I wished it were this easy to make her one in real life.
16
After the Holly house disaster, I tried my best to, you know, (a) not give Mom any reason to flip and (b) convince her to let me stay after school again. I cooked pasta and meat sauce one night. I didn’t even complain when Tío R. just sat at the kitchen table criticizing everything I did: too much salt, add cut-up fresh tomatoes—don’t just use the sauce from the can!—and no, Christopher and Benjamin shouldn’t help. They were boys. Well, I thought, if boys weren’t supposed to be in the kitchen, then why was he there?
I helped Mom bring in grocery bags. The mail. And on Halloween, I even volunteered to take my brothers trick-or-treating around the neighborhood. They dressed as wrestler zombies, which we had to explain to Tía Laura and Tío R. I guess they don’t celebrate Halloween in Guatemala or whatever. I convinced my brothers to give me ten pieces of candy each because if I hadn’t taken them around the neighborhood, they wouldn’t have gotten any candy. It must have all worked, because Mom started letting me stay after school again. Days and weeks went by, and no progress on Dad’s situation. With each day, I imagined the president’s wall getting higher. Pretty soon it would be so tall that even Dad wouldn’t be able to find a way over it.
While I was picturing Dad climbing up a too-tall wall, Holly jolted me back to the present, hopping happily over to my locker. “I have an orthodontist appointment!” Okaaay… a little weird, to be this crazy happy to be going to a dentist. “I’m getting my braces off!” she added. “I’ve had them for two years and three months.” Ah. Now it made sense; I’d be psyched too. She shut her locker. Her brown-haired “triplet” friends—Elizabeth, Shannon, and Lauren—walked up. They were nice enough and all, but I hadn’t become friends with them like I had with Holly.
Lauren smiled at me, but it was vacant. I got the feeling she didn’t like how Holly was hanging with me all of a sudden.
“Hey,” she broke in. “Do you want to come to Starbucks with us? We have this period free.” The others nodded on cue.
I’d been to Starbucks once, but only to use the bathroom. A coffee costs like five dollars in there. And coffee is nasty, anyway.
“No, thanks. I’m good,” I said.
Lauren glanced at one of the other girls. “I meant Holly,” she mumbled.
Whoa. Was Lauren throwing me shade?
Holly instantly gave her a What the fuck? look. “Lauren—”
Lauren quickly backtracked. “I mean, sure. Why don’t we all go?” Then she gave a little gasp. “Actually… I could use your help, Lili.”
“Mine?”
“Yeah!” Now she looked all excited. “I have a three-page paper due in Spanish, and I haven’t even started it yet. My treat at Starbucks if you help me? Pretty please?”
Holly choke-coughed as I gaped at Lauren.
“I mean, you speak Spanish, right?” Wow. Lauren was oblivious.
“Yeah. But I don’t write it that well. Actually, I take French.”
“You do?” Lauren asked. “But why wouldn’t you just take Spanish? It’d be an easy A.”
My jaw clenched. “Well… do you get easy As in English?”
Lauren went all pink, like on her neck and everything. “I didn’t mean… I wasn’t…”
I didn’t mean to give her attitude; I was just answering her question. But Lauren legit looked like she was about to cry. Oh, great. I could see the headline now: metco student makes local girl cry. What the—
“Ha!” Holly grabbed my arm. “No class is totally easy. Speaking of class, let’s go, Lili. And, Lauren, no Starbucks for me, thanks. Later.”
“Later.” Blinking hard, Lauren tucked a piece of hair behind her ear and stalked away, Elizabeth and Shannon by her side.
When Holly and I were alone, she said, “Seriously. What is wrong with her?”
I didn’t want Holly to make a big deal out of it. I didn’t want it to be a thing. Lauren had assumed I could and would help her on her Spanish paper. So? This wasn’t the problem. I even remembered something Genesis had said during her pep talk in the library. I mean, why wouldn’t I help her? That wasn’t it, though. What bothered me was that she was only going to invite me to Starbucks after she realized I could be of help to her. Ugh. So, yeah. This was a whole lot to explain to Holly, so I just said, “It’s whatever.”
