I. Envidia

Daniela was young for her grade — only thirteen years old when she started high school — and hit puberty early, making her the main target of men’s lewd comments when we walked down the street. Qye guapa, we’d hear on the sidewalk in front of 7–11, cries of that ass echoing at her backside during late-night excursions to the beach.

At just barely fifteen years old, I was chubbier than I wanted to be, with frizzy hair and braces that rubbed my mouth raw. The flint-eyed mechanics in front of the Jiffy Lube never wolf-whistled at me. She had the hips and breasts I wanted but didn’t quite have yet, the long glossy hair I was never quite able to grow. I didn’t want these men, old enough to be my father, to notice me, but I wanted boys my own age to see as something attractive, engaging — a girl like Dani, a girl worth looking at.

II. Hogaridad

I am exactly fifteen and a half, dipping my toes in my best friend’s pool. The sky is cloudless — as usual. It is hot and dry, maybe ninety degrees — as usual. I have known Daniela Gonzalez since seventh grade, and now we are freshmen in high school. She is my only friend; to her, I am one of many. She is mysterious, funny. Dani is socially adept in a way I have never been, gregarious, likable. I am fifteen and a half, and she is fourteen for another three weeks.

I want badly to be her — a long-haired girl with a figure that men stop to look at, living in a mansion lit with crystal lamps and hung with tapestries, with kind-eyed parents who respect her privacy and never yell. Mrs. Gonzalez calls me mija and performs sermons that begin with anecdotes from her modelling career, relating the men and women she knew in those days to the greater life lessons that she wants to impress upon me. She shows an interest in my life that I am not accustomed to; it is addicting. In my dreams at night, a doctor calls my parents to tell them that there is a mix-up, that my birthdate is wrong, that I am Daniela’s sister. In my dreams, we go on family road trips to Mount Rushmore and New York City, and I speak Spanish with the faultless Mexican accent that I have heard Dani’s mother slip into.

I spend every day at their house, or try to, leaving a toothbrush in Dani’s bathroom and filling a spare cupboard in the upstairs hall with books that I hide from my parents — Infinite Jest, Lolita, Youth In Revolt. I find out the secret to the smoothness of Daniela’s hair — a combination of coconut oil and Mane and Tail. With her mother, we listen to Mexican folk music and speak Spanglish, pinche idiotas melting into conversations about Religious Studies class and the racistas and homófobas at our Catholic high school. We have our fifth period class together, Advanced Theater, and we usually spend the whole hour comparing notes on the babosos in our other classes, speaking with enough Spanish to obscure our conversation in a room of white people and enough English to make it effortless. We have our own terminology, too — our own code names for the people we like as well as those we despise, secret names for places and things, a type of Spanglish that is only entirely comprehensible to the two of us.

This is a language that we use all the time, words that become as accessible to me as standard English. We speak it in the kitchen as Mrs. Gonzalez shows us how to soak chía seeds; in the wee hours of the morning when conversation yields to sleep. As the sky shifts from dark blue to gray, we whisper: pendejo, a pejorative that doubles as a nickname for a boy we know; bolillos, which refers to white bread and white people; pinche panadería, fucking bakery, our name for the mostly white school we attend. Dani calls my father jefe, calls me puta, and I call her mana — sister.

III. Soledad

On the television, President Obama seems grave, yet jubilant. When CNN cuts away from his press conference to footage of people celebrating madly in the streets, pulverizing piñata effigies of Osama Bin Laden, I see their jubilation and I feel grave. The flavor of it, the fury, is far too reminiscent of the anti-immigrant protests I remember from my childhood. The television fills with pale dervishes cloaked in American flags, wanton in their celebratory bloodlust, all of them stomping exuberantly to the beat of a million people chanting their country’s name. Just inches from the television screen, Mrs. Gonzalez blends watermelon and cucumbers for aguas frescas. She and Dani are only half-watching the bacchanalia on display.

