Sal and Gabi Break the Universe (A Sal and Gabi Novel)

by Carlos Hernandez

  “SAL INDUCED A PANIC with his trick,” said Gabi. “He put dozens of students at risk with his, his…shenanigans!”

  She sounded so outraged. I didn’t even think you could be outraged and say the word “shenanigans.” It’s so…leprechauny.

  “Hey!” I said to Gabi. “I thought you said you were my advocate, too?”

  “Fair is fair,” she sniffed. In that moment, I learned something important about Gabi Reál. That girl didn’t like to lose.

  “Well, Mr. Vidón,” said Principal Torres, “you heard what Gabi said. Do you think it’s in any way appropriate for you to induce mass hysteria in my school? People could have been trampled!”

  “Oh no!” I replied, covering my mouth. “I never meant to hurt anybody! How many kids were trampled?”

  Principal Torres blinked. “Well, no one. But you still can’t go around causing disruptions.”

  I let my hand drop. “No, of course not, Principal Torres. I did not mean to delay the start of the next period. I am so sorry!”

  Her mouth became as small as a cat’s butthole. “You didn’t delay the next period.”

  “Oh,” I said, looking down again. “That doesn’t seem like much of a disruption, then.”

  I peeked from the corner of my eye. Principal Torres smirked at me. It was an appreciative smirk. I’d read her right. She liked sarcasm.

  But Gabi wasn’t done with me yet. “Oh, no, nuh-uh, no way. You’re not getting off so easily, Sal. Something’s fishy here,” she said, crossing her arms in thought. “Nobody could fool that many kids into believing a nonexistent chicken had fallen out of a locker.”

  I shrugged. “Fooling crowds is literally what magicians do for a living.”

  “Can’t fool me,” she said.

  “Check your hand,” I said.

  Slowly, skeptically, Gabi uncrossed her arms and opened the hand I’d shaken earlier. She gasped.

  Both Yasmany and Principal Torres craned their necks to see. And they gasped just as gaspily when they saw I had stamped Gabi’s palm with the word GOTCHA! in black ink.

  I showed them the top of my right hand and pointed at the silver ring on my middle finger. Then I flipped my hand over, revealing the stamp.

  I hate showing people how my tricks work. But, you know. Desperate times. It was better than explaining the chicken.

  “Whoa,” said Yasmany.

  “I never felt a thing,” said Gabi.

  “He’s good,” said Principal Torres. Then, seeming to decide something, she stood. “All right, Mr. Vidón. You are free to go. And let’s try really hard not to see each other tomorrow, okay?”

  Time to get out of there before Gabi thought of any more ways to get me in trouble. I turned for the door.

  “And as for you, Yasmany,” said Principal Torres, “I laid down the law for you at the end of last year. This is your third strike. So I’m afraid I have no choice but to expel—”

  “Principal Torres,” I said, spinning on my heel and facing her.

  “Yes, Sal?”

  “Well, it’s just that you kept correcting Gabi and telling her that this wasn’t a trial. But now you’re saying ‘I laid down the law’ and ‘three strikes’ like it is one.”

  “Hmm,” she said. She leaned against her desk. “It is very interesting to me that you are now sticking up for a kid who bullied you not even an hour ago, Mr. Vidón. What exactly is it that you want?”

  What did I want? Here was a chance for me to get rid of a kid who had attacked me for no reason. And he had a history of causing trouble, according to Principal Torres. I should have been happy Yasmany was about to be expelled.

  Except Gabi, student council president and obviously one of the smartest kids in school, seemed to like him. And Principal Torres had bent over backward all last year to help him. And I’d bet fifty bucks he was a dancer who was good enough to get into Culeco. And I had a feeling that if he got kicked out now, he would never, ever, ever recover.

  “Maybe you could give him another chance?” I asked.

  “Yeah?” asked Principal Torres. “You think that’s the best thing to do here?”

  “I think it’s a great idea!” piped Gabi. “This way, Yasmany could have a…a…” She struggled for a phrase, and then, when she remembered it, shot out of her chair like Patrick Henry. “Teachable moment! You love teachable moments! Well, now’s your chance. Right here, right now, let’s take a moment and give Yasmany here a proper teaching! Whaddaya say?”

