Chapter Text
Gasoline
Stupid, but pretty.
Like, the latter cancelled out the former, and that made it OK.
Like, sure, you’re a dumbass, but don’t worry – your latest selfie got 300 likes on Instagram.
So, it’s all good.
But he hadn’t always been.
Pretty.
There was a time when he had been small and gangly, his knees and elbows too big for his skinny frame, his hair the kind of tight, wiry curls that were difficult to tame, when he hadn’t yet grown into the full lips or the sharp cheekbones and jawline he had inherited from his mother; and he had still been stupid then, but he didn’t have the excuse of being pretty.
When people called him stupid, now, all he could think about was sitting outside of the school counsellor’s office in the third grade, the heels of his sneakers propped on the edge of the seat and his arms wrapped around his knees, and trying not to cry, because they had figured out his secret. Through the blinds in the office window, he could see his Tia Rosa shaking her head, confused, and then hurt, because he had been lying to her. When they got ready to go and visit his mother, every second Saturday morning, and she told him to pick a book to take, he picked Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site every time. It wasn’t because, the whole time he had been growing up, Rosa had worked on construction projects. And it wasn’t because it was his favourite.
He picked it because their bedtime routine since he had been five years old was to read along with audio-books on YouTube, and the song was rhythmic and rhyming.
He picked it because he could remember it – recite it – by rote.
His mother gave him that smile, the one that crinkled at the edges of her eyes and pressed her lips together, like she was trying to hold back a laugh, and she shook her head, her coal-black hair, cut into a blunt bob, brushing her shoulders.
“This one again, mijo?”
Rosa would lift her shoulder in a shrug, her cheek dimpling with amusement.
He would tell the story to both of them. Every page, from the crane to the excavator.
And no one could tell that he couldn’t make sense of all of the letters or words.
But that day, the counsellor told Rosa. That he could speak in two languages, but could scarcely read in either. That he could stand at the front of the class and present show and tell, but his spelling tests had letters written backwards or omitted, if he even attempted the words at all. That his state administered vision test returned a perfect result, despite that he seemed to struggle to read from the whiteboard. And when she came out of the office, she was crying. She knelt down in front of him, clasping one hand around his, where they were wrapped around his knees, and smearing the tears from her cheeks with the back of the other.
“Diego, I’m sorry, sugar,” she said, her voice soft and husky, the first one he had ever learned, even before his mother’s. The voice that had soothed him as a baby, sang him rhyming songs in Spanish, and told him te quiero, every night before they went to sleep, and every morning when she left for work. “I’m sorry I didn’t see how you were struggling.” She squeezed his hands, and reached to brush her thumb over his cheekbones when he started to cry, too. “We’re going to get you help, OK?”
And she did.
Rosa took Diego to meet adults who had him do tests and assessments, who assured him that there was no wrong answer, as if being instructed to read aloud for the class, or invited to the whiteboard spell a word from their homework sheet, and not being able to do either, wasn’t wrong. As if he was somehow supposed to forget the laughter of his classmates, and the concerned frowns of his teachers.
They said things like dyslexia and hereditary and tutoring.
He didn’t want to tell his mother, when they visited, but Rosa said they had to, and he didn’t take Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site, that time. He just sat on the other side of the table and cried, while she held his hands tight and whispered that it was OK.
The learning aides at Diego’s elementary school in Oakland were overloaded with struggling students, and the education support program didn’t provide specialised support for dyslexia. They couldn’t afford to hire a dedicated tutor, or enrol him into a private school with intensive programs. So, because of him, they moved from their two-bedroom apartment in the city to a little one-and-a-half-bedroom duplex on the southern edge of Evergreen county, where they just scraped into the catchment area for an elementary school with a government funded special education unit that offered push-in learning and exclusive classroom programs.
Some parts of it were good.
He learned more letters and words, and after a year of being placed in an exclusive classroom program, with less students and more teachers, who sat beside his desk to work out problems together, and didn’t ask anyone to read out loud or come up to the board, he moved to the push-in program, which meant he could go to regular classes, and a lady with fiery red hair and a tiny, sparkling piercing in her nose came to sit next to his desk and help with reading and writing.
Some parts were bad.
When Diego was in the small class, the kids who went to regular classes didn’t want to sit with them at lunch. He sat with his classmates. Some didn’t talk, and others couldn’t. There was a boy who would sit at his desk in class, tapping his pencil fast and loud, and then suddenly start throwing things – his pencil case, his backpack, his chair, other students’ belongings – and wouldn’t stop until the security officers came in to take him out of the room. There was a boy in a wheelchair, who liked to tell jokes. At least, Diego thought they were jokes. The punchlines were often based on math equations or a play on words, and he didn’t usually get what was funny about them. There was one girl who signed, and could read lips, so he could talk to her, and she wrote down her responses, but he couldn’t always read them.
