Just Like Us by Helen Thorpe

Author:Helen Thorpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

15

AUTO THEFT

Yadira took down a snapshot pinned to the bulletin board in her room and handed it to me. I beheld a black-haired newborn in a pink jumpsuit with a matching pink bow in her hair. “That’s my new sister,” she said proudly. It was early in the winter quarter of her sophomore year, and I hadn’t seen the girls for several weeks. Recently Alma had called from the hospital in Durango to say that she had just named her new daughter Cristál. Now Alma was right back where she had started—mothering a child in Mexico, with the baby’s father working for an American employer, twelve hundred miles away. At the moment, Yadira was working part-time to help support her siblings. Consequently, she was taking three courses instead of four—a math requirement, a sociology class, and a course on Spanish literature. Clara had signed up for the same Spanish course, a required science class about the evolution of life, a communications class, and an arts and humanities requirement. Both girls said their favorite class was Spanish, which was taught by Miriam Bornstein, one of a handful of tenured Latino professors at the university. Several other Latinos with tenure taught in various graduate schools at the university, but Miriam and her husband, Óscar Somoza, were the only tenured professors of Latino background who focused on teaching undergraduate students.

“Every day, I say to Yadira, ‘I love Miriam. Don’t you love Miriam?’” Clara announced. “The teacher is from Mexico, so we identify with her.”

“Our first Spanish teacher was Argentinian, and she said our Spanish wasn’t real Spanish.”

“Miriam knows that even if we speak Spanglish, it’s a means of communicating!”

Just then, Luke arrived with a bicycle messenger bag slung over his shoulder.

“You won’t believe what happened last night,” Yadira told him. “You know how Mercedes sometimes sleeps over? Well, last night we were like, why don’t we steal Marisela’s mattress—”

“Oh, my God!” Luke exclaimed. “I saw them! I saw them with the mattress!”

The girls often invited their friend Mercedes to stay overnight, because she lived in a dorm located in a remote corner of campus and hated walking home after dark. She usually slept on the floor, but this time Clara and Yadira thought it would be funny to play a trick on Marisela. Over winter break, she had started dating a construction worker named Omar, and they were now inseparable. While Marisela was out with Omar, the other girls snuck into her bedroom, giggling wildly, and stole her mattress. “We were just settling down to go to sleep, and then she started pounding on the door!” Yadira recounted. “We were, like, ‘What do we do?’ We thought maybe she would go away, but she kept pounding and pounding.” Finally Yadira opened the door. “And she was scary, she was so mad!”

“I’ve never seen her so mad,” confirmed Clara.

“Luke, she was seriously, seriously pissed.”

“I know! I was watching The Shawshank Redemption in the lounge when Marisela and this guy came by with the mattress. They were cursing and yelling.

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