The Street Belongs to Us Read online

  I leap up and grab my skateboard, which is leaning against the wall. I jump on, bend my knees, and hold my arms out like I’m surfing in the ocean. “Look, Mom, I’ll be able to skateboard all the way to school.”

  My nana claps. My mom smiles but then remembers her rule. “No riding in the house, Alex.” She says it softly, though, so I know I’m not really in trouble.

  I hop off my skateboard and return to my seat. I am about to take a bite when I notice something awful. “Hey, my chicken leg is gone!”

  Johnny starts giggling. He’s chewed half the meat off it already. “Here, you want it back?” he taunts and tosses it onto my plate.

  “Ewww, gross,” I say and throw it back at him.

  He ducks, and it misses him and slides across the linoleum floor. He laughs harder.

  “Stop fighting at the table! And don’t throw food!” my mom shouts. Now I know she is actually angry.

  “He started it,” I say, defending myself.

  “He started it.” Johnny mimics me in a high, whiny voice.

  “Stop it, Johnny,” Mom says curtly.

  I give him a smug little smile.

  Johnny stops laughing and looks down at his plate. He gobbles the last three bites of his dinner and gets up to leave. He looks at my mom, says, “Dinners were better with Dad,” and walks toward his bedroom.

  My mom’s eyes get shiny. I look at her, but I don’t know what to do.

  My nana suddenly picks up where we left off, like nothing happened. “With sidewalks you can roller-skate. Rollerskating was my favorite thing when I was a little girl,” she tells me. “I would skate all the way from the Mission down to the big public library at the Civic Center in San Francisco. I remember when—”

  “Weren’t the steep hills dangerous?” my mom says before my nana can launch into a story that would take up the rest of dinner for sure. I figure my mom has three reasons for interrupting: 1) She doesn’t like my nana repeating her stories all the time; 2) She believes most things are dangerous and doesn’t want my nana encouraging me to do those dangerous things; and 3) She’s still mad at Johnny, but he’s not at the table to fight with anymore. My nana is still here and always ready to argue with my mom.

  “Nope, I was very skilled. And besides, it was good exercise,” my nana explains, and smiles with all her teeth showing. My nana brings up exercise whenever she wants to irritate my mom.

  My mom rolls her eyes. “Good exercise won’t help if you’re in the hospital with a broken leg.”

  My nana wipes her lips politely with her napkin and says sweetly, “You’ll end up in the hospital anyway if you get too fat from no exercise.”

  “I’m fine, Mother,” my mom says curtly.

  “But men might be more interested in you if you lost some weight,” my nana pushes.

  “Plenty of men like me well enough,” my mom answers sternly. “And I don’t actually need one to support me.”

  My nana tells my mom she is too fat at least once a week. I love my nana a ton, but I wish she wouldn’t say that. Who cares if my mom is fat? Who cares if anyone is fat? I don’t. I used to live inside her big stomach. My nana hurts my mom’s feelings, and sometimes they get into fights about it. My mom looks like a photocopy of my nana, only bigger and with dark brown hair instead of white. I think my nana looks at my mom and sees a fat version of herself, and it makes her say those mean comments to my mom. I tell my nana and my mom they are both really pretty, but it doesn’t stop them from fighting.

  Tonight, my mom shakes her head, wipes her mouth, and stands up. “Just be careful when the sidewalks come, mija.”

  When my mom gets home from work, she is very tired. She’s in charge of all the money at the schools to make sure the teachers and the principals and the secretaries get paid, and the buildings get fixed, and they don’t go bankrupt. She doesn’t feel like arguing with my nana. She rinses her plate and puts it in the dishwasher. Then she leaves the kitchen in her big flowered skirt, with a book under her arm, and goes to her bedroom.

  I wish my mom didn’t have to work so much, but I’m kind of glad she hasn’t noticed our trench. She would think the trench was dangerous, too. Maybe the walls would cave in. Maybe somebody wouldn’t see the trench and would fall on top of our heads. But nothing bad has happened so far.

