Accidental Love (11 page)

Rene jumped off the bike and made a sour face at the sight of his socks. One was blue and the other black.

"You're a disaster, buddy boy," Marisa said, clicking her tongue. She tossed the bike aside and gave Rene a hug and a kiss on his lips.

"Guess what?" Rene asked.

"I don't know."

"I forgot to brush my teeth," he answered, and started his honking.

"You
cochino!
" She wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her sweater.

"Nah, just kidding. I brushed them twice. I have ascertained your hunger for my body and figured that you would want to devour it."

"Hunger for your body! You sound like Aaron."

Marisa flung a handful of leaves at him, wrestled him easily to the ground, and planted kisses on his neck and then a long one on his mouth.

"But do you think I'll change? You know, be strong like other guys?" Rene asked after he caught his breath. Before she could answer, he added, "You're so beautiful."

Marisa's heart leaped like a gazelle. "If you change, just make it your socks."

They shook themselves clean of leaves and grass and sat on a bench, holding hands. Marisa confessed that she did possess a desire to change. She had lost weight, that much was true. But she also wanted to be kinder, less likely to explode with anger.

"Less animosity toward mankind, you mean," Rene said.

"Less
what?
"

Rene offered a definition of the word
animosity,
which he said resulted when she called people and moments "stupid."

Marisa studied Rene and smirked. "You think you're all smart."

"But I am!" Rene honked. "I took a pre-SAT exam and I scored great."

Aaron showed up, a basketball under his arm. He was wearing an oversized Los Angeles Lakers jersey. The back read
KOBE.

"Hey," Aaron greeted them. His sweats had been dragging in the dirt and the cuffs had picked up a lot of mud.

"Hay is for—"

Marisa punched Rene in the arm. "Don't you dare say it."

"Priscilla's not here?" Aaron asked with his eyes cast on the netless rim.

"She'll be here," Marisa said, and against her better judgment attempted to flatter Aaron by describing a shot he had made against Washington.

"Yeah," he uttered, and did a slow layup.

"Oh, here she comes," chimed Rene.

Priscilla was running up the hill with a beagle on a leash.

"I am
so
late," Priscilla said. She was out of breath, and her face was pink.

Marisa understood why. Priscilla had spent her time dressing. Her hair was done in a ponytail and she was wearing a tight dress. Her lips were shiny with lip gloss.

Aaron gawked at Priscilla and did the best thing that a jock could do to demonstrate he liked someone: He passed her the basketball.

"Thanks," Priscilla said, beaming. She palmed it awkwardly, and laughed when it hit her knee and rolled away. Her beagle chased after it.

"What's your dog's name?" Marisa asked.

"Peaches," Priscilla answered as she retrieved the ball.

"Come on, let's play," Aaron said. "How about you three against me?"

What a jerk
, Marisa thought. She prayed that Priscilla would see him for what he was: a conceited jughead.

"Sounds good to me," Rene said.

Aaron bounced the ball between his legs and faked left, which all three of his opponents bought. He moved swiftly right and finger-rolled the basketball through the rim.

"Oh, wow," Priscilla said. "That was really good."

Aaron bounced the ball and tossed it to Rene, who started toward the basketball. He shot but missed the backboard.

"Hold on, dude," Aaron said. "You got to check the ball. You can't just start shooting. And anyhow, it's my outs. I made the basket."

Marisa's heart was pumping with something that felt like hatred.
Cálmate,
she warned herself.
Chill.

Rene instinctively handed Aaron the ball, and kept doing it while Aaron scored easily against the three of them. They lost 21–0.

"You're so much better than us," Priscilla said. "Like, we never got to shoot even once."

"Yeah, you did. But you missed." Aaron suggested that he play with only his left hand.

"That sounds fair," Priscilla said giddily. A storm passed over Marisa's eyes—she just didn't like this guy, no matter how handsome he was.

They again lost 21–0, so Aaron suggested that they just watch him do reverse layups.

Marisa fumed. Still, she watched him do one reverse layup after another. He then had Rene feed him balls as he tried to dunk the ball.

"Throw it higher, man," he scolded.

Rene tossed the ball, but each time Aaron complained about the toss until he finally snarled, "Never mind." He glowered at Rene.

