New Horizons doesn’t run any services on Tuesdays, so Marco and Julia are free to joyrides around the parking lot. The church is historically Black, a minute’s drive from the house—past the docked RVs in wind-beaten blue dresses and the salmon two-story whose Christmas lights never come down—until you reach the neat white steeple and know you’re there. A vinyl banner bound to the railing reads, DRIVE-IN Parking Lot CHURCH. COME AS YOU ARE! STAY IN YOUR CAR! As a child, this rhyme scheme delighted Julia. Now she’s nineteen and developing carpal tunnel in her right hand from the five classes she’s taking down at City College and the cartoon hot rod on the vinyl banner is so sun-bleached, it looks electrocuted, drained of its life force. Two Mexican fan palms jut from a backyard bordering the lot. The palms are conjoined, forking blue veal above.

“If I had to amputate my hand, would you do it for me?” Julia says.

“Give me a steak knife, sure.” Marco loops the lot, wrist-over-wrist on the turn. “Is this a cry for attention? Jesus loves you—stuff like that.”

“The expression is ‘cry for help.’”

“Jesus never cried a day in his life,” he says, then pauses. “I think.”

Marco and Julia’s church is farther out, more pared down, the approximate size and shade of a liquor store—stout, stucco, the orange-brown of adobe clay. It’s called Iglesia Piadosa, but there’s no indication of this anywhere outside. Someone keeps clambering over the motorized gate to tag SERGIO or maybe SERIO along the west-facing wall. The gate is spiked. The spikes are mostly decorative. Occasionally a drunk wanders up the short flight of stairs out front looking for DELIQUOR, where you can buy alcohol, chilaquiles, and money orders all under one roof, and Desirée on tambourine has to say, No, sir, this is a place of worship, take a hard left down at the trolley tracks.

“God blesseth, God be with you,” mumbles the drunk on the way back out.

Marco says this is the difference between Mexican Catholics and Mexican Christians. Less bourgeois bullshit. ‘Bourgeois’ is a word he learned from Julia during one such joyride. Julia is always saying, At least the Catholics get to zone out to color.

“We don’t need any ornamentation to believe,” is his argument today.

“Ornaments boost morale. All we have are folding chairs. And we ask for tithes too, so how different can we really be?”

“Don’t need steeples, don’t need fancy signs.”

Iglesia Piadosa has a ceiling fan and wrought iron window grates. The signage on their street says things like CASH FOR DIABETIC TEST STRIPS and WE BUY HOUSES (CASH!) and also YARD WRK TREETRIM CASH ONLY with a phone number listed out. The bus benches tell you to use a clean needle every time or to call Attorney Prince Smith In He Who We Trust if you’re hit by a car. Every Sunday, Pastor Tito says they’ll see about getting a banner made. His bellows escape through the metal screen, trail pedestrians down the block, the emphasis unevenly placed: “Y le dio un lugar donde quedarse—”

“Our basement’s been ‘under construction’ for six years,” Julia says.

“Maybe if you donated more during collection.”

“Swear you’ve never taken money from the basket.”

“Swear,” Marco says and reaches over the center console to give the thick hank of her braid a tug. “Unlike you, I’m a good and God-fearing child.”

“Swear on anything,” Julia amends.

Swear on everything? said kids at MLK Park when they wanted to renew a vow of trust, to check you weren’t scamming them. Those three words urged you to inventory your loveliest relics for a live audience. Swear on your mom. Swear on your cat. Swear on Shakira stirring air with her ass. Swear on your dead grandma, may her everlasting soul rest in peace! Marco heard this expression passed around as a kid and ran home to butcher the delivery. Swear on anything! he yelled with instinctive force, to verify Julia hadn’t been in his bedroom while he was gone. In response, she gave a brief but imprecise list of some things she swore on (Polly Pockets, Duvalín, dust bunnies, lemon-scented garbage bags). It’s since become an inside joke.

“I swear on…” He raps a knuckle to the steering wheel, the rubber Guadalupe keychain suspended from his rearview mirror quivering. “…Hammocks…Hubba Bubba chewing gum…the DMV…”

Julia discerns he’s lying by the quality of this list. “No one swears on the DMV.”

“They do if they wanna see it smited.”

“Smote.”

“Fuck,” Marco says, “off.”