But of course, it wasn’t.
* * *
I wanted to see Dustin. Disappear in one of his big hugs. We usually met after school, before he left for practice or games. But today they were playing a team an hour away, so he’d left school early. On the bus ride home I sent him like a million texts, even though I knew he couldn’t answer. But later he replied to every single one. I know! We got on this big back-and-forth about women’s sports vs. men’s sports and how it’s the media’s fault that women’s sports don’t get as much attention, and so it’s a perpetuated cycle. I couldn’t get over how easy it was to talk to him. He wasn’t like any other guy I’d hung out with. I mean, it may sound weird or totally dorky, but I really liked… Okay, I’ll just say it—his mind. I liked how he taught me stuff just by telling me about stuff he did. Like, he geeked out over rock climbing. So I learned all about different climbing grades and names of grips and holds, like pinch grip and pocket grip, because he and his brother went to the White Mountains one weekend.
And yeah, he did talk a lot about sports, but he could tell when I was getting bored, and he’d switch it up. He had no clue I’d rather talk about sports than about my family, any day. What? Was I supposed to tell him about how Tía Laura actually went through my closet while I was at school and “borrowed” a sweater because she was apparently freezing? Welcome to November in Boston, Tía. I admit, it was mad funny the other night when she tried on one of my old puffy coats. She looked like a blue marshmallow, but she sashayed around the apartment, thanking me repeatedly. It was pretty sweet.
* * *
Speaking of sweet, there Dustin was at my locker the next morning, with a fresh blueberry muffin for me! He’d stopped at the bakery on his way to school. He was going on about how this bakery used only Maine blueberries in their muffins, which was why the muffins were so good, and I mentioned that my brothers loved to cook. “You have brothers? You never talk about them—”
“Two,” I said, thinking, Please don’t ask me about my family.
“I have three!” he said, all happy. “Mine are older, in college and grad school. Another is married. How about yours?”
“Almost nine.” Please don’t ask.…
“Twins? That must be fun!”
“Er…”
“Lil?” He pretend-elbowed my arm. “You okay? You’ve gone one-syllable on me.”
“Yes. I am.” I grinned. “See? That was three words.”
“Ha—but each just one syllable!”
Now I pretend-elbowed him.
A teacher coming down the hall called out, “Good game yesterday, Dustin.”
I could see Dustin’s Adam’s apple twitch. Impulsively I reached out and touched it. He turned, and I swear he was going to lean in and kiss me, but the teacher was now two feet away. Dustin gave him a high five. I mean, it would’ve been rude to leave a teacher hanging like that, even though no one high-fives anymore.
After that, though, something shifted. There was more charge to every text, every glance, everything. And it was dope. And then, later, instead of our usual good night emojis—the sleepy one, the smooch-faced one, the monkey with his hands over his eyes—he wrote: Come over this weekend?
I stared at those four words in happy disbelief. Then the happy collapsed. Yeah, right. Like my mother would go for that. No dating until I was like, ninety, and plus, I think she was convinced I might get pregnant just by talking to a guy. I flopped back against my mattress, so annoyed.
You there?
I sat back up, said I’d check. Then, sorry, family plans, is what I told him.
Thing was, if Mom had known that I w
as hanging with Dustin, she probably would have pulled me out of METCO altogether. Or taken me to Bible study class like the one my cousins in Chelsea went to on Saturday mornings. I went with them once, and that was a blast. Not. A sweaty pastor in a too-tight suit sputtered proverbs in Spanish, after which we all descended to the church basement for punch and sugar cookies while the men played tambourines and guitars and the women sang church songs. Yeah, not happening again.
What did happen: going to the basement with Dustin.
It was during study hall. He texted me, asked me to meet him at his locker. Then he led us toward the stairs. On the way I spotted Genesis. She and two other kids were pinning theater performance flyers on the bulletin board. “Hey,” I said with a wave. She didn’t wave back, just watched as Dustin and I pushed through the double doors that led to the basement stairway, an odd look on her face.
