By the summer of 2015, the twins were living on their own, having fully and finally severed from daily life with Wilber. Raúl talked to him on the phone from time to time, but Ernesto refused. Any necessary communication—about sending money back to El Salvador, about their parents—went through Raúl.
Things settled into a rhythm. They had steady jobs, the weather was warm but not too hot, and they were excelling at summer school, earning credits toward graduation that would help make up for some of last year’s Fs, which counted for no credits at all. They didn’t see Wilber much that summer, but summer school had shorter days, ending at 2:00 instead of 3:30. That extra hour and a half allowed them more time to relax with friends in the uneven shade around school before heading to Montclair. The quiet look-alikes traipsed through Oakland in the early mornings and late nights, ferrying themselves between school and home and work to make enough money to do it all over again the next month.
Raúl, in particular, was grateful for the routine. Those days of uncertainty between the eviction notice and Ernesto allowing him to move in had shaken him deeply. He felt comfortable in the summer’s equilibrium, although this time the bad spirits that seemed to stalk him had not so much retreated as lodged inside him—below the surface, dormant, but there.
“I’ve got a bomb inside my head,” he said. “I can feel it in there. It’s like I can hear it clicking.”
In August, three months after Raúl moved in, the brothers stopped for tacos at a Mexican restaurant on their way to work. Raúl ordered carnitas, while Ernesto, who had been skittish about eating red meat ever since the desert, ordered chicken. They ate in silence until Ernesto looked up and spotted their bus, the northbound number one, slowing to a halt across the street. Missing this bus could leave them stranded for over half an hour. Ernesto shoved one last bite of chicken taco into his mouth and made a run for it. “Come on!” he shouted. Raúl, still working on his carnitas, didn’t notice the bus until his brother was already out the door. He boarded just before the doors shut behind him.
They rode in silence for twenty minutes, funneling down into the Chinatown thickets of markets and pedestrians, then rounding the bend north toward Berkeley.
Then Raúl felt his pocket. “Shit!” he said. “Shit, shit, shit!”
“What?” Ernesto said.
“My wallet!” It was stolen, he said. Someone had stolen it from him.
“You left it on the table,” Ernesto said.
“No, I didn’t!” He was sure he remembered putting it into his pocket.
The wallet was black fake leather embossed with the words EL SALVADOR and the national seal. It had held a hundred dollars in cash and his school ID. Raúl now had no identification whatsoever, and no money. He couldn’t go back to the restaurant now or he risked being fired for lateness, and anyway he was sure someone had pickpocketed him. He spent his shift that night recalling the faces from the bus as though they were a police lineup.
The next day he went back to the restaurant. “Sorry,” the lady behind the counter said, and shrugged. She hadn’t seen a wallet. “Good luck.”
That was money they had been planning to send home, and their parents needed it worse than ever. The debt was nearly $20,000 now, and things had got bad in the fields. “There’s a drought,” his father explained. The drought had been slowly building for a few years—too little rain, rain coming at the wrong time—but the summer of 2015 was a terribly dry one in El Salvador. In just June and July, over $100 million in revenue from corn alone was lost, affecting about 211,000 acres, mostly from small-scale farming operations like the Flores family’s. They were almost through the spring’s harvest, surviving off what little more they could grow between seasons and purchase when the twins sent money home. They siphoned that money away from the debt payments. There were practically no tomatoes left over to sell in town to have money for other things.
Wilber Sr. worried about the rest of the year. “We’re suffering, mijo,” he said to Raúl. “We just haven’t had any rain.” Since living alone, the twins had sent $200, $500, and $750 installments, but they still couldn’t crack the goal of a thousand a month. One week Ernesto had given Wilber $650 to send home, but according to Maricela it never came. Was she lying, or Wilber? He suspected Wilber—whether he’d forgotten, or hadn’t had the time, or had pocketed it to fill one of the frequent holes in his own finances, Ernesto wasn’t sure. Furious but unwilling to wage another battle, Ernesto added it to the list of ways his brother had let him down.
Every month Maricela walked hangdog to visit the moneylender and offer the latest excuses. Sometimes Wilber Sr. went along with her, sometimes he didn’t—but since he couldn’t read that well, and his math was limited, Maricela was the family ambassador. It was shameful, admitting again and again that they couldn’t pay.
Raúl and Ernesto remembered the time after Wilber Jr. left, when the whole family had huddled together in the kitchen, stomachs rumbling, eight children listening to their mother and father spin lies about how they were all good, just fine, that Wilber shouldn’t worry, no problem if he couldn’t send money that month, may God bless him. That now his parents were openly telling Raúl and Ernesto about their woes meant it had to be bad—really bad. He and Ernesto scrounged together what they could and sent seventy-five dollars the next day. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Their guilt ate away at them in pieces.
