I was fresh out of high school and in love with Mom’s boyfriend Julian, he was the one who showed me how to play “Desperado” on the acoustic guitar when I was fourteen, how to reload his Glock without making me look like a loser, I was the one who had to sit on the couch and watch him and Mom neck like animals in rut from across the living room, or what could be sensibly called a living room in this single wide whose contractors must have thought it a good idea to dissect a space barely the size of a coffin into three rooms, into three smaller coffins, a coffin in which I would happily lie in, anywhere but that couch from where I could watch my mom and Julian watch each other with close interest, with that amplified awareness the hardest of drugs could lend the best of us, I would sit there on the passenger seat next to Julian some days and help him with those industrial-sized plastic casings he was paid to discard God knows how, I would help him change the gear like a magician’s assistant whenever he was busy rolling a spliff in the middle of the road, I would hold my breath and hope for a moment in which our hands would graze each other, our shoulders would touch base, our eyes would lock longer than a mere couple of seconds, anything but this limbo in which we did our best to preserve our integrity, our family bond, at least for a while, a bond that made us all go to the convenience store some nights and grab Potato Stix and Hot Fries for dinner, a bond that put me and Mom out of that apartment block in North Hollywood and out on the street after Dad died, a bond that had Julian and me stranded on the edge of my bed and kill some Nazis on my PlayStation 2 until the early hours of the morning, a bond that made him take me out on a ride in his baby blue Chevy Malibu every Tuesday night and drive around West Adams until we found a spot where we could simply park the car and start making out, until I went down on him and took his load in my mouth, until we returned home and simply pretended nothing had happened, until Mom returned home from her language class and showered us with all the new phrases she learned to impress her immigration officer, oblivious to the tension in the room, to this electricity jittering between me and Julian, between my bad complexion and his white skin, between me and his growing indifference after I told him I was pregnant, after I left home and got lost in the world, a world that got me and Mom and Dad and everyone I cared about all drenched in rainwater, a rain that would spare my baby and then go away.