Show Your Work Shrunken First Semester chapter 5 by maximally

Lupe thought for about four more seconds. Then she opened the laptop.

She didn’t make a speech about it. She didn’t cross herself. She just rolled the desk chair up to his desk and set everything out like a woman laying down a casserole and a gravy boat: the laptop square in the middle, and Max beside it, on the open spread of an SAT prep book he hadn’t touched since March.

“Abuela, you don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t have to.” She pushed her glasses up her nose. “I’m going to.”

She lifted the lid.

The screen woke up blue and bright, and Max’s own face looked back at him from the lock screen, a selfie from graduation, squinting, gown crooked, Izzy’s hand making bunny ears behind his head. From down on the SAT book, the photo was the size of a drive-in movie. He looked about twelve.

“Mira nomás,” Lupe murmured. “So handsome. So pale.”

She typed the password with two fingers, slowly and correctly, the way she’d typed report-card comments for twenty-seven years. His birthday, backwards. Then ventus, lowercase.

The desktop opened.

It worked. Of course it worked. Max felt it like a cold drop of water down his spine. Izzy knew his password the way she knew his locker combination and his Netflix profile and the exact spot behind the Christmas box where he kept the laptop at night.

Lupe put one fingertip on the trackpad, and the cursor shot to the corner of the screen like a startled cockroach.

“Ay, this thing.” She lifted the finger, frowned at it, and set it down again, lighter. “Your abuelo’s computer has a mouse. Like a Christian.”

“You can just tap—”

“I know how to tap, mijo. I took the district training. Twice.” She scooted forward to get closer to the screen, and the vinyl seat let out a long, sticky complaint, and then something else did.

FFFFRRRRUUUUMMMPPPP

It rolled out from under her, warm and lazy, and crept across the desk a few seconds later like fog off the Bay. Onions this time, and pan dulce, and something sulfurous and patient underneath that had clearly been waiting its turn. Max pulled his knees up and breathed through the crook of his elbow.

“That was the chair,” she said, eyes on the screen.

“It was not the chair.”

“Half was the chair.” She tapped. A folder opened. She tapped again, and the next one opened, and then she was going, steady and unhurried, reading each name out under her breath like attendance. “Documents. School. Calc Two.” A pause. “Old Notes.”

She stopped on the last one. misc.

“Miscellaneous,” she said, to nobody in particular. “Every kid who ever hid a note in my class put it under something boring.”

She clicked, and the screen filled up with women.

Max had braced himself for it. He had not braced himself enough. Rows and rows of thumbnails came marching down the screen, tiny little squares at first, and then Lupe found the slider at the bottom and dragged it all the way to the right, and every one of them got big.

Big women. Enormous women. Women in sneakers and women in slippers and women barefoot on the carpet, towering over little men the size of action figures. Little men on kneecaps. Little men on shoulders. Little men sitting on a fingertip like a parrot, or peeking out of a cup holder, or standing in the shadow of a heel with their arms over their heads. A whole row of feet. A whole row of big butts in tight leggings, shot from below, like a camera on the floor looking up at a weather front.

There were subfolders, too. Neatly named. feet. pockets. sat on. big girls. And in the corner, a second folder full of text files, each one with a little lined-paper icon. Max saw the number at the bottom of the window—412 items—and wanted to crawl under the SAT book and live there.

“Abuela, those aren’t—”

A red fingernail came down on the desk in front of him. Not on him. Just in front of him, like a ruler laid across a desk.

“I’m reading.”

She read.

That was the horrible part. She didn’t flinch and she didn’t gasp and she didn’t slam it shut. She read the folder the way she had read everything Max had ever handed her: permission slips, a ninth-grade essay about The Outsiders, the note he wrote her at fifteen apologizing for breaking her good serving bowl. She leaned in until the light turned her glasses white. One red fingernail tracked along under each row of pictures, left to right, and her lips moved very slightly, the way they did when she was counting something.

Scroll. Stop. Scroll.

She opened the text folder and read the titles. The Babysitter. Big Sister’s Pocket. Summer Job. She Keeps Him. There were forty-one of them. She opened one, read the first paragraph, made a small, flat noise in her throat, and closed it again.

“The spelling is very good,” she said. “The commas, no.”

Max put his face in his hands.

“And this?” She pointed at a bookmark at the top of the browser, which had opened all on its own, the way browsers did when you least wanted them to. A forum. Dark gray, cramped, a little cartoon logo of a man standing on a palm. Logged in. In the corner, a username.

