“I’m very upset.” Her eyes abruptly clouded. “I was worried about you. I don’t get why you keep hurting people.”
His skin grew hot beneath her gaze. He wanted to tell her the fight wasn’t his fault, that Guerrero had started it. But instead he hung his head, ashamed for disappointing her.
“If you, um, don’t want to see me anymore, I won’t blame you. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to—”
“Diego!” She sounded even more upset than before. “You don’t get it, do you? I care about you.”
Diego leaned back on his heels, startled by her response. How could she care about him? Wasn’t it obvious how messed-up he was?
“Don’t say that unless you mean it,” he told her.
“If I didn’t mean it,” she countered, “why would I say it?”
He glanced down at the floor tile. “But you don’t know me.”
“I’m trying to,” she replied. “Are you going to let me?”
He wanted to let her, but…“What do you want me to say?”
“To start, you can explain why you’re always getting into fights.”
Diego flashed back to Vidas telling the judge about getting to the core of Diego’s anger: the Mac stuff. How could he ever let her know about that?
Instead he explained, “Guerrero started messing with me. I lost my temper.”
“So will the same thing happen,” she challenged, “if you lose your temper with me?”
“No!” How could she compare herself with Guerrero? “I would never hurt you. Never.”
“You already have,” she told him, her voice pained. “When you hurt somebody like you did, you hurt yourself, too, and it hurts me to hear about it. I want to care about you, Diego. But only if you decide you’re going to care about yourself.”
She stared at him so hard that he had to avert his eyes.
“Give me a call when you make up your mind,” she told him. And with that, she turned and walked away, rejoining her friends.
He shuffled back to his locker and found Kenny waiting.
“I think I just screwed up again.”
Kenny pressed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Did she dump you?”
“Um, no. I don’t think so.”
“Did you dump her?” Kenny asked.
“No.”
“Then what’s the screw-up?”
Diego shrugged with frustration. “I just don’t know if I can do this dating thing.”
“Well, if you’re not dumping each other, I think you’re already doing it.”
Diego pondered that as they rode the bus to his house, where Kenny helped him catch up on the classwork he’d missed while in juvie.
Later that evening, as Diego made dinner, Eddie asked, “Why did you stay at your friend’s house so many days?”
Diego hesitated. Should he tell him the truth about jail, even though he’d promised not to? He didn’t want to lie; he wanted to be a good example. But he also didn’t want Eddie to know what a mess-up he was.
He put his arm around his little brother’s shoulder and told him, “Look, I made a mistake. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. Okay?”
Even though he wasn’t being fully honest, it was the best he could do.
CHAPTER 17
ON SATURDAY MORNING, Diego biked to work without eating breakfast, his stomach too knotted up with worry. Would he get fired for having been in jail?
His boss, Mrs. Patel, greeted him as usual, with a list of chores. Hadn’t she heard about his arrest? Despite feeling guilty about it, he decided not to bring it up. Instead, he worked extra hard all day and stopped only for a quick pizza slice. When his shift ended at six, he asked, “Um, is there anything else I can do?”
“You’re a hard worker,” Mrs. Patel replied with a knowing look. “Learn to cool that fire in your belly and you’ll do okay in life.”
Diego swallowed hard. Was she hinting that she’d heard about his arrest? He held his breath, waiting for her next words.
“See you next Saturday,” she said.
“Thanks,” he told her, and raced his bike straight home, determined to stay out of any more trouble.
The following week, he arrived at his probation appointment early—still apprehensive about the things he’d admitted to Vidas but eager to talk about Ariel.
“How’re you feeling?” Vidas asked as Diego sank into his usual green vinyl chair.
“Good,” Diego replied, taking a candy from the jar Vidas extended to him. He liked being back in the familiar office. “Um, can I talk to you about something?”
“Anything,” Vidas replied, unwrapping his own candy. “I’m listening.”
“Well, it has to do with—you know—the girl I went on a date with?”
