On These Magic Shores

by Yamile Saied Méndez

  Pudgy Kota blushing bright red looked more like an apple than ever.

  “The Tooth Fairy will come, you’ll see,” I reassured her as she dressed for school. This lie, ­surprisingly, came naturally to my lips. The baggie full of baby teeth in Mamá’s nightstand flashed in my mind, and although it would be better for my sister to learn the truth — or the lies — about magic and fairies, I didn’t have the heart to smash her innocence.

  Quietly, like shadows so the baby wouldn’t wake up, Kota and I went through the motions of school preparation. I’ve heard Mamá say there were ten kids under the age of four at Avi’s day care, and most times she didn’t even take a nap. She needed peace and quiet and all the sleep she could get.

  “What are we doing with Avi?” Kota put on her backpack and waited by the front door.

  “We’ll leave her at the day care. I know she doesn’t usually go until noon, but the place is open. We’ll say it’s just for today,” I said with such authority.

  Kota didn’t complain. She did half-roll her eyes, out of principle.

  Avi didn’t stir as I checked her diaper (it was dry) and changed her pajamas for a flower-printed dress and solid pink leggings. I didn’t do her hair because the cloud of golden curls around her face was perfect.

  “Ready?” Kota asked, taking hold of the door knob.

  I nodded, my arms full of sleeping baby, and followed her outside.

  The air was crisp and sweet like the apples still hanging from the trees in Mr. Chang’s orchard. I made a mental note to pick a few on our way back from school. We had the three hundred dollars I had found in Mamá’s wallet. I had left two hundred in the chifforobe, and had put five twenties in my backpack. We needed food. Whenever I had a minute, I’d get milk and bread at the gas station. I’d save the rest, managing with as little money as possible. Maybe I could pay the audition fee. Although I was sure I hadn’t been cast as Wendy, I didn’t want to owe the school any money. I already got free lunch.

  “What are you thinking?” Kota grabbed hold of the crook of my elbow, like she did with Mamá.

  I licked my lips, thinking with longing of the Chapstick I’d left at home.

  Before I could answer, she asked again, “Are you thinking of her?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wonder if something happened to her. What if she got mom-napped? What if she’s waiting for us to come and rescue her?”

  We were almost at the day care, a small yellow-­painted house with a few plastic slides and a teeter-­totter out front. I had never seen any kids actually playing outside.

  Kota continued, “We can’t just pretend nothing happened, you know?”

  I stopped so she could look at me when I spoke. Her cheeks were chapped.

  “Kota,” I said, “Mamá will always come back to us —”

  “Papá left,” she said, lifting her chin defiantly.

  I didn’t need the reminder. “Papá’s different. They’d been having issues for a while. But Mamá? She’d never leave us.” The truth of my words burned inside me. I felt like the religious people giving testimony at church, claiming they “knew” something for which they had no proof. Mamá wasn’t here, but she’d showed time and again that she loved us, and a mother who loves her kids doesn’t just walk out on them and disappear from their lives.

  “She normally wouldn’t,” Kota added. “But what if something bad happened to her?”

  In the time it took me to blink it away, I saw our future stretched ahead of us: the three of us placed in foster care with different people. My sisters forgetting all about me. My sisters getting hurt.

  This was the second day without our mother. How long could we hold on without her?

  I knocked on the day care door. A baby cried inside.

  In that moment, Avi woke up. The whole sky fit into her terrified eyes. “Minnie,” she said in that pure voice that did something powerful in my heart.

  “It’s okay, baby,” I whispered. “I need to go to school. I’ll pick you up after.”

  Kota smiled and caressed the blonde curls of our baby sister. A thin lady who looked like she hadn’t slept in forever opened the door. At the sight of her, Avi mouthed, “Minnie,” but no sound came out of her lips.

  The hairs on my arms stood stiff like pins.

  “There you are. It’s kind of early, but oh well,” the lady said. I knew her, Mirta. She was from Argentina too. “Why didn’t your mom bring her yesterday? Was she sick?” Mirta had a voice like the tongue of a cat.

