Pao was under strict orders not to be on the premises during tarot readings or curos, which her mom did for extra money. Her mom never said it directly, but Pao knew she was supposed to stay away because her skepticism “interfered with the vibe.” Like she was a microwave oven and not a twelve-year-old who got sick of wandering the neighborhood in record-breaking heat while her mom pretended to do magic.
Hopefully, Mom will get real money this time, Pao thought. Sometimes she let clients pay with books or eggs or massages—or, worst of all, IOUs. The refrigerator door was plastered with blue Post-it Notes from Mrs. Jacobs, who always brought one with a dollar sign on it in lieu of cash.
Pao’s mom never turned anyone away. She said healing was a “calling.”
On the kitchen table was a plate with two pieces of cold pizza from the bar where her mom worked, along with another note:
If we had a dog, you would have been up four hours ago to walk him. Plus, he would have eaten your breakfast. See you after the curo. XO Mom
“It would be so worth it,” Pao told the neighborhood cat, Charlie, who was prowling around on the patio. Pao ate the first piece of pizza in two bites, slid open the door, and tossed the crust to him. He sniffed it suspiciously before deciding it was a prize worth carrying away.
Pao was (obviously) a dog person, and you’d never catch her cuddling a cat. But the Riverside Palace had its own ecosystem, and Pao had a grudging respect for Charlie and the other wild cats for keeping roof rats and scorpions away.
After a quick shower and the daily hunt for her notebook and pen (in case of any brilliant ideas, obviously), Pao barely made it out of the house before her mom woke up. She heard her door open just as the front door was closing. It was a dance they’d been doing all summer—avoiding each other as their differences became too big for their tiny space to hold.
The heat outside was oppressive even at eleven, and though she’d planned to spend the day doing scientific research on the library computer with occasional breaks to look up dog breeds her mom couldn’t possibly refuse (Maybe a hypoallergenic breed like the West Highland white terrier? Or a Border collie, which rescued people from natural disasters?) Pao calculated her personal temperature-to-distance-to-motivation ratio and muttered, “Forget it,” to the Riverside Palace’s resident sprawling, dusty cactus.
Sighing, she turned up the stairs to Dante’s apartment instead and knocked, barely waiting for Señora Mata’s “¡Adelante!” before walking in.
“Good morning, señora,” Pao said to Dante’s abuela, who was sitting in front of what had to be the third broadcast of the morning news. “Okay if I hide out here again today? My mom has a client.”
Señora Mata muttered something in Spanish before crossing herself. When she looked back up at Pao, there was pity in her eyes. Pao knew it meant she was welcome, as always, but that Pao’s mom could use some assistance from heaven.
“Well, I’ll just be in Dante’s room,” Pao said, loud enough for him to hear in case he was doing any weird boy stuff in there. Even so, she waited outside the door for as long as she could stand before knocking.
Dante answered looking normal, though—his hair sticking up at weird angles, no styling gel in sight. As usual, his room smelled like dirty socks and his abuela’s Florida Water, which she used for cleaning despite its distinct lack of antibacterial properties. Pao’s mom was obsessed with the stuff, too. It was one of the many things the two of them had in common, including devotional candles and questionable taste in tamale fillings.
As she walked into the room behind him, Pao remembered Dante’s blush and her own fizzy feelings of curiosity last night, and she wondered if things would be awkward between them today. But apparently the weirdness was like bioluminescence: harder to spot in the daylight.
Well, that was one hypothesis, anyway. She’d have to keep working on it as more data came in.
Dante tossed her a lukewarm can of Coke and a PlayStation controller before flopping down into his nest of twisted blankets and changing the racing game to two-player. Just like always.
“Emma coming by?” Dante asked.
“Nah,” said Pao as she selected the pinkest car and the driver with the nineties high ponytail, just so it would be more annoying when she beat him. “She has a piano lesson today, then lunch with her parents at the club.”
Dante nodded, and Pao immediately felt bad for using her phony posh voice. Emma never sounded like that. That was her life, the same way this one was Pao’s. It just felt strange that they were so far apart sometimes, like Emma was in a world Pao couldn’t reach.
