Incompletion

Jacqui Corazón was not supposed to be at the top of her class, valedictorian. Or at least that is what her guidance counselor, Mr. Thomas J. Shell- (the J didn’t stand for anything, she figured out through a quick LinkedIn search, which led to a much larger FaceBook deep-dive)-said through a set of peeling, crippled-pink lips. Jacqui sat there with the expectation of something, perhaps within herself, to happen spontaneously. Maybe the tiled ground would open up and swallow her whole, or maybe she would stand up so quickly that the folded chair she had been sitting in would fall back and clatter against the bookshelf directly behind her and shake the wall, so much so that his stupid motherfucking framed degrees from Boston University and Suffolk University would fall from the Command hooks they hung from very precariously. And she would cuss him out so horribly, she would end up in the eleventh circle of hell. But she wouldn’t even care, it would have been a much better place to be than that stupid office.

She just said, “Okay, fine,” then grabbed her backpack from beside her, slung it over her shoulder, and walked right out of that office. She walked down the hall, feeling numb. But it wasn’t a full body sort of numbness, but a sort of tingling sensation that started in her fingertips and toes and traveled up her feet, fingers, ankles, forearms – up further and further and further. Classmates shuffling out from their fourth period classes moved in coagulated bunches, clustered together, whispering about who-knew-what and who-cared.

jacqui–

Jacqui’s head snapped to the side, and into focus came the smiling face of her best friend, Annie Calderón; pale skin, big, light green eyes, and wild strawberry red hair, but it wasn’t wild in a way that would get her looks or complaints, but looks that said “What did she do to get her hair like that?”

Annie waved; Jacqui waved back. Her whole hand was numb now.

see you later? Annie lightly touched Jacqui’s shoulders as she passed by, the same ones that Annie had compared to a linebacker’s in the dressing room they shared while back-to-school shopping. Jacqui had smiled, when she actually wanted to slap that bag of skin and bones.

But she wasn’t actually skin and bones; she had the perfect body, achieved by 5AM gym sessions with a personal trainer who had trained the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders five years in a row, and the cleanest of diets with a surplus of vegetables and fruits with names that were easy to pronounce but Annie didn’t care to learn. Once, Annie had dragged Jacqui to Whole Foods and Jacqui was taken to the world of white people who had bleached their hair to crispy ends, had botoxed their eyebrow muscles, smile lines, crow’s feet, so far out of existence, that their features were pulled tight like Saran Wrap. Plastic people, Jacqui thought as Annie handed her bagfuls of fresh produce, she was surrounded by Plastic People with skin like Saran Wrap and metal teeth and robotic stomachs who had camera eye-lenses that were all staring at her, making note of her brown skin and rolls (her mother always told her that they were curves, God-given) that she tried to draw attention away from by pulling her shirt down over her jeans, which weren’t really jeans because they were elastic bound at the waste. They took note of her piercings, the stud in her nose, the rings that were stacked up the shells of her ears and glittered when she stepped under the fluorescent lights up above.

And her hair, not straight, bleached, fried, but dark and sleek, curled into small ringlets that her mother hated, but she loved.

But it didn’t matter; she didn’t matter in this Plastic People House of Worship, where all you had to do to be accepted was be able to read and properly pronounce the ingredients on a box of gluten-free-dairy-free-egg-free dried squash-flaxseed crackers.

do you think i should make eggplant chips for dinner tonight?

“Why?” Jacqui looked at the smooth, purplish vegetable in Annie’s hands and snorted. “You know your mom is making arroz con pollo tonight, with tostones. You love that.”

Annie rolled her eyes; they flashed in the fluorescent light with a kind of feeling that Jacqui couldn’t quite name – annoyance, dismissal, shame – and she scoffed. i know, but that’s not gonna help me get toned. it’s all full of crap, and she cooks the meat in its own fat, and rice is a carb, but its like, a heavy carb.

Jacqui raised a brow. “Okay, then make the eggplant chips.”

With a satisfied little smile, Annie plopped the vegetable in her shopping cart. let’s go check out the sushi case.

Jacqui blinked. She was still standing in the middle of the hallway. The coagulated bunches of her classmates had mostly dissipated to go to their fifth period classes – hers was English, which she loved in theory, but she didn’t like to read in class, to be led through discussions, to basically do much at all. She excelled in math and science and history – logic, facts, a clear line you can draw from A to B. She needed clarity in a world that couldn’t make up its mind on what she was to make it all manageable, so she could keep from feeling this numbness, the numbness that was still travelling up her arms and legs – it had started in her shoulder too.

