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

by Carlos Hernandez

“I have no idea. That was strange. Why did you bring me ice cream, Dr. Vidón?”

  Papi tented his hands. “By accident. I just did a quick count in my head: sixteen people in the room, so I told Sal to put out sixteen bowls of ice cream.”

  “He did,” I agreed slowly. “I subtracted one for myself, because I knew I shouldn’t have any. Papi forgets I am diabetic all the time.”

  “And I forgot you weren’t human, Bonita. I think of you as just another person. I’d give you ice cream like everyone else if I could.”

  “That is so sweet!” said Gabi. “Sal, I love your dad!”

  “That is very sweet indeed,” said Bonita. She wobbled over to Papi and stuck out her hand. “Thank you for that compliment, Dr. Vidón.”

  Papi surprised me with the gentleness and respect he used to shake Bonita’s hand. “Anytime, my friend.”

  I slow-clapped. “Very touching. But you aren’t fooling me. I am a magician. I know all about long cons. There is no way you are a robot. You are way too human.”

  “Sal, stop being so thick-headed,” said Gabi. “My dad is a robot!”

  “How can a robot be a dad? You all just admitted Bonita can’t even be an American.”

  Papi shrugged like he was saying, Good point.

  “I know how I can prove it,” said Bonita, walking up to me. “Sal, look at—”

  But she was interrupted by someone’s cell going off.

  “Pardon me a moment,” said Bonita to me. “I’ve received a text. It’s marked urgent. Do you mind if I read it?”

  “No,” I said.

  She didn’t take out a phone or look at a watch or anything. She just kind of looked a little higher in the air, and her eyes moved like she was reading. A second later, her face snapped into a new expression: horror and sadness.

  “Oh no,” she said. She was right; her lips didn’t move when she spoke. “Gabi. Quickly, get your things. We have to leave immediately for the hospital.”

  “The hospital?!” said Gabi. She dropped her spoon in the bowl and hopped out of her chair. “Iggy?”

  And this is the moment when I believed that Bonita was a robot for real. She started crying. Her tears looked totally human; whoever had made her had done a perfect job on her tear ducts. But she didn’t look ashamed, or try to hide her grief, or be brave in front of everybody. She just honestly let everyone know that she was scared and shaken. I’ve never met a human who could be as truthful as she looked just then.

  “Yes,” said Bonita. “It’s Iggy. He’s taken a turn for the worse. We have to go.”

  NO ONE SAID much of anything as Gabi and her dad-droid gathered their things. They moved quickly, waved good-bye (neither of them could really speak), and walked outside. Soon, a car picked them up, and they were gone.

  None of the rest of Papi’s work buddies felt like having any more ice cream. They left soon after. Papi and I found ourselves sitting alone in the dining room with a lot of dirty ice cream bowls and a lot of burned-out sparklers.

  Papi, feeling as miserable as I did, assessed the table of dirty bowls. “Let’s wash these later.”

  “Excellent idea,” I agreed.

  We got up and walked into the disaster area that the living room had become. The big black computer had generated a lot of heat by then, making the living room, like, ten degrees hotter than the rest of the house.

  “It’s not so bad, is it?”

  I rubbed my forehead. “Dude. American Stepmom’s gonna wedgie you in two.” I pictured in my mind a brand-new kind of wedgie: the Reverse Guillotine. I’d have to tell Adam Hoag about it tomorrow. Maybe he’d interview me for his documentary!

  I swear I saw Papi’s butt cheeks clench. “You’re right. Better break out the big guns for this one.”

  And that’s what we did. We picked American Stepmom up from work—“Surprise! We’re taking you out to dinner! Isn’t that nice?”—and ate at Chocolatón, a restaurant where basically everything was—you guessed it—chocolate. It was American Stepmom’s favorite place to eat in the entire world. She had chicken mole with chocolate bacon and chocolate jalapeño poppers on the side, and a chocolate malt to drink. I almost went into diabetic shock just watching her eat.

  After a glucose check and a little math, I had egg-white crepes with pepperoni and tomato sauce. Papi had a glass of water. He was still full from the ice cream social.

