Blackbird

Alex |Chapter 2

WHEN I WAS SEVEN OR EIGHT YEARS OLD, I thought being American meant reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. But that feeling of being a total American was short-lived, and it was a shattered dream I dared not confess to Abuelita.

Because later, in high school, that dream was redefined, still feeling no less American but now with a hyphen attached: Mexican-American. The hyphen alone made liberty and justice for all a conditional element going forward that my family would learn the hard way.

I'd thought about those past dreams since last night and the conditions that came with being a hyphenated citizen. My father spent time cutting coupons at the dining table. The air conditioning was broken, so a heavy warmth lingered in the air. Having stripped off all my excess clothing, I sat barefoot in front of a tiny oscillating fan, turning toward the faintest breeze whenever it caught my skin.

The summer sun hadn't yet risen above the houses, but the weather forecasts this morning promised a scorcher. One for the record books. Abuelita placed another stack of breakfast tamales on the table, stuffed with various fillings and wrapped in a corn masa dough.

"Abuelita, I'm too full." I gave her pleading doe eyes. I still had greedy eyes, but my stomach was not a democracy, and her breakfast tamales sat like lead in my belly.

"The boy is not hungry," Dad spoke up and then turned to me. "We need to talk."

Something about his tone suggested the appearance of a smile, but I didn't catch one. He refused to take his eyes off the coupon he was cutting.

"Como estás, Alex?" he asked. His eyes flicked up to me just once.

"Estoy bien." I shrugged, because I was okay, but his face said that I hadn't fully grasped what he was asking.

"You came home late last night. Derek saw you talking with Tate Parker." He left his sentence open-ended while I filled in the mental blanks. "Have you been friends for a long time? I haven't seen you talk at school."

"No. We're not friends." And this wasn't a lie.

There were days when my dad's job didn't feel like a weight on my shoulders. During long summers, like the one we were heading into now, away from school, it became easier to forget that my dad was employed at the same high school I was enrolled in. But every time I saw my father pick up those scissors, just like a mop at school, it felt like a slap in the face, a reminder of how far we'd fallen.

"Does it matter who I am friends with if you did nothing wrong? What happened to you was an injustice."

Dad would never discuss it, but he was fired from Parker Realtors for pot-smoking on his lunch break and sued for causing the company reputational damage. A client found him cleaning a mass of joint butts behind the dumpster.

He won't say he did it or that he didn't. He doesn't say much other than, 'No es nada de lo que estar orgulloso"—It's nothing to be proud of—then the conversation was over.

"A friendship with a boy who has Dean Parker for a father will serve none of us well. No wonder Tate fights in the streets. Do you want to be caught up in that? Move on. You can't fight every injustice. Sometimes, you shouldn't try because the bigger picture is more important, and I chose to let this go."

My earliest memory was breaking a jug of water perched on top of the refrigerator—a superstition Abuelita took seriously because water wards off evil—and she'd cried for five straight days. I couldn't count the number of times I'd been yelled at for passing the salt or scratching an itchy palm, but her beliefs steered our daily lives.

On day six, my father had whispered something in her ear, and suddenly, Lita was back shuffling across the Kitchen in her worn slippers; no longer wary spirits would cause her mischief. It took several more years for me to figure out he had told her an appeasing white lie. I knew this because whenever he spared the truth since he had a tell, his eyes pinched together a fraction when he spoke—like the lie had to be squeezed out of him in order to pass his lips.