They need to shut down Daddy Joe’s. I tell Mai that when I see a smashed-up roach on the floor by the booth we sit in. She’s laughing. So is Sato. It’s me and Q that look like we want outta here.

“When you have food, you get roaches,” Mai says. Then she starts talking about how her family’s food truck got a few of ’em too.

“You can get shut down by the government for that,” I say, wiping my hands on my shorts.

Q unzips his backpack. Pulls out watermelon-flavored hand gel. Squirts some on his hands. Mine too. Sato says we all just pathetic. “A few germs ain’t gonna kill you.”

Mai’s shaking her head, but she got her hands out too.

Daddy Joe’s is exactly sixteen bus stops from our school. On Saturdays the place is hopping. People line up outside all day long to get a table. During the week, things slow down. Like now. There ain’t nobody here but us four and two tables with one person each at ’em. We in the restaurant ten minutes before anybody comes from the back and asks us what we want.

“I ain’t got no money,” Sato says, looking at me.

I roll my eyes at him. “I got money,” I say, “but I ain’t buying you nothing.”

The waitress is so neat and pretty you wonder why she works in a place like this. “Don’t waste my time, now,” she says, staring at Sato.

“Give me . . . Give me a bag of chips and some iced tea,” Q says. “Vanilla pudding too.”

Mai orders apple pie, a glass of water, and french fries covered in gravy.

“Help a brother out, Q,” Sato says, trying to get money. “I’ll pay you back. I get paid Saturday.”

“I got your back,” Q says, trying to sound cool.

I check out the dead flies hanging on the dirty yellow strip in the corner. I stop counting at fifteen.

Q’s dipping his barbecue chips in his vanilla pudding one at a time and smacking his lips like that mess taste good. Sato’s getting down on cheese fries and milk. I’m sitting with my hands folded in front of me. Sato puts a fry up to my mouth and tells me to taste. I shake my head no. But I eat the fry anyhow.

“Q,” he says, “you know Raspberry is so cheap that she don’t spend money on her own self? Not a dime,” he says, sticking another fry in my mouth.

I chew on the fry real slow, trying to make it last. Q wipes his bowl clean with his two middle fingers. He tells Sato that he don’t know that much about me. Mai tells him that I’m the cheapest girl in the whole wide world. We stay in that place three hours. The waitress finally asks us to leave when she sees we ain’t doing nothing but taking up space.

Sato and Q leave us as soon as we get outside. There’s a basketball court up the street. They say they gonna walk ahead and check it out. Me and Mai take our time. I ask her about her dad. Whether he’s really gonna send her away or not.

She stops. Grabs hold of her long, thick hair and says, “If he makes me go, I will cut it off. Snip, snip, gone.”

My eyes get big. “Your dad will kill you.”

“So?” she says, rolling her eyes. Next thing I know Mai’s jumping over a fireplug, her long hair flying all over the place.

“Now, that’s what I like: a Puerto Rican girl with long pretty curls,” some boy says. He’s mowing grass in front of the funeral parlor without no shirt on. The blond hair on his chest looks thick and wet, like the stuff you take off corn when you clean it. He looks older than us. Like seventeen or eighteen.

“Hola, little momma,” his friend says. “Won’t you come to Poppa?”

Mai fingers her tattoo and keeps on walking.

The boy with the hairy chest crosses the street and follows us. “You too good to speak?” he says.

We walk a little faster.

“Señorita, will ya please-a tell me your name-a?” he says, keeping up behind us and putting his hands in her hair.

Mai pushes his hand away. He pulls on her hair again.

“I’m not Puerto Rican. I’m black,” she says, stopping and pointing to her tattoo.

He laughs. Says she should wear a bigger sign if she wants people to know what she really is.

I look him up and down and tell him he needs a sign himself. “Stúpido,” I say, remembering some Spanish.

Mai starts saying stuff too. “Idioto.”

I slap her five, but the words that come out his mouth next shut us both up.

“Perpetrator,” he says. “That’s what you should have on your arm. Your forehead, too,” he says pointing there. “Fake.”

Mai crosses her arms and says, “I said I’m not Puerto Rican.”

Sweat is dripping down the side of his face. He takes his T-shirt and wipes it. Smells the shirt and makes a face. “Well, you ain’t black, neither. Not all the way, anyhow.”

Mai puts her arm next to his. His is almost as dark as hers. “How you know what I am?” she says.

He laughs. “I got eyes,” he says, sticking his neck way out. “Two of ’em.”

I can see Sato and Q up the street about a block and a half away. I tell Mai we should go ’cause they gonna wonder what happened to us. The boy with all the lip starts walking away, telling Mai she could say she was Puerto Rican if she wanted. “Those girls are hot,” he says.

Mai and me start walking again. “See what I mean? People think they can say anything to me,” she says, digging in her purse for a rubber band and putting her hair in a ponytail.

“He was just talking,” I say, sitting down on the curb. “Don’t pay him no mind.”

Mai says she already forgot about him. But she don’t say nothing to me, Sato, and Q the whole time we’re on the bus headed back to school. When Sato asks her what’s wrong, she doesn’t speak. But before we off the bus she hands me a note. Why do people care what I am, anyhow?

I write her back. Smack Sato’s hand when he tries to snatch the note from me. I don’t care if you black, white, or crazy, even. We girls. All the time.

She smiles—a little. Writes me back and hands me the note while we stepping off the bus. I’m black. I’m black, it says, like maybe she won’t believe it herself if she don’t keep repeating it.