I held his hand. “Is that why you came back? To rescue me, Titán?” I’d meant to sound playful, flirty, bantering, like always. Instead, my voice was deep and hoarse. I couldn’t stop looking at Diego’s lips.
He leaned closer, and just like that, we were shoulder to shoulder. I traced a finger over his barrio tattoo, and he lowered his forehead to mine. Tentatively, I put my hand on the nape of his neck. His skin was hot under his curls.
The music played on in the background. I took a deep breath, about to jump into one of Paraná’s whirlpools. I wouldn’t resurface the same.
I leaned in first. My mouth was soft and hot on Diego’s.
He kissed me back. A shuddering breath escaped us both, and he pulled away. Although clouds covered the night sky, I could see the Southern Cross and the whole Milky Way reflected in his eyes. I took hold of his worn-out sweatshirt and pulled him back to me. He closed his eyes, but I was afraid that if I closed mine, I’d miss something. Soon I couldn’t fight the urge anymore. I let the whirlpool take me. I didn’t even know how to swim. My eyelids dropped.
Diego wrapped an arm around my waist. Before I knew it, we were kneeling on the sand, facing each other, the blanket bunched up around our legs, the mate knocked over and forgotten. La Furia met her equal in el Titán. The latent goddess inside me pulled at her bindings until she snapped them. Together, we held on to this boy who’d come to wreck my world.
My mouth moved down to his neck; skin recognized skin. His hands burned against my back, climbing up, up, up.
In a lucid second before I took off my jersey, I remembered we were out in public.
Nothing would happen to Diego, but if someone saw us like this, the consequences for me would be dire. I’d break my mom’s heart. I’d become a hated tool in my father’s hands. Roxana would think I’d given up on everything I’d worked for.
“Te quiero,” Diego said in my ear, trying to catch his breath.
With my hands on his chest, I gently pushed him away. “Don’t lie to me.”
“If anyone’s a liar, it’s you, Furia. Who taught you to kiss like this?”
Like I would ever tell him he’d been my only one. I laughed. “Who taught you?” I teased him back.
In reply, he kissed me again and again and again.
“My knees are killing me,” he said when we broke apart to breathe. He fell back on the sand but didn’t let me go. He pulled me up onto his lap, his arms wrapped around me. His heart beat hard against my back.
“In La Juve, the mister always says life is a bianconero business. Love is black and white; there’s no in-between. Camila, I’ve loved you all my life. I can’t pretend I don’t. Not anymore.”
He turned me around and kissed me again, softly this time, like we had all the time in the world, like he wasn’t leaving the next day.
But he was.
“What are we going to do?” I asked, my soft voice an echo of Furia’s desperate cries.
“I have a plan,” Diego said. With every sentence that left his mouth, I said yes with a kiss. He pulled me down on the sand while raindrops baptized us as they fell from the pregnant clouds.
18
Eventually, the rain chased us away. Diego helped me get back to the car. The moment by the river was already gone.
We carried our shoes, the mate things, sand, and something else, a link that made me hurt every second I wasn’t touching him.
Thunder shook the car. Diego looked at me, his curls plastered to his forehead, goose bumps covering his strong arms. His sweatshirt must have come off at some point.
I looked at the clock on his dashboard. “My parents are going to kill me.”
“I’ll come up and tell them the truth. I mean, it’s not like they won’t have guessed. I told them I came back for you.” Diego kissed my forehead.
Vestiges of the old Camila climbed out of the smoldering pile of senselessness that couldn’t quite bury her.
Somehow, I wiggled out of his arms. “Wait,” I said. “We’re not telling anyone.”
“But why?”
Diego knew my parents, but would he understand if I told him about the fight with my dad the night we’d gone out? Or my mom’s warnings the morning after?
“Diego, I . . .”
Say it, say it, la Furia chanted, echoed by my drumming heart.
