Ten Chula’s

Oscar Díaz tosses a folded piece of paper onto my desk as soon as Se?ora Mu?oz turns her back.

“Yo, why don’t you two get a room or something?” he whispers to me, loud enough for a handful of people to hear. I tune out their giggles and open the note.

meet out front after school?

I look up at Beckett. She’s twisted around in her seat, smiling. Blush and heat flash off my face as I nod my answer.

After school, I rush out front and spot Beckett straddling her scooter at the curb in front of the flagpoles.

“Want to go for a ride?” she asks as I move closer. She’s holding two helmets.

I run the tip of my finger along the fender of her hand-painted Vespa. Paisleys. Polka dots. Mountains. Flamingos. Palm trees. I’d drink in all that color, if I thought it would radiate out of me the way it does with Beckett.

“Did you paint this?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s really cool,” I tell her as I walk around it.

“Thanks.” She says it with a shrug, like it’s no big deal, like she hand-paints a vintage scooter every other Tuesday.

“How do you even have this?” I ask.

“I worked my ass off at the shop since I was, like, twelve so I could buy it.”

I glitch on the word ass coming from her.

“Here,” she says, handing me a helmet.

I stare at it before taking it from her, watch as she buckles her strap. She turns to smile at me.

“You coming?” she says, and my mouth goes so lust-dry, all I can do is lick my lips and nod.

I keep my arms loose around her so I don’t come off pervy as she reaches low between her legs to switch something on. Then, with one foot still on the ground, she tips the scooter to the side a degree or two, and I have no choice but to tighten my grip so I don’t fall off as she starts the engine. With barely enough room for a passenger, there’s nowhere for Beckett to be but pressed all the way against me. The scooter is vibrating. I’m vibrating. My whole body. Every cell of it. This girl... this daydream of a human, this cloud floating silently by me every day for three years... somehow, I’m sitting on the back of her Vespa, and she’s pressed into me, and I’m the one who’s floating.

I don’t ask where we’re going—honestly it doesn’t matter. I’d ride across the face of the earth as long as it means leaning up against her like this. Her hair teases me through the opening of the helmet. Not much more than a warm breeze separates me from the curve and softness of her skin.

We pull up in front of a card table restaurant called Chula’s. Escondido has lots of these little hole-in-the-wall restaurants, but there’s only one Chula’s.

“Excellent choice,” I say, sliding off the back of the scooter.

“They have the best coffee,” she tells me. “Better than any chain.”

“And killer tortillas.”

Her face lights up. “I know, right? So good. And they’re huge.”

Inside, we order two coffees and a basket of homemade tortillas and sit down at a rickety table near the back. Waves of music, strings and horns, dance around us.

Si la Adelita se fuera con otro,

La seguiría por tierra y por mar....

“I saw you today,” she says. “At lunch.”

“You did? Where?”

“Down at Food City, with your wife.”

My face flames out for a second.

A woman in a Chula’s shirt comes by and sets our coffees and the basket of tortillas on the table. Beckett reaches over, tears a strip off one of the tortillas, and inhales deeply.

“Holy crap, these are so good,” she says on the exhale.

I watch her fold the strip she peeled off and pop it into her mouth, and when she’s fully loaded and unable to talk, I say, “Fool.”

She stops chewing.

“What?”

“Where you saw me today? It’s... it’s Fool City.”

“Fool City?”

“The curve of the D is burned out on the sign out front.”

“Huh.” The tiniest smile tugs at one corner of her mouth. “I never noticed that.”

“Yeah, so. Now it’s just Fool City. And Stella’s not my wife. She’s my best friend.”

I notice how her neck tenses up as she finishes chewing and swallows.

“Okay.”

Now that things are awkward, I tear off a piece of tortilla as well, roll it up, take a bite.

“I’m a little disappointed in myself,” she says. “I’m usually better about noticing those kinds of details. About the sign?”

She squints like she’s conjuring an image of it, trying to visualize the burned-out part of the letter.

“Details matter,” I say, reaching for a sugar packet.

I’m just about to rip it open when Beckett says, “Wait,” and wraps her hand around mine, sugar packet and all.

“Watch this.” She lets me go, then pulls her coffee cup directly in front of her.

I pry my attention away from the invisible imprint of her hand on mine and watch as she picks up a small metal pitcher. From several inches above, she pours a thin, slow stream of cream into the cup, and we lean in close so we can see what happens through the clear glass.

The reaction is immediate.

