“Don’t you dare try to find a way to blame any of this on me,” Tía Isabela told her. “Now, exactly what happened? I want to know what you did. Don’t skip a single detail.”
“All right, I’ll tell you,” Sophia said, as if she was going to make her mother sorry she demanded it. She wiped away her artificial tears and took a deep, exaggerated breath. “First, I helped her get ready,” she said, nodding at me. “I showed her how to do her makeup, and I loaned her a pair of earrings and helped her with her hair. She wears it so plainly, and…”
“I’m not talking about any o
f that!”
“Well, you just said don’t leave out a detail.”
Tía Isabela sighed. “And then?”
“Ignacio, her Mexican boyfriend, drove up in his filthy old pickup truck. It was so gross I was hoping it wasn’t as dirty inside as it was outside. After all, she was wearing an expensive dress. He was wearing this costume like a mariachi or something. I didn’t think he liked the way she was dressed, and I thought she might not enjoy herself, because those Mexicans would make her feel out of place or something.”
“Oh, so all of a sudden, you were worried about how she would be accepted by Mexicans? You were that concerned about her happiness?”
“Well, she’s my cousin. You told us she was going to be part of the family, Mother. You said…”
“Just go on with the story,” Tía Isabela said.
“Later, I met up with Alisha, Delores, and Trudy. We were going to go to a movie, but I told them about Delia and the way Ignacio looked at her. They thought it would be a good idea to drop in on the fiesta to see if she was having a bad time. They thought if she was, we’d take her with us.”
“They thought? It’s always someone else who comes up with these ideas.”
“It was my idea, too. I wanted her to spend time with American girls. If she is going to live here and be part of our family…”
“And?”
“And I was glad we went, because when we got there, I could see she was sort of by herself. I could see the Mexicans were looking at her funny, like she was some kind of a traitor or something for not dressing in those costumes. They probably never heard of Valentino. Most of them looked like they dyed some rags and wrapped…”
“Sophia! Get to what I want to hear,” Tía Isabela shouted.
“I’m telling you like it happened. Isn’t that what you want? You said to be exact.”
“Go on,” Tía Isabela said, now looking exhausted.
“Well, almost immediately, her boyfriend Ignacio pulled me aside and asked me if it was true what Bradley Whitfield had done to her. She had apparently told him everything, every nitty-gritty dirty detail about her rape.”
I spun around. I was able to follow most of what she was saying well enough and had no doubt about what she had just said. I started to shake my head, but her eyes burned through mine to singe my brain with another warning.
“What could I do, Mother? I had to say yes. I don’t know or remember even if you knew it, but it was Ignacio who beat Bradley away when he came after her to get her to do it with his friends, right, Delia? Didn’t Ignacio help you before? Well?”
Tía Isabela looked at me to see what I would say. I nodded. She had thrown a tidbit of truth into the pool of lies. I couldn’t deny it.
Tía Isabela turned back to her. “Then what?”
“The next thing I knew, he was off to the side whispering with three of his friends and with her. I think she told them where Bradley had raped her. She must have, in fact. They started to leave the party, cursing Bradley and threatening Mexican justice.”
“Mexican justice?”
“Something like that. I stopped Ignacio and said, ‘You’d better not do anything to Bradley Whitfield. His father’s pretty important around here.’ I guess I shouldn’t have said that. It made him angrier, all of them angrier. He pushed me aside, mumbling about how terrible we treat Mexicans now, and continued out.
“Alisha said we had better follow them to see what they were up to. I told Delia she had to come with us, that this was happening because she had told them too much. We all got into Trudy’s car and tried to follow the Mexican boys.”
“What do you mean, tried?”
“They went so fast we couldn’t keep up. Delia was crying, sorry for what she had done. We were all getting frightened by now, so we went to the Roadhouse to calm down. We came home right afterward. Next thing I knew, Jesse was banging on Delia’s door late at night. I was in her room with her, trying to get her calm enough to go to sleep. She was crying and mumbling all sorts of things in Spanish I couldn’t understand.”
“Jesse came to get you?”