Is your name really Sócrates Napoleón?

Kids in middle school avoided me. My closest friend was HBO. My only social life was logging on the internet and pretending to be someone else.

SÓCRATES NAPOLEÓN, YEA WHAT? BY DIEGO ALEJANDRO ARIAS 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 125

My name is Sócrates Napoleón. I used to hate it. I lowered my head every time it was read out loud in a classroom, at a doctor’s office, or at a fucking Starbucks

The name was too Latino, not Latino enough, kind of ridiculous, oddly ethnic in a European kind of way, and, perhaps, most embarrassingly, it highlighted the ignorance of my social class, the stain of poverty and mis-education that followed those sorts of names on brown folks like me.

“Is your name really Sócrates Napoleón?” Tamara, my middle school crush, asked me.

“Yea, no lie, that’s my real name.”

“Damn, your mom did you real dirty,” she said.

She sat in front of me in Mr Insogna’s sixth grade honors English class, and she turned around laughing and looking at her girlfriend, Sofia. Tamara was a black girl from East Orange and Sofia was Panamanian. I overheard them playing a game of kill, fuck, or marry in the cafeteria. “Ewww,” Tamara said when Sofia brought up my name. “Sócrates? God no, please, can I get a do over?”