Surviving Valencia

I heard Valencia crying. Whether they were real tears of shame or the tears of false, obligatory repentance, I was not sure.

When Rob and Mrs. McCray left, I pulled myself a little closer to the vent, waiting for an even bigger blowout. But Valencia did not get screamed at, smacked across the face, or locked in her room. She was just told she could never see Rob again.

“What will people think?” I overheard our mother saying. Her tone sounded not irrational and disgusted, but soothing, reasonable, concerned. Her syrupy voice was so out of character that it made me take notice. It told me that there was something very powerful happening between Valencia and Rob. Something extraordinarily threatening, that my evil mother must stop. I clenched the fistful of crayons I was holding until they all broke in half. Then I ground them into the back of a notebook with my palm, wishing I had the guts to grind them into the carpet.

“Okay, it’s over,” said Valencia.

“What’s the matter with Rob’s mother?” our father asked.

Oh my god. I rolled over on my carpet and threw the crayons at my shelf of stuffed animals. These people, these parents of ours, didn’t deserve to reproduce.

“She has cancer, Dad,” Valencia shouted.

“Cancer?”

“Yes. Cancer.”

“She looks like hell,” he said.

“So you’re never going to see him again, right?” said our mother.

“Right.”

We all thought that was the end of it. Well, I didn’t. I mean, it was obviously not the end of it. But he did not call again and Valencia and Van refrained from mentioning anything about him, and eventually it did seem that Rob McCray had been forgotten.

But one day, not long before the end of their senior year, I was looking through Valencia’s backpack and found a love letter. It was folded into a square with the corner tucked into itself, the way letters were all folded back then. I wonder if kids still know how to fold those letters. I guess not. I guess they just text now.

The letter was dirty. It was my first exposure to real sex and created expectations and needs in me that have never been satisfied. Oh, to be Valencia. Though she was really just a girl, generous promises of seduction and love were being offered to her on a silver platter.

They’d had a fight and Rob was sorry. He wanted to make it up to her. He wanted to kiss her stomach, kiss her back, kiss her everything. He was in love with her. He poured his heart and soul out in smudgy blue ink. I can still picture it as clearly as if it had been meant for me and I read it yesterday.

After reading it several times, while I stood frozen and listening like a jackrabbit to my family carrying on in other parts of the house,

I carefully refolded it and put it back inside Valencia’s sunglass case in her backpack pocket where I had found it. It had been over two years since she and Rob had been forbidden to be together. Who would have dreamed Valencia had been disobeying my parents all that time? The love letter was the granddaddy of all discoveries, whetting my appetite to search for more. Soon I was hiding in her closet, listening as she made plans to meet him and then told our parents she had cheerleading practice. I silently lauded her, more enamored than ever.

Chapter 13

Valencia started packing up her room in late June of 1986, as soon as we got back from our trip to Glacier National Park. She started with her winter clothes, folding them into tidy stacks and inserting lilac sachets into the pockets of sweaters. She took the photos that were stuck into her vanity mirror, curling up like spyglasses, and flattened them into her album with the sparkly roller skating girl on the cover. Then, thinking better of it, she rode her bike down to the Ben Franklin, returning with a plain gold album. She removed the pictures and set the roller skate girl album on my bed. Treasures were arriving there daily. Hourly even. Hot rollers and a boxed set of Garfield all-occasion cards. A zippered quilted bag filled with bottles of thick, oily nail polish, mainly all variations of the same shade of coral pink. A pile of Seventeen magazines. Knitted mittens with snowflakes on the back of the hand (those I was not excited about, considering they were made by my grandmother and I had the same pair in a different color).

Valencia went so far as to yank off her class ring and place it in my hand.

“Here you go. I’m not going to wear this in college. I think that would be weird.”

“Don’t you want it for later? Or to give to your daughter someday?” I asked.

“No. You can have it.”

It’s still on my right ring finger today.

At one point our mother got irritated by it all and intervened. “Why are you getting rid of all these things?” she asked, picking up a pile of teen romances off my bed and stomping down the hall to wave them in my sister’s face. “We just gave you these books for Christmas! This Christmas! What are you thinking? Do you think when you go to college you are going to turn into a different person? Don’t you think you’re going to need anything anymore?”

“I have already read all of those. I read the one with that Chinese girl on the cover twice, Mom.”

“Your father and I paid good money for these. Or did you think Santa Claus brought them on his sled?”

I stuck my head into Valencia’s room to try to help, “It’s not like she’s throwing them in the garbage, Mom. She’s giving them to me.”

They ignored me. “Take these books with you,” our mother ordered.