Read Online Gringa by Sandra Scofield - Free Book Online Page A

in bed that night thinking about him, and I realized he was the only human being in the world whose opinion of me counted. After that I studied even harder.
    One day, coming out of class, he said, “You know, you’re becoming Mexican in your manners.”
    â€œMeaning what?” I asked.
    â€œMeaning you’re learning to use words to hide your feelings,” he answered. It was the first time I realized there was power in language.
    Kermit and his girlfriend Sherry invited me to outings to the sand dunes or to the reservoir to swim, or to the beautiful clear springs a hundred miles away where we could swim and drink beer and get burned by the sun. I knew it was Sherry’s idea; Kermit would never have thought of me. Sherry had a niceness about her. I thought it probably made her good at the bank.
    I was out of place with Kermit’s friends, though. I was too young. I thought the boys were vulgar, with their jokes and crumpled beer cans, though their girlfriends tended to be calm and smiling, unless they got drunk and sick or loud. I knew the boys thought I was standoffish, not so much shy as distant, like maybe I thought I was too good for them, boys with their hair cut close to their skulls, and cutoff jeans with nothing underneath except their genitals they went out of the way to expose, always sitting with their legs up and their arms resting on their knees. I did feel distant; I couldn’t follow the talk about sports and cars, and I didn’t think their jokes were funny. I was bored and embarrassed when they screamed and belly flopped, tugged at the girls’ bathing suits in the cold spring pool, nudged and kissed in the car while I hugged a window, looking out, my cheeks on fire. I was so different, and I didn’t know why. I would have liked to be more like the girls they liked. I would have liked to have the boys touch me—I was curious and lonely—but I was too young, and an outsider, a queer foreigner of some kind, and I knew that if I pretended to be like the girls, and they touched me, my brother’s hearty sunburned friends, I would fall under them like something liquid, and they would take it all, before I knew if I wanted to give it away. They would know I was trying to keep up, and they’d do what they were always saying they’d like to do to some starlet (Sandra Dee, in “A Summer Place,” was the sweetest, they said, and she really needed it), which was to fuck her brains out. Besides, there was my brother. When I looked at him I couldn’t imagine what he thought of me. Probably nothing. He was looking ahead.
    I got a part-time job at Penney’s. They put me in the department that sold men’s underwear. I amused myself guessing sizes before they asked. Then I thought: if I have to do this all my life I’ll kill myself. It wasn’t a farfetched idea. The father of a sophomore girl at school had blown his brains out in his bathtub, and then her mother took an overdose and left her orphaned. Another boy lost his mother when his father followed her to a motel room where she was meeting his law firm’s partner. In Texas you could shoot a woman like that. Worse, a girl my same age held a gun in her mouth one night and begged her boyfriend to shoot her. He liked somebody else, and she was always crying. He buried her in a caliche pit. They quoted him in the paper: “I just did what she asked me to do.”
    One day I saw a boy in the library, checking out a book. His eyelashes made shadows, he had extraordinary, glossy hair. I realized he was Mexican; his eyes never looked at mine. I started seeing him here and there, in the gym at assembly, in the lunchroom when I forced myself to eat. I thought about going up to him and saying “Como estas,” just like that, and the thought made me laugh at myself.
    I bought a bicycle. Kermit said I looked freaky, zipping around with my little basket in front piled with books and my