China Knowles—Thursday Night—Fuenteovejuna
“Hello?”
Irenic Brown’s voice is smooth—a weather forecaster on a sunny day.
“Hello?” he says again.
I feel myself churning through the cycle. Mouth, tongue, teeth, epiglottis, esophagus, stomach, duodenum, jejunum, ileum, cecum, colon, rectum, anus. I skip the accessory organs because they are not useful to me. I have bile. I have gall. I know my liver is in there somewhere, but right now it’s not useful to me. I have no filter.
“That you, AJ? Are you in a bathroom?” he asks. “Sounds gross.”
I put on a different voice. I think of Lansdale and how well she lies. I make her part of my digestive system and I stop there, in my Lansdale canal, and say, “You wanna get some? I got a girl here wants some.”
“Stop lying, AJ. You couldn’t get a girl if you paid for one.”
“She’s out cold, bro.”
“Who is this?” he asks.
“It’s easier when they’re out cold, right? Bitches fight too much.”
“Wrong number,” he says. Then he hangs up.
I look around my room and I plug my curling iron in. Just as it’s getting hot enough, Mom knocks on my bedroom door and tells me to come out. I want to say, Come out of what? My colon? My own mouth? Instead, I unplug the curling iron and go downstairs.
Mom has put a bathrobe on over her black latex bodysuit and has asked her dungeon friends to leave. Dad is in bed because he has to fly somewhere else tomorrow to work. She sits me down at the kitchen table and tells me the police called her today about the bomb threats.
“They think it’s you,” she says.
“It’s not me.”
“So you know who it is?” she asks.
“It’s not anyone.”
She sighs and takes a hit off her electronic cigarette and she looks like a robot in a bathrobe. Shiny black exterior, glowing red electric drug. “It’s got to be someone. The school isn’t sending the threats to themselves.”
“Maybe they are,” I say. “I mean, metaphorically.”
She looks at me and gives that worried, halfhearted smile.
“Maybe it’s like Fuenteovejuna,” I say.
“Fuente what?”
“Fuenteovejuna. The play about the town in Spain? In the fourteen hundreds?”
“What does this have to do with the police calling my house? Or you burning that nice monkey? Your father brought that home from a trip. He didn’t mean any harm.”
“Yeah. I regret burning the monkey.”
“So?”
“Fuenteovejuna is a play, but it’s about something that happened in real life in Spain in, like, fourteen-something. There was this commander in the town and he was out of control. He attacked innocent people all the time and raped women and stuff. He was so bad that they finally, as a town, agreed to kill him and bury him.”
“I can’t see how this relates, China.”
“That’s because you didn’t let me tell you the end.”
She motions for me to tell her the end.
I say, “Someone told Isabella and Ferdinand about his murder, so they sent out the magistrate to interrogate the villagers in Fuenteovejuna. No matter how many people they tortured—men, women, and even children—everyone had the same answer about who killed the commander.”
“And?” Mom takes another drag off the robot cigarette.
“And they all answered the same way,” I say. “They said ‘Fuenteovejuna did it.’ ”
“Isn’t that the name of the town?”
“Yes.”
“So the town killed the commander?”
She stares at the sink, where there are two sex toys drying on the dish rack. My little sisters believe these are cooking utensils because one time she left them there until morning and we lied and told them that.
She says, “But the town didn’t kill him, did it? The villagers were covering for the real killers, right?”
“Depends on how you look at it,” I say.
“So what am I supposed to say to the detective when he calls back tomorrow?”
“You should tell him Fuenteovejuna did it. I bet he never read Lope de Vega. He’ll probably go looking for some Latino-Irish guy named Fuente O’Vejuna.”
“It’s not funny.”
“It’s the truth.”
I’m a throbbing organ on legs since I heard Irenic Brown’s voice. I’m sweating. I feel like I could spontaneously combust.
Mom says, “You’re not yourself lately.”
I say, “Did you notice?”
“I figured you would tell me in time.”
“I probably will.”
I get up as she’s taking another hit off the robot cigarette. “Us parents. We think we should do something.”
“About what?”
“The bomb threats.” She looks at me sideways. “Is there anything else we should do something about?”
“Do you think I learned about Fuenteovejuna in school?”
“I guess.”
“Do you think the test makers know of Fuenteovejuna?”
“What test makers?”
“The ones sending the bomb threats. Those test makers.”
“So you do know who’s sending the threats?”
I stand at the doorway and sigh. “Yes.”
“It’s the test makers?”
“Sure.”
“Do you think they’re on the voice mail menu? I’d love to call and give them a piece of my mind.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But I’m tired and I have to go to school tomorrow. I’m going to bed.”
When I get back to my room, I don’t plug in the curling iron. I block my number and redial Irenic Brown’s number. I wait until he answers and I make a noise like a police siren until he hangs up.