GEOMETRY CLASS SEEMED to drag on forever. Jimena kept glancing at the clock until Mr. Hall scowled at her. “Do you think you can help the clock move faster by watching it, Jimena?”
“No, sir.” She stifled a yawn and looked at Catty.
Catty drew a chain of entwined roses and hearts across her notebook. Jimena thought she was a talented artist.
Vanessa still took notes, her pencil scratching across the paper at an impossible speed. She eagerly raised her hand to answer Mr. Hall’s questions.
The desk in front of Vanessa was empty. Serena had cut afternoon classes. Jimena wished now she had gone with her. She needed to talk to her about Veto, but she had a suspicious feeling that Serena was meeting Stanton. Jimena felt nervous about it. She worried that whatever Cassandra was planning involved Stanton.
She tried to quiet her apprehension by listening to the steady tap of rain against the windows. The weather forecast said it would clear by this afternoon. She hoped so. She didn’t want to wait in the rain for Veto.
The bell rang and she jumped.
Catty looked up and stretched as slow as a cat.
Vanessa had a satisfied grin and carefully tucked her notes inside her geometry book. “You guys want help with the homework?” Where did she get the energy?
“No,” Catty and Jimena answered together.
Vanessa winked. “All right, but if you change your minds . . .”
“No!” Catty and Jimena shouted and followed Vanessa outside to the hallway.
“Look who’s there.” Catty pointed, then pulled on her yellow slicker and opened an umbrella. “I thought you asked him for breathing room?”
Michael leaned against a bank of lockers. His black hair was pulled back in a ponytail, accenting his strong, angular features. He smiled when he saw Vanessa and his dark eyes seemed to light up. No girl could resist looking at him. Vanessa had liked him since the beginning of the school year when she first met him in Spanish class. Jimena didn’t understand why she suddenly felt like she needed more room. Michael didn’t seem like the smothering kind of guy.
“I was hoping we could talk some more,” he said to Vanessa. Without asking he took her books so that she could pull on her trench coat, then he put his arm around her and started guiding her away from Catty and Jimena.
“I’ll see you guys later,” Vanessa called over her shoulder.
“Can you believe she’s got such a gorgeous guy and she’s going to throw him away?” Catty opened her locker and put her geometry book inside.
“She’s not throwing him away. She just wants more time for herself.”
Catty nodded. “Still.”
“I know . . .” Jimena agreed and longingly watched Vanessa and Michael walk away. “They look so in love.”
“She’s a dope if she lets him go.” Catty slammed her locker.
“Sounds like you’re a little celosa.”
“A little jealous?” Catty grinned. “I’m crazy jealous. That’s the one thing I want, and I don’t ever think I’m going to get it.” Catty looked down at her watch. “I’m late. I’m watching the shop for my mom this afternoon.”
Catty’s mother owned the Darma Bookstore on Third Street. Business had been slow recently, and Kendra had started teaching extension courses at UCLA. Catty’s mother was a Latin scholar and had even worked once translating medieval manuscripts. She taught Latin and Classics. Jimena had been impressed when she met her. Kendra didn’t seem the type to have done so much studying.
“So, you want to hang out at the store with me?” Catty asked. “We could make some tea and watch videos. It’s never that busy. I think everybody in L.A. has their supply of Buddha beads.” Besides prayer beads, the bookstore also sold candles, incense, crystals, and essential oils.
Jimena slipped into her coat. “No, I have something I have to do.”
They waved good-bye, and Jimena walked out to the edge of campus, carrying a pile of books and an umbrella.
She sat on a cement bench that faced the street. The storm had started to clear, and blue sky peeked between swift moving clouds. A light breeze brought the smells of wet dirt, eucalyptus leaves, and drying cement. She lifted her hair and stretched, enjoying the feel of the clean air.
After an hour had passed, the sky had cleared completely. Jimena had missed one bus already, and when the next one approached she felt a need to run to it. Instead she let it roll by and decided to walk down to Beverly Boulevard and grab a bus there. She gathered her books and started walking.
