The Babysitter

         The first thing I notice is her bangs. They are high, some of the highest I’ve seen. I imagine holding my wooden 30-centimetre ruler up to her head and I guess they’re at least seven centimetres. In this town that means something. I’ve learned that much already.
         In our new house, we don’t have beds or lamps or dressers. We don’t even have a piano—my sister and I practice on a portable electric Roland Mum says will absolutely ruin our ears—but we do have a curling iron, hairspray, and a mirror. I will learn how.
         Her name is Teresa, as in Madre Teresa, who she is not. I hear Mum tell Daddy that Teresa dropped out of high school, but she’s the only girl available on short notice, so she’ll have to do.
         She’s supposed to pick up my little sister Billy at her school, then pick me up at my school, then take us to her house until our parents are done work, when they’ll pick us up. But three o’clock is prime time down on Fifth Street and Teresa’s baby blue, two-door, ’78 Cutlass Supreme isn’t gonna cruise itself, so the strip is usually our first destination. 
         Now, I say “the strip,” but don’t think glamorous, okay? This is not LA. This is inland California, the San Joaquin Valley, a dusty town of 10,000-ish souls, mainly rose pickers. There’s no beach here, no movie stars, no architecture, boutiques, or fancy restaurants. Instead it has pageants, parades, and a faded but friendly tortilleria where you can get spicy pork mole tamales, three for a dollar. And, at the right time on the right days, there are lowriders: huge classic cars modified to bring them as close to the ground as possible, where they float like cruise ships. A speed bump is a major problem for these cars and drivers take the long way round to avoid them. Fifth Street doesn’t need speed bumps, though, because the whole point of cruising is to do it slow. Slow and low.
         There’s also uncertainty here. I hear the adults talk about it. Will the boss get mad one day and report you to immigration? What happens when all the roses have been picked? They’re talking about building a new prison. This sounds bad to me, but the people here seem happy about it. It means jobs. “But only for those with papers,” says Mum. Many of the parents of her kindergarten students don’t have these, so they will stay in the fields and orchards and continue to worry.
         All lowriders are beautiful to me, but when we’re cruising I keep a lookout for my favorites: a tan ’71 El Camino with the Virgin Mary on the trunk and black roses along the sides, and a hot pink ’79 Chevy Impala with intricate pinstriping that makes its hood look like a woven rug. Teresa teaches me the makes, models, and years and I write them on the final page of my composition notebook. I also record the style of their license plates. The oldest lowriders have beat-up, faded plates with yellow writing on black backgrounds, and Teresa likes these ones best. 
         Even the plainest car becomes cool when you add hydraulics. We have to drive two hours over the Grapevine to Magic Mountain theme park if we want a thrill, but the vatos on Fifth Street make their own roller coasters, bouncing their lowriders along the strip. They invest all their money in their rides and live at home with their parents even though most of them are over 21. 
         Teresa’s car is clean, the paint job is new, and a honeysuckle air freshener hangs from the rearview mirror, but it’s not lowered and has no hydraulics. Her cousin has a shop and is gonna give her a great deal, so she’s saving up her babysitting money. I dream of the day I get to be inside her car when it boots up, as noisy as our mum’s Apple IIe computer, grabbing the attention of everyone on the block. 
         If Teresa has a girlfriend along for the cruise, I sit in the back with Billy, but if not, she says, "What, you think I’m your chauffeur?" and I get to sit in the front.
                                                                     ***
         At school, I’m the one with ugly secondhand clothes and a weird accent. The kids ask if I’m from England. I say no, Canada, but only some of them believe this is a real place. 
         A boy named Eduardo, who wears pomade in his short cedar-brown hair, tries another angle. “Pero hablas Español, ¿si?”
         No. I don’t. Not really. Only a few phrases I’ve picked up listening to Mum on the phone with Abuela. 
         My English is wrong, my Spanish nonexistent.
         The school day is intense, as I try to figure out the rules in and out of the classroom. My four-square game on the playground is terrible but I’m good at behaviour. To control the class, Ms. Paslay uses a rainbow-coded behaviour chart. If the card in the envelope with your name is red, you’ve done nothing wrong that day. The first mistake changes you to an orange card and so on down the rainbow. Only Darren ever gets to purple. He’s so bad, he gets to purple nearly every day.
