Free Muchacho by Louanne Johnson

she shaved it all off. She has about ten earrings in her ears and a little bone in her eyebrow and a diamond in her nose and something stuck in her tongue. She wears real short T-shirts so you can see the rings in her navel and she has weird bumps on her chest so she must have some in her nipples, too. When Letty got her ears pierced, she went around smiling all the time, checking herself out in the mirror and admiring her earrings. But that pierced girl never smiles. She’s the saddest person I ever saw, but she doesn’t go around crying or anything. Mostly she swears at everybody. I don’t have a good title for her poem, so right now I’m just calling it “Pierce Everything.”
    PIERCE EVERYTHING
    Punk up your hair or shave your head
    Pierce your eyebrows and your nipples and your lips and your soul
    So the hate and the hurt can ooze out of you
through a million tiny holes
    I got some tears in my eyes after I wrote that one, but lucky for me nobody saw because the bell rang for lunch while I was writing and everybody except Lupe ran out of the room, including McElroy who always goes jogging during lunch in some baggy brown shorts. Lupe stayed at her desk, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was copying down the assignment from the whiteboard and she had her head bent down close to her notebook. It almost looked like she was praying and her hair fell down and hid her face like a shiny black satin curtain. And Lupe became my next poem.
    LUPE FULL OF GRACE
    I wish I could be Lupe’s rosary
so she could hold me in her hands
and tangle me up in her fingers
and press me to her lips
and pray me into being a good man
one bead at a time
    After I wrote that, I felt like I had turned into a poem myself. I felt as light as a piece of paper, like I could float right up to the ceiling. I copied that poem over real neat and tore the page out of my notebook and folded it over and over, likethe little kids do, until it was a tiny little square. I wrote Lupe’s initials on it and put it in my pocket and carried it around with me until after school when I pretended to tickle Lupe and I stuck it inside her bra and held her hands so she couldn’t get it out. When I finally let go, she hit me in the head with her purse and called me a
pachuco
, but I didn’t even care. I just smiled, thinking of my poem sitting so close to Lupe’s heart.

CHAPTER 11
SECRET READERS
    A FTER L UPE READ MY POEM, SHE CRIED. T HEN SHE TOLD ME I should be a writer because if you can write something that makes people cry then you have the gift. I told Lupe maybe I had a little tiny gift. Maybe only she would cry from reading my poems and not other people, so she said, “Let’s show them to Mr. McElroy and see what he thinks,” and I said, “Not.”
    “You shouldn’t be afraid,” Lupe said. “He’s not a very good teacher, but he’s a nice man. And he wouldn’t laugh at you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
    “I’m not afraid he would laugh at me,” I said, except that is exactly what I was thinking. “I just don’t want to show them to nobody but you.”
    We were sitting on the bench outside the main officeeating lunch, where most kids don’t like to hang out because it’s too close to the principal. There are other places where it would be more private but I don’t trust myself to be in private places with Lupe at school. When we’re in the same class, sometimes I have to get myself kicked out because sometimes I can’t sit down when Lupe’s in the same room with me—if you know what I mean. I have to get out of the room just so I can breathe.
    “Your poem is better than T.J. Ritchie’s poem that got sent to the magazine,” Lupe said. “He showed it to me. Yours is way better.”
    I didn’t like T.J. showing his poem to my girlfriend, but at least she liked mine better than his. Unless she was just trying to give me self-esteem which she thinks is so important if you want to succeed in life. Beecher was always talking about