by Anna Meriano
“Isabel, why is it that every time I turn around, you’re telling Leo something horrible?” Marisol emerged from the kitchen with her own tray of pastries, which she immediately passed off to Isabel so she could lounge against the wall and raise an eyebrow at Leo. “Always consider the source, cucaracha. Isabel thinks nobody can have friends just because she doesn’t have any.”
Isabel clattered the sweet queso-filled buns onto the shelf with a huff, but she didn’t exactly deny what Marisol said.
“If you’re obsessed with memorizing Tía Paloma’s lists”—Marisol nodded at Leo’s stack of papers on the counter—“and staying here until midnight making lucky bread, then of course you’re not going to have good friends. But that’s your decision. You can go after Caroline right now if it matters to you. Blow off the schedule, make up with your friend. Or you can stay here and compete with Isabel to be the world’s most powerful and lonely bruja.” Marisol snatched a cuervo off the shelf and took a bite. “Up to you.”
Leo looked from Marisol to Isabel, annoyance again rushing up into her cheeks. Her two eldest sisters—who never agreed on anything—were too busy glaring at each other to realize that they were telling her the same exact thing: choose.
Between magic and friendship?
Leo didn’t want to give up either one. But . . . did Mamá have friends? Leo frowned. Mamá was closest to Tía Paloma, and she had friends from the brujería convention. Friends who had their own magic. And Tía Paloma didn’t have many living friends, but she was Tía Paloma.
Leo stomped past both her older sisters, gathered up her papers, and crossed through the kitchen to join Alma and Belén in the parking lot. The twins consulted with each other (and possibly with more ghostly observers) in whispers, crouched around a pink candle—for communication—that Alma rolled carefully up and down a sheet of paper covered with what looked like cinnamon sugar. Like Solomon’s seal, cinnamon often worked to give extra strength to a spell. Not that the twins needed extra strength in their spells. They gave it to each other already, their ghost-channeling skills even stronger than Tía Paloma’s because of the way they lent each other strength.
Alma and Belén were each other’s best friends—another special case, which meant Leo was officially out of people to use as examples to prove Marisol and Isabel wrong. Even with the sun reaching full strength overhead, chasing away the last remnants of the cool Texas morning, Leo shivered.
She slipped back into the kitchen before Alma or Belén could see her. She didn’t want to interrupt their flawless cooperation, or hear another lecture. Inside she breathed in the heavy warmth of baked and unbaked bread. She watched Mamá pop two plastic-wrapped trays into the walk-in refrigerator, wipe her hands on her apron, and then look around the kitchen and smile.
“It’s good to be back where I belong,” she said.
Leo’s insides lumped together like oatmeal. Would Mamá agree with Isabel, that friends were a luxury a bruja couldn’t afford? Would she say that Caroline didn’t belong in the bakery, or in Leo’s life?
“Hi there, ’jita.” Mamá opened her arms to Leo. “Paloma told me you were such a big help this weekend. We still have so much to do before the sixth, and I’m counting on you to run the register. Right?”
Leo felt frozen to the ground as she leaned into Mamá’s hug. She should listen to Marisol, run out the front door to chase Caroline down, and apologize. But she didn’t want to let Mamá down, or Tía Paloma, or everyone who counted on her help at the bakery. She nodded. “Right, Mamá. I can do it.”
Leo knew how Caroline was hurting. She knew what it felt like to feel left out and out of place. But that understanding was exactly why she couldn’t follow Marisol’s advice. She never wanted to feel that way again.
She didn’t want to choose at all. But she would always choose her family.
CHAPTER 5
SURPRISE
Leo slept badly that night, but she woke up worse.
At first she thought it was the beam of bright sunlight slipping through her blinds and creeping under her eyelids that made her wake with a start. The birds outside her window too seemed to chirp with extra-sharp notes that dug past her pillow and into her ear. Even the smell of her bed seemed wrong—not bad, but different, like a hotel pillow. But as she wrinkled her nose, scrunched up her eyes, and rolled over, something large and unmattresslike moved with her, and Leo’s eyes snapped open.
Before her was a face, staring down at her, with a wide pair of black-hole eyes.
“Leonora,” Abuela said, her hand shaking Leo’s shoulder with more weight and strength than a ghost should have. “I think you’d better get up.”
