Mel held the reins as he dismounted. “School and work first. Then we’ll see if there’s time to play.”
“And can we ride outside the corral?”
“Once you prove you can handle a horse, you can go anywhere.”
You can go anywhere. Suddenly, the missing link in his plan to help Don Vicente clicked into place. So obvious, he mentally kicked himself for not having thought of it sooner.
“How long before I prove I can handle a horse?” Jaime took the reins back from Mel.
Mel walked by his side. With her hat she seemed taller than him, but he noticed her brown eyes were just below his as she smiled at him. “Depends how much you want it.”
Oh, he wanted it. Now the question was, how would he draw Seme, with his robotic tank wheels, on top of a horse? Because even though Seme’s first adventure had ended up botched at the hands of Diego, it wasn’t enough to keep a good creature down.
They exited the corral, with Mel latching the gate behind them, as Meester George headed their way. A nervous pain gripped Jaime in the stomach. When Mel offered to teach him how to ride, he never thought of asking Meester George for permission. The setting sun cast a shadow on the owner’s face. Picasso and all the tack belonged to the rancher. He might not want Jaime to use any of it. Jaime stopped the horse and gripped the reins tighter.
“That the first time you ride by yourself?” the rancher asked.
“First time with no Don Vicente,” Jaime agreed. “Eez okay I ride horse?”
“No one else is riding him and you did all right,” Meester George said as he ran a hand down Picasso’s legs as if making sure he was sound. “If you practice every day, I can see you riding out to check on the cattle on your own in a few months.”
“No.” Jaime shook his head. “No months. Saturday.”
Meester George turned away from his gelding to stare down at Jaime. “What’s happening on Saturday?”
Jaime took a step back and crashed into Picasso’s neck. He could do this. Be brave. “That day I go to Don Vicente’s family.”
Meester George shifted his hat to have a better line of vision at Jaime. “What are you talking about? The old man doesn’t have kids.”
Jaime explained his plan as clearly as he could. A couple of times Meester George interrupted, saying Jaime’s idea didn’t make sense and Jaime searched for new words to explain. When Mel offered to translate, Meester George shook his head. “If the boy wants something, he has to learn to ask for it himself.”
Once Jaime finished, he waited to hear Meester George’s response.
“Not happening.” The boss man shook his head.
“But sir,” he remembered to address him as Tomás did, and as the rancher preferred, “eez good idea. It work. It get Don Vicente out and he come home.”
“The plan is a good one. But it’s the part about you going around on horseback that won’t fly.”
Jaime shook his head in bewilderment. “No fly. On horse.” He patted Picasso’s neck, as he’d seen Don Vicente do so many times with Pimiento.
“I mean that you can’t do it on a horse.”
“Why?”
The rancher shifted into a wide stance that made him seem even bigger than normal. “For one thing, you can’t ride by yourself. You can barely stay on at a trot, and I can’t spare a rider to go with you for a whole day. Second, the places you want to go to are much farther away than you think. It would take days to visit them all on horseback. And lastly, you don’t even know where to go.”
Jaime’s shoulders slumped against Picasso’s neck. A few minutes ago, the plan seemed perfect and horses were the miracle to make them work. Now he was back where he started.
“But I still think the basis of your idea is a good one. You’ll just have to find someone who can drive that’s not your brother or the others, since I need them here.” Meester George tipped his hat and headed to the barn office.
A sigh that sounded more like a horse snort came out of Jaime as he led Picasso to the barn. He had a good plan, a great plan even. A plan that would convince the judge that Don Vicente was a reliable man who could be let out on parole.
Mel showed him how to remove the cinch from the straps and lift the saddle off the horse’s back. She then brought out the brushes, teaching Jaime how one brush worked in a circular motion to loosen the sweat and hair and the other to sweep off the excess.
He supposed he could try to work his plan by calling people; then it wouldn’t matter that he didn’t have a driver. Except he didn’t really get along with phones, and wondered how many people would even answer. No, there had to be another way. Another driver he hadn’t thought about.
