Camila Cal Mello

The whiteboard on the first day of second grade was simple, straight to the point. In blue Expo capital letters, a question demanded an answer: WHO ARE YOU?

Volunteers went first. Chatty girls and hyper boys sprang to the front of the class, talked about how they were born a few blocks away or born in a different state and moved to Florida but still visit their grandparents every holiday. I learned about new states every year like this, mouthfuls of Pennsylvania and Nebraska. 

Most kids were normal, unsurprising enough to keep classmates interested in the previous class’s doodles on the wooden desks. But in every class, there was at least one of us that would shake up the room, a cause for everyone’s attention. 

In a choir of responses to the question “Where are you from?” our answers rose to the surface, flares in the sea of “the United States of America.” 

My name is called. 

I walked to the white board, pink-Velcro Bratz doll shoes patting the linoleum, face turning the same shade of rose as the collared shirt I wore. I had a Hello Kitty watch around my wrist, and I could feel as it ticked on my wrist, a reminder that with every second that passed, my classmates would soon know the truth about me. 

I’m from Uruguay, I would say to a classroom of blank stares. I moved to the U.S. a few years ago. Every face stared back at me, like I was a creature they never could have imagined. And the activity would turn to show and tell, just like that, the room erupting with questions.

What the heck is that? 

Is that like a poor country?

Like UR-A-GAY? 

Then how come you can speak English?

Do you even have Bratz dolls? 

Will you speak Ur-Gay-An for us?

Can we call you an alien?

The teacher settled everyone down, and then every time, I tried to defend myself. 

Ooh-roo-goo-eye. It’s a small country in South America. It’s under Brazil, next to Argentina. Not rich, but not poor. We have beaches and they’re so beautiful that there’s no sharks. My grandma thinks sharks are made up because she’s never seen one. We like drums, barbecues, and tea. Well, really, it’s not tea. It’s called maté, and we drink it in a circle. My mom says I even drank it when I was little, stole it from her hands. I don’t remember that. We speak Spanish in Uruguay. I’ve been in Florida since I was two years old, and I learned English from TV and teachers. I’m just like you. I like Bratz, and Barbies, Pokémon, and Power Rangers. The yellow one is my favorite. We left because my mom says we have to dream big, and America is where all the dreams go. Yeah. That’s who I am. 

Silence. Always a beat of silence. 

So, you’re an alien?

***

I stared at the graph, thinking about how similar it looked to what I learned in my third-grade math class. The dots on the graph usually represented something in an equation, miles or dollars or temperature. In this case, the dots were me, my body mass index over the last couple of years.

It’s just too high, the doctor said to my mother. It’s just that I work too much, can’t supervise, my mother said to the doctor. It’s just that she needs to lose it, he said. It’s just that we’re in the stressful process of becoming legal, she said. It’s just that she’s not the right size. It’s just that she’s big boned. It’s just that she’s fat. It’s just that white girls are so much skinnier. But we’ll fix her. We’ll fix her. 

I hate math, I thought, as the exam table paper crinkles beneath me, beneath this body of mine that doesn’t know how to stop taking up so much space, that doesn’t know how to exist as part of the mean. 

***

The first thing I noticed about her was her hair. Pin straight, black, sleek. A little clip held her bangs, like the Snooki poof, but better. It smelled middle school good, a mixture of Garnier Fructis and straightener burn. The scent of beauty is pain. I knew this because we had gym class together, early in the morning, when our odors were fresh.

The second thing I noticed was just how easy to notice she was. Her walk was more of a bounce and with every step to the locker room, heads turned, mouths called out her name. I was new to the school, a rookie sixth grader, but it was obvious: she was the popular girl, the eighth-grade queen, the star of the show. Our lockers were beside each other, and every morning, I played my part as an extra. 

She was the first girl I ever saw use the smoky eye look on her eyelids, the greys and blacks shimmering on her skin. She didn't walk outside again until she'd looked at every part of her face in the tiny locker mirror, as if to make sure she was still beautiful enough for the role. I watched her, wishing I could say you’re perfect so perfect but instead I focused on my gym shorts and how they felt against my skin– too small, too full of holes. 

