• My name is America. My mother, Esmeralda, named me after my country because she had been pregnant as she illicitly passed over the border from Mexico. Only three days later, in southwest Arizona with the company of two other Mexican woman, she gave birth to me. People say she always said I was born to be American. I'll never know if it's true though, because she died that same day.
    The two other Mexican women, Leandra and Nacha, took me from Cabeza Prieta to Phoenix. There, they lived on the streets, picking up and losing small jobs. They barely kept me alive. I got sick very often and sometimes they would take me to see a man they referred to as Ruben, who was both a skilled medicine man and the reason I survived the dirty streets of Phoenix as a baby. I was too young then to remember.
    Three weeks after my second birthday, Leandra got a job cleaning a hospital every night. One year and four months later, she got pneumonia and died. Nacha grieved for weeks, she tells me that if Esmeralda had not made her promise to raise me, she would have taken her own life. She was alone, without money, raising a three year old on the streets of Phoenix.
    She started me in preschool that year. She says the cost of preschool was more than the cost of supporting me without a job, often we went without food for days. She said to tell the teacher that my mommy couldn't make me lunch because she was busy, but really I had no mommy and we had no food.
    When I finished Preschool, Nacha walked to Texas with me on her back. She said she did it because she couldn't afford Phoenix anymore. But when we got there, Texas was not much less. Nacha took jobs cleaning houses in the evenings, and during the day, she was a ranch hand for a man named Mr. Davis. He was always kind to us, once I even stayed in his guest bedroom with Nacha. It is my earliest memory, and the first time in my life I had slept on a bed. He pitied Nacha and I, and so he paid her generously. Time passed and we lived more easily than before.
    I turned six a few weeks before first grade, I remember because Mr. Davis gave me a cupcake with a candle in it that was shaped like a six. He even sang the happy birthday song to me.
    Then, a few weeks after I started first grade, Mr. Davis suffered from a heart attack and died. His son took over the ranch. He was twenty-nine at the time. Nacha was twenty-three and very attractive. He ordered her to please him at night or he would throw her back on the streets. She obeyed. I can remember her sobbing endlessly, telling me that I need not worry about her. About four months passed, and it became apparent to my six year old mind that her stomach was getting bigger and bigger. She was unable to work some days, others she forced through her pain. She told me she had swallowed a watermelon seed. I swore to myself that day never to eat a watermelon.
    Nacha hid her watermelon from Mr. Davis. Sometimes she would wrap it tightly; sometimes she said she was getting fatter, but mostly she just avoided him.
    Soon it became too apparent, and young Mr. Davis found out. He immediately ordered Nacha to leave the ranch. We were packed up and gone that day.
    Four months later, she gave birth to a stillborn in a dirty hospital outside of Huston. She named him Izek and we buried him just inside the first trees in a forest that bordered a cemetery. I don't know what the cemetery is called, but I remember Izek's Forest with vivid details.
    I remember Izek's still, silent face as it was covered with dirt. I remember how we stole a small potted tree from an elderly woman's porch and planted it over Izek's body. Then Nacha watered it with her tears. I remember how she told me to run home when it started raining, but our “home” changed so often that I didn't know where to go. I remember the somber gray that everything seemed to turn.
    Two days later, Nacha took me to Arkansas, where we lived for nine months while I attended the second grade, I was seven. From there we hitched rides through Tennessee and Kentucky to Virginia. It took a month and a half to get through each state between scrounging for money and walking when we couldn't get a ride, which was most always.
    We didn't even realize that my eighth birthday had come and gone until four weeks after. Nacha panicked that I had been missing school, and sent me off quickly.
    The other schools I had attended had been decent. The other kids left me well enough alone, but here in Virginia, the third graders ridiculed my ratty cloths and dingy face. They called me a dirty urchin and nicknamed me Mexico. I begged Nacha to let me quit, but she refused. She told me school was the only way I was going to get off the streets, and that I'd better work hard so as not to waste our money. I did, it was easier to ignore my classmates that way, but now they called me a nerd too.
    I spent fourth grade there too. And fifth.
    On April 15th, one month before my 11th birthday and one month and two weeks before school, I told Nacha that if she didn't let me drop out, I would kill myself. We made a deal that I could transfer instead.
    We walked to the next town that night and arrived around three the next day. She work endless overtime for two weeks and bought us train tickets to a small town in Pennsylvania. I had never before questioned how she determined where to take me, but it was always big cities in far states. I asked her why that night, and she told me to sit down with a sigh. She then leaped into a story about things I didn't understand. What I got out of it was that I was an American, and she was Mexican. I was legal, and she was not.
    Abansburg was small, the streets lined with houses, but generally empty save for a few dog walkers or kids. Cars slowed carefully as they raced down the highway that passed through the middle of town.
    Nacha and I moved into a small, run down apartment building in the not so pretty part of town. Turns out the not so pretty part was prettier than all of my other homes. Nacha then began working at a Wal-Mart. She had the night shift, so from then on I never saw her much. We left each other notes.
    I wandered most days. I would just walk around. Sometimes I couldn’t quite find my way home, but I always did in the end. There was nothing else to do.
    Sometimes if I couldn’t sleep I would walk down to Wal-mart and see Nacha. The employees promised not to say anything about my sneaking into the back rooms, though a few didn’t look happy.
    I realized a day late that it was my birthday. I didn’t tell Nacha that I was eleven. I didn’t want her to spend money we didn’t have on me. But three days after my birthday, I found a small package on the floor next to my cot wrapped in newspapers.
    I unwrapped the tiny box and opened the cardboard lid. Inside was a glittering pair of stud earrings and a note. Nacha’s large, round scrawl told me to go to Wal-mart at 12:45 for a surprise and bring my gift.
    The next few weeks I would glance in every mirror to catch a glimpse of my shining earrings. They made me happy, to have something I didn’t need; it felt almost sinful. It felt good.
    That year passed easily. Nacha and I saved up a little money and I even made a friend in school. Her name was Rachel. She was in the grade above me, so we really didn’t see each other in school very much, but I went to her house often. She even had a dog. Even though I’d heard dogs barking all my life and seen them, I’d never pet one or played with one before. It was fantastic.
    For my thirteenth birthday, Rachel gave me another pair of earrings and Nacha took us for ice cream. Little did I know this was one of the last few times I really spent with Rachel. That year she went to high school and she changed. She didn’t have time for me, she had big plans. I heard that she drank and was on some kind of drugs. I didn’t really care, though. I was already completely numb to pain.
    But despite all these things, it was this next year that has been the hardest to deal with. It was the year I was supposed to go to high school. But didn’t. Because Nacha got shot.
    I think that there is something called destiny or fate or whatever because I do not believe that all these terrible things could happen to one person by chance. There are people who go through their entire lives rich with their family and friends drinking champagne and going to parties, and then there are the people that live next door to them. Who starve, who get sick, and who die.
    I will understand these things someday. I just don’t now.