  We had fun. We joked, we laughed, we heard about all the gross things elementary school kids do in a principal’s office and we gagged. Well, I gagged. Elementary school kids are gross.

  And then, right when American Stepmom’s dessert came—a personal fountain of melted chocolate with strawberries and marshmallows to dip into it—Papi told her that they had installed the remembranation machine in the living room.

  “You got it up and running already?” asked American Stepmom, around a mouthful of marshmallows. “That was fast!”

  “Yes,” said Papi, scared to say the next sentence. “But we still have a little…um…cleanup to do.”

  American Stepmom stopped chewing. She knew that guilty tone of voice.

  She side-eyed him so hard, I’m surprised he didn’t fly out of his chair. “How much cleanup?”

  “You’re gonna wedgie him in two,” I said.

  American Stepmom did not, in fact, cut Papi in half with his underwear. I think he might have preferred that.

  When we arrived home and stepped inside, she swallowed her anger down one gulp at a time. When she finally did speak, she expressed, very slowly, and with a lot of “Phew, babies!” thrown in, that she was “very disappointed” that Papi would leave “the shared space of the living room” in “such a state of disrepair” that “it was unusable by anybody but him and his coworkers.”

  “We have this huge house,” she said, “and we’re not even using half of it. Why’d you put the machine here?”

  “It’s the only place it would fit,” Papi replied, looking like a dog that had been caught drinking out of the toilet. “I wanted to install it on the second floor, but we couldn’t get that monster through the hallway.”

  “I see,” sniffed American Stepmom. “So we can’t entertain in the living room, we can’t watch TV or play games in the living room, we can’t read or take a nap in the living room, because you decided our living room isn’t a living room anymore, it’s a transdimensional remembranation room, and there isn’t any room for living anymore.”

  “Now, Lucy, I didn’t think—”

  “You can say that again.”

  Ouch.

  “Sal,” Papi said to me, “would you excuse your mother and me?”

  “Please don’t fight,” I said. I didn’t mean for it to come out so squeaky.

  American Stepmom softened her posture. She smiled at me. “Hey, kiddo. Your papi and I love each other very much. We can disagree without being cruel or unreasonable.”

  “I think we both agree I messed up,” said Papi, hugging American Stepmom from behind. She squeezed his big, shaggy arm. Eyes closed, she let her head sink into his bicep as he apologized. “I’m sorry, mi vida. I was in such a hurry to install the machine and stop—”

  He interrupted himself. But I knew the end of that sentence: stop Sal from bringing Mami Muerta back ever again.

  “It’s getting late,” said American Stepmom, “and we have school and work tomorrow. Maybe it’s best if we all got ready for bed.”

  “Yes,” said Papi. “Let’s all get ready for bed.”

  But they didn’t move. They stood there, Papi hugging American Stepmom, watching me until I shut the door to the bathroom.

  “Don’t fight!” I yelled from behind the bathroom door. “I’ll be listening!”

  My alarm went off at 1:00 a.m. I checked my fasting glucose—yep, still diabetic—then rubbed the dreams out of my eyes and cat-walked to the living room.

  The remembranation machine was so black it was like a hole in the world. It was a blackness that ate space. It took up half the living room with not
hingness.

  Well, until you got to its front, where its screen shone with blue-gray light. It displayed a 3-D blueprint of the first floor of the Coral Castle, like Google Earth, except it was my house. A VR headset hung on a hook. A touch pad and keyboard were just sitting there, dying to be used.

  I didn’t know how to operate the remembranation machine, but what I did know is that adults used it all day long. And adults suck at computers. A kid like me could probably work it better than they could.

  I tried the touch pad, and, yep, in three seconds I figured out how to pan through the house and rotate the camera and basically see the Coral Castle from any angle. Candy from a baby.

  At the bottom of the monitor, the graphical user interface read CALAMITRON COUNT: 679. I guessed that the silver dots of light, hovering all over the monitor like fairies in the forest, were calamitrons.

  I used the machine to scan the first floor. There were a few random drops sprinkled throughout the living room, the kitchen, and the dining room—little puddles where several drops clustered together. But most of the drops were pooled into human-size silhouettes, silvery shadows in the shape of a woman. A woman exactly the shape of my latest Mami Muerta.

