Salvation Page 9

  The customer folded his arms over his chest. “I don’t wanta know what this grease rag”—he jerked his head at Señor Tosa—“thinks I might’ve done wrong; I wanta know what he’s gonna do to fix the problem. And how much it’s gonna cost me.”

  How about some time in anger management? Or maybe with an antibiotic. A circle on the guy’s arm looked suspiciously like ringworm.

  Señor Tosa explained that he would have to check out the engine first.

  “So you’re saying you can’t do your job?” the other man griped.

  Salva wished he could send a silent message to the mechanic. Just let him take his beer gut somewhere else and see how fast he gets a quote on a Sunday.

  Señor Tosa, his face blank, asked for the man’s phone number, promising to call back with the quote by four o’clock.

  The customer seemed to get over himself long enough to reel off his number, which Salva scribbled down on one of the yellow invoices.

  The guy swiped up his hat and stomped toward the door.

  “We’ll need the keys,” Salva called after him.

  The man spat again. Then he dug into his jeans pocket, pulled out an object, and sent it spiraling in a lousy throw. Salva caught the key.

  “You tell your real boss,” the guy said to him, “I’m talkin’ to someone who speaks English on the phone, not this Spanish flunky. This is America.”

  And the guy walked out.

  Salva still hadn’t gotten the anger out of his head by the next afternoon as he entered the cardboard forest that now filled the multipurpose room. Rows of wooden stands with corrugated tree trunks and boughs covered in paper leaves stood in his way. He burst past one, knocked it down, and sent dozens of leaves blowing in every direction.

  “Careful!” Beth gasped from the stage. “That’s the forest for the spring production. They’re not dry.”

  Yeah, well, he’d figured that out a little late.

  He reached for the sundered foliage and got his palm covered in glue. Ugh!

  Beth came forward with a wet towel and reached for his hand.

  He tugged away, grabbing the towel more brusquely than he should have.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  Yeah, something was wrong. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. Which bugged the hell out of him.

  He wiped his hand.

  She stood there, just waiting at first, then crouched down and began to pick up the ruined leaves. “What is it?”

  She doesn’t want to know. No one ever wanted to know. And the people who did know—his father, Señor Tosa, Señora Mendoza—they all preached the same silent mantra. Poner la otra mejilla. Sometimes he hated the friggin’ Catholic Church!

  “Salva?”

  “This is America!” The words burst out before he had a clue he was going to say them.

  “Oh”—Beth paused in her leaf gathering and grinned up at him—“is it?”

  Exactly. “What makes people think I need to hear it?!” He whirled and crossed through a row of drying trees, separating her from his anger. “Or that anyone needs to hear it?”

  The tone of her voice sobered. “It’s a defense, I guess. For people who are scared.”

  He kicked the wooden stand of another tree without thinking, then reached out to rescue it. More leaves tumbled. “Of what?” He found it really hard to believe that the jerk at the machine shop had been scared of Tosa’s father.

  “Of their own ignorance.”

  The tree trunk was vibrating. She was right. He knew she was right, though he’d never heard anyone put it that way before.

  “Who said it?” she asked.

  And the vibrating stopped. He realized he didn’t even know the name of the idiot.

  Sighing, Salva bent down to pick up the mess.

  She eased a garbage can, already half filled with discarded leaves, in his direction. “Tell me.”

  “You don’t want to hear about it.”

  “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”

  He stared at her. His mother had been like that. She’d never asked a question without wanting to know the answer. Beth—well—he didn’t have to impress her. And she didn’t come with all the baggage that was in his family. Plus, nothing was too “out there” or “over her head.” Or too deep. She seemed to operate on a plane of feeling.

  Salva stretched for a distant leaf, then found himself spilling: the details of the conversation in the machine shop, the thousand other times he’d heard that stupid comment about America, and all his own logical arguments against it—that America included Latin America, that English was the native language of England, that no one who’d never learned a second language had the right to judge.

  “You’re right,” Beth said when he was done. No arguments. Or vacillations.

  He felt like he could breathe for the first time all day.

  She was silent for maybe a minute, then asked, “Have you read “Ending Poem” by Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales?”

  Random. He wiped up the floor with the wet towel.

  “It’s by Puerto Rican writers,” she continued, “about celebrating all the cultures that make us who we are. It’s kind of awesome.”

  Which was so Beth. Telling him to read a poem. As if real people could just work out all their problems through literature. Like the characters in a book.

  Well, maybe not in the plays he’d been reading for AP English: Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Othello. Salva stood up and draped the soiled towel over the edge of the water fountain. Sometimes heroes didn’t solve anything. Sometimes they died.

  11

  REHEARSAL

  The young man in front of Beth, his hair tousled, shirt loose, taking out his vengeance on paper trees, was not the Salva she knew. Though she’d had fair warning. He had slammed his locker door, loudly, between first and second period. And everyone had stared.

  “Looks like something’s blown the god’s cool,” Ni had joked at the time.