One morning, when my best friend Stephanie and I were the only ones left in the locker room trying to wrangle our hair into ponytails and tying our laces tight, she burst into the locker room, frantically digging in her bag, pulling out a tube of concealer. She missed something during her spot-check. 

I was about to walk outside, and then she looked at me for the first time, hand outstretched. 

“Can you hide these for me?” 

Her upper arm was covered in tiny bite marks, blood-like. I looked at her in awe, confused, taking the tube instinctively, then at Stephanie, eyes wide. 

  “They’re just hickies,” she said. Obviously.

I pressed the soft sponge of wet makeup onto her skin until the marks gradually faded into a memory of a blemish. Stephanie nodded her approval; any trace of imperfection was gone.

Before we walked outside, she turned to us, pointed at our hair with one perfectly manicured finger. 

“I’ll braid your hair sometime; you’d look good with a French.” 

A few days later, she made good on her promise, shuffling us into the tiny bathroom behind the gymnasium after we’d all lost at dodgeball. Her hands went to work quickly, yanking hair into intricate patterns all the while talking about her boyfriend, how he was stupid, how he was maybe a cheater, how he ruined Bruno Mars songs for her forever. We sat mostly quietly, occasionally laughing or nodding when it seemed right. She finished our hair, moved on to our faces, spreading thick foundation with her fingertips onto our pimply foreheads, swiping blush on the apples of our cheeks, painting her trademark smoky eye onto our virginal eyelids. It’s easy to be pretty, she said, patting the makeup over every inch of my face, you just have to cover all the bad parts. 

When she was done, we turned to look at ourselves in the mirror, half-expecting that we made this all up, that we hadn’t been in the trance of her touch. But Stephanie had one long braid trailing down her back and I had two French pigtails, pulled forward to rest on my chest. And our faces. They were coated in her skin color, in her shimmer. We looked like different people, knock-off replicas of the coolest girl in school.

“See?” she said, admiring her work. “Now you’re beautiful.” 

It was the first time I felt seen by someone who mattered, and I didn’t care if it wasn’t really me who she was seeing, but instead, who I could be. 

*** 

Between the end of fourth grade and the beginning of fifth, all the white girls started shaving their legs. I never really understood why, they didn’t have much visible hair to begin with. Just flashes of blonde that you had to squint to see, their fingers pinching them tight under the fluorescent light.  

All the girls in the class would gather around the freshly shaven legs, running our palms on the silky surface of their knees and calves. The hair on my body starkly contrasted against their ivory skin– I was just too dark, too hairy. But my mother didn’t think it was time yet for me to learn how to use a razor. None of the girls in Uruguay started shaving until they were much older, she said. The other Latinas huddled in our own circles, pretending like we all weren’t wearing long pants, ignoring the chorus of feel them, they’re so soft! 

In the shower, I stared at my mother’s pink razor, at the power it held. Once, I even dared to run it against my upper thigh, enough to see small pieces of hair drift towards the bathtub floor, enough to see how easily this razor and that drain could make me one of them.

It wasn’t until sixth grade that my mother finally handed me my own pink razor, after months of pleading. Even after waiting for this day for so long, I found that I was afraid to shed my skin. I turned to my older sister, asked if she would help me. We shaved my legs together, each blade cutting away what I hoped would be the last of my insecurity. I finally understood the white girls afterwards; I wanted my smoothness to be felt, to be seen as soft. 

Years later, I lay in my high school boyfriend’s lap, watching the clouds float over the park. He looked at me intently, dark eyes scanning my face. 

“What is it?” I asked. I thought about my face, how I’d plucked my eyebrows just a few hours ago, covered up my pimples with concealer, tapped sparkles over my eyelids, made sure that my teeth were sparkling. Everything was in order; it had to be. I wanted him to think I was beautiful.

He smiled.

“It’s just that… I love your mustache. It’s cute.”

***

My white Converse were a tinted blue in the front seat of his car. I wiggled my feet, watched the lights under the glovebox cast shadows on the laces. 

It was the kind of car I would want if I let myself want it. 

Baby’s silver Benz. Smudge-less screen that told me how to find my way home, how to find my way away from it. Speakers that felt like the artist was whispering into my ear. Leather seats that never stopped smelling new, that made me feel kinda bad for dirtying them with coffee or sex. Little dial by the center console that switched the light to any color, that could cast a whole rainbow on some dirty old shoes. 