  In all, there were five silver shadows in the Coral Castle, all in different poses. There was the silver shadow of Mami Muerta in the kitchen, in front of the stove. She looked like she might be stirring a pot there, but no utensils were drawn in silver dots, since the machine only detected calamitrons. A river of particles whooshed over to the next Mami Muerta, who appeared to be walking into the dining room with her hand on someone’s shoulder. That must have been when she and I had led Papi and American Stepmom to dinner. The last three shadows, all connected by gleaming, sparkling currents of calamitrons, were in the dining room. There she was, serving Papi’s plate—you couldn’t see the plate or Papi, but I remembered her posture exactly. There she was, dancing with American Stepmom, her leg kicked up. And the last one was blurry, but I think she was running with her hands outstretched toward the place where I’d been standing when I passed out. That must have been the last thing she was doing before she disappeared. Papi had said she was trying to catch me when I started to faint. There was the evidence.

  This Mami, she loved me. We’d gotten along so well, all afternoon. And she had danced with American Stepmom! As I stared at this ghostly afterimage of her, I couldn’t help but think that maybe she was the one, the perfect mami to join my family and make all my dreams come true.

  Except she’d brought 679 calamitrons with her.

  I felt sweat rising out of my skin in tiny beads. How many calamitrons were too many? Was it five million? Five thousand? Five?

  Okay, Sal, I thought. Take it easy. Relax.

  No wait! Don’t relax! That’s how you started all this trouble in the first place!

  So I tensed up instead.

  I hadn’t destroyed the universe yet. So maybe a few calamitrons were okay. I mean, what’s a few calamitrons among friends, right?

  Wrong. It wasn’t smart and it wasn’t brave to keep calamitrons around. Mami was already gone; there was no point in keeping the calamitrons she’d left behind. The answer here was clear: Get rid of them.

  But part of me didn’t want to. I liked the idea that some of Mami’s particles were still floating around in our house. She wasn’t all the way gone. I never wanted Mami to be all the way gone. The opposite—I wanted her all the way back.

  And anyway, could I actually get rid of them? Papi had said that he thought I could send anything from another universe back, and that would begin the healing process for holes. But I’d already returned Mami, the same way I’d sent back Yasmany’s chicken, and her calamitrons remained. Maybe they needed a little help going back to where they belonged. To reattach a finger, you need a surgeon. Maybe I needed to be the calamitron surgeon.

  OR! We had the remembranation machine! I could fix this right now.

  I buried my love of Mami deep inside so I could think clearly again. My fingers started flying over the remembranation machine’s keyboard, like the blurry hands of a hacker character in the movies. In no time I found the command to INITIATE GENERAL CALAMITRON PURGE. It asked me ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO PURGE ALL CALAMITRONS IN RANGE? (RANGE = 5KM FROM EPICENTER)

  In smaller letters beneath that question was the message (YEAH, YOU PROBABLY DO.)

  So I moved the cursor to the button that said YES and—

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” said American Stepmom from behind me.

  I jumped so high I fist-bumped Uranus before I crashed back to Earth and landed flat on my back in my living room.

  American Stepmom pretended to be all worried about me, but she couldn’t help but laugh. And hey, I would’ve laughed if I was her.

  She reached out a hand to help me up. “I appreciate you wanting to make amends for your actions, Sal. You’re worried that you’ve inadvertently done something bad by bringing back your mami, and you want to undo the damage.”

  “I just wanted to see how it worked,” I said, taking her hand.

  She smiled, half-laughing, half-sad. “This is your Papi’s equipment. It’s his experiment. He gets to decide when and how to run it.”

  “Okay, I get it. No more touchie the machine,” I said when I was back on my feet. “I’ll make it up to him. And you.”

  Surprise changed her face. “Oh yeah? How?”

  I gestured all around us. “I can help clean up this mess. You know Papi will take a hundred years to get around to it.”

  She thought about it for a second, then stuck out her hand. “Deal.”

  We shook.

  American Stepmom put a hand on my shoulder. “You know what? I could use a cup of cocoa. Want to join me?”