We took two flights of stairs down, and then kept going… to the storage rooms? “The basement?” I managed a small smile. He responded with a bigger one.
We found a secluded spot behind a row of old lockers. Dustin leaned against the wall and pulled me close, so close that I could feel his chest rising and falling. If I looked up, our lips would touch. Maybe. Maybe I was crazy about him. And now he took my hand and squeezed it tight. He dipped his head.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said back.
And then we weren’t saying anything at all.
17
Yeah… so I was kinda loving my social life lately. And yeah, it was a major distraction from worrying about Dad, and like, basically being tethered to my room because Tía Laura and Tío R. were so flippin’ loud with their card playing—usually Thirty-One or poker—and the phone calls they had with relatives on speakerphone. Why, oh why, did they have to use the speakerphone? I will never understand. But yeah, it was all a welcome distraction.
But there was something I was not loving. Believe it or not, keeping up my grades was hardest in Creative Writing class. I mean, I could have worked harder on my assignments, but five a.m. was killing me—so much that sometimes I fell asleep in my clothes. I did finish reading Enrique’s Journey for Mr. Phelps’s class, at least.
At my locker I pulled the book off the little shelf to give back to Mr. Phelps. Man, was that book gutting. I just kept imagining Dad riding the tops of the freight trains. And thousands of people did this—not one train, but as many as thirty!—to get through Mexico.… If people knew that it sometimes took over a year… If they knew that some folks went for days and days without eating… knew how migrants kept scraps of paper wrapped in plastic tucked into a shoe—scraps with telephone numbers of relatives in the US… If people knew these things, would they still assume immigrants just came here to cause problems?
I yanked out all the Post-its I’d written notes on for my “review” of the book. The orange squares fell to the ground like confetti. There were a lot. Maybe I wouldn’t pick them up. Maybe let some other kids find them and read them. Yeah, right. They’d step on them and leave them for the janitor. So I squatted down and picked them up one by one, and—no lie—it was like I could feel the weight of the words on the paper, bringing back scenes. I remembered how one father wrapped his eight-year-old daughter’s favorite hair band around his wrist before starting the train journey north.
I wondered what my dad might be holding on to.
(Okay. That wasn’t exactly a distraction from the situation with Dad.) Weekends? They were unpredictable, depending on Mom’s mood swings.
Mrs. Grew didn’t have swings. She was on permanent full force. She took off points for EVERYTHING—spelling, grammar, everything. Today she didn’t even say hi to the class, just wrote on the whiteboard: Write about a meaningful trip you’ve taken and explain why it was so meaningful. Use sensory details.
I wrote about my family’s vacation together, last April break. We drove down to Houston to visit my mom’s cousins. In a van we’d rented by using a Groupon, we drove and drove and drove, dipping down through states I’d only ever seen on a map—West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana. Instead of stopping at Pizza Hut or McDonald’s, like everyone else I knew did, Mom had packed enough homemade food into the cooler to last us the whole trip—pan con frijoles, hard-boiled eggs, arroz, pollo asado, plátanos, and tortillas—and some Vietnamese spring rolls on the side. We ate at the picnic tables at rest stops, where puddles with gasoline rainbows dotted the parking lots. Even though it took forEVER to get down to Houston, I loved those days in the van, the windows down, my hair all crazy blowing in the wind, me listening to music on my headphones, Benjamin and Christopher asleep with their mouths open, Mom talking to Dad or reading her magazines while we all passed around a bag of chips. So that’s what I wrote about.
Mrs. Grew was suddenly standing right in front of me. “Miss Cruz.”
“Yes?” I set down my pen.
“Care to share your story?” She sounded genuinely interested, but still, no. I mean, there was no way I was going to share!
“No, thank you,” I said. But in case she was legit going to give me an F, I quickly handed her my pages so she’d know I’d actually written something. Mrs. Grew walked back to her desk, frowning. I tried not to look back at Rayshawn, but of course, I did. He gave me a look I couldn’t figure out. Did he feel bad for me? Did he think I was pathetic? Or was he just sleepy?