On Tuesdays, they individually have nothing to do so they jointly do nothing together, without ever specifying why. Speaking about the drives would imply observance of a ritual. Rituals imply affection and/or organized religion. Julia doesn’t have that kind of faith in older brothers—their immensity or their instructional value. Some days she can only bear to be around Marco while strapped into a moving vehicle.

“‘Catholic Mexicans’ and ‘Christian Mexicans’ sounds better,” she says after a moment of thought.

Marco hums, noncommittal.

“Religion isn’t as static. We let go of it when we want to,” she continues. “The first word is the descriptor, the second the fixed noun. ‘Mexican Christians’—why give God so much weight? Are you or aren’t you Mexican?”

“Do we care?”

Growing up, the division of genders relegated Marco and Julia to opposite ends of the house, hobbies, thrift stores. Only at church were they delivered unceremoniously to the same descending staircase, the basement classroom intended for the ill-defined age group referred to by everyone else as ‘los jóvenes.’ Julia wore ankle-length skirts and pinned short veils to her hair, seated quietly for Bible studies. Marco slipped away untroubled, vanishing to dribble bottle caps in the gated parking lot or to pool quarters with the other boys for a bag of duros sold at the cart on the corner of Imperial and 61st. One year, on Día de Los Reyes, she caught her brother rolling a joint down at the trolley tracks edging Iglesia Piadosa. On the crown of a raised knee, he gave the rolling paper his tongue and moments later sealed it like a god kissing his creation awake.

#

In Fiction Writing, Professor Robles says that to lean on verbs like ‘look’ and ‘feel’ is to apply a filter to your narrative, to project unnecessary psychic distance. The English department at Julia’s community college is appointed reject classrooms with hopper windows that can only hold up so much sky. The light is weak and reaches them too late. Professor Robles says filtering is like wrapping your face in cellophane, then trying to give someone a kiss. Imagine that. Do you think that would feel comfortable, natural even? The class is nearly all girls. There’s a Zapotec boy who never smiles or removes his baseball cap, shoulders pulled back razorblade straight. The terminally bored Chicanas cluster by the wan sunlight, clicking their nails and their laptop keys, correcting the geometry of their lip liner relative to their philtrums. Professor Robles paces the aisles. He tells them to tend to the concrete. He says ‘I remember’ anecdotes are gluttonous detours in a medium which already affords them too little real estate. Everything that exists within the story’s frame must advance time. Everything that stalls it must be excised.

#

Julia sits in the hall to begin reworking her last assignment. Someone is lying prone on the carpeted floor, a windbreaker open over their face. Someone farther down is passing out cake slices in little foil boxes.

In the margins of her most recent sketch, Professor Robles has written, Passive. WHAT is desired by your “I”? Too many coordinating conjunctions (because, &, so). Let’s edit this down. Julia slashes heavy lines through her opening paragraph. Fiction Writing isn’t technically a general education requirement. She doesn’t let this on to her parents, who believe she’ll soon be a teacher at the chartered middle school near their house. The sketches she turns in are full of dream sequences, girls rooting around in milk thistle, ancient dogs buried under turned earth by someone’s older brother. Her narrators have disobedient hair and windowsill idols. Both hair and idol go ignored. Somewhere, a clot has begun to take shape. No one knows it yet.

Each week, Professor Robles hands her work back and says, “Locate the tension. Then exploit it.”

LOCATE, Julia writes in swirling cursive.

“Hi. Cake?”

She glances up.

Citlali is holding out a plastic fork and a foil box.

“Oh…thanks. What for?”

“My last semester,” Citlali says, smiling. She’s been at the community college two years longer than Julia, flunking out of math classes at a clip. “This is my ‘thanks for dealing with me, goodbye, I’ll miss y’all.’”

Julia stares into the latticework of cinnamon-dusted frosting. “You’re transferring?”

“In a way.”

“Congrats. You must be—really happy.”

“Happy?”

Julia meets Citlali’s eyes and momentarily goes mute. “To get out of here?”

“Fuck no,” Citlali says, with stunning force. “I’d stay forever if I could.”

Julia can’t make sense of this response. “Doing what?”