The twins didn’t know much about the U.S. government, but ever since the rich guy who wanted to be president started talking about building a wall and deporting immigrants home, the Spanish news stations, and the whole Latino community they knew—from their friends at school to their co-workers to the guy who pierced their face to the lady who cut their hair for cheap—were talking about Donald Trump.
“Do you know he said Mexicans were rapists and criminals?” Raúl said.
“Asshole,” said Ernesto. They took this comment to mean that all Latino immigrants were criminals or were suspected as such. In the evenings, the restaurant kitchens were filled with chatter about this guy, his bold racism. The kitchen crews at both restaurants laughed about the things he’d said as they scrubbed the pans and stacked the dishes into the sinks—“We’ll all go home, boys! Donald Trump’s on his way!” but, both twins noted, real fear underlay the joking.
A lot of people on the news and at school said he wouldn’t win the nomination, but most of their friends and co-workers weren’t so sure.
“I think he’ll win,” Raúl said. “Definitely.” People were racist, he knew, and lots of people in the United States—even in Oakland—disliked immigrants. They could feel it, sometimes, in the gazes of people in the pizza shop or the taquería by school, that look reserved for people thought of as outsiders and even as threats. He didn’t understand why. What had immigrants ever done to them, besides build their houses, pick their food in the fields, serve it to them in restaurants, wash their plates, then do it all over again?
“He will be the president,” Raúl insisted, and then “we’ll all have to watch out.”
The twins had a three-week break between the end of summer classes and the start of the 2015 school year, which offered a gift of time: they could sleep in as late as they wanted and see friends in the mornings and afternoons. But soon enough it was back to long nights and too-early mornings. After a week in the twelfth grade, where they understood little and couldn’t keep up with the work, they made a decision: they wanted to try eleventh grade over again.
“We want to focus this time,” Ernesto told the school counselor.
A week later the twins received the good news, right on time given their political anxiety: their green cards, said Amy, had finally arrived. Learning a few months back that they’d been approved was one thing, but the victory had been abstract, not something they could fully trust. That Amy now had the cards in her office, with their names and their photos, was something different altogether.
“I’ll believe it when I have it in my own hands,” Raúl said.
Ernesto worked seven days a week while Raúl worked only five, so it was Raúl who went into San Francisco to pick up the cards. He was giddy. What would they look like?
In her office, Amy handed the cards over with a smile. “You don’t want to lose this,” she said. “But you really should carry it around with you, just in case you’re ever picked up for any reason.” It was rare but wasn’t unheard of, she explained, for the authorities to put someone in immigration detention, only to later figure out that that person had papers.
Raúl nodded, but he knew he would never lose his green card. It wasn’t unlike the bike they’d traded for with his father’s corn, a prize that bestowed freedom and also, because it was rare and costly, a little guilt.
It deserved a proper home, but Raúl still had no wallet. On Mission Street he ducked into a small outpost that advertised cheap shipping to El Salvador. Inside were stalls carrying key chains, statuettes of the Virgin, and phone cards. “Excuse me, señora, but do you have any wallets from El Salvador?” he asked a bored-looking woman sitting behind a glass case.
“Let’s see, mijo,” she said. She pulled out wallets one by one. “Guatemala,” she said, pausing, “Guatemala, Guatemala, Guatemala. Aha! Sí! El Salvador.” Onto the glass counter she placed a brown horsehair wallet with EL SALVADOR burned into its skin.
“No, not that one,” he said. “That’s not my style.”
“What’s your style, then?” she asked, amused.
“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “I’ll know it when I see it.” They rifled through the rest of her collection but came up empty. Raúl was disappointed. For all his disdain for the conditions back home, he brandished his Salvadoran-ness as if it were his sponsor: a hat with the 503 country code, a key chain in the shape of El Salvador, a Salvadoran T-shirt.
He opted for a plain black wallet, like the one Ernesto had: faux leather, plenty of slots for the cards and photos he might one day need to store, boring maybe, but also professional looking—the kind carried by a permanent resident of the United States. By a man. In the safety of the store, he slipped his green card into one of the slots: a perfect fit.
The fact of their permanent residency answered, once and for all, the question of whether Raúl and Ernesto were allowed to stay in the United States. Yet in the same stroke it forced the twins to confront another question: whether they wanted to go back home. Now that they had their papeles, they could get passports, which meant they would legally be able to travel—which allowed them to think, in real terms, about visiting El Salvador. This was an option Wilber had never had (and still didn’t), and while they were waiting on the outcome of their case, it had seemed the most distant of hypotheticals.
On the one hand, things back home were terrible and getting worse. In addition to the debt and the drought, homicides were higher than even before the 2012 truce. The MS-13 and Barrio 18 factions were at war as always, but now the government was ramping up its side of things. Following the bus strike, El Salvador’s Supreme Court ruled that any gang member was to be, in the eyes of the law, considered a terrorist and thus subject to even harsher prison sentences. The street wars were out of control, with nearly thirty homicides a day in August—higher even than during the civil war.
