Bulletproof Vest Read Online Free PDF Page A

asked. “What gang?” I said, thinking, what a jerk. I can’t believe he called me out of class to ask me this. “Don’t play games with me, Venegas. I know you’re in a gang. I know you’re the leader. I want the name.”
    Even though I wasn’t the leader of a gang, in the four years I’d been at his school—fifth through eighth grades—I probably had spent more time serving in-school suspensions and detentions than in the classroom. At one point, the school had even placed me in a program for “at risk” kids, though I never understood what exactly we were at risk for. I was assigned to a mentor, a retired professional football player. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” he asked at our first meeting. “A famous fashion designer,” I said. “Okaaay,” he said, “and just in case that doesn’t work out, is there anything else you might want to be?” he asked. “A supermodel,” I said, without thinking twice.
    â€œIs it because of your neighbor?” Frida asks.
    â€œYeah,” I say.
    They all know about the neighbor and his two brothers. Frida, Mirna, and Fabiola all live on my street, had heard the gunshots on that night, and every other night, when my father came home in the wee hours, blaring his music and unloading his gun into our front yard. At first, the neighbors used to call the police and report that they had heard gunshots, but eventually, they got used to it, and no one bothered calling the police anymore. I had once gotten into an argument in the library with Marcos, one of the boys who lived up the street. “Well, at least my father doesn’t come home in the middle of the night, shooting his gun and waking up the entire neighborhood,” he said. “Well, at least my brothers aren’t drug dealers,” I shouted, because word around the neighborhood was that the high school kids bought weed from his older brothers. The librarian shushed us, but still, the sting of his words lingered. Why did we have to end up with a lunatic for a father? Why couldn’t we have had a normal dad like my friends and cousins had? It was a relief that he was gone, and gone for good.
    â€œWhere you moving to?” Mirna asks.
    â€œI can’t tell you,” I say. My mother had warned us not to breathe a word to anyone—it was our own makeshift witness protection program.
    â€œWhen?” Norma asks.
    â€œThis weekend,” I say.
    I pull out a notebook, have them write down their addresses and phone numbers, and promise to call and write. Over the next year, I keep in touch with several of them, though eventually we stop corresponding, except Frida and I. She’ll keep me updated on everyone: Maribel was not going to high school because she had gotten pregnant, and soon after high school began, Araceli had also gotten pregnant and dropped out. After high school, Norma had landed in rehab. Eventually, I lost track of all of them, including Frida, though years later, I heard that she had gotten into drugs and that one day she had driven her car deep into the forest and slit her wrists.
    My mother isn’t there when we move. She’s in Mexico taking advantage of our recent status as temporary residents to visit her mother. We had been granted temporary residency under President Reagan’s amnesty act—except for my father, who had already had one too many run-ins with the law; his application was the only one denied. Though he was still allowed to stay in the United States with his work permit.
    Between Friday night and Sunday afternoon, my siblings and I take what seems like fifty truckloads from our old house to the new one. We strap chairs, tables, mattresses, and bicycles down with rope in the back of a borrowed truck, and load boxes packed with dishes and garbage bags filled with linens and clothing into my eldest sister Mary’s car. Back and forth we go all day