La Reina Se Queda Reina

[Brackie]

Today was not a good day for Sandy Ibarra.

For one thing, Dad was making a long haul delivery to California, so he wasn't going to be home for a few days. For another, Mom was sleeping at the hospital because she kept on taking other nurse's shifts and didn't have time to come home. Alexis and Daniella were starting to have nights where they wouldn't come home until way after bedtime, and when he tried confronting them about that before school this morning they pretended like he was made of drywall, so that was one more thing. So he was responsible for four children, half of whom were entering a phase where they no longer wanted him in their life because they thought they knew everything. Alberto sure as hell wasn't going to help, he pretty much gave up after Sandy's resounding success in his eyes.

On top of that, he'd failed today's Calculus pop quiz. Sandy knew he'd been falling behind, but it just shocked him by how much he was. He was convinced Phillips had it out for him, hell he was convinced every teacher at this damn school had it out for him, but there was a small part of him that wasn't in denial, and knew he'd fucked up.

But that wasn't the worst part, no. He could have dealt with all of that if he'd just been able to get to soccer practice this afternoon. Lo and behold, miracle rain. If this were any other school in the country the team would have been out there practicing right now, but Coach Moore was a goddamn pussy and suddenly practice was cancelled. He'd been pretty vocal about the fact that Scott or him or whoever the fuck else weren't going to disappear into the mud if they just practice while it was raining, but obviously, the teachers still had it out for him, so his cries were ignored.

So that's why it was a particularly bad moment for a particularly uncoordinated freshman to accidentally bump into Sandy while he was piling things into his locker, because Sandy's head snapped towards the intrusion upon his personal space and flew towards it like a heat-seeking missile.

"The FUCK you think you're walking, kid!"

Sandy pushed the 15-year-old and he toppled over, the belongings in his hands flying everywhere over the linoleum floor. And to top it all off, it was Reo. Of course it was Reo, the kid whose parents couldn't even give him a subtle name, he had to broadcast his whole Japanese thing over the school. Which of course made him a target for Sandy's friends, and by extension Sandy himself. Sandy didn't have anything particularly against Reo, but Reo didn't make things easy by refusing to fight back and just looking terrified all the time. He didn't know how this kid was going to survive as an adult if he couldn't even stand up for himself as a kid.

Of course, he had a role to play, since there were people around, so he slipped the mask back on.

"I-I-I-sorry Sand-"

"You bet your fucking ass you're sorry, now get the fuck out of here!"

"B-Bu-But my things-"

"I SAID BEAT IT!"

And just like that, Reo ran, leaving numerous papers and homework sheets behind him. Sandy wasn't sure how he was going to hand his homework in now, but if it was any less of his problem it would be on a different continent.

He trudged back to his locker, re-opened his bag, and put back his last book. The day wasn't even over - he had essays due tomorrow he needed to finish tonight, he had to make dinner for Stevan and Yiandro, and not to mention how he had to keep the phone close just in case Alexis and Daniella needed help because he sure as hell had no idea what they were doing and the only way he was going to find out was an emergency phone call.

Sandy had no idea his afternoon was going to be even more troublesome.

[MurderWeasel]

((Mina Mashall continued from The Odd Couple))

The unseasonable rain suited Mina's mood and the scowl she wore as she slipped her way through the halls. The gloomy, overcast day was bringing everyone down, and that made Mina just a little bit happier, in a cloudy sort of way. She was more or less keeping her head down on her way out, though she was moving against the general flow of traffic; her locker was in the far reaches of the school, maybe by chance, maybe the system taking its quiet revenge for her past transgressions or trying to limit the destruction she could wreak between classes by making her walk further. Mina had considered moving to a more backpack-based mode of conveying her papers and books, but didn't like how it looked or felt, so she coped. Right now, she was going to retrieve some work to take home and maybe or maybe not complete.

That all slid to the side a bit, however, when a momentary gap in the mass of students revealed a familiar tableau playing out about twenty feet ahead. She saw the little Asian freshman bump into Sandy, heard the shouts and felt the impact. The boy scrambled away, leaving his papers strewn across the hall, and Sandy turned back to whatever he was doing, which was clearly not even close to the spill. That was predictable enough; it was habitual retaliation. As the freshman darted past Mina, she turned to say something to him, but he wasn't paying attention or slowing down. She didn't even get a good look at his face. She couldn't tell if there were tears in his eyes.