But I couldn’t say I loved him. If I did, I’d be defenseless, and I was afraid that I’d do something we’d both regret forever. The girl Diego said he loved was the strong one, the winning Camila, the one with a future she was forging for herself. The one who was still fighting. If he rescued me, if I quit for him, I wouldn’t be the girl he loved. I wouldn’t be myself.
He let me sort out my thoughts and pushed a button on the console. Soon, heat warmed my seat.
“You don’t have to tell anyone if you don’t want to,” he said. “How do you live carrying so many secrets?”
Diego had a face like a book. I wasn’t that fluent in the language of love, but anyone could have seen it painted all over him. In my family, love had always been a weapon to be used against the weakest at their most vulnerable. I wouldn’t let my parents use it against Diego.
“Listen,” he said. “I can’t ask you to wait for me. You’re not the kind of person who’ll just knit a scarf or sit on a pier like the girl of San Blas.”
Why was it always the girl waiting and losing her mind?
“But I’ll wait for you, Camila. Until you’re ready to give me a chance.”
“You say that now . . .”
Lightning flashed, and I counted to three before thunder rumbled. He wanted a chance. He wanted to wait for me. Until I was ready.
My fantasies with Diego usually reached embarrassingly romantic points, but I’d never even dreamed of something like this.
He took the package from the back seat and handed it to me. The paper was stained with water and muddy sand. “I’ve been wanting to give you this since I arrived.”
I carefully placed my finger under the Scotch tape, but he said, “Rip it for good luck.”
Feeling guilty because this paper must have cost a fortune, I tore it off and opened the flat, white cardboard box. What I was certain must be the scent of Europe, clean and sharp like the expensive stores at the shopping center, filled the car. My fingers brushed the silky fabric of a jersey.
“What’s this?”
“Take it out and see for yourself.”
Carefully, I lifted the jersey. It cooled my fingers like water. It was an original, Juventus and Adidas, with all the official stamps, and on the back, above the number twenty-one, was my name: camila.
“Had I known,” Diego said softly, “I would’ve had them print Furia. You know, they have a women’s team. Maybe one day . . .” In the space of the ellipsis, I saw our future like in a movie.
“Maybe,” I said. I wanted him to take me somewhere else right now, while we had the chance. I wanted him so much, I could’ve done it right there in the back seat of his car.
He leaned in to kiss me, the same raw hunger in his eyes. Before our lips touched, his phone buzzed. My first impulse was to tell him to ignore it. We couldn’t stop now. But Diego glanced down at the screen, and his eyes widened in alarm. “It’s Pablo,” he said. “He’s asking if I know where you are.”
As if midnight had struck and turned the car back into a pumpkin, the illusion vanished. Pablo and the rest of my family might as well have been sitting in the back seat, watching my every move.
I looked at myself in the small, fogged mirror on the visor. I looked just like someone who had played a brutal fútbol game and then spent the last couple of hours rolling in the sand by the river. How was I going to hide all this?
Rain drummed on the car roof, amplifying my nerves.
Diego said, “He’s worried. What should we say?”
> “Nothing!”
He looked at me like I wasn’t making any sense. “I’ll come up and tell him and the whole family—”
“No!” I exclaimed a little louder than I intended. I saw it all so clearly now. “Pablo just gave us the best excuse for being together tonight.”
“He’s going to tell. He’s not stupid. He has to know about us.”
I took Diego’s face in my hands and kissed him. “Here’s what we’re going to say.”
Diego trusted me so implicitly, he texted what I dictated to him without once questioning me. He sat up and typed staccato lies to his best friend.
Never had I felt this much power over anyone else, or even my own life, and the taste was intoxicating.
Diego sped home, but still the storm beat us to 7 de Septiembre. By the time we crossed Circunvalación, the rain and wind were wreaking havoc on the west side of Rosario. Water ran through the streets. Torn tree limbs had brought down power lines, dooming the residents to darkness and warming refrigerators. An empty 146 bus moved aside to let us pass. The beams of its headlights brightened the dark road. The BMW wasn’t built for the fury of Santa Rosa. She was drowning us.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said.
