Pablo
by Jessica Isaacs

Pablo stood apart from the other children with his head down, cautiously glancing from child to child through his heavy, crow-black bangs draping his forehead like a mourning veil.  The playground was a storm of lightning fast, tennis-shoe-clad boys and girls, all Pablo’s age, but all several shades lighter than he. The children zipped past Pablo without a single glance – all part of the electricity of the playground, a self-regenerative electricity fed by the screams and laughter of privileged children.  These were strong children who would go home to after school strawberry cupcakes with sprinkles, eat dinners of chicken nuggets with ketchup, green beans, and macaroni and cheese, maybe drink root beer, too, and lick ice cream cones, and then take bubble baths with cotton candy scented bubbles, listen to soft mother voices read stories about baby birds and big red tractors, and then fall into untroubled sleep in comfortable, clean smelling beds, tucked in by their fathers and protected by their teddy bear sentries and guardian angels beckoned by their nighttime prayers.

Pablo stuck his hand into his shorts pocket to make sure the hot roll he saved from his lunch hadn’t crumbled into a million pieces.  Today was his first day of school.  He hadn’t wanted to come, but Grandmother said he had to.

“Anyway,” she said over the cigarette in her lips, “you’ll get a free lunch.  Breakfast too.”

So, Pablo met the bus on the corner at 6:30 this morning.  He had been cold, standing outside in the chill, damp morning air, the wet grass soaking his worn out canvas shoes.  He’d wished he had a jacket, but Grandmother said when the social worker dropped him off last week that she didn’t drop any clothes with him except the shirt on his back.

“Damn that woman!” Grandmother rasped, her coughing fits worsened by her rage. “How am I supposed to buy you clothes?”

Grandmother had coughed a few more times, and then she drug Pablo down to the local church and rummaged through the charity closet until she found three pairs of shorts, one with bleach stains and one missing a button, and two t-shirts without too many holes in them.

“This’ll do till winter gets here,” Grandmother puffed as she pulled the shirts over Pablo’s head one on top of the other to make sure they fit well enough.

Pablo didn’t like those clothes, but they would have to do.  They were all he had.  He certainly had no jacket or superman shirt like the kids on the playground playing kickball.  He didn’t even have a change of underwear or fresh socks.

“People don’t see those, no how,” Grandmother had said.

So, Pablo had gone without.  Most days, Pablo wore no underwear – but today was his first day of school and Grandmother had rinsed his underwear out in the kitchen sink and hung them on the bathroom doorknob to dry just so he could wear them today.

“Better wear’em,” she hacked, “or that damn social worker will take you away from me, and then who knows who the hell will want you.”

Grandmother had been too asleep this morning to help Pablo get dressed for school, but Pablo put the underwear on, too ashamed not to, and too afraid of his grandmother’s hell.  He couldn’t risk landing in another white woman’s house and getting in her way again. “Pablo wasn’t clean enough,” his last foster mother had said to the social worker, “he just has too many cultural differences.”

Pablo was six.  He didn’t even know what “cultural differences” were – but he knew that he was different from that white woman’s children.  They always had nice new clothes, and he always had to wear the ones they didn’t want anymore, the ones with the stains and holes.  They always got nice new toys, and Pablo got their old broken ones that were missing parts.  They always started the fights, and Pablo always got the punishment.  His last punishment had been the call to the social worker that kicked him out of the house altogether.

After he had endured three months at the group home with mean boys twice his age trying to corner him in the bathroom, Grandmother finally agreed to take him.  Grandmother had never wanted him before.

“Don’t have the money,” she’d always grumble when one of Pablo’s foster mothers would let him call Grandmother on the telephone, “you’re my grandson, though.”

That was the closest thing Grandmother ever said to I love you – “you’re my grandson, though,” and Pablo clung to those words.  They were all he had.  Yes, Pablo was her grandson.

So, when the social worker notified Grandmother that Pablo had been kicked out of another foster home, and suggested that Grandmother was Pablo’s last hope because she at least would understand his “cultural differences,” Grandmother said, “Well, how old is he now?”

And when the social worker said that Pablo was old enough for school and Grandmother wouldn’t have to watch him or feed him during the day, Grandmother figured the least she could do was give the boy a place to sleep.  That was the least she could do, and that was about all she did, except to remind Pablo that he was her grandson and that she was his last chance.

Pablo figured he’d make the best of it he could.  He’d never been a troublemaker, usually just kept to himself, but kids always seemed to want to pick on him, anyway.

This time, Pablo thought, I’ll just stay where they can’t see me.  I’ll make myself invisible, and Pablo tried to hide his different skin tone, his hunger, his urge to run and play and belong, in the shadows of the schoolhouse, praying the electric children would not notice him or the hot roll in his pocket.

Yet, just as Pablo flattened his back against the cold, shadowed brick of the school building, the kickball the electric children had been playing with flew over to Pablo and landed at his feet.  Pablo tried to resist picking it up, but he was only six, and six-year-old boys are drawn to balls like metal to magnets. Pablo bent to pick up the ball, and the hot roll in his pocket fell out onto the dusty ground. Pablo reached for the hot roll, but a child’s foot stomped his hand.  Pablo stood, dazed, shoving his injured hand into his pocket and holding the kickball with his other arm.

“Yuck! What do you want that old thing for?” a well-dressed boy sneered at Pablo, and ground the hot roll into the dirt.  “Give me back my ball!” the boy shouted. He kicked Pablo, snatched the ball, and ran away, absorbed effortlessly by the playground’s hum.

Pablo stood there, shocked, burned by the electricity of the playground. His hand throbbed, his leg ached, his head stung – he could not even cry.  Pablo stood in the shadow of the school building for the rest of the day staring at his ruined hot roll.  No teacher ever noticed him. 

When the buses came to take the children home, Pablo stood silently, invisibly,  in line to board the bus, walked silently, invisibly to the back of the bus, and rode silently, invisibly to Grandmother’s house.

Pablo half wished Grandmother would be home when he got off the bus, but she wasn’t. He’d known she wouldn’t be. She spent her days at the casino and never came home until Pablo was asleep.  He’d tried to wait up for her once; he’d been hungry and hoped she would cook dinner when she got home, but when she arrived and he asked for dinner, she just slapped him and sent him to bed.  So, Pablo didn’t wait up for her anymore.  Pablo was too scared to tell her he was hungry. 

If only he still had that hot roll –

But he didn’t.  He didn’t have anything except the burn from the playground.

The next morning, Pablo stayed in bed, cold without pajamas and only a thin, worn-out sheet for covering.  The bus stopped at Grandmother’s house, but since Pablo wasn’t waiting in the wet grass, the bus drove on.  Grandmother woke at noon and went straight to the casino, never noticing Pablo was still in his bed.  Pablo’s teacher never noticed Pablo wasn’t in school. The electric children peacefully hummed their playground vibrations, completely unaware Pablo had been shocked out of existence. No one had ever wanted Pablo, and little Pablo, all alone in the empty house, finally cried until he couldn’t. 

I’m invisible, sobbed Pablo, and no one even noticed.

So, he simply stayed in his sparse bed, fading further away by the hour, desperately wishing someone would see him.

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