by Adi Alsaid
I shake my head, even though she can’t see me. “I’m on the plane now.” My voice sounds far away, kind of like I left it that dark, cold room. “I’m not okay yet. But I will be.”
I say goodbye and hang up as the flight attendant walks down the aisle, closing overhead bins, instructing passengers to buckle up.
I breathe in deep as we take off, watching as the earth sinks below us and we start to float above the clouds. And that’s when I realize what’s missing. My throat is bare, and it feels like everything’s lost again.
“Oh,” Rajan says, startling, reaching for his backpack. “I grabbed this from the bin earlier. I didn’t want you to forget it.” He combs through the outside pocket and pulls out a little tangle of gold.
And I’ve never been more grateful. For who I am. For who I might get to be.
My Ganesh. The god of new beginnings.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The author of the YA doc dramedy Symptoms of a Heartbreak, Sona Charaipotra is not a doctor—much to her pediatrician parents’ chagrin. They were really hoping she’d grow up to take over their practice one day. Instead, she became a writer, working as a celebrity reporter at People and (the dearly departed) TeenPeople magazines, and contributing to publications from the New York Times to TeenVogue. These days, she uses her master’s in screenwriting from NYU and her MFA in creative writing from the New School to poke plot holes in her favorite teen TV shows, like The Bold Type—for work of course. She’s the co-founder of CAKE Literary, a boutique book packaging company with a decidedly diverse bent, and the co-author (with Dhonielle Clayton) of the YA dance drama duology, Tiny Pretty Things and Shiny Broken Pieces, soon to be a Netflix Original TV series. Forthcoming are the psychological thriller The Rumor Game (with Dhonielle Clayton) and the contemporary YA comedy How Maya Got Fierce. Find her on the web at SonaCharaipotra.com, or on Twitter @sona_c.
THE CURANDERA AND THE ALCHEMIST
Maria E. Andreu
The first snow falls on a Tuesday. Tuesday is the day I teach English as a Second Language classes, a deeply improbable thing for me to be doing for a bunch of reasons. Like, because I once needed ESL classes. Like, because ESL for people like me, and my mom, for the men in the group I teach...well, maybe it’s a bit of a tiny bandage on a heavy bleed. It makes no sense, but I want to do it anyway. Which I never would have imagined the day Ms. Scofield roped me into it.
The day of the first snow, I’m on my way to the library carrying my favorite book. The snow’s tinkly magic lights the orange-blue sky and makes the whole world hold its breath. But, like all held breath, I should have known the moment couldn’t last for long.
* * *
It is two months before the first-snow Tuesday. The intercom crackles to life. “Luisa Diaz, please come to Ms. Scofield’s room.”
Crap.
I check the time on my phone. Oh, not good. I had wandered into the library at the start of my free period. I meandered over to this dark part of the stacks in a blind corner where a bulb has gone out. I ran my finger over the spines slowly, willing them to speak to me. One did, its dark green cloth alive with promise. The Alchemist’s Confession. From a glimpse at the author’s name, I could tell it was mis-shelved. Maybe someone stashed it here so no one would find it. Or maybe they wanted only a certain kind of someone to find it, the kind of someone who gets lost in the dark nooks of libraries.
I turned to its first page.
It is the rare person who can withstand transformation, although so many think to wish it. Magic should be summoned only by the hardiest among us. I tried to explain this to her, but I loved her too dearly to do a good job of it. That’s why things happened as they did.
Questions pricked at me, and soon I was tearing through page after page.
Now that the intercom has broken the spell, my phone tells me that I not only burned through my free period, but the one after that, gym. Maybe that’s why Ms. Scofield—the school counselor—is calling me: detention for cutting class.
I pull the book up to my nose, an old habit. It smells faintly of old ink, of paper that was once too close to moisture and...something else. My mind hunts for the memory, but it escapes me.
One more minute. I’ll go to Scofield’s in a minute. The hunt for the memory the book’s smell evokes takes me down blind alleys and lands me almost eight years ago, in the faraway village where my mother grew up.
* * *
When I was ten years old, the women of Colinas went across the street from my grandmother’s house to see Don Isidro, the local curandero, one by one. They came back pale, clutching sweater fronts together with one hand near the neck and looking behind them, as if haunted. They whispered of being shown to the back room, where Don Isidro stayed when he came to visit. In a rustle of skirts and sisters they told the tale of what he’d said to them. “He’s no good, just like I thought, he’s running around,” and, “Three branches from the willow, braid them together and...”
Inevitably someone would describe in detail what Don Isidro did during her top-secret visit, although the others reminded her she wasn’t supposed to. He took a long puff of a big cigar and blew the smoke into a teacup, watched the pattern as it rose, then read a candle like it had her life story written in the flame in a way that sent her into uncontrollable shivers.
They shooed me away when they noticed I was listening. These were predictions and prescriptions I wasn’t allowed to hear.