On the other hand, the twins missed their family.
But perhaps the notion of going home was an abstraction anyway. They asked around about plane fare; the absurdity of spending a single dollar for tickets, let alone over a grand, to visit those still burdened by their leaving felt paralyzing. It would have to be a consideration only for that magic, future time when their debt would be settled and their lives along with it.
The twins argued over which place was better: the United States or El Salvador. Raúl insisted the United States was better, but Ernesto, the one who had lusted for life up north, now wasn’t so sure.
“It’s safe here,” Raúl insisted, throwing his hands up. “I’ll never go back there, not ever!”
“It’s dangerous here, too!” Ernesto reminded him. Oakland had plenty of violence of its own; they had both been jumped, after all.
Yes, there was violence in Oakland, allowed Raúl, but nothing like in El Salvador.
“Things are fine,” Esperanza told her boys when they next called, back to whitewashing the narrative. “Things are fine. We pray for you, my angels.”
The first practical order of business, after getting their green cards, was to apply for Social Security cards. That would mean they could start working for full minimum wage.
They took their birth certificates, their completed applications, and their green cards to the commercial office building in downtown Oakland, where the doorman directed them to the third floor. The guards pointed them over to the check-in kiosk, which spat out a number: A063. They sat down to wait among the rows of gray metal seats. Next to them was a young woman dressed in pink velour pants, who muttered to herself while laying out the contents of her purse on the empty chair next to Ernesto—a packet of gum, headphones, several tubes of lipstick and mascara—then placing each item back in her purse, only to take it all out again.
“Motherfuckers,” she said each time a new number was called. “How the fuck we supposed to hear what the fuck they’re even saying, shit?” Ernesto and Raúl exchanged tense smiles.
An hour later, when their number was finally called, they handed their paperwork over to the officer behind the counter.
“Twins, huh?” the woman said, looking them over. Same faces, both dressed in their common uniform of black shirts, jeans, and red and black Nikes. She scanned their paperwork.
“Okay, whose is this?” she asked, waving Ernesto’s birth certificate.
“Mine,” he said.
“This one I can do, but yours,” she said, pointing to Raúl, “I need an original.” She shook his birth certificate. “An original,” she repeated, a little louder. Ernesto had a tattered color copy with a new stamp, so it looked original, whereas Raúl’s was a black and white facsimile, the duplication slightly askew.
“Come back when you have it,” she said matter-of-factly, and thrust the copy back, moving on with Ernesto’s application. Raúl nodded and stepped away from the counter, not daring to argue.
When Ernesto’s Social Security card arrived at school six days later, he laughed as he tore open the envelope. Raúl watched from the office doorway. Ernesto pulled out the blue card stock and flung it aside on the desk, peering into the envelope. “Where is it?” he said.
Then he picked up the document from the desk and saw the small card attached by perforation. “That’s it?” he said. This thing everyone wanted, that people bought and traded on the black market, that ensured fair wages and employability in this great northern beast of a country, looked like something he could have made in computer class. He smiled and gently tore the card from the rest of the sheet. He’d take it that night to his boss and get on the official payroll.
Raúl left the room.
Ernesto was doing well at work. He did less dishwashing and more busing now, working invisibly around the customers. He even answered the phone every now and then, something he secretly loved to do. “Hello, how can I help you?” he’d say in English that, though his vocabulary remained limited, was less and less accented each day. His boss complimented him on his work ethic and made sure he was tipped out at the end of each night. Wilber Sr. had taught his children to work hard. It wasn’t easy, said Ernesto, to find such hard workers as he and his brother.
The customers liked him, too. A few regulars would slip his tips into the pocket of his apron, something that made him nervous because one of the cooks, who rolled sushi from behind the bar, would scowl when he saw it.
“I get a lot of attention from women customers,” Ernesto explained to me. “I think it’s because I wear a shirt with short sleeves, and I carry a lot of things, which flexes my muscles so it makes me look like I’m really strong.”
He felt welcome, needed, and capable at the sushi restaurant. In most other Montclair establishments, he felt out of place. They were gabacho restaurants, restaurants for white people, for Americans—not for people like him and his brother. “I’m embarrassed,” he said, just walking into a gabacho place. “I don’t feel comfortable in places like that.” Gringos, he put it in a clear display of internalized racism, were more “refined” than they—more sensitive and delicate.
“It’s just true,” Raúl agreed. Not that they were born different, but they grew up different and therefore were different—it was a cultural thing. “Places like that,” from the twins’ point of view, were where people like them worked, not where they were patrons. Their comfort in the affluent parts of Oakland wasn’t an issue of either language or legality. Living on the margins of a gentrifying city only underlined to Ernesto what the twins had been told and had fought during their whole lives: that they were less than, and that they didn’t, and shouldn’t expect to, belong.