Case in point: The only time Pao had ever eaten lunch with the Lockwoods at the country club, she had accidentally ordered duck—which was called something fancy and French she’d been embarrassed to ask about. Then she’d used the wrong fork, as Emma had gently informed her in a whisper. Pao hadn’t had the guts to go back there since, and she still apologized under her breath every time she saw a live duck.
In the too-small bedroom, which was already heating up, Pao won the first two races without even trying. They talked sparingly as they continued the tournament, Dante managing to get by her in one round and doing a horrifying victory dance.
When Señora Mata called “¡Almuerzo!” an hour or so later, Pao was grateful for the break. It was only a matter of time before Dante would get sulky about losing.
Pao knew some girls let boys win just to keep them interested, but beating Dante was one of the great joys of her life. No amount of new nocturnal boy-girl strangeness was going to replace that.
Dante’s arm brushed hers as he stood up. Pao’s stomach and all the organs around it seemed to swoop.
I’m still not letting him win, she told her stupid body.
The layout of Dante’s apartment was identical to Pao’s, but while Pao’s mom had left their main room open to hold all her bookshelves and small altars, Señora Mata had divided hers into a living room and dining area.
In this house, we don’t eat in front of the TV like heathens, the señora liked to say, ignoring the fact that the only thing that separated the table from the TV in question was a floral-print couch. Not to mention the fact that the TV was always on.
During lunch, Pao had to use a lot of brainpower to keep her elbow from touching Dante’s. Unfortunately, it wasn’t distracting enough to block out the news broadcast. Pao always found the local news depressing, and today was no exception.
According to the anchor, it was the one-year anniversary of Marisa Martínez’s drowning in the Gila River. Her body had never been found.
“Such a shame,” the señora said, in accented English for Pao’s Spanish-challenged benefit. “She was so beautiful.”
Pao hated it when people talked about Marisa, though she did her best to hide it. Marisa had been the town darling. Latina, but blond and barely sun-kissed, so everyone could feel good about loving her. She’d been popular in school, while Pao was the weirdo with only two friends and the I NEED MORE SPACE T-shirt.
Regrettably, Pao had been the butt of one too many of Marisa’s jokes. Two years older, Marisa had always made fun of Pao’s obsession with “goofy space stuff,” and her tendency to “smell like hierbas.” She also mocked Pao’s mom for looking “out of it” at fundraisers and school programs.
It was strange when someone you didn’t like died prematurely. Pao was sorry about what had happened to Marisa, of course, but she always had a squirming guilty feeling when anyone brought it up.
Today, though, the guilt was second to the reminder of Pao’s strange experience at the river yesterday. The ripple-less splash. The nightmare that had followed…
The news moved on, reporting on a string of child abductions up north, near Mesa. As the anchor talked excitedly about a possible suspect in the kidnappings, grainy security-camera footage showed a tall, lanky figure with dark hair and pixelated features. A shiver traveled down Pao’s spine. The guy in the video didn’t look much older than the teenage boys who hung ou
t in apartment F. Pao knew he couldn’t be one of them, though—Mesa was too far away.
She tried to listen to this story, but Señora Mata was still clucking about beautiful Marisa.
“Yeah, it was a tragedy,” Pao said, irritation buzzing in her chest like a swarm of yellow jackets. “But not because she was blond and pretty. Because she was a person, and people’s lives are valuable whether they’re beautiful or not.”
Señora Mata’s mouth fell open, revealing a piece of green pepper stuck to her dentures. The air in the room seemed to evaporate, and Pao felt an entirely different kind of swoop in her stomach—fear, this time. But the angry buzzing was still there, too.
“Well, I think that’s enough lunch!” Dante said, grabbing Pao’s plate and standing up between his abuela and his friend before either one could get seriously injured. “Pao was just leaving, weren’t you, Pao? Good-bye! See you next time!” He nudged her toward the door with his foot, still holding both of their plates, three-quarters of Pao’s meal untouched.
At the door, he said in a sharp whisper, “You can’t talk to her like that! She’s just old. She doesn’t know any better.”
