The Book of Unknown Americans(30)

“I know. This is it.”

And finally Arturo agreed, and the decision was made.





Mayor


What can I say? She grew on me. Those Sundays after church, instead of sitting on the couch with our parents, Maribel and I started hanging out in the kitchen by ourselves. She wasn’t always good at keeping up a conversation—she lost her train of thought sometimes, and she talked slow in order to find the right words as she went along, and sometimes she forgot that we’d already discussed something, so I had to repeat myself—but a lot of the things she said were smart. Besides, I had learned that she was listening even when it seemed like she wasn’t. When I had met her in the Dollar Tree, before I knew anything about her, she had seemed intimidating and aloof. But now that I knew better, I understood not to take it personally. She would trace her fingernails along the top of the kitchen table or look at the ceiling sometimes, but when I stopped talking, she would respond in a way that proved she’d been paying attention all along and, even better, that she was actually interested in what I’d said. Which was more than I could say for most people and definitely more than I could say for any girl I’d ever known.

My dad didn’t like it. “Why can’t you talk to normal girls?” he asked me once after the Riveras left.

“What is that supposed to mean?” my mom said.

But we all knew what he meant: Why couldn’t I talk to a girl that wasn’t brain-damaged? I did talk to the so-called normal girls, of course. I mean, I asked them to pass me a paper in class or I mumbled an apology when I bumped into one of them in the hall. But it was never easy for me, at least not the way it was easy for me with Maribel, maybe because she was brain-damaged, maybe because she didn’t seem so intimidating because of that. In another life, one before whatever had happened to her had happened, I was pretty sure she would have been just another girl I was scared of. And I was pretty sure, too, that she wouldn’t have given me the time of day. I had a feeling she’d been one of the popular girls, the one all the guys lusted over. But this was a different life, one where I was getting a chance with her. Maybe it was terrible to think of it like that, but I wasn’t going to pass it up.

“Do you remember that girl Enrique used to date?” my dad went on. “What was her name? Sandra? The one who wore headbands. You can’t find someone like that?”

“I don’t want someone like that,” I said.

“Leave him alone,” my mom chimed. “Maribel’s a nice girl.”

“Maybe,” my dad conceded. “But not for Mayor.”

My dad’s narrow-mindedness only made me feel more connected to Maribel, though. Like maybe I was the only one who understood her, the only one who was willing to give her a chance.

I started stopping by her apartment sometimes after school. Her mom wouldn’t let Maribel actually go anywhere with me, so she and I just sat on the floor in the bedroom she shared with her parents and talked. They had clothes folded in piles along the wall and a mattress wedged into the corner. Maribel had a sleeping bag that she rolled up during the day and set under the window. But the atmosphere was uninspiring, to say the least, and I found myself wishing that I could take her somewhere, even just to Dunkin’ Donuts down the street, where I knew we could score free doughnuts if they were about to throw them out anyway, or maybe to the movie theater, where I could show her how to sneak in the side door, which William and I had been doing forever. I thought she deserved it, you know, getting out into the world. As far as I knew, she only went to school and came straight home, which made her seem a little like a caged bird who no one trusted to fly. But her mom wouldn’t budge. The rule was that if I wanted to see Maribel, it had to be at either her apartment or mine—no going outside, no taking a walk, no nothing.

Most of the time I found her sitting on the bedroom floor, writing in her notebook or standing and staring out the back window. I’d ask her what she was looking at or what she was writing about. Sometimes she told me. Other times she didn’t. Either way, it didn’t matter much to me. I was aware that my original reason for talking to Maribel, which had been fueled by a sense of responsibility, had been replaced by something else: I just wanted to be around her. I still wanted to take care of her in certain ways, but it was more than that now. I liked her. I liked her more than I’d ever liked anyone.

We talked about nothing mostly, like what she was doing in school and about music and our parents. I would tell her the most random things—“Did you know that the average person drinks sixteen thousand gallons of water by the time they die?” or about the time I saw Vicente Fox on TV—and she would smile sometimes, which was always my goal.

We talked about the weather because now that it was getting colder she was waiting for it to snow, to see what it was like.

“I guess there’s no snow in México, huh?” I said.

“Yes.”

“ ‘Yes’ there’s no snow or ‘yes’ there is snow?”

“There is snow.”

“In México? No way.”

“In the north, yes,” she said.

“You know there’s different kinds of snow, right? There’s wet snow, which can get crusty and freeze. And then there’s really light snow, which is soft. And don’t even get me started on snow-flakes. There are four classes of those: columns, dendrites, needles, and rimed snow.”