Emako Blue

Monterey Hamilton is Emako’s best friend, and one of the main narrators of the text. Privileged and sheltered, Monterey’s life is easier than Emako’s in many ways, a fact that Emako often reminds her of. Monterey resents her parents and her easy life at times: “They treat me like I’m still a little kid. Like I don’t have good sense. Like they’re afraid something bad’s gonna happen” (47). Monterey’s parents turn out to be right, that bad things can and will happen to their daughter, but Monterey can only see their coddling and inability to treat her with the maturity she feels like she deserves. She fails to see at this point that her parents’ affection and her lack of fear is a privilege that not all of the characters in the novel share.

Friction crops up in Monterey and Emako’s relationship at various points in the text when Emako tries to point out that Monterey lives a sheltered life: “One day when you start to grow up, you might see how it really is, but right now you’re blinded by your perfect little world” (58). Emako says this to Monterey in front of her crush, Eddie, embarrassing her. Emako does have a point in her statement, however, as Emako and Eddie bond over their brothers' incarceration for gang activity, something Monterey simply cannot fathom or pretend to understand.

Monterey, always wanting to be grown up, loses her innocence after witnessing Emako’s death. The experience teaches her that life is not always fair, and it gives her the experience necessary to assert her independence from her parents, who realize they can no longer pretend that they can protect her from the evil of the world.

After Emako’s burial, Monterey’s mother tries to put a blanket on her for the car ride home. Monterey lashes out at her mother, in pain from having to witness the burial of her best friend at only fifteen years old: “‘I’m not a baby anymore! [...] Stop treating me like I’m a baby!’ [...] Then Daddy turned around. ‘She’s right. She’s not a child anymore, DeeDee [...] But, Monterey, one thing [...] Put your seat belt on’” (123). To Monterey’s surprise, her normally protective father seems to also recognize Monterey’s growth. After experiencing Emako’s death, Monterey is no longer a child. This signifies an important shift in their relationship, while Monterey’s father shows her that he and her mother will continue to look out for her by reminding her to wear her seatbelt, doing what small things they can to continue to protect their daughter as she grows up and sees the harm that the world is capable of inflicting.

Eddie Ortiz is another of the main narrators in the text, and he functions as a parallel character to Emako. Eddie carries overwhelming anxiety about gang violence in Los Angeles, having had his family affected by it first-hand after his brother Tomas, a gang member, goes to juvenile detention. Eddie lives in fear that the gang activity will bring violence to him and his family, and at first often prays to God that his innocence will protect him: “I whispered a prayer to God to protect me. I didn’t want a bullet in my spine or head. I wanted to see my future. I was innocent. Innocence had to count for something” (70). Eddie tries to change his circumstances by working hard to try and escape to college a year early, which he believes will help him escape the violence in his community: “I couldn’t wait for my future to become my present, for the present to become my past” (38). This quote shows that Eddie, at first, believes that once he leaves Los Angeles, he will be able to leave his past and his fears behind.

Eddie learns from Emako’s death that innocence is not a protection against violence and that escape does not always bring relief. Emako’s murder affects Eddie differently than the other narrators because of his proximity to the circumstances that resulted in her death: “I wondered if I would make it. If they got Emako, then maybe thy would get me too [...] I knew now that innocence didn’t mean anything” (121). Eddie does get his opportunity to escape from Los Angeles. Accepted early to Arizona State University, Eddie cannot wait to leave. At the end of the text, however, he realizes that his anxiety has not been fixed by this opportunity for a different future: His family and loved ones will stay behind, and he will continue to worry about them in his absence.

One of Eddie’s last lines is: “I looked at my pretty baby sister and wondered what was going to happen to her when I was gone. I was going to make my mother and father promise not to ever let Tomas come back and call this home [...] Arizona isn’t that far away” (121). This quote illustrates that while Eddie may be able to physically leave Los Angeles behind him, those he loves will not, and therefore his worries will stay with him even when he is no longer there.

Jamal is another narrator in the text, and Emako’s would-be love interest. At first, Jamal is a somewhat stereotypical character, interested in dating as many girls as possible without forming deep attachment to any of them. When he meets Emako again, after remembering that the two of them took piano lessons together as children, he is already dating another girl, Gina. He describes himself slipping into “player mode” when he first approaches Emako and is surprised when she has no interest in playing his game. Despite this, Emako and Jamal form a friendship, and their relationship grows as Jamal realizes that he has actual feelings for Emako and wants to be with her exclusively.

Like Emako, Jamal dreams of using music to make a living. He dreams about a life where he and Emako join together in a musical duo: “I could see it all. I would write the music and produce the tracks. We would be kickin’ it all over the world” (26). Their shared love of music brings them together and helps to form their connection. Emako enables Jamal to envision a future in which he does not have to act like a smooth guy and can just be himself.

Jamal struggles with people’s perception of him, and his player persona is a way to try and assert control over the way the world views him. He identifies the anxieties he lives with as a young Black man in an American city where there is prevalent gang violence. He states that he does not want to become a victim of gang violence himself, knowing that the media would assume that, because he is Black, he was gang affiliated. When Jamal loses Emako, he feels like he loses the only person who ever understood him. He explains this to Eddie on the way back from Emako’s burial, admitting: “[A]t first I was just runnin’ my game, treatin’ her like she was just another honey, you know […] and then all of a sudden I started lovin’ her. Now it feels like someone took a bat to my heart and beat the hell out of it” (118). Jamal’s first experience with real love and understanding ends in tragedy, another casualty of senseless violence.