He studies the Skittles, and then he begins to separate them out slowly. Green on one side, red on the other.
“He doesn’t hate you.”
Neither of us says anything for a long time.
“I don’t know,” he says finally. “He sends me letters, at least. Well, pictures.”
“Like, from magazines?”
“No, he draws them. They’re really good.”
He pops the candy into his mouth and pulls a wallet from his back pocket. He takes out a piece of paper that’s been folded into it and hands it to me. “This one’s of our hammock, the one outside our grandmother’s house.”
The hammock is hanging between two fruit trees, with mountains in the background. It’s got little flowers underneath, butterflies, even a caterpillar.
“It looks just like the place, which makes me wonder about my little brother. He was only seven the last time he saw that hammock.”
“It’s really good.” I hand it back to Phoenix. I’m trying to imagine him there—swinging in the hammock. It’s not easy to picture. That landscape seems so far away from where we are right now, at a random exit off the interstate.
“Ari doesn’t hate you,” I say again.
Phoenix puts the drawing back into his wallet and reaches for the last of the Skittles.
“Will he be able to come and live with you?”
“I don’t think so.” He takes a piece of candy between his thumb and forefinger and examines it. “But he’ll probably get to stay here, which is really good.”
“Why not with you?”
“It’s different for me.” He looks over at me. “I’m an adult.” He smiles a big innocent grin. “At least, they think I’m an adult. I’m not so sure.”
“Yeah, I’m an adult too. Technically,” I say. “What does that even mean?”
“To be an adult?” he asks. “I have no idea. But I guess what it means for me is that my chances of staying here are pretty bad. I’ll know for sure in a couple of weeks.”
He’s not staying here. Those words have a strange effect on me, like they’ve punched a tiny little hole in my chest. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying not to overthink my reaction to the thought of him leaving. I barely know him, after all.
“What happens in a couple of weeks?”
“I go back to court. Until then, I’m free to do whatever I want, as long as I stay within twenty miles of Amanda and Sally’s house.”
“Wow. What freedom.”
He stretches his hand out to offer me the last Skittle. It’s green.
“I’m not complaining. You should see where I was before I got this thing,” he says, gesturing toward the tracking device beneath his jeans.
You’d never know he was wearing it, unless you knew.
For better or worse, I know. That’s not the sort of thing you forget.
“What was it like?” I ask. “I mean, in detention.”
A strange emotion flashes across his face—one I can’t read. Then he turns to look at me again. He really looks. It’s like he actually sees me. His eyes have a little crinkle around the edges, like they’re smiling. And then his face actually breaks into a real smile that makes my stomach do a flip.
“Let’s just say I’d rather be sharing these Skittles with you than sharing a room with sixty men dressed in blue jumpsuits.”
“Sixty men? They put sixty people in the same room?”
The whole flipping-stomach thing is still happening, which makes me feel a little more awake or something, and also a little scared and confused.
“Yeah.” He nods. “And there was no privacy—you couldn’t even shower or, uh—Well, I mean, we had to do everything out in the wide open.”
I look at Phoenix, and my mind starts to conjure the image of him standing under a hot stream of shower water. I let it, even though I know I shouldn’t, since I have a devoted boyfriend, and since Phoenix is telling me all these terrible, sad things. But it feels so good to have that thudding pulse spread from the pit of my stomach—to feel anything that isn’t fear or anxiety or the dull, hazy distance of life going on around me, without me.
Sitting here with Phoenix, sharing candy I don’t even like, imagining what water would look like running through his hair, across his face, down his back and chest. God, it feels like living.
I’m pretty sure he feels it too.
Phoenix’s phone rings.
“It’s my parole officer,” he says. “Give me a minute.”
Phoenix steps out of the car and starts to talk. I sit there, still wondering how a boy like Phoenix can end up with a parole officer.
Phoenix laughs, which is not really what I expect from his conversation with a law enforcement official. Then he leans through the window of the car and covers the receiver with his hand.
