The Five Wounds Read online

  She’s a good person, Brianna. She tries!

  I believe every young person is capable and precious. Ha-freaking-ha, thinks Brianna now, as from the staff room window she watches Lizette Maes give a blow job to a banana. Brianna notes that Lizette has opted not to peel the banana before pleasuring it. Good, thinks Brianna, I hope the pesticides make her puke.

  In the courtyard, the other girls surround Lizette, leaning in, spluttering over their juice boxes. Even through the closed window, Brianna can hear their boisterous laughter. It’s impressive, really, a full-body performance: the girl straddles the picnic bench and her eyes are rolled back ecstatically, big breasts heaving in a more or less convincing imitation of arousal. On the ground, from her infant carrier, Lizette’s three-month-old daughter Mercedes peers up at her mother with cross-eyed fascination. Up and down the length of the banana Lizette runs her tongue, encircles the black tip with languid caresses.

  Brianna can’t stand this girl. As far as she’s concerned, Lizette is neither capable nor precious, and to be honest, Brianna can’t muster much sorrow for what the girl has gone through—incest, rape, poverty, god knows what other horrors—a fact that disturbs her enormously. Lizette is unpleasant and aggressive, with a sly gleam in her gorgeous, heavy green eyes. Mercedes, Brianna feels sorry for, but to be brutally honest, she’s even written off the baby as a lost cause.

  “Charming,” says Raquel, who manages Family Foundations’ Family Food Security program. She has paused on the way to the microwave, Lean Cuisine in hand, and followed Brianna’s gaze to the courtyard outside.

  “And you wonder how she ended up in her particular predicament,” says Brianna, disliking herself.

  There are two picnic tables in the Family Foundations courtyard, between which the girls used to distribute themselves more or less evenly, depending on shifting alliances, but ever since Lizette joined the class a few months ago, all eight girls crowd around one. That’s Lizette for you: the great unifier.

  Ysenia weighs her own banana in her hand, as if trying to determine whether she should contribute her own take on fellatio or remain in the audience. At the end of the table, only Jen remains aloof, frowning fiercely into her compact as she applies lip gloss so pale it might as well be Vaseline. She’ll disapprove, Jen will, but she won’t leave the circle. Instead she clings to the bench with a single clenched butt-cheek. Even Angel, earnest Angel, is laughing, which irks Brianna still further, because Angel is one of her favorites and should know better.

  There is no need for Brianna to go out there. Her lunch break isn’t over for another twenty-five minutes and she still has to put in a call to her dentist’s office to see about scheduling her cleaning. Still, she sighs an aggrieved sigh, pitches the remains of her lunch into the trash.

  “Good luck,” Raquel says grimly.

  Brianna reminds herself that she is a twenty-five-year-old adult tasked with this girl’s well-being, an adult with all the advantages in the world, including but not limited to: white privilege, a stable, middle-class upbringing, a bachelor’s degree, a teaching license from the State of New Mexico, and a certificate attesting to the fact that she’s completed training in teen outreach. She can be generous, she tells herself. She can be the bigger person.

  Outside, the spring warmth envelops Brianna. Most of the girls are alerted to her approach by her clicking heels and freeze, but not Lizette, who has now set to moaning. Up close, the performance is even more disgusting. The banana is slick, and saliva shines at the corners of Lizette’s mouth. Trinity elbows Christy. The girls fall silent, watching Brianna watch Lizette gyrate like a porn star. Angel looks positively stricken as Brianna advances. With a rapturous groan, Lizette thrusts the banana down her throat. A remarkable length disappears from sight.

  She slides it in and out until, finally, Brianna snaps. “Lizette. Are you going to eat that? Or just slobber on it? Because that’s a grant-funded banana.”

  Lizette removes the banana with a pop, slurps and swallows. “Hey, miss. I was only playing.” She wipes her mouth with her sleeve, then dries the banana neatly on the hem of her sweatshirt.