         And that’s just for the stuff Ms. Paslay notices. She doesn’t know that he’s mean on the playground, especially to girls. If I were back home I would yell or tell, but here they call that being a rat and I can’t risk it. Darren is the kind of kid Daddy would say is troubled. I try to avoid him as much as possible. I try to disappear. 
         But after school, on the strip, I’m a badass chola surveying my domain, as Teresa explains which vatos she’d go with and which she wouldn’t. When we’re in the car, she never talks to any boys, though she often waves or lifts her chin to a friend or cousin. Sometimes she points her thumb at me and Billy and calls out "I’m working!" to explain why she isn’t stopping to get the chisme. I wish I had sunglasses like Poncherello, I wish I wasn’t wearing a polyester sailor-stripe dress from the Goodwill, I wish I was tall enough to rest my arm comfortably out the open window, but none of this really matters. I’m on the strip, riding slow and low, singing along to Paula Abdul on Teresa’s tape deck. 
         He’s a coldhearted snake. Look into his eyes. 
         Uh-oh! He’s been tellin’ lies.
         I am cruising. Not even the most popular girls in fifth grade are doing this yet.
                                                                     ***
         School mornings are a rush and my bangs never turn out quite right, nothing like Teresa’s. I want a tall powerful wall, straight up, with a sweet little curl beneath. And rigid enough to hold through the cruising hour, not just for school. 
         One day I hop in and Teresa says, "What happened?" 
         "I had to run in gym class," I tell her, flipping down the passenger side sunshade and inspecting the damage in the mirror. My bangs are flat and sticky-looking. "Oh no!" I say, my nose starting to prick with tears. I’d walked around all afternoon looking like this.
         Maybe this explained why Darren whispered “wetback” at me during reading time. I didn’t know what he meant and I ignored him, but Eduardo overheard and said, “What you say?” Eduardo had to change his chart and Darren snickered. 
         “I can’t take you cruising like this,” Teresa said. “My homegirls are gonna think I’ve lost my touch. Let’s get Billy, then fix your hair before we go downtown."
         I sit criss-cross applesauce on the floor of Teresa’s peach-tinted bedroom in front of a full-length mirror. She kneels behind me and combs out my bangs. Flakes of hairspray fly through the air. "We don’t have time to wash, just fix," she says, grasping my bangs and splitting them into two sections.           She closes the curling iron around the back section. I flinch from the heat. This part always makes me nervous ever since the time Mum was giving me ringlets for church and got distracted and touched the edge of my cheek with a hot iron. I had a mottled purple patch of skin for weeks. Teresa pulls the iron up to the tips of the hair then rolls it tightly back. I flinch again when the iron is close. "I’m not gonna burn you, hija, relax." She holds it there a long time, and when she slips it out the curl is tight and glossy and so secure it looks like it doesn’t need hairspray. 
         "Your turn," she says, passing me the curling iron. It’s a proper California curler from Sally Beauty in Bakersfield, heavier and thicker than the one Mum got on sale at London Drugs back home. My hand shakes a little as I clamp the lower section of bangs and twist forward. I want to hold it as long as Teresa but I lose my nerve and the bottom curl is looser than the top one. "Good enough for today," she says. With her rattail comb she teases the two curls into a fluffy cloud of hair, and I squinch my eyes tight for the spray. She has the bad, powerful kind of hairspray, the kind that makes holes in the ozone, and she doesn’t skimp, holding the nozzle down and moving it back and forth across my bangs five times before she’s satisfied. 
         I open my eyes and smile. They’re perfect. Teresa’s smiling too, resting her chin on my head, her hair long enough to tickle the burn scar on my cheek and hit my shoulders. We look like a Coast Salish totem pole, the ones I learned to draw last year in grade four. Teresa is the thunderbird at the top, her spiral perm its broad wings. I’m the bear cub beneath. “Teresa?” I say, meeting her gaze in the mirror. 
         “¿Que?”
         “What does wetback mean?” 
         Teresa stands up fast, and the tips of her hair whip my face. “Where’d you hear that?”
         “This stupid boy in my class, Darren.”
         “White kid?” she says, unplugging the iron and starting to wind the cord around it.