Leo bolted upright. “Abuela?” She didn’t have the power to see ghosts on her own, so she must be dreaming. But she didn’t feel like she was dreaming. She pushed sticky curls off her forehead and licked her dry lips. In dreams, she didn’t usually notice that she really needed to brush her teeth. “What are you doing here? What’s going on?”
“That’s what I woke you up to ask, Leonora.” Abuela still sat on the bed, her dark eyes still boring into Leo, and her navy sweater still buttoned over her gray skirt. She wasn’t see-through or glowing, and she didn’t have bones peeking through her skin or anything to show she wasn’t a living person. She looked just like she had the last time Leo had seen her, when Alma and Belén had used their powers to summon her into the room a couple months ago.
Alma and Belén’s powers . . .
“Abuela!” Leo sat up straight and grabbed her dead grandmother’s hand. “This must be my birth-order power! I got it, finally! I’m just like Alma and Belén. I can see you!”
She looked around the room, confusion turning into heart-pounding excitement that shot through her like a sugar rush as she searched for more ghosts. The light coming through the window made sparkling diamonds against the wall, and the birdsong made her want to jump to her feet and dance with joy. No more waiting until she was fifteen, wondering what power she would get as the first-ever fifth-born girl in the history of her family. No more feeling jealous watching Marisol and Mamá pluck items out of thin air or Isabel change the mood at the kitchen table, and no more wondering what secrets Tía Paloma and the twins were keeping.
Leo could see ghosts!
The thought was a little scary. Would Leo become like Tía Paloma now, her head always busy somewhere else and her attention scattered by all the invisible spirits talking to her? How many ghosts were there? Would they always wake her up?
“Leonora.” Abuela interrupted Leo’s bouncing thoughts. Her arms crossed, and she stared at Leo with serious eyes. “If this is your power, it isn’t like any of your sisters’ abilities.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Abuela said, “this.” She stood up, raised an arm, and slapped the wall so hard Leo jumped. Several small orange objects fluttered out of the place where her hand met the wall, soft ovals that collected on Leo’s pillow. “You’re not seeing ghosts,” Abuela said, “because I’m not one. Not anymore. I’m here. I’m solid. Leonora, what did you do?”
“Me?” Leo yelped. “I didn’t do anything.” She knelt on her bed, leaning closer to Abuela until she could see wisps of white hair coming out of her bun and curling around her ears.
Abuela scoffed and took a clumsy step backward. “Well somebody did, because one second I was having a perfectly pleasant time in el Otro Lado, and the next I’m being pulled through the veil, and here I am, in your room!”
The veil? Otro Lado? Leo didn’t know what any of it meant, but as her abuela scooted backward, her feet kicked up bits of orange that swirled around the floor. Leo leaned off the side of the bed to pick up a handful . . . to find that they were soft orange flower petals. They broke in her fingers, releasing more of the scent that had woken her up.
They were marigolds—the flowers placed on altars during Día de los Muertos.
Leo stared wide-eyed at Abuela, who shrugged, causing a few petals to flutter o
ff her shoulders and join the rest on the floor.
“I can’t seem to stop shedding them. Leonora, whatever is happening, we have to find out what it is and how to reverse it. And quickly—there are some lines that shouldn’t be crossed.”
Leo was confused, scared, and still only half awake, which may have been why she was brave or grumpy enough to meet Abuela’s stern glare with one of her own. “I didn’t cross any lines.” She threw off her covers, planted her feet on the floor, and stood as tall as she could to look her short Abuela straight in the eye. “And if you’re going to be in the real world for now, you should just call me Leo.”
Her grandmother held her gaze for a moment, then clicked her tongue with a softened expression. “Growing up to be just like Isabel, I see.”
“You mean Marisol?” Leo guessed.
“Oh, hush.” Abuela waved a hand, scattering more flower petals. “I’m dead, not senile. I mean your Tía Isabel. This is just the kind of mess she would make. She never knew when to stop pushing the boundaries of her power.”
From what Leo could tell, Abuela was the one making a mess, blowing flower petals all over her room, but she kept that thought to herself. She checked the clock on her bedside table and found that it was 7:06 a.m., just a few minutes away from her alarm. She and Marisol weren’t on early-morning duty today; they were supposed to join the rest of their family at the bakery later to help set up display shelves and run the register once the morning rush got started. Which left Leo with only one option.
