Eight “Hit the gas, I have a test
at ten,” said Lucía from the back seat.
“What is your test for?” asked Gabriel.
“Genealogy of Mexican Objects.”
“Yikes. And is it hard?”
“Yup, it’s like Chinese to me.”
“And do you know it?”
“Not very well. I wanted to go over it on the way.”
“Sorry.”
“No worries.”
Lucía’s lips moved as if she were praying, and she closed her eyelids as if that would help her trap the information. She opened them to check if she had memorized what was in her notebook.
“I am going to fail miserably,” she said.
She closed the notebook.
“I’ll have to copy from Viviana.”
“It would be cool to go to college,” said Gabriel.
“What would you like to study?”
“Computer programming.”
Lucía remembered the little radio jingle: “I signed up at ICM to study computer programming...”
“And why don’t you sign up?” asked Lucía.
Poor guy, she thought, he probably didn’t even finish elementary school.
“Well, right now I gotta work, but once I save up, maybe I’ll go to night school. I don’t want to be a driver for the rest of my life.”
“No, of course, it’s great that you are ambitious. It’s important to move up in life.”
He smirked from the rearview mirror.
“In general, I mean.”
“Don’t try to fix it.”
Lucía smiled.
“Let’s change the subject. What happened to your earring?” asked Lucía.
“Your mom had me take it out,” smiled Gabriel.
“That’s what I thought. She likes uniforms.”
When she got out of the car, he said “Good luck on your exam.”
“Keep your fingers crossed,” she said. “Oh and pick me up at two thirty.”
Gabriel found a spot in the parking lot, opened the windows, put the seat back, turned off the cheesy Spanish pop that Lucía liked, and got ready to take a nap. For a while, he watched students arrive in their own cars and wait for the van that picked them up at the parking lot to drop them off at the school entrance. The other drivers, all older than him, leaned on the cars reading the paper, smoking cigarettes, or chatting among themselves. Some students walked towards school as if they were going towards the firing squad. He would have liked to arrive at the university in his own car, with a briefcase full of books and notebooks.
He went over the tone that Lucía had used when she said goodbye. When she came back at 2:30 he would ask her about the exam; she would be super happy because she’d nailed it; he would say “See? I told you so.” and they would chat all the way home. But Lucía showed up at 3:15 with two girlfriends. He was not in the mood. He had moved the car at 2:20 and had tried to stay close to the entrance (although the security guards kept shooing him away). He hadn’t eaten.
“Aren’t you going to open the door for us?” asked Lucía.
Annoyed, he got out of the car and exaggerated the kind of courteous ministrations his father used when he brought la Señora Natalia home.
“What the hell? It’s after three,” he said.
Lucía was astonished, as were her friends.
“Take us to Plaza Duraznos,” she commanded.
The friends sat in the back, and Lucía rode shotgun, with the pretext of making room for her friends. Her thigh was pressed against the stick shift. When Gabriel changed gears, she did not move it.
“So how was the trip to Cabo?” she asked her friends in the back.
“Deluxe, you have no idea. The hotel was amazeballs. The food was delicious but sixteen-hundred-dollars for a dinner for four people,” said one in English.
“Wow, not even in Europe,” said the other one.
“And the spa treatments were to die for. I had a milk bath. My skin was super soft after that.”
“How much was that?” asked one of them.
“A shitload. Like a hundred and fifty. Without the tip.”
“Adriana had a cactus treatment that’s supposed to reduce cellulite and water retention. She didn’t like it because they slathered her with slime. Lucky chased seagulls on the beach. He had scrambled eggs with salmon and machaca norteña for breakfast, te lo juro.”
People are starving to death and these bitches feed salmon to the dog and smear food on their asses, Gabriel thought. They speak English so I can’t understand. I’m gonna say a couple of things in fucking English, let’s see how they like it.
After taking forever at the movies and coffee after the movies, he had to take them home. One had left her car at the school’s parking lot, the other one lived in Tecamachalco. Lucía stayed in the front seat.
“Do you always eat your bread in front of the poor?” Gabriel asked her.
“What?”
“I mean, with my dad, do you also talk about sixteen-hundred-dollar dinners and hundred-and-fifty-dollar massages, and you cocktease him with your gossip?”
Lucía fell silent.
“I don’t know what you think of me, but I am not who you think I am. And I am not made of stone, okay?”
“Neither am I,” said Lucía, with an impish smile.
They arrived home and he turned off the car. Before he could open the door for her, she gave him a little kiss on the cheek. He nimbly moved his face towards her lips, trying to catch her mouth with a bite, but she ran out of the car.