the border patrolmen, for doing what I had to do. Things are easy for me and my family. I’d be dumb to think otherwise, to believe that, because we are both brown, the world isn’t playing favorites when it clearly does.
I spotted the sign that read Salton Sea. I needed to get out of the car—it felt too crowded with emotions. I parked and didn’t bother letting Leticia know what I was doing, just opened the door and got out. Leticia soon followed. Flies circled us. The ground crunched as if we were walking on bones. Tiny bones. There was no one around to witness our sneakers crushing the stones to dust. Leticia was angry, and I didn’t know how to reach her or how to make things better. Leticia’s superpower was empathy, but my superpower sucked.
“It smells like death,” she said after a long silence.
“Yeah,” I said.
I didn’t grab Leticia’s hand. I just stood by her. We stared at the desolate Salton Sea and waited for a sign to point us back home.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lilliam Rivera is an award-winning writer and author of the young adult novels Dealing in Dreams, The Education of Margot Sanchez, and Never Look Back. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Elle, to name a few. Lilliam lives in Los Angeles.
VOLVIÉNDOME
Alaya Dawn Johnson
It’s different, every time I go back. The very familiarity makes it strange to me, as though I have fallen asleep to travel the old corridors of my half-forgotten childhood, where my friends and family and I slide into our grooves, side-by-side troughs in the sediment of the last thirty years, so deep that we can hardly see one another. But I am not asleep as I land in National (we old Washingtonians who remember our loyalties still refuse to use that bastard’s name). I am awake and my skin feels inside out, rasping like a hair shirt, as I step onto the gate bridge. The air is thick and sweet, the sun weak; I am stepping across a chasm, into another time, another life. I was born in DC, and I spent my twenties in New York, but five years ago I packed two suitcases and fled across the border. I remade myself: I learned Spanish, found kindred spirits among my fellow displaced, diasporic artists of Mexico City, entered a master’s program to sit with ancient texts in old languages and dream of the past. I liked so much of the person I was becoming that I began to flinch from the girl I had been. Her places were not my own.