“Come on,” she said, taking Abuela’s hand and tugging her toward the door. “I’m going to prove to you that this isn’t my fault.”
Leo peeked out of her room, nervous even though she knew Mamá and most of her sisters were gone. She walked from her room at the end of the hall to Isabel and Marisol’s shared room, Abuela’s shiny black shoes clacking against the wood floor. Her older sisters’ door was open, showing Isabel’s spotless desk and neatly made bed. When Leo peeked farther into the room where Marisol’s bed was, a lump of wrinkled gray sheets and bunched black blankets squirmed.
“Marisol?” Leo whispered. “Are you up?”
“My alarm doesn’t go off for three more minutes,” Marisol’s voice grumbled out from her nest. “This better be good, cucaracha.”
“Get up, perezosa,” Abuela said, crossing the room to shake a lumpy section of the bed that might have been Marisol’s shoulder. “Didn’t I teach you that God helps the early riser?” She turned to frown at Leo. “That saying sounds terrible in English.” She shook the blankets harder. “Wake up, my sinvergüenza.”
Like a mummy rising from its sarcophagus, Marisol sat up. She untangled herself from her blankets and blinked her puffy eyes at Abuela.
Then she screamed, flailed, and fell off the bed.
“Leo, what did you do?”
Marisol was not the person Leo would have picked to tell about Abuela first. Her sixteen-year-old sister was out of bed now, pacing back and forth across Isabel’s side of the room, where the floor was cleaner.
“I didn’t do anything,” Leo said, for the second time that morning, her voice turning shrill as her confidence sank. Was it possible to cast a spell completely by accident? “I mean, I don’t think I did. . . . What kind of spell would do this?”
Marisol’s pacing shifted as she inspected Abuela, circling her at a distance as though she was made of live snakes.
“Stop that.” Abuela crossed her arms and glared at Marisol, who glared right back. “I’m your abuela, not a museum exhibit.”
“You’re dead,” Marisol snapped. “I don’t understand. Do you have a pulse? Is your . . . is your hip still broken?” She grimaced as she asked the question, took another step back, and continued her wide circular pacing.
Abuela shook her head. “I feel perfect. No ailments or injuries, even my arthritis. Fingernails normal length. No smell—I don’t smell, do I?”
She glanced at Leo, who hesitated, not sure if the scent of marigolds counted.
“Well, I’m definitely not rotting,” Abuela said. “So we know that much, at least.”
“Know what?” Leo asked.
“That she’s not, you know.” Marisol held her hands straight out in front of her with her fingers curled into talons. “A zombie.”
“I’m not raised from the grave,” Abuela corrected. “Which, trust me, you should appreciate. Necromancy brings a lot of troubles, and the stink is the least of them.”
“I guess . . .” Marisol approached, close enough to pat Abuela’s shoulder. “But you’re pretty solid for a ghost.”
Señor Gato, the Logroños’ big black cat, chose that moment to pad into the room, yawning. As soon as he stepped on a marigold petal he stopped, his nose twitching and the fur of his tail puffing out. He whipped his head to stare at Abuela, then gave a loud hiss and darted into the hallway as fast as Leo had ever seen him move.
“I’ve never seen him act like that when Alma and Belén talk to ghosts,” Marisol said, her voice shaking a little.
“I’m still a spirit,” Abuela said. “The cempazuchitl petals tell me that much. I’ve just been . . . pulled through, into the physical world. Very strange, as the cat was smart enough to notice. I’ve never known our magic to work this way.”
Leo shrugged and looked at Marisol, who had finally come to a halt in front of Isabel’s desk and now pressed her palms flat against it. “This is not good,” she whispered. “This is really bad.”
The knot in Leo’s stomach tightened as she watched her sister’s shoulders rise and fall like she had just finished five laps around the football field in PE. Isabel had told Leo once that Marisol was afraid of magic, but Leo had barely believed her. What was there to be afraid of?
“It’s okay,” Leo said. “It’s going to be okay. Isn’t it?”
