“Boy Baby, who was man and child among the great and dusty guns, lay down on the newspaper bed and wept for a thousand years.”
Boy Baby, boy baby, boy baby, bashful baby, my baby, sweet honey baby, little darling honey sweet baby of mine, my boyish honey baby, my boy baby, my baby boy. She repeated these names to him when they lay together at night, stroking the side of his face. It became like a mantra, the way these words gained a rhythm until he could keep time with them too, tapping on her naked shoulder blades in the summertime or, in the wintertime putting his hand up and under her sweater to tap against her one birthmark.
She hadn’t met him in an obvious way, like her friends had met their boyfriends, in the plaza late at night, trading cigarettes and gum, or in the school hallways. They’d met in the Mexico City bus station, waiting with their separate classes for bus tickets to visit Teotihuacan. He had seemed tough; his eyebrow cut with a razor blade on the left side, tight washed jeans and the newest sneakers. He looked over at her with her group of friends waiting on the teacher for their tickets and his whole face softened for just a moment. That was the first thing the girl liked about him: the way he could yield to her sweetness.
They did not speak then, but once they’d entered Teotihuacan, they found each other in one of the underground tombs and among stone walls still red with cochineal and blue with indigo, he said something to her, the girl couldn’t remember what but she moved closer to him. He asked her what she was called and she said girl and she asked what he was called and he said boy. They spent the day walking up the Pyramid of the Sun and down the Avenue of the Dead, talking about themselves. On the way out, they had to walk past rows and rows of vendors selling souvenirs—wooden jaguars that made a growling sound if you blew air through them, t-shirts with a pyramid badly printed on them, and item after item made of obsidian. He walked in to one and bought a triangle of black, made to look like a small, squat Pyramid of the Moon, and gave it to her. For you, girl, he said. They were inseparable after that.
Things happened: she let him shave a small notch in her eyebrow so they matched, he wrote her a bad song on the guitar he was just learning to play, she started wearing more makeup and he began to spend his nights graffitiing walls in the neighborhood, he met her parents and everyone, surprisingly, got along. They made habits: conchas at the bakery after school on Tuesdays, never going to sleep without whispering out the window goodnight to the other, even though there was no way it could be heard over the din of the city, drinking in the plaza near school on Friday nights with their friends.
Later, she kissed one of his friends at a party and he punched a wall so hard it dented the drywall and his left knuckle. She kissed the knuckle every night after that, as if it was her’s to mend. Later, they would get into screaming fights on the streets between their houses, so loud that the women running the taco carts on the block would be forced to intervene. Some would yell at them to callate! Some would come over and coo at girl, ask if she was ok, move as if to shield her from him. Later, he would sneak into her apartment lobby and ring onetwothree times in succession to the apartment next to hers, which was her signal to come downstairs. He would be worn out, having just run from the cops after another night painting. He would collapse onto the floor and into her arms and cry, sometimes, say IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou, you know that. Like that, a statement of fact: you know that. It was as if he had gotten scared he would become one of those forgotten teen bodies on the streets that their parents so often warned against. Those nights felt long, a thousand years spent in that lobby. That was when she began to call him boy baby, my baby, sweet honey baby.
Later, she would get pregnant, accidentally, and be too afraid to tell anyone but her grandmother. Grandmother had long ago stopped caring about social protocol and so could be counted on to initiate the girl into all the important parts of life. Her grandmother lit the girl’s first cigarette and pierced her cartilage when she wanted it done, held a piece of jicama behind her ear and then iced it afterwards.
Grandmother said, girl who was it?
And girl said, boy baby.
Listen, grandmother said, I remember when I first got my period and the blood seemed like it would be the worst thing in the world, until soon the absence of it became more terrifying.
And grandmother took the girl to a doctor’s office en las orillas de la ciudad and because of this phrase, the girl couldn’t help thinking of the city as a frightening ocean she would have to get back in once boy baby’s baby boy was out of her. The office was made of pea green tile and the girl wore a dress she’d had since she was thirteen.
That night her grandmother made her tea and heated up cherry pits on the stove, tied a tea towel around them so girl could hold them to her stomach until the cramping stopped. Grandmother rubbed her back. Oh, she cooed at girl, there are some terrors only women will know. Boy baby was somewhere in the city, painting graffiti onto a highway overpass, belly down on the cement, his two friends holding him back by his feet. Sometimes he wrote GIRL for her, sometimes on a solo trip, he even wrote BOY BABY, thinking of her hands running down the side of his face like water.
Afterwards, for they did not last long, she saw BOY BABY written on the metal closed door of a bakery a few doors down from her house and she stopped and sank to the sidewalk and cried. The triangle of obsidian sat on her bedside table still, the black of it so absorbing. She thought of it, sometimes, as the baby that had gone. Boy baby. Little darling honey sweet baby of mine.
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