Staff - Short Stories from Printers Row, Volume One

G ET OUT OF this donut store where Im the one dropping dough into the hot oil vat at five most mornings and go all the way back to the night where nothing happened. Still you would come up hands empty. People like chalking up blame but when they do, I laugh. This story is not my fault.

Third grade, Lili came to our school. That week I spotted her older sister walking the halls but it took me until Thursday to realize the sisters were linked. They stood lined up for the bus looking as if they had been carved by different knives or mothers.

Seeing Lili in third grade, youd think she was round and cute like one of those dolls in an ad with the boom and echo meant to make some brown-skinned welfare mom run and get it on sale. Lilis hair was long and straight, so shiny it made you want to take a scissors to it, while her sister even in fifth grade had big hulking shoulders and a face that could have been pared jagged by one of our rusty blades in wood shop. Plus the nose on that face, like my mother said about people, the nose on that face to me that nose was identical to the statue of the Indian who stood outside our village cigar store, the one so exciting to our local vandals that the storeowner had to take it in for protection every night.

Later I learned the sisters name was Ros, pronounced as if it should have been spelled Rose. If a letter went missing in the spelling of her name, she more than made up for it with her shoulders, broad like a teenagers under a tank top where you already saw bra straps, plus the arms big like two flattened chicken fingers. Standing in the line-up for bus 31, ready to go home, I looked over at bus 30, trying to understand how Lili could have a sister who looked so different. This part I remember exactly. I was wearing my denim overall dress, standing behind Emma, not listening to whatever she was saying about how Ella was crushing on Nolan and made him blush and how Tommy always stomped on her feet. Lili was the first girl I had met who didnt know how to speak English, and even if my mom liked calling me a smart aleck and know-it-all, I knew nothing about being that girl who couldnt speak English.

Lili spent that first week at the front of the class, seated straight as if Miss Connor could just hit a secret commando button on her desk which would electrocute a students seat. Later I learned bus number 30 went where no other bus did, tumbling on a dirt road at least a mile all the way up to land owned by our main farmstand, the Portarella place. Lilis house anyway was not a house in a neighborhood but a trailer plopped among a clump of others, all strung with Christmas lights and chicken wire around tiny gardens of cucumbers and violets that didnt hide how half-permanent they were. For all the electrical wiring running into those places, in half a day any one could be hitched for somewhere else.

The first time I saw her place from the outside I thought it looked fun, like she knew as much as the workers who came each year to run shooting galleries and rides at the county fair and spent a week smoking outside their trailers, spitting jokes out at one another.

My mom always used to say I had a photographic memory. It would get me in trouble if my mouth didnt first, according to her, but it wasnt me who first called Lili a wetback. Emmett learned stuff from his older brother and he taught us the word. Even if the same brother bullied Emmett til his eyes were purple, Emmett got phrases that benefited us all. Already by second grade we knew how to call boys four-eyes or retard, dork or faggot. Or fatso. All kids know these phrases can come in handy.

But when on Lilis first hour with us Emmett called her a wetback, it took the rest of us a while to understand. We were unschooled. We knew it was something bad, and I told him to quit. After we became friends, Lili kept reminding me that she knew that in that first hour I had stood up for her. I told Emmett to stop saying wetback because it made him sound special-ed, but then Dalton who really was special-ed spoke up and said wetback meant Lili was Mexican as a taco.

That part also wasnt true. An hour later, Miss Connor wanted to tell us more about Lili no Y, she kept telling us, as if to remind herself more than us, Lili with two Is, isnt that interesting, class? and kept saying Lili is from Gua-tay-ma-la, the name of her country. She made us all write the name down. Guataymala.

I turned around to make a face at Emmett. See? I mouthed. Not Mexico!

That marks the first time Lili got me in trouble because of course Miss Connor thought I was talking up in class. I got grounded on a chair sitting outside, and while I sat there, kicking my heels against the wall just loudly enough for someone inside to hear my rebel code, I was thinking Guataymala would be a good name for a horse. One day maybe I would have my own horse like Sherry did, I could take riding lessons and Id tell Guataymala to go faster.

Each day she came to school, Lili softened. She showed up with her shiny hair, sitting up straight and wearing the same too-fancy dress three days in the week and then one other laundry-day dress but always smelling clean like shed been scrubbed with ivory soap. Her last name, Rodriguez, was just before mine, Rogers, and so I was no longer lining up for recess behind Emma but now Lili. Life is so random that if the alphabet didnt go in its order, Lili and I probably wouldnt have gotten to be friends.

Once I leaned a little too close to inhale her perfumed hair. I remember thinking soon as she spoke a little more maybe I would invite her over to play line tag one afternoon in the grass behind my house, the way I used to do with Emma. Because even in the beginning, Lili sometimes threw me a shy smile which made me think she already knew English and was just fooling everyone.

Before lunch some aide always led her out of class to the soundproof room where, from what I saw, the Chinese boy Matt and a Greek kid named Spyro got to have a lot of lollipops and a little bit of English grammar.