Fish Out of Agua:. Michele Carlo
all the yelling, not Alice.
10
BLOODSISTERS
One day I walked up to a group of kids in the playground next to my new school and said, “Hi, my name’s Michele, what’s yours?”
My father had picked me up from school after a half day because my mother was at the doctor with Kevin, who was having another ear infection. Instead of taking me home right away, he let me play in the playground next to the school, something my mother almost never let me do. I was excited. Some kids were playing with a small pink rubber ball called a Spaldeen, taking turns bouncing it against the brick wall of the “Parky House,” the building where the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation employee, who was called the Parky, kept all the playground stuff.
The kids looked nice. I thought maybe I could make friends with them. I had been going to school there for what seemed like a long time, and I didn’t really have any yet.
“Do you like Underdog?” I asked. “I like Underdog. Do you want to play Underdog?” Underdog was the quintessential Saturday morning cartoon back then, a takeoff of Superman about a mild-mannered dog with super powers.
“Freckle-Face Strawberry! Freckle-Face Strawberry!”
It was the fat boy with the hooded eyes. He yelled this at me every time he saw me, which was a lot: here at school and also in the other playground, which was down the block from our building.
I got quiet. Every time he yelled this at me, it made whomever I was trying to talk to run away. How was I supposed to make friends if the fat boy always spoiled it for me?
“Bwaaaaaah!” the fat boy yelled. Then he and the other kids ran to the other side of the playground. I slowly started to walk back to where my father was.
“I’ll play with you.”
It was a girl just my size, with pretty brown skin and three pigtails sticking up out of her head.
“My name’s Darlinda and this is my sister Gigi,” she said, pointing at an older, much bigger girl standing next to her who rolled her eyes at us.
“I ain’t playing no baby games. You go ahead,” Gigi said.
Darlinda and I climbed up the side of the monkey bars. When we got almost up to the top, I turned around and said, “It’s just little old me, Underdog! Don’t worry Sweet Polly, I’ll save you!” and jumped off. I was surprised when I hit the ground. I was so happy finally to have someone to play with; I think I thought I could fly.
There was no padding under anything in playgrounds back then, just broken asphalt, broken glass, and occasionally, a broken hypodermic needle. My poor father, who had just looked down to light a cigarette, looked up to see me screaming and bloody with a piece of glass sticking out through the flesh under my lower lip. He ran to me, wrapped his handkerchief around my chin, picked me up, gently and carried me home to where my mother would pull out the glass, clean the cut, and yell at him for not watching me. I still have the scar, and I still remember being carried over my father’s shoulder, looking back through my tears, seeing Darlinda waving after me.
From that day on Darlinda and I were friends. We were in the same class at school, and we were both in the Silver Reading Group (this meant that even though we were in second grade, we were reading at fourth grade level). We traded books: The Shy Stegosaurus of Cricket Creek, Henry and Beezus, and Harriet The Spy. We shared baloney sandwiches and Hostess Sno Balls at lunch. I showed her my kitten drawings. She drew too, a boy with a spotted pet dinosaur she called a Keebie.
One day Darlinda said, “Let’s be Bloodsisters.”
“What’s that?”
“We get a razor blade and you cut your thumb and I cut my thumb and then we mix our blood together and swear we are best friends forever.”
“Okay.”
“You have to get the razor blade though.”
“How come?”
“You have a father. Get the blade from inside the razor he shaves with.”
Darlinda’s father was dead. He died not long after we met. I told her that I didn’t see mine once for almost a year, but she said it wasn’t the same. I thought I was lucky I still had a father and I almost backed out, but I got the blade that night anyway. I’d gotten good at sneaking things at abuelita’s, like the time I put soap in the pan when Titi Ofelia was cooking and everyone thought she made a bad dinner and no one ever found out. I had to balance on the rim of the bathtub to get the razor out of the medicine cabinet and almost fell too, but I got it and stuck it in the new book I’d just finished, Beezus and Ramona. If I wrote a good book report for it that night, I’d be in the Gold Reading Group, the first one in the class.
The second they let us out in the schoolyard for lunchtime the next day, Darlinda and I raced across the concrete to the farthest corner and went behind a tree. I quickly took out the razor from inside the book and poked the end against the underside of my left thumb till a small red spot seeped out and trickled down my hand. It didn’t hurt that much but looking at it made my stomach feel a little sick and I started to get afraid we were going to get caught. “Hurry up,” Darlinda said as she grabbed at the blade, conveniently cutting herself as she did so. We looked at each other for a second, grabbed each other’s hands, and then mashed our thumbs together while we jumped up and down.
“Bloodsisters! Bloodsisters! Forever and ever till we get married and die!”
A teacher heard us yelling and came over, but Darlinda had thrown the blade away so we didn’t get caught with it, though we both were sent to the nurse. The nurse asked us what happened. “Nothing,” we answered in unison. The nurse gave us a look of disbelief, daubed our wounds with Mercurochrome, put double Band-Aids on them, and sent us back to class. That was the only thing they really worried about in those days—that the cut was cleaned. If a child slit her thumb and mixed blood with anyone today, they’d both be kept under quarantine until they turned eighteen (or at least the next six months). But this was the early spring of 1968, the peak of the cultural and societal upheaval we now call “The Sixties” was just beginning.
While we were waiting for our book reports to be returned, I kept looking at my thumb. It hurt more now, but it was a good hurt, as if it had been for something. I never had a Bloodsister before. I wasn’t sure what it meant; Darlinda and I already played together all the time. Maybe it meant that the fat boy wouldn’t bother me anymore. While I was thinking about all this, I got my book report back and on top was a gold star. I was in Gold Reading Group. It was the best day of my life. I couldn’t remember ever being so happy.
After school though, Darlinda had to go right on the school bus and my mother and Kevin weren’t waiting for me out front like they usually did, so I had to stay behind the fence in front of the school doors, where you were supposed to wait if your parent was late. I went down to the gate to look for my mother, but heard someone breathe behind me and turned around. It was the fat boy. He was in third grade, but his class barely got up to the Green Reading Group. I knew because all the names of the kids who had gotten their colored stars were put up on the walls outside their classrooms. The fat boy kicked Beezus and Ramona out of my hands and my thumb started to throb.
“Goldie-star! Smarty-pants! Freckle-Face Strawberry!”
A few kids and teachers were at the top of the stairs, but none of them were looking at us. I tried to go around the fat boy but he blocked me. I bent down to pick Beezus up. He pulled my ponytail and said, “Go back to Ireland, Ketchup Head!”
“Ireland?” I said, puzzled. “I’m not Irish.”
“Yeah, well, what are you?”
“My family is from Puerto Rico, but I was born in Manhattan. We live on St. Peter’s and…”
“Puerto Rican! No wonder you play with niggers…spic.”
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what a