Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe

by Carlos Hernandez

  “I gotta be me.” I shrugged.

  “Don’t change the subject,” said the drone, now getting in Yasmany’s face. “I am so mad at you!”

  “What did I do?” Yasmany asked defensively.

  “You, bubba, said you wished there was just one person in the world who was on your side. Well, what am I, then? Chopped [BLEEP!] liver?!”

  Vorágine sighed. “I find it ironic that I, who am a toilet, seem to be the only entity in this entire school who isn’t a potty mouth.”

  Yasmany laughed despite himself. He crossed his arms and shook his head. “Why do I always feel better when you yell at me, Gabi?”

  “Because,” answered the drone, “you know why I yell at you. It’s because I love you.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, you do. You really do.” He held out a finger, and the Fey Spy (a little spit-covered, I admit) landed on it. “I’m sorry. I’m just upset. My abuelos are trying to get me to move back in with Mami. They said they’re too old. They can’t handle me.” The humor was draining out of him fast. Sadness was starting to take over his whole body again. “Where am I gonna live, Gabi? I got nowhere to be. Why doesn’t anybody want me?”

  “Stop saying that,” the bird on his finger chastised. “I want you to have a great life and to be taken care of. So does Principal Torres. So do a lot of people. You just have to let us help you.”

  “Help me how?” His anger reignited. “You gonna adopt me, Gabi? You gonna be my new mami? Because my mami doesn’t want me. None of my family does. My family hates me.”

  The Fey Spy put a wing over where its heart would be if it wasn’t a robot. “Oh, Yasmany.”

  “My mami died,” I blurted.

  Yasmany had pretty much forgotten I was there in the bathroom with him. He looked up at me now, shame curling his mouth downward. “I’m sorry I came at you, Sal. You just surprised me, is all.”

  “My mami died,” I said, waving away his apology, “but then Papi married American Stepmom, and she’s a great mom. I can’t imagine life without her. But I miss my mom all the time. But I’m so happy I have a new mom. Both at the same time.”

  Yasmany, who wasn’t the cheepiest chick in the nest, didn’t say anything out loud. He just gave me a look that meant And what, pray tell, is your [BLEEP!] [BLEEP!] point, good sir?

  “What I’m saying, Yasmany, is family isn’t just blood. You can give the people who love you a promotion, make them your family. I mean, Gabi is your sister. You know that, right?”

  He looked at the bird and smiled. “Yeah. My annoying little sister.”

  The Fey Spy flew onto Yasmany’s head and started woodpeckering it. “Who are you calling annoying?” Gabi said while her robot bird drilled into his skull.

  “You, you mosquito!” Yasmany flailed, trying to swat the Fey Spy. He finally managed to grab it. Bringing it close to his mouth, he said, “And I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Then he planted a disgusting kiss on the drone’s hummingbird head. Like, a giraffe-eating-peanut-butter kiss.

  “You are nasty!” the bird-bot complained. “Stop drooling on my highly advanced equipment, you Neanderthal! If you break my drone, I swear, I’m gonna take it out of your hide!”

  Yasmany turned back to me. “Sisters.” He shrugged. “Whatcha gonna do?” Then, still jokey, but jokey in a way to cover something honest, he said, “Hey, so it looks like I’m in the market for new family members. Wanna be my brother?”

  Well. Okay, then. Didn’t see that coming,

  I thought about it. We were still just becoming friends. It felt too soon to call each other “brother.” Maybe someday, you know?

  But Yasmany was so vulnerable right now, and he’d reached out to me with so much hope in his wincing mouth and blinking eyes that I’d have to be a first-class monster not to want to tell him yes, I’ll be your brother.

  So I went over to him and, wearing my sincerest face, answered, “Nah, chacho. You’re too ugly to be in my family. But we’re friends. Why don’t you spend the night at my house tonight?”

  “Yes,” he said instantly. Then, maybe thinking he’d gotten his hopes up too fast, he added, “You have to ask your mom and dad, right?”

  I patted his back and opened the bathroom door. “What my padres don’t know won’t hurt them.”

  Oh, he liked that, Yasmany did! He looked me up and down with newfound respect. I held the door for him, and he bowed like a prince to me—years of ballet had taught him how to bow like a champ—and we walked out of the bathroom.

