The Mare

Velvet

My school is in Williamsburg, where we used to live before Crown Heights. We’re not supposed to keep going there because you have to go to school in your district, but my mom didn’t want us to go here because she heard about gun violence. So she just pretended we didn’t move and the school pretends they don’t know we moved so we can go there. Which I’m glad for because I would rather stay there than go to school with new people, but it also means that in the summer all the other girls are together and I’m in Crown Heights with Dante. Everybody else is getting to know each other more and I’m not getting to know anybody because my mom is too afraid to let me out the house. We can’t walk to school anymore, and because my mom can’t let us go on the subway and the bus alone, she goes with us when it’s barely day and drops us off in the school yard before she goes to work. We stand there and wait, even when it’s freezing cold, for like an hour before everybody else comes to school together, looking at us like they’re sorry for us.

I used to be friends with three girls there: Helena, who dresses straight off the truck, whose mom does her hair like J. Lo blond; Alicia, whose eyebrows grow almost together, but whose mouth is so smart she still hangs out with the cutest older boys; and Marisol, with her chubby body and sweet voice, who watches cartoons like a little kid but reads books nobody else can understand. But when I moved, Helena started talking shit about my clothes, like telling me her mom said she couldn’t believe a Dominican mother would let her child walk around like that. And Alicia, if I found her alone she would talk like when we were kids — but in the cafeteria she would be grillin’ me with her new girls and calling me Velveeta behind her hand.

The only one who’s still nice is Marisol and that’s partly because she dresses like me, from stores that don’t have names, and her skin is bad now and she’s too serious. I still like her sometimes because you can talk about private things with her and not feel stupid. But really I wish I was still friends with Alicia and Helena even if I kind of hate them.

But that was last year, and this year I had hope it would be different. Partly because of the horses, and partly because of this girl called Strawberry. Strawberry wasn’t her name, but they called her that because every day at lunch she ate strawberry ice cream bars. And because of the red streaks in her long hair.

Strawberry didn’t know all the girls, either. She came to our school last year when there were only a few more months left. She was special and tragical. They said she’d moved from New Orleans because of the hurricane. They said she’d been on the roof with her family without any food or water. They said she’d been sent to one foster place in Texas but something happened and she’d had to leave and go to the place she was at here. And she still couldn’t go home even though the hurricane was a year ago because her family was someplace where people were acting crazy and killing each other’s dogs.

If she’d been a girl like us, we still would’ve been nice to her. But she was not like us. She was two years older than everybody on account of being held back twice, and she was beautiful like a woman. She had breasts, and she wore flowered bras that you could see through her clothes. She wore makeup and sat kind of sideways, and looked like she was smoking a cigarette in a black-and-white movie. Her mouth smiled, smiled hard, but her eyes did not smile, ever. Her eyes watched and looked for something they knew they’d never find. I liked her; everybody liked her. All the girls who used to be my friends and then laughed at me for having church clothes wanted to be friends with her.

Then in the spring we both had detention and the teacher was new and he let us sit together. His cell phone rang and he answered it and we started whispering. She showed me a picture of her older brother, Marco. I showed her a picture of my grandfather. At first I told her he was in DR like he was alive. I told her how he called me on the phone and sent me a sea horse. Then I said, “But then he died.” I don’t know why I told her. But when I did, she got quiet and her eyes got different and so did her mouth. She said, “My brother’s dead, too. He drowned in the hurricane. Him and his girlfriend were trapped in the attic and they couldn’t get out.” We both looked down and it was deep. Then she said, “What’s your favorite movie?” and before I could tell her, the teacher started to yell.

The next day I gave her the pink-brown shell that my father gave me. I showed her the sea horse, too. I gave her the shell and let her hold the sea horse and it happened again: her eyes got feeling in them. She asked if she could have the sea horse too, but I said no, it was the only other thing I had from my grandfather. Her eyes changed back, and for a second I thought she was gonna keep my sea horse. But then she changed them back again, and they smiled with her mouth only not mean, and she said, “When I see one of those Ima think of you,” and gave it back. “Where you gonna see a sea horse?” I asked, and I laughed because it sounded funny. She laughed too, and said, “SpongeBob.” And everybody saw it, her talking and laughing with me with her real eyes, and all the way to the end of the year, nobody started anything with me.

The one bad thing was that being friends with Strawberry made me sometimes pretend I didn’t really know Marisol. Which was sick. Except really I didn’t know Marisol so much anymore, all she did was read.

So I wanted to see Strawberry and show her the pictures of my real horses. I picked the best ones — me on Joker and Reesa, me grooming Rocki, who was mad big — and I pasted them inside the cover of my school notebook. I didn’t put the one with Ginger in because I didn’t want to explain her to everybody. Except for Strawberry. I thought maybe I’d show it to her.

But when I got to school, I didn’t find her at the assembly and I thought she went back with her family. Then when I saw her in the hall and I started to go to her, she gave me a grill with her eyes like dead. Like she never knew me, or talked to me about the most private thing. It made me feel sick. I couldn’t believe she meant it at first. But then in class she sat with the girls who were bitches to me. I sat behind them and I whispered to Alicia, my friend turned bitch, and she whispered to me, but turning around like I was somebody following them and then turning back to the others. That’s how they were to me all day. Except for Strawberry. She didn’t turn to me at all. She just talked loud like to make sure the whole room heard her, and the teacher didn’t really stop her. She talked about her brother Marco in Puerto Rico. Like he was alive.