“Being a shithead. Bothering the tutoring center. Forgetting to return all the books I borrow. What I always do.” She winks, already moving on to the student napping beneath their jacket, who she nudges with an impertinent foot. When she stoops beside them, the waistband of her jeans furrows open. A moth is inked into the base of her spine.

Julia’s hair was once that length, in the days when she still wore it loose and tumbling. Now she braids it down her back, tucks the tail into the hood of her sweatshirt. These days, Citlali’s is shoulder-length and peroxide blonde, her roots showing in a clear violation of border agreements. All borders are bullshit, so she leaves it like that. Black encroaching on blonde. The necklace caught at her clavicle is a gold ‘C’ in a gothic script. It settles there, an interred virgin—motionless, face shining. Julia stares at its stillness.

She met Citlali during a neighborhood birthday party, the number ‘7’ emblazoned on every flat surface. Julia sat in the rented bounce house, swaying in place as hollering kids flew at the netted windows like torpedoed cherubs. She felt too old and too removed to frolic, but not old enough to follow Marco inside, where he was playing video games with the gangliest of the boys. Then Citlali wrenched the nylon flaps apart and dove into the bounce house head-first. The added weight threw Julia into a vortex of sweetly moussed hair. Citlali caught Julia by the belt loops, said, “You good?” and laughed. Julia felt the sound like coils of heat down the nape of her neck. She was fifteen, so every second was a century.

The moment she sinks her fork into the cake, a river of milk wells up, growing height and flooding the foil.

#

Julia remembers the time an aunt was playing with her hair while she did homework at the dining table. Having long hair invited touch; at nine, this was a lesson she was beginning to learn. In a moment of absentminded fussing, this aunt parted the sleek outer shell to reveal a matted nest at the base of Julia’s skull. It was small, dark. The knot had been buried underneath all the rest. That she had been washing and brushing around this hardened clot for the last several months, nurturing the surface while the seed within ripened and telling not a soul about it, was unfathomable to the house at large. Cousins gathered up, took turns prodding the clot and cackling, as if they’d discovered a pest of particular interest. Marco sidled in from the yard and took in the scene with apparent interest. His face brightened.

“I call cutting it out!” he cried.

Julia hadn’t known the clot existed. She wasn’t sure how to say so.

#

Every Thursday at Northgate Market, their father orders and pays for Julia’s lunch. The order is the same every time. Torta de milanesa de pollo, freezing can of Sprite. He does this because that was all Julia wanted to eat from ages nine to ages nine and three quarters and because, she supposes, this is his most vivid memory of his daughter: the year Julia learned to split her hair down the middle while shampooing and brushing; the year their mother sheared it to Julia’s temples in retribution for the clot, saying, Ahora péinalo como tú quieras; the year Julia snapped her ankle taking a running leap off of the Mazda and their father had to princess-carry her inside. Visitors flipping through their photo albums linger on this era—Julia with her bulky cast and bowl cut, toes bare. Bad hair and worse ankle. They ask how Marco hurt himself. You think I was ever that ugly? he likes to joke.

The line for food moves and the supermarket overheads score their foreheads until they’re anointed in warm white. Julia doesn’t say much during their weekly lunches, content to listen to her father debate sports with his coworkers. Marco’s contributions are utilitarian, an involuntary reaction to the flow of conversation. He leaves behind napkins that dearly remember the pulse of his fist. At the close of the meal, Julia gathers them up and throws them out. Occasionally Marco glances at his phone, she’s not sure why. The weather never changes and the clock always does. This discrepancy is inherent to San Diego. Curt blue heat. Back to work or school. Blue is all and everywhere.

Julia spies a girl from Fiction Writing at the food counter. Vanesa is paying for a tub of pozole, one arm around a little girl in a plastic tiara. Hominy kernels bob in the red broth like fish babies. Like baby teeth propelled from their sockets. Vanesa writes blistered prose poems about atonement and insomniacs in love, no punctuation, signed with her initials. v.h. She tells the class they’re about ex-boyfriends. Professor Robles says not to reveal their wellspring—not until the work is complete.

Marco ducks his way into Julia’s line of sight. “¿Por qué no vas a saludarla?”

She feels a flare of real annoyance, knowing he’s reverted to Spanish out of habit but also that this is more likely to snag their father’s attention. She wants to say, Not everyone I know is someone who knows me back.

“My feet hurt,” she mutters.

