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Edilio Escobar sat in his family's trailer: too small, too warm, usually with too many people inside. The worst was the fact that they were waiting. He knew their deportation was inevitable. So Edilio talked to his dear friends on the phone, and he slept in the too-small pull-out bed with his two younger brothers--a real-ish bed though! And now he was having lunch with his mother.
She kept asking him if he was okay. The old him would've been patient at first and now annoyed, but he said the same answer over and over again: sí, sí, Mamá. I'm okay.
He woke his brothers up screaming one night--more than one? He still wasn't entirely sure. But he was screaming for Roger, screaming no no no please --
His mother had put a plate of food on the fold-out table in front of him. "You need to eat," she said in smooth, warm Spanish. "You're all bones, chico ."
He was all bones? No. He'd seen children who starved to death in front of him. And yeah, he was really thin. He wasn't denying that he was probably--definitely--underweight. But he wasn't starving. Not like Mary had been before she...
" Gracias ," he said, cutting off his train of thought. Even if he wasn't actually starving, he'd always be hungry. "I could eat forever."
"I can make whatever you'd like," she promised. But she looked tired, and that made Edilio sad. He didn't want someone taking care of him, not too much. He needed his independence. And he loved his mother.
"I'm happy with this, Mamá," he said instead, leaned back on their green, patchy couch. She hummed and went back into the kitchen.
"Edilio?" she called after a moment. He poked his head around the couch to look at her. "You should go play with your brothers, sí ? Relax a bit, hijo ."
Play? Like he was a kid? He was fifteen. And besides, his hermanitos would ask questions that made his throat close up... They were a miracle to him, from a desperate pipe dream (not that he smoked, but): healthy, grinning children.
"If you don't mind, I'd like to stay in here." He said softly, and grabbed the throw blanket off from behind the couch before wrapping it protectively around himself. His mother didn't answer so he took that as a yes. With a sigh and a trembling hand, he turned on the television.
And then he dropped the remote.
It was a newscaster. Reporting on--oh, how original--the anomaly that had been Edilio's twisted home for the past year: the Fallout Alley Youth Zone, or FAYZ. Places that were hauntingly familiar for him: his parents would usually turn the tv off for him when this stuff would come on. But not now.
Now, now, the boy's face was scratched and bruised and burned. His long blonde hair was crusty with blood. He ran out of the burned-down forest, his clothing hanging off of him and his shoulder blades sticking out. He looked like a wild animal.
" Gracias a Dios , oh Dios mío , gracias-- " Edilio half-sobbed, twisting the blanket so tightly in his nervous hands that he was afraid it'd rip. He took a deep breath: keep a calm head. Listen to the reporter. Listen, idiot.
They didn't identify the boy, but Edilio didn't need them to. They did, however, say that he was being rushed to San Luis Osipo. SLO.
"Mamá, SLO." he blurted, standing up and almost knocking the fold-out table over. He had to see him, to make sure that this was really actually real. He needed Roger. Roger, who had gentle eyes and soft, parched lips; Roger, who took care of six-year-old Justin--and he was in Heaven now, for real--and who took care of Edilio, who laid with him with their backs against each other. They had comforted each other, kept each other strong, and Edilio had fallen fast and hard for him. He helped him come out. He had been his first too--first kiss, first time making love.
Roger...he had been told he was dead. Burned, drowned, just like little Justin.
"Mamá!" he called again, and there was a desperate panic in his voice. He strode from the small living room to the kitchen--she wasn't there. What if she wasn't here at all anymore?
Before that thought could go any further, the trailer door opened again. His mother was standing there, furrowing her eyebrows at him. "I go outside for one minute to check on tú hermanos ..." She made the tsk tsk noise before softening. "Are you all right? You look like you've seen a ghost, child."
"I have." he whispered, and sagged. "I really have."