Shut Up, This Is Serious

by Carolina Ixta

Genres: YA Coming of Age; YA Contemporary; YA Social Themes

Synopsis

An unforgettable YA debut about two Latina teens growing up in East Oakland as they discover that the world is brimming with messy complexities, perfect for fans of Elizabeth Acevedo and Erika L. Sánchez.

Belén Dolores Itzel del Toro wants the normal stuff: to experience love or maybe have a boyfriend or at least just lose her virginity. But nothing is normal in East Oakland. Her father left her family. She’s at risk of not graduating. And Leti, her super-Catholic, nerdy-ass best friend, is pregnant—by the boyfriend she hasn’t told her parents about, because he’s Black, and her parents are racist.

Things are hella complicated.

Weighed by a depression she can’t seem to shake, Belén helps Leti, hangs out with an older guy, and cuts a lot of class. She soon realizes, though, that distractions are only temporary. Leti is becoming a mother. Classmates are getting ready for college. But what about Belén? What future is there for girls like her? 

From debut author Carolina Ixta comes a fierce, intimate examination of friendship, chosen family, and the generational cycles we must break to become our truest selves.

 

Release date: January 9, 2024

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 368

Sample

Autumn

 

One

IF YOU REALLY KNEW ABOUT IT, YOU’D KNOW LETI’S MOM NEVER even taught her about birth control. That woman holds the cross so tight in the house, it’s what she used to pry open Leti’s legs. That’s what I tell Leti, anyway. And if you really knew about it, you’d know that despite this, Leti was pushing to do it with Quentin. But if you really knew her like I know her, you’d know she only slept with him twice before she got pregnant. And the first time didn’t even count because he finished before he was inside her. She called me to tell me about it and was all like—oh, you know, he got nervous, you know how it gets. I don’t know about any of that, but I popped my gum and said uh-huh anyway.

If you grew up with Leti’s family like I did, you’d know that her ma is always pinching Leti’s cheeks and calling her prieta or India. That’s to say, she’s calling Leti ugly in a racist-Mexican way. She’ll be standing there giving Leti a bendición and then turn Leti’s palms over, praying she’d lighten to their color.

So, you’d know why Leti still refuses to tell her ma who the father is. Cuz if you knew about the situation, you’d know that the father, Quentin, is, God forbid by her family’s standards, Black.

You’d know that Leti chose not to tell her ma because if her ma found out she was gonna have a grandchild darker than her own daughter, a Black grandchild, hail Jesús, María, and José, her ma would shoot herself in the head right then and there.

And if you knew Leti’s pa, you’d know where the scar on Leti’s eyebrow came from. You’d know his hands and his mouth and his temper bigger than the sky. When Leti’s pa drinks, he goes on and on about what he cannot stand. At the top of that list is Black people, and right below that is loose women.

But you don’t know any of that.

And really nobody else does either. If there’s anything I’ve learned since my pa left, it’s that people think they know somebody, but it turns out nobody knows anybody at all.

Which is why when Leti is pulling her sweatshirt tight over her stomach, I tell her to cut that shit out. Leti is the smartest person I know—like, she’s a fat nerd. But she’s tugging at that fabric so tight it might rip open at the seams. She’s not even showing yet, but she’s always been hella dramatic this way.

She gets it from her ma, but Leti is a whole other ballpark. At least her ma has that immigrant shit to put her stress on—Leti’s just stressed to be stressed. If the bus is late, if that A isn’t plus, if a paper is wrinkled—big Virgo behavior.

When she stops tugging at her sweatshirt, her backpack slips off her shoulder and slides onto the concrete. It thuds with weight.

“How many books do you have today?” I ask her, while swiping lip gloss over my mouth. It smells like cherries.

She smacks her lips. “Two.”

“You got that calculus one?”

She shakes her head. “No. Just chemistry and history.”

“All that homework is gonna make your brain thicker before your stomach can catch up.”

She sighs. “Stop, Belén, that’s not funny.”

I look over at her and raise my eyebrows.

Then we both laugh.

Every morning we wait for the bus together. We’ve done this since middle school. Rain or shine, we wait for the bus across from the Wendy’s on International and 31st Avenue. We sit right by the shop where my sister cuts hair. At this time of the morning, six thirty, not even Ava’s awake. The sun isn’t even out yet. But here we are, cuz it’s the first day of our senior year and Leti already has zero period AP Chemistry. And if she goes early, I go early,

There’s no way I’m riding the bus by myself.

