She slung her backpack over her shoulder and wheeled him back inside, through the dining hall where the staff was putting out fresh bibs and juice boxes, down a corridor of rooms with noisy televisions, past the aide at the medicine cart and the janitor mopping the tiled floor.
She got her granddad inside his room and locked the door.
The gun was wrapped in a hand towel inside her backpack. When she unwrapped it and showed it to him, his eyes turned bright. He mumbled some words that might’ve been a prayer. She took it as a sign. He was rocking back and forth. He was excited and so was she.
Someone tried to open the door and her granddad hushed. The handle jerked a few more times then stopped.
He tapped his chest and mumbled more things she couldn’t understand.
Red lights hit the windowpane. Another ambulance, another resident, another old-timer with a stopped heart. He stared out the window briefly then looked back at her. She brought the pistol close to him. He reached for it and knocked it out of her hand.
It was disgusting having to put her hands on the floor under his bed, guessing at the kind of germs that were sticking to her palms. The pistol had slid next to some half-eaten toast and a ball of used tissue. She grabbed the gun and crawled out from under the bed.
She understood this was scary for him, yet she knew what was right. She had aim. She had this one skill. She was a natural. Then she had a moment of doubt. Maybe he didn’t understand. Maybe waving his hand like that meant something else entirely. Maybe she had it all wrong.
A voice shouted from the hallway. Someone banged on the door.
There was always doubt before she swung at the ball, before she lit the match, doubt before swallowing a pill. She knew not to give in to doubt. She had intuition. When it came down to it, she had follow-through.
She put the pistol to her granddad’s chest, took a deep breath.
The blast knocked her against the wall. She slid to the floor wondering how there’d been so much kick. Maybe she hadn’t planted her feet. Maybe the gun had misfired.
The window was blown out. Her granddad still sat upright in his wheelchair, the floor and his lap covered in shattered glass.
Sloan stood outside the window, so close he could have stepped into the room, his mouth set in a hard line. He kept her gaze, kept the rifle pointed at her as the janitor swung open the door. Sloan lowered the gun and said, “The rules were easy, Callie.”
The bullet, lodged somewhere in her lungs, spread a dull ache down each arm, up into her head, through her torso. The cold dead weight of the pistol sat in her hand and she tried to close her fingers around it. It was impossible to move, to reach for the bullet hanging around her neck. She heard the train approach, saw a mound of shredded paper targets in its path, endured the searing pain. Then, as the air of her final breath escaped through the hole in her chest, Callie saw herself standing at home plate, the bat resting on her shoulder, hoping for the right pitch.
Pablo Escobar
by Yuly Restrepo Garcés
Largo
On the Tuesday of my second week of eleventh grade in America, Nicole found me eating on the stairs by the soda machine and introduced herself. Several weeks later, I’d be clinging to the back of her sweater as we said goodbye for the last time before she got on a plane to somewhere in Oklahoma, but that Tuesday I was just scared to talk to her. The school floor plan dictated that at lunch students had to gather in a big rectangular space in the middle of the building, and there were few places where I could eat without being out for everyone to see me. The previous week, my cousin and her friends, who were in the tenth grade, had made fun of my ratty, faded Chuck Taylors and middle part and the fact that I was wearing jeans instead of a skirt and my general FOB-ness. After that, I stopped sitting with them at lunch. I wanted to talk to no one, especially some girl who couldn’t speak Spanish.
Nicole put a lot of coins in the soda machine and pushed some buttons and took out two plastic bottles with what looked like blue liquid in them. She walked over to the stairs, where I was failing to take delicate bites out of what the cafeteria sign said was a sloppy joe sandwich. Nicole handed me one of the bottles.
The liquid inside was, indeed, electric blue, and the label said Fruitopia.
“You’re in my French class,” she said. “I don’t think you’ve seen me because I sit in the back. You’re always in the front.”
Nicole was short and chubby, with brown hair that she had styled in stiff curls, and small, incandescent blue eyes. Even as my heart raced with the responsibility of answering, I thought of my mom, who would have loved the color of Nicole’s eyes as she had been loving the blue eyes of people we encountered in the overly air-conditioned grocery stores of Largo since we’d come to America a few weeks earlier. Nicole was wearing cargo pants, a tight navy T-shirt, and crisp white sneakers that she later told me were K-Swiss, as if that was supposed to mean something to me. She’d soon be my first real American friend, and I’d lose her just as quickly.
“Thank you,” I said. “We’re in French together?”
“Yeah, I sit in the back. Might as well because I never know the answers to the questions. You know all the answers, but I can never hear you when you say them.”
“I know a little French,” I said. Before leaving Colombia, I had been in college for a semester, studying foreign languages. My French was good, but English was what I liked to study the most. Now it made me feel dumb when Americans spoke to me and I couldn’t keep up, or I pronounced a word I knew well in a way they couldn’t understand, so silence became my refuge.
Nicole opened her soda and drank three big gulps, pointing with her eyes at my bottle, asking me to do the same. The soda tasted like cotton candy. I thanked her again.
“Where are you from?” she asked. When I told her, she said she didn’t know where Colombia was, but that some cousins on her mom’s side were from the Virgin Islands.
“South America,” I said. She nodded.
Outside, a blindingly bright and hot late-August day raged, but any natural light that entered the building did so through a row of small windows high on the walls above student lockers. The spotless white floor, the blue lockers, the cafeteria tables — all had the sheen of fluorescent lighting.
“Did you know there was a shooting at this school a long time ago?”
“Someone shot in here?”
“Yeah, my dad told me two kids brought guns to school and started shooting people at lunch. I think the principal died or something. But it was a long time ago. Anyway, they were fucking crazy.”
I kept trying in vain to eat daintily while Nicole told me tales of the place where I had come to live. She told me about the rainbow stain in the shape of the Virgin Mary that had surfaced on an office-building window in Clearwater, about a town full of psychics and mediums, about alligators in people’s swimming pools and ghosts in an old hotel that was now a university building in Tampa. She said her dad was a huge nerd and liked to collect all kinds of things, including these bizarre Florida happenings. She said we could eat together from now on, and that I could go over to her house whenever I wanted.
That night, my mom and I dragged a beige leatherette sofa we had found on the curb of our street into our duplex. It was the only piece of furniture we now had, aside from a TV-dinner table my mom’s boss had given her. The previous night, the aunt we had come to stay with had yelled at my mom for not doing anything around the house, and we’d had to leave and move into the apartment we had found only a few days earlier. We had planned to move into it after we got some furniture. My aunt didn’t work and spent all day watching tennis matches on TV and sipping vodka out of an iced tea can and crying while showing me clothes she had worn when she was younger and thinner. I didn’t know what to do with all that, so I pretended I had something else I needed to do. I didn’t even have the guts to tell her she was being unfair to my mom, who worked two jobs. Eventually, I understood this was what made being friends with Nicole so easy. She expected nothing of me but what I could give her. She didn’t even expect me to talk.