The Street Belongs to Us Read online

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE STREET BELONGS TO US

  “Pendleton Jiménez has painted an authentic picture of puberty with a light touch that is both respectful and endearing. Godoy’s animated drawings, economical and evocative, add to the overall magic.”

  –LINDA SCHUYLER, co-creator and executive producer of the Degrassi franchise

  “Full of humor and heart, The Street Belongs to Us is a beautiful and subversively queer story that probes the depths of intertwined human loss and connection.”

  –CORY SILVERBERG, author of Sex Is a Funny Word

  “The Street Belongs to Us magically addresses gender, grief, pain, longing, and illness, all with a writing cadence that makes us love each character like family.”

  –JOIE LAMAR, author of Mambo Lips

  “Beautifully written, this story of discovery and healing reminds us of the power of digging deep in both our own yards and in those of collective history.”

  –OLGA GARCÍA ECHEVERRÍA, author of Falling Angels: Cuentos y Poemas

  “Look to The Street Belongs to Us for truth about kids, how they talk, how they mask and unmask their true feelings when faced with the hard truths of life. Truly affecting throughout to its deeply touching conclusion.”

  –CECILE PINEDA, author of Entry without Inspection and Apology to a Whale

  “This delightful and sensitive story is both rich with emotion and with cultural and historical experiences. A book tenderly written, one to be cherished and enjoyed.”

  –GIANNA PATRIARCA, author of Italian Women and Other Tragedies

  “The Street Belongs to Us creates a complex, rich, and beautiful world. Pendleton Jiménez shows us the beauty and importance of gender diversity and how kids can navigate the difficult and exciting changes that lie ahead.”

  –LISA SELIN DAVIS, author of Tomboy: The Surprising History and Future of Girls Who Dare to Be Different

  “Such a joy to read! The Street Belongs to Us is a wholehearted, fun story that also focuses on navigating life’s challenges like puberty and losing one’s mom.”

  –CLAUDIA RODRIGUEZ, author of Everybody’s Bread

  “Super-duper wow! Pendleton Jiménez’s The Street Belongs to Us is an ¡Oralé! amazing read. A joyful, captivating, corazón-tugging cuento. It is all queer fun, family love y cariño.”

  –VERÓNICA REYES, author of Chopper! Chopper! Poetry from Bordered Lives

  THE

  STREET

  BELONGS

  TO

  US

  KARLEEN PENDLETON JIMÉNEZ

  ILLUSTRATED BY GABRIELA GODOY

  ARSENAL PULP PRESS

  VANCOUVER

  THE STREET BELONGS TO US

  Text copyright © 2021 by Karleen Pendleton Jiménez

  Illustrations copyright © 2021 by Gabriela Godoy

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any part by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.

  ARSENAL PULP PRESS

  Suite 202 – 211 East Georgia St.

  Vancouver, BC V6A 1Z6

  Canada

  arsenalpulp.com

  The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada, and the Government of British Columbia (through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program), for its publishing activities.

  Arsenal Pulp Press acknowledges the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, custodians of the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories where our office is located. We pay respect to their histories, traditions, and continuous living cultures and commit to accountability, respectful relations, and friendship.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.

  Cover illustrations by Gabriela Godoy

  Cover and interior design by Jazmin Welch

  Edited by Shirarose Wilensky

  Copy edited by Linda Pruessen

  Proofread by Alison Strobel

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:

  Title: The street belongs to us / Karleen Pendleton Jiménez ; illustrated by Gabriela Godoy.

  Names: Pendleton Jiménez, Karleen, 1971– author. | Godoy, Gabriela, 1974– illustrator.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200329049 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200329065 | ISBN 9781551528403 (softcover) | ISBN 9781551528410 (HTML)

  Classification: LCC PS8569.I425 S77 2021 | DDC jC813/.6—dc23

  To my grandmother María Celia Tomasa Jiménez Giner Vda. de Valles y Vda. de McCann, who filled me with her stories.

  To my daughter Elena, who flings open the door each day in search of adventure.

  CONTENTS

  prologue: OUR STREET

  chapter 1: DIGGING

  chapter 2: WOLF

  chapter 3: SIDEWALKS

  chapter 4: YOU’RE GONNA PAY FOR THIS

  chapter 5: BATTLE

  chapter 6: LONG ENOUGH

  chapter 7: THE SECRET WEAPON

  chapter 8: BLOOD

  chapter 9: I REMEMBER YOUR STORIES

  chapter 10: THE SWAP MEET

  chapter 11: HE DOESN’T WANT TO

  chapter 12: THE STREET BELONGS TO US

  chapter 13: STREET PARTY

  chapter 14: THE BUD

  chapter 15: SET SAIL

  chapter 16: WHAT ABOUT ME?

  chapter 17: DOWN THERE IN THE DIRT TOGETHER

  epilogue: THE MORNING SUN

  acknowledgments

  prologue

  OUR STREET

  I live at 3618 Muscatel Avenue, where the wash makes the street bend. The wash is a big, deep cement stream that dribbles over algae. It is protected by a tall chain-link fence and a strip of desert filled with little prickly thorns. There are a few scrawny palm trees on our street, but mostly, the sky around us is empty. When the smog lifts you can see the radio towers all the way at the top of Mount Wilson.