One night Ernesto’s boss made a big deal about someone who had just walked into the restaurant. Everyone from the kitchen leaned out to look. It was an older guy, bald with thick white eyebrows, dressed in a black long-sleeved shirt. A movie star, maybe?
“That’s the governor,” his co-worker said. Jerry Brown. The head, someone explained to him, of the state of California.
Governor Brown came in a few more times that fall. One night he came in by himself, and Ernesto felt the urge to ask for a picture with him, to have some proof of his proximity to an Important Person. But he was too nervous to ask.
His co-worker asked for him. “Sure,” replied the governor gamely.
Ernesto was legal now; he had nothing to fear posing with the leader of California in front of the restaurant’s health board certifications. He thanked Brown in English and turned toward the kitchen, right then posting the photo to Instagram and Snapchat, overlaid with a caption, “With the governor,” followed by a blushing emoji.
On a busy night a few weeks later, Ernesto was busing the table of a couple in their twenties, perspiring in his smeared black apron. The table was a mess of splattered soy sauce and sushi remnants, and Ernesto did his best to be inconspicuous as he cleared the plates. The guy had ordered several large beers already. He gesticulated just as Ernesto went to take one of his empty bottles, inadvertently swatting it out of Ernesto’s hands and into his own lap.
“Fucking Latino!” he shouted.
Ernesto narrowed his eyes and said back, “Fuck you!”
The guy moved as if to hit Ernesto, who didn’t flinch, but then his girlfriend calmed him down. Ernesto turned around and walked toward the kitchen. He punched a wall in the back of the restaurant and dented it slightly, ripping the skin off his knuckles. His boss didn’t reprimand him but didn’t seem to sympathize much, either. “Stay in the back,” she said, “until he’s gone.”
Ernesto still dreamed of going home.
He knew he couldn’t go to La Colonia—too dangerous—but he could at least get to the capital and meet his mother there, maybe his father and some of his siblings, too. Someday, he thought.
It couldn’t hurt to apply for a Salvadoran passport. He’d been on a winning streak with bureaucracy lately, and the process seemed simple enough: go to the Salvadoran consulate in San Francisco, fill out the paperwork, show his green card, and pay the fee. But after waiting on line at the consulate, a dim-lit, low-ceilinged office suite in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, he learned that to get a passport he’d first need a DUI—a Salvadoran ID. He could apply for that here in San Francisco, but he’d need not only an original birth certificate but one that had been printed and stamped by his local mayor’s office sometime in the past year. This he didn’t have.
Assuming Ernesto could even get his birth certificate, the DUI and passport process would take months. Going home receded even farther into the horizon.
Raúl, for his part, still had no interest in going back. El Salvador had gone sour, like food left out too long. He had been dwelling in the past again; if he allowed himself to think too much, his whole body began to shake. That place had kicked him out on his ass, far away from his family, his loved ones, his place, his future. “My friends, my ex-friends, are with the devil. I never want to see their faces again, never, ni en una pintura” or “not at all”—literally, “not even in a painting.” Just picturing them in his mind made him want to punch his own hole in the wall.
He felt this anger, but also, he could admit sometimes, a fear. “I’m scared,” he said, to go back. People he’d trusted had let him down spectacularly.
He finally received his Social Security card, which brought temporary relief, but as the fall dragged on, his anxiety mounted. He had a hard time sleeping, and even when he was awake, thoughts rose to the surface that for over a year had been pretty well tamped down. He’d be sitting on a bus or in class, and it would suddenly go black all around him, as if he were there on the cold roadside in Guatemala, head throbbing and listening to the coyota scream. Now that he was truly “safe” in the United States, all the old worries and soiled memories came flooding back in.
Meanwhile Ernesto fell in love. Love, as he’d learned last year with Marie, was a good distraction from both homesickness and bad memories. His new girlfriend was a ninth grader; too young for him, Ernesto knew, but she had pursued him, shooting him glances in PE class and hanging on to his arm while the teacher shouted instructions. Sofía was her name. Ernesto loved her eyes, sultry but also kind and soft. Though she was only fourteen, she had a lot of responsibilities at home, where she had to cook and clean and take care of little kids. She understood him, he felt—not all the way, but she could grasp that he had a lot on his plate.
Best of all, she was from El Salvador.
Raúl was jealous that his twin had someone at school to loiter with in the courtyard, to kiss, jealous of the fact that he was in love. He also wasn’t sure about Sofía. She’d give long hugs to other classmates, or be chatting with a group of younger students—mostly boys—and not even acknowledge the twins as they passed. And then she’d go accusing Ernesto of flirting with other girls on Facebook and complaining about how he spent too much time at work.