“You mean Ariel?” Vidas asked.
“Yeah!” It amazed him that Vidas remembered her name.
“How’s it going with her?”
“Well, um, I thought she’d be mad at me for getting locked up but instead…” Diego felt himself grow warm inside his shirt. “She said she cares about me. I think something’s wrong with her.”
“Because she cares about you?”
“Right.” Diego cracked his knuckles nervously.
“Diego, everybody has good points and bad. Clearly, she sees your good points.”
“Yeah, but she doesn’t know how many bad points I have. What if she finds out and dumps me?”
“That’s the risk we take,” Vidas said, “whenever we open up to someone. What are the bad points you’re worried about?”
“You know,” Diego said, but Vidas gave no acknowledgment.
“The stuff I told you,” Diego explained impatiently. “About Mac.”
“How have you felt about that,” Vidas asked, “since you told me?”
Diego slid his hands beneath his thighs. He wanted to talk about Ariel, not Mac. “I haven’t felt anything.”
“You must feel something,” Vidas insisted. “That was a pretty major secret to tell me.” He pointed to the smiley-face poster. “Pick a feeling.”
Diego scanned the faces. His gaze landed on a squiggle mouth with a pair of eyebrows pointed upward. “Embarrassed, I guess.”
“Embarrassed?” Vidas’s brow crinkled. “You’ve got nothing to feel embarrassed about, Diego. You did nothing wrong. He abused you.”
Diego’s legs began to jiggle. He wished Vidas would stop using words like “rape” and “abuse.”
“I should’ve stopped him.”
“How?” Vidas asked. “You were a little boy. He was a grown man.”
Diego glanced down at the floor. “I could’ve fought him harder.”
“Diego…” Vidas spoke slowly, measuring each phrase. “You wanted a dad…. You wanted to be loved…. There’s no shame in that…. You trusted him. He violated that trust…. You didn’t do anything wrong. He did.”
Diego listened carefully, absorbing every word. And yet he still felt at fault.
“After that night on the boat,” Vidas said gently. “It happened again, didn’t it?”
Diego looked up from the carpet, wondering how Vidas knew.
“Want to tell me about it?” Vidas asked.
“What for?” Diego balked. “It won’t change anything.”
“It might. Talking out your secrets can help you change.”
Diego gazed out the window at the boats in the harbor and recalled the dream he’d had his last night in detention: Him in the ocean and Vidas feeding the shark.
“It didn’t happen again for a long time,” Diego admitted. “Not like on the boat. When Mac came to visit us, he acted like that night had never happened. And so did I. Sometimes I thought maybe it hadn’t really happened. Maybe I’d just dreamed it.”
Diego paused, wishing it truly had been only a dream.
“He brought us presents and clothes, like if Santa had arrived. All our neighbors were jealous. Everybody liked him.”
“That must’ve been confusing,” Vidas interjected.
“Yeah.” Diego nodded. “While Ma worked, she’d leave me at his hotel. We watched TV and he’d start to drink. His face would get this look: needylike…and then he’d put his hands on me…. I hated it. I wanted him to stop. But then I remembered Ma slapping me and telling me I shouldn’t say anything.”
Diego watched Vidas carefully, worried again that he’d get his mom in trouble. But Vidas showed no interest in pursuing details about his mom.
“So I thought,” Diego continued, “if I just let him do that, at least he won’t do the other thing, like on the boat. I just watched TV till he finished. Afterward he’d tell me how much he loved me, acting like some kid who’d been given a present. I’d block out what happened, telling myself it hadn’t been that bad. After all, I had friends whose dads beat them, whose parents yelled at them and said horrible things. At least Mac didn’t do that. He never hit me.”
“But what he did to you was horrible,” Vidas countered. “Just as bad, if not worse. You didn’t deserve that, Diego.”
Diego’s legs jiggled faster. “So then my mom married him, he adopted me, and we moved here.”