  On the other side of the wash, about a hundred yards away, is the freeway. There are so many cars on the freeway that you always hear a quiet hum, like the sound of the air-conditioning at the big pharmacy. There are so many cars on the freeway that the TV news guy says the exhaust is turning the rain into acid. He warns that it’s eating away the steel that holds up the freeway itself. I think that’s okay ’cause one day they’ll cancel each other out. No more freeways and no more acid rain.

  They say we shouldn’t drink it, but Wolf and I tilt our heads back and open our mouths when the drops start falling. We run away if my mom sees us and starts hollering to stop. She wears a dress and heels, so she can’t keep up with us. We sprint fast and breathe hard, and the smell of fresh mud pushes up into our noses. I’ll be in trouble later, but it hardly ever rains in the San Gabriel Valley, so you don’t want to miss your chance to taste a storm.

  There are small fences between the front yards in our neighborhood, but nothing separates the yards from the street. Bushes, grass, and dirt bump into each other and make good hiding places. And the yards are perfect for Nerf football games. But you have to be careful because some drivers like to pretend that the bend on Muscatel Avenue is a racetrack. You have to stay out of the street. My cat, Vaquero, was killed by one of these race car drivers just two years ago.

  But that was before I turned twelve, before Wolf and I waged our mud war, before the summer they tore up
the street.

  Alex Richardson-Salazar

  Rosemead, Califas, Aztlán, 1984

  chapter 1

  DIGGING

  “Nana, look! The trucks are here!” I shout.

  “What trucks?” my nana answers, quickly setting down her coffee.

  “For the sidewalks, remember? I’ll get to skateboard all the way to school!”

  “It’s so loud, mija.” She shakes her head. “It could be a trick. An invasion! Cuídate!”

  “It’s okay, Nana, I don’t need to be careful,” I say. “It’s just concrete and gutters. And it’ll be fun to watch them dig.”

  “Stop shouting and go outside, already!” My brother’s voice, coming from his bedroom, is garbled. “I’m trying to sleep!”

  Johnny is seventeen. He basically does three things. He sleeps, he complains, and he plays heavy metal really loud. I hope that doesn’t happen to me when I become a teenager. It seems really boring.

  I’ve been waiting for my front-row seat for the show. All the neighbors have been talking about it. The city has decided to rip up our whole street this summer. I throw off my pajamas and change into my striped shirt and jeans. Then I sit in the yard with a glass of milk and a piece of peanut butter toast gripped in my hands. It is the end of June, the time of year when the days trick you. It is cold in the morning and burning up in the afternoon. At nine a.m., the grass is cool and wet underneath me, but I barely notice. The trucks roll in yellow and red and silver. The machinery looks like muscles, big metal muscles.

  “There’re so many! Come quick!” I yell.

  My nana leans over as she walks but still manages to drag an aluminum lawn chair out beside me. She is a tiny old lady with curled white hair, dark eyes, and a round, pretty face that used to get her hired to do commercials. She goes back inside the house and returns with her mug of coffee. Our neighbors from two doors over, Jaime and his brother, Mateo, are perched on their bicycles at the top of their driveway. Our other neighbors, from across the street—Diego, his mom, and his aunts—have pulled four chairs out onto their porch. The women knit and talk and sometimes look up to see the digging.

  I watch the metal claws push inside and crush the earth. Rocks and dirt crumble and fly.

  “Wow, Nana! I wish my fists were that strong.” I squeeze my hand into a ball and punch the grass.

  My nana shakes her head. “Alex, I don’t like that. La tierra nos cuida. It’s dangerous to dig up the earth.”

  “If it’s strong enough to take care of us, it’s gotta be strong enough for me to dig it up,” I answer back. “And then I could squish the mud into all kinds of shapes.” I wave my hands in zigzag patterns.

  “You think your shapes are better than the earth’s?” My nana responds in her all-knowing way that means the answer is no.

  “Nah, I don’t mean that, Nana. I just want to be powerful enough to do it.”

  “Mija, even if you could, you might find things in the ground, things that were meant to be buried.”

  “Treasures?!” I get even more excited. “That would be cool.”

  “There are things that want to be found in the earth and things that don’t.” She sips her coffee. “I’m not worried about treasure. Things like gold and jewels want to be found. In fact, they’re not so hard to find,” she claims confidently. “Sometimes the ground above a treasure will glow, if you know how to look for it.”

  I want to ask if she’s ever found a glowing treasure, but before I can get the words out, she says, “But sometimes old toys or dishes want to stay hidden and forgotten.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe they hold painful memories. Maybe a little girl once loved her dolly and her brothers threw it out in the garden so she couldn’t find it. And then she cried and cried for over a year.”

  “Oh, Nana, that’s awful. Did you know her?” She knows every story about every sad thing that ever happened from California to México.

  “I knew her brother, and he was a real creep. He used to pull the girls’ trenzas at school.” She shakes her head disapprovingly.