Dinner at Annie’s house was always a relaxed affair, or it should have been. Annie’s mom, Lena, was blasting Joe Arroyo’s music from her iPhone speaker – her hips swinging along to the trumpets and drums and marimbas, all swirling together into a past that no one at that table really laid claim to.

[Vasílalo rumbero

Del caribe aflora]

Paolo and Lena were first gen immigrants from Colombia. They were born in Bogotá and Barranquilla respectively in 1993 and 1995, and met at the Universidad de Bogotá Jorge Tadeo Lozano; a real mouthful. He studied business administration, she studied law. But then the market crashed, briefly, and their parents started to panic, you should go, they said, to Boston, there’s so much to do in law and finance and you can raise kids in a safe neighborhood. Lena liked to think of herself as a sensible person, Paolo too, but the fear took hold of them both like a vulture with prey in its beak. They had done extremely well for themselves, like they were supposed to. It was almost like a fairytale.

[Barranquilla hermosa

Yo te canto ahora]

In the front hall of their split level suburban home tucked in the curve of a cul-de-sac that Jacqui never went to was a reprint of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, and next to that was one of Francisco Botero’s painting reprints – Jacqui thought it was so odd, to have an expression feelings surrounding the consequences of war, next to something that was anything but, what did she know about interior design and the meaning of art, especially to the masses. She probably would have learned more if she was allowed to take AP Art History, but her schedule was just too full.

So full, with APs that she liked and she despised, so full with extracurricular activities, so full and so broad, but yet she couldn’t make valedictorian, and believed it because some stupid man with tiny, beady pig eyes and dog anus lips said so. She was trying, she was doing well, she was–

hey, Annie nudged Jacqui’s side with her sharp elbow, shocking her back into existence. The numbness started up again. are you okay?

“I’m fine. Don’t worry.” Jacqui looked down at her plate, colored green glass from a new spring collection that had come out at HomeSense; her own mom had been there just the week before and said that she liked the colored glass, a menagerie of light greens and dark greens, blues, and purples, but then she looked at the price tag. too much, too, too much. dios mio. She put down the plate she had been holding, very gingerly, like a fragile baby bird, Jacqui imagined. Then Jacqui imagined her mother near the check-out line, with her cart full of things – new throw pillows to decorate the wicker-framed couch, not even a real one, and cheap plastic plates that had rims that were designed to look like grape vines, heavy with little purple acrylic circles; forbidden fruits. Little wooden statuettes of tropical birds, tons of them that reminded her of the type that used to crowd the vendors’ stands that were lined up on the white sandy beaches of Calí, like powdered fruit candies. She had fled her home in 1985, when Escobar and his guerillas tore through the country and caused more bloodshed than the promised good; with only five dollars in her pocket and her favorite knit button-up sweater, she touched down at Logan airport and never looked back.

[Con mar y rio

Una gran sociedad

Barranquilla hermosa

Yo te canto ahora

Con gratitud y amor]

Jacqui imagined her mother putting everything on the “put-back” shelf – one by one – and walking out of HomeSense with an empty cart. She made sure to put her cart back in the rows that were in the front entrance because if she didn’t, she was surely going to get looks from passerby and employees alike.

Jacqui stared at her reflection in the curved green glass surface of that stupid HomeSense plate until she noticed Lena standing behind her, a steaming pot and ladle in her hands. She was the spitting image of Annie, or rather, Annie was the spitting image of her. Fair skin, fair eyes, and wavy strawberry blonde hair. Paolo was the opposite – dark skin like her own, with brown eyes that had splinters of silver and gold in them, and straight black hair that was pulled back into a messy ponytail. His face was not open like Lena and Annie’s – closed, Jacqui thought, his face is closed like my mom’s own. Even though he’s been here for forever, Jacqui thought to herself, and has cultivated this perfect life with this perfect lawyer wife and this perfect daughter. They live in a perfect house – Jacqui’s eyes flicked to the swath of the living room she could see, the entire house was open concept, of course it was – and lined up on the mantlepiece that sat just above the fireplace were little wooden carvings of tropical birds – parrots, with wings and heads painted in every brilliant color of the rainbow. The fireplace itself, she noticed, kind of looked like the entrance to a Grecian temple. It felt like everything around her was pasted together, pastiched.