Once Mel said Picasso could return to the horse paddock, Jaime walked him back. The wind shifted to reveal the scent of something delicious cooking in the big house. That was it!
Doña Cici smiled at him when he entered through the kitchen door without knocking. “You got a nose like Vicente. I only just finished.”
She handed him a spoon of still hot, sweet cajeta, similar to dulce de leche but made with goat milk.
Jaime held the spoon over his hand to ask his question first. “Can you drive a car?”
She paused her canning to nod out the window where the sky began to darken. “Not at night, my eyesight isn’t good enough anymore.”
“But during the day you’re fine?”
“Sure, my license is still valid.”
He told her his plan to help get Don Vicente out of prison. Unlike Meester George, she didn’t interrupt or insist that he express himself in English. “So can you do it? Will Meester George let you drive one of the trucks and have the time off?”
He finished the question by finally sampling the spoonful of cajeta. Sweet and deliciously flavorful.
Doña Cici dropped the lid of one of the jars with a clatter before turning to Jaime with a stern look. “El señor does not tell me what I can do. When his wife’s not here, I run the house. Yo soy la que manda.”
Jaime grinned. He knew she’d be on board. He crept a finger to one of the jars for another taste but got slapped away like a bug. Doña Cici gave him a scolding look, but then prepared a handful of saltine crackers with a dollop of cajeta on each one and handed them to him. “No more, or you’ll spoil your dinner.”
“Please let me spoil my appetite for Tomás’s cooking,” Jaime begged, only half kidding.
Doña Cici laughed as she returned to her canning. “Let me seal these jars and we’ll go over the plan.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Mr. Mike told me what happened, Sean wrote in his notebook the next day on the bus. Diego is such a jerk. I know it’s not the same, but I got you this.
The notebook Sean handed Jaime wasn’t anything fancy. A blue cover made from cheap cardboard and spiral rings holding the unlined pages together. It looked exactly like the one Tomás had bought him when he first arrived. Like the one that had been massacred in the bathroom.
Sean turned the notebook to the back cover. In robotic font, he’d written The Adventures of Seme: Seme Rolls Again.
Jaime signed his thanks by touching his chin and extending his hand out, following it with a thumbs-up.
He began drawing the story on the last page, in true manga fashion. He thought of redrawing their original stories, maybe even improving them. The first image had Seme with a cactus…?
His hand streaked ink across the page as a shrill laugh came from the back of the bus. Jaime cringed and didn’t have to look to see who made the noise. He’d have to tear out the page and start on a fresh one, but just the thought of losing a page because of a mistake pained him.
No, better work with the streak and start something new. New book, new stories, new Seme.
• • •
Classmates cheered as they walked into the classroom to find the window blinds drawn. Jaime looked up from his desk where he’d been studying a road map Doña Cici gave him. She’d marked the locations of Don Vicente’s friends, and
he wanted to spend the remaining minutes before class figuring out their route. But that wasn’t easy with everyone bursting into song and dance every time they entered the room.
“Why people happy?” he asked Freddie, who was leaning back on his chair as if to get comfortable.
“Mrs. Threadworth only closes the blinds when we’re going to watch a movie.”
“A movie?” He folded away the map just as the bell rang. Yes, that would definitely be a reason to celebrate. And even better with Diego still suspended.
“As you have figured out, we’re going to have some screen time.” Meesus turned off the classroom light and sat by the laptop. “I found video clips of immigrants and refugees around the world sharing their stories.”
Jaime sank low in his chair. He felt as if he’d be sick. He didn’t want to see what others had lived through any more than he wanted to relive the experience himself.
“After we have finished watching the videos,” Meesus continued, “I want you to write a story about one of the people you witnessed, imagine what their life was like before, or what happened after. How did their experiences change their lives?”
The class groaned and a few people voiced their complaints.
