i would be your girl / be us against the world [ 80's au ]

Elena Salazar was the prettiest, most popular girl in her grade because her older sisters were the prettiest, most popular girls in their grade. It was an inheritance, though she didn't need her sisters to earn the title. She simply was the prettiest, most popular girl in her grade, surname or no surname. All her life it was a just a fact. A fact of Elena Salazar's life.

And it was the easiest life in the world. She was a kind girl. Always smiling. As all-American as a Latina could be in the mid-eighties, speaking Spanish at home - and only at home. Papa's orders. He'd seen too much violence in his fourty-something years to teach his daughters anything else. A blonde-haired mother and an olive-skinned father, Elena wasn't quite sure where she should fit so she sat with everyone and anyone and made so very many friends, remembering all of their names first-try. It was easier to befriend everyone, much more managable than choosing a side. She was a friend to all. A lovely, lovely girl, other parents singing music to her own mother and feather's ears. It was hard, but it was easy. She got so used to trying to please everyone that it almost became second-nature.

Elena Salazar was sweet - almost too sweet. Blinded by ignorance, spoiled and a little sad sometimes. It was a miracle she turned out that way toddling behind banished Jacinta all her life, now locked away at some boarding school so she wouldn't cause problems. Crestfallen when she thought of Jaci, when she hung up the phone in the hall after the dial-tone rang in her ears for minutes after the line disconnected - but you wouldn't know it. To the world, Elena Salazar was perfect. Anything but her older, meaner, more treacherous sister. So she believed their misconceptions as best she could and decided to be the happiest, kindest, most pure person she could be.

She rode her bike everywhere, even with a drivers permit, because all the boys wanted to drive her places. So she let them struggle lifting her bicycle into the boots of their cars whilst she sat in the passenger seat eating ice-cream, overalls on and a scrunchie in her hair, absent-mindedly watching the world go by with a twinkle in her eye. They would never oppose the Mayor's daughter when she said she wanted to bike home. Never lay a hand on her, no matter how they lusted after her. Never speak a bad word against her when she told them they were friends, good friends - but just friends.

February 14th, a lovely date. An even lovelier birthday for the loveliest girl. She had wanted a camera for her birthday. Youngest of Mayor Salazar’s daughters - a daddy’s girl - she unwrapped it with a shriek and a great big hug. It cost a fortune and the film was even dearer but she still let every single girl in her classes try it out, giggling and laughing when their pulled faces and bunny ears bloomed on shaken polaroids that ran out in under an hour.

Life was easy for Miss Elena Salazar. It was sunshine and rides home, pink Converse and loud shirts, hairspray and cherry flavoured-milkshakes and silk bed sheets. It was a simple life. It was a harder existence. But easy, in all the best ways.

Then the new kids moved in. Twins - one stoic, one scowling, and a younger one dropping his cardboard boxes on the driveway because he thought he could carry them all at once. Elena watched them from her window with great curiosity, giggling a little as the younger one bumbled his way through his belongings until her mother called her away from the glass.

"Don't bother," she'd said dryly to her youngest daughter. "They'll be gone soon enough."

"¿Qué quieres decir?" _{("What do you mean?")}

Her mother simply tutted and took a sip of her glass.

The way the pretty girls giggled at the new boy sat on his lonesome in the cafeteria twisted at Elena's insides. She fiddled with her bracelets absent-mindedly, trying not to make her glances at him obvious. He was different. Had an accent. His older siblings had found a few stragglers to latch on to on the other side of the hall, but even they had each-other. Something about him seemed friendly, seemed needing a friend - like a puppy. Her mother hadn't let her have one of those either.

"I hear they're poor. Like, really poor. But his brother or whatever was like a child model so the older ones? The twins, right? They basically have a bank account filled with cash from doing that and their Mom's only a waitress?" "So that's how they can afford that house next to you right Elena?" "My brother's got Algebra with the girl, she has a different last name to him." "Elena? Hello?" "What about the other twin?" "Yeah, the twins have one last name. He's got another." "What the hell?" "Right? Different Dad's or something. Can you even imagine Elena?" "Elena?" "Helloooooo! Earth to Elena?"