“How?” their father cuts in. “All you do is sit on your ass all day.”

A wave of laughter around the table. Marco sucks his teeth, thumbing clean a canine in the reflection of his phone screen. In his work uniform, he’s deep blue and baby-faced, a fact which does little to deter his endless motorcade of maybe wives, mostly girlfriends. Julia likes him the least next to their father, their breasts embroidered an identical red. She returns to her food, saying nothing.

“I told you to stop!” Vanesa whispers to the little girl on their way past the table.

The girl swings unrepentant from the crook of Vanesa’s arm, ankles airborne, then returned violently to earth. A scuffle ensues as Vanesa grapples for control of her bicep. The little girl’s rubber flip-flops thrash.

“Fatty,” the girl says, on a breath of pure spite. “Fatty, fatty—no, you—!”

“Ay, las niñas de esa edad,” someone at their table says in long-suffering tones.

Vanesa starts dragging the girl off, though she’s delayed by a peroxide blonde exiting the bathroom. Julia pretends to study the menu up front. From her vantage point, Vanesa and Citlali are paper dolls, fine silhouettes waiting for further attention. A silver butterfly protrudes from the shadow of Citlali’s navel.

“Girl, why…” Vanesa is saying and switches the pozole from one hip shelf to the other.  “…Do you look…”

“Shh!” Citlali says, but she turns her foot out to display her small belly.

Vanesa wants to know who and how and if so, what Citlali’s family has to say about it. Their hushed voices are growing harder to ignore. The little girl catches Julia staring and flashes her nubby fangs, hissing darkly. A feral sound. Vanesa says, “Aye—pinche—c’mere!” and gives the girl a hard pinch to the arm. The girl kicks out with her sandaled feet, biting, snarling, tiara flung halfway across the food court. No one is safe, not even Citlali, who’s been declared a fatty, too. Citlali offers a magnanimous agreement—she will be soon—and the trio exits through the supermarket’s automatic doors, into the same day as every day. Marco tells Julia she gets this look on her face sometimes. Sleeping where she stands, even when she’s sitting. Everyone else alive with waking.

#

She dreams Professor Robles has her by the shoulders. She’s in a pinafore and ballet flats. He keeps saying, What. Is. Desired? The room is watching. Julia knows it’s a trick question so she traps her tongue behind her teeth. She wakes up thinking of her liquor store-sized church, mini Jesus and his wreath of thorns, little Julia boring her gaze into him while they dissected Ezequiel in the basement’s slanting light, Marco anywhere but seated. Jesus’ hair whittled carefully, like a crude spirit lifted from a rind of mud. Long, alive. Cada uno tenía cuatro caras y cuatro alas. Julia lies perfectly still. She thinks of Citlali’s four-eyed moth, pinioned to her spine. She thinks of herself at age eleven, downloading eHarmony on Marco’s iPod Touch and catfishing old men with photos of Danna Paola. Julia made sure to use only the most natural-looking candids from Google. Aren’t u the prettiest thing. Outside of Atrevete a soñar, Danna Paola was a different girl entirely, so maybe it’s true what TV says—that a pair of glasses and a bad haircut can doom you to obscurity. Julia never thought of the catfishing as projection. The dating profile wasn’t Julia. Julia didn’t want to be a telenovela star. She wanted to displace the desire.

#

“Do you remember Danna?” she says during their next Tuesday joyride.

“What’d my hairline look like at the time?” Marco says with the speed of a game show contestant. “And how’d her mom feel about me?”

“Danna Paola, stupid.”

“The actress…?”

“I used her face for that fake dating profile when we were kids.”

Marco shakes his head, signaling into New Horizons. “Don’t remember.”

“Huh?” Julia leans forward. “It—that was a formative moment in our childhood! You made me delete everything. You banned me from your room. I threw your iPod so hard it cracked!”

“You were banned from my room the second you were born,” he says. “Know what I remember? I remember the year your lice kept coming back. Nothing killed ‘em. Not the nasty shampoo. Not the nit combs. We had to shave you bald. Old ladies loved coming up to us for one of two reasons—to say, ay, mira este niño bonito, or to check if you had a terminal illness.”

“That never happened.”

“They’d ask me if I loved having a little brother and I’d tell them I knew I couldn’t.” A pause. “‘Cause you were terminally ill.”

