Ultraviolet, p.1
Ultraviolet, page 1
PRAISE FOR ULTRAVIOLET
“Honest and poignant and intensely relatable. A true gift to maturing tweens everywhere.”
—Ernesto Cisneros,
AUTHOR OF THE PURA BELPRÉ AWARD WINNER Efrén divided
“Humorous, heartfelt, and beautifully written.”
—Randy Ribay,
AUTHOR OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST Patron Saints of Nothing
“Masterful and timely.”
—David Bowles,
AUTHOR OF THE PURA BELPRÉ HONOR BOOK They Call Me Güero
“A lyrical explosion.”
—Francisco X. Stork,
AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF I Am Not Alone
Title Page
Praise for Ultraviolet
Dedication
Ultraviolet
Irrational Fears
Knock Out
Straight Frozen
Camelia in the Light
So Alike
You Wanna Go Around?
The Firsts
Sucka Bump
Play Like a Man
Isn’t She Lovely?
Mocosa Sisters
Dinner Debate
Feminists
Jagged Spine Kiss
A New Way of Seeing
How to Walk into the Fire
Changes
Camelia and Me
Casa de Chocolates
Exhibit A
Word’s Out
Birds and the Bees
Seventh-Grade Sex Ed Class
Mr. Trejo’s Weird List of Sex Ed Topics for “Boys”
Where Gonads Go
Building Immunity
Growing Pains
Morning Rise
Hey, Body
Círculo, Mi’jo …
Oversharing Collision
The Couples’ Quad
Cheetos vs. Takis
Artwork Shine
Gram Bam Boom
Mr. Trejo Soul
Cockfights
Green Guy Aggressive
Code Word
Takedown
Blue Demon Message
The Group Chat
Así No Más
Laundry Land
Brick Load
Fernando’s Community Garden
Temazcal
Consent-O-Rama
When I’m Grown
Duck-Billed Platy-Creep
Mating Rituals
Friday with the Fellas
Puberty Stuffs
My Heart Song
Alive and Kicking
Feel-Better Bag
Whoosh Boom
Brothers Rise
Energies of the Body
Inside the Temazcal
A New Warrior
Wuss Out
With Who?
Corpse Silence
Chava Returns
More Than a Bee
Lovesick
Tender Rosie
Tapping Tita
Before Her Light
Wet Vac Clapback
The Winner Chat
Wildfire Red
Rotten Things
Can’t Shake It
Make Out
Volcanic Dark
Tearing
Broken
Grandpops’s Inheritance
Miserable Maybes
Group Chat Challenge
Double-Headed Lucha Libre Quarantine
Gram Ultraviolet
Paco on My Side?
Chava Baboso Face
Burning Comet
The Biggest Burn
Talking Mess Text
More Broken
Living Piano
Picture Love
Snitch Fever
The Man Circle
Let It Out
Puber-tea
More Fish in the Sea
Got Your Back
Dry Ice Pops
The Right Thing
The Moms Ambush
Fusing
Medicine Dream
Surveillance
FaceChat Forehead
Chancla Stomping
Chismoso
I Text Chava
Missed FaceChat
Early-Bird Butt Whoop
Square Up
Through Time
Winner?
The ER
The Loser
Car Cry
Check Myself
Open Heart
Busted Lip Circle
FaceChat Fumbles
Ultraviolet Song
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Fonts and More
About the Author
Copyright
Who invented love, anyway?
Had to be a girl, right?
Had to be.
’Cause I don’t get it.
Who can understand
the feeling of shimmering sol
that swallows anything smart
you wanna say
and tangles your blushing nerves
up inside your growling guts
so bad,
you almost wanna fart
so bad,
your skin turns all goose bumpy?
Just by looking at the
brown besos of her eyes,
the embers of her cheeks,
hearing the sound of her voice in the key of F
entering your ears,
taking root inside
the blob of your thirteen-year-old dude brain
and washing everything you see
with a reel of colors
beyond the spectrum
red,
orange,
yellow,
green,
blue,
indigo,
violet.
More than that.
Ultraviolet.
Glow-in-the-dark outrageous.