  “No, she’s never sick,” I said because it was the honest truth and I needed to pad the lie that followed. “We had company.”

  Kota’s face went bright red, but she didn’t open her mouth to call me out on my lie. Her silence encouraged me.

  The lady moved her head, halfway between a nod and a shake. “Look at that!” she exclaimed. “Well, tell your mother I want to talk to her. Is she picking up the girl?”

  My nostrils flared. If I had super powers or magic, I’d turn this woman into the toad she was at heart. “She won’t be picking up Avalon today. I’ll stop by after school.”

  Mirta squinted her eyes. “What time?”

  I calculated super fast. Usually Mamá picked up Avalon at the same time the bell rang. If I cut the last class, I’d be able to get here at the same time Mamá always did.

  “Three-thirty. Like always,” I said.

  Mirta opened the door wider. Inside, a baby in a high chair watched PJ Masks. I pictured my sweet Avi sitting in a high chair in front of the TV all day. She didn’t deserve this. She deserved to be at home, or at the very least, in a day care with someone who was nice and really cared. I didn’t want to leave her there, but what else could I do?

  “Te quiero, Avi,” I said and kissed her cheek, hoping the kiss would last her until we saw each other again.

  Avi, resigned to her fate, hugged me tightly and then smiled at Kota. But it was a small, lightless smile. I put her down and she walked of her own free will inside the day care.

  Without another word, Mirta shut the door in our faces. Kota and I stood there, rooted, for a second or two.

  Maybe my teachers wouldn’t notice if a three-year-old attended class with me.

  “It’s not like the kids in my class can color any better than her. If you saw some of the pictures Bree turns in . . .” Kota said. She’d obviously been thinking the same thing as me.

  We walked hand in hand until we arrived at her school, which was right across the street from the middle school soccer fields. The usual group of soccer fanatics already dotted the grass. No one was allowed to play before school, but the kids just stood there, like they needed to feel the energy from the field or something.

  “See you later,” I said.

  Kota smiled at me and waited in the corner for the crossing guard to give her the go-ahead. In the crosswalk, she found a friend. As if she’d left all her worries on my side of the street, Kota chatted with the other kids like we weren’t orphans, as if we were just like the rest of them. Maybe she was. Maybe my sister was the normal one after all.

  As I stood on the sidewalk staring at my sister, the guy on the skateboard passed right in front of me. He couldn’t go behind me. No, he had to disturb my morning and make me notice him. But the swoosh of the wheels on the sidewalk made me wish for something that would let me fly past people, zig-zag between them. Go fast, fast, and never stop until I reached the stars.

  Just as my imagination was taking me to a Neverland where skateboards soared through the air, the guy stopped a few feet from me.

  “You never came back to finish your audition.” He looked at me like I had killed his favorite pet.

  I didn’t have a skateboard, but it wasn’t like I couldn’t amble around him either. “What happened to ‘I don’t talk to sevies’?” I’d never let him forget his words.


  His face went all the shades of red, but he had a tiny smile that his longish hair didn’t cover all the way. “I’m sorry, okay? I was wrong.”

  “But your mom had to shake you for you to understand, right?” I tapped my foot, channeling the best impersonation of my mother I’d ever performed.

  “Like I said, I was wrong. I just wanted to tell you that the theater teacher asked about you when you didn’t come back.”

  “Mrs. Santos?” I didn’t want to let him off the hook so easily, but this was great news. Mrs. Santos had asked about me! But what could this mean? Only good news, I imagined.

  In spite of my resolve not to let my hopes soar, they flew of their own accord. In a millisecond, my imagination took me to Broadway — one day I could play Angelica in Hamilton, or Vanessa from In the Heights. I’d never seen either, but I’d heard the soundtracks, and oh! They were fantastic, which didn’t surprise me, because their creator and I shared a last name. Maybe we were even related, who knew? In any case, one day, I’d tour around the world, and then, I’d run for president of the US.