She jumps, pulled back into the conversation. He leaves her sight, but not her mind. "Huh? Oh... okay." Her sisters had told her to stay away from these girls but her heart couldn't abandon them so easily. They were terrible gossipers, borderline bitchy, but they told her she was pretty and were extra kind to her around her birthday party. And they could be kind, sometimes. Most times. They included her in whatever they did. Never made her feel like an outsider, even when she chose to sit with other people. They accepted her, for her. Elena just couldn't say no.

("Hey, you're Marley right?"
Goofy smile, wide eyes. Relief - she knows it all too well. "Yeah!"
"I'm Elena," she sets her tray down next to his and grins. "I think we're neighbours!")

She couldn't ever say no. 

"Mija," Papa says over the dinner table. "¿Qué te preocupa?" ("What troubles you?")

"Nothing, Dad," her mother's eyes and words a chill down her spine.

This was the part of her life that wasn't so easy. This, this was the hard part. The reason Jaci left. The reason she was made to leave. She wouldn't stop the defiance. Wouldn't sit on her hands and be quiet. Wouldn't tip-toe around their parents, wouldn't swallow her pride, wouldn't do everything Elena had done to keep a roof over her head. 

"Don't lie to your father." Another shudder, she drops her fork. 

"There's this..." careful, she swallows. Hard. Careful she has to be. With her words. With her truth. With her desires. With what she does with those as a Salazar. She can't hide her confessions in Spanish. Not to her mother's trained ears. 

"There's someone at school being picked on. His name's... doesn't matter. Anyway. He's not fitting in. And I've made friends with him and all, but the other kids don't get it, and I want them to like him but there's this rumour going around about him and I-"

Her mother interrupts. "The boy next door? Christ, Elena, it's been three weeks and you're already pining," she is disappointed, dropping her own fork with a clatter on china. Elena is a Disappointment, capital D. Her mother is Drunk at the dinner table, again, capital D. "What else do you expect? If your father hadn't paid that woman next door to threaten to expose the old Mayor's love childre-"

"Enough!" Papa's turn to exclaim, Elena is shaking in her seat. Expose the old Mayor's love childre-

"That's why... he resigned... and let Papa...?"

"Well done!" Mom is laughing now, clapping slowly with her sluggish joy. "She finally figured it out, mi esposo. Your daughter. Slow as rocks, but she gets there in the end!"

"I..." she has to go. She has to call Jaci. No, Mom will listen in. Papa will listen in. "I have to-"

She's out the front door and speeding down the street on two wheels, pedaling away from her father hollering her name into the night sky.

Around and around and around her wheels go. She pedals until her legs give out and it hurts to gasp in the cold midnight air and she has to push her yellow bike back home in the moonlight. Owls hoot, cars rush past in the distance, someone's playing MJ on the radio down the street. Elena cries a little, if only for herself. She doesn't cry because she feels betrayed. Her families' deviance isn't a surprise. She cries because she feels stifled. Heavy. The weight of this secret just another rock in her backpack. Life is easy. Milkshakes and neon, movie tickets and arcades. But life is also so, so hard. Lost sisters and phone wire, boys next door, being the Mayor's daughter. Being the Mayor's daughter.

She can't go home. So she goes to the next best place.

Juno Pryce is lovely. A little sleepy, a little startled to see a girl with a bike and watery mascara and limp hair on her doorstep at 12am, but lovely nonetheless. She makes Elena some coffee, knocks on a bedroom door she can only assume is Marley's, and doesn't ask questions. 

"I know this sounds strange, but you're not the first friend of my kids to show up unannounced in the middle of the night."

Elena looks at her for a moment and smiles - but her smile falters the second she thinks of what her mother had said. If your father hadn't paid that woman next door to threaten to expose the old Mayor... 

She wonders if this house was paid for by her father's dirty money. She wonders if he wrote it off as a political campaign expense. Oh, how proud she was wearing his buttons to school. Now she can barely think of him without feeling sick. She wonders if this woman, so cool and hardened and yet so kind, is as awful as her parents are. She couldn't be. She can't be.