“Stop.”

“If they accused you of being terminally ill, I’d say, ‘Nah, that’s just my little brother.’”

Julia gapes. “Seriously, I had lice?”

“You kept sharing your coat with all the other girls at Rosa’s. Everyone told you to stop, but you wouldn’t listen.”

“Rosa’s?”

“Under-the-table daycare. Neighbor lady.”

She sits back. Rubber Guadalupe is placid as a lamb, hair enshrined in green fabric. Motherhood appears to have made her sleepy. Julia reaches up, flicks her into a swing. “No one told me any of that happened.”

“I swear on anything.” Marco maneuvers the car into a parking spot, shuts it off. The conjoined palms split the windshield. “The day Dad shaved your head, Ma had to leave the bathroom she was crying so hard. I was eight, so you would’ve been like three. Bzzt-bzzt”—he mimes the careful orbit of the clippers—“in the tub.”

“Why was she crying?”

“Mother-daughter shit,” he says succinctly. “Ask her if you don’t believe me. Probably threw out all the photos.”

In all the photos Julia remembers, she and Marco never touch and when one Christmas their father said, Let your brother hug you, Julia, no seas una niña malcriada, she bit down on her white-hot rage and endured the vise of his arms. It seems daily she encounters the same four-faced creature in her brother’s presence—this peculiar sense of resentment and veneration, revulsion and awe.

#

Everyone in Fiction Writing wants Julia to give her “I” narrator a name and to make “I” do something other than dream. They see an arc for “I” that will culminate in a kiss or a death, but the death should not be animal because animal suffering is too commonplace to leave an impression. After class, Professor Robles tells Julia there’s something poignant about her hair clot concept, if she can connect it more clearly to “childhood trauma.” He says “childhood trauma” in air quotes.

“No ‘I remember X,’ ‘I remember Y.’ None of that,” he says. “You’ll need to be more clever if you want memory to come into play. When we bring the past into our stories, it’s because it contains something profoundly painful, something that draws an explicit line through to the present.”

Julia writes down memory trauma XYZ in a sloping hand she hopes is too lawless to decipher. If only SERGIO/SERIO were here. Professor Robles informs her in grave tones he’s nominated her for a campus-wide writing award, open to students with work demonstrating exceptional creative merit. Fifteen pages minimum. There will be a blind judging process, followed by a spring ceremony to honor the finalists. First place receives a check for $50. He says Julia can put this on her CV, someone from the student paper will interview her, the UCs will eat it up. He says unlike most students here, Julia displays a real hunger to wrap up her gen-ed requirements and transfer to a four-year university.

“This is the way we have to be as first-gens, if we want to transcend our circumstances.”

She twists the tip of her pen, its nib vanishing into thin air. “But we haven’t gotten to the final short story yet. I don’t have fifteen pages.”

“Most students,” Professor Robles says, “they get complacent. They drag their feet. They fall back into their old slacker ways. They forget why they’re here. I say this every year: community isn’t a purgatory unless you treat it that way. If I’m nominating you, it’s because I look at you and I can tell. You know something the rest of them don’t. You’re in, you’re out. Boom.”

#

Marco drives like he owns a lowrider and not a sedan that arrived to him with ninety-three thousand miles already recorded: left-handed, wrist cocked. When Julia’s grades first started dropping in high school, he ferried her around National City in this car and he did so with the air of a grudging father. They idled in half empty parking lots while his shitty engine gnashed its teeth. She was fifteen. I just sit in the bathroom and read, she told him of her newest academic habit. If you’re gonna skip class, you need to be less of a loser about it, he retorted and so began their weekly joyrides. She made him swear not to rat her out—on anything in the world. He swore on their old dog Mini Boy, on his best sneakers with the blue toecaps, on Family Size Fruity Pebbles. It was the year he was fired from his delivery job for falling asleep at the wheel and totaling another car. At home, their mother thumbed his fuzzed skull, told him to be more careful. Their father offered him work at Imperial Ave Auto Body Shop.

She says, “Remember when you used to help me skip class and we’d walk around Plaza Bonita all day?”

“Your emo phase,” Marco concurs.

