The Flowers by Dagoberto Gilb Page A

didn’t have to listen harder, it just got louder. I wasn’t sure if I couldn’t make it out because it was in Spanish, or I wouldn’t have been able to hear it anyways, even if it were in English. I used to feel better about talking Spanish. My mom used to speak it a lot more, and I used to hang out withmy grandma, who didn’t speak English, and I could talk with my primos who lived there with my tíos, but that all stopped once Grandma died. I never saw my cousins no more after that either. And then my mom only talked Spanish when she had to, which mostly she didn’t have to, or maybe to say something to me in my ear when people were around. So I never spoke it either, never really tried. But I still could understand it, mostly, so I was listening.
    The Spanish came from where that girl lived, in #4, which was a two-bedroom. I’d seen her like twice, and one time was while I was sweeping and I saw them around the TV. I saw her through the screen and window so good it was like she leaked through the mesh. She looked back at me too. Since I never saw her where I went to school, I thought she might go to St. Xavier’s. I was sure she was my age, or close. She had a baby brother or sister who cried. Her family practically never went out, and she didn’t either, not even when they went grocery shopping. Her parents both worked at night, swing shift, and they always went together.
    The loud male voice up there, almost always yelling, didn’t really stop, just went from closer to farther away, but a radio came on, and it was steady, and though it wasn’t on very loud, it covered up the man’s voice, her dad. She was listening to the same station I liked, the hits station, so I like listened to it with her and imagined her listening next to me. I liked her. She would like me, she had to. She was really pretty. Uu-ee pretty, made my stomach do circles. Like I said, I saw her twice, and that one time I knew she saw me back.
    â€œYou just check her shit out,” one of the twins said. We were walking the tracks, going home slow, avoiding the worst grease puddles, kicking dented cans and throwing dirty rocks at them, seeing who could keep themselves balanced on top of the rail longest.“Look her up, look her down. Nod your head like a brother, like bad, you know?” He nodded his head slow, bobbing his head to the right, squinting his eyes, even though he had his glasses on.
    The other twin was polishing his glasses with the bottom of his white shirt. They both wore the same short-sleeve white shirts, no tails, ironed too, almost every day. It was almost like they had a Catholic uniform, but the color of the slacks changed, and the pants didn’t always match each other in style but the shoes were shined, both pairs black wingtips.
    â€œI think I’d be getting more worked up for la güera, bro,” he said.
    â€œWho you talking about?” his brother asked.
    â€œLa blondie,” he said, “who lives right upstairs from este Sonny. Remember he told us?”
    â€œOh yeah, that’s right!” his brother said, like it was all as easy as that, and then he turned to me. “You see her again yet?”
    They made me laugh all the time because they talked so smart but they were so fucking stupid. They knew as much about sex as they did these girls in the apartment building. I couldn’t believe I told them anything.
    Like, for instance, about the nudie magazine I ripped off from the mailbox. It’s because it came in a brown wrapper and I thought I would, you know, take it. It was sitting there, and nobody was around. The label was addressed to the man in #2, a one-bedroom. He was Ben and he lived with Gina and they pretended to be married and Cloyd told my mom he knew they were only shacking up. Cloyd didn’t care because they paid the rent on time and had professional jobs—he wore a suit and tie and left early. They were like