“Officer Worth needs to know where you plan to take me.”
“Dahlonega,” I say.
“No, he needs details.”
“It’s a surprise.”
“He doesn’t do surprises.”
“Ugh,” I say, trying to sound dramatic. “There’s a lady in Dahlonega who makes homemade pupusas every Saturday morning. She sells them outside her church. And she makes that kind with the little flowers. I checked.”
Phoenix leans in closer, an adorable smile spreading across his whole face. Seeing that smile, it makes me breathe a little easier.
“You’re taking me to another city for homemade pupusas de loroco?”
“Yeah,” I tell him. “As long as Officer Worth gives us permission. And I think we need to hurry, because she quits selling them at noon.”
“That’s so amazing,” he says. “I can’t believe you’re doing that for me.”
I hear the officer’s voice coming through the phone’s speaker.
“Pupusas?” Phoenix speaks into the phone. “They’re a food from El Salvador—like tortillas, sort of, stuffed with meat and cheese and stuff.”
He listens again.
“What’s the address?” Phoenix asks me. “Of the church?”
I show him my phone, where the address is programmed into the map.
He reads it aloud. “Ninety-Three Main Street. It’s called Saint Matthew the Apostle.”
After a moment of listening, Phoenix says, “I understand.” And then, “I can do that.” And then he laughs and says, “Yeah, sure, Officer Worth. I’ll bring you one. But they’re only really good when they’re fresh.”
Phoenix looks over and gives me a thumbs-up. So Officer Worth is going to let us go on this little adventure.
Phoenix turns his back to me and I let myself study him—the curve of his neck, that place where his hairline ends. I let myself notice the way it feels to study his angles.
The parole officer must be saying something funny again, because Phoenix laughs nervously and shakes his head.
“Dude! We’re going to a church.”
Then more nervous laughter.
“We’re just friends,” he says quietly.
Then he listens some more and begins to nod.
“That sounds great. Thanks.”
He shoves the phone into his pocket and gets back into the car. “Did you hear that? Uh, the last part?” His cheeks are flushed, and the tips of his ears have turned red. I can’t really imagine what Officer Worth would say to cause Phoenix such embarrassment. Or maybe I can.
“Your parole officer thinks we are, like, on a date?”
“Yeah, well, not exactly.”
“What did he say?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Come on.” I shove him, teasing. “Tell me.”
He looks over at me and runs his hand over his short hair. “He told me not to let you take me to some cheap motel—that he knows exactly where I am at all times.”
I’m pretty sure I start to blush too. But I can handle this.
“Bummer,” I say, nudging his knee again. “I guess that ruins part two of my surprise.”
; He shakes his head, but he doesn’t move my hand from his knees.
“Drive,” he says, looking at the clock on the dash. “We’ve got forty-eight minutes until those pupusas disappear, and you’ll lose your chance to try the best food ever invented.”
And then I have this thought, that even if he might be leaving soon, Phoenix will need to be part of my life for now—like, every day. Because I know he’s running away from something so terrible I can’t imagine it, but when he’s with me, we both are here. Right here.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
PHOENIX
I’M EATING MY THIRD pupusa de loroco. The curtido is perfect and the pupusas are damn near perfect, and this crazy beautiful girl is next to me—so close that, even though we’re not touching, I feel the warmth from her body. And she keeps closing her eyes, leaning her head back a little, and releasing these small, soft moans.
I guess she likes pupusas.
“OhmyGodohmyGod,” she says. “What is this stuff called again?”
“Chicharrón.”
“Okay,” she tells me. “Chicharrón is my new best friend.” I watch her take another bite of pupusa and then slowly wipe the curtido juice from her lip. “And this slaw stuff? What do you call it?”
“Curtido.”
“Is there more?”
I look into the white plastic bag that the nice abuelita gave me.
“There’s a ton,” I say. “Enough for, like, a week of binge-eating pupusas.”
