Bump

  Dedication

  For Arianna, Maya,

  Kenny, Maddie, and Abigail

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One: Green Girl

  Prologue: Fénix

  A Month Earlier

  Eggs Again

  Chicas Malas

  Shipwreck

  Señor Arellano

  The Wall

  Corazón

  The Deal

  The Ropes

  Zina

  Rudo

  Young Girls

  Power Session

  The Disaster Show

  Part Two: Lightning Girl

  40,000 Likes and Counting

  Heat

  Pop

  A Larger World

  Hardway

  Águilas Y Ratas

  Home Visit

  Canceled Show

  Weekend Visit

  Cutting Promos

  Blow Off

  Grudge Match

  Burning Down the House

  Epilogue: Papi

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One:

  Green Girl

  Prologue: Fénix

  Everything hurt.

  That was what MJ quickly learned about professional wrestling.

  It was always hot in Victory Academy, where she had spent most of her after-school hours and weekends for the past month, learning the secrets of pro wrestling. The walls were metal, and after a short while she began to think of the old warehouse like one giant oven in which she was slowly being cooked. The several large fans constantly turning their bladed heads did little to banish the heat. She’d almost gotten used to sweating buckets every day.

  MJ stood in one of the wrestling ring’s four corners, holding the ropes where they connected to the top turnbuckle. The “ropes” were really steel cables covered by a garden hose slit up its middle and then wrapped in duct tape. MJ still wasn’t sure why everyone insisted on calling them ropes. She could barely see over the top of the corner. Even the youngest student in the Academy was almost three years older than her, and she wasn’t big for her age besides.

  MJ ran in place, her feet pumping as if she were sprinting around the track at school even though she stayed planted in the same spot.

  On the cement floor beyond the ropes, Mr. Arellano stalked like some kind of predatory animal in a jungle, circling the ring. The skin around his eyes may’ve been wrinkled and sagging from age, but those eyes remained clear and sharp, and they seemed to see everything.

  “Bump!” he barked at the students inside the ring.

  MJ stopped running in place and let go of the ropes-that-weren’t-really-ropes. She let herself fall backward, keeping her feet firmly planted where they were on the canvas. She tucked her chin tight against her chest as she landed on the upper part of her back between her shoulders. MJ extended her arms as she fell and slapped her hands against the mat at the same moment her back hit it. She was careful to keep her elbows turned out so they didn’t painfully smack the ring floor. It had taken her weeks to master that one small mechanic of taking a bump, and her elbows bore dark bruises that still served as her best reminders.

  Landing hurt, just a little, far less than it was supposed to look like it hurt, but far more than people who dismissed wrestling as fake would ever know. Mr. Arellano had told MJ that bumping, especially taking bigger bumps than a simple fall backward, would be harder on her because there was so little padding over her bones, and that it would get easier when she had more meat on her.

  It hurt, but it also felt good in a strange way. It sent a rush through her body every time. The truth, as bananas as MJ knew it would sound to most other kids she knew, was that it all felt good. The oppressive heat, taking bumps, running drills, bouncing off the ring ropes until the skin under her right arm and across her back wore a red stripe.

  After the brief shock of the bump passed, MJ stood up as fast as she could. She grabbed the ropes and began running in place again.

  “You need to be back on your feet faster than that!” Mr. Arellano shouted at her from the floor.

  Even his yelling at her and the rest of the students all the time felt good. In fact, it was one of the things MJ enjoyed the most. It was the first time in her life that someone yelling didn’t make her feel smaller, didn’t make her want to shrink away from the source of that yelling and hide. When Mr. Arellano shouted and cursed at them, there was no anger, but there was also nothing held back. He treated his students like adults, even her, and that was the part that felt good.

  “Bump!”

  MJ planted her feet and let herself fall again, welcom-ing it, gravity guiding her back to the warm mat that almost seemed to hug her, like a friend.

  As she landed, MJ could barely remember her life before the ring, or maybe she just didn’t want to.

  A Month Earlier

  Everything hurt.

  That was what MJ quickly learned about being twelve years old.

  Even if the big hurts were fewer and far between, every day seemed to be filled with little hurts. When the rest of the team had a sleepover and didn’t invite you, it hurt. When they friended you on social media just to send you messages that kept you awake at night, it hurt. When a group of older girls shoved you into the lockers as they sprinted down the school hallway, it hurt. When you woke up in the morning and remembered what yesterday was like and you knew today would be more of the same, it hurt.

  All those little hurts added up quickly, until they felt like carrying a big concrete block you couldn’t put down.

  MJ always kept the blinds in her room shut tight, as tightly as she could pull their rough drawstring. It wasn’t that she didn’t like light; she didn’t like sunlight. More than that, she hated the way the world looked in the sunlight, and the way she looked. Sunlight was too bright. It was too honest. Everything showed in it, especially imperfections; dirt and dust and stains on furniture, and scratches and bruises and bumps on skin. The fake light from lamps was more forgiving. You could hide things in the soft, muted glow of fake light. Sunlight was like the harsh stare of the kids at her school, always looking for weaknesses in everything and everyone they saw.

