fter gym we lined up in the hallway outside the locker rooms and waited for the bell to ring. I stood with my back pressed against white painted cement watching minutes tick by.

Indian boy was a year younger than me. He stood across the hall watching me watch the clock. When our eyes met, his black titanics steadied while mine shifted to the floor. A black ponytail hugged his neck, and when the bell rang, I watched it disappear into the crowd of freshmen ahead of me.

A year later he came looking for my brother but found me instead. On the couch, his friends squeezed next to my friends and we sat in a squashed mess watching Traffic and passing a bag of Doritos back and forth.

"Tijuana," he said. "I'm gonna make it there some day."

After a while they didn't bother to knock. They pulled up in a cherry red 4-Runner, stomped out their cigarettes on the front porch and helped themselves to the house.

After a while Indian boy didn't bother to put out his cigarette. He walked into the house, smoke between his fingers, and laughed.

"Take that out," I told him. I'd let them smoke in my bedroom just once. But that was with the door locked and the stereo pumping and a cold winter night descending in the air.

He laughed again, took a drag.

"You can't smoke in here."

He took another drag, blew the smoke toward the ceiling. "Well, I am."

"I'm serious. Get out." I shoved him toward the door.

He turned back, stared hard. The others moved against the couch. "Make me," he said.

I raised my brows and looked into his obsidian eyes gleaming in the dusty light of the living room. "Fine, but sit by the window."

With cigarette pressed between his lips and eyes sunrise steady, he said, "That's what I thought."

In the car, Indian boy sat middle-back, gripping head-rests and yelling "shoot the moon" in my ear until the speedometer neared eighty. We sailed past red lights and street signs and kids on bikes and he said from the backseat "all the way to Tijuana, baby," in a comfortable voice while my head pulsed with fear.

Next to me, my friend struck a lighter and watched the flames rock in country road bounce. Indian boy held his hand over the yellow wave and said, "I bet it's warm like this in Tijuana," and I watched the black hairs on his hand curl and disappear. The hiss of butane and the smell of burning hair and suddenly I remember the trailer, the one where the sound of expanding metal overpowered screams and the air was thick and gray and no one could find him, not even the firefighters. Not until it was too late.

It was too late, I thought, too late, and I looked up and watched a tree, framed by a thousand stars blinking in the tireless night, shed bark and branches and shatter glass. The lighter flew from her fingers and Indian boy launched past me, snagging his shoe on the emergency brake, and hit a fence where marigolds and milkweed grew in tangled roots.

A week later, people came and laid flowers and a fast south wind blew the sweet smell of tobacco that whispered Tijuana. Everyone said "I'm sorry, so sorry," and I nodded and thought: you're the only one.

 

[END]

© 2003 Kelly Spitzer