Boy thought it was sura to sit next to La Borrada. She’d only gotten worse than how she was in the 1st grade.
He often reflected on how they started out as friends in the 1st grade. She was gentle and friendly to him when they first met in class. She ended up sitting across the aisle from him, and they whispered back and forth a lot.
Boy taught her what the alphabet meant, and she seemed very thankful for it.
“Watcha. All the figures like these are called letters, and they’re only so many of them,” Boy whispered to her when the teacher asked another student to recite the letters they’d been studying that week, which had stumped the chavo cuz he couldn’t tell letters from words.
“Le pañas?” he asked her.
She nodded and smiled at Boy, which made him feel good.
All went well until after Christmas break, when a new girl came into class.
Her name was Silvia. Pale, long jet black hair and skinny, she ended up sitting across the aisle from him and behind and on the other side of Boy from La Borrada.
“Where’d you come from?” Boy asked as soon as he got a chance.
“From here, but I was in bed until Christmas,” she replied in a frail voice.
Boy immediately felt sorry for her and decided he was going to help her.
“You know what letters are?” he asked later in class.
It was then that La Borrada started acting up.
“Stop bothering her,” she admonished Boy.
“I’m just…,” Boy started to say.
“I’m gonna tell the teacher if you don’t stop,” she warned.
La Borrada was cross to him the rest of the year. She once even pushed him when they were in line to drink water from the refrigerated fountain in the hallway.
Boy put her out of his mind when he went away for the summer.
Now that he was back and everybody was back in their usual position, including Silvia, and La Borrada had grown even taller than him by a couple of inches since he last saw her.
“He’s from where everybody sleeps outside and walks around with no shirts or shoes,” she whispered across his desk to Silvia.
Boy felt angry but didn’t say anything.
La Borrada kept up the carilla.
“Shut up!” Boy finally told her.
“Oh, órale. I’m gonna get you after school,” she snarled at Boy loud enough that everybody around them but the teacher heard.
On his way home, he was confronted by a small posse of boys led by La Borrada.
“Say shut up again,” she taunted Boy.
“Yeah, say it!” a boy, one of La Borrada’s tirilongos, said.
“I can’t hit her, but I’ll flatten you with this rock,” Boy challenged him as he’d learned to do in Los Montoyas.
The posse dispersed, including La Borrada.
The next day, she stopped giving him carilla.
