This Side of Providence Read Free

quite here yet. I don’t really mind walking, but I like riding the bus because I get to sit next to Krystal and hold her hand without anybody seeing us. In the winter she used to let me keep my hand inside her mittens to get warm. I know my fingers were ice cold but she didn’t complain. That’s when we started going out. If I was older or had any money I’d have to take her places and buy her food and jewelry and other things girls like to make her feel special, butfor now we just sit together on the bus and pass notes in class that usually just say “hi.”
    I first noticed her because she has long curly hair that goes halfway down her back and she never ties it up like the other girls, not even in P.E. She says she likes me because I talk when I’m not supposed to and I got green eyes like the men on soap operas. People always ask me if they’re fake since Puerto Ricans aren’t supposed to have green eyes. I say I wish they were darker so I wouldn’t have to squint in the sun and answer dumb questions all the time. What they don’t know is that I got them from my mother, and if she ain’t Puerto Rican then nobody is. I know she thinks they’re the only nice thing she ever gave me, even when she looks at them and says they’re too pretty to waste on a boy.
    I walk the long way home, instead of taking the shortcut over Route 6, since I’m by myself and gotta avoid the white kids that hang out by the water tower and smoke cigarette butts and stick up for their own like that punk David Delario. Halfway down Hartford Avenue it starts raining harder, so I stop by the projects to visit my best friend César and maybe borrow a jacket for the walk home. He’s smaller than me, around the size of my little sister Luz, but his uncle Antonio gave him free run of his closet when he got a new girlfriend and she refused to touch anything that some other girl had touched before her. Most of the clothes I got used to be Antonio’s, including the Yankees shirt I’m wearing right now and a pair of jeans so big I have to tie an extension cord around my waist just to keep them up.
    When I pass César’s apartment the door is wide open and I can hear his grandmother yelling at him to stop tracking mud into the house. She’s a big woman, about the same size as Teacher, and she grabs his arm and drags him to the front door like he’s no bigger than a five-pound bag of rice. He says something I can’t understand but it doesn’t seem to matter to her. She tears his sneakers right off and throws them out into the rain. Then she smacks him across the face. His head flops onto his chest like a rag doll and he doesn’t even try to protect himself. I wonder how his grandmother can hit a kid who only comes up to her waist. At school the kids call him Elmosince he’s got a wild patch of curly red hair and strangers are always asking him how an Irish kid can speak Spanish so well. He always says the same thing, “I guess it’s the luck of the Irish,” and then we both crack up, even though we don’t know anything about the Irish or being lucky.
    His grandmother smacks him again, on the other cheek this time, and I watch him wipe his eyes with the back of his hand, pretending not to cry. Before he can see me his grandmother slams the door, erasing both of them from my view. Like if I can’t see it, I won’t know what goes on inside. I keep walking, telling myself that next time somebody calls him Elmo I’m gonna punch them in the face. My chest starts to feel tight, like when you hold your breath too long, and when I get under the highway overpass I let out a huge scream. It echoes in a dozen voices I don’t even recognize. My heart stops for a second, and then starts to beat fast again, but I don’t feel better.
    It’s dry under the overpass, but it smells like pigeon shit and homeless people—no place I want to