At Foot Locker, employees loved to harass him into disclosing his class status, which was always “uninterested.” Those same employees fell back while he inspected a pair of Jordans he had no intention of buying. He ignored the Timberlands because though they were his destiny, in those days he was still pretending otherwise.

“I wasn’t emo,” Julia says. “I wanted to drop out.”

“Already beat you to that.”

A crow alights on the church’s handrail to watch them through the windshield, vinyl banner rippling beneath its talons. Marco circles a Tipu tree well at a crawl. He doesn’t break focus to multitask. He elbows the window down, inclines his head, spits a sunflower seed outside. One glance will tell you he’s a swear-on-anything son. Nothing off limits. The son who brought home 1.8 GPAs, third-party insurance claims, job dismissals, tattoos—of their dead dogs, Romanized birthdates, prickly pear cacti sprouting hot pink nails. Short of a pregnant girlfriend, he’s survived every conceivable mutinous child milestone. The year Julia’s hair was found to be lacking, she lost it to a pair of her mother’s scissors.

“How do guys get girls?” she says, apropos of nothing.

“Like anything else. With money, or with finesse.”

“What if they have neither?”

“Then they’re shit out of luck, I guess,” Marco says and tries not to seem like he’s issuing Julia a look of pure, undivided suspicion. “Why?” He crams a few sunflower seeds into his mouth, jars the car into park.

Julia fiddles with her braid, the heavy length of hair that always catches at her elbow.

“Stop doing that. You’re giving me anxiety.”

“Touching my own hair…?”

“It’s reminding me of your lice days.”

“Don’t call it my ‘lice days!’”

Marco sighs and tosses the crow a handful of seeds. After a short silence, he says, “What girl? The one with the demon sobrina or blondie with the belly button ring?”

Julia drops her hands into her lap. “Why are you looking at her belly button—?”

A guffaw.

“Can you act your age?” she snaps. “Like ever?”

“De hecho, no,” Marco says, in true twenty-four-year-old fashion. “We both live with our parents here, and only one of us has a real job.” His jaw works a seed over. “See, this is the main thing wrong with women. They think all men are idiots—”

“The problem with men is that they start sentences with, ‘This is the main thing wrong with women.’”

“Listen, I got no clue who knocked that girl up and I’m not finding out for you.”

“I never told you to!”

“¿Entonces qué?”

Julia thinks of Citlali’s unborn baby. All around, the mothers and aunties either mourning her good looks or celebrating her domestic ascension. Soon she’ll be the goddess of kitchen cupboards, revered by Heaven and Her Holy Cabinetry. Sex out of wedlock is sinful, but children can be redeeming, the baptismal water’s waiting breath. It seems banal to point out. Criticism of her conscription has been done to death and no one ever cares anyway. Citlali has entered into a formal agreement: hem-mending and slow stews and chemical deep cleans. Every holiday from now until forever a double shift while the men turn blue beneath the radiance of the television set, unmoving, a row of mannequins.

“She’s only twenty-one and…” Julia trails off, voice thinning with doubt. “…You have an opinion on everything.”

“An opinion? My opinion is that you need to find more interesting things to do with your time.” Marco fumbles around in his glovebox, switches out rubber Guadalupe for a Caribbean-scented tree air freshener. “Look. Or—listen. You gotta consider that she might want this for herself. Even if you don’t.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It’s a point, so consider it.”

Julia turns her face towards the conjoined palms born to be together, then the naked cascade of New Horizons. Three stories, with a louvered pergola and windows so reflective they look like sheets of floating ice. It seems the white paint has never once been visited by SERGIO/SERIO.

Her eyes well up. Rubber Guadalupe is gone, the flimsy outline of a tree trembling in her place. CARIBBEAN COLADA, in all caps. Julia doesn’t know how anyone can distill so many nations down to their composite parts. She knows in the state of California, you can be pulled over for hanging something from your rearview mirror, even and including countries. She knows her brother doesn’t care, having driven his adolescence away with a broken side mirror, a missing rear license plate. In his estimation, he owes no nation his allegiance, least of all the one he was born in. This is, she supposes, the Chicano way.

“Deep breaths,” he says, batting the air freshener in her direction. “Then we get you a hobby.”

“I have one,” she says and flexes her sore fingers.

“That’s not a hobby. That’s your life’s work.”

