Gabe

Sneak peak of some Vol 3 Gabe narrative, via flashback. He would be around 14/15 at the time of this.

When I got up this morning, my mom was already crying, eyes all bloodshot and watery. Most people's eyelids got puffy and red when they wept, and I think hers would have been too if they weren't already swollen black and blue with about five layers of concealer caked over them. It was running down her cheeks, big flesh-toned makeup tears dripping into the greasy mash of amarillos, eggs, and corn she was frying up on the stove. Her cooking was always the obscene lovechild of American and Puerto Rican cuisine, everything fried and cheap. Poor person food.

I didn't say a word as I walked up the counter and poured a cup of coffee. I brushed aside the shattered fragments of a mug, tried to politely ignore the dark splash of café up the wall and the dent in the plaster.

"That's for your father," she said, her voice still strained from their fight.

"Looks like he already had his." I pointed to the wall and took a long sip.

I felt like a dick when that made fresh tears well up in her sad kicked-dog eyes, but I couldn't force myself to give her a hug when the next words out of her mouth were, "You must pray for your father." Hell, I had trouble not throwing my own damn mug at the wall. Instead I just smirked.

"Those candles you're always burning not doing the trick? Rita of Cascia should really get off her ass and do something one of these days."

She smacked me across the face before I was even done with the sentence. No surprises there. I could taste a little blood where my teeth cut my lip and wondered if she liked hitting me because she couldn't hit him. She crossed herself and muttered the trinitarian as I dabbed my mouth and came away with a smear of red on the back of my hand.

"Don't you ever speak of the Saints like that! Dios mio, Gabriel, this is not how I raised you!"

"Right. You raised me thank God for the rain when he pisses on us." I slammed down my coffee, grabbed my backpack, and high tailed out the door so I didn't have to hear her start sobbing again.

The backpack was just for show; I always chucked it in the bushes outside of the abandoned house next door, and no one ever bothered to steal it because it had books in it. School was only a few blocks away, so was a bus stop where I could catch a ride to the Miami people see on television. Tourists don't realize that beyond the fancy hotels and crowded beaches, there's real Miami - barrios and slums and places you'd never want to be caught white and rich or you might damn well wind up caught dead.

I liked to walk along the boardwalk, imagine I was there on vacation with a real family. I poked my head into shops, pretending I could afford the overpriced knick-knacks that the out-of-towners ate up. Twenty dollars for a shitty balsa wood carving of a dolphin. Ten bucks for a keychain with a picture of a sunset that probably wasn't even taken here. There were little stands pedaling tiny acrylic cages, inside each a plastic palm tree and a sponge and a hermit crab. I thought it was a sick kind of funny, people trying to immortalize their vacation with something they'd kill in a week.

I liked to watch the women, too. The kind of girls on the boardwalks in Miami would spray on their tans before the beach, wear little string bikinis their rode up their ass cracks, then give you the stink eye for looking. The nice thing about them, in a fucked up way, was that I didn't have to try being discreet; even if I acted like a gentleman, they would never even consider someone like me. They liked the sort of men who had their skin tanned by a booth, not by birth. So I was free to stare at them just like the meat they served themselves up as. And part of me felt dirty for that, and part of me didn't care.