She had only gone a little way when she felt a car pull up behind her. She turned expectantly, hoping to see Veto’s smiling face, and was immediately let down.
Serena’s brother, Collin, waved from behind the wheel of his utility van. Jimena had really disliked Collin when she first met him. Their constant bickering had upset Serena, but they got along okay now.
She stepped to the van and looked through the passenger-side window.
“I’m looking for Serena. Have you seen her?” His face was sunburned, his nose peeling and his lips still had traces of white zinc oxide. Lines from dried salt water traced around the back of his deeply tanned neck. Wind whipped through the driver’s side window and blew his long white-blond hair into his blue eyes. He looked like something from a kid’s comic book.
“I haven’t seen her,” Jimena answered.
“You haven’t?” He looked surprised.
“Maybe she had a cello lesson,” Jimena offered, even though she knew that wasn’t true. Serena was keeping her relationship with Stanton a secret from Collin. Her brother was overly protective of his little sister, and that meant he tended to scare boyfriends away. Although, Jimena couldn’t imagine anyone frightening Stanton.
“You want a ride then?” Collin leaned over and opened the passenger-side door.
She hesitated. There was still a chance she could meet up with Veto.
“Come on,” he coaxed.
Finally she handed him her books and crawled in.
He smiled broadly and waited for her to hook the seat belt before he pulled away from the curb. His surfboard was in the back of the van wrapped in towels.
“Why aren’t you surfing?” she asked. Collin was a total board-head. Waves were the only thing he ever had on his mind.
“Heavy rains bring pollution.” He shrugged. “They closed the beaches.”
During heavy rains, raw sewage filled with bacteria spilled into the ocean, threatening swimmers with hepatitis. But Jimena knew that not all of the beaches were closed. She had heard kids at school talking about the six-foot swells down at Huntington Beach.
“Too bad, storm surf is awesome.” He mused. “You want to stop at Farmers’ Market?”
“What for?”
“To get something to eat. Aren’t you hungry?” He smiled and turned the wrong way. “Let’s go down to Philippe’s and grab a sandwich.”
She shook her head. “Thanks, but I need to get home.” The day felt so over for her. She just wanted to change into her sweats and go over her geometry while huddled in bed.
He continued driving toward downtown.
“You’ll need to turn back,” she reminded him. “I really don’t have time today. Sorry.”
He seemed disappointed. Maybe he hadn’t eaten all day.
“Take this street back to Wilshire.” She pointed and he took a quick right.
When they drove past MacArthur Park, Jimena thought she caught of glimpse of Cassandra.
“Pull over!” she yelled.
“Here?” Collin seemed surprised, but he was already aiming the car to the side of the road. “What’s up?”
“I think I saw someone,” she answered and unhooked her seat belt.
As the car slowed she jumped out and ran through the gridlocked traffic to the park. She hurried around people selling homemade food from large white kettles and darted past vendors’ displays of brightly colored plastic toys, beaded jewelry, and silver watches.
She stopped near a man selling balloons and cotton candy in plastic bags.
Morgan and Karyl sat on a park bench near the lake, watching Cassandra step onto one of the paddleboats.
The wind twisted Cassandra’s frilly lace skirt tightly around her.
Jimena started to go closer to investigate, when a commotion made her turn back. People were spilling from the sidewalks into the street, stopping traffic near Collin’s van.
She glanced back at the water.
Cassandra sat down in the paddleboat, and Karyl and Morgan waved good-bye to her.
A shout made Jimena whip around and look back across the street. A young lanky boy climbed on the hood of Collin’s van. He jumped up and down and waved his arms as if he had just won a soccer game.
She took one last glance at Cassandra. She was pedaling the boat out to the middle of the lake.
Then Jimena turned and sprinted back across the park. When she got to the other side of Wilshire near the van, she shoved through the crowd. She recognized some of the faces of the boys who were bothering Collin. Two lived in her grandmother’s apartment building. They were acting bolder than their years, taunting Collin with lewd hand signs.