Julia feels every muscle in her face pull still. Saying nothing means saying everything, so she tells him, “You can’t ever take a girl from her life like that.” Her face goes hot to hear herself so choked up. “Use condoms. Make her go on the pill. Make her prove it. Okay? You have to. Her end of the world is your…whatever.”

Marco looks at her like she’s lost her mind. “I don’t need a gay virgin lecturing me on sex.”

An upwelling of appalled sensation. Julia is shocked to discover the sound it produces. She’s shocked it belongs to her body—laughter.

“Just ‘cause I don’t say shit doesn’t mean I don’t see shit,” he says.

This strikes her as beautifully put. Poetic even.

Marco kicks the car back to life with his socked toes, his knock-off Adidas slides. The crow cries out, taking to the air. Most days Julia doesn’t like her brother and most days he only narrowly tolerates his sister. Sometimes he says things she finds unforgivable—You grow a backbone at the weirdest times or, Yeah, you’re the first in the family to be good at school. But that don’t mean smart. It means good at English, shit at Spanish—and she joins him on his joyrides anyway.

#

Julia dreams a brown girl sits one desk ahead of her. There’s a secret between them. The secret is a tattoo. It lives along the valley of the girl’s lower back. On a good day—and all days are good in these dreams—Julia can see the moth’s hindwings and no more. She tries to decide what this says about the girl, that she opted for the moth and not the slimline butterfly. The girl giggles with her friends while everyone waits for class to start. Class never starts.

Today the girl glances back and palms her belly, intercepting Julia’s eyes. She says, in a voice made of vowels, “They call it baby fat because the baby will get it all in the divorce and they call it divorce because birth is a division of selves—me and her.”

Julia says, “You are using too many coordinating conjunctions,” and tries to edit the girl down.

Citlali says, “You’re avoiding contractions. You’re putting them off and for what?” and sticks her ringed fingers down Julia’s throat so that Julia feels compelled to say ahhh as a denial of intimacy, speech disfluency for a routine dentist’s visit. An acrylic thumbnail scrapes her jaw. Citlali tastes as good as toluene smells. Her jugular notch is shining. She tells Julia to resist metaphor. Her hair is hair. Her hair is heat, belief, a home altar built out of an abandoned shoebox, the weather unbraiding itself into a bolt of dark blue cloth. Church boys abandoning the Bible to leg it to Baja California, then returning with undercuts and clean teeth. When Julia wakes the next morning, the light is like connective tissue and there are metaphors all around.

#

Julia’s “I” narrator is bathing. “I”’s hair escapes her two or ten wisps at a time, darkening the surface of the water. The hair serpents, unwinding without end. Long strands begin to aggregate, climbing the white tile wall in dense groups, forming the first fragments of a new language. A closed circuit of communication between “I” and “I”’s body is born. “I” is named in the title of the sketch. The title is “I, Medusa.”

“I want to sit down with you because I feel I’m going about this in the wrong way,” Professor Robles is saying. “I have every intention of setting you up to win this award and I don’t want to throw you into a task you find confusing. Correct me if I’m wrong: all your sketches so far have been connected?”

The empty classroom faces a downtown intersection of taco bars described as ‘bright’ and ‘buzzy,’ the crosshatching of subpar trolley tracks. Julia blunts the glow by relaxing her eyelid muscles. Idle light. She traces out this phrase on her thigh, nodding.

“Okay. These sketches are intended to generate a wide selection of material—not an exquisite corpse. Now, don’t get me wrong…it’s important for you to have fun. But we can’t neglect logic in pursuit of that fun.” He taps Julia’s latest sketch to underscore his point, the leaps and riots of red ink. “What is the story here?” He pauses. The pause lengthens like a tendril of hair. “Simple question. Can you answer that for me? Or no…?”

