Nothing like a word of encouragement from a stranger. A talkative stranger. She told him her grandparents were really strict and old-fashioned. But she didn’t say much about her parents, like why they had left her and where they were.
She changed the subject back to him, her features sharpening with curiosity. “You’re new, aren’t you? What’s your name?”
“It’s AJ. AJ Martinez.”
“What’s the AJ stand for?”
She had to ask. He didn’t even know this girl. Why should he tell her anything? Because it didn’t matter. He didn’t care what she thought. “I go by AJ for a reason,” he muttered.
“Is it something really dorky or out-there? Like Ajax, or Apollo Jehosephat, or Able Janitor…”
He tried not to laugh.
She slid a notepad across the table toward him. “Here, write your name on this piece of paper. I’ll take one look at it, then destroy the evidence.”
Geez, this girl was relentless. He wrote his two given names on a piece of paper and slipped it to her. Of course she couldn’t keep her mouth shut, despite her promise.
“Angel?” she said, her voice a sharp exclamation that made heads turn. Noticing, she switched to a whisper. “Your name is Angel?”
“It’s pronounced Angel,” he muttered, not that the Spanish g made it any better. “Angel Jacinto. And we had a deal.”
“Right,” she said. “Ahn-hell. Sorry, AJ.” She ripped the scrap of paper into tiny bits of confetti. “I actually like how it sounds in Spanish. Are you fluent in Spanish?”
He nodded. AJ had grown up never sensing any boundaries between English and Spanish. Thoughts and words flowed freely across the divide, and until he started school, he hadn’t realized he was speaking two different languages. In school, he’d been taught that English was the way to get ahead, but Spanish always echoed through his mind, somehow more expressive, more meaningful. It was the language of his dreams.
“That’s lucky,” Chelsea said. “Are you taking Spanish?”
Another nod. His teacher, Sr. Diaz, was from Puerto Rico. His Spanish sounded different from the language AJ was used to, but it was the one class he knew he’d ace without studying.
It was funny how Chelsea deemed him lucky. He didn’t feel so lucky. He felt like a fish out of water, even in Spanish class. And she didn’t seem to realize a lot of people in this country, even in Texas, considered his knowledge of Spanish a reason to hate him.
Chelsea turned out to be as good a listener as she was a talker. Without really planning what he was going to say, or knowing why he needed to talk, AJ told her what had happened to his mother. It was really the first time he’d told anybody, blow-by-blow, about that day.
He’d gotten up as usual. He could hear Mama in the kitchen, singing “Livin’ la Vida Loca” along with Ricky Martin on the radio, a tune that suited her unselfconscious, happy voice. His mom was young and pretty, and she dressed for work like a kid, in jeans and sneakers. At her job at the rice-packaging factory, she had a locker where she changed into a coverall and hairnet. Since Bruno had left, she worked overtime whenever she could, but the mornings before school always belonged to AJ.
They’d had breakfast together that day as usual. She quizzed him on his spelling words because there was always a test on Friday. His mom had never finished school. She claimed helping him with homework helped her improve her English. This made homework seem important. He got all his words right except disinterred. She made him spell it three times and use it in a sentence: The cats disinterred a fish carcass and had a smelly feast.
It was a completely normal morning, and AJ probably would’ve forgotten all the details, except it turned out to be their last day together. He’d gone to school like normal, moved and jostled through classes, lunch, recess, study hall the way he always did. The nightmare had started last period. Mrs. Alvarez came and got him out of science class. The teacher’s aide explained that there’d been a raid on the packaging factory where his mother worked. She’d been handed over to ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—and detained.
AJ had never really thought about the word detained. He quickly learned that in his mom’s case it essentially meant she’d been sucked off the face of the earth.
Mrs. Alvarez hadn’t seemed concerned at first. She’d been sure there would be someone to look after AJ. Nearly everyone had relatives or someone with the church. AJ was the exception. He was the only child of an only child. His grandma lived in the valley, on the Mexican side. Bruno, his former stepdad, had been out of the picture since he’d left them high and dry. Which was how AJ ended up flying through the night to be with Bo Crutcher, the father he’d never met.
“That’s completely freaky,” Chelsea said. “And totally unfair. She didn’t do anything wrong.”
Too bad Chelsea’s opinion didn’t matter.
Without being invited, she dragged a chair over to the terminal and started searching the Internet. She was like a dog with a bone, typing in phrases like “immigration law” and “naturalized citizen” and trying to figure out why his mom could be living like a regular person one day, and an outlaw the next. Mainly, like AJ, she wanted to figure out how his mom might be allowed to stay in the U.S.
“Let’s write a letter to your congressman. Who is it?”
“No clue.”
“Well, geez, let’s find out.” Chelsea was pretty good at all this, and within a short time, they had sent a note via the Web sites of a Texas representative and a senator. For good measure, they sent the same message to the assemblymen from New York, too.
“Says here a medical situation would warrant special permission,” Chelsea continued, “if it’s a condition only a special doctor in the U.S. can deal with.” They both leaned toward the monitor and stared at before