My mother’s first car was a used Ford Escort, small, practical, a vessel to beach and park trips on the weekend. It was a risk because we were still undocumented, uninsured, unrecognized as people in this country. But we had to go to school and work. So, she drove it carefully, two hands on the wheel, always staying in the same lane, tensing her knuckles when a cop was nearby, lowering the radio, asking us to stay still, stay quiet. 

Soon after, my sister’s first car was a wine-red Chevrolet Lumina, a used cop-car, graduation gift. The insides were a velvety felt, soft enough to make you want to go barefoot. Without papers, she couldn’t go to college, but she could secretly have this car, drive it cautiously, find freedom behind the wheel. 

Years later, my first car was a bug-eyed Nissan Juke, with over one hundred thousand miles, a whole life driven before my hands reached its cracked steering wheel. I named him Zamp, after the Olympic runner and prisoner of war, Louis Zamperini. He could run fast, he could survive, despite any obstacles. We were legal residents by then, but I still drove like my status could be taken with a single speeding ticket. 

This wasn’t his first car. But I remembered it. A white Benz, brand new that year, delivered directly to his high school hands. I’d sat in that one, too, full of feelings that I couldn’t quite place, strapped down by the seatbelt’s unwillingness to release. 

We were in a McDonald’s drive through trying to figure out what we meant to each other. The line was long, cars piling up for midnight snacks or attempts at momentary distractions. I should’ve been asking him if we were really just friends, if college had changed us, if he thought four years was enough time to admit how we felt, if he ever really had to wait for anything he wanted, but the line moved forward and the lights turned to blue and I stayed still, stayed quiet. 

A car cut in front of us from the other line. It was a clunker, an old station wagon, paint peeling, only seconds left under the hood. We weren’t close to hitting it, but he was angry now, laying on the horn, the red in his face and blue hue of the LEDs like a warning sign that I should be careful, even then, all those years later. 

He’d sat inside Zamp, on the peeled seats, looked past the stains to open the sunroof, poured his own bottled water on the windshield to make sure I could see, that I could always see what was in front of me. 

For him, all the Rain-X in the world wasn’t enough to see me. He knew exactly who he was sitting next to, but it didn’t matter, it never mattered, because his white face was furious, fuming, foaming at the mouth to say the words: I wonder who’s got the better insurance?

In that moment between wanting and getting, I saw my own reflection in his clear windshield, a blemished passenger on a rich boy’s leather, and I could see past it, at the clunker in front of us, just like the cars that got me here, and the person inside it, just like my mother, my sister, and I, proud of what he called junk, and what we called freedom. 

***

Some days, I wish I could go back to that day in the classroom. I’d stomp to the board, armed with a dry eraser, and get rid of every single letter of those words that resounded in my brain for most of my adolescence. Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?

I didn’t know. 

My life in this country was still fresh ink on a passport, a reminder that I barely belonged here. I wanted to fit in everywhere, to blend, yet still be seen as a person. Instead, I was pretending to be someone else, yearning to be the pretty, skinny, rich girl. If I was visible, it was because I was too fat, too hairy, too Latina. 

I’m an American citizen now, just a few years in. I held the certificate in my hands, a dream turned palpable, and yet, I didn’t feel any different or like I belonged any more than before. I realized I never would; I wasn’t meant to. 

I would be lying if I said it wasn’t hard, still, to find the balance between being seen too much and not enough. Sometimes, still, my voice feels small when I talk about myself, like if I’m quieter, I’ll be easier to digest. Sometimes, still, I text my best friend, I’m invisible, and I believe it, that I made this all up and I might disappear at any second, and then he texts back, No. You are the sun. 

The exam room graphs and crinkled paper, the sparkly makeup and braids, the pink razor and ivory skin, the boy and the Benz, they showed me not who I could be, but who I wasn’t. If I could go back, I’d stand tall in my Bratz shoes, understanding that the ticking on my Hello Kitty wrist was not time running out but moving forward, always forward, to the moments where I could tell the classroom, the country, the world, that I’m me, just me, and that should always, always, be enough.