“TinyMax underscore Sunnyvale,” Lupe read aloud.

“That’s not me.”

“It says Max. It says Sunnyvale.”

“Anybody can type Max and Sunnyvale!”

“Mm-hm.” She clicked the username. A profile page came up, nearly empty: no picture, a handful of posts, a little row of statistics underneath. She didn’t read the posts. Her eyes went to the statistics instead, and stayed there a second longer than they needed to.

Joined: 3 weeks ago.

Max saw her look at it. He didn’t know why she was looking at it. It was one more line on a screen full of things he’d never seen before, and he was too busy wishing for death to wonder about it.

Lupe didn’t say anything. She just went back to the folder.

*

It took her a while to notice.

Max could tell exactly when it happened, because her fingernail stopped tracking and her scrolling slowed down, and then slowed down more, until she was moving one row at a time.

“Hm,” she said.

She scrolled up again, back to the top. Then down. She clicked into big girls and went through it slowly, picture by picture, and then she clicked into pockets, and then sat on, and every time, the little noise in her throat got a little lower.

Max looked at the screen, really looked, for the first time, and felt his stomach turn over.

They weren’t just big.

They were all big in the same way. Not tall and skinny like models, not muscle girls, not the cartoon blondes some kid’s older brother had shown everybody on a phone in eighth grade. These women were thick. Wide hips. Soft round bellies. Big, heavy tits that sat on those bellies and spilled over them. Fat asses. Thighs that touched all the way down. Dark hair, brown skin, gold hoops, red lipstick. Some young, in crop tops and bike shorts. Some older, in sweats and sandals, with reading glasses pushed up into graying hair.

None of them had names. None of them were anybody.

They all looked like his family.

They looked like Victoria at the pool. They looked like Tía Fanny at Christmas, bending over the oven. They looked—his brain refused, and then did it anyway—like the woman sitting next to him, a mountain from where he sat, breathing slow, with the light of the screen in her glasses.

“Mijo,” Lupe said, very quietly.

“Abuela, I—”

“All of them look like us.”

It wasn’t a question. She said it the way a doctor might say it’s spread.

“I didn’t—”

“Not one skinny white girl in the whole folder. Not one blonde. Four hundred and twelve, and every one of them a Vasquez.” She shook her head slowly. “Your Mamá. Your tía. Your cousins.” She scrolled once more. “Four hundred and twelve, and not one mistake,” she murmured, almost to herself. “Not one girl who doesn’t fit. Even my best students put one wrong answer on a test.”

Then she stopped scrolling.

“And Abuela.”

She clicked. It was a comic.

One page, four panels, two on top and two on the bottom, drawn in thick black ink and colored like the Sunday funnies. The file name was just a string of numbers. There was no title, and there didn’t need to be one.

The woman in it was sixty, maybe. Big everywhere, the way Lupe was big everywhere: a soft, heavy, wide-hipped mountain of a body in a long, pastel bathrobe worn thin at the elbows. Gray streaks in her dark hair. Gold chain sinking into her cleavage. Fuzzy slippers. The man was about the size of a clothespin.

It wasn’t her. The robe was lavender, not pink. The face was rounder, the nose was wrong.

It didn’t matter. It was close enough to hurt.

Lupe didn’t take it in all at once. She read it the way she’d taught a thousand twelve-year-olds to read a comic strip for a unit on visual literacy: left to right, top to bottom, one panel at a time. She put her fingernail on the first box.

In panel one, the woman was stepping on him. Not hard. Just one slipper, planted on his whole body like he was a bug on the kitchen tile, with his little arms and legs sticking out on either side of the sole. She was looking down at him over her reading glasses with a look of mild, fond interest, holding a coffee mug.

“Hm,” said Lupe. “Her slipper is too clean.”

Max felt the heat start in his ears.

Her fingernail slid right.

In panel two, the woman had dropped onto a sofa with her robe hiked up, and he was underneath her. All of him. There was nothing left of him but two kicking feet sticking out from under one huge brown asscheek, and a little shower of drawn motion lines, and the woman leaning back into the cushions with her eyes shut, completely at peace.

Lupe looked at it a long time.

“That’s the good couch,” she said finally. “Look how she sits. She sits like a woman who just finished the dishes.”

The heat was in his neck now. In his chest.

Her fingernail went down to the bottom row.