Collin leaned against the side of his van, legs crossed in front of him. He didn’t seem worried. He was actually smiling at the boys.
The boys weren’t Ninth Street and that was the problem. She thought they might belong to Wilshire 5. She had seen their graffiti in her grandmother’s basement.
Collin didn’t move. He was making no attempt to get back in his van and drive away. Didn’t he know how dangerous this could be? Their spindly arms and legs might make them look like elementary school boys, but if he pushed them they would have to make a big show of their daring.
“Hey,” she let the word come out hard and severe.
The three boys turned slowly and faced her. Their shaved heads made them look too young for the violence that was on their minds.
“Hey, what?” the lanky one said.
Then all three boys moved as one, close together toward her, emboldened by one another’s bravado.
Jimena shook her head and smiled. “You think the three of you make a vato strong enough to take me on?” She folded her arms carelessly over her chest.
The fat, dark boy with the long Lakers T-shirt and huge Nikes glared at her.
She knew instinctively that to win she had to act crazy. She let her hand reach inside her coat. She no longer carried a knife or a gun, but her hand remembered the motions of reaching under a shirt, and resting fingers on the cold heavy metal of a gun. That was dangerous. The boys could be strapping. Twelve- and thirteen-year-old kids could buy guns, or steal guns as easily as they could find a way to get a pack of cigarettes.
“Where you from?” The larger boy held his head up in challenge.
She laughed. “Nueve. ¿Y qué? I’m Ninth Street and so what? What do you think the three of you are going to do about it?”
The boys hadn’t expected her to be ganged up. They were too young to remember the time when everyone knew Jimena.
For a moment the boys had a strange look on their faces and they exchanged tense glances. Jimena knew that they saw something menacing and peligroso in her eyes.
The larger boy stepped back. “Come on,” he ordered. “La chica no vale la pena. She’s not worth it.”
The smaller one spit near her shoe before he turned and slowly followed his friend.
“Bitch,” the lanky one mumbled under his breath. He turned and bumped against the people circling the van as he walked away.
Once they were away from Jimena, they sprinted across the street to the park. They stole a soccer ball from a group of younger boys and started to play a hard game to undo the humiliation that a verdadera gang member had just inflicted on them.
She looked at Collin and shook her head.
He was still smiling. Those boys probably couldn’t have driven his car, but the posturing, pretending to be able to do it, was what amused them. Other twelve-year-old kids in her neighborhood were fighting a war. She remembered the helpless feeling of hearing gunshots and seeing the white flashes from the back of cars and diving for cover. That had been in the old days of drive-bys. Now gangsters got their 9-millimeters, walked uninvited into parties, and shot at point-blank range.
She knew what a bullet could do, and she suddenly felt angry that Collin hadn’t gunned the motor and fled.
“You think this is so funny?” she snapped. Before she could say more, thunder rippled through the air.
People in the park glanced up and looked at each other with astonished faces. Some laughed with nervousness, but no one ran because there hadn’t been a tremor.
She scanned the lake for Cassandra. The boat was gone, and Morgan and Karyl were no longer sitting on the park bench. She checked the rest of the park. She didn’t see them, but in the commotion they could have seen her and hidden. If they were doing something for the Atrox, they wouldn’t want her to know about it.
“Doesn’t seem like a quake to me,” Collin said beside her.
She couldn’t forget her anger that quickly. “Why’d you stay and mess with those ’hood rats?”
Her anger took him by surprise. “What do you mean mess with them? They accosted me.”
“You know what I mean,” she said. “You should have gotten the hell out. You think you can face down a gang of little punks? They get out of control and have to show the others that they got what it takes even if they don’t. It’s like these punks can’t wait to build a big reputation so everyone will know their name.”
“Is that what you did?”
That caught her by surprise.
“Yeah,” she whispered in a hoarse voice that seemed to travel over all the memories of the things she had done. She gathered her books from the front seat of his van.
His eyes had a new look for her. Was it pity, embarrassment, or understanding? She pretended not to see, and went on, “Maybe one of them even had a gun.” She turned and started walking toward her grandmother’s apartment. “Why am I wasting my time? You’ve had a nice easy life, so there’s no way you can understand.”
