Everybody in fourth period called Gustavo “Romeo” because he called girls nicknames even more obnoxious and thought they liked it, had the biggest ego coupled with the deepest acne scars. Always turned around in his chair with his whole torso over the back, staring at “Maricela la Mamacita” sitting behind him. “I hope you drop that pencil so I can watch you pick it up.” Maricela would be working out pre-calculus equations on graph paper, and he’d lean over her pencil so that she couldn’t see the derivatives. Poke her not-even-remotely-pregnant stomach. “So when are you going to tell your daddy that the baby’s mine?” If she opted to look at the textbook instead, he’d slam it shut and make sure to catch some of her hair between the pages. So that when she retracted her eyes from his, trying to get some space to breathe air that he wasn’t exhaling, she’d yank her scalp and yelp. That way, he’d have an excuse to mutter loud enough for the class to hear, “La tonta was trying to think so hard, she broke her head.” Guys laughed and nudged each other, eyebrows raised. Girls sighed and rolled their eyes. The ESL teacher was usually in a corner of the classroom helping Misael set up Rosetta Stone on the computer, ignoring that he uninstalled the software every other day to avoid the boring kindergarten-esque language exercises.
After those conversations, the girls complained to each other that Gustavo’s underlying beliefs about women, his obsession with discouraging them from academic pursuits because God forbid they should be focused on something other than him, was the problem. I agreed, but my support was suspect, because everyone knew that I was the light-skinned peer tutor who informed on them to the principal if he asked, “How are the Mexic—English Language Learners doing?” When I told Gustavo to “stop being so sexist,” he would ask me, “Do the carpets match the drapes, Güera?” Since my dad insisted that we were “Spanish,” not Puerto Rican like his dad, I considered that nickname fairly accurate, but his question made me twitch angrily and go red in the face. If Maricela complained that Daniel and the other guys were egging Gustavo on, they’d shrug and claim that it was just funny how hard he tried to get attention. Susana finally demanded, “So you agree that’s a valid way for him to ‘try’ in the first place?” I mostly stood behind her, arms lank at my sides, and muttered something non-committal along the lines of, “Yeah, what she said.” Teachers always got me in trouble if I snitched on guys who bullied me.
The principal laughed in my face when my dad took me to the office to complain that a student had bitten my arm so hard that the skin around the teeth marks turned black. “He goes to the continuation school; I have no jurisdiction. It looks like you weren’t complaining when it happened; you let him bite you that hard without fighting back.” I stammered and then went silent. The principal smirked at my dad. “Sounds like you’re just an overprotective parent.”
“So you’re not concerned about health risks for your students; that kid broke the skin. What if I was the kind of parent who sued the school over that?”
“Do you really think that would go anywhere?” Usually a compulsively polite person, my dad stood up and left the principal’s office without thanking him for his time. The principal narrowed his eyes at me as I reached the office door. “So you’ll translate if problems come up among the…ESL…students, right?” I nodded. My dad was disappointed that I didn’t take the complaint further, but I was too humiliated that the principal could laugh at him for caring about his daughter’s safety. And I felt increasingly like Friar Laurence, exacerbating conflict without reflecting on my complicity, privy to too many grudges and protecting the wrong interests.
The next day, Maricela slapped Gustavo across the face, and he asked her why she would hurt her future husband. Misael spoke low into his fist like it was microphone, “Rom—eee---ohoh!” The guys collectively wolf-whistled, and Daniel shouted, “Sexy when you’re angry, Maricela Julieta!” Emboldened by collective support and Shakespearean validation, Gustavo pinched her cheeks. “More like Mari Mamasota.”
“At least from behind!” Daniel started a lengthy joke describing the amount of poison that a Juliet with a butt as big as Maricela’s would have to take in order to slow down her apparently equivalently humungous heart to fake death even momentarily. “There won’t be shit left for Romeo!”
“Then he can shoot himself like in the movie.” Maricela had had it. Susana threw up her hands. “Did anyone even watch the movie? Romeo drinks the poison. Juliet shoots herself.” The study hall teacher had just screened Romeo + Juliet, featuring young Leonardo DiCaprio, in an effort to interest freshman in the plot, as if that was more the issue than asking a high school student, fluent in or learning “modern American English,” to read the play’s archaic Elizabethan language. Besides, the biggest complaint whenever a teacher showed the 1996 Luhrmann movie was that the 1968 Zeffirelli film had more nudity.
“Qué neeeeerdy.” Misael announced to his fist-mic. It wasn’t until the teacher shushed the class and asked what was going on that we noticed Gustavo wasn’t saying anything. Susana looked at Misael, and he dropped his shoulders, lowered his hands, and discarded the commentator pose. “Nothing.” I didn’t know what was going on, so I asked Susana as we left the classroom. “I wasn’t thinking. I should have been more sensitive.” I told her that I understood, I got frustrated when people didn’t pay attention to storylines, especially when a movie had already reinterpreted that plot. “Are you worried that Maricela and Daniel were hurt when you accused them of not paying attention in class?” Such were my nerdy priorities. “No, it’s that Gustavo’s brother was shot a few days ago. Somebody mistook him for somebody else.” Nobody called Gustavo “Romeo” after that.
Eventually, Susana suggested that the girls clump their desks together, so that Gustavo would have to answer to several classmates when he tried to corner Maricela and interfere with her work. I kept looking through the obituaries for someone with Gustavo’s last name without finding anybody, like my dad always searched for people he knew. Months passed and a white student in the study hall for kids on the verge of expulsion to the continuation school died, and his picture appeared with a short euphemistic version of his life. Nothing about his parents or even the relative he was staying with giving him drugs and telling him to sleep off the early symptoms of overdose (the content of his last call to a friend in my first period class). What’s in a name? I don’t know, but other students, all with English, Irish, Scottish, and Italian names got to “pass away” in print, if they were seen as white or could pass as much as I can. There were plenty of articles about “gang violence,” with mug shots of dead children, meant to indict them for whatever they did to get themselves killed. Because kids don’t die alike in dignity. There wasn’t a newspaper story on a case of mistaken identity, no parent quoted saying that losing a child to violence so young buried strife.
Jenny Irizary grew up in a canyon that flooded every year, the only Puerto Rican for miles. Her work can be found in Label Me Latino/a, Snapping Twig, The Screech Owl, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Ink Dot, Duende, and Lavender Review.