In panel three, the woman was holding him up in her fist in front of her face, and licking him. One long stripe, root to crown, with a tongue as wide as his whole body. He was soaking. His hair stood straight up from the spit. And in the comic, the tiny man was blushing: the artist had drawn him bright red all over, with little steam lines coming off his head.

Lupe’s finger stopped moving.

She didn’t say anything this time. She just looked at the little red cartoon man, and then down at the actual little red man on the SAT book next to her, and then back at the screen.

Max wanted to evaporate. He wanted to slide off the desk and into the carpet and become one with the lint. He was redder than the cartoon. He knew it. He could feel his own heartbeat in his face.

Her fingernail went right one more time, to the last panel.

In panel four, the robe was open.

The woman sat in an armchair with her feet up, the little man cradled in the crook of one arm like a newborn, and she had one enormous breast out, heavy and brown and resting on her belly. She was holding him to it. His whole face was buried against the nipple, his arms wrapped around it, and her head was tipped down over him with her eyes half closed and the softest, sleepiest smile Max had ever seen drawn on anybody. One little speech bubble floated up beside her.

There. Grandma’s got you.

Lupe didn’t move.

For a long time she didn’t move at all, and the room was so quiet that Max could hear the laptop fan, and the fridge downstairs, and his own pulse thudding in his ears like someone knocking on a wall.

Then she leaned in until the screen lit her whole face, and squinted over her glasses at the fourth panel, the way she used to squint at a long-division problem that didn’t come out even.

“Wrong,” she said.

Max’s voice cracked in half. “What?”

“The size.” She tapped the screen right on the nipple, very lightly, with the tip of her red fingernail. “He’s three inches, more or less, like you. And she has this, like a pencil eraser.” She sniffed. “A woman built like that? No. He drew it too small.”

Max made a sound that was not a word in any language.

He had passed red a while ago. He was somewhere out beyond it now, a color without a name, so hot that he was honestly worried he was going to set the SAT book on fire. He couldn’t look at the screen. He couldn’t look at her. He couldn’t look anywhere, because everywhere he looked there was more of her, and all of it was very, very close.

Lupe glanced down at the front of her own housecoat.

Just for a second. Barely a flicker. Then her hand came up and settled there, flat, over the terrycloth, the way you’d put your hand on a pot you weren’t sure was hot yet.

Then she looked at Max.

“Somebody else put it there,” he said. His voice came out about the size of his body.

“Mm-hm.”

“I swear to God, Abuela. Somebody else put it there.”

Lupe studied him the way she’d studied the comic: one panel at a time.

“Maybe somebody did,” she said. “Somebody put it in the folder.”

She leaned down until her face hung right above him. The screen lit up one side of it in that awful cold blue.

“But nobody put it in your face, mijo.”

He didn’t have an answer for that. There wasn’t one.

Lupe didn’t push. She closed the comic and sat looking at the folder for a while with her chin in her hand. Max watched her eyes move, and it took him a minute to realize she wasn’t looking at the women anymore.

She’d switched the window to list view. He didn’t even know she knew list view. Four hundred and twelve file names in one long column, and next to them, a column of dates.

Her fingernail went down the dates, slowly. Then back up. Then down again.

“Hm,” she said again, in a different voice.

“What?”

“Nothing, mijo.”

It was her parent-teacher-night nothing. She’d done it for him once at her kitchen table, imitating twenty-seven years of fathers in Queens who swore up and down their boys did all their homework themselves. It always meant the opposite.

She didn’t explain. She just said something under her breath, very quietly, in Spanish, two or three times, like a phone number she was trying to keep in her head on the way to the phone. Max caught pieces. Three weeks. Four hundred and twelve. Every one of them a Vasquez. He didn’t know what the dates said, or why she kept going back to them, and when he started to ask, she lifted one finger without looking at him, the way she did when she was on hold with the pharmacy.

And Max could practically see her setting it on the shelf, right next to the Tupperware.

Then she let it go, or pretended to, and turned to look at him properly.

“You know what I see?” she said.

Max shook his head.

“I see a good boy.” She said it so plainly that his eyes stung. “I see a boy who used to stand at my counter every Christmas Eve spreading masa on the husks, two hundred tamales, and never once ask to go play. Who fixed my clothesline with his little screwdriver when he was fifteen, and was so proud. Who used to read me the newspaper when my eyes got tired.” She glanced at the screen. “And then his Mamá bought him one of these. And another one. And a phone. And a PlayStation. And every year there was a little less of him.”