  Principal Torres squeezed the bridge of her nose. She was acting all put out, but I saw she was hiding a smile under her hand. “Laying it on pretty thick there, Gabi, no?”

  Gabi took a bow. “Anything for my client. And anyway, you said you wanted to be convinced.” Her smile was as big as a bear trap.

  Shaking her head, Principal Torres said, “Okay, okay.” She turned to Yasmany, and more gently than she’d spoken all day, she said, “You could learn a lot from Sal, Yasmany. Okay, Yasmany, you’re not expelled. Instead, you’re going to write me a five-page report on type-one diabetes, due by the end of the week.”

  “Awww,” said Yasmany.

  Gabi backhanded Yasmany’s stomach—and hurt her hand. She danced around and tried to shake the pain out of her fingers. That cheered Yasmany up.

  As Gabi winced, she asked Principal Torres, “Permission to help Yasmany with the report?”

  “I would expect no less from you, Gabi. But I expect you, Yasmany, to do all the actual writing. Now, get out of my office, all three of you. And try to learn something in the rest of your classes today. That’s what you’re supposed to do in school, remember?”

  I LEFT PRINCIPAL Torres’s office first, and fast. My phone told me I only had nine minutes left in lunch period. Diabetics have to take meals very seriously. Bad things can happen to us if we don’t.

  Once I was out in the hallway again, I booked it for the nearest staircase. I had to go up two flights to my locker, where I’d be able to grab a bag of cashews and a cheese stick and a banana and Skittles—sweet, delicious Skittles, the world’s most perfect food. Plus, I could switch out some magic props. Now that I’d used my GOTCHA! stamp on Gabi, I wanted to perform a different trick in my eighth-period theater class. By that time, everybody in school would have heard all about my ring. In middle school, rumors spread at the speed of texting—especially when Gabi Reál, editor of the school paper, was probably doing the texting.

  Gabi, man. That girl was nothing but trouble.

  “Hey, wait up, Sal!” someone yelled from behind me. It was her.

  Give me a break.

  I did not wait. I did the opposite of wait. I jogged toward the staircase.

  When I looked over my shoulder, I saw her bounding toward me. Fighting monks gleamed in her bouncing, bushy hair.

  I didn’t think. I ran.

  I took the stairs three at a time. Then, to shake Gabi, I took a right at the second-floor landing and ran down hall 2S. I slid and spun and dodged and juked around people like a running back.

  I stopped in front of the clock on the wall: eight minutes left in the period. I gritted my teeth, lowered my head, and was about to run even faster for the staircase to the next floor.

  But I noticed then that every kid in the hall had their back against the wall. They’d cleared the way for me. And they were all staring.

  “What?” I asked them.

  No one answered. But a voice from behind me, which sounded suspiciously like a student council president’s, yelled, “Wait, Sal! I just want to apologize!”

  I tore down the hallway of freaky kids and bounded up the stairs.

  And fell.

  Crack went my right knee on the edge of a step about three-quarters of the way up.

  I almost yelled, but I swallowed it down. My eyes filled with water; I couldn’t see clearly until I blinked. I sat on the stair and gripped my knee. It hurt like a mother.

  “Oh my God!” Gabi rushed up and sat next to me. “Are you all right?”<
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  The pain was starting to subside. But I didn’t tell Gabi that. I massaged my patella and looked mournfully at the ceiling. “Diabetics don’t heal like other people, you know. Even a small cut can lead to gangrene. And a smashed kneecap? They’ll probably have to cut off the whole leg. Ah well,” I said, now speaking directly to my leg, “we had a good run, old pal, didn’t we?”

  “Cacaseca.”

  I looked at her. Gabi’s eyebrows sat flat on her forehead, her eyes slits, and her mouth a straight red scratch on her face. A classic Your caca is so seca expression. But she seemed a little worried, too. I could tell she didn’t quite know what to think about me.

  Which is just the way I like it. “Fine. Don’t believe me,” I said, sounding wounded. “But when you see me with a peg leg tomorrow, try not to join the other kids in making fun of me, okay? You’ve done enough.”

