Yaqui Delgado Quotes

Growing up is like walking through glass doors that only open one way--you can see where you came from but can't go back.

You know where this Yaqui girl is going to be in a few years if she doesn't change? She'll still be there, same as always in her old neighborhood--a nobody with nothing. And guess what? That's her worst fear.

How can you say bad things about someone you don’t know?” I shout. “How can you hate a stranger? Why do you have to pick on people?” she’s not better than Yaqui. It’s like everywhere there’s a bully in my face.

Maybe we only tell our scary secrets when we have no choice.

It was Ma who first noticed my body changing, but she wasn't exactly tactful about my getting cuerpo. "Put on a bra already, Piddy," she said after she noticed a man on the bus gawking at my chest one day. "You can't go around with two loose onions in your shirt for all the boys to stare at," she snapped, like it was my fault that the man had helped himself to the show.

I’ve been thinking lately that growing up is like walking through glass doors that only open one way — you can see where you came from but can’t go back. That’s how it is for me, anyway.

When I look up, I’m surprised to find myself in front of the old building. My feet must have gone on autopilot. I’m like one of those African elephants that finds her way home, no matter how far she’s roamed.

The whole building was probably listening in on her escandalo through the pipes; maybe even the whole block could hear. That tells you how mad she was, because if there’s one thing Ma hates, it’s looking low. The worst thing you can be is a chusma. She thinks we get a bad rap as Latinos, which she’s always trying to undo by being extra quiet and polite all the time.

Ma pulls me to her and hugs me so tight and for so long that I can feel her heart beating in her throat. It’s so pure that it takes my breath away. It’s as if she’s pressing all her strength through my skin and into the marrow of my bones.

In face, all I have left of my father is his last name – and I think that’s only because Ma couldn’t stand the shame of leaving FATHER’S NAME blank on my birth certificate. What if the hospital people thought she was the kind of woman who couldn’t remember the names of the men she slept with?

The camera does a close-up on the girl who can miraculously see again. It cuts to the mother-in-law, then to the clueless husband. All at once, the credits run. “Maldito sea!” Lila shoves the coffee table with her foot. “We have to wait to see that hussy get what’s coming?” “Please. You know what’s coming.” I rub perfume on my wrists and sniff. It’s better than sour milk, and it reminds me of fancy department stores where I can only browse. I stuff a few samples in my pocket. “It’s going to end the way all the novelas end. Everybody happy.” She shoos away my idea like it’s a bad smell. “So what? Nobody gets happy the same way. That’s what’s interesting.

In fact, all I have left of my father is his last name – and I think that’s only because Ma couldn’t stand the shame of leaving FATHER’S NAME blank on my birth certificate. What if the hospital people thought she was the kind of woman who couldn’t remember the names of the men she slept with?

Yeah, sure. That’s what you think.” She sounds a little sad when she says it. A boy hasn’t looked Mitzi in the eyes for years. Their eyes stayed glued to her chest. “I’ll be her boyfriend noticed you or something like that. But if that’s what happened, you’re done.

I grip my charm tighter. All I can think about is Yaqui Delgado’s eyes, about what kind of cloak she wears, what kind of dagger she’ll run through me.

Nobody is ever beating off starvation at Mitzi’s house. Her parents are so utterly boring, old-fashioned, and ordinary. Her dad works at a clinic, and her mom volunteers, does the laundry, and cooks. Everybody does his or her job – and Mitzi’s is only to study. I decide that annoys me too. What would my life be like if my dad were still around? Easier, I bet, just like hers.

Darlene rolls her eyes – again – like I’m the stupid one. White-skinned. No accent. Good in school. I’m not her idea of a Latina at all. I could point out that Cameron Diaz is Latina, too, but why bother? It won’t change Darlene’s mind.

Nobody is in the school yard when I get there, except for a few guys hanging near the fence. I recognize a couple of them from the forbidden Latin lunch table. I walk fast, trying not to be noticed, but, of course, they have to go out of their way to call me out. “Move that junk, mami!” one of them calls, making squeezing motions with his hands. I don’t turn around to give him the finger, though I probably should. Instead, I hurry up the steps two at a time.

School is no better. Since the day I “played’ fastball, when I step up to the chain-link fence each morning, my shoulders hunch up, my mouth dries, and my head goes blank. A big cloud just swallows up everything about me. It’s like the schoolyard is a big miasma – one of those make-believe poison clouds that scientists once thought killed you until they figured it was actually microbes in water and microwaves and other stuff that really gets you. Yeah, DJ’s a mind erasing miasma, and it’s eating my brain. I forget everything about velocity. I can’t remember the reasons we were in World War I. Each period, I stare at the clock, thinking about getting from one class to the next without meeting Yaqui, like that’s the real test. Sitting in class is just what I do in between.

I can’t get Yaqui Delgado out of my mind. Plenty of girls shake their junk. How is that enough to make somebody hate you? It’s crazy.

Son unas cualquieras,” she mutters. Nobodies. No culture, no family life, illiterates, she means. The kind of people who make her cross to the other side of the street if she meets them in the dark on payday. They’re her worst nightmare of what a Latin girl can become in the United States. Their big hoop earrings and plucked eyebrows, their dark lips painted like those stars in the old black-and-white movies, their tight T-shirts that show too much curve and invite boys’ touches.

SKANK is scribbled in ballpoint pen on my desk. I don’t exactly know why my heart starts to thump. It’s not like there aren’t messages and other handiwork all over this school. Take auditorium seat J-8. I found out during last week’s Expectations of Excellence assembly that it’s got a faded image of a penis carved on the armrest. No one likes to sit in the Pecker Chair for an assembly. People make fun of you the whole day after that. Ask Rob.

Estas hecha una mujer.” She shakes her head sadily. A lot of the salon women tell me this: “You’ve become a woman.” None of them ever sounds too happy about it.

I grip the edge of the table. It’s not fair that I have to upend my life because Yaqui is bloodthirsty. But so what? Think of how unfairly things turned out or Ma with my father – and how she survived anyway. And how about Joey and his mom? Is it fair to be seventeen and on a bus by yourself to get away from your family? Run away if you have to, he told me.

Most people feel happy looking at old photos. Me? I just feel lost and jumbled.

So what? Nobody gets happy the same way. That’s what’s interesting.

all of our sad days are like faded bruises, almost forgotten.

I open the yearbook and start paging through it as fast as I can. Basketball games, Ping-Pong, Yearbook Club, Drama. I check the cover to make sure it’s not a mistake. It’s like I’m reading about another place entirely. The school in this book has nothing to do with the place where I spend my days, the place where three in ten of us won’t graduate. It doesn’t show the empty air around me as I wait alone in the school yard, the bathrooms I won’t go into, or the dead look I have to keep on my face as I go from class to class.