An Island Like You by Judith Ortiz Cofer

Author:Judith Ortiz Cofer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2015-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

2.

Harry’s place is a mess after the party. Paper cups like party hats on everything. The TV, still on the music channel, is blaring out one rap song, the disc player, another. Matoa laughs as the words get all tangled up in his head. The coffee table is laid out like a buffet of party trash; Harry himself has passed out on the sofa. Matoa feels disconnected from the scene like he has just finished watching a good action movie and the lights have come on in the theater. Time to leave. He takes a last look at the place — what you’d call a well-stocked situation, he thinks. A real apartment, in an apartment building, not a decrepit tenement like El Building. Harry has the latest in electronic equipment, and the furniture is all glossy black and white leather. He had shown Matoa his closet too. It’s almost as big as Matoa’s bedroom and crammed with the kind of clothes Matoa’s only seen in magazine ads. He’d whistled in amazement when Harry pulled out a pair of Italian shoes he said cost him two hundred bucks.

It’d been a small party, only ten or fifteen people, all older than Matoa. He’d felt out of place at first, especially with the women, who looked like high-fashion models in their tight dresses and high heels. But they’d all been real friendly, and after a few drinks and some of Harry’s samples, it’d changed. Matoa began to feel at home. The women no longer seemed so tall and intimidating, and the men treated him like his brothers in the Tiburones did.

Matoa steps out into the hallway. There’s a winding flight of stairs in front of him — for a minute it looks like a giant slide, but it’s just that the dark carpet makes the steps seem to disappear in the dim light. He puts one hand on the banister on the way down, still feeling pretty good.

Matoa walks home to El Building on instinct. He doesn’t know what’s finally kicked in, but he’s begun to feel that he’s in the middle of a whirling cloud of colors and lights: headlights leave a trail as they speed by, and streetlights connect one to the other in gold tracks. Matoa leans against a wall, trying to steady himself. The building sways. He covers his head, thinking the building will fall on him. He laughs, and the sound of his laughter rolls down the sidewalk, bouncing like a can pushed by the wind. It’s like someone’s turned up the volume in his head to the max.

As he waits for his brain to tell him where his feet are, Matoa glues his eyes to the front door of El Building, but it keeps slipping away. He’s standing still and everything else is going around and around.

It’s late. The only thing on the streets is the trash to be collected in a few hours. It looks like a landscape of mountains and valleys to Matoa — all the bags and boxes and beat-up, rusted cans.

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