Sofía buddied up to Raúl at first, calling him her cuñado, her in-law, and nestling up to him sometimes purring, “Hola, cuñado, qué tal?” Sofía didn’t seem to have a hard time telling them apart, even from the beginning. Raúl liked that about her. But Sofía monopolized his brother’s attention. Just days after they’d started going out, gone were the twins’ off-campus lunches. Ernesto and Sofía would snuggle on the couch in the back corner of the library while Raúl sat alone with the company of his earbuds and phone. Often, when he sneaked out to go buy something, Ernesto noticed him leaving and yelled him over.
“Raúl!” he’d shout. Raúl would saunter over, feigning uncaring. “Buy me a taco.”
“And a soda!” Sofía would add. Sometimes he did their bidding, other times he didn’t.
Raúl could feel the bomb in his head making him jittery and withdrawn, but his brother didn’t seem to notice. He had been there for Ernesto the year before when he was unraveling, all those nightmares and breakdowns. Now his twin was off with this fourteen-year-old, and he’d become invisible.
Maricela continued to hound her brothers. “How much can you send this month?” “We’re worried they’re going to take away the land for real this time.” She asked them about school—how much longer until they graduated? Could they take a break?
“We only go to school a couple of hours a day,” Raúl told her, which was a lie. “We’re doing everything we can.”
But Cesar remained a steadfast father and boyfriend, sending the seventy dollars each month, visiting as often as he could, meeting Maricela outside the factory on his lunch break, crooning into his wriggling baby’s ear as he gobbled down the food Maricela brought him. She’d ride over an hour each way to see him for this fleeting break, but it was worth it.
Cesar complained all the time about how bad his job was. He worked like a donkey in that factory, tiring his body and wasting his mind, all for practically no money in the grand scheme. After a few months, the owners cut everyone’s hours, and thus their wages, so he only made $350. He was starting to think that the way out was the United States.
A neighbor said she could connect him to someone in the United States who would, for a price, marry him so he could immigrate legally. When he shared this idea with Maricela, she was furious. The notion of her man, the father of her children, leaving her—and worse, marrying someone else? Cesar protested that the American contact was a sixty-something old lady, no one he’d ever actually be interested in, only a business arrangement. It would be good for the family, he promised, and after two or three years, once he got his papers sorted out, he’d divorce the lady, come back to El Salvador to marry Maricela, and apply for papers for her and the kids.
In the United States, marriage fraud for immigration purposes is a felony punishable by up to five years in jail and a fine of up to $250,000. Over the past decade, several fraud rings have been busted for coaching couples on how to make their marriage appear legitimate. In part to combat arrangements of the kind Cesar was considering, the Department of Homeland Security created a special Document and Benefit Task Force and, in 2014, launched an aggressive ad campaign. (“If you walk down this aisle for the wrong reasons,” an ICE brochure reads over an image of a church altar, “…you could end up walking down this aisle,” over a photograph of a prison hall.) Marrying someone with papers in the United States is a lengthy and expensive process that receives much government scrutiny. Immigration officers ask to see wedding pictures and proof of a past relationship, and they can even conduct home visits to ascertain a marriage’s legitimacy.
Cesar’s plan, then, was a risky one, if not an outright scam. It was unlikely that the marriage would seem plausible to the U.S. government, if his contact actually married him instead of walking away with his money. A marriage visa had to be initiated before the spouse entered the United States; Cesar’s plan to just show up and get married wasn’t how it worked, and the older woman likely knew that.
But Cesar didn’t. Nor did Maricela. In spite of her jealousy, the way Cesar spoke about the plan seemed to her to make some sense.
Recently, both Wilber Sr. and Esperanza had contracted chikungunya, a mosquito-borne virus not unlike dengue fever that wipes people out for weeks with a fever, sore muscles, and aching joints. They are barely able to get out of bed to use the bathroom. Though rarely fatal, the greatest risk of chikungunya is to infants and the elderly—like Wilber Sr., only in his sixties, but frail and weakened, it seemed, by his fears around losing the land. Maricela sponged their brows and spoon-fed them soup and atole as she thought over Cesar’s plan. Her father had grown alarmingly frail. At times, staring at him on the bed like that, sweating, stiff, his chest hardly rising and falling, she worried he might die. And what would happen to their family then?
Maricela gave Cesar her blessing to go; she was convinced because he was convinced. She also started to think about going north herself—not in a dreamy way but for real this time.
She’d heard that women traveling with children were being set free when they crossed the border. (This was a later mutation of the rumor Homeland Security secretary Jeh Johnson had tried to discredit nearly two years prior in the quedate campaigns, a misunderstanding stemming from the U.S. government’s practice of releasing women from overcrowded detention facilities while they awaited removal proceedings. The future court dates, the prospect of deportation, and the ankle bracelet tracking devices that ensured these women didn’t disappear were facts that had been lost in the game of telephone that brought immigration news to La Colonia.)