  Wolf says we have to stay camped out in our trench. With all the dirt and kids around all day long, he predicts a great battle is coming soon. Actually, he’s hoping for a battle. Being a kid living in the suburbs hasn’t really given him too many opportunities to be a soldier.

  chapter 4

  YOU’RE GONNA PAY FOR THIS

  Wolf and I peer out of the trench and watch as Diego’s older brother, Tony, skids in circles on the muddy street in his black vw Bug. He installed roll bars inside so that if he does ever flip over, the roof won’t cave in. He speeds up, slams on the brakes, and skids into the turn. The car makes loud screeching sounds and shoots mud in every direction. The Villagrana brothers a few doors up run inside their house to get away. Tony knocks goop all over my dad’s roses, and Diego goes into hysterics, giggling and pointing from across the street.

  “Teenagers are the worst.” I shake my head.

  “Something is wrong with their brains,” Wolf explains. “It’s science.”

  “I hope I don’t get dumb like that,” I fret.

  “Me too,” Wolf says. “I hope he stops soon.”

  Tony shows no signs of stopping. He spins out and nearly crashes over the edge of the wash. He runs over a bush and dents the fence. He gets out of the car, checks the damage, and laughs.

  “I don’t think it’s such a good idea that they let teenagers drive cars,” I mutter.

  Our perfectly beautiful dirt street has been taken over by a single idiot. The grown-ups are still at work, so there’s nobody around to tell him to stop.

  Unless? Hmm.

  “Wolf?”

  “Yeah?” he says, cringing as Tony pulls pieces of a thorny bush out from the wheel well above his tire. Tony yelps and kicks the bush when the prickles puncture his hand.

  “We could try to get Johnny to stop him,” I suggest.

  He shakes his head. “Then we’ll have two teenagers to deal with.”

  “Maybe they’d cancel each other out?”

  Tony hops back into his car and starts the engine, giving it a good revving.

  Wolf nods. “Go.”

  I can vaguely hear the deep thrumming of Johnny’s bass guitar coming from the garage. Last year, Johnny cleaned up the garage and made it into his band’s practice space, covering the walls with blankets so that the music wouldn’t be too loud for the neighbors. I think it’s the only thing he’s ever cleaned. He calls it his sound studio. When he’s in there, no one is allowed to interrupt him. But this is a special case.

  I knock. “Johnny?”

  Thum, thum thum thum, thumming Metallica bass solos, endlessly.

  “Johnny?” I call again and open the door. “It’s important.”

  “What?!” he yells.

  “Tony’s driving his car around like crazy,” I blurt out. “I’m afraid he’s going to hit something.”

  Johnny shrugs. “That’s got nothing to do with me,” he says and slams the door in my face.

  “Argh!” I shout, but he’s gone back to his guitar now.

  I wish Johnny wasn’t so mad all the time. He wasn’t like that before he started high school. He would boss me around and flip me over and stuff, but he wasn’t in a bad mood most days. He hasn’t really hung out with me since our dad left.

  He says it’s my mom’s fault that my dad left, but I feel like he blames me, too. My mom and dad used to get into a lot of fights over me. Like when I stopped eating peas because they made me feel like barfing and my dad told me I couldn’t leave the table until I ate the pile on my plate. My mom said I didn’t have to eat them and they started arguing. I ran to my room and Johnny yelled after me to “stop being such a baby.” My parents kept right on
fighting. Maybe it was my fault that he left.

  I walk slowly back over to the trench and lower myself in next to Wolf. Tony drives around the corner and out of sight. I think we have a reprieve, until I hear his engine revving, over and over. I hear the thum thum thum of Johnny’s guitar together with the rev rev rev of Tony’s engine, and I’m still thinking about those dumb peas, and I feel sick to my stomach.

  Tony slides into gear and screeches back around the corner and onto our street. He’s going way too fast. When he finally pounds the brakes, the car doesn’t stop. It does a sideways glide across the mud, up a curve, through the Vega’s bushes, and bang! Into the corner of our garage.

  “Whoa!” yells Wolf.

  “No way!” screams Diego.

  The three of us run to the side of the garage to see a new two-foot hole and crumbling plaster.