  “What did she want?” I asked, pushing the crazy fantasies aside.

  The guy made a cool move with his foot and the skateboard flew to his hands. He tucked it underneath his arm. “Nothing, but last night after you ran away, she kept asking about you. She looked worried when you didn’t come back.”

  Mrs. Santos had been asking about me. She knew my name. She wanted me in the play maybe because she wanted me to be Wendy. That meant I’d been totally believable as the protector of Michael and . . . and . . . what-was-the-other’s-name?

  This meant I had to pay the fee before she changed her mind. I wanted to be in the play more than ever. It looked like my plan to the White House continued without a hitch.

  First, I had to drop this guy who didn’t leave me alone. I went around him in the direction of the school.

  Unfazed, he walked beside me. Never in all my years as a student had I walked beside anyone who wasn’t my mom or my sister. I didn’t know what to say, or what speed to walk. Should I jog to try and match his longer strides, or should I hold my pace and make him slow down for me? But what if he walked away instead of waiting?

  “Your name’s Minerva, right? Like —”

  “Like McGonagall from Harry Potter, I know. Haha. How funny.” I refused to even look at him.

  “I was going to say like the goddess, but whatever.”

  Awkward. “I go by Minnie, though,” I said.

  He chuckled. “Like the mouse?”

  I didn’t even reply. The faster I got away from him the better. I cut through the grass to cross into the holy ground of school. He followed me, the skateboard still tucked under his arm. “Minnie Mouse is my sister’s favorite character. That’s why I said that . . .”

  Now he was the one not knowing what to say.

  I didn’t want to make the situation easier for him, but he had sisters. Finally, something we had in common. “You have sisters? How many?”

  He chuckled again. “Six. Six older sisters.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. How cool would it be to have so many older siblings, so many people to take the load should your parents go missing?

  “What’s your name?” I asked as the bell rang.

  “Maverick,” he said, winking. The fool actually winked. At me. “My name’s Maverick.”

  The sun came out of a cloud just as Maverick jumped on his skateboard and rode to the school doors. Against all the rules. He flicked the skateboard and grabbed it in the air, turned, and saluted me. No shadow followed behind him.

  I couldn’t pay my fee before first period because the bell rang as I was walking in the school’s front door. Maverick and his stupid conversation had made me late. I had to run to math.

  The office lady wasn’t happy I stopped by to pay the theater fee between Civics and English, but I didn’t want to wait any longer to pay what I owed.

  “Mr. Beck is very strict about students being tardy,” she said in a singsongy voice of doom.

  Mr. Beck and his obsession with punctuality were the least of my problems. English was my easiest class. I always answered what he wanted to hear, and if the year continued as it had, I would get an A faster than a sneeze. I could afford a tardy without a problem.

  What I couldn’t afford was not getting the part of Wendy because I hadn’t paid the audition fee. On the other hand, I couldn’t afford the audition fee either, but when Mamá came back, she’d feel so guilty for leaving us that she wouldn’t mind I’d used the money for the play. It was for school, after all, and she always said nothing was more important than school.

  It turned out the office lady had been right. Mr. Beck took my tardy slip with the same contempt as if I had spat on his face.

  “It shows your disrespect, Miranda. When you’re late, it shows that you don’t care. Literally.”

  Thank you very much, Mr. Beck. That was exactly what I needed to hear.

  If being late meant a person didn’t care, what about when a person just walked out and never came back? At least Papá had left after a fight with Mamá. But why would she leave us? I hadn’t even talked back at her. Not that much anyway.

  I could take hours of numbing schooling, but Avi was stuck with the evil witch in the haunted day care. What had she done?

  Why had Mamá left her?

  Thinking too much can give a person a headache. Images of Avi and the reasons my mom had decided to vanish bounced in my head like astronauts in space.

  Boing!

  Boing!

  Boing!