Gretchen smiles big. “Let’s do it! Let’s sit here until next Sunday and stuff our faces with pupusas!”
We both know that’s not gonna happen, but it’s amazing to hear her say that she wants it. I still can’t figure it all out—why she’s spending her time with me, why she’s doing this great thing for me. And also, if I’m being real, why we’re sitting so close to each other, so much energy tugging at the space between us, when she’s got a college boyfriend somewhere, who takes her out for dinner and drives his own car. We can be friends. I mean, that’s fine. But what it feels like to sit this close to her isn’t really a friendly kind of feeling.
Gretchen sped all the way up here on narrow, curving roads that cut through the forest. When the trees cleared, we were in this town surrounded by mountains, and the church was right in front of us. I didn’t know Georgia had mountains. I guess this shouldn’t surprise me. Until a few weeks ago, I couldn’t even find Georgia on a map. And now, here I am, sitting alone with her on the stairs of this pretty white church in a little mountain town. I’ve never seen a church like this, except maybe in the movies. It’s wood, painted a pure, bright white. All the windows are filled with colored glass. When the light comes through that glass, it changes entirely, making long shifting patterns on the floor. There’s a tall tower in the front, and a little porch with white columns. That’s where we’re sitting now, on the concrete stairs. We’re looking out across the street of a town with shops all lined up in rows. And behind the shops are mountains, their angles soft and gentle. The trees have these tiny new leaves on them, so they’re not quite green. They almost look yellow when the sun filters through them. Or gold, maybe. They’re so thin and translucent that they look fragile, like they might break if they fall to the ground before the summer heat toughens them.
When we pulled up, we saw a table propped beside a big comal. A bunch of mismatched plates sat piled on top of the table, next to a white plastic bucket. It reminded me so much of my abuela’s pupusa stand back in Ilopango that it hurt to look at it. Even the flowered tablecloth looked familiar, like my grandmother might have just pulled it from under the sink in her courtyard to spread it on that table herself. But there was no one at the table, and there weren’t any pupusas there either.
“We missed them,” Gretchen said, pulling into a spot in front of the church. I looked over at her, trying to ignore the ache in my chest. Her face was twisted into a sad grimace, so I wanted to say something that would let her know it was okay—that just being here with her was enough.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “It’s not a big deal. Maybe we can come back.”
We both knew that wasn’t likely. Officer Worth made clear that this was a one-time-only thing. He told me that if I decided to leave the state of Georgia with Gretchen, or if we weren’t back inside my twenty-mile radius by six, he would send the cops to chase us down.
Gretchen wasn’t ready to give up on the pupusas yet, so she made me go inside the church with her to see if we could find someone to ask. We walked to the front of the church—through big wooden doors that creaked and squealed on their hinges. Pushing on those heavy doors, Gretchen almost plowed right into an old lady in a housedress. Turns out, that old lady was Mama Lola, the sweet abuelita who sells pupusas here every Saturday morning to raise money for the church.
Gretchen launched right in. She told Mama Lola that we came all the way from Atlanta because she read about the pupusa stand on some food blog. Mama Lola squinted in confusion and repeated the word blog? a couple of times, rolling the word around in her mouth, like she was trying to get the flavor of it.
“En la computadora,” I told her, because at first I thought maybe she didn’t speak English, but she spoke plenty of English. Once Gretchen figured that out, she decided to go on and tell that lady my entire story, all the way down to how I’m separated from my brother. I’m not sure how much of it Mama Lola understood. Gretchen was talking really fast. But the abuelita must have gotten most of it, because she took us out to her son-in-law’s truck, opened the back, and loaded about thirty pupusas into a plastic bag, complete with little containers of red salsa and a bunch of plastic Baggies filled with curtido.
Gretchen tried to pay her, but she refused, saying the pupusas were a regalo—a gift. Then Gretchen gave Mama Lola a huge hug, which I think sort of shocked her. I went with a more subtle approach, shaking her hand and saying, “Gracias, señora. Muy amable.”