  Tony gets out to take a look and says, “Oh crap, man.” He doesn’t appear to be hurt, but he’s shaking his head and cursing as he stares at the damage to the hood of his vw.

  Johnny comes out of the garage to find the group of us staring at the wreckage.

  “Dude!” Johnny exclaims, his voice full of anger and disbelief. “That’s my sound studio.”

  “Uh, sorry,” Tony answers lamely.

  Diego pipes up, protecting his brother. “I saw it all and it wasn’t his fault.”

  “Oh yeah, it was!” Wolf retorts.

  I nod. “It totally was.”

  “You better fix it,” Johnny warns Tony.

  “It’s like he said, it wasn’t my fault.” Tony looks squarely at Johnny. “It’s all the loose dirt in the road. The city’s to blame.”

  “You mean this dirt?” Johnny says. He picks up a chunk of smashed bits of lawn, grass, and dirt hanging together and flings it in Tony’s face.

  “Hey!” Tony screams. “I’ll get you for that.” He grabs some mud, while Diego crouches down and digs into the ground.

  Johnny turns on his heel and quickly heads into the house before they can hit him back. Wolf and I run and leap into our trench. We gather up six of the mud balls we had stored and get ready for action. Johnny comes out of the house wearing an army helmet and turns on the garden hose.

  Tony shouts from the other side of the garage, “Where are you, girly-girl metalhead with the long pretty hair?!”

  But when Tony and Diego come around the garage looking for Johnny, chunks of dirt clutched in their fingers, Wolf and I pelt them with our mud balls while Johnny sprays them down with the hose. Diego and Tony cringe and yelp, trying to brush the mess off their clothes. They look at us in our trench, and Johnny with the hose, and retreat.

  “We’re gonna get you back, bad,” Diego threatens as he runs across the street.

  Tony gets in his smooshed car, lurches in reverse out of the hole he punched in the garage, and parks in his own driveway.

  “You can’t just crash into people’s houses,” I yell at him.

  “Yeah,” Wolf says, “that’s trespassing!”

  Wolf and I shake our heads, disgusted.

  Johnny comes over to examine our whole trench setup, looking from us to our chairs to our snacks to our mud balls.

  “Awesome,” he announces. He takes his army helmet off and places it over my narrow head. “Do some damage.”

  “Thanks, Johnny,” I say, surprised. Our cousin Chucky gave him the helmet after Vietnam, and Johnny doesn’t usually let it out of his sight. I never know when my brother is going to be nice, or why.

  Johnny turns to go, and then stops. “Wait.”

  “Yeah?” Wolf says.

  “Give me one of those chocolate bars,” he demands.

  I hand him one and he heads back to the garage. His guitar thrumming starts again, louder now through the hole in the wall.

  My nana emerges from the house, looking bewildered, and comes over to our trench. “I hear music in the sky, mija,” she says.

  “It’s just Johnny playing his guitar,” I explain, pointing. “But there’s a new hole in the garage that’s letting the sound out.”

  My nana walks around to the side of the garage and gasps when she sees the damage. She crouches down and creeps quickly back to us.

  “Was it Pancho Villa’s army or the Federales who fired the cannonball?” she asks in a panic.

  “No, Nana,” I explain. “It was just Tony and his stupid car.”

  “Is he a general?” she asks.

  “No, he’s a teenager,” I say.

  “And a bad driver,” Wolf adds.

  “There’s no war?” My nana wants to confirm.

  “Nope.” Wolf sighs sadly.

  “Are you sure?” she asks suspiciously and peers up and down the street.

  “Nana,” I say, “the Mexican Revolution is over. It was, like, seventy years ago. Pancho Villa and the federal soldiers are all dead now. They can’t bomb you anymore.”

  “Oh, okay,” my nana says and scratches her head. “Who won?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know if anyone did.”

  “Venustiano Carranza,” Wolf contributes. “And then he became the president.”

  “Hmm.” My nana nods. “I didn’t see that coming.”

  My nana turns away and begins to gently bob her head to the guitar strokes. “The music’s nice,” she says.