  I looked at her with one eye. “Didn’t you, like, eat four thousand pounds of chocolate for dinner?”

  She shooed my words away with all her fingers. “That was then, kid. You in or you out?”

  Sugar-free cocoa is pretty much the best thing to drink that has “sugar-free” in its name. No marshmallows, no whipped cream, and made with water instead of milk: Altogether, that sounds like three strikes, yer out. But at least it’s chocolatey enough to cover the taste of whatever weird chemicals they use instead of sugar to sweeten it. And American Stepmom put a cinnamon stick in it, and a little squirt of pure vanilla, and 100 percent cocoa dust (which is actually a little bitter, but in a good way), and a soft peppermint candy that was also sugar-free, stuck on the end of a cocktail sword.

  It was the greatest cup of cocoa in the world. She knows how much I love cocktail swords. She knows pretty much everything about me.

  American Stepmom had been the vice principal in my elementary school back in Connecticut. I liked her when I first met her. She was nice, easy to talk to, really funny. Her husband had died a few years ago, so we could relate to each other. I thought Papi might like her, too. And Papi was so sad. So sad.

  That’s why I kept getting myself sent to the vice principal’s office. I mean, not to brag, but I’m pretty sure no one in the history of the world has ever tricked their fifth-grade teacher into sitting on a whoopee cushion more often than I did. Never got detention for it, either. See, my vice principal thought I might be acting out because I was depressed over the loss of my mami.

  So Papi had to keep coming into school to talk with my vice principal and me. They found reasons to keep talking even after I stopped playing pranks on my teacher. And then one day, the summer I graduated from elementary school, my former vice principal made breakfast for Papi and me—well, she poured cereal, but she also whipped me up some cocoa with a peppermint candy on a cocktail sword—and asked if I thought it would be okay if she joined my family, because she loved Papi and she loved me, and, no, she would never try to replace my mami, but maybe, if I could find room enough in my heart, she could be my American stepmom?

  “American Stepmom,” I’d repeated, taking the sword out of my hot chocolate and popping the peppermi
nt in my mouth. “I like the sound of that.”

  “You’ve had a tough couple of days, haven’t you,” said American Stepmom, studying her cocoa as if she could read the future in it.

  I made the face. “You could say that.”

  She put her mug down hard on the counter, stomped over to me, and hugged me from behind like I’d just come back from the war. “You’re my hero, you know that?”

  I was struggling to keep my cocoa from spilling as she rag-dolled me around. “What? Why? All I do is cause trouble.”

  She sucked in breath like I’d cursed in front of her. Then she came around to face me, bent over so we were eye-to-eye, and held my shoulders. “Sal Vidón, listen to me. You’ve suffered so much, and you’re so brave, and so very clever. You are a magnificent young man. You hear me? You’re just trying to figure things out. All of us are. Everyone you know is trying to figure out how life works. But I’ll tell you a secret, Sal. No one knows. I mean, if I could do what you do, and I thought there was even a chance I could bring my mama back, don’t you think I would have done exactly the same things you have?”

  The tears in her eyes made them seem bigger. And look, I’m thirteen. The Teenager Code for Acting Cool required me to feel embarrassed by what American Stepmom had said. But I didn’t. It was just us in the kitchen, and she was such a good mom, and I’d have to be an idiot not to know it. So, as honestly as I could, I said to her, “I know you wouldn’t have. Because you always know the right thing to say and the right thing to do. At least Papi messes up sometimes. But you? You’re perfect.”

  She ducked her head and laughed. When she looked up again, she wasn’t crying anymore. “Are you kidding me? I mess up fifty times a minute, and that’s on a good day. But what you learn as you grow up is that everybody needs help. The sooner you ask the people you love to lend you a hand, the easier life becomes. Really, that’s it; that’s the secret. Trust in the people who love you. We can all figure it out together.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Now, is there anything you want to talk about?” And I could see in her eyes that she was steeling herself for it. She wanted to be a good mom to me, so if I wanted to talk about my dead mami yet again, she’d be there for it, even though every time we did, she got a little weepy and sneezy, like I just pulled a hair out of her nose.