"Hey, buster!" Marisa called out. "You think you're so good, why are you on a losing team?"

"'Cause we don't have a center," Aaron snapped back. "I'm gonna go."

Priscilla bowed her head, bit a knuckle, and finally cried, "Can't we just have fun?"

Aaron ignored the painful moment and spun the basketball on the tip of his finger. He did a layup and then said, "I gotta meet some guys." His eyes locked onto Priscilla for a long second as if he wanted to say something meaningful. Instead, he spread his attention to all four of them—the beagle had come to sit at Priscilla's feet—and announced that there was a preseason game coming up. He had free tickets if they wanted.

"
Ay,
how generous," Marisa said sarcastically. "Those tickets—what are they, two whole dollars?—would break us. I don't think I can afford to
buy one." She was hot. How she wished Aaron would do a layup into a brick wall. She had forgotten that phrase Rene had taught her earlier—something about antifreeze? No,
animosity.
That was it. She still wasn't sure she knew what the word meant, but she knew she possessed it within her soul. She was mean as a snake and would have spat her venom if Aaron suddenly hadn't wheeled and started jogging away.

The three of them watched his departure until he disappeared from sight.

Monday. Because Marisa was late to biology class, ancient Mr. Carver had her stay after to help him retrieve a cart of books from storage. The students were done with the frogs, done squinting at leaves under a microscope, and done kissing petri dishes and appraising the horrid bacteria spawned a day later. Now he wanted to lecture on fossils.

"And not fossils like me." Mr. Carver chuckled. He was an old man with rivulets of lines around his eyes and mouth. He walked with a stooped shuffle as if he were ready to spin a bowling ball down a polished alley.

Marisa and Mr. Carver ventured into storage. While he stepped among the shelves of books,
Marisa noticed a chalkboard on wheels. There was a poorly drawn heart at its center and within the heart a name:
Samantha.
Taped to the edges of the chalkboard were wilted flowers and balloons deflated with age. Someone had written,
We'll miss you.

"Who's Samantha?" Marisa asked. She had a deep feeling that this girl Samantha was dead and her memory no more than a crooked heart. A shiver rose from her lower back and blossomed in her shoulders.

"Who?" Mr. Carver asked from behind a wall of books.

"Never mind."

Marisa shivered when she touched the chalkboard. She examined the chalk on her finger, chalk as white as bone. She remembered playing dead with her cousin Pilar when they were little, and thinking that it wasn't really all that bad. She couldn't move, but she still had her thoughts.

"What?" Mr. Carver called. He reappeared from behind the wall with a stack of books in his hands.

"Who's Samantha?"

He set the books on the cart and approached the chalkboard, spanking dust from his hands. "I don't recall," he answered.

"I think she died," Marisa said.

Mr. Carver nodded. He peeled one of the cards from the chalkboard and remarked, "Maybe she died of a broken heart. I don't remember her."

Marisa thought of Priscilla. After Aaron left the park, Priscilla had collapsed against Marisa's shoulder to cry. Marisa had patted her on the back and let her new friend sob. "He's no good," Marisa said, and Priscilla had agreed through clenched teeth, "I know, I know." For a second she imagined Priscilla collapsing to the ground, brokenhearted, all because of a conceited boy.

Marisa helped Mr. Carver stack books on the cart. She looked back and wondered how long Samantha's name would remain on the chalkboard before someone—a janitor, a student, or a teacher as ancient as Mr. Carver—would erase her name for good.

Marisa stepped out of the shower, felt a bump on her hip, and asked herself, "What the heck is this?" For one frightening moment she thought that it might be a cancerous tumor. She dressed and ran to her mother, who was at the kitchen table about to bite into a jelly doughnut. After her mother felt around Marisa's body, she offered an unprofessional conclusion: It was a hip bone.

"See, you have a shape," her mother praised. Then she raised the doughnut to her mouth, nibbling it delicately with a napkin under her chin in anticipation of the oozing jelly. She swallowed and cleared her throat. "You're turning into a lady. How about we get you a new dress?"

Marisa wasn't quite ready for
that
much change yet. She declined the dress but did ask for three dollars—it was her turn to treat Rene to one of those fruity drinks at the school snack shop.

