Wanted by Heidi Ayarbe Read Free Book Online Page A

makes it all the more real. I can hear Leonard’s nasal voice in my head, though: Take the bets. Get a good spread. Come out ahead. Basic bookie law.
    It’s kind of the point of it all.
    No wonder everybody’s been talking about Nim’s truck being impounded. Everybody knows it was me. Message sent. Meaning received. But there’s a fine line between glory and stupidity. I need this job. I need the cash. I need to keep my clients in line. I didn’t need some stupid headline to advertise it. I’m all about invisibility. How can I expect some trust-fund pretty boy to get that? What a tool.
    I close the book and give them my daily special. “Between the Chargers and Falcons I’m offering a no-juice line. One-time deal—almost unheard of in playoffs. Any takers?”
    Silence.
    “Do you guys even know what that means?”
    Javier speaks up. “Not really.”
    I sigh. “Never mind. Who’s betting what?”
    The guys place their bets. They like when we meet in the courtyard. It makes it more dangerous—alive. There’s a rush when we pass money under the noses of the esteemed faculty—some of whom place bets with me, too. Well, just Mr. Myers, the Driver’s Ed teacher.
    Nim shows up with all the other bettors. “You have something of mine,” he says when the crowd clears.
    “You have something of mine.”
    He hands me the cash and I count it. “It’s all there,” he says.
    “That it is.”
    “So?” he says. Nim snatches for the paper I hold in my hand. His knuckles are bruised and chafed.
    I pull the paper away, staring at his hands. “What happened to your hand? Those bruises look pretty fresh.”
    “Garbage Disposal,” he mutters.
    Garbage Disposal. Everybody knows about them. But Nim? Nim’s part of some who-knows-what-supremacist group? Nim? I look around for Moch but don’t see him. It’s not uncommon, since he skips every other day of school anyway. But last time Garbage Disposal hit the streets, Pacho ended up with a broken jaw and Moch had two broken ribs.
    Garbage Disposal and la Cordillera are things people talk about—things that I don’t want to believe are real beyond some lame dress code. All talk. No action. But lately, there’s too much action. I hate to think of Moch as a gangbanger. I hate that Garbage Disposal is real—with guys from my class in it. “Garbage Disposal? Are you serious?”
    “Listen, you want to hang out with Cheech and Chong, that’s your deal. At the end of the day, we’re just doing the good citizens of Carson City a favor. Look around you.” Nim motions to the kids walking up and down the courtyard. “They’re like fucking cockroaches.”
    “ They ?”
    “Let me correct that. You ,” Nim says.
    When Nim needs me, I’m white. When he wants to demean me, I’m Mexican. And it’s always like that—I’m not enough of one or the other. I wonder what happened to the melting-pot theory of America.
    “You people take our jobs.” He tugs on my shirt. “My money is earned.”
    Earned? A set allowance from his parents is earned ? I stare at Nim and try to imagine Garbage Disposal—a group of guys who get spray-on tans, don’t have accents, and eat beige food have decided how America should look and sound and taste.
    “Why do you hate so much?” I ask Nim.
    “None of your business.” He shoves his bruised right hand in his pocket, gripping the title with his left, raking it from my hand, giving me one awful paper cut. Nim whispers, his voice an angry growl. “If you ever mess with me again, you’re dead.”
    “Likewise,” I say.
    He doesn’t hear the last thing I say because I’m barely speaking above a whisper, sucking on the thin line of blood across the palm my hand. The buzz of Monday and taking bets is gone, leaving me with an empty, sick feeling in my stomach.
    The bell has rung. Students pass and swirl around me, making me feel like I’m the center of a whirlpool—that abyss of nothingness. Ten minutes ago I was on some kind of vengeance