When he was allowed to go to regular classes, Diego was the only one who had a learning aide, and at lunch time, the other kids laughed and said he should ask her to sit with him, because their tables were full.
Sometimes, he went back to sit with the kids from the exclusive program.
Most of the time, he just sat by himself.
The worst part was, after they moved, instead of two hours each way to visit his mother, it took four – a day trip in Rosa’s big old pick-up truck. Long enough that they would book into a motel overnight rather than spend the whole day on the road. Rosa couldn’t afford to take that much time off from work, so their two-weekly visits became four-weekly.
Every time she saw him, his mother’s eyes got dark, and she did that smile – the one where, against her will, the corners of her mouth turned down a little, because she was trying to hide that she was sad - as she said how much he had grown.
When Diego got to middle school, his grades still weren’t where they should have been, but they were close enough to passable that he didn’t require an aide any more, and Rosa found a college student who did tutoring to pay for her school books. She came to the duplex on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons to help him with his homework. She wore her hair in a long black braid and brought him pappadums to snack on while they worked.
Over time, Diego figured out ways to distract from what he didn’t want other kids to know about him. He made jokes, and offered compliments, sometimes played up in class when he was having trouble focussing or understanding the assignment. He pretended he was confident, especially when he wasn’t. He played soccer for a local community team, and they went out for pizza when they won games. Sometimes, he was invited to his teammates’ birthday parties.
It made the days easier, having other kids to sit with, in class and at lunch, even if he still spent most weekends with Rosa, watching movies and cooking and tending to the herbs and vegetables that they planted in colourful ceramic pots that lined the little patio behind the duplex, tomatoes and chilli peppers, spinach, coriander and lemongrass.
“You sure you don’t want to invite one of your friends from school or soccer to sleep over, sugar?” Rosa asked, applying eyeliner in the mirror by the front door before she left to meet one of the site secretaries from the project she was working on for a drink.
Diego reached for the remote to change the channel to his favourite cartoon, Generator Rex, and shook his head.
He had spent years inviting and hoping.
He learned it hurt less not to ask.
No one wanted to be friends with the stupid kid.
The summer after he finished middle school, Rosa signed a form so that he could get a job cleaning and stacking shelves at the new Walplex. It wasn’t fun – the cleaning products smelled like hospital floors and the middle-aged ladies who supervised some of the departments gossiped and complained about each other - but the junior trainees that worked in the bakery and butcher sections were only a few years older than him, and chatted with him in the break room or when he took trash out to the dumpsters by the loading bay where they smoked.
The last weekend before he started his freshman year at high school, he and Rosa drove out to Chino, checked into the same roadside motel they always did, where the desk clerk recognised them and gave Rosa a key for a room around the back, the same one they always stayed in - two beds and far enough from the street to dull the sound of the traffic. They put their overnight bags in the room, taking only the items they were allowed, and went to visit his mother.
When she smiled at him, it was bright and sudden, and full of wonder.
“Mijo,” she murmured, looking up at him with dark, damp eyes, and reaching up to touch the edge of his ear, his jaw, his arm at the hem of his t-shirt sleeve. “You got so big.”
It was just as well – that he got big.
He started freshman year at Liberty High the following Monday.
He didn’t learn it the first day, but Diego figured out soon enough that there were kids that most people avoided.
One of those kids was Monty.
Some were scared enough to give him wide berth in the hallways, or to be careful what they said around him, and how. Some were wary enough to ask for a reassignment, if they were placed on a group project together, or allocated to the same team in gym class, although most of the time, it was safer to be his teammate than his opposition. Sometimes, there was even hesitation in the faces of teachers when he walked into their classroom, a flicker of panic, because they sure as hell did not get paid enough to break up brawls involving a boy with all of the unreasoning anger and violence of a hurricane.
Diego wasn’t afraid.
It wasn’t that he was brave. Not back then, anyway.
Back then, he had just been lonely.
“Liberty’s going to be the start of a whole new life for you, mijo,” Rosa had insisted, looking at him over his shoulder, their reflections in the mirror dotted with flecks of water on the surface of the glass from changing and rinsing the guard on the clippers she used to refresh his fade, the night before he started freshman year. She curved her index finger around the shell of his ear, careful not to nick the delicate skin. “You’re gonna make so many friends.”
He wanted to believe her.
He didn’t. But he wanted to.
