Piecing Me Together(2)

Lee Lee would get that. She’d look at me, and we’d have a whole conversation with only our eyes. But now I have to wait till I get home from school to fill her in on the crazy things these rich people say and do.

Mom keeps on with her talk. “I really wish you’d make at least one friend—a close friend—this year at your school,” she says. Then she says good night to me and walks into the hallway, where she turns and says, “Almost forgot to remind you—did you see my note on the fridge? You have a meeting with Mrs. Parker during lunch tomorrow.”

“On the first day of school? About what?”

Mom shrugs. “She didn’t give me details. Must be about the study abroad program,” she says with a smile.

“You think so?” For the first time in—well, for the first time ever—I am excited to talk to Mrs. Parker. This is the year that teachers select students to volunteer in a foreign country and do service learning projects. That was the thing that made me want to attend St. Francis. Well, that and the scholarship. When we met with Mrs. Parker, my guidance counselor, I think she could tell I was not feeling going to school away from my friends. But she knew from my application essay that I wanted to take Spanish and that I wanted to travel, so she said, “Jade, St. Francis provides opportunities for our students to travel the world.” She had me at that. Of course, she didn’t tell me I’d have to wait until I was a junior.

Mrs. Parker always has some kind of opportunity to tell me about. Freshman year it was an essay writing class that happened after school. Sophomore year it was the free SAT prep class that met on Saturday mornings. Saturday mornings. She likes to take me downtown to the Arlene Schnitzer Hall whenever there’s a speaker or poet in town, telling me I should hear so-and-so because kids in other cities in Oregon don’t get these kinds of opportunities. I know Mrs. Parker is looking out for me—that she promised Mom she’d make sure I’d have a successful four years at St. Francis—but sometimes I wish I could say, Oh, no, thank you, Mrs. Parker. I have enough opportunities. My life is full of opportunities. Give an opportunity to someone else.

But girls like me, with coal skin and hula-hoop hips, whose mommas barely make enough money to keep food in the house, have to take opportunities every chance we get.

Before Mom walks away, she says, “I’m going to pick up some groceries after I get off work tomorrow. Anything you need me to get?”

“Did you see what I added to the list on the fridge?” I ask, smiling.

Mom laughs. “That was you? I thought maybe it was E.J. who wrote that.”

E.J. is my mom’s brother, but I have never called him Uncle E.J. He is twenty, so we are more like siblings. He started staying with us when he dropped out of college. Well, let him tell it: he took a leave of absence, but it’s been a year and I haven’t heard anything about his trying to go back. Instead he’s busy making a name for himself as a local deejay.

Mom walks to her bedroom. “Mint chocolate chip ice cream. I’ll see what I can do,” she says. “If I have enough money, I’ll get it. Promise.”

I finish getting ready for school, thinking to myself that I know all about Mom’s promises. She does her best to make them, but they are fragile and break easily.





3


dejar

to leave

The next morning I wake up before the sun. So early that only trucks and people up to no good are on the streets. There’s nothing in the fridge but baking soda in the way back and half-empty bottles of ketchup, barbeque sauce, and mustard on the door. I drink a glass of water, take a shower, get dressed, and leave by six thirty so I can get to the bus.

I ride the 35 through the maze of houses that all look like one another, like sisters who are not twins but everyone thinks they are. Living here means when people ask, “Where do you live?” and you say, “The New Columbia,” they say, “You mean the Villa?” and remind you that your neighborhood used to be public housing for World War II shipyard workers, and they remind you how by the eighties a lot of those apartments were run-down and how really, they were just the projects with a different name. At least that’s what Mom says. She’s always telling me, “I don’t care if they give the ’hood a new name or not; it’s still the ’hood.”

Lots of people can’t find beauty in my neighborhood, but I can. Ever since elementary school, I’ve been making beauty out of everyday things—candy wrappers, pages of a newspaper, receipts, rip-outs from magazines. I cut and tear, arrange and rearrange, and glue them down, morphing them into something no one else thought they could be. Like me. I’m ordinary too. The only thing fancy about me is my name: Jade. But I am not precious like the gem. There is nothing exquisite about my life. It’s mine, though, so I’m going to make something out of it.

Not only for me but for my mom, too, because she is always saying, “Never thought I’d be here forever. But that’s how things turned out.” And when she says this, I know she means that if she hadn’t had me when she was sixteen, she would have gone to college, would have maybe moved away from Portland, would have had fewer struggles. She never outright blames me for making her life harder than it needed to be; instead she pushes me. Hard. “Because no one pushed me,” she says. One of us has to make it out of here, and I’m her only child, her only hope of remaking herself.