Going all that way by herself without a coyote would be too risky: many women, she knew, were raped, kidnapped, and even killed. She knew girls often took birth control before they left to make sure they didn’t get pregnant if—when, even—they were raped. Plus, she doubted her ability to find her own way. She’d have to go with a coyote, which cost about $8,000 these days. Could she take out another loan, this time in her own name?
Cesar loved the idea. In his plan, he would go live with the lady and get official papers while Maricela made it across the border, turned herself in, and was set free. He’d be officially married, but what did that matter? They’d be together, in America, with their daughter. She couldn’t travel with both girls, so she’d have to leave Lupita at home—it would be easier to feed and travel with an infant than a toddler—until she could send for her.
No matter who told her—her brothers, especially—that this plan wouldn’t work, for a few weeks she couldn’t be dissuaded. But then Cesar began to change his mind. He became aware that the marriage plan was quite probably a scam and that it offered no guarantees. They set the plan aside.
Still, Maricela thought about going.
“Don’t come,” Ernesto messaged her on Facebook. “Seriously. Don’t do it.” She scrolled through their photos again. If she were in their place, everything would be different—not just for her but for the whole family. It should have been she who’d gone.
“We’ll see,” she replied.
In October, Raúl decided that he wouldn’t go to school anymore. A few of their friends, like Ibrahim and Diego, had graduated, and others, like Brenda, Douglas, and Alfredo, had dropped out or changed schools. They hadn’t really kept in touch. Being around people, friends new and old, now made him anxious, and besides, he wanted to be with his own girlfriend. He’d found her on Kik, the chatting app, two weeks after Ernesto and Sofía got together. Marleny was her name. She was a senior at a high school downtown, and though she was born in the United States, she was Mexican American and had grown up speaking Spanish. Like him, she was tired of school, and like him, she was lonely.
“I love you,” she texted early on, with three red hearts.
“Me too I love you” he replied.
“I love you I love you.”
“Damn,” typed Raúl. “I love you so much.”
The Monday after they started going out, Raúl and Marleny ditched together. They met up in downtown Oakland and walked the streets, intoxicated with the waking up of the city, the freedom of having nowhere to be, and being in love. They sat on the benches in Jefferson Square Park, halfway between the city center and the highway, and hopped another bus to the lake, where they walked its perimeter, holding hands. They swung on the swings as homeless men sat hunched on benches and elderly men pulled cans from the municipal trash bins. They made out and he felt her up before they hopped on the bus and ate tacos on International. He kept his body as close to hers as possible, and they kissed for a long time before he had to leave for work in Montclair, promising to see her tomorrow.
Around the time he met Marleny, he began cutting himself. He’d heard of other kids at school doing this, how sometimes people felt better with a little bit of pain. He tried it once, and the feeling of the blood seeping from his skin was like the release of a pressure valve. He liked the way the stripe of red-brown looked on his arms after the blood dried.
As Ernesto was sleeping one night, Raúl took out the small knife, hunched over by the light of a lamp on his bed, and sliced.
Ernesto woke to his twin’s low grunts of pain and satisfaction. “What are you doing?” he hissed.
“Leave me alone. It makes me feel better.” But he was glad Ernesto was awake as he cut more slashes into his arm, digging just deep enough to let out a satisfying bit of blood, just enough to start beading on the skin. The accumulation would linger a moment and then burst its own dam, dripping down his arm in a stream just red and thick enough to be impressive.
For a week he passed the time like this: leaving with Ernesto in the morning with the promise of going back to school, getting on the bus, then jumping off downtown to meet Marleny before Ernesto could stop him. Raúl didn’t care that he was lying to Ernesto every time he promised to go to school. If Ernesto got to spend all day with his girlfriend, then Raúl should get to, too. He and Marleny wandered the streets together, wounded by the world and in love. She stroked the raised accumulation of scars on his lower arm, moving lightly over the freshest ones, still red, like hash marks to chart the passage of days.
But after that first week, she insisted she needed to go back to class—it was her senior year, and she loved him, of course she loved him, but she had to be in school. For her future. So after their morning meet-up, he began dropping her off in front of her school, then chose a bus to hop on. One took him to Alameda, where he stared out the window as the bus crossed the Oakland estuary and meandered through the quiet, tree-lined streets full of big houses. Another took him to the base of the Oakland hills, where he looked up at the hillsides balding from thirst—the same drought, he knew, that was afflicting his family back in El Salvador. For another week he rode AC Transit to new places, not answering his brothers’ phone calls, not answering anyone’s calls, just staring out the window, feeling his arm throb, listening to the tick-tock in his head.
Marleny was the only one he wanted to talk to, but after not too long, their relationship turned volatile. He resented her for not skipping with him and accused her of having another boyfriend in school; she accused him of flirting with other girls. Twice that third week they broke up and got back together again.
