I'd Rather Burn Than Bloom: Prologue–Chapter 6

An impossibility. Rendering smell onto paper. Flattening a sound into two dimensions. Making meaning linear.

Mom is dressed to leave for her shift. Not a nurse, but a nursing assistant. Night shifts and night classes and admonitions. Don’t be like me.

I push the pencil down harder, to capture her tightly knit eyebrows, the muscles in her neck, taut.

“Why don’t you understand anything?”
It’s the worst thing I could say to someone who so many people discount on sight—her patients, her doctor, my teacher, speaking slowly and deliberately at parent conferences when I was a kid, glancing at the clock, as if Mom’s accent is forcing her to waste precious seconds, as if Mom’s accent means she can’t understand English.

Dad understands, my triumphant face says, and my voice, venomous, smug, echoes into forever as I snatch my precious, stupid shirt from her hands.

In my sketchbook, hastily scrawled letters crowd the panel, pressing in on my contorted face, leave me alone, leave me alone, leave me alone.

Joel Duran doesn’t talk a whole lot in school, and neither do I. So I remember the first time I ever heard his singing voice. Clear and unwavering.

And when we sang a duet in “El Burrito Sabanero” at our fifth-grade holiday concert, I was so nervous in front of the crowd, under the hot lights, I was afraid I’d pass out and fall off the back of the risers, but he looked at me and subtly mouthed my part and then I remembered the words.

She twists around, her brow furrowed in deep confusion at the sight of me all shrunken down below the window.

“What do you mean? I’m with them all the time.”
“Gallivanting, gallivanting,” she says, tutting.

The sky is filled with white cumulus clouds and airplane contrails crisscrossing overhead.

She was white, perpetually sunburned, the tip of her nose the same color as her dry strawberry-blond hair.

She eyes the tattered pile of ruined rice-paper wrappers at my elbow. On the table in front of her, in contrast, a perfect pile of delicate peeled discs grows steadily.

The lives of white kids are truly unfathomable to me.

She reads slowly and clearly from the First Epistle of St. Paul the Apostle to the Thessalonians, grasping the golden cross necklace at her throat.

Her house is full of pristine white carpets and rooms you’re not allowed to sit in.

Her parents don’t let her watch R-rated movies or listen to “secular” music.

As background noise completes the scene, the voices of the news anchors follow a familiar cadence.

My body lurches forward as the bus churns around the corner, my cheek pressing up against the cracked leather seat in front of me.

I stumble off the bus, across the dusty parking lot, and it’s when I’m on the concourse on the way to homeroom that the notification comes through on my phone.

“Security? We have an altercation in Concourse B.”
Yvonne takes a swing at me and misses.

Listening to him run through this checklist like we’re on some sad mission to nowhere is even more mortifying than I’d imagined.

We’re both so myopic that the only letter on the eye chart we can read is the E. On that drive home from the optometrist, the day I got glasses, in third grade when a teacher finally noticed I couldn’t see the board, everything sharpened, everything cleared, and things that I thought were one thing were actually something else.

I feel like all he does is stare at me now, studying me, prodding me, asking me, Did you meet anyone nice today? Did you have anything good for lunch? Did you drink enough water?—until I’m so tired that I want to fall into a hole because, no, no, and no.

There are ten of us today, from schools across the city. That number has been fluctuating as lengths of suspensions vary depending on the severity of the infraction, per the student handbook.

That number has been fluctuating as lengths of suspensions vary depending on the severity of the infraction, per the student handbook. Expulsions are also possible.

She ushers us into a circle, and everyone is doing everything to keep from looking at each other, or at her, because she’s being so earnest, and it’s embarrassing.

Like I’m in some kind of trance, I place this imaginary object at the base of my throat where the clavicle meets the sternum.

I part the broken blinds that have been mangled by Marty, who likes to sit on the sill in a sunbeam, exposing his orange-white belly to the sky.

Nick. In a tuxedo. With a white flower pinned on the lapel.

Nick nods, leaning on the rough adobe wall next to me and tilting his head toward my window.

I wait to disappear, I wait for oblivion.

Bernie, fourteen, precocious, and prematurely cool, leans on the front of our shopping cart.

He’s wearing crisp black denim, leather shoes, and his hair in a pompadour like it’s the 1950s.

I hold up a bag of frozen peas.
“What do you call these?”
“Small spheres of negligible nutritional value. I’m a growing boy, for peas’ sake.”

At this point, our conversations are limited to banter. Which feels good, in some ways. Normal. But sometimes when we’re joking around, I feel like we’re walking single file on a tightrope, arms wide, afraid to look down.

“Bernie, you’re gonna be late!” I warn the giant lump under the plaid comforter as I pass by the open door of Bernie’s room. “Dad’s getting ready to leave!”
“’Kay,” is the giant lump’s lackluster response.

Bernie has zero hour because he’s in the orchestra, so Dad’s going to have to drop him off before he goes to our old middle school, where he teaches. When we were both in middle school at the same time, the commute was much less complicated, but much more embarrassing.

“What are you looking at?” Yvonne hisses, her chin jutting out.

I should just drop out. I’ll take correspondence courses online and then I’ll never have to learn to drive, because I’ll never have to leave the house and never have to deal with anyone, ever again.