         “Yeah.” 
         Teresa turns back to the mirror. “It means he’s trash, hija. It means his mama is raising him wrong. Maybe she needs some help. Maybe you need to teach him to watch his mouth. You know?”
         I want to say, “But what does it really mean? Why would I have a wet back?” but the line between Teresa’s eyebrows is showing and I think she doesn’t want to tell me.
         “Yeah, I know,” I say instead. 
         She puts the iron back in its place on top of her dresser. "Good. Now we can cruise."
                                                                     ***
         By Christmas my family is more settled. A Yamaha upright fills our small rented house with its bright sound and I have a real shelf in my room to display my Madeleine L’Engle books, My Little Pony Blossom and Jem doll Roxy. Over the holidays I practice with the curler in front of the hall mirror until Daddy says the smell of burning hair is making him sick. 
         I ask for Paul Mitchell hairspray, but Santa brings me The Chronicles of Narnia instead. I lie on the couch all day reading them. I’m shocked when the older sister Susan doesn’t return to Narnia with her siblings, because she’s grown up and discovered lipstick. But why can’t she have both? It seems unfair. By the time school starts again I’ve finished the series. 
         Cruising goes on hiatus for the winter, while we’re haunted by valley fog so thick school often has to start late, or be cancelled altogether because the buses can’t run. We hang out at Teresa’s house making mixtapes and tamales and chismeando with her relatives. We learn Teresa has an archnemesis in town, a puta named Lourdes who stole Teresa’s last boyfriend. Now that hijo de puta has dumped Lourdes too but that’s beside the point. Lourdes needs to learn not to mess with people. 
         Teresa’s aunt does my makeup, emphasizing the outline of my lips and the arch of my eyebrows. "This is how I’ll do for your quinceañera, hija," she says, handing me her mirror.  I can’t stop looking at myself. The clothes are still wrong but the face is right. When it’s time to go home it takes six witch-hazel-soaked cotton balls to make me decent again. I’m not allowed to wear makeup or get my ears pierced until I’m 13.
                                                                     ***
         When the fog dissolves for good, we return to Fifth Street and one day, we spot the puta Lourdes coming toward us in the other lane, halfway down the block, alone in her rusty little Honda CR-X. 
         "Hold on chicas!" says Teresa as she roars up to the intersection, then squeals into a U-turn. Lourdes notices immediately, and turns off the strip. We follow.
         "Don’t stress chicas, I’m not gonna do anything bad, just gonna scare her a bit. Teach her not to touch my man!" I look behind me at Billy, scrunched into the corner of the backseat clutching her My Little Pony lunchbox. She doesn’t love cruising like I do, and she’s always happy when it’s over. She looks scared, and I think I should say something to Teresa, but it’s all too exciting. 
         For 10 minutes we follow close behind the CR-X—if she stops suddenly we’ll hit her for sure—until we’re on the edge of town and Lourdes picks up speed.
         Teresa floors it, then pulls into the oncoming lane. Now Lourdes is beside us.
         "I can’t take my hands off the wheel," Teresa says, "You gotta flip her off for me."  The road is straight and flat and in the distance I see a semi coming our way.  "Flip her off!" Teresa yells.
         I make a fist, then lift my middle finger into the unfamiliar shape and stretch my arm out the window toward Lourdes. She’s looking straight ahead, her chin almost touching the top of the steering wheel. We’re so close I can hear mariachi music coming from her radio. The semi honks brum brummm, brum, brummmmmm. Normally I love this sound 'cause it means the driver is responding to my trucker’s salute, but now I know it means something else. 
         The truck is close enough that I can see it has a white sunset license plate, but not so close I can read the letters on it. "Stop!" Billy cries from the back seat.
         Teresa pulls the wheel sharply to the left onto the dirt shoulder between the highway and the orange grove. My seatbelt locks as the car thuds to stillness. A moment later, the semi passes with another long angry brummmmm as the CR-X gets smaller and smaller.
         "Was that fun or what?" Teresa asks. Her eyes are round and the bottom curl of her bangs is wet with sweat. My heart’s pounding but I say yes. We turn to look at Billy, who’s scrunched up fetus-style in the corner of the backseat. "You can’t tell your mama about this, right chicas?" I nod. Billy closes her eyes and says nothing. 
