The Most Wanted Read Online Free PDF Page B

class. City people would have called us hillbillies or worse, though there are no hills right around where I lived.
    Well, I said I still wanted a job, because then I could pay for my own clothes. Mama said she’d think about it. Of course, she came right up with another objection. One night, she waited up to see me, even though it was a lot of trouble for her, being as how her shift started at six and she usually worked until five the next day and didn’t get home until seven. “No way are you leaving this house on Saturday,” she said. “Any Saturday. That’s your day to get your work done here. I can’t work these kinds of hours without you take care of this house, see? That’s your job. That’s your keep.” I wanted to defy her. But I knew she would give me up as incorrigible. Lots of mothers said to girls they’d give them up to the state if they didn’t behave, but they didn’t mean it. Mama truly did.
    I did sass her, sort of, one of the only times in my life I ever said anything back to her. I said, “So it isn’t really about Elena’s family.”
    “Well, I don’t really care if they adopt you,” she told me. “If they’re so successful, they could use another kid.”
    Elena’s mother actually did treat me like another kid in the family. And she was happy when Elena and me started being best friends. We’d always kind of known each other. But then, in eighth grade, Elena cheated off me in a math test, and when I caught her, she started to cry. That surprised me, because I always thought of her as so tough. So when the teacher noticed how good her grade was, I lied and said she didn’t look. Elena said that was the most loyal thing she ever saw anybody do.
    When we got the job, Mrs. Gutierrez said, “Well, at least Arley can be a good influence on you, Elena, and you can do like she does. She doesn’t have half of what you have, and you look how hard she works.” That embarrassed me, but you know, I was secretly kind of proud of it, and when I started hanging out at their house more, I would sort of leave my book reports around, so Mrs. G. would see how neat they were labeled and typed and decorated. I even kind of liked it when she said that I would end up a doctor or a lawyer and Elena would be, like, selling earrings at the mall.
    “No way, Ma,” Elena would pipe up. “I want to be a nude dancer. You know that.”
    Mrs. G. would mutter swear words or prayers in Spanish and go in the kitchen to get chips for us. The best thing about working, for Elena, was getting her mom off her case.
    “She’s such a royal bitch,” Elena would say. But Mrs. Gutierrez wasn’t a bitch at all. Elena just didn’t know there were mothers who wouldn’t even know what year of school you were in. When Mrs. G. would go, “Did you study for your English test, Elena Louise?” she thought it was a way of controlling her. To me, it was like tucking her in at night, or something, and when I would stay over on Saturday nights after Elena and me went to the movies at the mall, and her mom started nagging me, too, about how I would wreck my complexion eating so much grease or whatever, I totally loved it. I would even show her my report card, and she would make me promise I would never waste that good mind on just being a housewife, like her. “Go on,” she would tell me. “Say, ‘I promise, Luisa.’ ” I couldn’t really call her Luisa, though, but I did, sometimes, quietly call her “Ma.” The way Mrs. G. must have felt about me at first, about what I did, was one of the things that hurt the most. They had one of those big, close Hispanic families, where they watch out for the girls like they were made of cake sugar that would melt in the rain. Not that this had much effect on Elena’s oldest sister, Gracie. Connie was the nice sister, but Grace was a desperado, who’d once even spent a few months at the Evins Center in Edinburg after she refused to go to school so many times Mr. and Mrs. G. had to