In the hall after class he tapped my shoulder. “Hey.”
“Oh, hey. Hi.”
“Don’t let her get to you. You know, Mrs. G. And just so you know, it’s not just METCO kids she’s mad awkward with.”
“She’s whatever.”
Rayshawn gave a half smile. “So, it’s been about two months now. How you liking Westburg?” When I didn’t answer, he pressed. “Wellllllll?”
“Sorry… Guess I’m still bugged out by Mrs. Grew.”
“Right.”
“Fine. It’s okay,” I said. “Well, some of it.”
“Like Dustin?”
My face went all hot. “Yeah.”
He smiled, or smirked. It was hard to tell. “Why don’t you come sit with the METCO table at lunch sometime?”
“Me? Uh… they weren’t exactly the best welcoming committee my first couple of weeks here.”
“You know how it is.”
“No… I don’t.”
“They’re just waiting on you.”
“For what?” Now I was the one smirking.
“See if you last. If you stay.”
Whaaa? They were waiting until… Huh. I’d never thought of that! I hadn’t even remembered that METCO kids could start the program but then quit anytime they wanted. Yeah, like my parents would let me—but it was technically possible.
Rayshawn put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s not that deep. They’re just probably sick of opening up to people, only to have them leave. You feel me?”
“Do a lot of kids leave?” Actually, I could understand why. Too-early mornings. Aggy teachers. Long days.
“Yeah, actually.”
One of his basketball buddies bounced up and play-flicked him in the head.
“Later,” Rayshawn said to me.
“Later,” I said to the back of his head.
18
Just when it seemed like Tía and Tío would never leave, all of a sudden they were leaving, heading back to Guatemala. They must have all the money they need, I thought, again wondering how much “all the money” could even be. That made me kind of excited, kind of nervous. The Sunday before their flight, Tío R. surprised us all by making pepián. It was totally something Dad would have ordered in the Guatemalan restaurant in Waltham that we used to go to sometimes on special occasions. I’d never tried it. It was a stew the colors of an army jacket. And it took hours—apparently—to make, which meant Tío R. was in the kitchen for like the whole afternoon. He roasted tomatoes, crushed pumpkin seeds—even had Christopher and Benjamin help. Even though he’d said earlier that men didn’t belong in the kitchen!
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Mom had to go to the grocery store three different times because he kept asking for certain ingredients like dried chiles and green beans, but not all at the same time. Mom didn’t complain, though. Somehow having these smells in the apartment put her in a good mood. Or maybe it was because we were all together, chopping and cutting and mashing and focused—finally—on something good that had nothing to do with getting Dad home. Jade came over for dinner and after one bite said the pepián was mad good and could she take some in a Tupperware to her grandmother, who was working late cleaning an office building. Of course Mom said yes. I wished they hadn’t waited to make Guatemalan food until they were leaving for Guatemala. That pepián was right up there with Vietnamese.
Once Tía Laura and Tío R. left, my brothers would get their bedroom back. But it also meant that things were getting real. I still had so many questions. So after they were finished packing, while my brothers were out playing on their scooters, my great-aunt watching them, I joined her. Dustin sent me a text, but I ignored it—I know! Tía drank her beer from one of those free plastic cups from the bank. Tío R. was smoking cigarettes with a couple of old dudes down the street. The streak of pink in the sky caught my eye. When I was little, Dad had told me it was the sun saying good night in sun-language. Good night, Dad. Then I sat on the steps beside my great-aunt.
Tía Laura must have seen me looking all thoughtful, because out of nowhere she said, “Don’t worry too much about your mother. She has depression, but it will pass. The sun falls before it rises once more. Así es.” She paused. “And don’t slouch, mija.” Why were people always telling you not to slouch?
So. Yes. My mother was depressed. I knew that. And it wasn’t going to pass until my father came home. So I asked, “Tía, I need you to tell me. Dad’s going to make it, right?”
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