The day I met him...
It was just like any other day, in which all I could do was think about how much I hated the fact that my sort-of-boyfriend, Fernando, was miles away from me. The occasional phone calls and texts were no longer enough to make me feel like the repercussions of a long distance relationship were worth it. We weren't seriously in love or anything, but at fourteen years-old we swore to each other that we were. And to make things worse, last night on his birthday the most I could do to “celebrate” with him was buying an $100 peso prepaid cell phone card to call him and hope that our conversation would be able to last more than thirty minutes before getting cut; to my dismay, it only lasted about twenty.
School was sort of my only escape from that reality. Spending time with my friends and classmates really helped me set my mind off from my personal struggles and just let me have fun. Remarkably, on this day we were randomly let out early in honor of my English teacher’s retirement. I was, as I imagine everyone was, so happy to get out early and spend time with my best friends, Vero and Zugey. We decided to take a stroll around the town, a usual activity of ours, and just talk about everything. I began to tell them about my problems with Fernando. As I spoke, Zugey wasted no time to criticize the fact that he was not that attractive, and even decided to impose her belief that all the boyfriends I had prior to him were also very ugly. She claimed that it didn’t make sense that being that I was “so pretty”, I only seemed to only go for the unattractive guys. Despite that half of what she said seems like it is a compliment, it felt more like a slap in the face than anything else.
Luckily, the topic of discussion shifted to Zugey and the guy that currently liked her. This discussion came up because Vero pointed out that we were headed toward the area where the guy lived. I had never seen this boy before, but Vero and Zugey spoke horribly about his appearance. So obviously I had a major interest in seeing how bad this boy really was. Vero suggested that Zugey should go to his house and visit him so that she could make his day. However, Zugey was not having it. She, in turn, suggested we go another direction, all the while continuing to walk toward his house.
Right before passing his house, we spotted our friend from class, Alonso. He saw us and automatically made his way toward us. He right away asked why were walking around the “Dieciseis” (which was the name of the barrio we were in). Vero told him that Zugey wanted to come to say “Hi” to Choki, the Zugey's admirer's nickname. He got so excited for some reason, and then told her he would go tell him to come out so that she could talk to him. He was about to go when all of a sudden he turned around and told me that he would bring me some guy they called, “El Chino”. I right away pictured a extreme beaner looking guy (thanks to all the horrible things Vero and Zugey would say about Choki), and so I told him I would prefer that he didn't bring me anyone. He completely ignored me and left. I started to freak out; I didn't want someone to see me with some random guy, assume things, and then call Fernando to tell him. So I told Vero and Zugey I didn’t want to meet the supposed “Chino” guy, and asked if we could leave. Zugey told me that we were weren’t going anywhere because it would be "rude" to just leave Alonso (She liked him during this time, so that was probably why she didn’t want to leave). She also reassured me that the “Chino” guy wasn’t bad looking, but I really didn’t care. We waited for about 20 minutes when Alonso finally came back. He was alone, and I right away thought that I was saved. But then he told us that he had already gone to tell them that we were waiting for them, but that they had just gotten out of work so they needed to take a shower and get cleaned up. I couldn't of been more disappointed.
Quite a bit of time passed, just talking to Alonso about random things, that I had forgotten about the other guys coming. Then suddenly, he said he was going to check up on the guys to see if they were ready. Right when he left, my dad called me and asked me where I was because he was waiting at my grandma's house to pick me up. I lied and said I was far away, when actually I was only a few blocks down from her house; I don’t even know why I lied when what I thought I wanted was to leave. Once I hung up, I told Vero and Zugey that we needed to leave soon, and they were kind of hesitant about it at first but then complied. Vero and I tried looking for Alonso at the bottom of the road, when out of nowhere we heard some one say, “A quien buscan?”(who are you looking for). We turned around, and because the sun was setting, the light only allowed us to see the four dark bodies coming toward us. We obviously knew who they were, but for some reason, it completely freaked us out to the point where we literally ran away from them to the other side of the street while yelling that we had to go.
Once we got to the other side, out of breathe and recuperating from that terrible yet strange scare, we began to laugh at ourselves. We thought we were done with them when, all of a sudden, we saw the same four bodies come out of the corner of the top of the street, but this time you could see their faces. And that’s when it happened, the first time I saw Chino. No one had to tell me which one of the four he was, I didn’t even really look at the others. My eyes instantly met his; and in that first moment, I felt it. I can even really describe what "it" was, but it certainly wasn't like anything I had ever felt before and yet something inside me, from that first moment, knew exactly what it was and what it would become. In other words, I knew he was someone special, different from anyone else I had ever seen before. He and I locked eyes for some time until we were formally introduced by Alonso. His first words to me were, “Mucho Gusto, soy Edgar” (Nice to meet you, I’m Edgar), he got my hand and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I was pretty much in a paralyzed state when this all happened, so much so that I could't make out one word, let alone even move.
After all the initial excitement kind of cooled down, I was able to somewhat relax. We separated from the group and began talking; mortifyingly, the first thing he asked me was why we had ran away from them. I just told him that it was because my dad had called me and that he told me I had to leave, although this was somewhat true, he didn’t really buy it. Zugey decided to ignore Choki and interrupt us and start up a whole conversation with Chino by telling him that she liked his hair. He pretty much tried to get her to pay attention to Choki, because he would ask her why she didn’t compliment HIM. She rudely said that there wasn’t anything to compliment about him. I felt so bad for the poor kid, although, from what I was seeing he really didn’t have many good physical qualities, but that wasn't an excuse for her to be so mean, least of all to his face. But she didn’t care, it was so easy to realize that she didn’t want to be with him, she wanted to be in my place talking to Chino. So because of this, she tried to sabotage our conversation by bringing up embarressing things about me and stating the obvious fact that I was super nervous. However, to her dismay, he didn’t care about the bad things she had to say about me. He seemed very eager to continue a conversation with just me, rather than with her included.
After miraculously getting her out of our conversation, we began to just talk about random things like school and Alonso. Alonso was an easy topic because, beside the fact that he introduced us, he was a good friend of both of ours. I kind of put out there that he liked to aggressively flirt with me, and so he said he was going to beat him up for doing that, even though I knew it wasn’t true I thought that it was sort of sweet.
Within those first few minutes of meeting him, I was so into him that I had completely forgotten that my dad was waiting for me to get to my grandma’s house. I realized this when he called me, again. I looked so retarded smiling like a freak while my dad was clearly and loudly yelling at me through the phone, but I really didn’t care in that moment; I was completely and utterly concentrated on Chino, and I did not want to leave. But I basically had no choice, he seemed sincerely sad that I had to leave and that made me want to stay even more. So I ignored the fact that I had to leave once again, until my “loyal” friend, Zugey decided to interrupt once again to tell me we needed to leave. That time I had no choice. So I said bye to him, not knowing when I would see him again; I didn't really think about it in the moment, but something inside me must have known that it would not be the last time.
On the minor walk to my Mama Lola’s house, Zugey began to ask me a bunch of questions, like what I thought about Chino and what we talked about. I didn’t say much, because I didn’t really know how to describe all the amazing and unexplainable things I felt being with him. I pretty much lied, and said that he was nothing special. But the truth of the matter was that he couldn’t of been more perfect. Although i didn’t want to tell my friends, I was so thankful that I didn’t leave early and that I had got to meet him. The entire rest of the night I couldn’t do anything else but think about the impression he left on me. For the first time in a very long time, I felt sincerely happy. I didn’t care about what would happen if Fernando found out I was with him or not, all I knew was that I would never ever look at that grocery store on the corner of 16 de Septiembre and Reforma the same ever again.