“Abuela, it’s not—”

“Four years, mijo. No girlfriend. No girl friend, even. You turn red at your own abuela. And all that time, you were up all night with this.” She tapped the edge of the screen. “Pictures. Women who don’t know your name. Women who don’t make you dinner, who don’t yell at you to put on a jacket, who don’t smell like anything.” Her mouth twisted. “Women who look like your family and aren’t your family. That’s what this is. That’s what this machine does to a boy. It takes everything real and gives it back to him flat.”

She leaned back. For a while, she didn’t say anything at all, and neither did he.

Then she looked down at him. Really looked: the whole three inches of him, sitting naked on an SAT book, still glowing, so small that the trackpad next to him was bigger than his bed.

Max watched something settle in her face, the way the dust settles in a room after somebody finally stops moving the furniture.

“No phone,” she said softly. “No PlayStation. No computer. You can’t even lift the lid.” She tapped the SAT book beside him, once. “Mijo. Do you know when the last time was nothing was plugged into you?”

He didn’t.

“Before I met you,” said Lupe. “And I met you at fourteen.”

She turned back to the laptop. She closed the forum, and the profile page, and the list of forty-one stories with their bad commas. She closed the folder, and the folder above it, all the way back up through Old Notes and Calc Two and School and Documents, one at a time, without hurrying, the way she used to put the chairs up on the desks at the end of the day.

Then she shut the lid.

It made a small, final little click, like a gradebook closing.

“Okay,” she said. “Here’s how it’s going to be.”

Max swallowed.

“In my classroom,” Lupe said, “I didn’t let the kids pick the books. I didn’t let the parents pick the books. I didn’t let the principal pick the books, and he tried, every year, that little man.” She folded her hands on top of the closed laptop. “I picked. Because I knew what the kids needed, even when they didn’t.”

“Abuela, what does that—”

“It means that for as long as you are this size, what goes in front of your eyes,” she said, “Abuela picks.”

There was no anger in it at all. Somehow that made it sound more permanent.

Max opened his mouth. He had no idea what he was going to say. He never found out.

Somebody knocked on the door.

*

Three little taps. Polite. Careful.

Lupe’s head turned toward the sound, slow as a lighthouse. Max saw her eyebrow go up.

“Now she knocks,” she murmured.

“Abuela? It’s just me.”

The voice came through the door in full baby-sister mode, sweet as a Sunday-school snack. “Sorry. I know you said, like, leave you alone. I just… I kind of need help with something?”

Lupe looked at the clock on the nightstand. Max followed her eyes. Victoria had been gone forty minutes. That left plenty of time. It also left not very much.

She didn’t say a word to him. She just held the front pocket of her housecoat open with two fingers, the way you’d hold a car door for somebody slow, and waited.

Max climbed in. He grabbed the lip of the pocket and hauled himself up just far enough to peek out, and this time she let him.

Lupe stood, crossed the room, and opened the door about a foot.

Izzy had changed. She’d pulled on a gray zip-up hoodie, sleeves down over her hands, and scrubbed off what was left of the black lipstick, and with her face bare and her hair pulled back in a claw clip she looked about fourteen. Max was pretty sure that was the point. She was holding something against her chest with both arms, the way kids held their science-fair poster board on the bus.

A yellow legal pad.

From inside the pocket, Max could see the cardboard back, soft at the corners, and a purple gel pen clipped to the top. Little strips of color stuck out along the edge where the pages were folded over—green, yellow, a little red. On the top line of the first page, visible upside down in the gap between her arms, was something written in big purple letters, and over every single i, instead of a dot, there was a tiny skull.

“So, okay,” Izzy said, eyes huge, lip ring caught between her teeth. “I was thinking about what I said. About how you, like, actually raise people. And I didn’t want you to have to look at all that gross stuff by yourself, so I kind of went through it already, and I sort of…” She hugged the pad a little tighter. “I made a list. From his stuff. Like, of what he’s into. So you’d know.”

Lupe didn’t say anything.

“I just thought it might help,” Izzy said softly. “Like, homework.”

Then she unfolded her arms and held it out.

The legal pad hung in the gap of the doorway between them, right at the height of Lupe’s pocket. Close enough that Max could smell the purple ink. Close enough that, if he leaned out, he could have touched it.

Lupe looked down at it for a long time.

Her hand lifted from her side, slowly, and stopped in the air.