Headmates
Chapter One
Cheap Tampons
Luke Santiago was six years old when he had his first kiss.
It happened in the sandbox when he lent his truck to his cousin Mateo.
The kiss was sticky with lollipop saliva and grit from the sandbox.
At the time, he didn’t think much of it since lots of people in his family were giving him kisses.
Like Mama, Titi, and Tito. It was only when people stopped giving him kisses that he took notice.
They grew less frequent once he’d started kindergarten and stopped altogether the day he was playing with his uncle and accidentally knocked him to the ground.
“I guess you’re a man now,” Tito said, which hadn’t been true at all.
He’d been only nine years old. But that’s what everyone thought, especially strangers.
It was his size. By the time he got to middle school, he was taller than his teachers, and by the end of middle school, he was taller than everyone .
He kept hoping it would stop. The pain in his limbs would keep him up sometimes, and he was getting too big for his bed.
But worst was school, where “Santiago” became “Sasquatch.
Even the teachers called him that. They would catch themselves sometimes, and correct it, but not always, and with the name came isolation.
No one sat with him. No one talked to him.
It was why his second kiss surprised him so much.
It happened in eighth grade when Millie Albarn called him out during lunch and told him to kiss her.
That made it different from his first kiss for two reasons.
First, she had been expecting him to initiate.
And second, because the person involved hated him, and he knew she hated him because he’d overhead her say she’d rather die than be grouped with him for the science project.
“Why?” he asked, sure he’d misinterpreted the request somehow.
Maybe she hadn’t asked for a kiss at all.
Perhaps she wasn’t even talking to him. Though why she would have called him out if she wasn’t going to talk to him, he wasn’t sure.
And it wasn’t like she could have mistaken him for someone else.
“Just do it,” she said, and it was clear from her tone that she really did hate him.
That was when the sweat started coming through his shirt.
He always sweated when he was nervous, and he was nervous all the time.
His mother thought it was ridiculous. “An elephant afraid of a mouse,” she would say.
But he couldn’t help it. Things were just so nerve-wracking, and they almost never went the way he wanted them to.
“Hurry up,” Millie said, and she was angry. Angry that he was taking so long? Or angry that he wasn’t Benjamin Klitnick? All the girls wanted to kiss Benjamin because he had colored eyes and pretty dimples and wasn’t the size of a giraffe.
Luke stepped toward her, and his heart rate doubled. He didn’t want to kiss Millie, but it never occurred to him to refuse. Luke didn’t refuse people. Refusing made people upset, and upset people made everything worse. So that day, he leaned down and kissed her.
He got only the briefest impression from the exchange.
Her lips were soft. She smelled of the raisin cookies in the cafeteria.
And then she shrieked—an eardrum-piercing sound—and slapped him.
It relieved him, that slap. It was the only part of the situation that made any sense.
But then there were more shrieks and also the sound of laughter.
Laughter everywhere. Wherever he turned, there it was.
What he didn’t know was that Amy Louer had dared Millie to do the kiss, and she’d dared her because it was the most disgusting thing she could think of.
But he didn’t have to know. He could feel it.
Their disgust—all their disgust. He fled down the stairs and straight out of school.
But even though he ran, and kept running, their disgust followed him, and not just that day, but every day after.
It never left him alone, and even when he did manage briefly to forget, it was never for long.
Always that disgust was right beneath the surface to remind him he wasn’t like the others, and never would be.
His mother didn’t understand what the big deal was. “So they don’t like you. You think everyone likes me? I still go to work, and you’re still going to school. Get up.”
It was true Gloria Santiago wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but she was wrong to insinuate they had anything in common.
Gloria was strong and loud, and if she was ever afraid, Luke had never seen it.
But he didn’t say so. He never talked back to his mother, and not because she would yell, but because he was the reason she had to work so hard. Well, he, and his father.
At fifty-three, Adrian Santiago was still raking in the ladies.
