The Mare

Velvet

Middle school was so big I hardly knew anybody. The halls were too big and if you walked alone, your feet echoed. The boys were suddenly big and they stank big too. There was broken glass on the playground and there were men guards and metal detectors in the halls, not just at the door. There were a lot of different classes with different teachers. There was at least some of the same girls, Alicia and Helena and Marisol and this other girl, who I was friends with before I got held back. And they were all mad bugged about their hair. They always were, but now it was like war, who had good or bad hair, whose hair was smooth and straight, whose color was ugly, which meant me, these new girls followed me in the hall going, “You need some foster care, your mami let you walk around with that fucked-up hair, it is abuse.” Marisol, they called her “nappy wildebeest,” even girls who used to be her friends, because her hair wasn’t done. And Marisol, when I said to her that Ginger liked my hair natural — even she looked sarcastic and said, “She’s white. She don’t know nothing about hair.”

It felt like people were acting in a show and they didn’t even pick the show, somebody else did, but who? I would hear things they said, shit girls fought about, things teachers got mad about or liked you about: stories we had to “discuss.” The first week there was a special assembly where people who used to be in gangs came to talk to us about how it was bad to be in gangs, and at the end of it they gave us shiny buttons for not being in gangs, but how did they know we weren’t?

These things were the show, and underneath was something else that you couldn’t even tell what it was — it was too big to fit in our words or in the things you were allowed to do, but I could feel it all the time trying to get out. Once I talked to Marisol about Fiery Girl, how she was so powerful but still so sensitive that Beverly’s sick-ass jabbing finger made her spin around so hard she had to kick it out. You could say things like “sensitive” to Marisol, and she totally got the story; her face lit up, and the something else was there. I could even see it sometimes in the eyes of people on the bus, or feel it in my mother’s hand; I could hear it when she screamed at me that I was a puta, mal nacida. I could feel it when I curled against her back. But then we would wake up and the show would take over again.

When I thought about Ginger and Paul it was the same, just the show was different where they were. There was the crying in Ginger’s face all the time, and she didn’t even know it was there because if I asked her why she was sad she would say, “I’m not sad.” There was riding the mare and then sitting at the table with Ginger and Paul or sitting at the table with my mom and Dante; being on the mare happened on another planet, someplace beautiful but with outer space all around it. I couldn’t even tell it to anybody. I was locked away from everybody. I couldn’t even beat on the door because there was no door.

—

Then one day I was helping my mom make dinner, tearing up lettuce for salad. She was making pork and tomato sauce that we would eat with pan sobao. It smelled so good, it made my mouth water and my stomach weak. Her food was so much better than Ginger’s and I wanted to tell her that, but something stopped me. Instead I said, Mami, I’m hungry. Could I have some bread now? and I took it before she answered. She said, Put that bread down! I said, Please, Mami, I’m hungry, and she answered, I don’t care! And I crushed the bread in my hand and she hit me. I yelled, I didn’t do it on purpose! And she yelled, You did! And hit me again. I thought, That is not abuse. Because I did crush it. And then she did it again. And I ran.