It’s what I see
when Camelia is around.
Is this what it feels like to be
in love?
Bees.
Abejas scare me rotten.
There, I said it.
I know. Of all the things
I could be afraid of, like
El Cucuy
the plague
earthquakes
La Llorona
fires.
It’s bees.
Tiny, hurt-nobody bees.
It’s the worst when a critter zooms by
because I lose all sense and wild jiggle
my whole body so it won’t sting me.
No, the worst is
when I’m around my boy, Paco.
Closest friend I have
my bud, my dude,
my “I got your back” kinda bro,
and a bee zim zams near me
forcing me to do the wild jiggle and run
’cause he laughs at me,
calls me a miedoso.
Stone-cold scaredy-cat.
And I have to hold myself back
from punching him on the arm
for him to quit it.
Just the thought
takes me right to the time I was six
swinging on the monkey bars.
I smashed a bee with my hand
against the metal.
I jumped off, my hand shooting streaks
of pain, turning on the siren of my wail
fire-engine red blasting through my boca.
It made Moms stop pushing my little sisters
on the swings and come running to me
with a
¿Qué pasa, Elio? ¿Mi’jo?
zigzagging
across her face.
My throbbing hand swelling,
my lips turning blue,
the weighted blow of pain
pulling me down to the ground
at Moms’s feet until
my face hit the sand.
Passed out. Stone-cold. Frío.
Then waking up a second later
just to keep crying
and pushing sand off my tongue
and Moms crying to see I’d come to,
and my sisters crying to see Moms crying,
my heart pounding louder than our cries,
all of us looking like a broken walnut—
tight, brown, and crumbled together.
The world spun so much I couldn’t see
the blue clouds and white sky
turn that moment into
what my pops calls an “irrational fear”
which I can’t get over
no matter what I do
to erase it.
Yeah, bees.
And my body growing
explosively like an Animorph
leaving purple Wolverine
stretch mark scratches
on my back and butt.
Puberty.
Wild and scary stuff.
And girls.
I used to be afraid of girls
until I met Camelia.
Eighth grade at
RISE UP STEM to STEAM Middle School
rolled around and everyone was coupling up.
Straight, gay, nonbinary, trans, artist kids,
STEM kids, band kids—didn’t matter.
The hormones were poppin’
I mean, everyone was down bad!
Joaquin and Teresita
Amanda and Christina
Mar and Azul
Danny and Juan.
Paco basically yelled as he pounced
on my shoulders while we walked
&nbs
Bro, it’s the first week of eighth grade!
Why is this even happening?
But that didn’t stop him.
Paco got to work scanning the halls
and before I knew it, he was chatting up Laurette
the güerita whose family is from Chihuahua.
A big cheesy grin and round eyes poppin’ outta
his mosquita muerta reddish-brown face.
Silly stupid happy.
No idea how he even learned
those moves.
Not me, I didn’t go looking.
I was too scared.
All this love stuff smacked me
on the jaw
like a good right hook
and knocked
me
out.
I was seriously minding my business.
I had just left my locker
with the machaca burrito
Pops packed for lunch
and was walking into the cafeteria
when I felt it.
The pull of watching eyes.
Sounds creepy, I know,
but it was less skin-crawly
and more, I don’t know, magnetic.
So obviously, I turned my sweaty head
and there she was
a girl with a blue streak
running through the front
of her short brown hair
with honey-hazel skin
and a face so bright and round
it looked like a gigantic sunflower
just staring.
She smiled at me and I froze
right in my tracks.
I wasn’t entirely sure if it was me
she was smiling at
but in case it was
I wasn’t going to move.
I mean, I couldn’t.
I didn’t even register Paco
who came barreling toward me asking,
So, you gonna split that machaca burrito with me or what?
I was straight frozen.
Like freeze-tag frozen.
If it hadn’t been for Paco
seeing how spaced out I was
and shoving me so hard
I crashed into a kid walking by,
I probably would still be there
completely helado.
Camelia was sitting
at the artsy-fartsy lunch table
where all the visual arts kids sit
holding a pencil
and an oversized sketchbook on her lap,
a yellow glow of light
bursting behind her.