“How?”
“I’ll find a way.”
When I got out of the car, the pelting raindrops couldn’t wash away Diego’s last feverish kiss or the memory of his hands all over my skin. I felt him watching me as I limped slowly up the stairs. My leg didn’t hurt so much anymore. Diego had said the hamstring was probably only strained but that I should be careful. Luciano had played after a tweak in his knee, and by the time the doctors realized his meniscus was shot, it was too late. None of the stories my mom told to scare me into behaving had ever terrified me the way Luciano in his blue La Valeria uniform had.
Once I was on my floor, I waved at Diego, and finally, he drove away.
I wished he’d taken me with him. But there was no avoiding my family.
Nico barked from inside the apartment, giving me away, and my dream of coming in unnoticed vanished.
To my surprise, we still had power. The only person home was Pablo, sitting in front of the TV, drinking straight from the orange juice bottle. Once Nico had licked my hand to his satisfaction, he made his way back to my brother.
The clock on the TV read just after eleven. There was no sign of my parents. Where could they be at this time?
Relief flashed in Pablo’s eyes before he had time to camouflage it with frustration. “Where the hell were you?” He sounded so much like our father that I recoiled.
Pablo must have heard him in his voice, too, because he put the bottle down and said softly, “You scared me.”
Encouraged by his effort to calm down, I made my way to him and kissed him on the cheek. He smelled like Diego’s new cologne.
“At work, Pali. I thought I’d wait out the storm, but it just got worse.”
Pablo shook his head. “You were with Diego the whole time.”
It was easy for Pablo to imagine the truth. He’d had plenty of similar experiences with Marisol and the other girls he’d hopped between since he’d discovered his good looks and blazing smile.
Thunder rumbled outside, making Nico whimper. The temperature had dropped at least ten degrees, and my skin prickled. I put the kettle on and made myself a ham and cheese sandwich. “Do you want one?” I asked, looking over my shoulder. He was flipping through the channels.
“Sure,” he said.
It was almost like traveling back in time to when Mamá worked at her atelier downtown and it was just the two of us most days. I never had Pablo to myself anymore.
When I brought the sandwiches and mate to the table, Pablo was laughing at a Simpsons rerun like it was the first time he’d seen it. The episode was almost over. He took a bite of the sandwich and smiled. “Thank you. I was so hungry.”
“You could’ve made something, you know? Your balls aren’t gonna shrivel up and fall off if you feed yourself.”
He laughed. “But you made the sandwich for me. My tactic worked.”
I stuck my tongue out at him. “Next time, I’ll let you starve.”
The Simpsons episode ended, and the transmission jumped to coverage about Central having all its players, even the reserves and youth teams, attend workshops about domestic violence. Pablo rolled his eyes and turned the TV off.
“Why did you do that?” I asked.
“I have nothing against the workshops, negra. Some of the guys are violent because they don’t know any better, and they can learn. But, I mean, a lifetime of hard work can go down the drain because of one moment of anger, and like Papá says, some women like the rough, bad boys . . .”
It was one thing for my father to say that and quite another to hear it from Pablo. I tried to remind myself that I wanted to keep my brother on my side, that I needed a lifesaving favor from him. Arguing wouldn’t change his mind, so why should I hurt myself trying? But I spoke up anyway. “So many girls are getting hurt because of that mentality. Look at me tonight. I was scared to come home on my own. I can’t even walk to the bus stop without being afraid someone will attack me. And you were scared, too.”
Pablo clicked his tongue. “Now, don’t exaggerate. Of course it’s not okay, but that’s the world we live in, nena. Maybe you shouldn’t be working at all. When you aren’t home, we worry you’ll be on the next poster. If you aren’t careful, it’ll be your fault if you are.”