The smell of ropas vieja filled Jacqui’s nose. The smell of cumin and onion powder and garlic blossomed in her nostrils, and made her stomach churn. The hum of Joe Arroyo faded into the background, buzzing so gently it was unintelligible. you like those? Lena asked Jacqui. She saw Jacqui was looking at the bird statuettes, or the plates. Jacqui nodded. “I think my mom would.” She pushed the meat and onion stew to the side to make some room for the rice that was sitting in the center of the table, in a plain white china bowl. “Where did you get them?”

Annie gave Jacqui a look; she wasn’t having rice, she was having a salad with some spinach, what looked to be cottage cheese, and bits of apple sliced up into cubes. It didn’t look like it would taste all that good, but Jacqui couldn’t taste the three bites off her plate she had taken.

HomeSense, i think. they were just so cute.

Paolo cleared his throat. so you girls have submitted your common apps?

Annie snorted. months ago. Paolo raised a thick brow at his daughter, who just kept her eyes on her plate; she was cutting up her steak and onions into teeny little pieces to make it seem like she was eating them, like she had been doing for years. okay, Paolo says, and you’ve picked your colleges?

Annie rolled her eyes, yes. i told you that i chose Emmanuel, Sacred Heart and BU.

Lena gives her daughter a tight smile and takes a sip of her water. good choices.

Jacqui knows that tight smile – its a smile that says, you’re aiming too high – know your place.

It was a smile that Jacqui saw on her mother’s own face; suddenly, she felt supremely jealous – the lump of masticated meat in her mouth sat thickly on her tongue. She didn’t understand these people, how they were supposed to be from the same place as her mother, and yet they were so different, so American, so plasticky, hardly even an inkling of Colombian shone through, really.

“I applied to BU, too. I want to study math, I think, or biology.”

Annie tilted her head at her best friend. actually?

“Why not?”

it just doesn’t seem like you.

Jacqui knew better; she could just let this roll off her back like the disapproving, biting words of her mother, or the assumptions made by Mr. Shell or the sting of Plastic People eyes in Whole Foods. But she didn’t.

“I’ve been working for forever to try and get into a good school to, like, ensure I have a good future. You know that.”Annie’s eyes were wide; her lips were shriveled into a tight, pouty line, cheeks sucked in.

Jacqui went on. “So why is it so unbelievable that I applied to the same school you did?”There was a deafening silence, and Jacqui couldn’t stand it anymore, so she got up, grabbed her bag and thin jacket from the pegs by the front door and left.

She let herself cry once she was at least two houses down. Jacqui hated to cry because it just felt unnecessary - what was the point of shedding tears when it didn’t get you anywhere? She was envious, so, so envious that the Calderóns could just be American. They weren’t ashamed by this, even when they should have been? But should they? They lived without much struggle, of course, it had been a struggle to get to be well-off – but they shed their cultural differences, their “eccentricities” all to make things better, acceptable.

That struggle only led to ignorance - Lena didn’t like Jacqui and her mom’s little house with wallpaper that was twenty years out of date and orangey-brown shag carpeting and two cramped bathrooms with toilets that hardly flushed. She would always pick up Annie and insist she stay in her glossy clean red Lexus with the doors locked. Paolo pretended to like the bottles of cheap whiskey her dad brought over for the yearly Christmas party – they all sat in the liquor cabinet in a little row, untouched.

Jacqui stopped in her tracks; it had begun to spit rain. She continued the walk, feeling her clothes grow heavier and heavier with droplets – she felt herself come apart at the seams and disintegrate; she was hardly anything when she arrived at her front door. She walked in and saw her mother watching Telemundo in the darkened living room, perched on the edge of the La-Z Boy her father had bought second-hand off of Craigslist.

hola mija

Jacqui didn’t answer. She tossed her backpack to the floor and soaked the orangey-brown carpet; then she peeled off her jacket. That was discarded, too. She flopped on her bed, and just stared at her popcorned ceiling, as if it would give her a way out, a way to justify her utter self-hatred and hypocrisy. But she couldn’t, not yet.

Everything just felt too large, too heavy. She fell asleep with damp skin and an empty stomach. She dreamed of nothing.