  Brianna smooths her wool skirt, one in a series of frumpy and seasonally inappropriate pieces she bought in hopes of looking older and establishing her authority. “You probably aren’t aware that someone has to apply annually for state, federal, and foundation grants to bring in the money to buy that banana so that you can have a well-balanced, nutritious, no-cost meal. You probably aren’t aware of the number of people working for slave wages who have sweated to deliver that banana from a plantation in Guatemala to this table.” She jabs at the picnic table.

  Through all of this, Lizette regards Brianna with her lovely, half-open eyes. In general, she doesn’t put much effort into her clothing, seems to have near-total disregard for her self-presentation—today she wears shapeless black athletic pants and a hooded sweatshirt—but her green eyes, with their fringe of heavy black lashes, are always made-up. Mascara, lavender eye shadow, smoky liner. They’re her best feature, and she turns them on people like weapons. The other girls watch Brianna, too: Ysenia places her own banana carefully among the wrappers on the table and sits up, nodding attentively. Beside Lizette, as if burdened with the shame that Lizette has refused, Angel looks at her lap, her ears pink.

  “I’m not wasting it, miss.” Lizette peels the banana and offers it to the table at large. “Anyone want this? I don’t eat bananas. They make my tongue all weird.”

  Squeals of disgust all around. “Gross,” says Corinna.

  Brianna exhales, and only then does she realize that she is trembling. “Lunch is over, ladies,” she says without looking at her watch.

  “Are you for serious?” says Lizette. “We still got like fifteen minutes.”

  “Lunch is over.”

  Brianna turns away, leaving the girls to gather their wrappers, but not before she sees Lizette toss the banana into the planter.

  THAT AFTERNOON at Community Meeting, after the girls have arranged their chairs in a circle and Brianna has reminded them to note the date of the Open House next month, she asks if anyone has anything they want to check in about. Lizette is the first to raise her hand.

  Instead, Brianna calls on Tabitha, who sits up straight and smooths her curly hair before talking. “Yeah, miss, I got a headphone issue. I don’t get why they’re not allowed, because, like, when we’re studying, it’s easier to tune people out with headphones. My thing is, if people are talking to each other, it’s easier to concentrate with music.”

  Brianna smiles hard, aware of Lizette’s hand swaying. “Those are valid points, Tabitha, and I appreciate you bringing them up. Our classroom rules make the classroom similar to a workplace. At a job you can’t answer personal calls or use headphones. The point is to give you what you need to succeed in the world outside the classroom. But during lunch and breaks, you’re welcome to listen to music.”

  Tabitha flops back into her chair, dissatisfied. “Okay,” she says, unconvinced.

  Lizette’s head is cocked in challenge.

  “Yes,” Brianna says coldly. “Lizette?”

  “Hey, miss. I really feel you weren’t fair, cutting our lunch short. We need nutrition.”

  Brianna forces herself to look at the girl, and to her dismay, her heart kicks with agitation. She hopes the movement isn’t visible through her sweater. Every single thing about Lizette bugs Brianna: those pretty eyes, that insolent fat slouch. Brianna can sense Lizette fungating, sending out spores of toxic attitude. She’s just so—sexual. “Well, I feel you were misusing your lunchtime. Lunch is for eating, and you were not eating that banana.”

  Lizette rolls her eyes. “You’re just all—I feel you’re just all butt-hurt because you can’t take a joke. Just because something’s not funny to you doesn’t mean it’s not funny to other people.”

  “Lizette, that behavior was not school-appropriate.” Brianna taps the classroom rules printed on the piece of butcher paper behind her. �
�You weren’t respecting yourself or your classmates, who deserve to eat lunch without being subjected to that kind of display. Your behavior might even be construed as sexual harassment.”

  “Sexual harassment?” Lizette hoots. “Who’d I harass? The banana?”

  Brianna takes a deep breath. “Sex is not a performance or a joke. It is something that should occur between consenting adults.”

  Ysenia raises her hand tentatively, and with relief Brianna nods to her. “Yes?”

  “I mean, it could be a performance or a joke, right? Like, if we want it to be? Didn’t you say that we’re in charge of our bodies? That we should be sex-positive?”

