The Smart Starts! curriculum is mainly an exercise in record keeping. In journals and planners and charts, the girls record not just their exercise, but also their consumption of prenatal vitamins, their day-to-day feelings. Each day they note their highlights and lowlights, Peaches and Pits. Those who have given birth record their babies’ feedings and bowel movements and naps, and those who haven’t record their own feedings and bowel movements and naps.
“It’s about being mindful,” Brianna tells the class. “It’s about becoming aware of how you’re actually living your life so you can make the conscious choices necessary to live the life you want.” She sits on the edge of her desk, knocking the heels of her big hiking sandals against the side. Those hiking sandals are one of many things Angel likes about Brianna. Their clunkiness makes her look small and tough and somehow very feminine.
Brianna. One of the prettiest names Angel has heard. She’s never had a teacher who used her first name with students, and the fact that Brianna does makes her approachable and modern and, if anything, more worthy of respect. She grew up in Oregon, she’s told them, which Angel imagines as a lush green Eden filled with burbling creeks and open, loving people. Around her teacher, Angel truly is her best self: hardworking, good, nearly innocent.
At home—at her mom’s house—Angel varied her walking route as much as possible. You see a lot, walking through Espa?ola, and not just the low, brown Rio Grande making its slow way out of town. Once she saw a white-clad Anglo Sikh woman with blond eyebrows pause in her telephone conversation to vomit into the gutter. “I’m back,” she said when she was done, straightening her turban. Another time a man reeled around the parking lot of the Jade Star restaurant, yelling at passersby, perplexingly, “I want to get my rock salt!” Sometimes she passes addicts, slumped docile and unseeing behind this or that building, drowning in their fixes, but Angel gives them a wide berth. Once one looked up at her imploringly. “Hey,” he said, defeated. Outside the public library one afternoon, she even came upon a whole dog circus run by a rescue organization and got to watch terriers in tutus leaping through rings and driving toy cars and balancing on one another’s backs. It was an amazing showcase of talent—and to think that once they’d been nobodies sitting in a pound, just waiting around to be put to death.
Way out here, though, there’s just dry pi?on and clumpy grass and short withered cactus, occasionally rabbits or quail, and the single road curving through the hills. Strange that with all this open land stretching around her, her path should be so much more restricted than in Espa?ola. Turn right at the end of the driveway, and the cracked asphalt soon gives way to dirt and then ends completely. Turn left, and a mile or so later you’re in the sad little village of Las Penas.
Most of the families out here have been on the same land for hundreds of years. Trailers and newer cinderblock structures are wedged into yards alongside crumbling adobe ruins. Some families, like the Romeros, continue to farm small plots of corn and squash and chile, irrigated by acequias, the straight green rows defiant in the face of discount Walmart food. The same few surnames: Padilla, Martinez, Trujillo, Garcia. Marriage and intermarriage like shuffling the same deck of cards.
Sometimes Angel can see what the Anglo artists see in the landscape. Here, in the fore, the young corn plants wave new-green leaves. A ground squirrel sits tall, then lowers his head to scratch with two dainty hands at a spot on his chest. Above, as though painted, the mountains rise, blue and golden.
All this beauty. Also underfunded public schools, dry winters, a falling water table, shitty job prospects. Mostly what people have now is cheap heroin. “It’s genocide, and we’re doing it to ourselves,” Mrs. Lujan, Angel’s English teacher said last year, tears in her eyes after another of her students—a junior Angel only knew by sight—had overdosed. “Please, please, please,” she begged the class. “Please don’t do it.”
Angel was, frankly, aghast to find only her dad here, and even given her woefully low expectations of him, he has still managed to disappoint her. He couldn’t even get up to take her to school? Was he really so busy being unemployed? What had Angel thought—that he’d have any interest in literally anything other than himself? It’s crazy how wrapped up he is in this penitente thing. Every night he has to go pray the Rosary, he told her yesterday.