I liked it when she read aloud because I could watch her without seeming to stare. I’d always been fascinated by the way her myopic eyes illuminated her thin face. Her long lashes drew attention like those on a doll. Beneath them, her liquid, dark eyes gazed out unblinking, serious, enormous. Her voice was colored with a slight Spanish accent. She spoke in a formal way that sounded as if she was cautiously considering each word in English, a language in which she was so fluent on the page. Her reserve made her seem older, though not physically older, like some of the boys who already had faint mustaches, guys like Brad Norky, who actually was older, having been held back. Once, at a talent show, I overheard two elderly women talking about the way Camille had read her poem about the ecstasy of St. Teresa.
“She has an old soul,” one of the women observed, and the other said, “I know what you mean.”
Even back then, in a way, I knew what she meant, too.
From seventh grade on Camille wore rouge that looked artificial against the caramel shade of her skin and made her appear feverish. She got glasses that year: ivory-sparkle cat frames that matched the barrettes clamping back the thick black hair she’d previously worn in braids. She was no longer quite flatchested, though the rose-colored bra outlined beneath the white blouse of her school uniform hardly seemed necessary. She could have used braces.
In seventh grade, a gang of us proudly calling ourselves the Insane Fuckups would sneak off at lunch to our boys’ club — the doorway of an abandoned dry cleaner’s where we’d smoke Luckies, spit, and discuss things like the rumor that some of the girls were washing their school blouses over and over to make the fabric thin in order to show off their underclothes. I made the mistake of mentioning that even Camille Estrada’s bra was showing, and, as if dumbfounded, Norky asked, “No shit? Estrada has titties! You think she might have a hairy pussy, too?” Then he burst into mocking laughter.
Even my best friend, Angel Falcone, couldn’t resist breaking up. “Instead of BB’s she’s got bb’s — bbitas,” he said, making his voice tiny. “Hey, maybe she’ll publish the news in her paper.”
“Headline!” Norky shouted. “Stop the presses!” and with the chalk he carried to graffiti up our doorway, he printed in huge letters on the sidewalk: ESTRADA HAS bb’s.
He chalked it on the graffitied tunnel wall of the viaduct on Rockwell, and along the bricks of the buildings we passed, and on the asphalt of the street where the little girls drew hopscotch courts alongside the school. It was one of those phrases that inexplicably catches on, and for the next couple of weeks it was every-where — in the boys’ bathroom, at the Washtenaw playground, on the concrete basketball court at the center of the projects: ESTRADA HAS bb’s.
In class, when I’d sneak a glance at her, it seemed her rouged cheeks burned, but perhaps that was only a projection of my secret shame.
Near the end of seventh grade, my desk was moved out into the corridor, where I was banished after topping one hundred demerits in conduct. Then, our teacher that year, Sister Mary Donatille — the only nun who insisted we say the Mary in her name — introduced Partners in Christ. It was an experimental program, borrowing, perhaps, from AA, in that it teamed habitual bad boys with sponsors — good girls — so as to give the boys a taste of the rewards of behaving. I can’t say what it was for the girls, torture probably; for the boys it was a subtle form of humiliation. Camille was assigned to be my Partner in Christ.
At St. Roman, two kinds of kids stayed after school, those in detention and the teachers’ pets who were invited to help the nuns clean the classrooms. Detention time was spent copying chapters from the New Testament, but thanks to Sister Mary Donatille’s experiment, instead of rewriting the Apocalypse, I got to clean the blackboard erasers with Camille. It was an honorary task: only pets were entrusted to take the erasers out behind the school and beat them clean against the wall. Although I’d been reassigned a seat beside Camille in class, we still hadn’t spoken. We stood together, engulfed in chalk dust and an uncomfortable silence relieved only by the muffled thud of felt against brick. In blocky chalk impressions I pounded out F-U-
“I really like your vocabulary,” Camille said.
“Real funny.”
“No, I mean it,” she said. “You have a neat imagination.”
I looked at her, too puzzled to respond. I didn’t know if she was putting me down or putting me on or applying some kind of condescending psychology, or if she was just spacey.
“That story you wrote for Christmas. About the ant. It was so cool. I wanted to publish it in the paper, but it was too long.”
She was referring to “The Enormous Gift,” which I’d written back in sixth grade for the Christmas competition. I frequently missed getting my homework in, but I’d found myself writing the story with an excited concentration I hadn’t associated with schoolwork. The assignment that year had been to write a story about a gift brought to the baby Jesus in his stable at Bethlehem. In my story, the gift was a crumb of bread that weighed a thousand times more than my narrator, an ant, but he hoisted it nonetheless, and after narrow escapes involving spiders, sparrows, the hooves of oxen, and soles of sandals, he finally crept into the manger to offer his gift.
“After you read it I kept thinking about it and saw what you meant,” Camille said. “How it was like a little miracle for the ant to bring the first bread to Jesus, who’d later make the big miracles of the loaves and fishes, and turn bread and wine into his body and blood.”
I’d never thought about any of that. To me it was just the adventure of an ant.
“The Enormous Gift” had been chosen to be read aloud in class, but it didn’t win the school competition. Camille won with “O Little Star of Centaurus,” a story in which the Christmas star was revealed to be a spaceship in the shape of a winged horse. I couldn’t help visualizing it as the fiery red Pegasus trademark for Mobil gasoline. It had traveled from the constellation Centaurus, where light-years ago Christ had appeared to redeem an advanced but brutal race of hooved aliens. The Centaurians, now converted to brotherhood and peace, had learned that Christ was traveling through the universe, redeeming world after world, and so in homage they followed him through time and space to witness each reappearance. The gleam of their ship was the star that guided the Wise Men, who in each new world came bringing gifts on each new night of Christ’s infinitely repeated birth.
“Your story knocked my socks off,” I said, not adding that, ever since I’d heard her read it, I’d wondered if the Christ on Centaurus had hooves like the other Centaurians. Her story didn’t say, but it posed problems for his crucifixion.
“Thanks,” she said, “but I thought yours should have won.”
“No way. They should make yours into a movie. How’d you make that up?”
“How’d you think of the ant?”
“I don’t know. I like to read about bugs and stuff,” I said, not mentioning how during the summers I’d sneak off down the railroad tracks to the Sanitary Canal, where I hid a homemade net for collecting butterflies.
“I never purposely try to make things up,” Camille said, sounding suddenly proper, the way she did when she spoke in class. “It just happens. It’s not about made-up anyway, it’s about feeling.”
She looked at me for agreement, but the transformation in her voice put me on guard.
“It’s about feeling, you know?” she repeated. “That’s what’s important,” she insisted, as if I’d disagreed.
She went back to cleaning the erasers, clapping them together like cymbals, the poofs of chalky smoke surrounding her bronzed by the rays that shafted through the clouds massed over the convent. She stared at the two chalk-dust letters I’d pounded on the bricks, and back at me, then beat in a blocky C.