"Jessica R."
Jessica Rodriguez in first grade brown and thick-haired, the only Mexican girl I knew. But she didn’t speak Spanish like me and I am fair-skinned Cuban, so we wouldn’t have had that in common anyway. We were friends, though. Except for Jessica Schaffer, we were best friends. She had a cousin, Eleanor, who came to the school in 3rd grade and no one liked her at all.Jessica’s mother combed her hair in the mornings. I remember begging, bullying my mother into combing my hair into a bun once or twice during elementary school. The ponytails I made myself hung nappy at the nape of my neck in elastic bands that tangled the hair and ripped it out. Jessica’s black tresses were always glossy and held back by beautiful bows, up high and perfect. I wanted my ponytail to swing like hers.
Jessica Rodriguez in 4th grade spry and golden-voiced became a cheerleader after the audition I failed when a boot slipped out from under me and I fell. I still get mad and hot when I think about it.
She won a prize at the speech tournament every year with the same poem about an inchworm.
My bookish shyness kept me from even being friendly to boys. Jessica Rodriguez in the 6th grade thin and smiling becomes Matt Edmonds’ girlfriend, even though she knew how long and hard I’d cried about him. Matthew Edmonds, whose sister had picked up the phone 1,000 times and cursed angrily at my silence. Matthew Edmonds, for whom I bought my first Valentine’s gift: heart-shaped thumb tacks in a box that read "It’s tacky but true, I’m stuck on you!" Matthew Edmonds, who my sister named the Dalmatian after, being that she had to like all the same things as me. Matthew Edmonds, who my mother patiently consoled me over for seven years. Jessica Rodriguez, who was at all the slumber parties where his name was exclaimed gleefully as that of a future husband’s.
This held until she and I applied to the same and expensive, racist, private junior high. The junior high where my identity was altered to match whatever the need be, where my advanced vocabulary and lack of accent or pigmentation made all the difference. Where I was accepted. Where Jessica, no matter how thin, spry, and thick-haired, was turned away.
That’s how I like to remember her; rejected, for once.