Her expression and demeanor managed to darken. As she reached the papers, she knelt and gathered them up, smoothing a few that had already been trodden upon. She took a quick glance at them, tried to remember her own voyage through these classes, gave up.

And there was Sandy still, up ahead at his locker like nothing had happened. Mina shuffled the papers into a more ordered sort of stack as she moved towards the boy, her original destination on hold for the moment. It would keep. Something tightened in her and she felt herself straighten up. She saw purple and blood.

She came to a stop to the side of Sandy's locker and just watched the boy for a second or two. He was handsome, good face, smart clothes, nice long hair, and if he wasn't an absolute tool Mina might've found him quite interesting indeed. As it was, he drew her attention for rather different reasons, and everything that could have drawn her to him under different circumstances repulsed her all the more.

"That wasn't nice," she said, finally announcing her presence.

[Brackie]

Sandy didn't notice Mina until it was already too late to avoid her. He was grabbing the various books he'd need for the essays tonight, and once he was done he closed the locker and noticed her standing right there.

Mina Mashall. His friends talked about her all the time, never in a flattering light. A busybody, a troublemaker, a traitor, the story varied from person to person but she was bad news for anyone who didn't feel like having their head talked off, which happened to be Sandy right now. Looking her up and down, she wasn't even anything worth looking at. If she was attractive, maybe he could hear her out then change her mind then maybe get into her pants, but she wasn't even hot so what was the point? Wasted effort, if you asked Sandy.

Still, maybe he could entertain her for a while. If "that wasn't nice" was the best she could do as an opener, then Mina was someone who could be put in her place. Everyone had their place, and Mina's was below him, in any meaning of the phrase.

"Life's not nice, chica. If it were it'd be a game. Best the freshmen learn it now instead of later, right?"

He slipped his books into his bag and slung it over his shoulder.

"Don't see how it's any of your business anyway."

[MurderWeasel]

"Lots of things are my business," Mina said. "You'd be surprised."

His tone was so blase it managed to deepen her scowl. At first she'd thought he was putting on a show or venting steam, but now the theory was leaning towards a cruelty so casual as to be wholly unremarkable to Sandy. She shouldn't have been surprised. She knew about him, knew his reputation, could label him a narcissist fairly comfortably from a distance, and yet at this precise moment it still took her slightly aback. And at the same time, it faded into nothingness to those around them. The flow of foot traffic in the hall had more or less resumed. Casual conversation among their peers had picked back up. No more glances came her way than usual.

"I thought we could talk a little," she said. Her fingers tightened on the papers, but she made sure not to crease them.

It was a statement weak enough that he could try to brush her off, but Mina wasn't too concerned about that; it wasn't like Sandy could really go anywhere she couldn't follow him—not without actively fleeing or ducking into the restroom, and if he did that she could keep him prisoner or force a return to conversation by milling around outside. She was willing to play this easy at first, if for no other reason then to improve the impact of the inevitable escalation.

[Brackie]

Sandy knew of how Mina worked. He'd never directly had a full conversation with her in all their shared time together at school, but one tended to compare notes when certain people pop up in their lives. He was anticipating this, and it wasn't like he could really do anything to avoid the inevitable. And considering he still had siblings to take care of at home, siblings who weren't allowed to use the stove yet and would otherwise miss dinner, he might as well get it over with.

The boy raised his left eyebrow during his pause, looking Mina up and down again. Sandy was certain to a fault that Mina couldn't shake him in any capacity.

"Might as well."

Even as he leaned against the locker, he still towered over Mina, in every sense of the word "towered". If she talked shit, she was getting hit.

"Don't keep me too long. Got important shit to take care of, and ain't none of that involves you being there, so."

[MurderWeasel]

"If you're in such a hurry, maybe you shouldn't fuck other people over," Mina said. "Then I'd have no reason to be here."

She shrugged. Sandy was big but not particularly scary to her. Most people weren't all that scary to Mina, especially the government's lapdog bullies. She knew the system inside and out—in several meanings of the phrase, at that—and she knew exactly how to drag others down to her level, and then she had home court advantage. She'd heard what Charlie got, and it still filled her with that melded pride and anger and shame. And Charlie, Charlie had self control. Mina had needed to say a lot to get Charlie to inflict what Sandy had upon that freshman without a thought.

He was leaning against his locker like he didn't have a care in the world, and that burned a little more in Mina, and she decided there was no need to beat around the bush here.

"Doesn't it make you feel bad?" she asked.