The routine has been the same since I met Leti in the sixth grade—back when she’d get up early to dig her nose in a library book at school. I wake up, scrunch some mousse into my hair, then make my way to the bus stop where Leti is already waiting.

She’s early—always.

Wakes up at five just to get up and study. For someone real smart, she can be hella stupid sometimes. I keep telling her that with that time she could play with some makeup or put a wave in her hair, but she’s always like no, Belén, I have to pass my AP tests. I don’t even know what those are.

Leti is straight as a board. No hips, no ass, no chest. No mascara on her lashes or gloss on her lips. Pin-straight hair she always stays braiding. Flat all around—not like me. When we first became friends, her ma looked me up and down and crossed herself. She told me I was pretty to my face, and I am, but behind my back she told Leti she had to be careful because I had a Jezebel body. My family doesn’t go to church like her family does, but I knew enough to know what that meant. Not my fault everything about me has a curve. Curly hair, wide hips, big thighs, full chest.

But I never fooled around with anybody.

I mean, I fool around, but I never went that far. Not that I don’t want to—I do. People just don’t offer it up to me like that. Not anybody good anyway. I get the honks when I walk down the street, but I’d rather die than mess around with men like that. Sometimes I don’t think there’s anybody for me to even mess around with at all.

That’s why when Leti met Quentin, I couldn’t even be mad. That boy is smart, kind, and tall. Studying after school and doing homework on the weekends. That’s how they met, dug deep in some studying at the library. Typical nerd shit, she’d read him flashcards while he made eyes at her. Homework dates where they took breaks to go to the liquor store and share a bag of Takis. I mean, Leti said they were only little breaks. But now she’s pregnant—how little could they be, you know?

I look over at Leti, her stomach covered by her AP Chemistry binder spread open on her lap. A group of men in a pickup truck zoom past us, whistling at us as they go. The rush of air sends her summer reading notes flying, ripping along the metal binder rings. Leti sighs, and I help her reorganize before the bus comes.

I swear, if I ever date somebody, they better have a car. No way am I taking this bus if I don’t have to. I’m dead tired of sitting here every morning getting sexually harassed by somebody’s tío while reading the same graffiti over the same real estate ads. Always Liam and Lauren selling some Oakland property to some white people, always the same 510 area code spray painted over their pantsuits, always the same FOREVER dripping over that white person’s face. If I had somebody, he’d pick me and Leti up, no question, from the cleaner curb down the street.

But I don’t.

Leti’s the one with somebody, and that’s still hard to wrap my head around. It just doesn’t make sense. If I’m the one out here with this Jezebel body, why can’t anybody put that shit to use? And if Leti is out here with not a curve on her face, how is she pulling more than me?

 

Not that I’m jealous—Quentin is good for her. When she told me she was pregnant, I couldn’t even stop crying. Like, can you imagine me as a madrina? Madrina Belén? That’s the flyest shit I’ve ever heard.

But everybody thought it’d be me.

Even Leti’s ma was upset she couldn’t pin this one on my shoulders.

Señora Barragón would’ve had the time of her life. All this: I always told you about Belén, you know she’s always up to no good, can’t trust a body that looks like that one, can’t trust a family that doesn’t know God, can’t trust a girl sin papá.

But here I am at the bus stop with Leti, with her stomach growing rounder with a baby and mine growing flatter since my ma turned into a ghost. Leti’s ma can’t say anything anymore. 

 

Two

I CUT SIXTH PERIOD. IT’S A HABIT AT THIS POINT. I HAVE NO BEEF WITH English class or reading or any of that—I’m smart, I like reading. But, the moment I saw Ms. Foley’s name on my schedule, I knew I had to cut. I spent some of junior year watching Ms. Foley slowly die right in front of me while she read books written by other dead, white people. It made me want to die more than normal. So today, I crawl through the hole in the wire fence by the dumpsters, holding my breath the whole way.

I’ve never gotten caught. With a school as big as mine, we can’t keep track of anybody. It’ll be a miracle if people even notice Leti is pregnant.

