Mexican WhiteBoy

“Hey,” the girls singsong in unison. Danny nods with a shy smile, aims his eyes at the asphalt. He feels the heat of their stares and for a second he wishes he could morph into one of the ants zigzagging in and out of tiny crevices in the street. Their little lives, he thinks, totally off the radar.
Danny’s sixteen, a shade over six foot and only a year younger than Sofia, but unless he’s on a pitching mound he feels like a boy. He’s long and thin with skinny arms hanging down skinny thighs-his arm length the reason he can fire a fastball so hard. His shoulders are wide, but his muscles have yet to catch up. Sometimes when he sees himself in a mirror it looks like his shirt is propped up by an upside-down coat hanger. Not a human body. Doesn’t even look real.
And Danny’s brown. Half-Mexican brown. A shade darker than all the white kids at his private high school, Leucadia Prep. Up there, Mexican people do under-the-table yard work and hide out in the hills because they’re in San Diego illegally. Only other people on Leucadia’s campus who share his shade are the lunch-line ladies, the gardeners, the custodians. But whenever Danny comes down here, to National City-where his dad grew up, where all his aunts and uncles and cousins still live-he feels pale. A full shade lighter. Albino almost.
Less than.