For years Marisa had been chubby—
una gordita—
but now she could see that beneath that wobbly fat breathed a shapely young woman. That thought made her sparkle and skip down the hallway at school.

"Guess what?" Marisa asked Rene after she gave him a hug, planning to tell him about her unfounded cancer scare.

"Not now." Rene shushed her by pressing a finger across her mouth and tugged her away from streams of students kicking down the hallway. They fled to the empty baseball diamond, where he unzipped his backpack and pulled out a tabby kitten whose eyes were half shut. The cat yawned and its tiny legs pedaled in the air.

"Qué linda,"
Marisa cooed.

Rene had to agree. He told her that he had found the kitten on the way to school.

"What are you going to do with her?"

"Keep her."

"But, I mean, we're in school."

Rene pulled back the sleeve of his shirt and checked the time. It was 8:12 and first period didn't start until 8:35.

"I'll keep her in my backpack," Rene said, but then decided that was probably an unwise move. Not all the teachers were old and deaf, so surely one of them would pick up the sound of meowing. They opted to hide the kitten on campus. "But we're going to need some food. She's, like, starving."

Marisa suggested the 7-Eleven on Fruit Avenue, and they were off, the cat meowing and Marisa meowing back. She had had a cat when she was very young, but the cat, a homebody who slept on an army blanket on the back porch, disappeared one day. She had made her dad drive around the block, her head hanging out the car window and crying, "Princess, Princess, where are you?" She remembered the rain and the reflection of her teary face, distorted in the wet car window. It didn't help that her father had quipped, "It's going to rain cats and dogs, and you'll get another cat—you'll see."

"Don't worry, baby kitty-kitty," Marisa sang as she let go of that sorrowful memory. "We're going to save you, kitty-witty." Then, patting her hip, she said, "Feel this."

Rene touched her hip—politely, as if he were a doctor.

"What do you feel?"

"It's your hip bone," he said, unmoved. "What about it?"

"When I got out of the shower this morning, I thought this bumpy bone was cancer. I'd never noticed it before. But I'm okay!" She hugged Rene and petted his backpack. "We're going to save you, kitty-witty."

They bought a can of cat food. Outside the store Marisa pulled back the tab, and the can opened with a sigh. She stuck her finger into the food and forked out a glob.

"Here's some grub." Marisa beckoned. She wiggled her finger at the kitten, which Rene had set on the curb. The cat, dazed by sunlight and freedom, staggered, stumbled, and rose to sniff a dandelion.

"It's
comida
time," Marisa crowed as she set the kitten on her lap.

The kitten poked at her finger and licked it, then began to suckle it.

"It's so hungry," Marisa whined pitifully. She dipped her finger into the cat food for a second helping.

They fed the kitten, returned it to the backpack, and started back to school in a hurry—they were late. On the way they faced a problem larger than if the vice principal had called them into the office.

"It's my mom!" Rene cried, and stepped away from Marisa.

His mother's car had just turned a corner, slowed, and braked in the middle of the road, its taillights red as sin. She whipped her head around, and her eyes locked on them. The car window rolled down.

"What are you two up to?" she yelled.

They turned and hurried through the broken fence at the corner of the campus. Marisa was miffed at Rene for having stepped away from her. She was aware that he wasn't brave, but wasn't she his girlfriend? Was he
that
scared of his mother?

"
I'm
sorry I did that," Rene apologized. He had picked up on her disappointment. He tried to put his hand around her waist, but she shrugged him off.

They walked in silence, ignoring the cat's meowing. When they began to cross the baseball field, Marisa asked, "What are we going to do with the cat?"

Rene suggested the dugout by the baseball diamond. "She won't go anywhere," he said. He set the can of cat food on the floor of the dugout, and the kitten licked it.

"She's so cute," Marisa said in a brighter mood as she took Rene's hand in hers. She didn't want to stay grumpy. It wasn't his fault his mother's second vehicle was a broom. She rested her head against
his shoulder and scanned the school grounds—a landlocked seagull, wing raised, was pecking at its feathers. "I wish we could go far away."

"Like where?" Rene asked.