by Diana Lopez
Anyone can see the books are used. All the paperback spines are creased, and the hardback jackets, torn. The pages are yellowed, dog-eared, underlined, highlighted, and tagged with pink or lime green Post-its. Other than that, the books are clean, which is weird because my dad will forget to dust the coffee table long before he forgets to dust his books. He stands before a shelf with a rag, pulls out the books one by one, and wipes the dust off. This eats up hours.
“Why don’t you get rid of them?” I ask.
“Remember,” he says, “los amigos mejores son libros.”
This means that books are your best friends. In addition to quoting poetry, Dad likes to say dichos, Spanish proverbs. I’m not really bilingual, but I know that el gato dormido no caza ratón means “the sleeping cat doesn’t catch the rat” and that una acción buena enseña más que mil palabras means “actions speak louder than words.”
“Besides,” Dad says, “I’m a bibliophile. Biblio, remember, is the Latin word for ‘book,’ and phile is the Greek word for ‘lover.’ Put them together and what do you have?”
“Book lover?”
“That’s right.”
“So does that make me a sockio-phile?” I ask.
One day, I tried counting my dad’s books but gave up around 600. I tried again, giving up at 923. I thought I could get my dad’s name into the book of Guinness World Records. I’d been reading it in the car every time Dad drove me to school or to volleyball games. I learned that the farthest human cannonball flight is 185 feet. If a football field is 300 feet, then imagine a guy flying over two-thirds of it. Wow! I also learned that the heaviest egg ever found was 27 pounds. More than two ten-pound bowling balls! It came from an elephant bird that went extinct a long time ago. I don’t know who has the most books, but I did learn that the most books typed backward is 58. Now that’s weird!
How can I not read when I live in a house with so many books? Sometimes I trip over one, pick it up, and before I can stop myself, I’m skimming the pages.
We have plenty of fairy tales and poems and big, fat books Dad calls epics, but I’m a facts-and-figures kind of girl. My favorite book is Gray’s Anatomy. It’s all about the human body. With my middle-school vocabulary, I can’t really understand all the words, but the pictures are great, especially the transparencies, clear pages that show the layers of the body starting with the bones, then the heart and lungs, then the stomach and intestines, then the muscles. I can look at those pictures for hours.
Yes, Gray’s Anatomy is a good book. It shows me how the body works. The only thing it can’t tell me is how the body doesn’t work. Believe me, I’ve looked. I’ve looked long and hard. Because I want to understand how my mom died last year. She was healthy, perfectly healthy, until she fell, cut her leg, and got a blood infection from something called staphylococcus. I didn’t understand it, any of it, but I sure tried.
A few months after the funeral, I asked my dad, “What’s a staphylococcus infection?”
“Well, m’ija,” he said with his teacher’s voice, “staphylo comes from the Greek word staphul, which means ‘a bunch of grapes.’ ”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Are you telling me a bunch of grapes hurt Mom?”
He didn’t answer. For the first time, my dad didn’t answer. He just put down his head and cried.
Egg Therapy
My dad started reading a lot more when my mom died. Sometimes when I dream about him, I see a body, a neck, and a book where his face should be.
“Are you okay?” I ask, peeking through his bedroom door.
“ ‘O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,’ ” he says.
Sometimes I can’t stand being in the house with my father so sad. Thank goodness Vanessa lives across the street. She’s been my best friend since forever. We play volleyball together. We do our homework. We talk about clothes, global warming, and boys. Ugly Betty is our hero. Our rule at restaurants is to eat the one thing we’ve never tried even if it’s tripas, a Tex-Mex dish made out of cow intestines.
We should be twins after all the time we spend together, and maybe we are twins, personality-wise. But in looks? Except for our brown hair and eyes, Vanessa and I are as different as a swan and an ostrich. She’s the swan, and I’m the ostrich. I’m really the ostrich—the tallest girl in class, all legs. Too tall and skinny for my jeans no matter what size I buy. Everything is high water. That’s why I’m a sockio-phile. I need something to hide my knobby ankles. Today my socks remind me of whitecaps on the ocean because they’re aqua with white lace around the cuff.
Vanessa doesn’t need a zillion socks. Everything fits perfectly—never too long or too short, too tight or too loose. And she never has a bad hair day. She could spend thirty minutes in front of a high-speed fan without getting tangles. If she wanted, she could make a paper sack look like something a model would wear.
I should be jealous, but I’m not. I don’t care about my looks. I care more about volleyball, geometry, and how toasters and lawn mowers work. But, I admit, when Jason Quintanilla called me Daddy Longlegs, I went to the girls’ restroom to cry. Not because I care what Jason thinks, even if he is the most popular boy in school, but because he called me Daddy Longlegs in front of Luís Mendoza, someone I do care about. Luís didn’t laugh at the joke, but he didn’t defend me either. He just stared at the sundial he wears on his wrist. I have such a big crush on him. How can I not like someone with a sundial instead of a normal watch? And he really can tell time when it’s not rainy and cloudy, and that’s almost always in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Of course, Vanessa knows all about my crush on Luís, since it’s my favorite topic of conversation. And I know all about her crush on a guy named Carlos.
I decide to get out of my house and walk across the street to Vanessa’s. When I see her mom through the front screen door, I tiptoe to the backyard.
“Hey, Vanessa,” I call through her bedroom window.
