We Never Asked for Wings

  Turning back to Alex, she sighed heavily, imagining giving him up, the acute pain of separation filling her chest. He studied the chemistry set, slowly picking up the beakers and setting them back down, as if pondering a mysterious substance that only he could see.

  “You okay?” she asked, moving a loose curl of hair away from his eyes.

  “Grandpa and I used to make sugar water in these, for the hummingbirds,” he said quietly.

  “You miss him.”

  Alex nodded. “He said he’d get me an acid/base kit for my birthday, and we’d test every corner of the bay together.”

  His birthday had come and gone, and his grandparents had sent nothing but a card.

  “I’ll get you one, as soon as I can,” she said.

  She knew exactly what he was talking about, from her days in Mr. Everett’s honors science class at Mission Hills. For two years she’d sat in his classroom, surrounded by every book and instrument invented to dissect and study the secrets of the universe. She imagined Alex sitting there, in the room where she and Wes had met, encouraged to ask questions and answer them. Mr. Everett would see his passion and talent immediately, and would take him on field trips to labs and science museums all over the Bay Area.

  But it wasn’t possible. The busing program she’d been part of had shut down years before, and all of Bayshore and the Landing were districted to Bayshore High. She’d never been to Bayshore High, so all she knew about it was what she’d read in the headlines. Sixteen gang members had been arrested on campus recently, and just days before school let out a loaded gun had fired from inside a backpack. It wasn’t where Alex belonged. It wasn’t where anyone belonged, really.

  A good mother would get him out of there. If Maria Elena was still there she would find a way, Letty was sure of it, even if she had to break the law to do it.

  And then she had an idea.

  “Wait,” she said quietly, the plan starting to take shape. They couldn’t move out of the Landing—not yet. She barely had enough money for milk. But she didn’t need to actually move to Mission Hills; she just needed to be able to claim an address on the other side of the freeway. And that was something she could do.

  “What?” Alex asked, looking at her with curiosity as she sat perfectly still, thinking it through. It would be good for Luna too. She was tiny and underweight, a condition her pediatrician had labeled “failure to thrive.” Luna’s stomach hurt constantly, and when the doctor had asked if she was worried about anything, she had been quick to reply: school.

  Rocking slightly, Alex pinched his cheek, his nose, and his tongue. “What?” he asked for the second time.

  “You’re going to high school in Mission Hills.”

  She would use Sara’s address to enroll him, and he wouldn’t waste the opportunity like she did.

  “What?” Alex sat up straight, his body shocked sober, and Letty took the last two beakers, not even bothering to mix them with the strawberries and mint. She handed one to Alex and kept one for herself, holding it up in the air between them.

  “Cheers.”

  Letty clinked beakers with her son, then shot the last of the rum and soda as Alex jumped to his feet and ran to the bathroom, slamming the door behind him.

  The noise of the airplanes vibrated in Alex’s skull. He’d woken up in that room almost every single day of his life, and yet nothing, ever, had sounded as loud as the engines did that morning. With extreme effort he sat up, peering out the window at the planes passing overhead, every ninety seconds a new one. Usually he would count the exact time between takeoffs, but today the ticking of the seconds only emphasized the blood pulsing painfully in his temples. His head hurt. His stomach hurt worse. Turning away from the light, he closed his eyes and groped around the window frame until he found the cord to the roller blind. A quick tug, and the relief of darkness pressed gently against his eyelids. He flopped back onto his pillow and pulled the blanket over his head.

  What had happened to him? He remembered collecting mint at the water, and sitting on a blanket in the stairwell with his mother, and he remembered the rattling glass of his beakers on their metal tray. There was a lime. And strawberries. And there was an echo, and someone shouting something over and over again—but it must have been him shouting, because he remembered the salty hand of his mother clamping down on his mouth and thinking about Yesenia, and feeling weird that he was thinking about her then, with his mother’s hand on his face and her alcohol breath so close to his nose.

  He’d gotten drunk with his mother.

  It was too horrifying to think about. Burrowing farther under the covers, he heard his sister walk into the room.

  “Alex?”

  “Go away,” he moaned.

  “Mom told me to tell you the bus comes at eleven oh eight and we’re going to be on it.”

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know. But get up. We’ve already been to Mission Hills and back this morning.”

  At the mention of Mission Hills, his mother’s final words of the night popped into his mind, the ones that may or may not have caused him to get sick all over the bathroom floor: You’re going to high school in Mission Hills. Or so she had said, in a moment of drunken inspiration. He doubted she even remembered it now.

  Luna climbed up onto the bed, stepping on his covered knees and hanging on the cord until the blind shot up, bouncing off the top of the window frame.

  “We brought you something.”

  She plopped a grease-spotted paper bag on the bedspread. He peered inside and saw a blueberry muffin. His stomach lurched. He didn’t want to eat ever again.

  “You can have it,” he told his sister.

  Luna tore a chunk off the top and stuck it in her mouth, chewing and licking the squashed blueberries off her fingers.

  “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “To Sara’s,” Luna said with her mouth full. She jumped down off the bed and paused at the door, waiting for Alex to get up. “Come on. Mom says now.”

