Kissing Arizona by Elizabeth Gunn Read Free Book Online Page B

fingernails and spiked hair. She slouched around the house scowling and swearing; when she bothered to come home at all, her mother complained.
    Marisol began to transfer her anger, and with it her talent for nagging, from the husband she had lost to the daughter she could no longer control. You want to eat my food you gonna help with the cooking , she raged . No you can’t go to the movies, I been cleaning Anglo shit all day, you got to do the dishes.
    Vicky had always resisted her mother’s discipline, and after Pablo abandoned them, her rebellion slid gradually toward open warfare. She turned twelve, and then thirteen, flunked sixth grade and began to menstruate. ‘One more expense,’ Marisol groaned as she showed her how to use the pad. It was all the sex education Vicky would ever get at home, but of course there was plenty to be had at school, much of it from the boys who had begun to taunt and tease her.
    During the depressing boredom of the summer remedial classes she had to take after failing sixth grade, Vicky discovered the refuge her imagination could provide. Her reading was still too poor to escape into literature, but her spoken English was fluent. Her best friend in the world became the TV set. By the hour, she watched the competitive posing of reality shows, Masterpiece Theater channel with its elegant accents and period costumes, cop shows featuring tough, smart American women who could run and shoot without smearing their make-up.
    Luz got a scholarship to a math-and-science camp for poor kids that summer, and Marisol worked her two jobs and slept. Vicky, ignoring Marisol’s demands that she clean the house, curled in Pablo’s chair, happy in her dream world. In bed at night she played the stories over in her mind, identifying with the smoothest-talking, smartest women, the ones with the power. Her inner view of herself became more and more at odds with her squalid surroundings and low test scores.
    On the first sizzling-hot day in August, Immigration and Border Protection agents staged a sweep on the house-cleaning staffs at several motels just as Marisol was starting the morning shift. Her green card proven fraudulent, she waited, weeping, in a detention center till her children could be brought to join her.
    Vicky, malingering through remedial math class in Wakefield Middle School, looked up from passing a note to the boy in the seat ahead of her and saw a man in a blue uniform in the doorway. She went with him willingly, glad of a break from the tedium of class. When her mother told her what was happening, she was first unbelieving, then indignant. Her reactions were all met with demeaning indifference by the authorities at the center, which reduced her to sputtering rage.
    â€˜Shut up,’ Luz hissed at her, ‘you’re making it worse.’ Luz had memorized the number on her Arizona birth certificate. She made them look her up in the computer and acknowledge her American citizenship.
    â€˜But you can’t stay here by yourself,’ the social worker said, ‘You’re only ten years old.’
    â€˜I can stay with Tía Luisa,’ Luz said. ‘Can’t I?’ she petitioned her mother. ‘Ask her!’ Marisol didn’t want to leave her younger daughter behind but Luz insisted, standing by the phone with her jaw pushed out till Marisol called Tía Luisa’s house and begged for the favor.
    â€˜You should have kept your mouth shut and hung onto your husband,’ Luisa said, blaming the wife as usual.
    â€˜Wouldn’t make no difference now, they sending me back,’ Marisol said. ‘But Luz is American citizen like your girls. Won’t you sign for her till we see—’
    â€˜See what? I got my hands full to feed my own. She’s too young to work on the house-cleaning crew and I can’t keep her for nothing, you hear?’
    Luz, who was hanging by her mother’s ear to hear as much as she could, said,