And yet Elena thought her father the world only a few hours prior. She wonders if Juno thinks of her terribly, knowing what kind of family the Salazars are. Elena hopes it's nothing too awful. Nothing to keep Marley away. She is fond of him. Too fond. His crinkly eyes, his wonder at things she assumed everyone possessed. His goofy laugh, how excited he got over the smallest things. The way he listens so intently to her conversation. That he likes cherry milkshakes just as much as she does . That he can't dance to save his life. That he makes her feel normal. That he never makes her feel terrible for who she is. That he doesn't care who she is, who her father is, and what that means in this town. That she could just... be around him.

Just be Elena.

Someone - not Marley, she soon finds out - enters the kitchen. It's Marley's sister. Max, Elena remembers with a little furrow of her brows. No, maybe that was the boy.

"You got some clothes for this one, Max?"

Ah, it was Max after all. 

"Yeah, c'mon," the older girl ushers, her voice quiet so not to wake the house. "I've got some t-shirts. You can sleep in 'em tonight."

They are simply kind. And they have no reason to be. Elena finds it foreign that they ask for nothing from her, that they ask nothing of each-other in return. She can't quite comprehend it. Even as she lays on the leather couch in their cozy living room and blinks back tears she has never felt more homely than she does in this house. In this strange, wonderful, family home.

"Flannel suits you!" grins Marley the next morning, handing her a cup of coffee. 

"Thanks," Elena responds through sleepy eyes and bed-hair. Max has long arms, longer than Elena's, red and black checks rolled up to her sleeves and still slipping down her forearm as she takes sips of her drink. Her neck hurts a little from resting it on a cushion, a far cry from her king bed next door - but she doesn't dare complain. "Your Mom's really nice for letting me crash here so late."

"Yeah," his eyes dip a bit, glance out the front window. "Juno's cool like that."

She finds out later that Juno Pryce is not, in fact, Marley's birth mom. But Marley, along with Max and Mackenzie, do share the same father. A DNA scandal, cross-country road trips, and his own mother signing away her rights to Juno would find Marley re-united with his brother and sister in a new town, with a new family, a new parental guardian. It's a lot to take in. They need dozens more cups of coffee and milkshakes. Elena stops sitting with the mean girls at lunch and instead sits with Marley and her secret. She says nothing at the dinner table. Ignores the fact that her mother has stopped speaking to her and she's stopped speaking to her father and the phone in the hall stops ringing. She is no longer the prettiest, most popular girl in school any more. Even though she pretends like she doesn't care it hurts, it hurts so much to have her life tipped so upside down and so many people discard her like her mother, but she swallows it down with whipped cream and popcorn and soda every afternoon she spends with Marley until one day she's teaching him how to ride a bike and he falls over on the sidewalk and she cries seeing him bleed, her fault, it's her fault - even though he insists that he's fine, and it spills out of her like her uncontrollable tears.

"...and it happened the first night I stayed on the couch last spring and I'm sorry I didn't tell you, I couldn't, I didn't know it was true, I'm sorry I'm so sorry I just couldn't ask you something like that and then you'd h-h-h-ate me a-and what if Juno found out she'd hate m-me what if she knows I d-don't know I'm sorry I hate her, I hate my Mom, I hate my Dad too I hate them I hate them I hate them I'm so sorr-"

He's hugging her now, band-aids and bicycles be damned, and she sobs into her best friend's shoulder. "Don't hate me, don't hate me, please don't hate me..."

She wouldn't blame him if he did.

"I could never hate you."

She could never hate him, either. Even if she tried. Even if the world wanted them to hate each-other. Even if her parents hated them together. Summer eighty-eight, Elena Salazar sheds her inheritance and calls Jaci on Marley's home phone and is Elena, just Elena. She speaks Spanish, and finds other friends who do too, and she is no longer the girl she used to be. But she is still kind. To her old friends. To her new ones. Even to her parents. Even to those who are not as kind to her.

It is a hard life being Elena. But it is a good life, with Marley by her side.