  But Beth had been too consumed with disguising her own automatic desire to defend him to pay much heed. She knew Ni’s sarcasm came from a history of defending her after spending hours, in the eighth-grade girls’ bathroom, watching Beth cry her eyes out over Salva’s failure to notice her. Which was why Beth had failed to tell her best friend about the study sessions. For five and a half months.

  I should have been up front from the very beginning.

  There was so much about Salva that Beth wanted to discuss.

  His mother for one. He never spoke about her.

  In fact, he rarely talked about anyone in his family, though Beth remembered he had an older brother who had picked him up every day from elementary school. And she knew Salva also had three sisters, the eldest of whom, Lucia, had graduated from Liberty two years ago. And about whom, when asked if he saw her often, he’d replied, “Too often.”

  As for his younger sisters, he claimed they drove him batty, but Beth could tell he cared about them because he had bailed on her only twice this winter—once to see their music concert and once to pick up Talia when she had been sick.

  He didn’t talk about his father either, but in the essay for Yale, in which the applicant had had to select a hero, he had chosen “Papá,” whom Salva seemed to think had built the entire world with his own hands, then schmoozed God into taking the credit. La familia obviously meant a lot.

  Though perhaps not as much as friendship. Beth had made the error—once—during a study session, of deriding Pepe Real for a brainless comment the guy had made in cit/gov. And Salva had unloaded on her fifty reasons why his best friend was awesome. The whole bond-between-guys-who-could-throw-a-ball escaped her. But she got that her study partner was defending his best friend.

  Like Ni had been this morning.

  And Ni had been right about Salva losing his cool. Beth had never seen him rail about anything as passionately as he had during the last few minutes. Or—she glanced up at the clock—the past half hour. “Umm…I hate to men
tion it,” she said, “but sign-ups are tomorrow. We have to choose a Shakespeare scene or…risk dire consequences from the Mercenary.”

  Their teacher had spent the morning’s lit class stressing the significance of the word deadline. “You will submit your scene on time,” she had declared, “or someone else will have the right to it. You will submit your first choice for the location of your performance, or there will be no way to make arrangements. You will submit the time of that performance, or you will not go on my schedule. And if you are not on my schedule, even if you have the most impressive project in Liberty High history, you will still fail.”

  Salva looked up at Beth with shadowed eyes, but he must have remembered the lecture. He shoved his hands in his pockets and strode past her toward the stage—which she had covered, literally, with copies of every Shakespeare play she’d ever seen or read. Twenty-eight plays. Perhaps too many. But they were really all excellent. And she’d been trying to be organized.

  He vaulted into the center of the books, then turned in a slow circle, something like a smile creeping onto his face.

  “Of course,” she said, “if there’s a play you’d rather use that’s not up there—”

  That was definitely a smile. “No offense,” he replied, picking up a copy of Coriolanus and turning it upside down, “but I think we should do something famous.”

  Well, he was entitled to an opinion.

  “I mean,” he added, “we’re being graded on the reaction of our audience. And if we do something no one’s ever heard of”—his thumb ran through the upside down pages of the play—“they’re not gonna get it.”

  He had a point. She scrambled onto the stage and started picking through the plethora of books. “Okay, well, there’s Hamlet and The Taming of the Shrew and Henry V, and—”

  “I think we should do Romeo and Juliet.”

  Henry tumbled from her grasp.

  “Cuz, you know,” he continued, “it’s the only play the freshmen have read.”

  Her hands were shaking. This couldn’t be happening. Could it? She’d been dreaming about having the chance to act out the role of Juliet opposite Salva Resendez since freshman lit, when they’d both been chosen to read the balcony scene aloud in class—something she was certain he’d forgotten.

  She avoided his gaze, staring instead into the folds of the green curtain gathered at the corner of the stage. “Who…who did you want to be?”

  “I don’t think we should be secondary characters.”

  She dropped the rest of the books, letting herself believe, for an instant, that this was real.

  “But I’m not doing one of those dorky balcony scenes,” he said.

  So much for the dream.

  “Plus,” Salva added, “Romeo is a major pain in the butt for the whole first half of the play. He mopes through the beginning, then falls all over himself for a girl without even thinking about the consequences.”

  Because thought has so much to do with falling in love.

  Beth blinked—hard. And had a desperate urge to hide behind the curtain. “So that would leave—”

  “The death scene,” Salva said.

  She wrapped her arms around her chest and gripped her elbows. Did he realize what was in the death scene? “I…I suppose we could try—”

  “No.” He stopped her. “We aren’t going to try it. We’re making a decision and making it work. Right?”

  “Um…” Oh my God. “Right.”

  “Good, because I have the perfect plan for the venue.” He started picking up books.

  This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t be real. This couldn’t—

  “We had a dare, remember?”

  Which meant? She met his gaze at last.

  He smoothed his hair and tucked in his shirt. “We’re performing in the center of the cafeteria,” he said. “At lunchtime. In front of everyone.”

  The kiss was an issue. Though Salva didn’t think it was such a huge one that it merited Beth’s pacing the stage at 6:46 A.M. the day of their second rehearsal. The school handbook was pretty clear in its language about “No physical acts of affection on school grounds.”