  So it was dark when she woke up that morning, and she liked it that way.

  Her mother felt differently. She marched into MJ’s bedroom at 7:01 a.m. just as she did every morning, ignoring MJ stirring in her bed and walking right over to the window, snapping the blinds open and letting the sun invade every corner of the room.

  MJ’s eyes only shut tighter. She turned away from the light, moaning and pulling her pillow around her head.

  “Mom, come on!”

  “You keep it too dark in here. It’s not healthy.”

  “The sun gives you cancer, you know.”

  “That’s not funny, Maya.”

  “It’s true,” she grumbled.

  “If you’re late again you’re going to find out I’m scarier than cancer.”

  MJ sat up in bed indignantly. “How is that okay, but what I said isn’t?”

  “Because I’m the mom,” her mother insisted.

  Still grumbling, MJ crawled out of bed and stumbled across the floor to her dresser. Pulling open the drawer, she fished out a pair of jeans and a baseball-style shirt that had “MJ” printed on the front. Her parents named her Maya Jocelyn. Papi always called her MJ because it reminded him of the character from the Spider-Man comics he read as a kid.

  MJ didn’t like the old comics much, but she loved her father.

  Eggs Again

  “You have to visit Papi this weekend,” her mother reminded her for the third time since Monday.

  An
d for the third time since Monday, MJ pretended not to hear her. Instead, she continued searching the ever-growing mess underneath her bed for the new Vans her mother had bought MJ for back-to-school. After half her body had disappeared into the darkness there, she found the left shoe under a couple of old Ms. Marvel comics.

  MJ knew plenty of kids who only visited their fathers on weekends. Maya never thought she would be one of them. She especially didn’t think it would be like this.

  She tried. Every day she tried, but she couldn’t stop being mad at her father for leaving, even in the quiet moments when she really, truly wanted to not feel that anger anymore, when she just wanted to miss him being there for her, just wanted to be sad about what was happening. That she actually wanted to be sad and couldn’t be just ended up making her even angrier, however.

  “I know you hear me, Maya Jocelyn,” her mother repeated, adding MJ’s middle name in that way parents had probably been doing since the first time a parent yelled at their child.

  “I hear you,” MJ grumbled, snatching her right shoe from behind a Corrina Que Rico action figure grappling with a Stevie Lord action figure (she liked to have her Corrina beat up on the guy wrestlers).

  “Everyone understands what you’re going through,” her mother said, more gently. “Papi understands, too. I didn’t want to make you visit him until you were ready, but if you keep on like this, you’ll never be ready, and that’s not going to work, Maya. This is the way things are now. I’ve tried to give you time to get used to it on your own, but I have to start helping you do it. That’s my job. Your job is to try, okay?”

  “I am trying,” MJ insisted. “I’m like the captain of the Get-Used-to-New-Stuff Team practically.”

  Her mother sighed. MJ hated that sound. It was like a horn her mother blew every time MJ let her down.

  “I know, baby. Get your shoes and your schoolbag and come to the kitchen, okay?”

  Her mother left her bedroom. MJ waited until she heard cabinets opening and dishes rattling in the kitchen before she finally crawled out from underneath the bed. She folded her legs in front of her and put on her shoes. The carpet felt stiff and unfamiliar beneath her. It was brand new, like everything else in the small house they were renting. One of the reasons the room was such a mess was because MJ had just dumped out the few boxes she’d brought with them from their old house when they’d moved in four months ago, and then shoved the contents of each box under the bed.

  MJ slipped the phone from her front pocket. She unlocked it and tapped the little talk bubble icon. Sure enough, Papi’s last voicemail was waiting for her. She didn’t listen to it. She also didn’t delete it. MJ hadn’t been able to bring herself to do either.

  “Come eat your eggs!” her mother called.

  MJ cringed. Almost every morning since Papi left them her mother had made MJ huevos rancheros for breakfast. It was the only dish her mother knew how to make, and she was terrible at it. Papi always did the cooking.

  She put away her phone and forced herself to stand up. Her backpack, notebook, tablet, and schoolbooks were spread across the tangled sheets and blankets of her bed. MJ stuffed them into the backpack and zipped it up before running out of the room.

  MJ’s mother called the kitchen a kitchenette because it wasn’t its own room like in their old house. It was narrow and separated from the living room by an ugly copper bar top. MJ sat at the little round table where they ate all their meals.

  There were a bunch of papers scattered on the other side of the table. Her mother had been going over their bills last night after she sent MJ to bed. Before MJ fell asleep, she could hear her mother worrying out loud, sighing and muttering to herself.

  She wouldn’t talk to her daughter about it, but MJ knew they didn’t have a lot of money, or at least they didn’t have as much as they used to. That’s why they were renting this small house, and why her mother had to sell the old one they’d lived in all of MJ’s life.

  Because of that mess of papers on the table, and what the papers meant, it seemed like all her mother did these days was work, way more than she had before. When they were in their old house, before Papi left, they’d spent almost every weekend visiting with her father’s family. They’d barely seen any of the family since they’d moved, and they hadn’t even moved that far. Her mother was too busy, although MJ sometimes wondered if Mom liked having that as an excuse.