  She popped to her feet and punched her hips. “No one told you to run from me, chacho. And why did you, anyway? I just wanted to say I was sorry for how I acted in the principal’s office. I got a little carried away.”

  “I ran because I didn’t want to talk to you.”

  She could not believe those words had come out of my mouth. “But that makes no sense! Everyone wants to talk to me.”

  I laughed at, not with, her. “Are you from another planet?” I jumped to my feet—which, since I really had hurt my knee, was probably not my smartest move. “You just spent the last half hour in the principal’s office trying to get me in trouble, just to get your sapingo bully friend off the hook!”

  Gabi was about to yell back, but instead she opened and closed her mouth a few times, like a guppie. Finally she asked, “What’s ‘sapingo’?”

  Just as I suspected. Gabi might have a Cuban-sounding name, and she might live in Miami, but she didn’t know much Spanish. Now, normally I wouldn’t care. But I could see it in her face: She felt a little inferior because of it. And against someone like her, you had to use any advantage you could find.

  So I was drippingly generous when I said to her, “‘Sapingo’ is a classic Cuban insult. It’s basically how you tell the person whom you are insulting that they’re about as smart as a day-old skid mark.”

  Gabi giggled. “That’s nasty. You’re nasty.”

  All of a sudden, I was giggling, too. Though I didn’t want to. I was still pretty mad at how she’d tried to get me in trouble with Principal Torres. But Gabi had a laugh that made you laugh. She giggled some more. So I giggled more. Then she giggled harder, and I giggled back.

  And then she got instantly serious. “Wait,” she said. “Did you just use ‘whom’ correctly in a sentence?”

  “Um, yeah,” I answered slowly. And then I added, “Magicians have excellent grammar?”

  She stared at me like she was trying to see my soul through my nostrils. “Who the heck are you, Sal Vidón?”

  The warning bell for next period played over the intercoms. Great. No lunch, no props, and an aching knee.

  That snapped the spell. I didn’t have to pretend to be annoyed when I replied, “I am never telling you anything. I don’t talk to reporters.” I shook out my hair, turned up my nose, and, maybe exaggerating my limp a little, took the stairs up to my sixth-period Textile Arts class.

  “You’ll talk eventually!” Gabi yelled after me. “I’ll make you talk!”

  LIMPING FOR GABI’S benefit had slowed me down. So as soon as she couldn’t see me, I had to sprint hard to be on time for class. I busted through the door of the Textile Arts classroom just as the bell sounded.

  All the other kids must have ended their lunches early to get a head start on their work. They had already broken into their pace groups and were sewing, stitching, steaming, ironing, dyeing, felting, and/or modeling clothes like time was money.

  It was one of the weird things I’d noticed on my first day at Culeco: The students arrived early. They stayed late. They hung out with teachers between periods to talk about what they’d covered in class. Basically, they liked school.

  I liked how much they liked it. For once I wasn’t a freak for liking school.

  Another weird thing was how many boys there were in Textile Arts. For me, this was a required course for my future career as a famous illusionist. Magicians need custom costumes for their tricks and to look cool while performing. Back in Connecticut, I probably would’ve been the only boy in a sewing class, if they’d even offered one. And I probably would’ve gotten into a fistfight every day because of it.

  But at Culeco, there were almost as many boys as girls studying Textile Arts. A lot of things were so much easier here.

  The Textile Arts teacher was Dr. Doctorpants. That wasn’t his real name—“Dr. Doctorpants’s Cosplay Carnival” was the name of his mask-and-masquerade shop on Etsy, so that’s what everyone called him. He always wore one of his costumes to class. Today, he was dressed up as a six-foot-tall bubble gum machine. The clear plastic dome he was wearing over his head held real gumballs up to his nose.

  The pile of gumballs didn’t muffle his voice, but it did shift as he spoke. “Right on time, Sal,” he said, loud and clear. “But time’s a-wasting! Time to get”—and to emphasize the dad joke, he dropped a coin into his costume’s head, spun the key, caught the Venus-colored piece of gum that rolled out of the chute, and tossed it to me—“on the ball !”