“And you don’t understand my philosophy.” He walked along beside her.
She glanced up at him. “Your what?”
“No fear,” he whispered.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“If I had given in and run like you’d wanted me to, then fear would have taken hold inside me.” He shrugged. “Then it starts to grow until you’re afraid of every little kid who comes up to you dressed like a gangster.”
“Maybe you should be afraid of those little kids.” She held her books tight against her chest.
He shook his head. “Once you’re afraid of something, you attract it into your life. I know.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Yeah, you try to avoid it,” he explained.
“And you try to get away from it, and because you’re trying so hard, you’re always concentrating on it, and the more you concentrate on it, the more you pull it into your life.”
She looked at him and wondered what he had feared that had made him develop such an odd philosophy. He seemed to read her thoughts.
“When I was younger my mother kept threatening to leave us.” He looked away from her then. “I was afraid she would. The fear became huge inside me. Every day I ran home from school. Every day I cleaned my room. All I could think of was her leaving. I tried everything I could to make her stay, and then she left. That’s when I decided to stop being afraid.”
“You were just a kid then.”
“So was Serena,” he added. “But I knew from that day that fear is a wasted emotion. It never stops anything bad from happening.”
“Do you know where your mother is?” Jimena asked quietly.
He shook his head. “Who cares? That was more than ten years ago.” But she knew from the tone of his voice that he did care.
She stopped at the walk that led up to her grandmother’s apartment building. “I don’t know where my mother is either.”
He glanced down at her.
“She never threatened to leave,” Jimena added. “One day she was just gone. Drugs made her go.”
“I’m sorry,” he murmured.
“My grandmother told me that some people can’t overcome their addictions and they should be pitied and prayed for and loved all the more—”
He interrupted her. “But you can’t forgive her?”
She nodded. “It’s worse than that. Even now, if I think about her, I can’t remember her face. I only see the photographs my grandmother has shown me and instead of remembering the time I spent with her, I remember the stories my grandmother has given me to go with the photos.”
“At least you had a reason for her leaving.” Collin didn’t seem to be speaking to her but to himself. “I wish I knew why mine left.”
“Did your dad ever tell you?”
He laughed, but it was a dry unhappy sound. “Yeah, he said she wanted to be a movie star.”
He walked her slowly up to the steps between the two cement lions. He stopped her before she put the key in the lock.
“That wasn’t fair what I said, about how at least you know why your mother left. It had to hurt as badly as mine leaving.” He touched her hand. It surprised her and brought on a premonition so strong that she uttered a small cry and fell back off the step.
He caught her arm. “What?” he asked. “Are you okay? Why are you looking at me so strangely?”
She had seen herself kissing Collin. And it hadn’t been a brotherly peck on the cheek. The kiss was long and passionate. She brushed her fingers across her lips. Collin? Why would she ever kiss Collin?
“Sorry,” she said and fumbled with the key. It kept sliding across the lock. “I don’t know what came over me.”
He took the key from her, inserted it into the lock, turned the knob, and handed the key back to her. “Maybe it hurt too much to talk about your mother.”
She started to go inside. “No, that was okay. Sometimes it’s good to talk about the bad things. It makes them hurt less.”
He nodded and she closed the door, then stood to the side, and watched him walk back to his van.
She needed to see Maggie. Something had to be wrong with her power. First she had seen Cassandra with Veto and she wasn’t even sure if Veto was alive or dead. And now she had a premonition of kissing Collin, her best friend’s brother. She supposed it was possible for her power to mess up. It had happened once when she had a head cold and lost her hearing and sense of smell. Maybe standing in the rain had given her some kind of illness that had affected her.
This was definitely an emergency. She turned abruptly and ran up the stairs to her grandmother’s apartment. She felt too impatient to wait for the elevator.
She unlocked the door, dropped her books on the floor, and picked up the phone. She had just started to dial when someone grabbed her from behind. She turned around, swinging.