Chino Alpha

Aliases: none Status: Supporting

Chino Alpha is Chino’s day-earlier duplicate, the mirror of Homeboy Alpha. While the time-traveling Chino parties at Sarah Yazzie’s house, Alpha stalks his own yesterday from the shadows, watching the woman he believes is cheating on him and working himself into a jealous fury.

Description

Alpha is Chino, a day earlier: same man, same heartbreak, none of the context. Jealousy fills his heart while vengeance fills his soul. He creeps to the corner with his heart pounding “like a war drum,” then along the fence with light steps and shallow breath.

Role in Volume 01

• Uncle Rob’s Time Portal: His only appearance. He watches from across the street as Chad arrives at Sarah’s door with a birthday present, his jaw dropping in “slow-motion collapse” when Chad steps inside. Later he peers through the bedroom window at two shadowed figures beneath the blankets, hearing Sarah’s moans “punctuated by Chino’s grunts,” and hangs his head “like wet concrete” had settled across his shoulders. He never learns what the reader knows: the man in the bedroom is himself, a day later, and Chad is gay.

Relationships

• Chino: himself, twenty-four hours later. They never meet.
• Sarah Yazzie: his guerita, as far as he knows, betraying him.
• Chad: the “other man,” as far as he knows.

Notes

• Alpha’s arc is dramatic irony in its purest form. Every beat of his suffering is built on a misunderstanding the story has already resolved for everyone else.
• Unlike Homeboy Alpha, he gets no party and no resolution. He vanishes from the text.