“That’s no excuse,” Pao said, her own brown skin and dark hair glaring at her from the mirror that Señora Mata had hung by the door to ward off bad energy. “If we don’t talk about our messed-up beauty standards, how will they ever change?”
As Dante’s expression hardened, Pao knew she would take all the boy-girl weirdness in the world over the storm clouds gathering between them. But she wasn’t wrong, so she didn’t apologize.
Some things are worth standing up for, she told herself, even though her chest ached.
“Not every fight is your fight!” he said, still clearly frustrated as she opened the door.
“Oh yeah?” she asked, her temper flaring. “And what’s your fight, Dante?”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re my fight, Pao.”
Pao wasn’t sure what he meant by that, so she didn’t answer before he shut the door behind her. Through the open window, she could hear his abuela berating him in Spanish. Probably asking why he bothered with such a loudmouthed girl when he could be searching for a silent blond supermodel girlfriend who did nothing but cook.
If I had a dog, Pao thought, I’d train it to pee on her doormat.
All afternoon, Pao tried to forget what had happened at lunch by brainstorming natural sources for rocket fuel and eating what had to be her body weight in Starbursts. When she ran out of pinks, she just kept going—reds, oranges, even a dreaded yellow.
A sign of emotional distress if there ever was one.
All she managed to put in her notebook was a sugar-smudged sketch of the river. If she unfocused her eyes, she could almost see a ghostly hand rising out of the water, like in her dream.
When a knock sounded on her apartment door at five forty-five, Pao tried to beat her mom to it, in case it was Dante. She didn’t quite make it in time, so all three of them ended up in the living room together, their eyes watering from candle smoke and incense.
“What are you two up to tonight?” Pao’s mom asked, sliding in a hoop earring as she prepared for an early shift.
“Nothing much,” said Pao quickly.
Too quickly. Her mom’s face lost its dreaminess and focused in on her immediately. “Paola…”
“We’re using Emma’s new telescope, okay? It’s practically homework.”
“As long as you’re not going anywhere near the river.”
“No, ma’am.” Pao put on her best innocent act and willed Dante to do the same. It wasn’t her fault the riverbank was the only place where it was cool enough to hang out and dark enough for stargazing.
“Good,” said her mom, now distractedly searching the living room for her other high heel. “Because you know La Llorona haunts the Gila. There have been sightings. You don’t want to get caught out when she’s searching for her lost children—”
“Mom!” Pao snapped, embarrassment making her cheeks hot.
“I know, I know, you don’t believe in ghosts,” she said, like she hadn’t just humiliated her only daughter. “But they’re saying there’s a murderer in Mesa, so you stick close to home, you hear me?”
“Mesa is miles from here,” Pao said dismissively. “And, according to the news, those kids are being abducted, not murdered.”
But her mom didn’t hear—she was too busy digging out her other shoe from under a couch cushion. “Aha! Found it!” She slid the low-heeled shoe onto one foot while hopping on the other, her purse strap in her mouth. When she finally had herself together, she swooped in, smelling like rose oil, to kiss Pao on the cheek. “I love you, mija,” she said. “Be responsible, and no river—I’m serious.”
“I love you, too, Mom,” Pao said, discreetly wiping lipstick off her cheek.
“Make sure she stays out of trouble, okay?” her mom said to Dante and, to Pao’s infinite embarrassment, kissed him on the cheek, too. And then, at last, she was gone.
“She’s still going on about La Llorona, huh?” Dante asked when they were alone, his tone forced, their earlier argument still looming between them. “Even my abuela stopped with that one when I turned ten. Now she just threatens me with the chancla. Much scarier.”
Pao had only been on the business end of the chancla—Señora Mata’s petrified old slipper—once, when she’d accidentally set fire to a macramé plant holder while trying to prove that you couldn’t put out an oil fire with water. But she privately agreed that La Llorona was child’s play in comparison.