But even though we go to this big-ass school, the office is always buzzing at my house: letters, voice mails, emails, texts. Always the same script in the voice of a robot mildly trained to roll its r’s: Belén Dolores Itzel del Toro was marked absent in one or more classes—please call the attendance office to excuse Belén Dolores Itzel del Toro’s absence. I have to give it to that robot, though. When you don’t speak Spanish, getting through my name is like combing through tangled hair.

When I cut class, I take my pick of places to read. Today it’s gray out. The pavement smells damp, like it’s about to rain, so I duck under the awnings on International and go to Ava’s salon. She hates when I cut class, but when she’s in a good mood, she’ll throw me some cash for sweeping the hair off the floor.

When you walk around Oakland, you have to look like you know better. I put on a pair of headphones and stick my nose up like it’s guiding me around corners. Like nobody can talk to me.

But everybody tries.

People say things without saying anything at all.

I walk down these streets every day, alone or with Leti, and it’s always the same shit. The same old men, wrinkles sagging off their faces, eyeing me like I’m something to eat.

And if it’s not them, it’s the tías and abuelas and mamás pushing strollers and sweeping sidewalks and selling tamales who look me up and down like I am a sin. You’d think they’d know better, since somebody probably did that to them when they were younger and looked like me. But I’ve learned that if there’s anyone who has been trained to hate women the most, it’s usually other women.

I see Ava’s salon in the distance. It’s called Güera’s and sits on top of an auto body shop on International and 31st Avenue, right across from Wendy’s. I told her not to work here off the name alone, but ends gotta meet one way or the other. Despite the corny name, it’s grown on me. It feels mismatched and comfortable, like somebody’s living room. It’s on the second story of a strip of gray, painted gold with a bay window tight against the telephone wires. When I approach it, I pass the bus stop Leti and I were waiting at this morning.

I hike up the staircase, holding on to the new railing as I go. Ava’s been doing hair here for a minute, but the repairs have only recently come. And you can’t even call them that. Matías, Ava’s useless boyfriend, painted the stairs one winter when he was out of work. He thinks he’s an artist because he tags up BART stations after hours, but he’s really just an asshole. The stairs were supposed to be black, but you can still see bits of the original hot pink beneath the smears of paint. Matías isn’t a good boyfriend to Ava, and I’m beginning to believe he isn’t good at anything.

When I walk into the salon, the welcome chime above the door rings. It’s supposed to prevent robberies, but the three synth notes that play sound like a death announcement. Ava looks up at the mirror ahead of her and glares at me in its reflection. A woman is seated in the salon chair, half of her hair clipped up as Ava blow-dries it big and round.

“Belén, what’re you doing here?” Ava asks.

I shrug, then dump my backpack onto the seat of a hooded hair dryer. “Sweeping, if you need me to be.”

She smacks her lips. 

“How about school, huh?”

I don’t say anything. Ava is always ending her sentences with huh, like some question you can never answer.

She calls to me as I walk away. “Belén, it’s the first day. Don’t repeat that shit you pulled last year. You don’t wanna end up like Pa.”

And there it went.

Ava’s favorite thing to do was use my pa as leverage. She did it often and did it well. Small, backhanded things to remind me what she really thinks of me.

I used to think it was annoying, even kind of harmless. But since he left, it’s been a power move she likes to exercise. I know I look a lot like my pa, but I wonder all the time if she knew how I felt—being compared to someone so awful. She had no idea how difficult it was for me to look in the mirror. I sometimes wondered if she ever reminded herself of him—like, he makes up half her DNA too. But she takes after our ma too much, down to the appearance.

She could never understand what it was like.

I ignore her, walking toward the waxing room where she keeps her cleaning supplies. I pull the beaded curtain to the side, the scent of melting wax singeing my nostrils. I feel like I lose a brain cell every time I inhale this shit, which leaves me to wonder how many Ava’s got left.

I walk past the waiting area, a bunch of leather chairs aligned side by side and saggy fashion magazines arranged on a glass coffee table. Nobody’s touched them in years. I keep telling Ava she has to get real subscriptions to current magazines and not let the clients thumb through haircuts from 2006, but she always smacks her lips and is like, Belén you know I only rent a chair, why don’t you tell my manager that, then who’s gonna help feed you, huh? Like, Jesus Christ.