  Waiting outside was Gabi. She had gentle eyes and a lip-only smile that was there to lend a little courage to Yasmany. Next to Gabi was Principal Torres.

  “Oh, baby,” she said to Yasmany. She pushed her huge glasses up her nose and opened her arms in the ready-to-receive-hugs position.

  Yasmany ran to her soccer fast and football hard. If it were me receiving, chacho would have knocked me to the floor, but Principal Torres was big, strong, and experienced at catching kids with poor self-control. She enveloped him in the fullest hug I have ever seen. They embraced like it was a matter of survival. As she squished him, she whispered to him all the ways in which she was going to help him, and he rested his cheek on her shoulder and nodded yes, and I’m not crying you’re crying actually we’re both crying that’s okay nothing wrong with crying but I’m gonna go ahead and end the chapter anyway m’kay?

  GABI, ACCORDING TO GABI, had noticed that Yasmany had been surly and sullen during the Rompenoche performance. I mean, chacho was playing a tree—no lines, no blocking, just standing there in his tree outfit and trying not to fall asleep. Yet somehow he still came across as surly and sullen. Anyway, she hadn’t had a chance to ask him what was wrong. But the second she had heard his voice in the bathroom (thanks to the Fey Spy in my mouth), she’d stopped chasing after me and altered her course to Principal Torres’s office, practically dragging her out from behind her desk and bringing her over to the bathroom.

  They’d both stood listening at the door for a long time—more than long enough for Principal Torres to figure out how bad things had gotten for Yasmany. And now that she knew, she wouldn’t let it continue. Principal Torres was a woman of action. A woman who got things done. A woman who, today, at least, was dressed up like a chess piece.

  The White Queen, specifically. She didn’t have an official part in Rompenoche; she just wore a chess-piece outfit in solidarity with the students. Also, her costume looked less like a costume and more like the getup an actual queen would wear. Her rhinestone crown caught the school’s fluorescent lighting and turned it into rainbows. Her swan-white cloak was the good-angel opposite of Spawn’s. The textured paisley lace of the top part of her dress had nothing on her skirts, which bloomed like an upside-down calla lily. She might as well have slipped her feet into two stars, the way her heels glowed.

  Principal Torres must have spent a bag on this outfit. But however expensive it was, she didn’t mind at all that Yasmany was resting his whimpering head on her shoulder. He could have been snotting it up like a Saint Bernard eating hot wings for all she could see. But she wasn’t the sort of principal who’d put her cleaning bill above a student who needed a hug.

  That hug seemed to last forever, but like all good things, it came to an end. All four of us went together to Principal Torres’s office to discuss next steps for Yasmany. He asked if we could come. I liked that.

  Step 1: Eat lunch. There was no way Principal Torres was going to let me miss a meal in her presence ever again. “I’m going to have Chef Bárbaro make my special lunch for all of us,” she said. “This is what I eat every day.”

  Every day? All right! I was pretty excited to get to eat special chef-made principal food. I brought my lunch from home, and it was fine, and good for me, and fine. Did I say fine already? I mean, that’s the word for it. Fine. But Principal Torres was at least as Cuban as I was, so I bet she ate Cuban food every day. Mmm…Cuban food cooked by a chef. Maybe it would be empanadas? I’d started getting a hankering for
them ever since I saw Iggy in his onesie this morning. Yeah, they’re bad for me. But just a little taste…

  Nothing to worry about, my chachos. Lunch was not empanadas. Lunch wasn’t any kind of Cuban food. Lunch was oatmeal.

  Sitting at Principal Torres’s desk in wee little chairs that were meant for butts four grades smaller than ours, we looked down at our steaming bowls of bubbling oats like we’d died and gone to the Bad Place and this was our punishment.

  “Why is it purple?” asked Gabi. She knew how to get to the heart of a problem right away.

  “To make it more interesting,” said Principal Torres, putting her crown on the desk and tucking a massive napkin into her collar, to protect her queenly gown. She had picked up her bowl and was already gobbling away. When she spoke, I could see a pink-purple pile of meal in her mouth that kind of made it look like she had a second tongue. “Since it’s made with water and the chef doesn’t put any sweetener in it, I asked her to color it purple. You know, so it’s not so boring.” She urged us on with her spoon. “Eat up now! It gets nasty when it’s cold.”

