Are We Ever Our Own by Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

Author:Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.

THE ELEPHANT’S FOOT

I first saw the elephant’s foot on the cement run outside of chapel. Muirenn was jumping rope, her body so steady her wool skirt barely floated above her knees, inching closer to Sandra’s Double Dutch record. I counted under my breath, letting the numbers shape fully in my mind and over my tongue. I didn’t like to say them out loud, but pretended instead they were a secret to myself. ‘Ihey were simple numbers, but all numbers were simple and they all could be twisted into something strange. In my pocket I ran my fingers over Muirenn’s study cards with the presidents’ names on them, right up to our beloved, newly-elected John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who the nuns had us pray for and who everyone in school claimed to be related to but me. Muirenn had covered his card in red hearts. Whenever she jumped, Muirenn asked me to hold her cards. She said I gave her luck.

“Twenty-five, twenty-six!” the girls around us called.

It was cold, November, and cloudy enough to almost want a streetlight, even in mid-morning. Sandra and the other girls chanted to the swat of the rope hitting cement. Sandra had always been the biggest in our group and the leader. But she wasn’t going to be the prettiest. It might be Muirenn, or even—if I stayed out of the sun and started waking up early to straighten my hair—me.

“Twenty-seven! Twenty-ei—”

“Touch!” Sandra yelled and the spinning stopped. “I saw Muirenn touch the rope.”

“I did not,” Muirenn said, staring hard at Sandra’s knees. The rope lay tangled between her shoes.

“Louisa saw it too,” Sandra said.

Louisa was short and kind of dirty, not pretty, not smart. Her father worked for a butcher on Damen Avenue and they lived in the tiny apartment above the shop. Sandra liked to tell her she smelled of meat. It was true, especially after her mother died. Not like something cooking, but the raw scent of pink pieces of chicken or dark blood sausage.

“I don’t know,” Louisa said. “Maybe—”

Sandra shoved Louisa and she fell back onto the cement. She didn’t even try to catch her fall, just curled tight around her satchel like it held something precious.

“Do over,” Sandra said. “You get one more chance.”

We started counting, all the way back at the beginning.

It was Muirenn who’d first spoken to me, her perfect oval face circled by burnt-orange curls that never frizzed or tangled, skin white as the statue of St. Bridget that greeted us at the front door. When I first came to St. Bridget’s All Girls Prep, I was still learning English, though I learned fast. My name sounded so foreign in the nun’s mouths I didn’t even think it was mine. CEC-il-a Arm-and-dough. Muirenn called me Ceely instead and asked if I wouldn’t come sit by her and her friends. If I wanted to study in her silent, clean kitchen while I waited for my sister to take me on the Red Line back to the South Side.

“Eight, nine, ten!”

Sandra’s voice drowned everyone else out.

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