The room has a box-TV with a VHS player that wheezes every time you try to turn it on. Next to the mirror on the wall, there’s an inexplicable poster of white motorcyclists and fashion models collaged onto a beach.

I go back into the salon and start sweeping around Ava’s shoes. Old, vieja shoes that she described as “sensible” when she put them on her Christmas list. Her client stands up and checks out behind a glass counter full of jeweled hair clips and cheap, Quinceañera tiaras. As she leaves, she drops a few dollars into the flower vase Ava uses as a tip jar. Ava fishes her hand in and pulls out a bill, folding it sharply and handing it to me between two manicured fingers.

“Just in case Ma doesn’t make it home in time for dinner.”

Most days that I come home from school, I see my ma has left me a box of Rice-A-Roni next to the stove. Not like she cooks anything better—she’d make the Rice-A-Roni herself if she was home. Since my pa left, all we eat are pobrecita meals: Rice-A-Roni, Maruchan, and frozen TV dinners. So, when Ava knows she’ll be closing the shop, she’ll sometimes throw me a five to spend at Wendy’s. If she wasn’t around, I don’t know what I’d do. When she was still working to get her cosmetology license, I’d have to microwave frozen vegetables and eat them with Tajin. 

You’d think we were broke or something, but that’s not really it. I mean, my ma doesn’t make a bunch of money. She’s a teacher, she’s underpaid, she’s busy. And I know we don’t have it like that, but we have something. We used to eat the way most families do, and it wasn’t excessive, but it didn’t rely on a seasoning packet for flavor. But since my pa left, this is how my ma operates. She’ll eat instant oatmeal for dinner if we don’t tell her to stop.

Ava’s no chef either, but she keeps an eye out for me. I take the bill from her hand and shove it into my back pocket, sweeping the last strands of the woman’s hair as I go.

I set aside the broom and slump onto one of the seats of the hooded dryers. Ava counts her tips and taps her long, acrylic nails on the glass of the counter. I reach for my backpack and pull out some poems I’m reading, excerpts from a collection by this nun named Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

This is what I wish I was reading in my English class, but I’m in the “College Prep” track. International High sorts us into three tracks: Advanced Placement, Honors, and “College Prep.” Fat quotation marks around the last one. The school sells it to families as a way to prepare kids for college, because no principal is telling a parent to their face that their kid is in a low-level class for students with poor test scores or truancy issues or bad attitudes. But we look at our books and look at our assignments and we know the truth.

In Leti’s AP English class, they read all kinds of good shit. The school is always announcing the grants they receive for the AP track, so their books are usually brand-new, without any creases in the spines. Most of the books in my classes usually have penises drawn on the pages, missing covers, or entire chapters that are illegible from being warped by spilled coffee.

Leti gives me her assigned reading when she’s done with it. It’s like a hand-me-down book system, and each time she gives me one, I am amazed by what they get to read out there. She gave me this collection of poems earlier, during passing period, and I shoved it into my backpack.

“You’re all done with it?” I asked.

Leti nodded. “I finished in class.”

I rolled my eyes at her. I never understood how she had so much homework after school if she was constantly doing it in class.

“Ms. Barrera says that Sor Juana is the first Mexican feminist ever recorded in history,” Leti continued, eyes wide with excitement.

“Inglés Sin Barreras told you what?” I moved my hair from my ear. It’s so big that it sometimes blocks out people’s voices, which I’ve grown to be grateful for.

Leti nudged me. “Stop calling her that.”

I shrugged. “It’s not my fault she chose to teach English with that name.”

“She’s not a commercial, Belén.” She rolled her eyes. “She said there weren’t any other feminists at that time period. She 

began a whole movement.”

“It doesn’t have to be all that,” I told her. “I don’t ever do what people tell me to do and I am not starting shit.”

She tugged at her braid, which fell over her shoulder. Not even a fishtail braid, a regular three-stranded braid that began at the curve of her neck and ended right below her paper-flat chest. It made me sad to look at. “You could start something. You have to start doing your work, college applications are due soon.”

I rolled my eyes again. “I’m not going to college. I’m not even going to sixth period. You think I’m gonna go and be around Ms. Foleys and people who want to become Ms. Foleys? I’d rather die.”

Leti smacked her lips and looked ahead, something she does when she’s frustrated with me. “You’re a good reader, Belén. You just have to do the work.”

