The Return Read Free

still had no idea what he was thinking. At Sporty's funeral, as his best friend was lowered into the ground, he hadn't changed the expression on his face. He could have been staring at the sky for all the emotion he showed.
    Jean ended up getting Lenny a Los Lobos tape, which he slipped into the boom box as soon as she and Carol arrived at his house, and cranked up the volume.
    Jean assumed that meant he liked it even though she hadn't had a chance to wrap it. He gave her a quick kiss and handed her a beer and she sat on the couch in the living room with a bunch of people she hardly knew and the party moved forward as they always did. There was alcohol, pot, music, laughter, and cursing.
    She and Carol cornered a hookah loaded with Colombian Gold near the start of the festivities and each took four hits so deep into their lungs that they could feel their brain cells leaving on the sweet cloud of smoke as they exhaled. They both began to laugh and didn't stop until they remembered they had nothing to laugh about, which was an hour later. So the first part of the party passed painlessly. Even though Jean got loaded regularly, marijuana often had an undesirable side effect on her psychology. The moment her high began to falter, her mood sometimes plunged, so rapidly that she felt as if she were sinking into a black well. In other words, the pot bummed her out as surely as it made her laugh, and this was one of those unfortunate times when, after an hour of giggling, she felt close to tears. But since she seldom cried, and never in front of other people, she just got real quiet and tried not to think. She didn't want to know she was in a place she didn't want to be with people she didn't care about and who didn't care about her. That her whole life was headed in the wrong direction and that it wasn't going to change because that was just the way the world was. That she was pregnant and didn't want a baby and didn't want to have an abortion and didn't want to end up like her mother.
    It was this last thought, spinning around in her head, that caused her the most grief. And the weird thing was, her mother was one of the few people in her life she actually respected. Come midnight, though, when the party began to thin out, and the dope began to filter from her bloodstream, her depression lifted sufficiently so that she was able to talk again.
    At the time she happened to be sitting on the end of Lenny's bed watching as Darlene Sanchez used the cracked mirror precariously attached to the top Lenny's chest of drawers to replace a few loose braids. Darlene was Hispanic, but wanted to be black; a formidable task, to be sure, since she was naturally whiter than Carol after makeup. Sporty Quinones had been Darlene's first non-African American boyfriend, a fact that was somewhat at odds with her reputation of having slept with most of the juniors and seniors in the school.
    But who was counting, colors or numbers. Darlene was hot, no debating that.
    "How are you feeling, girl?" Darlene asked, gazing at her in the mirror.
    "I'm all right," Jean said.
    "You looked like hell all night."
    "Thanks a lot."
    "No, I mean your mood." Darlene lifted a few strands of hair above her head and, in the blink of an eye, braided them. Her braids made her look pretty scary when she wore them just right. Her long painted fingernails were just as bad. They reminded Jean of razors dipped in blood. Darlene added, "You look like someone just died."
    Jean realized she had a can of beer in her hand and took a sip. "Someone just did."
    Darlene acted pissed. "Great! You had to bring that up. I'm here to have a good time, and you have to talk about Sporty."
    "I wasn't talking about him." Jean shrugged. "In this town someone dies practically every hour."
    "Yeah, right. God, what a downer you are."
    Jean burped. "Sorry."
    Darlene waved her hand. "It doesn't matter. I don't mind talking about him.
    We're going to talk about him later anyway. We're going to have a little