Luke didn’t see his father much, but he knew about the ladies because any time he visited, there was always a different woman in his apartment.
Sometimes more than one woman. None of those women were ever his mother, and she never let him forget that.
“Your father is un Diablo. Un Trasto. Bueno para nada. And if I ever catch you following his ways, Ayudame Dios, I’ll give you such a beating as your ass will never forget.
” But Luke didn’t need any beatings. He was terrified of women, especially the kind that surrounded his father.
Cosmopolitan women who looked like magazines and smelled like fancy stores.
It seemed the feeling was mutual. Women were just as scared of him, and some even more so.
It wasn’t always that way, though. At first, the height was just height, and there was nothing scary about a gangly, limp-haired bumbler.
But during high school he filled out, inheriting the broad shoulders, thick chest and strong arms of his father.
Except just like with his height, he didn’t stop at his father’s width.
The difference in their sizes was mostly proportional, but it didn’t feel that way. He was huge after that. A monster.
He remembered the first time a woman crossed the street to avoid him, nervously shooting glances over her shoulder until he purposefully turned a wrong corner just to make it stop.
He’d been only thirteen. And he’d continued to grow.
Gloria said it was because he ate more than a gorilla.
She said it so often he looked it up. Apparently, adult gorillas could eat over forty pounds a day.
He didn’t think he was that bad yet, but he still wasn’t done growing.
The pain during the worst of his growth spurt was so bad he would bite down on his pillow to keep from screaming.
Sometimes he even wondered if he could die from growing.
It didn’t seem normal that it could hurt so much.
But if he did die, he promised to keep it silent.
No matter what, he wouldn’t bother his mother with it.
She found out anyway when she came into the kitchen one night and found him hunting through the cabinet for the ibuprofen.
She liked to hide the bottle because she said it was what gave Tito his ulcer, but when she saw him with puffy eyes and snot dripping down into his mouth, she shook out three pills for him and sat down to massage his legs with those scarily powerful hands.
“Back to bed, nene,” she said when she finished. “I’ll bring the milk.”
She was always giving him milk, and always in the same mug too.
Warmed for fifty-five seconds in the microwave.
She used milk for everything—pain, bad dreams, illness.
He wasn’t sure milk was the wonder drug she thought it was, but it tasted good, and with his appetite the way it was, he never turned down extra nutrition.
He got through the growing pains, but he never really got through everything else.
He took to spending lunch in the stairwell or bathroom so people wouldn’t see how much he ate, and when he spoke aloud it was because he had to, not because he had anything interesting to share.
He would almost try sometimes. Something pushed inside him to try, even providing the words, sometimes.
A script he might use. But there were too many things that could go wrong with engaging.
Better to be quiet. To be alone and careful and quiet.
He could relax at home, at least. Despite his mother’s gorilla comments, there was always enough food, and she never said anything about the extra shifts she had to take at the hospital to keep up with his appetite, or all the nights she stayed up late cooking to be sure they’d be leftovers in the fridge for when he woke in the middle of the night with a growling stomach.
She had to work hard for all that food, and even harder to keep all his cousins fed too, especially when Tito died and left his aunt with seven kids—two of them still too young for school.
Luke liked the kids and would come over after school to watch them so Titi could go to work.
The kids didn’t call him Sasquatch or freak.
To them, all adults were huge, and his bulk was great for things like piggyback rides.
Lola in particular liked his size. She wanted to be a wrestler when she grew up and ate as much as she could in a vain attempt to keep up with him.
He was glad when she stayed cute and small, though.
People liked cute and small things, and he would do anything to make sure their lives didn’t turn into his.
It meant that when he could, he’d buy them extra things Titi didn’t have the money for.
Light-up sneakers or a new backpack. Things to keep them from being the only ones in school without them.
But it wasn’t enough. The proof came when Rosa asked if she could borrow ten dollars after he’d just spent the last of his money buying Lupe some jeans.