She’s on the phone. She says, “Can I call you back later? Lina’s here—yes, I promise—ditto—you know I do. Do I have to say it?” She cups her hand over the receiver and whispers, “I love you, too.” Then she hangs up.
“Who was that?” I ask as she holds open the screen so I can climb in.
“My dad. You came just in time to save me from apologizing to his girlfriend. I guess I hurt her feelings.”
“How?”
“I called her a Windsor and then I told her what it means.”
If that’s true, then Vanessa told her dad’s girlfriend that Windsor means more purses and shoes than brains. It’s a word Vanessa and I made up. We use it when we’re talking about stuck-up girls who think they really live in Windsor Castle.
Vanessa has two beanbags, one blue and the other red. I plop onto the blue one as if I own it, and in a strange way, I do. I didn’t buy it and Vanessa never officially gave it to me, but the blue beanbag’s mine—my little corner in her room. When she goes to my room, she hangs out on the top bunk.
“Why were you at my window?” Vanessa asks. “Is something wrong with my front door?”
I don’t answer right away. How can I tell her I’m avoiding her mom? Especially when Ms. Cantu is such a wonderful woman? She’s shown me so many grown-up things over the past year about washing clothes and cooking, things my mother was just starting to teach me. She even buys me girl stuff from the grocery store, Clearasil and Kotex, because I’m too embarrassed to remind my dad. I should be glad to see Ms. Cantu, but every time I do see her, she hugs me and calls me pobrecita and makes me feel like an orphan.
“I didn’t want to bother your mom,” I say to Vanessa. “She’s been so busy.”
“Tell me about it. Guess what I had for dinner last night.”
“Eggs?”
“And for lunch today.”
“More eggs?”
“That’s right,” Vanessa says. “How many times can you eat scrambled eggs without scrambling your brain?”
Around Easter,
most people hard-boil eggs before painting them with dyes made by dissolving colored tablets in hot vinegar. But in Texas, we make cascarones, confetti eggs. Instead of hard-boiling eggs, we carefully crack open a small hole on the top and let the insides spill out. Then we wash and dye the eggshells. After they dry, we stuff them with confetti and glue a circle of tissue over the hole. On Easter morning, we run around and crack the eggs on each other’s heads. Confetti gets everywhere. It’s a lot of fun.
Everybody loves cascarones around Easter time, but Ms. Cantu has made them a yearlong event. That’s why poor Vanessa lives with mountains of eggs. They’re everywhere—eggshells stacked on the kitchen table, above the fridge, on the couch—some blue, orange, or pink, and some still white—and next to the eggs are circles of tissue paper and piles of magazines and newspapers because Ms. Cantu believes in making her own confetti with a hole puncher.
“If only eggs made us better at volleyball,” I say. Vanessa and I play for our school, but our team isn’t very good.
Vanessa laughs. “Maybe we’d win a few games.”
“If that were true, I’d come over and eat eggs all the time.”
“I’d feed them to the whole team.”
“I don’t know what’s crazier,” I say, “reading all day like my dad or making cascarones like your mom.”
“She calls it ‘therapy.’ I guess she’s upset because my dad has a girlfriend. I don’t know what the big deal is. It’s time to move on. My parents have been divorced for three years.”
“Maybe your mom thought he’d come back.”
“But she doesn’t want him back. She’s a man-hater. When she isn’t making cascarones, she’s watching telenovelas or the Lifetime Channel. All the stories are about rotten men who cheat on their wives.”
“Well, my dad’s not rotten,” I say.
“Neither is mine, but try telling her that.” Vanessa grabs a heart-shaped pillow and hugs it. “How’s your dad doing?” she asks.
“I don’t know. He can’t talk without quoting some book or saying some dicho that doesn’t make sense.”
“It can’t be worse than a mom who keeps making cascarones. Easter was five months ago!”
“At least she’s not saying her flesh is going to melt.”
“At least you don’t have to eat your dad’s version of therapy.”
“What are we going to do?” I ask. “Our parents are so miserable.”
“Don’t worry,” Vanessa says. “We’ll think of something.”
Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
WELCOME
DEDICATION
9 BIKINIS
5 ROBINS
30,000 PEOPLE
45 BILLION BEES
50 PAIRS OF SHOES
180 TILES
1 BELLY FLOP
0 TEARDROPS
3 GRADES
6 QUIET RULES
4½ PROJECT IDEAS
5 CUL-DE-SACS
30 QUARTERS
1 SILLY DREAM
2 SPARE INVITATIONS
20 MESSAGES
3 SIDE EFFECTS
2,051 PAGES
532 DOLLARS
9 CHIA PETS
28 CARS PASSING BY
43 PHONE CALLS
144 OUTFITS
2 INTERRUPTED SLOW DANCES
4 TEACHERS, 2 PARENTS, 1 COUNSELOR
4 EXTRA ENVELOPES
500 NAMES IN PINK
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO BY DIANA LÓPEZ
PRAISE FOR ASK MY MOOD RING HOW I FEEL
A SNEAK PEEK OF CONFETTI GIRL
COPYRIGHT
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. Although some real organizations and events are mentioned, they are used fictitiously, and are not meant to imply any endorsement, association, or other affiliation by such organizations or event organizers.
Copyright © 2013 by Diana López
Excerpt from Confetti Girl copyright © 2009 by Diana López
Cover photo © Shutterstock
Cover design by Tracy Shaw
Cover © 2013 Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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First ebook edition: June 2013
ISBN 978-0-316-20995-3
E3