Now Jaime really felt sick. He didn’t have to imagine what happened, he already knew. And having to write it in English would only be worse. What could he write? It bad. Boy scared. Family says love him. They still says good-bye.
But when the videos started, Jaime couldn’t turn away from the faces on the screen. Old men with sunken eyes, women with hollow cheekbones and worry lines on their foreheads. One man with a bushy black beard kept talking about a boat. Another, a woman in a headscarf, went on about her feet. Their accented words were sometimes hard to understand, but Jaime felt he knew them. Had met one under a bridge near Ciudad México; another on a bus near the border between Guatemala and México. They all shared the same unsettled look: Even though things were better now, the soul remembered too much to ever truly be okay. The next video showed a Honduran girl with short black hair and wide, half-scared eyes staring at him from the screen.
“Mah-ee name ees Jessica—”
Jaime lunged from his desk along the wall to the screen at the front of the room before realizing it was the whiteboard and not the real person. A real person he knew. “Dat’s Joaquín!”
He turned from the screen to Meesus’s desk and slammed the space bar on her computer to pause the video. A couple of kids protested but he ignored them as he stared at the person in front of him. It was impossible. The last time he’d seen the eleven-year-old kid was on top of a freight train heading to Mexicali. They had traveled together for days before that. The kid had helped save Vida’s life and had latched onto Ángela’s side like an extra limb. No matter what gringos said about Latinos all looking alike, Jaime knew this was no doppelganger. This was his friend Joaquín. Alive!
“What’s going on? Jaime, are you okay?” Meesus asked in a half-worried, half-annoyed voice.
“Dat’s Joaquín!” he repeated. “He, she, eez my friend.”
“I think you’re confused. This girl is called Jessica.”
“No. Eez Joaquín!” He waved his arms in the air. “I know him, her.”
Meesus shook her head. “I don’t think so, Jaime. I got this off the Internet. It’s streaming from YouTube.”
“But eez true! She dress like boy. I know. She friend.”
“Okay, Jaime, she’s your friend,” Meesus said, even though it didn’t sound like she believed him. She placed a hand on his shoulder and tried to lead him back to his seat. “Now, please sit down.”
He shrugged off her hand and leaned in closer to the computer. He dragged the timeline bubble back two seconds to start the video from the very beginning.
“Mah-ee name ees Jessica—”
“See, Jessica,” someone shouted in the dark.
“Shh!” Jaime moved the bubble back a second. Meesus made some comment that Jaime didn’t try to understand.
“I come to deez country de Honduras,” the girl continued. Jaime’s nose almost touched the computer screen and his eyes crossed, distorting the familiar face. She sounded different from the boy he knew, and at the same time identical. As Joaquín, the boy was shy, scared, and barely talked. Now as a girl, this Jessica said many words, but in English. He’d heard that sometimes, shy people found it easier to talk to a camera than to other humans. “I no have good life in Honduras. My mamá and me we leave. Go live with Tía in El Norte. But my mamá she die. Bad men kill her. I see all.”
The girl looked away as she wiped her eyes on her shoulder. Jaime’s heart pounded. He had guessed that her mother had died, but had no idea she had witnessed the murder. He’d imagined Miguel’s murder many times, but it couldn’t compare to being there, seeing it all, and knowing there was nothing that could be done to stop it.
The girl in the video took a couple of seconds to recover. “I dress like boy. Boys more safe. Friends tink am boy.”
“ ‘Friends’! Dat’s us!” Jaime exclaimed, which caused him to need to drag the bubble back again. Half the class groaned and Meesus tried another attempt to get him to sit down. Didn’t work.
“—Friends tink am boy. Friends help, then I leave friends and go alone. Ees hard. I go on trains top. Ees cold. I let go. I land on dirt. I walk long time. I eat plants.”
Jaime longed for more details about what happened after they separated. He wanted to hear everything—how she survived the train, la Bestia. If anyone discovered along the way that she was a girl. If anyone dared hurt her.