My mind went racing
through all the possibilities.
Was she sketching me?
Was I annoying her?
Was this actually a stink eye?
Or was she just looking
beyond me
at the disheveled crop of
engineering and musician kids
sitting where I usually sit?
Then, she smiled.
It was one of those
too-good-to-be-true
sparkle-on-the-teeth
kind of smiles too.
Sunrays and everything.
I think my jaw
dropped open
because I was absolutely certain
she was smiling at me.
She couldn’t have been smiling at Paco,
who had his back to her
clueless that she was even there
and who by this time
was jumping all over me
stealing my burrito and laughing
with our friends—Luisito, Cheo, and Raul.
Camelia’s shining smile
was all the fuel I needed
to shoot him off me
and smile back.
Then, clearly still under her spell,
I made a beeline
for the open seat
right next to her.
Paco, Luisito, Cheo, and Raul
were yelling and trailing behind me:
Ooh, watch out, now!
Get to steppin’!
Scared of you!
Dale gas, fool!
It was steel-band loud.
Kaleidoscopic colors bounced
off the walls
but somehow, somehow,
the swirl of my world
settled into one
finite focal point
of glimmering quiet,
her
sweet
sunflower
face.
I may have tripped over
the first words
I ever said to her,
Uh, what are you drawing?
This manga called Witch Hat Atelier. You wanna see?
I answered with an idiotic,
Nice!
I peeked over her shoulder
to see she was a really good drawer.
Like super talented
and all that.
I heard someone snicker.
It was a broody, skinny kid
named Chava
sitting at the artsy-fartsy table
across from her.
Whatever.
Then she smiled again
and literally
my heart
shot out my chest
like an out-of-control
boomerang
and zoomed back
in three seconds.
No one ever explained
something so out of this world
could happen to me
and that one of those
hard-to-erase
irrational fears
would disappear
into the flash
of all her light.
Camelia is hella cool.
Like supremely beautiful and strange
in all the best ways.
I looked it up and it turns out,
she’s named after
a flower
and it shows.
A camellia is so strong
it takes two weeks to wilt when cut.
With Camelia everything is real.
The like-her-a-lot kinda feelings.
The maybe-it’s-love kinda feelings.
Ultraviolet feelings
that juke around my body
that turn on places in me
I didn’t know existed.
We marathon text after school
for three days straight
and I can confirm she is “the one”
based on these facts:
she prefers Marvel over DC
like me,
she’s done martial arts
like me,
she’s into hip-hop musicals
like me,
she takes no one’s mess,
well, except for the bees,
so sorta like me,
and she draws manga and anime
my absolute freakin’ favorite.
She can’t be more perfect.
She can’t.
Well, maybe if she played piano
like me,
but whatever,
she’s near perfection.
I wonder if the world has
turned ultraviolet
for her too?
I almost ask her
but then
I think twice.
Whoever heard of having your whole vision
change because you met some girl?
Except she isn’t some girl.
She is Camelia
whose flower name
makes it rain
ultraviolet.
Maybe it’s how
beauti-licious Camelia is
that makes any fears
scoot away.
Maybe it’s
the colors that fire off
when I see her.
Maybe because
I practiced a thousand times
in the mirror …
I dunno.
But something
swishing and swirling
around
inside me
gives me the guts
to walk right up
to Camelia’s artsy-fartsy table
today, on the fourth day of liking her,
pull her aside so we could be alone,
and ask her the question
I was hearing everyone
else asking the kids they liked …
Camelia, you wanna go around?
Huh? Around what?
She hadn’t gotten the memo. Oof.
I feel like a flaming
chicharrón all deep-fried and flaky.
You know, like go around, together?
You’ve lost me, Elio.
Camelia’s eyelids fall
like blinds
halfway down
a window.
I mean, I mean … would you like to be my girlfriend?
Ohhhh! That’s what that is? Um, yeah! I would!
she says, nodding wildly.
Then, she wraps
her arms
around
my neck
and squeeeezes me
so tightly
she chokes
the chicharrón
