The Madonnas of Echo Park Read Free Page B

one good idea to get me out of this. They stared back hypnotized in defeat, the way men look when they have played their last, failed excuse. I could sense the walls of the room sliding together, two sides of a V closing shut, our bodies interlocking, our differences now irrelevant. It was simple as following Aurora’s lead.
    I shrugged her hands off me.
    â€œI can’t dance with you,” I said. “You’re a Mexican.” It was a moment I’d rehearsed with my mother, but the word
Mexican
caught on the roof of my mouth like a stutter. It was the hard
x
—the same consonant that degrades the word
sex.
    â€œWhat do you mean?” She laughed, her shy smile saying,
You cannot be serious.
    â€œYou are
a Mexican,
” I said, loud enough for the entire class this time. “I can’t dance with you.”
    Aurora kept smiling, but her eyes focused on the chalkboard, evaporating me in a glance.
    Madonna continued to play. Ms. O’Neill lunged at Aurora and pulled her into the circle. While they danced, the crowd relaxed and bunched into the segregated clusters we knew so well. My two useless cohorts emerged from the corner and patted me on the back. A couple of Vietnamese girls came with them, their satisfied smiles making me blush. They couldn’t tell for sure whether Aurora, with her excellent command of English and British band names etchedin ballpoint onto the cover of her denim blue three-ring binder, was a “real” Mexican (real as in a
chola
), but they
were
sure that Aurora’s best friend, named Duchess, was. While we talked, a group of Mexican boys teased me in a singsong mock-Chinese. The boldest of the bunch asked Aurora to dance with him, which she did. I watched them in silent fury, like a lost man watches the horizon.
    The school bell ended the party. Ms. O’Neill called me over to her desk and asked Aurora to stay after class. She was on the other side of the room, shoulders hunched, putting her records away as fast as she could.
    â€œYou did a terrible, terrible thing today, Brando,” Ms. O’Neill said. “Why would you say something like that?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I lied.
    â€œWell, I think you owe Aurora an apology.”
    â€œOkay,” I said.
    We turned to see a door slamming the way it does in a vacuum. Ms. O’Neill raced out of the classroom, shouting “Aurora! Aurora!” until her voice cracked.
    When Ms. O’Neill returned, she said, “You’ll apologize first thing after break.”
    I spent vacation in my hot, airless bedroom in self-imposed exile, not leaving my house for fear of seeing Aurora at the bus stop or on my way to the supermarket or, worse, running into Duchess, who I believed was on the lookout to beat me to a bloody pulp (this being, at the time, the worst thing I thought a gang member could do to you). Playing on an endless loop on my bedroom television was MTV. I saw the “Borderline” video several times a day for a week. At some point in the video, there was a close-up of Madonna’s face that would melt, time-lapsed, into Aurora’s face, staring at me with that same hollow look I saw when I rejected her, betraying an emotion beyond disgust or contempt—it was a look that said I didn’t exist. I’d recognize this look more and more as I grew older, in places both private and public, for reasons both explicit and unspoken, and once you’ve been
seen through
in this way—once you have been made
transparent
—
no amount of physical pain matches the weight of invisibility.
    When we returned from break, I told Ms. O’Neill that I hadn’t forgotten about what I’d done at the dance and was ready to apologize to Aurora, even if I had to in front of the class. She said that wasn’t necessary but was proud of how determined I seemed. The bell rang, and we took our seats in the castes we had arranged for ourselves and felt