CHAPTER 17: NOW

I’m headed to observation for the second time today. I got to see Lexi in group this morning, and now I’m watching her and Janet play some game called Scrabble, where you use these little wooden tiles to make words on a playing board. After a while, Lexi dumps her letters back into the bag.

“I suck at this.”

Janet checks her watch. “We still have some time,” she says.

“I’ve got a headache,” Lexi says and pushes the game board away.

Janet starts clearing the letters off the board. When she’s done, she tosses Lexi the bag.

“What am I supposed to do with this?”

Janet shrugs. “Whatever.” Like always when Lexi gets like this, Janet pulls out her paperwork and ignores her.

Lexi dumps the tiles back out onto the table and starts flipping them faceup. After a while, Janet sets down her pen and fiddles with the tiles, too. She doesn’t say anything, but she pulls letters toward her and spells out words. First S-L-E-E-P, then K-I-T-C-H-E-N, then B-O-O-T.

Lexi mixes up the tiles in front of her and reaches for an S. She’s way slower than Janet, playing with each letter before setting it down. She spells S-P-I-T and then squeezes in an R and an I to make it S-P-I-R-I-T. After that, she makes her own name. Next she spells out C-R-A-Z-Y. Then Lexi is pulling the A and the Z down from the first word and adding an A, an E, then an L. She sits staring at the word, at my name.

 

So she knows me. She has to. She knows me, but what does she know? Maybe she’s the one who’s not talking.

“Know what it means?” Janet asks. She doesn’t look up from the tiles she’s fiddling with.

“No,” Lexi says. “What?”

“I don’t know. Want me to try to find out?”

“Fine,” Lexi says. “Whatever.”

This throws me because I realize that even though it’s my name, I’ve got no idea what it means. Never even thought that the name my crew stuck me with might mean something. When my homies started calling me Azael, I took it on like everything else, no questions. Now I think maybe I should have asked just what kind of shit I was painting myself with.

Lexi scoots the letters in my name closer together then spreads them far apart. After a long time, she sweeps them into her hand and drops them back into the bag.

I’ve had enough of Lexi by the time I finally get back to my cell. Too much. I feel like talking to Tiger, but his cell is empty. Pakmin’s probably got him glued to a chair watching his cousin. It’s some stupid shit they put us through in here.

I’m counting the concrete blocks in the walls when I remember the papers I stole from my file yesterday. I’m such an idiot—who forgets something like that? I listen for Gabe’s footsteps, and then when I’m sure nobody’s coming, I lift the mattress and slide the pages out from under my black book.

First I set aside the blank pages I was supposed to use for notes. I’m thinking these will be good for some practice drawings because I’ve only got one page left in my black book, and I’ve got to save it for something good. Then I pull out the stuff I took from my file. It’s only about three pages, and I’m planning to just read them top to bottom. But then I feel a kind of a lump on the last page, and I pull it to the front of the stack. I know right off from the handwriting that it’s from Becca. The butterfly necklace I gave her is bunched up in the corner and covered in tape.

2 My Forever Azael,

Take your stupid necklace back. I’m so mad at you it’s like somebody gave my heart a fucken hot pepper and then wouldn’t give it no milk. I’m so mad at you for proving my mom right. I’m so mad at you for all the times you kissed my stomach and said all that sweet bullshit, that you was working to change. I’m so mad at you for giving me the buterfly and promising that this time it was for real because it wasn’t. You lied about changing. You turned around and went rolling with your pinche boys toward nothing but more trouble. Javi stinks of trouble but you didn’t bother to sniff. It’s your own fault for going w ith him.

I had all these stupid ideas for us. Just like a girl. I was gonna get my nurse aid certificate one day and you was gonna get your GED and maybe some kind of training. We was gonna have enough for our own apartment, a car, maybe cable. Not the kind of money you thought of, you and your SUVs and rims and fancy fucken kicks. But I was gonna teach you how to be real happy with what we had, not to want more. You know how good I could always satisfy you.

This time you gone too far and nothing you could say can take it back cuz you ain’t gonna be talking to me no more. Like it or not, we’re done. And I don’t like it because I wanted you and you wanted me but that aint good enough in this world. I’m making myself crazy with all this shit and I can’t do it, I got to stop. Who knows if you’ll ever see this. There was times before that they didn’t give you your mail or nothing. But this is a thousand times worse. There’s no way back to what we had. I can never be yours now. It hurts, baby, it hurts, but that’s how it is.

Your once one and only,

Becca

This changes everything. Now I know that things are screwed up real bad. The fucked-up rating of my life is through the fucking roof. Whatever they’re saying I did, whatever Becca heard, it was bad enough that she doesn’t want nothing more to do with me. It has to be something whacked because Becca’s real loyal. She’s no run-scared snatch.

And then it hits me. I’m not the one supposed to inform on Lexi; she’s the one who’s dumping shit on me.

She could’ve been hanging around the park the day of the battle with Crazy Crew. Maybe she got picked up for something, and then the officers came along offering to ease up the charges in exchange for information. Maybe she didn’t want to report on one of her homies, so she decided she’d screw me over instead.

It’s got to be that. Lexi is running some kind of racket here. She has to be lying because I didn’t do anything. Hardly nothing, except for pounding that punk who messed with Eddie. But I saw him stumble away all hunched over; he couldn’t have been too messed up.

So Lexi’s faking that she saw me do something. Probably tomorrow I’ll start hearing her tell lies about me. Just try it, I want to shout. Just try pinning shit on me, white girl. It’ll fly right back into your face, bitch, it will. Pinche puta.

The heat of my anger cracks against the icy silence in my heart where I used to hear Becca’s voice. I picture those sad eyes of hers, so big and brown you could disappear in them. No way can I believe she could mean that it’s over. I never would’ve done this to her. I swear if I’d got her knocked up, I would’ve married her and taken care of her forever. She can’t mean it. Then I look back down at the words written out in her careful girly handwriting. I see the necklace there. Proof that she’s done with me.

It’s not that I was lying to her about changing. I just should’ve done it faster.

I pull the pencil out from under the mattress and grab one of the blank sheets Gabe gave me. I’m going to draw something for Becca to make her see that she’s wrong to quit on me.

I start working out a butterfly in gray spirals across the page. I draw Becca in the corner sitting with her face in her hands. I put the butterfly on a leash that goes all the way to the other corner. I draw myself there with my best apology eyes.

I’m feeling good about my work until I take another look at the butterfly. When I see what I did, my hand slips, and I break the tip of the pencil.

There it is, twisted inside the butterfly along with all the spirals: LEXI.

I rip the drawing in half and shove everything back under the mattress. I lie down on top of it, but I can’t get her name out of my mind.