  “It’s already nas—” Yasmany started to say, but Gabi smacked his arm. She, I noticed, hadn’t started eating, either, though.

  Me? I shrugged and dug in. Yeah, it was no Cuban feast, but it was fine. I am well-trained in the art of Eating Food that Tastes Like Wet Cardboard Because It’s Good for Me. Oatmeal is great for most people with diabetes: It has a low glycemic index and, as part of a balanced diet, it can help promote heart health, which is important, since diabetics tend to have heart issues later in life. I don’t want heart issues later in life, so oatmeal is in my regular meal rotation. Plus, taste-wise, these oats weren’t as bad as Principal Torres had made them sound. Chef Bárbaro had cooked them with cinnamon and vanilla and other spices that gave the oatmeal a Christmassy smell. It was easy to snort up all that good aroma and keep it in my nose until I pushed a spoonful down my throat. Made it taste pretty not half-bad.

  And the fact that it was purple? Meh. I’ve eaten stuff that’s looked way worse. And when I got the idea to pretend I was eating frappéd Santa elves, it tasted even better.

  Maybe the idea of eating elves that had been blenderized didn’t hold as much appeal for Gabi. She clearly didn’t want to touch the stuff. But there was no way she would be so rude as to refuse a bowl of anything Principal Torres offered her. So she closed her eyes, relaxed her face until it became expressionless, and took a bite.

  “Delicious,” she lied, churning the ball of meal in her mouth like a camel getting ready to spit. When she finally tried to swallow it, she extended her neck as far as it would go, trying to help it roll down her esophagus. But from experience, I can tell you oatmeal don’t roll, bruh. She had to force it into her stomach by jerking her chin and twisting her head around, the way a goose eats.

  As soon as she had recovered enough, which was definitely not instantly, she added, “Thank you, Principal Torres.” Which was very good manners, especially given the fact that one of her eyes had started ticcing.

  Yasmany, however, needed a little more training in manners. “This is baby food! I can’t eat this. I’m a growing boy. I need a hunk of pig or cow or something.”

  “Man up, boy,” I said. I would only say such a thing to Yasmany when I was under the protection of Principal Torres. Given the way he glared at me now, though, maybe that hadn’t been a smart move.

  “Meat is so twentieth-century, Yasmany,” said Gabi, feeling quite superior now. She took a much smaller wad of oatmeal for her second bite and, instead of putting the spoon in her mouth, kind of kissed at it and then licked the four chigger-size purple oats that had gotten on her lips. “You need to catch up with the times. This oatmeal is quite…palatable…after the first bite.” She had to goose-neck again just to get those four little oats into her gut. “Or maybe the second,” she added, flipping her hair.

  “Not every meal needs to be a party,” said Principal Torres, as much to Gabi as to Yasmany. “You know what I would give for a Cuban sandwich right now? But I promised Alexis I would try to eat more healthily. They say I can eat whatever I want after our hundredth anniversary. But for now, for them, I eat oatmeal for lunch.”

  “Ah, the things we do for love,” I said to her, licking the last of the purple off my spoon.

  I had learned early on in my time at Culeco that Principal Torres didn’t mind a little teasing. In reality, she was a playful, fun person. But she could turn her authority on faster than a Roman emperor could give the thumbs-down. Whenever she focused her hard, bespectacled stare on me, I had to suppress the urge to squirm.

  “Anyway,” she said, finally releasing me from her punishing gaze, “we have more important things to discuss.”

  That led us to Step 2: short-term solutions for Yasmany’s situation. “You say Yasmany can spend the night at your place tonight, Sal?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And he can spend the night at my place tomorrow night,” Gabi jumped in.

  “Oh? Your parents would be okay with you having a boy over?”

  Gabi set her oatmeal on the desk, ready to make a point—something along the lines of how much her parents trusted her, and that it most certainly would not be a problem. But the second she put down her bowl, Yasmany grabbed it and didn’t even breathe before he started shoveling purple goop into his mouth. The rest of us discovered to our surprise that he had somehow, in the six seconds we had looked away from him, finished his own bowl. It lay sideways on his lap, scraped clean. Then, by the time we looked up at him again, we discovered, to our surprise, that he had finished Gabi’s bowl as well and was happily dog-tonguing the last bits out of it. When he noticed us gawking at him, he asked, with a mouth smeared with elf juice, “What? I was hungry.”