Compared to his middle school, Liberty was huge, a sprawling campus of concrete render and glass facades, stretching from tennis courts at the edge of the woods on one side to the baseball diamond and football field on the other. Like most, Liberty was a school that leaned into its all-American sports culture, offering basketball and baseball, athletics, track and tennis, wrestling, cheerleading, and its crowning jewel, football.
No JV soccer.
Despite that he was surrounded by other freshmen, just as small and naïve and hesitant as he was amongst the teenagers who stalked the halls, Diego felt uniquely alone. Liberty was the kind of school that was big enough to get lost in. Amongst hundreds and hundreds of kids, maybe, no one would care if wasn’t clever, or if he spoke with an accent, or if he didn’t dress like them. Probably, they wouldn’t even notice him at all.
Once, that had been all that he hoped for.
But Rosa dreamed of more for him. And he wanted that, too.
The other boy didn’t look friendly or approachable – actually, he looked sort of surly and defensive – but he was the only other student who didn’t appear to know anyone else in homeroom, the other kids chatting and laughing and sharing stories of their summer vacations, and the desk to his right was empty.
Diego took a chance.
“está este asiento ocupado?”
The boy glanced at the empty desk and lifted his shoulders in a disinterested shrug beneath a black and tan plaid shirt.
“Knock yourself out.”
He spoke without an accent, but had, it would seem, understood the question.
It was a start.
Diego slid into the chair, slinging his backpack beneath the desk.
“I’m Diego.”
The boy cut a glance in his direction, his expression flat.
“Orale.”
He didn’t offer his name, or anything else, looking away again when Diego smiled.
But it was something.
Diego didn’t want to come across too eager, too desperate, so he left the boy alone, watching him quietly at his periphery. The boy bounced his heel beneath his chair, as if there was somewhere else he needed to be, and worried his lower lip with his tongue and teeth, pausing the agitated actions only to respond to roll call.
Montgomery de la Cruz.
Diego thought Montgomery sounded like the name of somebody’s grandpa.
When they were dismissed, the other boy grabbed his bag from beside his desk and left quickly, without saying anything to anyone. Diego took his time, retrieving his timetable from the back pocket of his jeans and reading it carefully, twice, and then again to be sure that he had understood and was headed to the correct class. The unfamiliar hallways were crowded and non-descript, the doorways and posters all looked more or less the same. Diego checked the nearest room number against his timetable, thought he must have missed a turn, and spun around to go back the way he had come.
A few feet away, the other boy – Montgomery – rounded the corner. He smiled, sudden and relieved, and Diego followed the line of his gaze to a girl a few yards away, standing with two other girls in short skirts and expensive sneakers. The girl, blonde and pretty in a floral dress, looked stricken to spot him.
When he stepped toward her, she shook her head, warning him away.
The rejection wasn’t of him or for him, but Diego felt it, anyway.
He knew it well.
A second-hand pain, like the ache of a phantom limb.
If Montgomery was hurt, it didn’t show in his expression. He turned and walked past Diego as if he wasn’t even there, as if he were totally alone in the hallway. Diego wondered how he did that – hid whatever pain or anger he was feeling from showing on the outside – but he thought it would be weird to ask. He would need to think of some other way to try to make conversation in home room tomorrow.
As it turned out, he didn’t need to wait that long.
At lunch, Diego sat out at a table by the back quad. He hadn’t got to know anyone well enough to ask to sit with them in the cafeteria, and most of the kids there were eating from trays, laughing and chatting, clusters of Liberty Tigers varsity jackets and cheer uniforms, jokes and smiles and stories of summer vacation.
A brown paper bag was tossed unceremoniously onto the table beside his own sack lunch, and Diego looked up, startled, at the boy from homeroom.
“You said it was Diego, right?” the boy said, more a statement than a question, as he threw his backpack beneath the table and sat down without asking or being invited. He reached for the paper bag, tipping out an egg salad sandwich, an apple, and two granola bars. If he intended to make conversation, he made no immediate attempt, tearing the plastic wrap from his sandwich. It was cut in rectangles, rather than triangles – the same way Rosa had cut Diego’s. He smiled, small and uncertain.
“Montgomery, yeah?”
The other boy spoke around a half-chewed mouthful of sandwich.
“You can call me Monty.”
On the first day, they had math together, and on the second day, English. By homeroom on the third day, Diego had come to learn that Monty was the kind of kid that people called stupid, too.
He saw it in the way that the teachers swallowed down a sigh when he raised his hand to answer a question. Half the time, it was deliberately wrong, an obvious joke or distraction, and even when it wasn’t, Monty grinned like it was while the teacher explained the correct answer with a tight, tired voice.
Sometimes it was funny.
Sometimes, Diego wondered why he drew attention to it.