“I find phone and call Tía. She says I muss cross frontera. I muss get caught in El Norte. She says only way.”
She took another deep breath and Jaime did the same. Why would her aunt tell her to deliberately get caught? Who would want to be in a detention center? It didn’t make any sense.
“Tía says people die in desert. Centro de inmigrantes in El Norte is better.”
Joaquín/Jessica stopped again and when she continued, Jaime noticed she skipped over the part about how she crossed the border, and how she managed to get caught. He knew why she did that—too painful. Plus, you didn’t reveal immigration secrets on YouTube so la migra would prevent others from doing the same.
“Centro have many people. Many sick. Babies cry. Too many people. Migra says I leave with Tía, need space for more people. Tía only family, Mamá died, no family in Honduras. Now I live with Tía. I go to school. I learn Eengleesh. In futuro, I go to universidad and get job. But today, I need money. Money for lawyer of inmigración so I stay. I good person. I not want be scared.”
And then she started singing the national anthem. Jaime recognized it from movies even though he didn’t know the words. But more surprising than that was her voice. Rich and pure and able to hit all the notes without ever cracking. She could sing any song in the world and make it sound beautiful.
The video ended with a website for her crowd funding campaign. Jaime grabbed a pen and paper and wrote down the URL, and the video’s URL.
“Dat eez my friend,” Jaime insisted again and Meesus didn’t have the energy to argue with him. “How I make contacto with her?”
Freddie raised his hand as if Jaime were a teacher and he had the answer. “YouTube lets you add comments to videos. You can put your e-mail address there and maybe she’ll see it.”
Brilliant! Jaime supposed he couldn’t blame Freddie for having bad taste in Pokémon friends.
“Can you please?” The words were barely out of Jaime’s mouth when Freddie was at his side on Meesus’s computer.
“Now, boys . . .” Meesus made another attempt to regain control but they didn’t listen.
“What’s your school e-mail address and password to log you in?” Freddie motioned to the screen.
Jaime typed in his information. A few seconds later Freddie pointed to the comment box. “Type what you want here.”
Jaime started punching keys with two fingers. He didn’t k
now how to add Spanish accents and forgot about capital letters and most punctuation, but that hardly mattered.
joaquin soy jaime! you’re alive! me and angela miss you e-mail me when you get this, and he included his school e-mail address.
“She see it?”
Freddie shrugged and nodded at the same time. “I think YouTube sends comment notifications. Even if they don’t, if I posted a video to raise money, I’d check the comments. But you might also get some junk mail.”
Didn’t matter. He never thought he’d see Joaquín again and now that he knew she was out there. When they traveled together, hadn’t she said something about San Diego? Where was San Diego? He’d do whatever he could to be in touch.
Back at his desk, he pulled out his phone and hid it under his desk to text Ángela. It didn’t matter that they’d barely spoken in ages, and when she did, it was in English. He didn’t care that she had been acting weird. Maybe the good news about their lost friend would make her smile again and return to her normal self. Because if it didn’t, then he knew there would be no hope of finding his cousin again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
¡Joaquín está vivo! Just saw her on video! The Spanish text prediction on his phone let Jaime write to Ángela quickly and with accent marks. Once finished, he made sure the phone was on silent before looking at Meesus innocently.
A light flashed in Jaime’s lap. Except it wasn’t a reply from Ángela. It was an e-mail. Tomás must have linked it when he configured Jaime’s phone.
The e-mail came from a JJ Morales, subject Hola. Probably spam. Still, Jaime opened it.
¡¡JAIME!! Is that really you? How’s Ángela? Are Xavi and Vida still with you? Can we talk after school?
¡Sí! Jaime typed back.
Just as he pressed send for his message, the phone levitated out of his hand and into Meesus’s. “No phones during school, you know that.”
“But Meesus, dat was Joaquín!”
“You can get it back at the end of the day. Now class, books away for your math quiz.”
The Crossroads Page 16