Alexandra climbs off the bed, running a fingertip under her eye.

– Hectooor, you ruin my makeup. Mooom, look at my face.

She runs out the door and into the bathroom, where she’ll spend the next hour redoing her hair and makeup.

Their mom is still laughing.

– You look like a dancing fish, mijo. A fish.

He smiles.

– C’mon, Ma.

He puts the needle back down on the beginning of the song, bounces back to her and grabs her hands, pulling.

She jumps up and down a few times with him, then frees her hands and covers her ears.

– Enough, mijo, enough! Too loud. Come eat.

She reaches out and grabs a fold of his belly skin between her thumb and index finger and gives it a twist.

– Eat!

He bounces free and moshes around the tiny room.

She waves her hands in the air and walks away, still laughing, the song thundering and ripping new cracks in the taped up speakers.

Through the open door he watches her walk back to the kitchen, where she spends her life minding pots of rice and beans and stewed pork and chicken.

His dad is in the livingroom, asleep on the couch already, his ruined leg propped on a kitchen chair, a bottle of his painkillers sticking out of his bathrobe pocket, a half empty gallon jug of Gallo on the floor.

Hector pushes the door closed and dances, slashing his hand up and down over the strings of an invisible guitar. The guitar he’ll have one day when high school is over and he takes BART into The City for the last time.

He’ll crash in a squat full of punks and put together a band and play that guitar when they gig at Mabuhay and he’ll take it on the road and he’ll see shit that he’s never gonna see if he takes a job at the quarry and marries one of the pachuco chicks from the neighborhood and has three kids by the time he’s old enough to go in a bar. Fuck that. He’s gonna buy a guitar and be a fucking punk.