  Her mother put a glass of milk and a plate of huevos rancheros atop a tortilla in front of her. MJ tried very hard not to make a face as the smell hit her nose. The eggs smelled like hot ketchup and they looked like brains heaped onto a plastic frisbee. Papi made his own tortillas from scratch. Abuelita had taught him how. Her mother bought the ones from the store that felt like rubber in your mouth and tasted like wet cardboard.

  MJ poked at the red mess with her fork as her mother sat down next to her with a cup of coffee.

  “Are you not hungry?” her mother asked.

  “I don’t want to be late,” MJ lied.

  “Oh, really? What’s happening at school today?”

  She shrugged.

  Her mother frowned at MJ over the rim of her coffee mug.

  “When are gymnastics tryouts?”

  It was MJ’s turn to frown. “It doesn’t matter, ’cuz I’m not going out this year. I told you.”

  “You said you’d think about it, as I recall.”

  “Oh. Well. I meant I’m not going out this year.”

  “Maybe I can come to school with you and take a class in this new language you’ve been speaking lately.”

  “Ha-ha,” MJ shot back at her.

  “Why don’t you want to do gymnastics anymore? You were getting so good at it.”

  “I don’t like the kids.”

  “What’s wrong with the kids?”

  “They’re kids.”

  “And what are you?”

  “Something else. At least that’s how they treat me.”

  Her mother was quiet for a while.

  “Why didn’t you tell me last year that was happening?” she finally asked MJ.

  She shrugged again. “There was a lot going on.”

  “Yeah, I guess there was. I’m sorry, Maya. Maybe we can—”

  “Can I go now?”

  Her mother treated her to another sigh, then said, “Take three good bites, then you can go.”

  “How about one really big bite?”

  “Stop negotiating with me and eat,” her mother ordered her.

  MJ took a deep breath and quickly shoveled three forkfuls into her mouth, chasing each bite with a big gulp of milk to wash out the taste.

  “Do you want something different tomorrow?” her mother asked her as MJ got up from the table.

  MJ shouldered her backpack. “How about money to go to McDonald’s?”

  “I hate you so much,” her mother said with a wicked grin, shaking her head.

  “Hate you too, bye!” MJ called back to her cheerfully as she ran toward the front door.

  Chicas Malas

  Lunch was both her favorite and her least favorite period of the school day.

  She liked it because she could be alone, and usually no one bothered her. She didn’t like it because sometimes she got tired of being alone, and during lunch there was nothing going on to make the time pass faster like there was during class.

  Even though she and her mother had moved, MJ was still attending the same school. Mom said it was because it was the best in the district, and she wasn’t going to let MJ go to a school that wasn’t as good. MJ could tell it meant a lot to her mother, keeping her here. Selling their old house had been really hard, and MJ knew her mother blamed herself.

  That’s why MJ had such a hard time being mad about moving, or at least being mad at her mother. She could see how much pain it caused Mom, and MJ didn’t want to add to that. Besides, as much as she loved their old house, after Papi left, every room reminded her of them all being together, and that always hurt.

 
Going to a different school was one change MJ wouldn’t have minded making, though. The kids at her school always seemed so stuck up to MJ. And most of them didn’t look like her. She never really talked about that, not even to Papi, but she noticed. She noticed every day.

  MJ bought chocolate milk from one of the school’s vending machines. There was a spot behind the library where MJ liked to sit against the wall and watch wrestling on her tablet while she ate her lunch.

  Lucha Dominion was MJ’s favorite pro-wrestling show, and they put out a new episode every week. She had their app loaded onto her tablet so she could keep up with it and watch extra stuff like interviews and behind-the-scenes videos. Unlike other wrestling shows, which ran all year long every year, Lucha Dominion happened in seasons like a regular TV show.

  “So this is where you hide now?”

  MJ looked up in alarm.

  It was Madison. She was the top-ranked gymnast their age in the state and one of the worst people on the planet, or at least that’s what MJ thought.

  Madison was flanked by Emma and Sophia, the other stars of their school’s gymnastics team. The two of them weren’t so bad, except when they were around Madison, and then they were like hyper puppies someone kept poking with a stick. It wasn’t hard to understand why. Not only was Madison their team’s undisputed leader, her dad was their gymnastics coach. No one wanted to cross her.

  Besides, MJ thought, the three of them looked like they belonged together. They all matched. They were like an advertisement for The Pretty White Girl Store.

  MJ had managed to avoid them since the school year started three weeks ago, but her luck had finally run out.

  “I’m just eating my lunch,” MJ said, returning her attention to her tablet, hoping they’d go away.

  None of them moved.

  “We didn’t see you at tryouts,” Madison said.

  “That’s because I wasn’t there. I’m not doing gymnastics anymore.”

  Madison folded her arms across her chest and smirked.

  “Why not?”

  MJ didn’t answer her, because telling them the truth would just make Madison say even meaner things, and probably do worse than that.