         Teresa taps her blood-red acrylics on the steering wheel. The scent of split windfall oranges starts to overpower the honeysuckle air freshener. "Hmm… well, what about… you know, there’s a Taco Bell about five minutes down the highway. My cousin works there. You girls like Taco Bell? We could get…." She opens the ash tray where she keeps her change, tinkles through the collection. "We could get three soft tacos and a Coke Classic to share. Does that sound good?"
         Billy nods and wipes her eyes. We’ve never been to Taco Bell. The soft tacos are warm, drippy, and cheesy, and Teresa lets us eat them in the car. We will never tell. 
                                                                     ***
         In May, smog settles on the valley and turns our town into an oven. The four-square court sizzles like a comal, cooking our Keds like tortillas. Ms. Paslay brings a big electric fan from her house and sets it up by her desk 'cause the air conditioning keeps crapping out. We’re in the middle of a quiz on fractions when Darren leans over and whispers, "I like it when you’re all sweaty." 
         Talking during quizzes isn’t allowed, but I can’t hold it in. "You’re so gross!" I say, a touch too loud.
         "Rebeca! No talking during the quiz!" shouts Ms. Paslay. "Go change your chart."
         I can’t believe this is happening to me. I’m one of only two people in our class to have zero chart changes all year. The other is Valerie Gallegos. She can’t resist a smug smile as I walk over, remove the red card and replace it with an orange one. Now she’ll get a citation at the year-end assembly and I won’t. Her bangs look really good also. I finish the quiz and make it to the girls’ room before I start to cry.
         "That bitch Paslay," says Teresa when I explain why my eyes are red. It’s the first time I’ve heard the word. "I swear she had it in for me. I hardly ever had a day when I didn’t have to change my puta chart. You only had to do it once! Your mama’s not gonna care about that." But she’s wrong. At dinner Mum says I need to learn to ignore boys like Darren, that I shouldn’t have talked during the test, that I need to respect the rules of the classroom.
         She just doesn’t understand what it’s like here.
                                                                     ***
         By the end of the year I’ve lost my accent and now speak fluent Valley Girl. I know the words to two Paula Abdul songs, three Janet Jackson songs, and the chorus of La Bamba. (We like the Selena version better than the Los Lobos version.) I still can’t speak Spanish, and I still don’t have a bed, but my bangs, on a good day, are a work of art, rising nearly three inches above my skull. 
         With my perfect streak ruined, there’s less motivation for good behaviour. The next time Darren bugs me, I flip him off automatically, without even checking to see if Ms. Paslay is watching. “Rebeca!” she shouts. “I’m surprised at you.” I’m a little surprised myself. I start to get up to change my chart, but she says, “Stay where you are. I’m writing you a demerit.” 
         The class goes quiet. Chart changes are common, but demerits are rare. Even Darren only has three. I have to take the paper to the office where the principal signs it, and Ms. Lopez, the secretary, notes it in the school-wide demerit ledger. I stand by her desk watching and I don’t let tears fall. Later, when I tell Teresa what happened she smiles and says “¡Orale!” Right on. 
         I miss the final week of school ‘cause we’re going home to Canada for the summer. By the time Valerie is receiving her citation at the assembly, I’m 300 miles away, crawling slowly north on the I-5 in the backseat of our noisy, sticky, un-air-conditioned Toyota Corolla.
         Billy and I pump our skinny arms at every passing truck, hoping for a friendly brum brummm. We always look at license plates so I know our first success of the trip comes courtesy of an obliging driver from New Mexico. "Thank you, New Mexico!" we shout out the window. Billy smiles at me and I think maybe she’s really gonna keep quiet about the cruising, Teresa teaching Lourdes a lesson, and Taco Bell. We stop at a Mexican restaurant in Sacramento for lunch, but the tamal in my Kid’s Combo Platter is crumbly and bland. Not like at home.  I’ll be in sixth grade in the fall, old enough to look after my sister and myself at our house after school. Soon I’ll start taking care of other kids too, make money, and buy my own clothes. Maybe I’ll teach someone how to curl her hair and line her lips, and maybe we’ll cruise, but probably not.