Gabi nodded in comprehension. I mean, I have no idea what she thought she comprehended from this situation, but she obviously didn’t think freaking out would help anything. Instead, she steadied herself, tossed her hair, then walked forward, holding the chicken out to the woman like Rafiki holding Simba. “Sorry, mujer. Mucho sorry. Like, tres patadas sorry.”
The lady eyed Gabi suspiciously as she approached. No doubt she thought Gabi was speaking in tongues to her, the way she was butchering Spanish. But the lady’s voice was softer when she answered, “Los jefes nos cobran a nosotros por cada pollo que se desaparece. Ya somos pobres. Por favor, tenga compasión, diablita bonita. No los robe más.”
“She’s saying,” I translated, “that the bosses make the workers pay for any chickens that go missing. She’s saying they’re poor already. She asked us not to steal from them anymore. Also, she thinks we’re devil spawn.”
Even though I was looking at the back of her head, I could tell Gabi smiled. “No más robos,” she promised the woman. “Somos angels.”
Gabi’s terrible Spanish was working. The woman laughed. “Júralo, si eres tan ángel.”
“Los dos se lo prometemos, señora,” I replied.
The lady’s eyes volleyed between Gabi and me, and her smile landed somewhere between doubtful and trusting. “Bueno, si me están diciendo la verdad, voy a rezar por ustedes. Si Dios quiere, quizás pueden subir al cielo y vivir con los ángeles. Pero tienen que ser espíritus buenos y ayudar a los vivos, empezando ahora mismo. ¿Entienden? ¿Pueden ser espíritus buenos?”
“Sí,” I answered.
Gabi quickly added her own, “¡Tres patadas sí!”
With one last I-mean-business stare at each of us, the lady grabbed the chicken with her one free hand. Then she shimmied, struggled, shrugged, slid, shook, and finally shoved herself back into the hole, and was gone.
I felt both relieved and worried. The hole in the locker was now bigger than I’d ever seen it. And before this it had almost closed all the way! Sometimes I don’t make good decisions.
Gabi, however, felt a little differently. She slammed the locker door closed and leaned against it. She looked flushed, exhilarated, ready to run a marathon. “Did you see that?”
“Um, yeah. I was right here with you the whole time?”
“Sal! That was the most amazing thing in the history of amazing things.”
“It’s definitely up there.”
“How in the world did you do that? Wait!” she said suddenly, running over to cover my mouth with her hand. “Don’t answer that. Let me get my phone out. I want to record every word of this. I don’t want to miss a thing!”
IT WAS NINETY DEGREES outside—ten thousand with humidity. Florida in August, man. Kill a Connecticut boy faster than you can say “sunstroke.”
At first, Gabi wanted to start the interview right there at Yasmany’s locker. But then she said she wanted time to process everything she’d seen—and to wash the raw chicken juice off her hands. I said okay; we could talk once we got to the Coral Castle.
But she couldn’t wait that long. About ten seconds after we’d left the school grounds, she asked, “So, you really are a brujo?” She used that TV-reporter voice that makes everything sound like the scoop of the century. Also, she looked completely, annoyingly, unbothered by the heat: no pit stains, no forehead sweat, no flushed cheeks, no nothing. The metal sorceress barrettes in her hair took turns blinding me. Also, she stuck her phone too close to my mouth to record my answer.
I eased her hand away from my face and, loud enough to be heard over the rumbling traffic, replied, “No.”
“No?” But she didn’t say that into the phone, so she brought the speaker to her mouth and repeated, with even more panache, “No?!”
“No.” I smiled. Sometimes, smiles are masks.
She harrumphed off the record, and then, struggling to be professional, followed up into her phone. “So let me get this straight, Sal. Despite the fact that you confessed to ripping a hole in the universe, despite the fact that you put your arms through solid metal and concrete to pull a chicken out of who-knows-where, and despite the fact that a weird lady popped out of the locker to get her chicken back, you maintain that you do not possess supernatural powers. Is that correct?”