  “We could just cut it,” he said, leaning back to stare at the tissue-paper-covered stage lights. The line was his, after all. He’d had three million to master in the two days since they’d chosen the scene, in his view much more of an issue. She’d set the deadline, an unforeseen consequence of choosing a drama club member as his partner.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She swatted him with her script. “You’ve already learned it.”

  He quoted at light speed: “‘O you the doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death.’”

  She groaned—no doubt because of his lack of expression. But he’d get to that later, if he could survive waking up at six A.M. three weeks in a row. The scheduling had been a hassle. Beth had insisted, since they had only three weeks to prepare, that they rehearse every day. Which meant he’d had to barter away his Monday and Tuesday evenings so that Char would walk the girls to the morning bus. And that meant he’d spent three hours yesterday at the Laundromat with not only his younger sisters, but also Char’s punky nine-year-old brother.

  At least Pepe would be happy.

  Unlike Beth. Who had begun the morning by forcing Salva to haul a cafeteria-style table onto the stage. And was now harping on the stupid kiss. “The Mercenary said we should cut with discretion,” she argued. “The line is almost at the end of your speech. It’s clearly important.”

  He rolled over onto his knees and gave her a salute. “All right, madam director, what do you suggest? I could just recite it without any action, but that kind of screams idiot-actor-who-doesn’t-know-what-he’s-saying, doesn’t it?”

  She started coiling her pencil in her hair. It was kind of cool seeing her in creative freak-out mode. “Last year,” she said, “for the fall drama production, there was a fake kiss behind an umbrella.”

  “An umbrella in a crypt? Yeah, that sounds good.”

  She stopped pacing. “You’re a great help.” Her sarcasm matched his.

  And—well—he kind of deserved it. “Look.” He stood up, then rotated, his hands facing outward. “The real problem with hiding behind a prop is that we’re performing in the center of the cafeteria, so no matter where we try to hide, part of the audience will be able to see.”

  She pulled her pencil from her hair. “We could move up along a wall—”

  “No.”

  “You are so stubborn!”

  This from the girl who’d made him haul a table onto the stage. “Okay, so you’re supposed to be dead.” He snapped his fingers and pointed her toward the heavy prop. “Go on, die.”

  She arched her eyebrows, then climbed onto the table and lay back across it horizontally. Her head was still up.

  “Dead.” He climbed after her in a single movement.

  “Actually, I’m not—”

  “Sleeping like you’re dead.” He knelt above her.

  She dropped her neck back. “Look, Salva, can’t you just tell me—”

  “Let’s assume I’m not kissing you while you’re talking.”

  She shut up.

  “Or while I’m still talking,” he added. “That gives us a window of four more lines before I drink the poison.” Death by poison in the school cafeteria. There was a sweet congruity to that. “So maybe I’m just announcing my intention to kiss you and don’t try it until after I drink the poison. But then—” He took her shoulders and pulled her close.

  She was warm. In his arms.

  And smelled like coconut shampoo.

  En el nombre de Dios. He dropped her, then reached blindly for his script, pulled it out of his back pocket, and started leafing through it, even though he knew all his lines by heart. The plan had seemed so logical when he had thought it out: the play, the scene, the characters. The words didn’t bother him. Lines were just lines. And it was just a project. For a grade.

&nb
sp; What he hadn’t thought about—what he’d failed to comprehend—was that for the scene to work, he and Beth had to do more than talk.

  They had to touch.

  “I move close as though I am going to kiss you.” He avoided her gaze. “But before I actually follow through, the poison kicks in.” He grabbed his throat and fell backward on the table. “‘Thus with a kiss I die.’”

  12

  THE SHAKESPEARE PROJECT

  Logic sucked, Salva decided, as he stepped into the chaos that was the cafeteria on the day before spring break. Somehow he had survived the three weeks of rehearsals, of listening to his head rather than his body, of telling himself he didn’t feel anything. Three weeks of waking up from dreams in which he’d succumbed to the smell of coconut and the touch of untamed red-brown hair.

  All so he could confront this: banging trays, flying utensils, shouts across the social divide. And the sick smell of scalded vegetables mixed with that of half-burned fried rice. He picked up a tray.

  Then cringed as a fortune cookie crunched beneath his shoe.

  At least Beth, who had staked out a table at the center of the room, couldn’t have witnessed the ill-timed step. She’d been panicking all week over the smallest details: the way her hand should fall as she died, how he should pronounce the word betossed, how she should throw the goblet—a school milk carton painted black.

  Gossip about the best Shakespeare projects had been up and down the hallway all week. He’d seen two performances personally, one in the gym, and one in the middle of an AP calc quiz. Now there was an idea. How could your audience not love being interrupted from straining their brains for correct functions by Caliban, Trinculo, and Stephano?

  Though, of course, Salva hadn’t needed their help. He’d been phoning in an A in calc all year. The course didn’t deserve its reputation.

  Unlike AP English. Where a full third of his grade was going to depend on what happened here in the next five minutes. The Mercenary lurked in the far back corner of the room. She arched her eyebrows in his direction, then tapped a pen on a notepad. His stomach took a dive that had nothing to do with burned rice.