“That was a big change,” Vidas observed. “How’d you feel about it?”
“Excited. I wanted to see snow. Everybody had always said how great the U.S. was. We moved into a huge apartment compared to our one tiny little room in Mexico. Ma said this would be a new start for us.”
“Was it?” Vidas asked. “Or did Mac continue to molest you?”
Diego flinched at the word “molest.” A molester was some perv who hid behind bushes, not his own stepdad.
“Sometimes,” Diego replied. “When he took me somewhere in the car, he’d stop and park…. You know? And afterward he’d take me for ice cream, just like normal; never talk about what he’d just done. I wanted to run away, tell somebody. But who? And what if they sent us back to Mexico?”
Diego brought his hand to his forehead and rubbed a circle. What would’ve happened to Mac if Diego had told somebody? Would he still have killed himself? Or might he still be alive? A sudden rash of guilt prickled Diego’s skin. It was too overwhelming to think about all that.
“So then Eddie was born and Ma put the crib in their room. But he cried a lot. One night when he kept crying, Mac came to sleep with me. That’s when it happened again, like on the boat.”
He could recall the doorknob’s click, footsteps across his carpet, bedcovers pulled back, and Mac’s body, warm and huge…. His hand, smelling of cigarettes, covering Diego’s mouth…The feeling like he couldn’t breathe, like he wanted to throw up…And the pain, so great it made him cry.
“Diego…?” Vidas called softly.
“Huh?” He realized he’d zoned out.
“You need some water?” Vidas asked, pouring a cup from the plastic bottle on his desk.
Diego downed the water in almost a single gulp. “Thanks.”
“What were you remembering?” Vidas said.
“Um, wanting to throw up.” Diego pitched the empty cup into the trash can. “Maybe if I had, it would’ve stopped him.”
Vidas stared silently. “You’re blaming yourself again. It wasn’t your fault.”
Diego knew that—in his head. But he didn’t feel it.
“Did your mom ever question why he didn’t just sleep on the couch?”
“That’s what I asked her. But she told me his back hurt and I was being ungrateful after all he’d done for us.”
“Did you think you were ungrateful?”
“I didn’t know what to think. In the morning he drove me to school and gave me lunch money, telling me he loved me. And at night he watched TV and played games with Eddie and me, like everything was normal. Even after Eddie got older and stopped crying at night, whenever Mac and Ma fought, he’d come to my room.”
“How’d it feel,” Vidas asked, “to live a secret life like that?”
“I stopped feeling anything,” Diego said, his voice flat. “What was the point? I thought, He’ll never let you go. No matter how hard you try. There’s nothing you can do. So, just stop feeling.”
“And now?” Vidas said. “How do you feel?”
“I just want to cut out the whole memory.”
Vidas gazed down at Diego’s arms. “You mean like with that shark’s tooth?”
Diego didn’t get what Vidas was saying at first; then he understood. “I guess so.”
Vidas nodded and Diego continued: “Sometimes I have this huge sense, like this isn’t who I’m supposed to be, this isn’t the life I was supposed to have, this wasn’t supposed to happen. But there’s nothing I can do about it…. It’s too late now…. May as well just end it.”
Vidas leaned forward slightly in his swivel chair. “End what?”
“End me,” Diego said. His voice was emotionless. “I read once about this thing called ‘the call of the waters,’ where sometimes a sailor pitches himself off his ship into the ocean. Nobody knows why…. But I do. It’s like there’s something pulling at me, some undertow that’s caught me, and no matter how hard I fight it, I’m going under. I’m a goner. May as well just give it up, you know?”
“No.” Vidas shook his head emphatically. “You’re not a goner. You’ve got a lot to live for. It takes courage to face the things you’re telling me. You’re probably the bravest boy on my caseload. You can get through this. Just don’t give up. Okay? Never give up.”
Diego curled both fists beneath his chin and rested his head on them, listening. No one had ever called him brave before. And yet even now he could feel the dark current pulling at him, wanting him to die.