We were there in my mother’s “back home” for six months. Long enough for Don Isidro to visit Colinas twice, once with enough time to see my mother. His visits were prized, and time with him was allotted by some unwritten math that only my aunts seemed to understand.
When I asked my mother what the curandero said, she replied, “He says we’ll cross the border on a Tuesday. And that we’ll make it through.” That was all she’d tell me, although I could tell there was more. Maybe something about my father who’d died when I was little. A message, perhaps. That night I dreamed of sneaking to see Don Isidro myself. In my dream, I crawled into a teacup and floated in smoke, up, up, out of the cottage and following the spines of the mountains all the way to North America.
I resented being excluded from my mother’s solo visit to the gnarled old cottage where the curandero’s mother lived. Don Isidro came to stay with his blind, ancient mother every once in a while as part of his rounds. No one quite knew how far afield his rounds took him, but the news of his arrival back in town spread like wildfire through the dry brush at the foot of the cordillera. By the afternoon of the day he’d arrived, he was completely booked for his whole weeklong stay. Everyone went to him with a covered head and a basket of fruit, bills carefully folded in an envelope tucked in a pocket like he was some priest in a cathedral for dark spirits, not a dude in a ramshackle cottage by a canal running with icy water from the mountains.
Although the whole fuss about him was irritating, I was grateful for my mother’s buoyed spirits after her visit to him. She had looked defeated for weeks at that point, like we’d never get back to the United States. Which was crazy, because the US was home. I’d gone to the States as a baby with my mother and grown up on Nickelodeon and Five Guys. When my mother picked me up from school in fifth grade and said, abruptly, “We need to go back home,” it had taken me a long beat before I understood she meant the country she’d grown up in, not our basement apartment. “Abuela’s sick. We have to go.”
Once we’d gone, we’d been stuck there. Stuck as my grandmother grew skinny in a matter of weeks, as my mother and my aunts washed her, faces lined with purpose. Stuck as everyone shuffled in wearing black and wailed in the front room with the big TV that looked like it was from the 1950s, and which had long been repurposed into a display case for knickknacks. Stuck after that, too, while the sisters decided what to do with the house, hinting it was time for us to go so the mud-walled place could be sold.
Stuck w
hen we couldn’t get a visa to come back to the US because we’d overstayed our last one.
My mother had tried bribes and long lines, but we didn’t get a visa. She signed away her rights to her share of her mother’s house for enough money for us to take a plane to Mexico and then paid a guy to smuggle us in. On the US side the guy who’d led us across stuck us in a room with peeling wallpaper and told my mother he wouldn’t let us out until we paid him more. But he did let us out.
I never did find out how my mother paid what he asked for, because by that point all she had was a ten-dollar bill in a fake pocket she’d sewn into her bra.
* * *
I shake the memory away. Scofield is definitely going to give me a detention. But it might just be worth it. The book was so engrossing, the descriptions so alive and intoxicating, that it was as if it had bewitched me to keep reading. An alchemist is not a curandero, but there were similarities between the book and my memories of Don Isidro. Maybe it wasn’t the smell that reminded me of my mother’s visit to Don Isidro, but the magical ether that seemed to run through the two things.
They were the same, the alchemist from the book and old Don Isidro, in ways I couldn’t identify on a test, in ways I felt somewhere behind my throat. But not entirely. The alchemist falls in love with a showgirl and creates the most magical theater in all of London, where people for hundreds of miles come to be mesmerized and amazed, just like the women of my mother’s town were amazed. Who knows what Don Isidro was up to, why he left and roamed and came back unexpectedly. Maybe he ran a secret magical theater too.
I pull myself up off the library floor, take out my ponytail, and scrape my hair back with ragged nails into what I hope is a semblance of a respectable, visit-the-school-counselor look, then put my ponytail back in. Teachers and counselors never get tired of telling you not to judge a book by its cover, but that’s basically all they do, reading the superficial tea leaves of absences or rumor to figure out who to haul down to the office. As if they could know any of us in the hundreds of faces they deal with every day. I bet she has a checklist. I’m stressing it, but she just got to the Ds and that’s why she called me in.
Although probably not.
Ms. Scofield’s office is two doors away from the main office. I know there’s no reason for the actual office to make me nervous, but it does. And so does being this close to it. I knock on her door gently.
“Luisa, is that you?” I hear through the thin, plastic-y wood.
I turn the knob, open the door. “Hi, Ms. Scofield.”
“Thank you so much for coming. Come in, come in.” She moves her hand like she’s fanning herself.
She thanks me as if I could have just told the school counselor I wasn’t coming.
I sit in the chair across from her. Her office is like a hospital gift shop: fake cheer abounds. You never go to the school counselor when you’re happy, but the room is floor-to-ceiling motivational posters, bright boxes, hot-pink feather boas and, as if that wasn’t weird enough, a frog puppet inside a frog basket that looks more appropriate for a kindergarten than a high school. She pulls an iPad off a table that’s covered with magazines and bits of what look like colored index cards. She swipes at it languidly, without a lot of commitment. Its brightness glints off her glasses.