Raúl spent nearly two weeks under the radar, avoiding school and his twin. He added more piercings to his face like more and more of his friends had at school, loving the way the needle felt when it pushed through his skin. He changed the barbell of the eyebrow piercing on his right side to a peg with black shiny barbs on each end, then added a twin piercing on the right side, which gave the impression of horns. Ernesto already had an eyebrow piercing, but now Raúl had two. Ernesto had pierced his upper cheek, but Raúl bested him again, piercing a pinch of flesh on his temple, opting for barbed ends of that one, too. The last and most expensive piercing was a little circle that clipped into his cheek like a small, sparkling shield. Ernesto didn’t have anything like that.
On the bus after each piercing, Raúl would polish the screen of his phone and hold it up as a mirror, admiring the work. He felt proud of the way he was designing himself. It was a free country here. No one would bother him for these piercings or assume he was a gang member, as they might back home—just as they might for his Nikes, his hip-hop clothes, and his nice phone. It was his face, his money, he’d think, passing the hours as the pain in his face dulled.
He never once missed work. He’d end each sojourn at the Italian restaurant, always showing up just before his five o’clock shift so he could change into his work clothes—a T-shirt stained and stretched at the neckline, dishwater-soiled pants—pull on his thick white apron, and get to work on the dishes.
The Italian restaurant, tucked back into a second-rate strip mall, was a nice place where diners often came to celebrate birthdays and graduations. Raúl impressed the kitchen with his quick work and resolve. He scoured the industrial metal pans with vigor, dislodging every meatball remnant, hosing them down, replacing the clean pans under the counter as the line cooks filled more trays with newly shaped meatballs. Raúl had tired of the food there, but he didn’t mind the washing—the physicality and pace seemed to stave off his anxiety. The marks on his arms grew sodden and red with the dirty water.
The older guys at the restaurant called him Pepito and poked fun at him for being the youngest, but he didn’t care. He knew he was the best worker, and for those six hours every night, he took refuge in efficiency—every moment meant more of a dollar he could take home, every dish a concrete task. It was when he was walking, or lying in bed, or looking out the window on the bus, that the bomb came back into his head. Maricela had called a few nights into his hooky spree to report that Esperanza and Wilber Sr. had come down with chikungunya; he hated that he wasn’t there to help them. He was stuck here in Oakland where he didn’t really want to be, but he would never go back, either. When his sense of injustice welled to the breaking point, he’d take out his little knife and slice into his arm, as if he was slitting his ex-friends’ throats.
“What the fuck?” Ernesto said in English when he saw Raúl’s new piercings.
“I can do whatever I want. It’s my face,” said Raúl.
“You’re always following what I’m doing,” Ernesto replied.
“Fuck you. I make my own choices.” They didn’t talk the rest of that night.
They were careful not to post too many close-ups on Facebook so their sister and brother wouldn’t see their piercings and tattle to their parents. Wilber Sr. and Esperanza would think it was devil work, if not proof that they’d become gangsters up north.
That weekend Ernesto got a new barb on his eyebrow, then a half ring on his lip. Sofía thought they were cool, but after the lip ring, she thought things had gone far enough. “No more,” she said.
After a month of going out together, Ernesto decided it was time to ask Sofía’s parents for permission to date her. This was a common custom: a young man courting a girl must ask her parents as a prerequisite to getting their approval for it. The last girl he’d asked about was Marie, his only other real girlfriend. “Going out without permission,” he said, “that’s fine, but it’s a different thing.” It was less serious, that is, than what he felt for Sofía.
He hadn’t approached Sofía’s mother yet because Sofía wasn’t allowed to date anyone until her fifteenth birthday, which was coming up. Ernesto was planning to ask soon afterward, but he was nervous. He rehearsed in his head: he’d take out all his piercings, visit Sofía’s home, and look her parents in the eye with stiff formality: “I am your daughter’s boyfriend, and I want to ask your permission to keep seeing her. I love her very much, and it’s not right for us to go on without your permission.” What worried him was the questions they might ask—about his age, his family, where he lived, whom he lived with, his grades in school. He knew he couldn’t give reassuring answers to these.
She wanted him to be at her quinceañera, but it was a Saturday on Halloween weekend, and getting off work would be hard. She vacillated between understanding and being annoyed that her boyfriend couldn’t come to her party, her big day. He’d do his best, he told her.
He focused on her real birthday, two weeks before the party. That day he carried an aerial bouquet of Happy Birthday balloons to school, along with a necklace and matching earrings that he’d picked out with painstaking deliberation from Forever 21. He felt sure she’d like the attention of getting jewelry and a bunch of iridescent balloons from her boyfriend in public. But he was over an hour late to school, and before he could find her, she sent an angry string of texts: “You’re not a responsible person.” “It’s my birthday and you don’t even come on time to see me.” “You don’t take school seriously.”
They spent the day in a fight. He shoved the balloons toward her and walked off. She snatched their ribbons before they floated away.