  My head throbbed. When Mr. Beck asked me what the theme of The Little Prince was, the words calcified behind my teeth. A sound that should have belonged to a zombie and not the future president of the Unites States came out of my mouth. I couldn’t blame the rest of the class for laughing at me. I would have laughed too if I’d been in a better mood.

  But thinking too much can make a person ultra-grumpy. Maybe that’s why Mamá always had that frown on her face after a long day of work.

  What wasn’t funny was Mr. Beck’s headshaking and tsk-tsking, as if I’d let him down. Again. “The theme of The Little Prince,” he said, “is that the most important things aren’t visible. Literally. Take note.”

  I knew that. He was the one who needed to take note. As my English and homeroom teacher, how could he not see that I wasn’t my normal question-­answering self? That, added to my throbbing head, plus a pain in the middle of my chest, as if I had a swollen stone that grew with each passing hour that I didn’t know where my mother was.

  “When not even Minerva Miranda knows the answer,” Mr. Beck said. “That means it’s time for . . .”

  The whole class held its breath.

  “Pop quiz! Five questions on The Little Prince.”

  A wave of hatred rippled my way. “Thank you for ruining my life,” said a mousy kid I’d never noticed before. He had the biggest glasses I’d ever seen on a kid my age. I’d always wanted glasses, but I had perfect vision.

  Other people echoed the mousy kid’s thoughts, but I was used to putting my I-don’t-care mask on. I wore it when Mr. Beck passed out the quiz printouts (which proved this wasn’t a pop quiz, but that it had been planned, and he had used me as a tool). The mask also stayed put while I answered the whole thing in less than five minutes, although I’d used complete sentences and examples.

  While the rest of the class scrambled to answer what the rose meant (universal love) and the symbolism behind the snake bite (returning home), I looked around me, noticing things and people I’d never noticed before.

  The guy on my right, Ravi, caught my eye and mouthed, “It’s all your fault!” His dad was a rich doctor who ran a clinic for the poor. Mamá had taken me there for a middle school physical exam. I felt guilty that I couldn’t return the kindness. I didn’t like owin
g things to people. So when he stretched his neck to peek onto my paper, I let him copy my answer. My intellectual property was all I could share.

  A girl and a boy who I thought were related, if not straight out brother and sister, didn’t try to copy or to even pretend they were working on the quiz. They had brown skin like mine, maybe a little lighter. They looked as lost as I had felt the day of the audition, looking for the auditorium.

  The way they lowered their eyes when the teacher walked past their desks, the way the teacher never even looked at them, the clothes they wore (unrecognizable brand names and faded colors) told me they were new immigrants. They must have transferred in recently, because I’d never seen them before, much less had a chance to talk to them yet.

  Andromeda was a small town surrounded by fields and mountains, connected to the bigger cities by I-15. Like a little oasis. We still had things like a mall and a library, though. It was the perfect place to transition into America — or the US, as my mom insisted I call it, because the whole continent was America.

  Maybe the girl felt me looking at her because she turned to me and held my eyes for a long time, as if she wanted to figure out my story. I held her gaze, testing my defenses, until I was too uncomfortable and looked down. And then a prickly feeling on my neck made me look over my shoulder, and to my complete surprise, there was Maverick at the door looking at me.

  “Literally, Miranda,” Mr. Beck said. “Don’t try to copy your neighbor now.”

  I turned back to lay out my hatred on the ­puniest, most clueless teacher ever. But before I could give him a piece of my temper, Maverick said, “Mr. Beck, I’m actually here because Mrs. Santos is going to announce the cast and asked for Minnie to join us.”

  The cast! And Mrs. Santos had asked for me!

  My hands flew to my face in surprise, but I composed myself in time. I couldn’t show this much emotion to these kids or worst, the clueless teacher.

  Maybe it would be better if I said I wouldn’t go. Now that I thought about it, after the disaster at auditions, it was pretty obvious that I hadn’t made it. There was no way I got the part of Wendy. And if I wasn’t Wendy, I couldn’t be anything else. I’d been so stupid, thinking that after Wendy, I could one day play Angelica or Vanessa.