“Well, your SATs were stellar. Really good work there. You were in the top four percent of the school, and even better statewide. Your grades, though. Talk to me about that.”
“I...uh.” I leave it at that. She’s going to have to ask a better question. Or give me time to come up with a better answer. My throat is full of things I want to hold and not say. To explain it to her would require so much backstory. It would be like asking someone to read a book before teaching them the alphabet. Just the thought of trying makes me want to curl into a ball.
“Top of your class freshman and sophomore years. Pretty good the first half of junior year. So you can obviously do the work. And then the second part of junior year and here at the start of senior year you’re in...well, I was going to say ‘free fall,’ but that’s not very counselor-y, is it?” She actually winks. She’s not very old, so I guess she thinks she can still get away with the I’m-not-like-all-these-other-oldsters-who-just-don’t-get-it stance.
“I guess free fall is a fair term,” I say. I’m not going to make it easy for her. Some part of me thinks it’s her job to see more.
“Your attendance is not great either,” she says. I guess I should appreciate the fact that she’s being straight. I do not. I run my nails over the rough fabric of the sides of the chair. Her solutions to my attendance problems will probably involve watching videos and writing essays. I need a lawyer. Not even that. New laws. A magic wand.
I keep my gaze on the space just above where her eyebrows meet. I read somewhere that people think you’re looking in their eyes when you do that.
She puts the iPad down. “Is there anything you want to talk about? How are things at home?”
“Fine.”
She nods her slow I-know-what’s-up nod. I saw it during junior year, when my grades first started slipping and she called me in. I wonder if she remembers. She’s acting like this is the first time we’ve talked about this.
“I spoke to a few of your teachers. Their sense is that you’ve lost your motivation. We have a creative solution for you. If you’re open to hearing it.”
I slide up the chair a little. Creative solutions aren’t going to fix my problem. But they’re like a scent I can’t ignore, and I let myself listen even through the ammonia smell of what’s-the-use. So the deal is this: come here, to the public library, Tuesday nights, teach ESL, and they’ll count it as an independent study, which can supplement either my English grade or my history grade. I have no idea what ESL class has to do with history, but maybe they picked the two classes I’m most sucking wind in and organized it with those teachers. I’m not sure how this is even okay by the rules, but it was their idea. I know some of my classmates have hustled Senior Independent Instruction Programs—SIIPs—for senior year. Like Amanda from my math class is supposed to be helping to file at her mother’s law firm, but I know for a fact she goes to the mall and her mother’s law clerk signs the slips so that the school doesn’t get wise to her. I wanted to do one, but I had no idea where I could get an Independent Study gig, so I didn’t even try.
ESL is on the second floor, at a set of light wood tables set up next to an enormous circle window through which you can see the town hall and the leaves turning showy shades of yellow and red, and some going straight to brown. I know how you feel, brown trees. It seems a lot of work to turn something gorgeous only to have it all fall off and get carted away in big yellow garbage trucks.
The woman who runs ESL looks like she started working here roughly around the time George Washington got inaugurated. She’s all wispy white hair and powder-blue sweater pulled primly over bones and old boobs. She greets me as I walk through the door.
“Jennifer called and said you’d be coming. Do you have any experience teaching ESL?”
“I speak Spanish,” I answer. It’s weird to hear her calling Ms. Scofield by her first name.
She regards me through sharp blue eyes. “That’s too bad,” she says. “Slows it down, actually, if you speak their native language. Although a few of the day laborers speak Mam and K’iche’. Don’t suppose you speak either of those, do you? It’s good to hold most of the class in English, but we’re in desperate need of some way to communicate basic things in Mam and K’iche’.”
“I...no.” I don’t tell her I’m not even sure what those are.
She turns away, leading me toward a table. “That’s too bad,” she says again. I appear to be a deep disappointment to her even though we’ve only just met. She gives me a stack of photocopied pages from a book. “I’m Betsy, by the way,” she says.
I am tempted to answer, Ross? But I don’t.
“Hello, Florencio,” I say, following Betsy’s instructions to speak to the students only in English. “I am Luisa.”
He smiles and nods. He looks unsure.
“Have you done any ESL classes before?”
He smiles nervously, his eyes blank.
I side-eye Betsy. She’s sitting down with a student several tables away, and there are three other tutor-student pairs between me and her.
I drop my voice lower and ask again, this time in Spanish. Hearing me speak a language he understands makes Florencio’s eyes light up, and he raises his voice an octave as he responds. This is his first ESL class. He arrived in the US only two months ago. He is staying with his cousin, and he already has a full-time job working for a landscaper. I want to ask him how old he is, but he doesn’t volunteer the information, and it seems rude to ask.
I quickly switch back to the sheet that Betsy gave me. Introduction Games, it says. I skim the instructions and realize it’s an activity for a large group. I flip to the next one. It’s called Name Game. It’s also for a group, but I think Florencio and I can pull this off. I explain the rules to him. I cheat and explain them in Spanish, but insist we do the game in English.