“Maybe we’ll break up,” he said, shrugging. He didn’t want that. But he was too tired to fight. After hours of back-and-forth texting that night, they made up. “Thank you for my balloons,” she said. The next day he gave her the jewelry. When she untied the bow and lifted the top of the box, she squealed and hugged him. He gently hung the necklace around her, fastening it from behind, and she clipped on the earrings eagerly. They were good again.
Raúl and Marleny broke up for good. By ditching school so many days in a row, Raúl had gotten his brother’s attention. Ernesto worried about what Raúl did all day, and also about his parents laid up back home, shaking with fever. They’d been sick now for over two weeks—standard for chikungunya but ominous all the same. “You don’t understand,” he told me when I tried to reassure him. “They’re old, and frail. This could kill them.”
Ernesto monitored his twin’s social media, where Raúl posted photographs of his cut-up arms. “What the fuck is he doing to himself?” Ernesto said. “If my mother knew, she’d just—I don’t know what, she’d die.”
One morning when he couldn’t take it anymore, he left school to go look for Raúl downtown. Ernesto dialed his twin’s number on repeat in hopes of driving him crazy enough to answer, but he wouldn’t pick up. Ernesto pictured him watching the phone ring and ring and ring, flashing his name. He’d never ignored him like this. Ernesto hardly needed to glance around Jefferson Square Park to know Raúl wasn’t there. “I can tell when he’s around,” he said, “and when he’s not.”
He’d heard the stories before, in El Salvador and here, the stuff of bad movies and bad dreams: “All of a sudden you get a phone call, and your brother is dead.” Suicide, he meant, that sin.
Ernesto took to camping out in my office for extended periods each day, overwhelmed, looking for help tracking down Raúl. One day a group of Yemeni mothers, clad in long, shiny black abayas that covered their frames from wrist to neck to ankle, and colorful scarves pinned tightly against their faces, visited the office regarding the parent English class we offered. They noticed Ernesto seated in the corner and murmured to one another in Arabic. They wanted to know what had happened to this sad boy.
“What’s wrong?” one of them asked him. “Are you okay?”
Where to start? He shook his head, then replied, “My mom is sick.”
“Your mama is sick? Oh, is she in the hospital?” the woman asked.
“No, she’s in El Salvador.”
“You’re here in this country all by yourself without your mama? Where’s your dad?”
“He’s in El Salvador, too.”
“Habibi, sorry, you poor baby,” the woman said, looking at Ernesto with tenderness. Then all four of the women teared up, seemingly surprised at their own sudden outpouring of emotion, missing their own families at home, perhaps, and dabbing their eyes with tissues and the ends of their headscarves and whispering to one another.
Ernesto tensed his jaw and swiveled his chair toward the corner. Seeing them there, these four mothers from a far-off place, with their strange gowns and soft, kind faces, made Ernesto miss Esperanza even more, and he began to cry. He hadn’t cried in a long time; even when he had been unraveling last spring, when he’d got the racing heart and trouble breathing, he’d never cried—not while sober, anyway. The horrible things that had happened to him had once ruled him, shackled him with anger and hate; now things were relatively good for him, but they had become terrible for everyone else he loved. Was it a zero-sum game? The tears came fast and hard. He twisted his face to stop them, but it was no use, they just kept coming, and the more they came, the more he felt like a boy and remembered crying in his mother’s arms, the way he could let his whole body fall into hers.
The truth was, he needed Raúl as much as Raúl needed him. But how could he help him? He didn’t want to be crying in the office at school surrounded by a bunch of strangers; he didn’t want to be looking for his brother on the streets of downtown Oakland. Get over it, he wanted to say to Raúl. Stop it. Start over. He wanted to be angry, but cooped up in this tiny dark office with these women, he could feel only the anxious consequence of love. He hunched toward the wall and let it go, filling the room with the echoes of his grief.
The women wiped their faces and stood up to go. “We’ll pray for you,” said the one who spoke English, “Habibi, we’ll pray for you.”
“Thank you,” he managed. She’d spoken in English, and he’d understood what she’d said.
Raúl had missed nine days in a row of school.
“Do you know what happened today?” Ernesto said to him after work that night. “I was in Ms. Lauren’s office, and a bunch of Arab ladies came in and asked about Mom. And I cried. I fucking cried—because of you.”
Raúl was surprised. He knew his brother was concerned, but not this much.
“I’m scared you’re going to end up dead,” Ernesto said. “I don’t want to be crying in a room full of strange ladies because I don’t know where you are, or what’s going on, and you’re not even picking up your fucking phone.”
“I know,” Raúl said. “I’m sorry.”
“If you don’t quit that shit,” Ernesto said, pointing to Raúl’s scabby forearms, “I’m going to kick your ass.” He told his brother, “I love you,” after a pause.
The next day Raúl came back to school.