Then Mama Lola’s son-in-law drove her away in his truck, down that country road.
So here we are—Gretchen and Phoenix alone on the steps of an empty white church, stuffing our faces with pupusas, looking out at mountains that seem to go on forever. The sky is blue, the trees are bright yellow-gold, and the sun is shining, like it’s trying really hard to produce some heat for us.
I push up my sleeves and let the sun warm my skin.
“I’m so completely full,” Gretchen says. When I look at her, she’s closing her eyes and leaning back on her elbows. She’s wearing another one of those enormous sweaters with a huge, wide neck, and it slides down her shoulder. Her eyes are still closed, so I let myself look at the thin black strap of her undershirt and the pale skin of her shoulder. Her skin is so light that the sun seems to shine right through it. I can’t look away.
I catch the scent of the curtido and I feel tired, suddenly. That smell—vinegar mixed with cabbage, and the earthy aroma of the masa—it takes me right back to my abuela’s pupusa stand down by the lake. It’s like I’m standing behind the comal with her, a scrawny kid who wishes he were out climbing rocks with his friends, but he’s helping his abuela instead, because he hasn’t got any choice in the matter.
I was the one who scooped the curtido out of the bucket. Every Saturday, Abuela made me go down to the commercial district by the lake with her to help. I put on clear plastic gloves that made my hands sweaty, and I grabbed handfuls of the stuff and dumped it onto the pupusas after she served them on plates. I used to stand there with her for hours, hating the stench of vinegar and the feel of the gloves on my hands, looking out to the mountains and the lake, thinking about all the adventures I wished I could be on with my friends.
“I should have let her teach me how to make these things,” I say quietly.
“Who?”
“My grandmother. She tried to teach me.”
“You should get the recipe from her. I’ll help you make them.”
My head is starting to spin. “She’s not around anymore,” I hear myself say.
>
“She died?”
“Yeah, a while back.”
“How?” Gretchen asks. It’s an innocent question, but I can feel my whole body starting to shake.
I don’t think I can answer. I guess I’m looking pretty bad, because Gretchen reaches out and puts her hand on my knee. It feels good there—warm, even through my jeans. I brush my finger lightly against hers and let myself notice how touching her, even like this, makes the blood pump faster through my veins.
“It’s okay,” she says, squeezing my knee. “We don’t have to talk about it.”
I look over at her, watching me, and I decide to talk. I can’t tell her everything, but I want her to know something.
“A few years ago there were floods in my town. There was, like, a—a current, a river of mud.” I close my eyes. I am whispering. “I don’t really know how to explain it.”
That’s the truth. How could I possibly begin to explain it?
“A landslide.” Gretchen nods. “I’m sorry, Phoenix.”
She leans into me, and suddenly I don’t care if Gretchen has a boyfriend. Maybe she doesn’t care either. Maybe it’s fine for me to want this—to want to feel her body pressed against mine. I want to sit like this for a long, long time, to study Gretchen’s soft hand on my leg, to know every detail of it. Because I don’t want to see any of the images that are taking shape in my head. I don’t want to see my abuela’s gnarled old hand, showing me como se golpea la masa con la palma de la mano.
My grandmother showed me so many times, how to pound the masa into discs, into just the right thickness for the filling to go inside. Her palm open, her wrist moving quickly up and down. I never could do it right. Con la prácitca, she told me, still working the dough. Con la práctica, se logra perfeccionar la técnica.
We would stand in my abuela’s courtyard, pounding that dough, and she would tell me how proud she was of me—a boy not afraid to make pupusas. She said there was no reason for this to be women’s work, that I could do it too. She said all I needed was practice. If only she had known that I didn’t care a thing about making pupusas. I wanted to leave that courtyard and head for the hills. But I was a good boy back then, so I stood beside her and pounded the dough.
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