That’s not what I said. But instead of correcting her, I deflected. “I didn’t take you for the superstitious type, Gabi. There’s no such thing as brujería.”
Gabi went suddenly quiet, switching her recording app off and watching her feet walk for a while. “I am not superstitious,” she said finally, more to herself than to me. “I am skeptical. I require evidence to support my opinions. But I have to admit, after what I’ve seen today, I believe in brujería! I mean”—and, suddenly remembering her job, she started recording again, glaring at me—“how else do you explain what happened today, Sal? It has to be brujería. You have to be a brujo. Do you deny it?”
Man, how do people walk around in Miami? I felt like I was being digested inside a dragon’s stomach. “I’m not a brujo, okay?” I snapped. “I don’t like that word. I swear, if you call me that again, we’re done.”
“Hey, take it easy! The whole reason I’m doing this is to give you a chance to share your side of the story.”
“If you hadn’t printed your story in the Rotten Egg, I wouldn’t need to give an interview in the first place.”
Now it was Gabi’s turn to get overheated. “So you think you can tear open the universe and pull chickens out of thin air and everyone’s going to be like, ‘Oh, that’s fine. It’s impossible and unexplainable and as scary as spiders, but we’ll just pretend nothing happened and go on with our lives’? No, no, no, no, no. Right here, right now, you tell me how you made a real live person come out of that locker, Sal.”
She shoved her phone so close to my mouth I could have kissed the screen just by stretching my lips. So I did.
“Ew!” she said, and wiped her screen on the leg of her jeans. “Look, bub, you can try to distract me all you want”—she took hand sanitizer out of her pack, squeezed a fat drop onto her screen, and scrubbed it with her finger—“but I am going to keep asking you until you answer me.” She wiped her phone against her leg again to remove the excess alcohol. “So you might as well come clean.” She examined her screen, seemed satisfied that she’d killed whatever cooties I had put on it, then raised it close to my mouth to record my response—but this time, not quite close enough for me to make out with it again. “Spill it.”
I wasn’t spilling anything. I wasn’t going to take orders from Gabi Reál.
I inhaled deeply, ready to lay into her good and proper, but she grabbed the back of my shirt. We had arrived at a crosswalk, where the Red Hand of Doom on the light was telling us to wait, and she had kept me from walking into traffic and getting run over.
That was nice of her, saving my life and all. I really had to do a better job crossing streets.
So when I pressed the call button on the traffic light, I gave her a more truthful answer than I thought I would. My voice was mostly wind when I said to Gabi, “Maybe I don’t know, either.”
She thought for a moment, then decided I was full of it. “What do you mean you don’t know? You have to know! You did it. You made the hole.”
“Sometimes you can do things without knowing how you do them.”
“Don’t change the subject, Sal. A mechanic can’t just fix an engine without knowing how the engine works. I can’t go home tonight and be like, ‘Oops, I accidentally finished all my geometry homework!’ I have to study first and learn how to solve the problems. Even babies have to learn to walk. You have to know what you’re doing to do anything.”
Hmm. She was a good debater. I stuck my hands in my cargo-pants pockets and thought about what she’d said.
The crosswalk signal changed from Red Hand of Doom to Glowing White Dude. Gabi made a big show of looking both ways, like she was teaching me. It was a little annoying. We crossed the street in silen
ce.
All around us, Little Havana sponsored a music-free dance party. Car engines drumrolled, and car horns trumpeted, and the people outside the corner store we were approaching slapped dominoes on their folding table hard enough to make their tiny paper cups of espresso jump. A mami coming toward us mother-ducked her three small children—stumbling and amazed by the world, babbling musical nonsense—across the street. A viejo loitering against a cross-signal pole, wearing a white guayabera with only one button fastened and sucking noisily from his cigar, was thinking the deepest thoughts in the world. Life is so complicated because it’s just so massive. Truth seemed so small to me then: like tickets you hand out to people before a carnival ride. Life was so much bigger than truth. It was real.
“Well?” said Gabi.