We drink our frescas, and Daniela tells me stories about the boys at school who are half in love with her and the one girl she secretly yearns for. I learn her name, Meghan, and I learn to resent the way she pulls Dani away from me, dragging her from the lunch table on flimsy pretexts, sneering when we speak the slurry of languages we have grown accustomed to. She feels excluded, Dani explained, so it’s easier if we just speak in English.

But we’re not talking about her.

Yo sé. But it makes her uncomfortable. The slow afternoons of lazing around the Gonzalez’s pool are reduced to Saturdays and Sundays and Dani spends more time skulking around with her girlfriend than she does with me. Without my best friend, walking becomes an anonymous pursuit. I begin to feel like nobody has looked at me in years.

III. Tontería

Summer has arrived, and police helicopters have arrived with it. I never manage to figure out why the beaches in Orange County are so heavily patrolled, and I learn to associate searchlights with summer and to stop asking questions. Daniela’s relationship is falling apart, and I get the benefit of her time now more than usual. She comes over now to my house, and I am given to understand that the Mr. and Mrs. Gonzalezs’ marriage is as ill-fated as Dani and Meghan’s own coupling.

We stay inside all day, waiting for night to fall on the coast, for the buzzing crowds at the beach to disperse. When the grizzled surfer dads have driven home and the tourists leave satisfied and sunburnt, when the only people on the boardwalk are the elderly people come to witness the sunset or to feed resident chipmunks, it is no longer too early. When the sky is no longer pale blue and the air is windless, humid, a manageable eighty degrees, and the parking lot is filled with ghost-eyed teenagers passing wrinkled joints, Dani and I walk to the part of the beach where a luxury housing development was meant to be built. The land is razed and planted with grass, sectioned neatly into plots, but is too expensive to be built on in these post-bubble years of Orange County real estate. While the neighbourhood is gated, the guards never remember to lock the pedestrian gate at the end of the driftwood walkway, and the abandoned lots spread before us are well-suited to watching the sunset unimpeded. Daniela always brings a speaker and I always bring the snacks; we spend too many nights to count sitting barefoot on patchwork grass with popcorn kernels stuck in our teeth and bachata music playing on loop. This evening, the ocean is dyed a freakish auburn, the phytoplankton reproducing in numbers enough to create what my science teacher has told me is called Red Tide. The lights on the beach cast spindly shadows over the sand, and a drum circle is forming on the splintery wooden walkway below the neighborhood we technically shouldn’t be in. Dani pulls out a fluorescent yellow Airhead, gnawing on it half-heartedly in the moonlight.

I ask how her girlfriend is. I haven’t seen Meghan in weeks.

Things are bad, she tells me, peeling open a package of Jolly Ranchers.

Porqué?

She likes men, she says.

She likes you, I counter.

She likes me. Daniela offers me a piece of candy, green-apple, and I wonder idly if it will stain my teeth. But she likes men more. I unwrap it, careful to avoid her eyes.

Then she’s a pinche idiota, I tell her, and the corners of her mouth start to twitch. I look up slyly. Ese puta no sabe quien eres, cree que el pasto es más verde allá.

She’s not a puta, Dani whines, turning away to text Meghan furiously. I stifle my laughter.

She’s estooooopida, I retort, drawing the sound out for comical effect, drawing it out until Dani, too, is collapsing with laughter. We wheeze into the sickly grass, and she thumps me on the back when I choke on my spit.

Let’s go, I say when we have collected ourselves, and we plod along the half-maintained boardwalk home. The tentative first beats of the drum circle have begun, marking our progress, fading out behind us.

A yellow-haired boy about my age calls me baby on the walk back, his even pastier friend yelling come here, sweet tits at our retreating figures. When we pause to study their faces, they look dumbstruck — and then, just as I recognize them from my math class, Dani hollers chinga tu madre, and they scatter like lizards in the face of her indignation. They were so scared of you, cobardes, and the two of us burst into peals of laughter, breaking into a sprint, our feet thumping to the same Romeo Santos rhythm. My mother looks at us like we are crazy when we open the front door of my house, still hysterical about something that is not even terribly funny, our hands and mouths stained with food dye and grass stains on the butt part of our shorts where we sat for almost the entire night.