If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go by Judy Chicurel Page A

smoking a joint with Cha-Cha and Raven out on the piazza. I didn’t love drugs as much as everyone else did; I was always too afraid I’d be the one who put the baby in the oven instead of the turkey, like the Thanksgiving babysitter did while she was tripping. I was on the verge of walking over to the station to catch a bus back down to Comanche Street when I heard behind me “Katharine?” I paid only half attention because nobody called me Katharine, not even my grandmother, and I was named for her. But then I saw someone coming into the alley fromthe side panels of the Pancake Heaven. He began walking toward me. “Katharine, is that you?”
    I only recognized him by his eyes, huge and dark and liquid, like they’d been poured into his face. I walked toward him and said, “Ramone?” When he leaned forward to kiss my cheek, I was surprised. We hadn’t spoken in years. When he hugged me, I caught a whiff of something sly and humid.
    “Been a long time, man.”
    “For sure,” I said, looking down at his feet. In summer, a lot of people went barefoot in Elephant Beach, but not in the center of town, where the pavement was tar-stained and dirty and littered with glass. Ramone’s feet were filthy, the toenails yellow, cracked. They looked like the feet of an old man, even though he was only eighteen years old, the same age as me. His once thick, curly black hair was now lank and stringy, tied back from his face with a blue bandanna.
    His shirtsleeves were floppy at the wrists. Nobody wore long sleeves in summer, unless they were trying to hide something.
    “How’s Ophelia?” I asked.
    Ramone nodded, smiling. “Fat,” he said. “
Gordita.
Third kid on the way.” Then he asked, “What you waiting on?”
    “My friends,” I said.
    He laughed. “That’s what they all say.”
    “No, really, I—” And then it came to me. Ramone walking out of those side panels, into the alley. I whispered, “So you—you’re the—”
    “I work for my brother now,” he said. “You remember Eddie?”
    “Sure, I remember Eddie,” I said. Eddie Lopez had at one time been the town track star. So good-looking, everyone was in love with him. My babysitter, Susie Rickman, showed me her yearbook one night when she let me stay up late to watch
Saturday Night at the Movies
. I was around eleven at the time and she was sixteen. She showed me the pages where people were voted Most Congenial, Best Dressed. Then she pointed to the Most Athletic couple and sighed. “That’s Eddie Lopez,” she said.“He’s the first Puerto Rican to ever be voted in for anything. Isn’t he gorgeous?”
    I stared at the picture. “That’s Ophelia’s cousin,” I said. “He drives us to the kickball games in her uncle Manuel’s truck.” Sometimes Uncle Manuel drove us to the games at other elementary schools, but on the days that Eddie drove us, everyone was quiet while he sang along to the radio. When he helped us down from the back of the truck, we demurely murmured, “Thank you,” afraid to look at him. He always smiled that famous Lopez smile, riddled with dimples. “Break a leg,” he’d call as we walked toward the playing field. Then he’d honk the horn as he backed out of the parking lot and yell, “Only kidding!
Buena suerte, chicas!
Good luck!” before driving off to his gardening job.
    Susie nodded. “He was going out with Stephanie Clayborn, they were so cute together. She told her parents he was Italian, you know, he’s so light-skinned, she thought they could get away with it, but then they heard him speaking Spanish one day and flipped out. They told her if she didn’t stop seeing him, they wouldn’t pay for college. What was she gonna do? Then he was supposed to get a scholarship to one of the state schools, Cortland, I think, that’s where all the jocks go, but something messed up and he didn’t get it.” She closed the yearbook and began rooting around in her purse for her cigarettes.
    “What messed up?” I