“I’m still thinking,” I answered. “Let’s cross the street. Then we take the next right on Fifteenth.”
This street was mostly residential, if a little sketchy. But even in rougher neighborhoods, Miami has a crazy amount of trees compared to Connecticut, and they’re huge and prehistoric-looking. It’s like there’s this thin layer of asphalt covering the city, but just beneath it, there’s a raging jungle raring to burst through, plants and trees ready to gush out of the ground in explosions of leaf and bark and flower.
“I don’t know how a tree makes fruit,” I replied, slowly, reading the idea in my head as it occurred to me, “but I can still eat fruit.”
“You have to know that it’s okay to eat the fruit, or it might be poison,” she countered, fast as a swordfighter. “You still have to know stuff.”
“No, you don’t, Gabi!” I said triumphantly. “Some hungry cave dude took a risk one day and ate the fruit.”
“Or cave dudette.”
“Whatever. They didn’t know what was going to happen. They just tried it. And sometimes it turned out to be a delicious apple, and sometimes it turned out to be poisonous berries. But they couldn’t know in advance. They just had to chew and swallow and see what happened.”
She thought about that for eight steps, as the heat rising off the sidewalk made the whole world waver before our eyes. Finally, she nodded, deciding something. “So, what you did with the locker, it’s like eating mystery fruit?”
I shrugged. “Maybe? I’m still figuring things out. Oh, we take a left here.”
As we turned the corner down my street, Gabi said, “Let’s just be really clear for the readers at home. So there are things you can control and things you can’t. Which is which? List them.”
Man. Easy for her to ask.
One good thing about Florida’s infinite flora is that you can find shade pretty much whenever you need it. A tree in a neighbor’s yard had a canopy that stretched over the sidewalk, so I took a seat underneath it. Gabi sat next to me, tipping the phone’s mic near me.
“Help me figure it out,” I said. “You could see past the back of the locker. I’ve never met anyone else who could. How did you do it? What, are you a bruja or something?” There. That’ll teach her.
Or not. “You bet I am. I’m the brujaest bruja that ever turned a prince into a toad.” When she was done laughing, she added, “But I get your point. I don’t know how I could see it. I just could.”
“Exactly.”
A thought was coming to her. She ruffled her hair with her free hand, and her barrettes sparkled. “Okay, Sal. So don’t explain. Show me.”
“What, right here?”
She got up and spun around, her arms wide. “Right here, right now, Sal. Do your thing. Make a hole in the universe. But talk me through it. What you’re thinking, what you’re feeling, everything. We’ll figure it out together.”
I looked around. There were a few people outside, tending their yards, chatting with friends on phones, filling the air with happy Spanglish. That made me nervous about “doing my thing” out in public. But no one would understand what was happening. I was pretty sure no one else would even be able to see what Gabi and I would see. In a way, this “thing” was the opposite of magic. There was no spectacle to it, no pizzazz, no booms or puffs of smoke or anything to say “Ta-da!” about. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.
I stood, took a breath, let it out. “I use meditation techniques that I learned from my psychologist,” I told Gabi. I closed my eyes and kept talking. “Right now, I’m picturing a screened-in porch. I’m imagining myself poking a hole in the screen with my finger.”
“I’ve done that before,” said Gabi. “Every kid in Florida has, I bet. I got in big trouble for it, too.”
I literally held up a finger, pushed it through the imaginary screen, and pulled it out again. I opened my eyes. “Okay, Gabi. Look and relax at the same time. Can you see the hole I made?”
Gabi stared at the spot where I had just poked my finger in the air. Her eyebrows got all bent up.
“Remember to relax,” I said.
She exhaled. Her eyebrows straightened themselves. “I see it! I see it! It looks like a little blurry spot.”
I stepped back and bowed. “Have a peek through, m’lady.”
She stood on her toes and raised an eye to the blurry spot. Then she jammed her whole face into it.
I yelped, but she couldn’t hear me, because her ears were somewhere else. For a few seconds it looked like she had no head—her neck just ended. When she popped her head back out again, she was smiling.