Later, he realised that, while Diego had been taught by Rosa and his mother how to defend himself against people saying or assuming he was unintelligent, Monty had grown up with the people who should have reassured him instead using those exact words for him. Rather than learn to reject the idea, he took those razor-edged barbs and wove them into his armour.
Partly, Diego knew that it was because, despite what people said, Monty was clever enough to understand that letting others think he was stupid allowed him the freedom to get away with things that they would have otherwise expected him to know better than to do.
Partly, Diego suspected that Monty accepted what people said about him because he thought it was true.
They met outside at the same table on the back quad each day during lunch. Diego was a little surprised, the second day, when Monty showed up as he had the day before, with two ham and cheese sandwiches and an orange. The third day, he was hopeful, and relieved when the other boy tossed down his sack lunch of a peanut butter sandwich, two apricots, and a muesli bar.
Monty didn’t ask him where he went to middle school, or who his friends were, or why he sat out on the back quad instead of the cafeteria. He talked about skateboarding and punk bands, and the dirt bike he had saved up for over summer. He asked what kind of movies Diego liked, and if he played sports. He didn’t seem to mind when Diego stumbled and dropped a Spanish phrase mid-sentence. He asked him what it was like growing up in Oakland, and if he ever saw anyone get shot. He hadn’t. Monty seemed a little disappointed.
That afternoon, they had History together, and afterwards, Diego tagged along when Monty went to check out the sign-up sheets for sports try-outs, pinned on the wall outside of the gymnasium. Frowning, the other boy glanced over the sheets for hockey and basketball, tennis, and then dug into the side pocket of his backpack, retrieving a pair of plastic rimmed glasses, which he put on with an air of defensiveness, as if daring Diego to say something about it. He didn’t.
After another moment of considering, Monty reached for the pen hanging from a string beside the sign-up list for baseball. From his expression, brows drawn together and the corners of his mouth turned down, he could have been signing up for voluntary detention for the enthusiasm he showed.
Diego raised a curious eyebrow.
“Do you even like baseball?”
“Nope,” Monty answered, writing his name in looping handwriting that looked like it should have belonged to just about anybody other than him – not unlike the glasses. “But my grades are for shit, so if I’m ever gonna get out of this shithole, I gotta get a sports scholarship.”
Diego looked at the sign-up sheets.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to go to college, or leave Evergreen, but for shit was an apt description of his grades, too.
And maybe, with a blue and white varsity jacket, that roaring tiger emblem on his chest, he would feel like he belonged.
“Sign up for football with me.”
Diego blinked at Monty, who had moved a few steps away and was writing on another try-out sheet.
“Nah, man,” he said, shaking his head. He smiled and shrugged when Monty looked at him. “Dominicans don’t play football.”
Monty snorted.
“The fuck does that even mean?” he muttered, mostly to himself, as he finished writing his name beneath the blocky handwriting of Luke Holliday. The list was long and crowded, but the only other name that looked familiar was Zach Dempsey, a boy from Diego’s Geography class, scrawled in the third space on the list, beneath Bryce Walker and Justin Foley – both written in the same handwriting. Monty looked at him expectantly, the pen poised over the vacant position beneath his own name. “C’mon, dude,” he said. “Try out for football with me, and I’ll sign up to any sport you want.”
Diego eyed him warily.
“Why would you do that?”
Monty shrugged.
“Shit’s more fun if you got a friend to do it with,” he said, already starting to write the ‘D’ for Diego as he glanced back at the other boy. “Right?”
The afternoon sun through the windows at the end of the hall suddenly seemed a little brighter.
Right.
Monty tried out for baseball and, together, they tried out for football and wrestling, even though Monty rolled his eyes when Diego chose it, and made a joke about him wanting an excuse to try to touch his ass.
When Monty came to find him after last period on Friday, waiting outside of Diego’s Geography class with a skateboard hanging from one hand, to tell him that they had both been selected for the JV teams, Diego couldn’t help the smile that lit across his face, or the question that tumbled from his mouth.
“Do you wanna hang out on Saturday?” he asked. “You know. Play video games or something?”
Monty hesitated, looking down at his skateboard, and then shook his head, and Diego felt his throat tighten and heat rising in his cheeks as he fumbled for something to say – an excuse that would make the invitation seem trivial and unimportant – as the other boy shrugged.
“I got plans with Bryce on Saturday,” he said, and somewhere beneath the wail of humiliation echoing around the inside of his skull, terrified that he had misunderstood the other boy’s intentions, had overplayed his hand, Diego thought there was a sliver of reluctance, or maybe uncertainty, in the other boy’s voice.
Before he could come up with anything casual and unaffected to say, to brush off the rejection, Monty looked up at him, cocked his head, and said, “Let’s do Sunday.”