[Brackie]

Sandy knew Mina's angle from the moment the invisible question mark left her lips. Usually if someone was interrogating him about this particular topic, they weren't so white. In his world, white people didn't care about the shit he did - they looked, they nodded, they approved, but they never seemed to object. He'd get some nosy junior who was actually smart enough to recognize the Cuban in his eyes or hair or face or posture, but he'd play dumb.

Something told him he couldn't do the same thing with Mina, but he might as well try.

"Don't remember ever feeling bad. Why?"

He paused slightly, following it up.

"I mean, way I see it, some people need to know their place, and it doesn't happen without a guiding hand."

Sandy glanced back to the hallway where the notes now in Mina's hands were once scattered. He didn't know where the kid was now, but either way it was no longer his problem, at least once Mina fucked off.

"Maybe now he'll watch where he's going and not run into people in the hallway. I think you can agree it's pretty rude."

[MurderWeasel]

"Yeah," Mina said. "It is pretty rude. Maybe we actually are on the same page."

That wasn't exclusively rhetoric. Sandy's point, framed how he'd framed it, was something Mina could really understand in a way she doubted even he could. Certainly, he must not have considered the implications, or else he judged her too stupid to catch on.

"It's just," she continued, "shoving people and refusing to accept their apologies, that's even ruder. So I guess I'm the guiding hand to show you your place."

She felt herself centering, her breath turning long and deep, the corners of her lips threatening to lift into the smile that had once been so natural. They both knew the score here. That was, of course, what this was about. Just as Mina had cast aside who she once was, so too had Sandy done his damnedest to bury his origins. He borrowed the vocabulary and the attitude and the confidence of the All-American patriot, but no matter how fervently he wished it, the clothes would never fit perfectly in the eyes of his chosen compatriots. Mina's scorn ran hot because she knew how easy it was to blend in, to ignore the little pangs of conscience and to accept the way of things as static because you were at the top, and yet she'd come to understand just how wrong it was and had turned away, even starting as she did in the very core of the problem. For Sandy, an outsider, to choose to sell his fellows down the river because he happened to have a bit less melanin, well, that required the conscious and active embracing of injustice for personal benefit.

And still he'd never quite get what he wanted.

Mina shrugged.

"Just how the world works," she said, "right, Ibarra?"

[Brackie]

There was a fair bit to get through with the ammo Mina launched at him, on various levels. Sandy could have been wrong, but he took her in this moment as someone who fought for truth, someone who actually cared about the people their country forgot, like everyone in Sandy's family and the various kids in these halls. Someone Sandy would have actually gotten to know in another life or another universe, outside of the snide asides shared by chance.

But there was no time for the mask to fall, and this was as an important time as any to keep it sealed to Sandy's face. He took a moment to recover from the shot echoing across his bow, glancing his eyes around the hall at the various students going about their afternoon and not as focused on the conversation as they should have been.

"You could say that."

You wanna play, Mina?

"Could probably say it less weird, though. Didn't take you as someone who called people by their last name. Thought you weren't about the whole army thing."

Let's play.

[MurderWeasel]

Mina shrugged.

"Not really, no. I better get used to it if it's gonna be the rest of my life, though."

Sandy was trying to get at her, she thought, to needle her and hurt her, to counterattack, but his weapon was an implication that was untrue, and that didn't nettle Mina all that much. He didn't believe she was some goose-stepping drone, and she didn't believe it either, so the accusation was nothing but a puff of smoke. She didn't totally understand why people got so astoundingly angry about the absurd; she used the tendency, sure, accused Charlie of fucking her dad to get a reaction, but why did that even provoke anything but laughter? Lies only hurt Mina if they bore consequences. What was dangerous was what was real.

And so, at the same time she brushed off Sandy's shot, she took the opportunity to offer something up, to pull up an insecurity and a fear and throw it right at the boys feet, because what could he do about it now? Say she was going to be a nothing grunt, waste her life indentured for the indiscretions she knew better than to commit? Too late. Mina had already said it herself. She did this sometimes, tapped into the roiling writhing uncertainty that crept behind her in quiet moments, reached deep into the murk and caught something slimy and pulled it out, because what was there to be be afraid of by comparison? Who could possibly hurt her worse than she hurt herself?

Sandy's attention was scattered. He seemed on edge. Mina, by contrast, was feeling pretty good now. She was finding stability, calm, the same righteous apathy towards her future she carried on her adventures with the law.

"No time like the present to practice," she said without missing a beat. "It takes a lot of practice to pretend you're something you're not, huh?"