“I’m concerned about you,” Vidas said, looking directly into his eyes. “Is it only a feeling you’ve had? Or have you thought about how you’d do it?”
Is there a difference? Diego wondered. “I used to think about using his gun.”
“Where’s the gun now?” Vidas asked.
“The police took it.”
Vidas relaxed a little and Diego continued, “Now I’m not sure how I’d do it—probably just swim out into the ocean till the sharks ate me…or I just couldn’t swim anymore…the call of the waters…”
Vidas tapped his fingers on the chair arm, clearly worried. “Do you still have my card?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Can I see it?”
Diego pulled the card from his wallet and handed it to him.
Vidas grabbed a pen. “I’m going to write down the number of the suicide hotline. If you—”
“I’m not calling that,” Diego interrupted, “and talking to some stranger.”
Vidas ignored his protest, wrote the number down, and handed the card back. “You can also leave me a message at my number here. Anytime, day or night. Even if you just start to think about suicide, I want you to promise you’ll call me. Can you agree to that?”
Diego nodded, though he wasn’t sure he meant it.
“I care about you, Diego.”
Diego squirmed in his chair, feeling hugely uneasy. It was hard enough to hear “I care about you” from Ariel; it made him ten times more nervous to hear it from a guy.
“How’re you feeling now?” Vidas asked.
“Good,” Diego lied, tired and wanting to leave.
“You sure?” Vidas pressed. “Anything else you want to talk about?”
“Nope.”
“All right,” Vidas said. “You might have some strong feelings come up after today. Call me if you need to talk, okay?”
He walked Diego down the hall as usual, telling him, “Bike safely!”
As Diego rode toward home along the seawall, he watched the tide receding down across the rocks, exposing the seaweed and barnacles. At moments it felt almost as if the current was reaching up and pulling him, too. And he wasn’t sure he had the strength to fight it.
CHAPTER 18
ON FRIDAY NIGHT, after making macaroni and cheese for dinner, Diego found himself staring at the phone, longing to talk with Ariel. He’d replayed their k
iss at least fourteen thousand times in his mind. And yet he hesitated to call. Eventually, she was bound to find out just how messed-up he was, and never go out with him again. So, why bother?
If only he’d talked to Vidas more about her—and less about Mac. Vidas made him feel like he stood a chance with her. What would Vidas tell him now? After considering for a moment, Diego carried the phone into his room and closed the door.
“Um, hi,” he mumbled when she answered. “It’s me, Diego.”
“I know,” she said softly. “I’ve been hoping you’d call.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” replied Ariel. “I’d begun to think maybe you weren’t interested anymore.”
“I’m interested.” He sat himself on the bed to keep his legs from shaking. “I just thought—you know—maybe you didn’t really want me to call.”
“Why wouldn’t I want you to call?”
“Well…” He wrapped a finger through a belt loop of his jeans. “Because of all my problems…getting into fights, being locked up…”
Ariel was quiet a moment before answering. “Diego, we’ve all got problems. Everybody does.”
“Not like mine,” he insisted.
“Well, then, you’re special,” Ariel said, as if trying to end the topic. Was she being sarcastic? Or did she really think he was special? Before he could ask, she announced, “My mom found out you were in juvie.”
“She did?” He hadn’t expected that. “What did she say? Is she mad?”
“Not exactly mad…More like worried. She said I should find somebody else to date.”
He bit into his lip, certain she was about to dump him.
“But I told her,” Ariel continued, “I don’t want to date anybody else.”
He sat up straighter. “You told her that?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” Why was she so bent on dating him?
“Because,” she explained, “I think your tough-guy act is just a front. I don’t believe you’re really that person. It doesn’t match the shy guy who’s always so nervous to talk to me.”
Diego listened and wondered, where was she going with this?
“Anyway,” she continued, “Mom says that she knows she can’t stop me from seeing you and that if I’m determined, she wants to talk to you.”