“Scandal” by Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07)
An excerpt from “Scandal” by Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07), published at TransAtlantic Panorama:
Scandal
When I was eight, the nuns told me to pray for my enemies. Knees against wooden kneeler, I prayed for Julio Gonzalez, the Puerto Rican boy who taunted me about my tip-toe walk and my pot belly. Three years later, all my fat gone, Julio snapped the back of my training bra like a slingshot against my shoulder blades. Another year, and he put his arm around me in the back of the school bus.
I liked it.
It was a sin to like it.
That arm around the shoulders – the gesture, the implication – opened an ineludible door. Or maybe, the lid to the treasure chest we all find secreted in the attic, or buried out back, the hinge well oiled, silently opening to the touch.
The nuns were still there. Dressed all in black like the black-lipstick Punks at the public high school. Like beatniks. Like bouncers. When I was thirteen, they called my father in because they’d seen a boy put his arm around my waist.
“Your waist, Evelina, your waist!” my father yelled that night.
I wasn’t allowed to go to the dance party.
So I rebelled. I went out with Eldrian Ocampo, the eighteen-year-old cousin of a Filipino classmate. Parachute pants. Hairspray. Forty neon spaghetti bracelets on each wrist. Yes. The certified, vinyl-scratching DJ of a back-spinning, moon-walking, boombox-carrying crew of break-dancers. Catholic break-dancers, it’s true. But as rebellions go, it satisfied.
I thought of Eldrian today for the first time in years, here in my high school room, and the room of college summers, where Flashdance posters and torn up toe shoes have been busy collecting dust. Keep-sake boxes stuffed with photographs and love letters are scattered across the floor, open among the trash bags and the cardboard box designated for things I cannot part with.
The other boyfriends are still here: The First Writer of Notes, The Under-Confident Gazer from Behind the Pillars of the Cafeteria, The Earnest Jock, The Frog Dissection Partner, The Verbal Abuser, The Only Other Cuban. […continue reading here]