“That is so cool! That house over there,” Gabi said, pointing to the tan stucco two-story across the street, “is orange when you look at it through the hole.”
I nodded. “It’s like us, but a different version of us. And there are, like, a trillion different versions.”
“Sal!” She started skipping, hopping, racing around me, a dog on a walk in love with life. “Do you know what this means? You just made a peephole into a whole different universe! This is just…I don’t even know what this is, but it’s the greatest thing!”
Half my mouth smiled and half didn’t. I started walking home again, and Gabi, maybe sensing she’d said something wrong, got in step with me and let us walk quietly for a minute. Each individual beam of sunlight felt like a separate hot spear sinking into my face.
“I keep bringing back my dead mami,” I said finally.
“Whoa, what?” she saidasked.
“I don’t mean to. Well, I used to do it on purpose. But a few days ago, it just happened. I didn’t even do it. Well, it had to be me who did it. But I didn’t mean to.”
“You brought back your dead mom? Like, from another universe?”
“Yeah. For a little bit. It was kind of nice, actually. But she’s gone again.”
“Oh.” Gabi started walking again. “I’m…sorry?”
“Me too.” I have to admit, it felt good to talk about it with someone. The sunlight didn’t hurt as much anymore. “You know, for someone who was accusing me of brujería a few minutes ago, you’re taking all this surprisingly well.”
She shrugged. “One of my dads is a scientist.”
“Did he help you with your lie detector?”
She nodded. “That dad’s a she. She’s always talking about stuff like this. But even so, Sal, you have to admit, what you do, it really is like brujería. No one is supposed to be able to see other universes, or pull chickens out of them.”
“Or dead mamis,” I agreed.
“Yeah.”
Any other time, I would have shut up at this point. But Gabi could see holes. She really understood me, better than anyone else. I couldn’t stop talking. “I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s a little scary, maybe.” I took a breath. “Maybe I need a little help.”
Gabi locked onto me with her full attention. And I am here to tell you, looking at her when she’s locked onto you like that is like staring at the sun. “I’ll help you, Sal Vidón. I will help you get control of this. I swear it. We’ll do it together.”
I believed her. You know how good it feels when a leg that’s fallen asleep starts to wake up? That was my whole body
.
I stopped walking. “This is my house.” I gestured toward the Coral Castle.
“Whoa,” she said. “It’s hideous. I love it.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.
Gabi, now sounding a little suspicious, asked me, “But why’s there a moving truck in your driveway? I thought you moved in over the summer.”
“We did,” I said. I had no idea what that truck was doing there. It was an unmarked gray eighteen-wheeler that had no business that I knew of at the Coral Castle. “Something’s not right.”
I stepped slowly up the walkway toward the front door. Gabi followed. The window shades were pulled; I couldn’t see anything inside. I took out my keys and started to unlock the door. On the other side of the door, a bunch of voices started talking at the same time.
“What the—?”
“Oh God, it’s late! We’re behind schedule!”
“We gotta hide the—!”
“Stall them! Stall them!”
I don’t know about you, but that sounded like a burglary in progress to me. Gabi and I traded looks.
“Who’s in your house?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What do we do? Should we call your parents? Or the police?”
“Nope” was my only answer. And, ready to chuck whoever had broken into my house into another universe, I threw open the front door.
I MEAN, I TRIED to throw the door open. But the criminals in my house had set the chain lock.
From my sleeve I drew my magic wand, the one I’d turned into flowers for Gabi that morning. I slipped my arm through the gap in the door and used the wand to unlatch the chain. A second later, I flung the door open and charged inside. Gabi, running in behind me, had her phone out, video-recording our entrance. The reporter in her smelled a scoop.
The couch, love seat, easy chair, coffee table, and entertainment center had vanished from the living room. Replacing all of them, and taking up even more space than they had, was the hugest black computer I had ever seen.
Sal and Gabi Break the Universe (A Sal and Gabi Novel) Page 16