“I just can’t believe my mom actually accepts that junk as reality.” Pao’s embarrassment was making her mean, she could tell. But she couldn’t stop. “Spirits haunting the riverbank? At least the maybe-kidnapper is an actual person, even if he is, like, three counties away.” She circled the room, blowing out candles. Her mom would have been furious that she didn’t thank the ancestors first. “She says she’s ‘more in tune with ghosts and spirits’ because of her tarot and healing work,” Pao said. “Which is just—”
Dante was getting this glazed-over look. After all their years of friendship, he could recognize a mom rant coming from a mile away.
“Sorry,” she said, grabbing her shoulder bag. “I hope you brought snacks, because there’s nothing here, as usual, and I ate all the Starbursts.”
Dante patted his backpack reassuringly. “Rode my bike to Seven-Eleven earlier. Abuela let me have the couch change.”
Pao nodded her appreciation, glancing up at him and finding him looking back. Their gaze lasted a beat too long, sending Pao’s stomach swooping again as she looked away.
Dante shifted uncomfortably and pushed his hair out of his eyes.
Pao’s stomach swooped yet again.
She told it to knock it off.
“Hey,” he finally said. “About what happened at lunch…”
“No, it’s okay,” Pao said. “She’s your grandma. I know it’s hard to—”
“I talked to her,” Dante said. “After you left. Told her that stuff you said about beauty standards or whatever. I don’t know if she got it for sure, but…”
Maybe it was the seven thousand milligrams of sugar coursing through her veins, or the promise of the telescope, but Pao didn’t let him finish. She stepped forward and hugged him for a long time, his backpack awkwardly knocking into her shoulder bag.
“Thanks,” she said when she finally let go.
Dante was blushing again. “Um, yeah. Sure. No big deal.”
They walked to the river in silence, but it was a comfortable one. Considering the roller coaster their friendship had been lately, Pao held on tight to the feeling.
When they reached their usual spot near an ancient, twisted juniper, Emma wasn’t there yet. Pao pulled the blanket from her bag and spread it on the rocky sand. The water looked almost still, the surface deceptively mild as dangerous currents flowed underneath. Pao shuddered when she thought of her dream—the hand with Emma’s ring, the de
pths of the river. She pushed the memory away.
Dante and Pao sat with their backs against a rock, Dante flipping through a comic, Pao doodling in her notebook, the comfortable silence persisting. Pao didn’t want to break it. After twenty minutes of waiting, Dante opened his backpack and started shoving peanut butter crackers into his mouth. For once, snacking was the last thing on Pao’s mind. “Emma’s always on time,” she said, more to the ground than to Dante. He wasn’t a worrier.
“Chill,” he said, holding out the sleeve of crackers. “Have one.”
But food didn’t quell the uneasy feeling in Pao’s stomach. Emma was never late. She should have been there already.
“Okay, this is officially weird,” Pao said when it had been an hour and the light was beginning to fade in the sky.
“She probably forgot,” Dante said, but even he was pacing now, his dark eyes darting around the riverbank and to the cactus field in the east.
They both knew that was unlikely, but it was comforting to hope, so Pao played along.
“Yeah, maybe she lost track of time reading comics or something. We can try again tomorrow.”
Dante rubbed the back of his neck self-consciously, not meeting Pao’s eyes.
“What?” she asked, a little more snappily than she’d meant to.
“Nothing,” Dante said. “It’s just…I’m supposed to play soccer with the guys at the park tomorrow.”
Pao tried not to react. Because of Dante’s new soccer friends, Emma and Pao had eaten lunch without him more often than not this past year. Pao had thought summer would be a safe time, when they could hang out with Dante like they always had and not worry about him getting too cool for them.
“You guys could come?” Dante offered, but she could tell he didn’t really want them to.
For the next ten minutes, they sat in silence, Pao trying to pretend that this summer would be just like all the past ones they’d spent together. Yet she knew it wouldn’t. Seventh grade was looming, and everything was changing too fast.
“Let’s go back home and call Emma,” Pao said, her alternating worries about her two best friends making tears spring to her eyes. She folded the blanket to give her nervous hands something to do. “Maybe her parents wouldn’t let her go out and she couldn’t get ahold of us to say.”
Paola Santiago and the River of Tears Page 3