  I gave Dr. Doctorpants a wink and twin finger guns that meant Good one, dude! Then I popped the gum into my mouth and made my way to my pace group, Knitting for Beginners. It was the most basic pace group in the class, which was fine with me. I’d never taken Textile Arts before—because Connecticut. I had a lot to learn.

  The other five kids in my pace group were laughing and working already, so I gathered up my knitting needles and yarn from yesterday (Dr. Doctorpants had already laid them out for me), sat cross-legged on the floor, and got down to business. I’d only been knitting for three days, but I liked it. There’s a little part of my brain that enjoys doing a small task perfectly, and knitting is basically doing a small task perfectly ten thousand times in a row.

  I was working on a red scarf—just about the last piece of clothing you’d ever need in Florida. But it was already giving me an idea for a new magic trick, where I’d hand the mark a scarf and let them unravel it entirely, until they were left holding a big ball of yarn. Then, presto-chango, I would turn it back into a knitted scarf right before their eyes!

  But how? When you’re making up a new magic trick, you have to figure out all the tiny details of how to make it work. Magic is basically doing a small task perfectly.

  For this trick, I was thinking I’d need a mirror box, a classic magic prop about the size of a cat carrier. It looks like an empty box, and there’s even a window to let people see inside it, but a mirror creates a seemingly invisible compartment the magician can hide things in. For my trick, I would put one scarf behind the mirror, and as the mark unraveled the other scarf, I’d stuff that yarn into the top of the box. The audience would be able to see the string the whole time through the window. Then I would reach up through the bottom of the box and slowly start to draw out the yarn—except it would appear to be reknitted into a scarf!

  I’d have to pull out the unraveled yarn and the second scarf at the same time, and then palm the yarn and slip it in a pocket. Wait, no—that’d be way too much yarn to hide in my hand. Maybe I could disguise the string in the scarf itself? That would be the most natural thing to do, since I’d be pulling both of them out at the same time. But the trick would work best if I could give the scarf back to the mark and let them inspect it, and I couldn’t do that if the yarn was hidden in it.

  I’d have to think about that some more. And I would have right then, if I hadn’t noticed that no one around me was talking.

  The first two days of class, my pace group had spent the whole class chatting. They’d talked so much, I had trouble concentrating on knitting. But everyone was nice and funny, and time flew by, so it was all good.

&nb
sp; Today, all the other groups sounded like they were having a great time. But mine? Silence. Everyone was sitting cross-legged on the floor like I was, knitting away and working hard, and having, by the looks on their faces, zero fun doing it.

  Hmm.

  “Hey,” I said to Gladis Machado, the girl sitting next to me. She’d been the funniest person in the pace group so far. “You’re doing really good. You’re almost halfway done with your scarf.”

  Gladis never looked up at me. “Thank you,” she muttered. And then, holding her needles in one hand, she pulled an ojo turco necklace out from beneath her T-shirt and gave it a squeeze.

  An ojo turco is a piece of blue glass with a blue eyeball painted on it. People wear them on necklaces and bracelets to protect them against the evil eye. Mami had one. Man, she was terrified of mal de ojo. She’d tell me stories about how a brujo could make you sick, make your cows give blood instead of milk, turn your hair white, make your teeth fall out of your mouth, age you fifty years in five seconds, all sorts of stuff. Papi, who didn’t believe in any of that, would wait until Mami left the room to tell me that her stories were just superstitions. And then, when he left the room, she’d come back in and tell me it was all 100 percent real.

  And, I mean, Mami’s ojo turco saved her life and mine when we had our car accident. But that’s a story for another time.

  Right then, I was busy noticing that Gladis was clutching her ojo turco just like Mami would whenever she needed a little extra protection against whatever curses life wanted to throw at her.

  Suddenly, the kids who had gotten out of my way in the second-floor hallway and stared at me googly-eyed as I ran past made a lot more sense. Rumors had been spreading that I’d done black magic.

  I pictured the horror that would have distorted my Mami Muerta’s face if she’d thought for one second that I was a brujo. I needed to fix this, stat.

  “What?” I said to Gladis, laughing a little. “You think I just gave you mal de ojo?”

  She gasped as if I’d just accused her of committing murder in the ballroom with the candlestick. “How do you know about mal de ojo?”