Chapters (57)
“Excuse us.” The trio of heavyset women who’d been on the street were frowning magisterially at us. “Can you clean up your mess? We’d like to get into this hospital.”
We knelt down to clean up the flowers. The pot was plastic and had survived the fall. With a little help from the guard at the reception desk, who found me a brush, we got most of the dirt back in the pot and reorganized the flowers; they looked half dead, but I saw from the price sticker that Josie had got them at By-Smart for a dollar ninety-nine: you don’t get fresh, lively flowers for two bucks.
When we’d finished, I stared up at her thin face. “Josie, I can’t promise not to tell your mother if you’re going out with some older guy she doesn’t know or doesn’t approve of.”
“She knows him, she likes him, but she can’t—I can’t tell—you gotta promise—”
“Are you having sex with him?” I asked bluntly, as she floundered through unfinished sentences.
Red streaked her cheeks again. “No way!”
I pressed my lips together, thinking about her home, her mother’s second job, which would have to support the family now that Fly the Flag was gone, her sister’s baby, about Pastor Andrés and his strictures against birth control. “Josie, I will promise not to say anything to your mother for the time being if you make a promise to me.”
“What’s that?” she demanded, suspicious.
“Before you sleep with him, or with any boy, you must make him wear a condom.”
She turned an even darker shade of red. “But, Coach, I can’t—how can you—and the abstinence lady, she say they don’t even work.”
“She gave you bad advice, Josie. They aren’t a hundred percent effective, but they work most of the time. Do you want to end up like your sister Julia, watching telenovelas all day long? Or do you want to try for a life beyond babies, and clerking at By-Smart?”
Her eyes were wide and frightened, as if I’d offered her the choice between cutting off her head or talking to her mother. She had probably imagined passionate embraces, a wedding, anything but what it meant to lie with a boy. She looked at the door, at the floor, then suddenly bolted up the stairs into the interior of the hospital. I watched as a guard at the entrance stopped her, but when she looked back down at me I couldn’t bear the fear in her face. I turned on my heel and walked into the cold afternoon.