Jumped In by Patrick Flores-Scott Page B

a quick scan.
    Then he leans in to me—dead serious—and he whispers, “Meet me after school. We’ll walk over to my place and write the poem there. We’ll have the weekend to get it on paper and two weeks to rehearse. The only way I’m doing this is if we completely kick ass on the eighth. It’s the only way.”
    â€œOkay.”
    Okay?
    As soon as the word tumbles out, blood rushes to my head and I’m squeezing a dry heave.
    â€œYou all right?” he asks.
    I hold my stomach and lean my head on my desk. I barely get out an “uh-huh.”
    â€œI’ll see you after school then,” he says.

 
    SCARED
    I DO IT .
    I meet him after school.
    I go because I’m too scared not to.
    But being scared is only 99 percent of the reason why I join Luis after school.
    The other 1 percent doesn’t have much to do with fear at all.
    The 1 percent is made up of the following:
    a) I’m bored.
    b) Too many old people.
    c) Curiosity.
    Let’s take these in order:
    For starters, I’m so bored I can’t stand it. I gotta do something! This is the first time I’ve felt like doing anything in forever. And that’s huge, because my level of boredom has been unprecedented. I’ve been so bored I don’t feel like anything can be not boring. Eating, watching TV, going fishing … even listening to Nirvana.
    I know there’s more to life than this pile of blah and sometimes I convince myself to get out there and look for it. But I just can’t make the move. I can’t start.
    I can’t begin to start trying.
    Until now.
    I don’t know why. I don’t know what it is, but there’s this little piece of me that wants to do something about it.
    To try and get my ass moving.
    The next part of the 1 percent: I’m spending too much time with too many old people. No offense to Ginny and Bill, but I’d like to hang out with someone who doesn’t have her hair dyed bluish, or someone who doesn’t have more hair growing out of his ears and nose than the top of his head. And it’d be nice to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t start sentences with “I remember when I was your age,” followed by a firsthand account of plowing the fields behind a mule or joining Pa to take up arms against the British in the fucking Revolutionary War!
    The third and final portion of the 1 percent is curiosity.
    I’m curious about Luis.
    I wanna know what Luis is like. I mean, I thought I knew what he was like. I thought he was someone who wouldn’t write a poem for stupid Cassidy. I don’t know why, but I wanna know. And I’m curious to see where a kid like him lives. How he lives.
    The fear of what Luis would do to me if I don’t meet him is so big that this 1 percent of stuff doesn’t even matter. I’d be meeting Luis if the 1 percent didn’t exist.
    But it does.

 
    NOT GETTING EXCITED ABOUT WRITING POETRY
    I MEET HIM OUT IN FRONT OF SCHOOL AFTER THE BELL RINGS .
    None of his cholo friends are there.
    No Carlos.
    We start walking without a word between us. I’m freaking out on the inside, and I try to convince myself that I can back out later.
    Could I back out?
    What would he do if I did?
    Okay, maybe I can’t back out, but frankly, after what I’ve seen from Luis in class, I figure he won’t have the guts to go through with this either.
    Luis’s apartment is a hike from Puget High School.
    We walk up the hill a few blocks through the quiet, woodsy neighborhood that abruptly erupts into sleazy Pac Highway. Past a casino, a junkyard, an adult video shop, a drugstore, a 7-Eleven, a Taco Bell, and some old motels. We turn up the hill, east to the Viking Glen.
    The Viking Glen is a typical boxy, gloomy beige, run-down apartment complex. We make our way around a plastic kids’ slide, a couple bikes with training wheels, a Little Mermaid wading pool full of dirty