  He groaned and kicked the covers off the bed, which satisfied his sister enough to leave him alone. As much as he didn’t want to get out of bed, he wanted less to fight with his mother. He didn’t even want to look at her. Sitting up, he found a pair of pants, pulling on one leg and then the other. The effort caused him to sweat, and he was afraid he would be sick again, but he didn’t think there could possibly be anything left in his stomach.

  Why were they going to Sara’s, and why did it have to be right now? It was the first time they’d been to her house since Letty had come home, and it made him feel sicker, remembering that first night in her apartment. If Alex didn’t know his mother so well, he would have thought she’d woken up determined to make good on her proclamation of the night before. But that couldn’t be it—at least Alex didn’t think so. It was true Letty had surprised him more than once in the weeks since school let out. She’d promised Luna she’d let her come to work with her every day and she had; she’d nearly kept up Maria Elena’s immaculate standards of housecleaning. And the day before she’d made oatmeal for breakfast. None of this, of course, was as hard as enrolling them illegally at Mission Hills; it was foolish for him to even consider it.

  But what would he do if she did? All he knew about Mission Hills was that they won the state science fair every year (last year it had been on the front page of the paper, a seventeen-year-old creating an early-detection system for pancreatic cancer using dipstick technology), and that all freshmen took a trip to Washington, D.C., every spring (he’d never even been on an airplane—which was ironic, given his view of the runway). These two things combined were enough to make Alex feel like saying no would be the equivalent of taking a match to his grandfather’s feather collection on purpose—endless possibilities extinguished. But could he really leave Yesenia to face Bayshore alone? Bayshore students were more likely to be in the obituaries section of the paper than the awards section. Luckily, he thought as he pulled on his socks, it was not a decision
he would ever have to make.

  Taking a deep breath, he walked out of his bedroom to face his mother. Letty stood by the kitchen sink, a glass of water and two Tylenol in her hand. She didn’t look at him when he entered the room, just thrust the water and medicine toward him and turned to the door.

  “Come on,” she said. “We’re leaving.”

  —

  An hour later they sat in Sara’s kitchen, a ten-page lease agreement spread out on the counter. They’d tried to distract Luna with a bowl of flour-water and some food coloring (“make Play-Doh”), but five minutes later, she was a sticky mess and climbing up and down the barstools, trying to see what they were doing.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Letty said, putting her daughter back on the floor and handing her a whisk. Luna dropped the utensil with a disinterested clank and climbed back up next to Letty.

  “But where am I going to sleep?”

  Letty had tried to keep her out of the conversation, but after the five hundredth question, she’d explained what was happening. She was signing a lease, pretending to rent Sara’s apartment in order to get Alex and Luna into school in Mission Hills.

  “I already told you, we aren’t really going to live here, but if anyone asks, you have to say you live here.”

  Luna frowned, still not understanding.

  “What’s your address?” Letty quizzed.

  “100 Mile Road, Apartment 31C.”

  “No. 770 Sycamore, Apartment 3.”

  “But you said we aren’t really going to live here.”

  “Oh, Luna! Never mind.”

  Letty looked in the refrigerator for something to distract her daughter and, finding nothing, set her on the counter by the sink. She turned the faucet on and pulled one hand and then the other under the running water, but the blue-brown flour glop was everywhere: wrists to forearms to elbows, knees to shins to the bottoms of her feet. Changing strategies, Letty plugged the sink and squirted in dish soap, stripping Luna down to her underwear while the sink filled and then setting her inside. The sink was enormous and undivided, and though Luna was much too old for a sink bath, she wasn’t too big. She laughed, delighted, as Letty pulled out the hose and sprayed down her back and shoulders. When the water had risen to her rib cage, Letty shut off the spray and left her daughter in the bubbles.

  Alex watched all this happen from his seat at the counter, looking over Sara’s shoulder as she completed the terms of the agreement seemingly at random: lease term, deposit, references. She put Maria Elena down, making up a phone number beside her name, and then paused at the blank space, where she was supposed to write the rent.

  “What do you think this place would rent for?” she asked Letty.

  “I don’t know,” Letty said, refilling the glass of water on the counter in front of Alex. “Drink. Maybe a thousand dollars a month?”

  “No way. You can’t even rent a parking space around here for that much.”

  She wrote down a number that made Alex squirm in his seat. His mother could never pay that. His mother could never even pretend to pay that. All morning, on the walk to the bus stop and on the bumpy, nauseous ride across Mission Hills, he’d practiced what he would say if his mother mentioned changing schools (variations on no thanks), and now he was sitting right next to Sara, watching it happen and saying nothing.

  “That’s probably not enough to be believable,” Sara said, scratching out the absurdly high number she’d written and writing one that was even higher.

  Alex felt his nausea pivot to panic. He was a rule follower, even when it didn’t matter. And this mattered. If anyone found out, his mother could go to jail.

  “They’re going to know,” he blurted. “There’s no way we can pay that.”

  “Who’s going to know?” Letty asked. “If you’re there, they’ll assume you’re supposed to be there.”

  Letty looked to Sara for confirmation.

