Headmates #3
He wanted to shove the tampons back at her.
It was what his mother would have done. He wasn’t supposed to take charity.
It wasn’t something Gloria had said out loud, but was something she had taught him, regardless.
Better to go without. Better to work hard and harder and for too many hours than to ever take charity.
But his throat was all stoppered up, and he just wanted to get away.
“Thank you,” he managed over all the shame in his chest.
He didn’t remember the walk home. He just kept feeling that burning in his throat and the pounding of blood in his ears.
He didn’t even go to Rosa. He just dropped the tampons outside her room and ran all the way home.
He kept running because it was better than thinking and because he had to hurry, but it was too late.
Gloria was pulling off her scarf when he rushed through the door.
She always wore a scarf, sometimes two, and all kinds of layers. She hated the New York winters.
“Ay, Lucas, always stampeding. You need to watch—”
He went right to the closet and took down the cookie tin. He could hear her behind him, yelling now, because he had pushed right past her.
“Do we need to go to a doctor, Lucas? Are you deaf now? Or maybe blind?”
In his rush to pull out his wallet, he accidentally dropped the tin.
It fell with a tremendous crash, or maybe that was in his head.
Noises got loud like that sometimes. They would reverberate in his head and block everything out.
He saw the note twist in the air and fall behind some of the junk in the closet.
They had lots of junk. He bet the lady from the store didn’t.
She could throw all her stuff away and just buy new things if she found she needed something again.
She wouldn’t even have to think about it, because when you had money, you could pretend you didn’t need it.
“I’m going to make money.” He could hear how tight his voice was. Tight and high, the way it got when he was going to cry, and he’d never seen anyone his size cry. “I’m going to make so much money you can buy whatever you want and not have to look at the price. Not for anything.”
He got on his knees to pick up the contents of the cookie tin. There was loose change, and it had spilled everywhere, but Gloria stopped him before he could even get all the bills up. “Lucas.”
He needed to get the note too—from the closet. He needed to erase the whole thing.
“Mírame, Lucas.”
As if he could. He might never be able to look at her again.
Charity. His mother never would have taken it.
Never. And neither would Rosa, or she would have done it herself.
Instead, she had come to him. Because he was family, and older, and supposed to take care of her.
Not a stranger. Not someone who didn’t even want to be seen with him.
“Lucas. We have enough.”
“We don’t.”
“Do we have a roof over our heads? Are we starving? We have enough, Lucas.”
But they didn’t. Otherwise, why did his mother have to wear sweaters in the house instead of putting the heat up?
Why only have chicken instead of meat? And why did Rosa have to use the cheapest tampons in the store?
No, they weren’t starving, but that didn’t mean they had enough.
People who had enough didn’t have to worry about having enough.
They didn’t have to count up their items before they got to the register or inherit all their clothes from someone else.
His mother might have said some other things, but he wasn’t listening.
In his head, he was making plans. He would learn about money, not just about how to make it, but about the money itself.
He would learn everything he had to, and he would do it quickly.
He would stop worrying about stupid things like Sasquatch and bad dares and fathers who were never home.
Only babies cared about things like that, and he wouldn’t be a baby.
Knowledge wasn’t the answer to everything.
He already knew that, because he was the smartest kid in his class, and that had never done anything for him.
The people who knew how to talk to others—who knew how to smile and make jokes and get others to like them—they were the ones who did well, and that only became clearer as he got older.
Still, knowledge wasn’t useless, and neither was hard work.
And he did work hard. Still, he was surprised when Gloria cried at his high school graduation.
It wasn’t like he’d done anything impressive, like get a doctorate as Tito had done.
“Ach,” was the sound Gloria made when he said so.
“Much good it ever did him. I think they paid him only in books. No, you will do better, Lucas. You’ll go much farther than he will.
” No one said anything about the missing Adrien, though he knew Gloria had gone to hand deliver the invitation, so he couldn’t pretend not to have gotten it.
Well, he didn’t need Adrien. Much more important were his cousins—all of whom had shown up, even Mateo, who had to skip a school trip to do it.
He was approached by a sports coach at his local community college when she saw him doing his morning laps around the track.
It reminded him of the cartoon devils that would appear on the shoulders of characters on TV.
But there was no point in tempting him. “I need to help out at home,” he told her.
“My family, they—I need to work.” It was what he’d told the guidance counselor in high school too.
She’d spread all these brochures out on her desk like a tarot card reading, the schools full of big names even he could recognize.