It’s the culmination of her old dream, the pinafore and the sluggish quality of the language around her. What. Is. Desired? Julia sees mini Jesus doing a Jedi hand wave from Iglesia Piadosa’s basement windowsill. Mini Boy stooped over a bowl of microwaved spaghetti in their backyard. The knot of dirt where they put his good bones to bed. Citlali’s gold virgin, her stillborn butterfly. Her lazing moth. Marco refreshing the masking tape holding his pulverized side mirror together. Julia fifteen and watching herself in the glass, her head lolled. Please, she says, put something on. Kill the silence. She’s listening to the disembodied radio woman say, “Equis, e, te, erre, a, efe, eme. Baja California, México.” All the border blasters air out of Monte San Antonio antennas and are therefore subject to Mexican broadcasting law, English-Spanish ad breaks. As the border-wall grows smaller, the TJ FMs begin to gather static, dropping in and out, turning gradually to mist: Ba…Ca…Mé…co…and isolated guitar chords. Julia is nine and aware for the first time of her hair clot. She’s nine and without her hair clot. Her nape newly freed to the wind. She’s clambering up the bed of the Mazda barefoot, the blue unwound above her. A benediction. The blue is the closest Julia has come to God. It’s the year their mother gives up on beauty routines at the bathroom toilet, Julia seated and quietly tantrumming. Julia hates having her hair done, those needle-like bristles jerking her scalp taut. Do you want everyone to think you’re homeless? Without her hovering mother, enough hair accumulated to form a nest, a mat, a small clot. Now it’s all gone. Her mother resigns herself to Julia’s deficiencies after that: the lousy grooming habits, the aversion to homemaking, the long hours spent shut up in her room with books. Julia is nine, her hair shorn high as a son’s. Her neck, her unwound blue. Their father standing nearby, conferring with their neighbor, who wants a second opinion on the trade-in value of his van. Julia is bounding down the bed of the creaking Mazda, elbows turned out like wings. Can’t do anything right. Can’t fix your hair, can’t clean your mess. Mírala. Nowhere do I see a daughter, their mother has taken to saying when she catches sight of Julia in the mornings, boyish, jaw brought forward by the fall of her dark cap of hair. Julia turns and leaps, one ankle fastened to the other. She’s a moth, a god, a gorgon, a nothing and nowhere daughter. She swears.

#

“What do you even do between classes?” Marco says.

Sometimes Julia takes out her notebook to free-write. Sometimes she reads from the Norton Anthology of So and So. The readings this semester are opaque, full of words like “triump’st” and “twixt.” All the poets deemed most important by the California transfer system die of fever or bloodborne pathogens after traveling to cold, remote cities for secret affairs. All the poets Julia deems most important drive used 2001 Acuras and post things online that say, “tryin to get good at stick n pokes if anyone wanna volunteer to be my canvas. pros: free art. cons: free art.”

“I got nominated for a writing award,” she tells her brother.

They’re at Coin Laundromat, waiting on two loads set to tumble-dry. A sign in the window reads, YOU DO LIFE. WE DO LAUNDRY, 99c/lb. WASH/FOLD. NO CREDIT! Machines seethe, foaming at the mouth. Tired mothers squat at the calmest mouths, their babies guiding toy hot rods around the folding stations or pounding dimpled fists on panty piles. Pásamelos—the chonies!

Marco squints at Julia. “Why say it all sad-like?”

“I don’t think my professor nominated me because I’m good. He did it because I was taking five classes in one semester.”

“And…? An opportunity’s an opportunity. Aprovéchalo.”

“It’s too late anyway.” Julia smiles in memory. Professor Robles nominated Vanesa, who won—the girl with the demon sobrina. “This happened last semester.”

Marco reaches out and pinches the bridge of her nose. “At least let me touch up your cut.”

Julia elbows him. “No. I like it mullet-length.”

“Y’know I found an old photo from your lice days? It was in a sewing box in Ma’s closet. Buried behind a bunch of other shit. Look.”

He pulls out his phone, unlocks the screen. There, a photo of a photo, Marco’s wrist holding it steady, the ridge of his big thumb knuckle. Julia is small and seated in an empty bathtub, a buzz cut baby. A wreath of dark hair circles her. She’s got a clump in one fist. Her eyebrows are raised in an expression almost too adult for a three-year-old—humorous, inviting. Little Marco crouches behind her, chicken legs and all. He’s grinning, front teeth coming in crooked, his eyebrows thrown up. She must have been mimicking him. That’s why she’s craning her head back. That’s why her eyebrows are hitched so high.

On the way home, they drive past Iglesia Piadosa, plain and simple as a dark pink box of donuts. Pastor Tito has added a sign to the front screen that reads, RAGING DRUNKS WILL BE REDIRECTED, in red ink.

“By who? God?”

“We can only hope.”