  I know what she’s talking about. “That’s how it all started with Diego. He grabbed Maria’s hair, but the teacher didn’t see it. That’s why I elbowed him, and—”

  But my nana is in her own world and not really listening to my story about Diego. She isn’t done with her stories. “Or maybe the dishes were a wedding gift to a young couple, but the husband disappeared the week after the ceremony,” she continues. “Nobody was ever sure whether he ran off to join the war or had some kind of accident while walking between the villages. He could have been attacked by bandits.” Her eyes get big at “bandits.”

  “Whoa!” I exclaim. I know she’s making the story good and scary for me.

  She shakes her head. “The broken dishes buried deep in the ground would be reminders of the mystery of the man and the pain of the woman.”

  “I remember that one. Wasn’t that your tía Catalina?” My nana always repeats her stories, and I already know many of them by heart.

  “She never remarried,” she says, and sighs.

  “She died too young of a broken heart,” I say, because I know it’s the next, and last, line of her story. I’ve heard it so many times, but I don’t really know how you can die just because your heart hurts. I don’t think that part is actually true.

  My nana is sick with Alzheimer’s, which makes her forget things. She doesn’t seem sick, though. She looks at the TV or the living room or the street and daydreams a lot. Her daydreaming mostly doesn’t hurt anyone, but if she were a kid at my school, it would really irritate the teachers. At home you can daydream as long as you want without getting into trouble.

  Crash! The big claws strike our yard a foot away from the rosebushes. I jump into the air with my fists out, ready to fight.

  “My father planted those flowers!” I scream.

  The machine is too loud for the driver to hear me, though, and after it dumps a load of dirt, it comes back to plunge into our grass again. My nana takes her slipper off and climbs up from her chair. She holds the slipper in the air, waves it around, and heads toward the machine.

  I gasp. “No, Nana, no!”

  She’s going to get hurt. I try to grab her dress to stop her, but she keeps moving forward. She’s very strong, even though she’s so short and old.

  “You think you can take our land with your big, loud machine?!” she shouts. “You’re not taking anything from me! I survived the Mexican Revolution! A cannonball went right through my roof when I was only three years old!”

  “Nana, stop!” I scream.

  The guy with the hard hat in the little window of the machine doesn’t see us. He makes it whirl around again—but only to stretch out the metal claws once more. I’m sure he’s going to knock right into my nana’s shins. I cover my eyes.

  Suddenly, the noise stops.

  I open my eyes. The construction man’s eyes are open too wide, and he is gripping the steering wheel tight.

  My nana is standing right next to his machine’s huge metal tracks, hitting its window with her slipper.

  chapter 2

  WOLF

  “Nana! Be careful!” I run up and reach for her elbow, trying to pull her back.

  The loud noise of the digging machine has turned to silence, but my nana’s hands are still clenched into fists.

  “Qué barbaridad!” she shouts. “Those are her father’s roses! He pruned them every Sunday.”

  The construction man wipes his sweaty face. “I’m sorry, señora,” he says about five times.

  She shakes her finger at him. “You better not touch our flowers.”

  The driver assures her that the machines won’t go near the rosebushes.

  My nana whispers angry words under her breath while leading me back to the house. That’s when I decide I have to act.

  I run in the front door and yank the receiver from the green wall phone. It’s not actually green anymore, but I still think of it that
way. It’s covered in thick white brushstrokes. A couple of years ago my mom announced that we had to move into the eighties, and so far that has meant getting rid of all the avocado-colored decor. She painted the door, the wall, and the phone, only I don’t think you’re supposed to paint telephones. Now I can only use it when the phone number doesn’t include a six, because the white paint made that button stick. And my mom doesn’t like it so much when we use the phone in her bedroom. Luckily, Wolf’s number doesn’t have a six, and I have it memorized, so I can call him quickly in emergency cases like today.

  “Hi … is Wolf there?” I speak awkwardly because a woman answers the phone. I’m not used to there being a woman at Wolf’s house.

  Then I hear a long drawn out “Heeeeyyyy.” Wolf always answers all cool, like he was expecting my call.

  “It’s Alex. You need to come over. The machines have arrived and they’re awesome. They look like giant metal bugs! Anyway, who was that woman who answered the phone?”

  Even though Wolf McCann is my best friend, I still get nervous talking to him on the phone. I hurry to get all my words out and forget to breathe.

  “I’m coming.” He hangs up without answering my question.

  Wolf doesn’t talk much on the phone. It’s almost like he doesn’t know what to say after his first hey. I don’t mind, though, because I know he’ll be here, on my lawn and then in my house, on our broken street, in ten minutes flat. His house is next to the freeway, too, only three blocks over to the west.

  I run to my room and explain to Hops the Kangaroo that Wolf is coming to help me figure out what to do about the street being torn up. My dad gave Hops to me before he left us. He works for Amtrak, and one day he was extra nice to an Australian tourist. The tourist asked my dad if he had any kids, and when he found out about me and Johnny, the tourist gave Hops to my dad as a gift for one of us. Johnny was already too old for a stuffed animal, so that’s how I got to have him.