  “It was inappropriate,” Brianna says too loudly. Sweat trickles between her breasts. Indeed, the front of her sweater wavers with each heartbeat. “Any future behavior like that could be grounds for expulsion from the Smart Starts! program, which has, as you all know, a zero-tolerance policy for behavior that could negatively impact members of the community. I suggest you all bear this in mind. And now, Journaling Time.” The relief in the room is palpable, and the girls drag their chairs to their desks and pull out their journals.

  Oh, it’s ironic that Brianna Gruver is teaching in the Smart Starts! program. In college, Brianna took an evolutionary biology class, and the entire semester turned out to be one long source of sorrow to her. Every lecture, every theory, every finding of every study, emphasized that Brianna Gruver had none of the traits signifying fertility, none of the bosoms or hips or plush ample fragrant femininity that the male of the human species, despite what the fashion magazines indicate, is looking for in a mate.

  Brianna’s roommate and supposed best friend Sierra (a double-D whose biological viability had by junior year already been twice proven, both times requiring Brianna’s presence at her side in the waiting room of Planned Parenthood) was also enrolled in the class, and each night over dinner at their co-op, she reported the day’s highlights to their male housemates. For instance, wasn’t it amazing that during ovulation, women’s voices increased in pitch? And wasn’t it more amazing that when played audio recordings of women’s voices and asked to rank them by attractiveness, heterosexual men picked the ovulating woman? Every time! Sierra’s high, vivacious voice would go on and on, the pheromones rolling off her like heat, enveloping and intoxicating the rapt boys surrounding her, while Brianna, deep-voiced, narrow-hipped, glandless virgin that she was, shoveled forkful after wretched forkful of quinoa into her mouth.

  The term had culminated in Brianna’s conviction that she might actually have ended up with a tricky dissembling Y chromosome, like those Olympic athletes who, despite their convincing vaginas and outward appearance and gender identification, are actually genetically male. These things happened all the time! Or at least to one in thirty thousand people. Brianna’s doctor had shaken her head, dismissing the studies on Swyer syndrome Brianna had printed out and presented her with. “People with Swyer syndrome do not menstruate regularly,” she said, and refused to order any tests, instead writing a script for Ativan.

  Brianna’s Smart Starts! students are designed for reproduction, every last one of them. Every day in the classroom, she sees the biological markers of fertility: those high baby voices, the curves in their ill-fitting skinny jeans, the plunging necklines that emphasize their young full breasts. The absolute recklessness. Of course these girls were desired. This classroom is the single realm in which Brianna might feel grateful—smug even—that her own biology and family history and social context and personal decisions didn’t predispose her to this fate. Instead, Brianna is acutely aware that she is, on the deepest level, unqualified for her job, and she’s always waiting to be found out. On her worst days, like today, she looks at her students, not with compassion, but with envy.

  Brianna isn’t hideous or sickly-looking. She is clear-skinned and intelligent, reasonably socially adept, reasonably well-adjusted, employed, possessed of her very own double bed. Everywhere you look, people are having sex—in books, in movies, in the bathrooms of Blake’s Lotaburger—her own students have had sex in the unlikeliest of places—but Brianna is trapped by her own cowardly nature, her terrible reserve, and also, she likes to think, by her competence.

  The girls start rustling and packing away their journals and books, despite the fact that there are still eight minutes left of class, but Brianna doesn’t bother to correct them. They swivel in their seats, talking to each other, and begin to stretch and stand, while their teacher sits glum and distracted at her desk.

  Brianna aligns her pens, closes her grade book and centers it with precision on top of the Nurture Now textbook. The school day is almost over, thank god, and Brianna thinks with longing of home. She’ll sit in the garden outside her casita with her novel, unless her landladies are puttering about back there. In that case, she’ll take her book and her vibrator into the bath and then think about dinner.

  Brianna doesn’t feel the need to bear children. She doesn’t feel any urgency to disperse copies of her genetic material into the world. She just wants to have full vaginal intercourse with an adult human male at least once by the time she turns twenty-six.