  She walks back to the house and returns with a folding chair and a sun umbrella. She sets herself up next to the garage, tapping her foot to Johnny’s strumming.

  Wolf and I spend the rest of the afternoon manufacturing mud ball grenades and drawing up battle strategies that we store at the far end of our headquarters. It is very peaceful for a couple of hours, until my mom comes home.

  The second she turns off the engine, she shouts, “What the heck happened to the garage?!”

  My nana tries to calm her, reassuring her it wasn’t a cannonball.

  “Johnny!” she yells. “What have you done to the garage?”

  Johnny comes out and yells, “Stop blaming me for everything!” He storms off into the house.

  Wolf and I sneak out of our trench.

  “Mom?” I say quietly behind her. I scare her accidentally, and she jumps a little.

  “Oh, Alex, it’s just you,” she says. “Where did you two come from?”

  Instead of answering that question I defend my brother. “It wasn’t Johnny,” I say. “Tony crashed into the garage with his car.” I point over to his dented-up vw Bug in his family’s driveway.

  “It was totally Tony’s fault,” Wolf adds.

  “Unbelievable!” my mom complains loudly. “I can’t even go to work without coming home to a hole in the garage.”

  All of a sudden it seems like a bigger deal than it had a couple of hours ago.

  “This is going to cost a fortune to fix! Did nobody think to call me?” she asks, exasperated.

  When the crash happened, I thought we were pretty brave and successful defenders, throwing mud balls at Tony and Diego in revenge. Now I look down at the driveway and feel guilty.

  My mom heads into the house to call the police. Wolf ducks out before they arrive and remember who he is. He is already on their radar after throwing a notebook at the principal last year. It smacked him right on the nose, and then everyone freaked out because of the blood. Wolf promises to come back tomorrow morning, though.

  A helicopter circles the street twice before flying away.

  My mom looks up. “The police send the helicopters for everything in Rosemead.” She shakes her head. “The damage is already done!”

  My mom and I stand beside our garage while she points at the crumbled stucco, complaining to the police who have arrived in their patrol car. When the officers head across the street to get the other side of the story, we glare over at the family on their front lawn. Tony pretends to limp, probably to get the officers to feel sorry for him.

  “He wasn’t hurt!” I exclaim, outraged.

  We stay and keep watch to see if they have any other tricks up their sleeves, but it�
�s mostly a boring police officer writing a bunch of words in his notebook. We can’t hear anything this far away.

  As soon as the police head off and we’re finally about to go back inside our house, Diego calls me over. We step away from the grown-ups so that they won’t overhear us.

  “What do you want?” I whisper.

  “You’re gonna pay for this,” he answers. “The police are blaming Tony.”

  “Pay for what?” I say. “It was his fault.”

  “Police don’t know anything,” he responds. “And besides, we still need to get you back for those mud balls you threw this afternoon.”

  “You’re on,” I answer.

  “Tomorrow, first thing,” he declares. “The battle begins.”

  chapter 5

  BATTLE

  07:55. I call Wolf and alert him to Diego’s battle cry. He was still sleeping when I called and mutters, “They drew first blood, not me.”

  I frown. “Are you dreaming that you’re Rambo again?”

  He mumbles, “I won’t surrender.”

  “Wolf.” I raise my voice. “Wake up! Get ahold of yourself.”

  “Wha? What’s going on?” Wolf says, finally sounding awake.

  “Diego is planning to battle us this morning, and I need you over here ASAP,” I plead.

  08:25. My mom carries her coffee mug out to the car and leaves for work.

  08:59. Wolf arrives at my place in uniform. My nana cooks up our papas con huevos burrito rations and wraps them in foil for us. We head out to the trench.

  09:33. The rations are already gone. Wolf perches near the top of the ladder. He is wearing Johnny’s army helmet and staring intently through my silver binoculars. (It’s very irritating that he takes such long turns with them.)

  Finally, Wolf speaks. “Diego’s dad is approaching his vehicle. Now he’s entering it.”

  I am writing this down, recording important enemy movements in my field journal.

  “He started his motor and is backing out of the driveway,” Wolf states quickly.