“You could go anywhere with your grades,” she’d told him.
As if some numbers on a report card could give him opportunities like that, when everyone knew it was money.
It took him three years to earn his associate’s, the classes stuffed in wherever they fit around his schedule.
He was working two jobs by then. One during the week and one on the weekends.
The classes had been in the evening, though if he’d been forced to keep to the “two absences per class” rule he’d never have graduated.
Thankfully, there were others like him at the school, or at least, enough people who knew what trying to fit multiple lives into a standard twenty-four-hour day was like.
“Just submit the work,” was what he was told by most of the teachers.
“If you can do that, I can misremember how often you were here.”
He never did attend a proper university.
He’d planned to transfer once he had the associate’s in hand, but the job offer came first, and he accepted it within five minutes of the email landing in his account.
The pay wasn’t any better than what he was getting at the nursing home job, but it was corporate, and his foot in the door.
The start of a career, though it was difficult to explain to Gloria why it was a step up.
“You’ll need to work more hours for the same pay?
And no overtime?” Put like that, it certainly sounded like a downgrade, but he had a plan.
A vision for how it could pan out. The job did come with an education credit, and he was able to enroll in one of those shitty online universities, doing his homework during lunch breaks and back and forth on the subway commute.
He was tired, paying the price for chronic overwork and years of accumulated sleep debt, but it was getting easier.
For one, the cousins were getting older.
Mateo wasn’t exactly a high earner, but he could still help out with the kids, and Rosa was worth her weight in gold.
Like his mother, he cried at her graduation—her college graduation.
She was two years younger than he was, but they got their diplomas the same year.
Hers was from a proper university, though.
He’d made sure of that, though she had fought him most of the way.
They’d had their first screaming fight the day she’d tried to drop out and get a job.
“You can’t do it alone!” she’d screamed into his face.
“Watch me,” he'd told her. But that was a lie too. It hadn’t been alone.
Not for one minute had it been alone. It had only felt like it.
The next job offer was more exciting. Again, it didn’t come with much of a pay raise, but he was in finance, at least, the field he’d been aiming for…
even if his actual job was only the barest step over “data entry stooge.” All of his colleagues were white, except for one girl, Shreya, whose family hailed from Bangladesh.
The only other Latino there was Eduardo—the janitor—a fact Eduardo himself didn’t miss.
“Make sure you’re the one they promote,” the man told him.
“You work the hardest, but when you’re too busy working, you don’t notice other people taking the credit.
Make sure your name is on everything. All the reports.
All the meetings. Because it’s not just you that you’re working for.
It’s all of us. Don’t stop until you’re at the top. ”
He didn’t know about the top, but maybe Eduardo was on to something, because three years later he was called into his manager’s office and told he was a junior analyst. Again, it didn’t come with much of a pay raise, but it was a real job.
One he could put on a business card. He wished he could say he’d been excited, but the first thing he did when he heard the news was lock himself into a bathroom stall with shaking hands.
He knew the work. Had been doing practically all of Ernie’s since the man had been fired for taking smoke breaks in the company’s lactation room.
But the work was the only thing he felt confident about.
As a junior analyst, he still wouldn’t be expected to speak up much in meetings, or draft important memos, but he’d be reporting to big people.
Important people. People who would use his work to make big decisions that translated into huge amounts of money.
What do I do? He texted Rosa.
She sent him back the name of her friend’s therapist. She’s not that expensive, was the qualifier. And Carmen raves about her. I think you should try.
But there were at least a thousand other things on his list of priorities that beat out mental health. White people had therapists. Brown people cried quietly in bathrooms.
What he didn’t know was that imposter syndrome was the least of his problems. It happened while he was moving his stuff to his new desk—a desk of his own , not just the one connected to all the others.
It was there, as he was setting things down in his cubicle, that he met Jaime Caron.
Well, he didn’t meet him exactly. The man who was showing him to his desk, a friendly but vaguely stupid man named Larry, was telling him about the sticky button on the coffeemaker when Jaime passed by with a folder tucked under his arm.
Luke didn’t know he was doomed. He didn’t know anything at all except a sudden flash of hot and cold and a vague trembling in his hands as he asked, “Who is that ?”
Larry was clueless too. He had no idea he was about to deliver the most important news in Luke Santiago’s young life as he said, “Oh, that?” Easily, dismissively, as if he weren’t talking about the most beautiful person to be put on earth. “That’s Jaime.”