  Amadeo’s mother wakes at five every morning to get to the Capitol building in Santa Fe in time for her job as a secretary—nay, administrative assistant—in the office of Monica Gutierrez-Larsen, Chief Clerk of the House of Representatives of the State of New Mexico. Amadeo has never met Monica Gutierrez-Larsen, but she exerts a force in their house. Yolanda isn’t typically awed by other people, but her boss is the exception. “That Monica is wonderful,” she says frequently. “So educated. Work always comes first for her.” Yolanda shakes her head and concludes with admiration, “A real professional.”

  Amadeo has always considered his mother a professional, because she sits in a climate-controlled office all day and has a gaggle of work friends—“the girls”—but when he hears her praise Monica—her intelligence, her capability—he wonders if maybe she had other ambitions than being an administrative assistant. She loves her job, though, loves dressing up for work, loves the endless, breathless days of the legislative session.

  Amadeo stretches in bed, remembering being a child, the comfort of being awake in the early morning, the sky outside still mysterious and dark, television news murmuring indistinctly from his mother’s bedroom. He would listen to her click around the kitchen in her work heels. Warm light spilled from her bedroom into the hall, fragrant steam from the shower. Amadeo would wait for her kiss, knowing that even as he reached his arms around her neck, he’d shrink from her coffee breath and the abrasive scent of her perfume.

  Then she would pull away (heels muffled on the carpet, snapping free and sharp when she reached the linoleum). At the front door, there was always a pause, and a bright note of hope would ring in Amadeo’s chest, but no, she was only buttoning herself into her long coat. The jingle of keys and the sound of the lock turning, and then the car would start up, the headlights briefly brightening the edges of his bedroom curtains, and Amadeo would follow the sound of the car until he couldn’t any longer. Alone, with two hours before his own alarm would sound in the blue light of the house (Valerie already up and buttering his toast), Amadeo would snuggle down into the blankets, trying to find that coziness, but it was gone, had left with his mother and was now speeding south toward Santa Fe.

  These memories sting because that little boy was superior to the Amadeo now. That little boy thought he was going places.

  Neither his mother nor Angel has mentioned the DWI. Still, when Amadeo thinks of it, he breaks into a full-body sweat, shame leaking out of him like effluent. And anger, too, because how hard would it have been for the cop to have been looking the other way? And how fucking stupid of Amadeo to have been speeding. He should have just pressed the fucking cruise control—it’s not even like he was weaving or anything. He got comparatively lucky: a six-month license suspension, community service, DWI school, at which they berate you for six straight hours and force you to
watch gruesome movies about people killed by drunks. Amadeo doesn’t much relish the prospect of sitting in a classroom again at the community center with the other lowlifes.

  He owes Tíve for bail and his mother for the fee to get his truck released from the impound lot, plus the fine and the cost of DWI school—the whole thing is outrageously expensive, and it strikes Amadeo as pretty shitty that the State of New Mexico thinks it can make money off people’s honest mistakes.

  Nonetheless, this morning, after he hears his mother back down the dark driveway, he springs up—before his alarm, before Angel has stirred—and starts the coffee. He can’t help feeling hopeful, because he hasn’t had a drink in over a week, and because today’s the day his windshield repair kit will arrive.

  Angel pinches the underside of her chin as she thinks. It’s Journaling Time, and Brianna has told them to make a list of things they each need to make their own and their babies’ lives better. The first few are easy.

  1. GED OR high school diploma AND college degree

  2. A godmother

  3. A support system

  4. A car

  5. A driver’s license

  6. A house

  7. A job

  Here Angel is stumped. If she got a job, who would take care of the baby? So she adds:

  8. Free babysitter. A good one.

  But there is no such thing, not really, not unless your mom or grandma doesn’t work. Even Angel knows that. Briefly she considers her father, then dismisses the thought.

  Christy and Trinity are whispering. They are best friends and knew each other from before Smart Starts! “We got pregnant, like, the same month,” they’re always telling people, which is either a crazy fluke or an organizational feat. Both possibilities depress Angel.