But I hate “doing the work.” It’s not that I can’t do it, I just don’t want to. Applying to college seems like the largest waste of my time—if I can’t even go to class, how do people expect me to go to college? Leti lectures me about it sometimes, but nobody lectures me more than Ava.

All of spring semester last year, she’d go on and on about my potential that was being wasted. She’d be in the middle of giving someone a blowout, holding the round brush in one hand and her hair dryer against her hip while saying, “Do you wanna end up like Pa, huh? That shit is not as good as it seems, Belén.”

But I don’t know who I want to end up like.

I don’t really know what I want to be.

It isn’t my fault. After my pa left, I’d cut class, collect my Wendy’s money, and go home to lie in bed. I lay there because I felt like I couldn’t move, like my body was tethered to the mattress. Some days, I’d find things to help distract me from the feeling. I was seeing this guy Jeveón, but when that fell apart, I’d just look out the window at the sagging telephone wires with sneakers tied on them. I’d think about how my chest felt so full, so heavy, but how my house was so empty.

Ava let that slide for a few weeks.

But after a while, the nagging started.

Since my ma began to disappear after work, Ava began to multiply. I knew she meant well, but after a while, it all became background noise. The feeling on my chest demanded so much of my attention. It only lightened when I was distracted by something that brought me joy—sleeping, reading, kissing. But Ava would die before she heard about that.

I peek up at her now. She’s looking at my backpack with her eyes squinted and tight. That means she’s about to ask me what’s for homework today. I don’t really feel like making up a lie, so I quickly dump the book into my backpack and zip it up fast.

“I’m hungry, I gotta go home,” I tell her.

Her face scrunches up. “It’s not even three yet.”

“Bye,” I call from over my shoulder, brushing past her next client in the entryway.

She calls out after me, but I’m already taking the stairs two at a time to get back on International. There, I breathe in that Oakland-smell of damp air and exhaust from whistle-tipped cars. I walk across the street and into Wendy’s, passing the iron bars against the windows.

I get what I can afford—a 4 for 4 combo with fries, chicken nuggets, a junior cheeseburger, and a Coke. When the money is right, I treat myself to a spicy chicken sandwich and a Frosty.

Since my pa left, the money is almost never right.

Even now, when I know I have enough to pay, my palms start itching when I hand the cashier the money through the bulletproof, plexiglass barrier.

But she rings me up fine.

I carry the greasy bag in my hand, preparing myself to walk down the street again, digging my heels into the pavement. I sit in front of Liam and Lauren on the bus bench opposite my morning stop. While I wait, I shove handfuls of fries into my mouth, listening as an old man honks at me, rolling his window down to blow me a kiss. I don’t react. I’ve learned these men are like pigeons—if you feed them, they come back expectantly. So, I sit and watch cars pass, people walk by, graffiti fade beige.

Once I’m inside the bus, I sit near the middle exit and press my head on the thick, plastic windows. I begin eating my burger while peering out onto the street. I think of the time Leti and I walked to her house, and how the honking was so bad and the cars kept circling like vultures. When we got to Leti’s house, Leti’s ma told us to never speak to those men. But she looked at me and at my hips as she spoke. Like I was speaking to them to begin with. Like I invited them to talk to us.

At the bus stop in my neighborhood there’s less staring, less honking, less worrying. I walk down the block to our house—boring, plain, white walls with a miserable excuse for a lawn. I see my ma’s car with its mismatched door parked in the driveway. Milagro.

But then I see my tía Myrna’s car parked beside it, and everything makes sense. I groan. I think I hate my tía Myrna. I know you’re supposed to love your family or whatever, but since my pa left, I no longer think that rule applies.

She is the definition of a metiche. She’s always in people’s business, always proudly bearing bad news and peacocking in her Ross outfits and clearance-rack Michael Kors purses.

I don’t know why my ma is always so happy to see her—after my tía delivers her gossip and leaves, my ma usually goes to cry in her room.

I stand on the front stoop, stuffing the Wendy’s evidence into the bottom of my backpack before my tía can think of commenting on my lonjas. I sigh, preparing myself to go inside, and grab the mail along the porch steps. I see an envelope from our electricity company. Bold, red letters are printed at the top, unmistakable as they read: ...