“I love how it spins into itself,” she says. “Like it’s forming a tiny galaxy inside a miniature universe.”

I look up at her, but she’s still lost inside her tiny coffee galaxy.

“You should try it,” she says.

I slow-spill the cream into my cup exactly the way Beckett did and watch as it swirls.

I go, “I have to admit, that’s pretty cool.”

“That’s one of the reasons I love coming here,” she says. “You can see everything inside these clear mugs. Any little thing you do sets off a whole new chain reaction. So, then, if you do this...”

She flicks a sugar packet, meticulously peels it open, and pours it into her coffee so slow and deliberate, I can almost count the individual granules of sugar going in. Unlike with the cream, this reaction is frantic, almost violent—like a mini–Big Bang. Before long, it settles into a kind of nebula, where the sugar crystals fall away like shooting stars.

“You like being the deity of a teeny-tiny universe, don’t you?” I say.

We both laugh a little, but our laughter fizzles back into silence pretty fast.

I decide to add sugar to my cup to see what happens.

“I can’t say fool,” she says out of the blue.

I look up.

“What do you mean?”

“My dad... I’m not allowed to use the word fool.”

“Why not?”

“It’s in the Bible.”

A gut-punch reminder of how pointless it is to ache for someone who could never ache for me back.

“He says the Bible uses the word fool for anyone who isn’t a believer,” she tells me. But then she shakes her head a little, that smile still tugging at her. “Fool City, though. That’s kind of perfect.”

She picks up her spoon, stirs the cream and sugar around in her cup. Her lips just barely brush the rim as she takes a sip.

“Seriously,” she says. “I don’t know what they do here, but it’s just... the best.”

I’d give anything to be that coffee mug she keeps pressing her lips against.

The awkwardness is so dense now, I can’t tunnel to the end of it.

Beckett seems to feel it too.

She goes, “Okay, rando question.”

“Do it.” I take a sip of coffee to help clear all that soft-focus out of my head.

She goes, “What’s the last picture you took with your phone?”

Easy. “I snapped some graffiti on the side of the parking garage at the old mall the other day.”

“Graffiti?” She makes a strange face. “Why graffiti?”

I think back to when Joanna taught me about counting train cars when I was little. How, when I’d hang out with my grandpa, he taught me to look even closer, at how they were painted instead.

“It’s all about the lines of it,” I tell her. “And the saturation of color. It’s pretty spontaneous too.”

She couldn’t be more confused if I told her I’d taken a picture of a UFO that landed nearby.

“Why the face?” I ask.

“No, I... I guess I just never thought about graffiti that way.”

“What way?”

Her gaze floats around the room.

“Like... art,” she finally says.

Now I’m surprised. “What else would it be?”

“I don’t know, I guess I always just thought of it as, like... visual noise,” she says. “Like something that’s not supposed to be there.”

Wow.

“Why the face?” She echoes my question from earlier, but there’s no smile behind the poke.

“No, I’m just... I’m confused, because... I mean, you’re an artist.”

“Yeah, I know, but...”

She sounds defensive, like she thinks I’m judging her. I’m not, though. I don’t think I am. I’m just curious. And she’s a curiosity.

I spin my cup a few times, waiting for her to finish her thought. When I change directions, the current inside the cup shifts with it.

But she doesn’t say anything else, so I go, “My grandpa had this thing he used to say. Something like, when we can’t see an object as art, it’s only because someone has convinced us it isn’t.”

She picks up her cup, holds it in both hands, lets her gaze drift out the window. I can’t tell if she’s mad, or just thinking, or if it’s something else. I scramble to come up with another kind of question to get the conversation going again.

“Okay, I’ve got one for you,” I say. “What’s the most repeated song on your playlist?”

She swings her gaze back to me.

“‘Nowhere, Girl,’” she says without even blinking.

I’m the one who’s blinking.

“By Cassie Ryan?” I ask.

She nods. “I love that song.”

“Cassie Ryan, the—?” I stop short before saying the words queer icon, simply adding, “Your parents are okay with you listening to her?”

A wash of pink crawls up her neck into her face.

“My parents think I only listen to the music they’ve bought me. Plus, they don’t actually know what I listen to since I always use headphones, and... yeah. I bought the CD so I wouldn’t have to download the album on their account.” She cuts a look in my direction. “They definitely have no idea she was the first secular concert I ever went to.”