“I’m not going to be a missing girl,” I said.
None of the girls and women whose faces plastered the walls of our city had ever intended to become statistics, either, but they were blamed for the crimes committed against them.
“Did you and Diego really go out again?” Pablo asked. “When I texted him, he said he was driving you home. Why didn’t he come up with you?”
I had all my answers ready at the tip of my deceiving tongue. “We didn’t go out. It was a coincidence he found me,” I said. “When I couldn’t venture out into the storm, one of the nuns said Diego was coming over to bring some donations, so I just waited for him.” Pablo nodded, accepting the lie Diego and I had created. “Then everyone wanted to see him and get pictures with him, and before I knew it, it was late. He promised Ana he’d be home tonight, since he’s leaving tomorrow.”
Pablo yawned. “I don’t know why he’s driving that car in this weather. I guess when you have enough money to throw butter at the ceiling . . .”
The jealousy in his voice shone neon green. This was my cue to head back to my room and install the new doorknob. I didn’t want to see this side of Pablo. I picked up my backpack and ruffled his hair before walking away. “Good night, Stallion. Don’t forget to come pick me up when you have your own BMW.”
He scoffed. “My red Camaro, you mean?”
“On these streets? You’ll fall into a pothole and resurface in China.”
Pablo threw his head back in laughter. “At least the Chinese like Argentine fútbol players.”
Now was the time. He wouldn’t deny me.
“Pali . . .” I willed him to read my request on my face.
My brother knew some things were too important to put into words.
He pressed his lips into a hard line, but his eyes were still velvety soft like the old Pali, the one nobody saw anymore. Finally, he nodded and said, “I won’t tell them you came home so late. But don’t do it again.”
“I won’t.”
I walked away, and just when I thought I was in the clear, Pablo called me out. “What happened to your leg? You’re limping, and your pants are all muddy.”
“I got hurt in a scrimmage,” I said.
Pablo laughed. “Stop trying to be funny. Really, what happened?”
I shrugged. “Walking to Diego’s car, I fell in a pothole, turned up in a fairyland. But I had
no choice but to come back to real life.” The joke revealed too much, but he still smiled.
“Just be careful, okay?” he said. “Everyone knows fairylands are full of wolves.”
19
Did something count as a miracle if it was possible only because of a lie? I didn’t really want to find out, so I put Deolinda’s estampita in my nightstand drawer.
In the shower, sand fell from my tangled hair and gathered like crumbs at my feet. After, wrapped in my towel, I curled up in bed, hugging the Juventus jersey, which still smelled like Diego. The nightstand was covered in dry petals.
In between pangs of pain in my leg, my body thrilled at the memory of tonight. I repeated Diego’s words and promises so I wouldn’t ever forget them, so they could make me stronger.
He had power over me, but I had power over him, too.
I fantasized about what it would be like if I were flying out with him tomorrow. Heading to the glamorous new life he had in Italy. I wasn’t the first or the last girl dating a fútbol player to do this.
My body was on fire. I hovered at the edge of dreamland, feeling Diego’s gentle fingers on my skin, his soft mouth on mine.
I hadn’t pushed the dresser in front of the door to protect me. Nico had stayed with Pablo.
I heard someone come into my room.
“Camila, what’s wrong?” my mom exclaimed, shaking my shoulder. I bolted upright. “Hija, are you okay?”
My heart hammered painfully all over my skin, as if that’s all I was, a heart. My mom held my face in her cold, cold hands and pressed her lips to my forehead. For a moment, I was afraid that she’d sense Diego in me, and all the things I’d been hiding from her.
Then I remembered. Today was Diego’s last day.
“I didn’t hear the alarm,” I said, gasping as if I’d run sprints. My voice was raspy.
“Mi amor, I think you’re sick,” she said, looking around the room as if searching for someone or something to blame. She stared at the flowers and then at me. “Is it because Diego leaves in the afternoon?”
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