  She nodded. “No one’s going to question you.”

  But what if they did? Alex was a terrible liar.

  “It’s only for a few months anyway—as soon as we can, we’re moving over here.” Letty turned back to the lease and initialed by the smoking policy. “Hey—do you think Mr. Everett still teaches there?”

  “I know he does. I ran into him just a few months ago. Honors science, zero period.”

  “Remember when Wes thought he disproved gravity?” Letty laughed. “And then Mr. E fixed the scale.”

  “He taught Wes?” Alex asked.

  Letty stopped writing mid-signature, and Alex wished he could pull the words right back into his mouth. Obsessed as he’d become, he’d forgotten his mother was completely unaware of his new knowledge. He searched her face, looking for signs of anger, betrayal, surprise—but he found none. Instead, she looked him square in the eyes and nodded. “Both of us, and now you.” She finished her signature with a wild flare. “Get ready to get up early,” she added. “His class starts at six fifty-five.”

  Just then, from the forgotten bubble bath across the kitchen, a spray of water arched toward them, hitting Alex on the shoulder and splashing all over the counter.

  “Luna!” Letty swiped at the lease, but it was too late. The ten pages stuck together, completely soaked through.

  —

  Alex went straight from Mission Hills to Yesenia’s house. Carmen’s car was gone; it was after dinner already. Nervous, he climbed the stairs to her apartment and found her leaning out the open doorframe.

  “There you are,” Yesenia said. “I went to your house earlier. Don’t tell me you were over there again.”

  Alex had promised Yesenia he would stop spending entire days in front of his father’s house, and for the first time he could tell her honestly that he hadn’t. Between the line at the DMV, where Letty changed the address on her license, and the line at the school-district office, it had taken all day to enroll them in school.

  “I wasn’t. I was at the school-district office. In Mission Hills.”

  “You’re moving?”

  “No. But my mom got me into Mission Hills High.”

  She smiled. Immediately: without one split second of pause, so that Alex knew without a doubt that she was happy for him and not just pretending to be happy. He leaned in and kissed her, pulling away quickly when he heard a noise, but it was just a little girl on a scooter, racing down the halls. He kissed her again.

  “How can you be happy?” he asked, when he finally pulled away. “We won’t be together.”

  “Because you need to get out of here. Only ten percent of kids from Bayshore High go to college.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because my mom told me. In the context of, you better be one of the ten percent.”

  “That sounds like something my grandma would have said.”

  They were quiet, Alex thinking about his grandparents, Yesenia squeezing his hand. “You should go to Mission Hills, Alex,” she said finally. “Your mom is right.”

  Yesenia knew everything there was to know about Letty, and knew that your mom is right was a sentence that had probably never, in the entire history of the universe, been uttered in reference to his mother. Last night’s drunkenness flashed through his mind. It wasn’t right, but in her own strange way, he knew she was trying.

  “Okay. I’ll go to Mission Hills.” His chest pounded with sudden excitement, finally allowing it to sink in. He shouted down into the parking lot: “I’m going to Mission Hills!”

  “Calm down, Superman,” Yesenia said, pulling on his shirttails, where they had popped free of his belt. “You’re not going anywhere looking like that.”

  Alex looked down at his clothes: the same khakis and white button-down he’d worn every day for all of middle school. Or maybe longer. “What’s wrong with the way I look?”

  “You look great, if your goal is to impress your girlfriend’s mother. But you already did that.” Grinning, she dip-skipped down the hall and returned with a white envelope labeled ROPA. Clothes.


  “We’re going shopping.”

  “I’m not letting you spend your money on me.”

  “Do you have money?”

  Alex dug his hands into his pockets, a reflex, though he knew perfectly well what he would find. Nothing. “No.”

  “So don’t argue. It’s not like I’ve grown this year. Or that I have any chance of fitting in.”

  Alex asked where they were going, but Yesenia didn’t answer, just pulled him through the parking lot to the bus stop. They sat on the bench in silence as two, three, four buses passed. Finally the 67, Mission Heights, turned toward them. Yesenia jumped up.

  Alex had never been to the Heights. He’d heard about it: an elite, woodsy neighborhood in Mission Hills, set into the ridge that separated downtown from the Pacific Ocean. They rode through town until the houses became estates, spread out, with sloping lawns and knotted trees between them. The neighborhood had its own downtown, just one cobblestone street with a handful of shops, and they climbed off at the bus stop in front of a bakery. The pastries in the window looked too fancy to eat.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Stop asking questions,” Yesenia said. “Just follow me.”

  Past the bakery and two restaurants there was a secondhand shop. The sign announced it benefited the American Cancer Society. Under a bright red SALE banner in the window, six handbags hung off a silver bar in rainbow order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple. The purple bag, closest to where Alex was standing, had been marked down to three hundred dollars from six.

  “Are you serious?” Alex asked. “We should have gone to Walmart.”

  “We aren’t shopping here.”

  She took his hand and led him to the alley behind the building. Tall stacks of boxes stood by the garbage cans, labeled SALVATION ARMY PICKUP. Alex was confused.

  “A secondhand shop that donates to a secondhand shop?”