  Principal Torres took a moment to place the crown back on her head. Then she pressed the button on her phone intercom. “Chef Bárbaro?”

  I could hear the sounds of a busy kitchen when she replied, “Hey, Jefa. How’d the oatmeal go over with the kiddos?”

  “Nothing but empty bowls on my desk. But I think one of them is still a little peckish. Do you think you have time to whip up a Cuban sandwich for a hungry boy?”

  “And three orders of fries for a hungry student council president?” Gabi added, blinking at her like a baby seal.

  Somehow, Principal Torres did not bust out laughing. “And three orders of fries, Chef Bárbaro?”

  “No problem,” said the chef, who had the cheery voice of someone who had lived an interesting life. “Be there in less than ten. Ciao for now so I can make more chow!”

  “Muchas gracias, mi amiga. Ciao.”

  Principal Torres cut the line and, folding her hands together, took a moment to make sure she said exactly what she meant. It looked like she was controlling her temper. But who was she mad at? No one in this room, I didn’t think.

  “Yasmany,” she began, “if you ever come to school again without having had enough to eat, you just tell me. Never”—her anger volcanoed, but she instantly brought herself under control again—“will a student of mine go hungry so long as Culeco has a penny left in its budget. And if Culeco runs out of money, I’ll pay for the meals myself. Children get all the food they need. Always. No fuss, no shaming, no questions. Okay?”

  Yasmany ducked and nodded.

  “Good.” Principal Torres calmed herself by stacking the bowls and putting all the spoons in the top bowl. Putting things in order calms me down, too. “Now that that’s settled, Yasmany, tell me again who your sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-period teachers are. You too, Sal. I’m going to have them give you your homework and dismiss you early. Since every class is basically practicing for Rompenoche, I think you two might be better off heading over to Sal’s now. Sal isn’t in the show, and, Yasmany, you know your role pretty well by now, right?”

  “I’m a tree,” he said, surprisingly glumly. “I ain’t got nothing to know.”

  “Right. So, let’s give yo
u two some time to get yourselves situated at Sal’s. Sal, you can help Yasmany with his homework—”

  “Why does everybody think I always need help with my homework?”

  Principal Torres gave him the look. “Okay. Sal, don’t help Yasmany with his homework.”

  “No! I mean, if he wants to help me…”

  She closed her eyes and nodded fast. “As I was saying, Sal, help Yasmany with his homework, but only if you want to. And then”—here she looked at me, and her words meant ten times more than words usually mean—“have some fun. Play. Come back refreshed and ready for school tomorrow. Do you think you can do that?”

  I turned to Yasmany. “Have you ever played Poocha Lucha Libre Cinco: Perro Sarnoso Edition?”

  “No?”

  I rubbed my hands together. “Perfect.”

  Yasmany and I got the rest of the day off. Which was pretty sweet, right? But the best part was I’d gotten away without having to tell Gabi what I thought of the show. That girl just couldn’t get her story when it came to Sal Vidón. And if I had my way, she never would.

  THE PADRES HAD JUST put the hedges around the Coral Castle ten days before. The young, gangly bushes hardly came up to my shoulders. So Yasmany and I had to crouch low to hide behind them as I peeked around to see if the coast was clear.

  It wasn’t.

  “Of all the raunching luck,” I cursed.

  “What?” said Yasmany, behind me.

  “Papi’s car is in the driveway. That means he’s home. Getting you inside just got a 1000% harder.”

  Yasmany squeezed his eyes into thin triangles of determination. “What do we do?”

  Squatting the whole time, I turned around to face him, scooped up some dirt from the newly planted hedge, and spread it evenly on the patch of sidewalk between us. I used my finger to draw a diagram of my house and yard in the soil. “Okay, we’re here, at this X. What we’re going to do is scramble over to the right side of the house. The side door to the garage is here, where this star is. We’ll go in, get the ladder out of the garage, and then carry it to this back window, where this rectangle is. If we’re lucky”—I looked at him like a sergeant who’s been on the front lines way too long—“the window will be unlocked, and we will get in undetected.”