Abuela put a hand on Marisol’s shoulder. Marisol jumped, then froze, then took a shaky breath. “It is,” she said. She turned around and, after a moment of hesitation, linked arms with her grandmother. “Sorry, Abuela. It really is good to see you. It’s just . . . you know. You’re not supposed to be here!” Marisol tossed her head and snorted. “This is all going to become my fault when Mamá hears about it, just you wait.”
“Why don’t you girls get dressed?” Abuela asked. “I can make some breakfast.”
Marisol tilted her head to one side, the furrows of her forehead flattening. “French toast?” she asked.
“I’ll meet you in the kitchen,” Abuela said. “As long as I have this strange body, I may as well put it to good use.”
“Can you see if there’s coffee in that pot?” Abuela asked Marisol as Leo entered the kitchen. Her older sister’s plate held two slices of French toast already, and two more sizzled in the frying pan on the stove. Orange petals drifted across the kitchen floor whenever Abuela moved. “If I have to go back to walking everywhere, I deserve some coffee to keep me going.”
“I think Daddy finished it before he left,” Marisol said. A smile cracked her grim expression. “We weren’t exactly expecting you, or we would have made two or three extra pots.”
Leo smiled as her grandmother laughed brightly. She didn’t know Abuela had loved coffee when she was alive, and it made her happy to learn it. She stopped in front of the stove to sniff the frying pan. She didn’t know Abuela made such delicious French toast either.
What she knew about Abuela came mostly from stories and pictures. She had heard about the time Abuela marched into Rose Hill Elementary to fight with a teacher for confiscating Tía Paloma’s markers: “If your lessons were interesting, she wouldn’t be coloring in class, would she?” She had heard how Abuela lured mice and cockroaches away from the bakery gently but threw shoplifting teenagers out roughly. She had heard that Abuela used to carry gummy candies in her purse to feed to Isabel and Marisol, but that by the time the twins were born she had switched to healthier fruit snacks.
“That was really good,” Marisol sighed, swiping the last bit of syrup off h
er plate, “but this is really bad. We need to figure out how to get you back where you came from, Abuela.”
“I agree,” Abuela said, flipping the slices of bread onto a plate and handing them to Leo.
In spite of the delicious smell, Leo frowned. Alma and Belén talked to ghosts all the time and nobody thought it was bad. Why did they have to rush to send Abuela back? Marisol hated magic on principle, but she was happy enough to eat Abuela’s breakfast. In fact, as Marisol prepared a new pot of coffee, Leo wondered if there was any way to repeat the spell that had brought her abuela back. Could this really be her birth power? The ability to bring back departed souls? Alma and Belén could send messages between living and dead loved ones, but how much better would it be to bring them together for real? If Tía Paloma could let Tía Isabel back into her room, or if Caroline’s mom . . .
“I guess we need to get to the bakery,” Marisol said, perching on a stool as the coffee dripped. “I don’t love the idea of driving you around town”—she gestured at Abuela—“because someone might recognize you, and that would be tough to explain. But I think we’re better off going anyway. Chances are we’ll need supplies from the bakery to fix this mess, and besides needing their help, I think Mamá and Tía Paloma are going to want to see this in person.” She cringed, hunching her shoulders like she was already hiding from Mamá and Tía Paloma’s questions. “The sooner we get to the bakery, the sooner we can send you back.”
“I like that plan,” Leo said quickly. Maybe meeting with the rest of the family would calm Marisol enough that she could see how it might be good to have Abuela here. Maybe Mamá or Tía Paloma could figure out if this was her power—if it was, it couldn’t be bad.
Abeula nodded. “Of course, girls, you’re absolutely right.” But her eyes lingered on the half-full coffee pot, and she made no move to leave the kitchen.
“Well, there’s no rush,” Marisol said, her shoulders relaxing slightly. “We can wait ten minutes for you to drink your coffee.”
Abuela’s eyes crinkled as she smiled. “There are certainly benefits to existing as an intangible spirit in el Otro Lado,” she said. “Like never getting hungry or thirsty. But I have missed this. The closest I can get is tasting the memory of coffee when you put it on my ofrenda.” She bustled to the refrigerator for the cream, more petals floating to the ground behind her. Leo was kicking them into a pile, planning to sweep them up before before they left, but as she scanned the floor for more marigolds, something by the windowsill behind the sink caught her eye.