My brain is reeling with questions. So many questions. Beckett likes C.Ry? How does she even know C.Ry? Maybe it’s because her music feels rebellious, and someone like Beckett would need safe ways to be rebellious. But I mean, “Nowhere, Girl” is literally an underground lesbian anthem, and it’s also the most played song in Beckett’s playlist, and I can’t figure out how those two things can both be true. I bet her parents would freak if they knew what that song was about. I bet Beckett would get excommunicated from church if they knew she listened to “Nowhere, Girl.”

Why don’t we head out to nowhere, girl?

Just hitch a ride to you-know-where, girl?

The sound of ice dropping into a cup at the fountain hits the air hard. Even the rush of bubbles pouring over the top of the ice sounds magnified, the shuffle of a customer’s shoes against the floor as they move from the soda fountain to a nearby table.

“So, did you sneak out for that concert?” I ask. “Or...?”

“They knew I was going to a concert, I just never said which one. Rays of Son was playing at church that night, so I guess they assumed that’s where I went.” She shakes her head as if that will erase the memory. Or the sin. “I felt bad about lying to them, especially because they never found out.”

I felt bad about lying to them. Not: I felt bad about going to an underground lesbian concert instead of the Christian rock concert my parents thought I went to.

She takes another sip of her coffee.

“I see how you’re looking at me,” she says. “I’m not a bad person.”

I’m not looking at her like she’s a bad person. Am I? Because I don’t think that liking C.Ry makes Beckett a bad person. But I do feel like it makes her a confusing person.

“They don’t understand that secular stuff doesn’t have to be sinful,” she says, even though “Nowhere, Girl” would definitely qualify as more than just “secular.” “And there’s no point trying to argue with them about that. There’s no point trying to argue with them about anything when the only answer to every question is because... y’know? Because I said so. Because it’s God’s will. Because is the thing parents say when they don’t want anyone to prove they’re wrong about anything. Besides... my parents don’t believe in explaining their logic, or even just... giving reasons.”

“Is that why you sneak around sometimes?” I ask.

She looks at me like she’s hurt or offended.

“I mean, like Justin’s party. I’m just trying to understand,” I say.

Her forehead wrinkles. “You can’t. No one could ever understand what it’s like.”

“What what’s like?”

I hold my breath so I don’t scare her answer away.

She looks into her cup.

“It’s weird, because... my parents tried for ten years to have me. My mom... like, every time she got pregnant, it ended in a miscarriage. She did have one baby, but it was too premature to survive. Then she got pregnant with me, and... I think she kept waiting for things to go bad. For nine months they prayed that I’d be the healthy, normal baby they’d always wanted. And I was. They believed I came into the world perfect, sent to them as an answered prayer and a gift from God.”

Her words drip down around us.

“You have no idea how hard that is, Daya. Seventeen years of holding myself to their standard of perfection.”

“Then stop,” I say. “No one’s perfect. It’s impossible and unfair.”

She shakes her head, starts to fidget, her fingers twisting around each other on top of the table. She spins that thin gold ring she always wears, slips it halfway up her finger, then down again.

“They don’t know who I really am,” she whispers.

I wonder if Beckett knows who she really is. Or if she’d be able to accept who she was once she did know. Is she doing things that go against her own nature just to keep up her parents’ dream of a perfect daughter? The same way I try to keep Joanna’s fantasy of a “normal” daughter afloat.

“Why do you keep looking at me like that?” she says.

“Like what?”

“Like that,” she says. “That face you’re making.”

But I never get a chance to answer.

Beckett’s phone goes off. She looks at the screen and says, “Oh, shit.”

“Everything okay?” I ask. Stupid question. Obviously, everything isn’t okay.

She shoves her phone and wallet back into her bag as fast as she can.

“I can’t take you home, Daya, I’m so sorry.”

“That’s cool. Um. Maybe we can get together tomorrow, for our project?”

“I’ll try,” she says, rushing to the door. “I promise.”

I’m still staring through the window a few seconds later, at the empty spot where her Vespa had been parked. At the invisible shape of her, just before she sped off. My brain works double time to fill all the negative space Beckett leaves behind....

She loves C.Ry.

She loves making mini-universes inside cups of coffee.

She sneaks out of the house sometimes to peel off some of the constant pressure she’s under to be perfect.

Only she’s not perfect.

There are all these layers to her that I never saw before now, all cracked or flawed in some way.

I wish I could tell her how amazing all that imperfection actually makes her.

If I’m lucky, I’ll get the chance to.

Tomorrow.