Salvation by Anne Osterlund Page B

guess. For people who are scared.”
    He kicked the wooden stand of another tree without thinking, then reached out to rescue it. More leaves tumbled. “Of what?” He found it really hard to believe that the jerk at the machine shop had been scared of Tosa’s father.
    “Of their own ignorance.”
    The tree trunk was vibrating.
She was right.
He knew she was right, though he’d never heard anyone put it that way before.
    “Who said it?” she asked.
    And the vibrating stopped. He realized he didn’t even know the name of the idiot.
    Sighing, Salva bent down to pick up the mess.
    She eased a garbage can, already half filled with discarded leaves, in his direction. “Tell me.”
    “You don’t want to hear about it.”
    “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”
    He stared at her. His mother had been like that. She’d never asked a question without wanting to know the answer. Beth—well—he didn’t have to impress her. And she didn’t come with all the baggage that was in his family. Plus, nothing was too “out there” or “over her head.” Or too deep. She seemed to operate on a plane of feeling.
    Salva stretched for a distant leaf, then found himself spilling: the details of the conversation in the machine shop, the thousand other times he’d heard that stupid comment aboutAmerica, and all his own logical arguments against it—that
America
included Latin America, that English was the native language of England, that no one who’d never learned a second language had the right to judge.
    “You’re right,” Beth said when he was done. No arguments. Or vacillations.
    He felt like he could breathe for the first time all day.
    She was silent for maybe a minute, then asked, “Have you read “Ending Poem” by Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales?”
    Random.
He wiped up the floor with the wet towel.
    “It’s by Puerto Rican writers,” she continued, “about celebrating all the cultures that make us who we are. It’s kind of awesome.”
    Which was so Beth. Telling him to read a poem. As if real people could just work out all their problems through literature. Like the characters in a book.
    Well, maybe not in the plays he’d been reading for AP English:
Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Othello.
Salva stood up and draped the soiled towel over the edge of the water fountain. Sometimes heroes didn’t solve anything. Sometimes they died.

11
REHEARSAL
    The young man in front of Beth, his hair tousled, shirt loose, taking out his vengeance on paper trees, was not the Salva she knew. Though she’d had fair warning. He had slammed his locker door, loudly, between first and second period. And
everyone
had stared.
    “Looks like something’s blown the god’s cool,” Ni had joked at the time.
    But Beth had been too consumed with disguising her own automatic desire to defend him to pay much heed. She knew Ni’s sarcasm came from a history of defending
her
after spending hours, in the eighth-grade girls’ bathroom, watching Beth cry her eyes out over Salva’s failure to notice her. Which was why Beth had failed to tell her best friend about the study sessions. For five and a half months.
    I should have been up front from the very beginning.
    There was so much about Salva that Beth wanted to discuss.
    His mother for one. He
never
spoke about her.
    In fact, he rarely talked about anyone in his family, though Beth remembered he had an older brother who had picked him up every day from elementary school. And she knew Salva also had three sisters, the eldest of whom, Lucia, had graduated from Liberty two years ago. And about whom, when asked if he saw her often, he’d replied, “Too often.”
    As for his younger sisters, he claimed they drove him batty, but Beth could tell he cared about them because he had bailed on her only twice this winter—once to see their music concert and once to pick up Talia when she had been sick.
    He didn’t talk about his father either, but in the essay for Yale, in which the applicant had