Taming Cross

I clench my jaw, because I’m imagining the upside down and sideways, but the fantasy disintegrates as I watch her eyes fill with tears. Somewhere in the last few months, Suri got a thing for me.

Lizzy tried to tell me once, but I didn’t take it seriously. Now I really wish I had.

Surri tucks her chin, looking down at the blankets, and I can see her lip tremble. I feel awful, so I reach for her. She crawls off the bed and steps back, toward the bathroom, and I feel slightly dizzy as I think, I knew this night would suck.

How the f**k did this happen? It doesn’t matter, Cross. Just deal with it.

I get up off the bed and grab her hand. “Suri, you’re my best friend. You and Lizzy.” She won’t look at me, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to quit talking. “But that’s all that it should be. Do you think I want you to be just another f**k?” Her eyes widen, and she tries to jerk away, but I tighten my grip on her wrist and hold her gaze. “That’s just it—you wouldn’t be. But I’m not ready for this, Suri. It would be bad. It would end up being bad for you.”

Her gaze flicks up to mine. Her eyes are red and wet. “I don’t know how I read this all so wrong.”

I grit my teeth. I don’t know how, either. “I love you, Sur, you know I do, but we’re friends first.”

More tears drip down her cheeks as her chin trembles, and I feel like a steaming pile of dog shit. “You want to be more with Lizzy,” she whispers.

“I don’t,” I grit my teeth as my heart pounds. It’s true, I got distracted by Lizzy a few months back, but that’s long over. “I don’t want anything with Lizzy.”

She shakes her head, then turns on her heel and marches into the bathroom.

For the next few minutes, I stand by the door, feeling helpless and heartless and frustrated. I consider knocking, but I can hear her sniffing and I wonder if she’d rather have her privacy. I rub my neck, which is still too tight.

I’m mulling that one over when I hear the door creak, and Suri steps out, looking calm and gathered. I reach for her hand, touching it for a moment before she draws away.

“Suri, I’m really f**king sorry.”

She holds up both hands. “I know, Cross. And it will be okay. I still want to go with you tonight, just as a friend. You really shouldn’t have to face the firing squad alone.”

I shouldn’t face the firing squad at all, but I’ve got things to settle with my dad. “I appreciate it. You’ll never know how much. But I think it would be better if you just go home tonight. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

I can see the moment that her eyes go cold. The moment that I lose a friend—just as surely as I lost Lizzy to Hunter. “Okay.” Her lips press flat. “Whatever you want.”

She walks briskly from the room, and I can’t think of anything to stop her.

CHAPTER TWO

If you’ve never eaten ant eggs, you haven’t lived. You only think I’m kidding. They taste…buttery. Buttery and crunchy and almost the texture of a boiled peanut. For not the first time, as I sit at one of the ragged picnic tables inside our little cafeteria, I think about Alec, the self-styled food critic who wrote columns for my college’s newspaper. His favorite word to use in conversation was ‘copious’. He broke his leg junior year, and for weeks afterward, Alec was laid up in his king-sized love nest, reviewing take-out food. Copious amounts of pepperoni pizza and greasy burgers. I smile a little at the memory. Like so many things from my past, it seems light years away from day-to-day life at St. Catherine’s Clinic for Sick and Needy Children.

It’s a weird place. Most of the time I’m here, taking care of children in this poverty-stricken Mexican neighborhood, nothing else exists. That includes memories.

I finish my rice and chicken, topped with the ant eggs that were a gift from Señora Maria, the mother of a little boy with cystic fibrosis. Victor’s family has more money than most we see, which is probably the only reason he’s alive today, at three. He had a rough winter, with a long hospitalization during which I couldn’t give him any of his favorite ‘pequeño Victor’ back rubs.

Those are the worst times, I think as I walk my empty bowl over to a row of garbage cans with tubs for dirty dishes on the top. The times when the kids I love the most stop coming here for one reason or another, and I can’t go visit them. Some of the nuns do house calls, but I can’t. I can’t ever leave St. Catherine’s Clinic.

A lot of times, it’s not so bad. The building is short but wide, with several different areas so when I pass from, say, the clinic quadrant into the living quarters, I feel like I’m going somewhere. But I’m not. When I think of how long it’s been since I felt the sun on my skin, since I cranked up the music as I sped down an empty highway… Since I browsed the internet or read a book I chose for myself or got my hair done at a salon… I kind of want to scream. Okay, I do scream. Sometimes at night, I scream into my pillow. Then I remind myself I’m lucky. My story could have had a harsher ending. Actually, it probably should have. This life I have here, with the sisters, with the kids…it’s a fairy tale, compared to what could have been.

I place my metal spork atop the nearest trash can, in a little plastic bin of silverware to-be-done, and put my bowl in a bin for plates and bowls. I glance up at the clock on the wall over the self-serve bar, where cheap grub rests in brassy bowls that are either kept cold on ice or hot on electric plates. It’s almost four o’clock, which means I have one more client before the day winds down and I prepare for evening prayers. I glance at one of the big, vertical windows that span one side of the room, wondering how hot it is outside right now. Wishing I could smell the sun-steamed grass.

I don’t peer out the windows or even step close to them. Instead I head into the dingy, one-stall bathroom with its meager supply of toilet paper and take the three squares allotted for each use. When I first took refuge at the clinic—which is located in the same building as St. Catherine’s Convent, just inside the city limits of Guadalupe Victoria—I was appalled by the scarcity of supplies, but after more than half a year, I’ve learned how to make it work. As I do my business, I wonder how many squares I’d allow myself to use for a ‘number one’ if I were to make it back into the States. Maybe four, I decide. Anything more than that would probably feel wasteful. I wash my hands, and as I dry them on a rough rag, I tell myself to be thankful for what I have. Even if I never make it back to the U.S., I have a good life here.

You can’t be grateful and bitter at the same time. So says Sister Mary Carolina. So what am I grateful for? I stare at myself in the mirror, ticking things off inside my head. I’ve been blessed to learn massage therapy from Sister Mary. I’ve been able to make a difference in the lives of children. And, almost more importantly, I’m accepted here. Cherished, even. Which is so much more than I expected when I arrived.