Beli shook her head and clicked her tongue. “You must stay nice and warm if you want to get better! Yesterday you were in that shed for hours! It must be full of mice in there,” she mumbled.
Mice! I shivered, and she handed me the steaming cup of hot chocolate she held in her hand as if she’d been just waiting for me. Warmth spread all over me with her lovely gesture.
“Gracias, Beli!” I took a sip and scalded my tongue. “Ay! It’s hot!”
“Sorry!” She winced. “You know I’m not the best judge of temperature in this cold. Brrrr, I can’t wait to go back to the island.”
From the kitchen table, where she was putting away the flower cuttings, jars, decorative sand, and ribbons scattered all around, Mami sighed. “Ay, Mami!” she said to Beli, whining in the same voice I used, the one she always complained about. “At least pretend you’re happy to be here. Mako has you all year long, and the girls and I need you too.”
Mako was my uncle, Tío Manuel Joaquín, and Beli lived with him and his family in the most gorgeous beach house in Puerto Rico.
“Gina, bebé,” Beli said as she went over to Mami and kissed the top of her head. “You’ll always be my favorite girl. You know that, cierto?”
In that moment, Julieta came out of her room like a gust of wind. “Talking about favorite girls? Here I am!” She laughed. “You ladies ready to go?”
My sister looked like a teen winter princess out of a shopping catalog, gift bags dangling from her arms and all. I blew the hair out of my face. Why didn’t my hair look like that, vibrant and alive? When I tried to curl it like hers, the edges bunched up in tight curls along my hairline like the crimped edge of an empanada before collapsing like wet paper towels.
Beli and Mami beamed at her. And who could blame them? Juli was the most stylish seventeen-year-old in our whole town of Andromeda. She was popular, relatively nice for being so spoiled, and so smart she was still trying to choose from a handful of colleges that were sure to accept her. I was candlelight, and she was the sun.
“Where are you going?” I asked, and took another sip of hot cocoa. The steam warmed my frozen face, but just barely.
“Mami, Beli, and I are going on a special mission.”
“To do what?” I asked, but what I really wanted to know was why they hadn’t invited me.
“We’re doing random acts of kindness,” Julieta said. “Delivering anonymous presents to people who might be feeling lonely during the holidays.”
“Anoma-what?” I asked, my eyes going from Mami to Beli. Now I noticed that Mami had changed out of her pajamas while I’d been dealing with the garbage situation. She’d even put on makeup and her dangly earrings. Beli looked ready to go on a polar expedition.
Were they really going to leave me alone?
“A-non-y-mous,” Julieta repeated. “It’s more fun to do nice things for people when they will never know who the giver was. The act of service is its own reward.”
“You have a lonely person right here. I’m sick,” I said, pointing at my throat.
“Just because we’re thinking of other people doesn’t mean we don’t love you, Nati. Love isn’t a pie that runs out when you divide it. You’ll survive for an hour on your own.”
I groaned, and Julieta sighed like I was the worst pain in the world. Looking at Mami, she said, “See? I told you she wouldn’t get it. She’s like a walking dark cloud.”
“We were perfectly fine before you barged in,” I said, and crossed my arms.
Mami and Beli exchanged one of their wordless looks, which meant they’d talked about this—me and my attitude—already.
Juli continued, “Anyway, I’m ready to go. If you want to come, I’d love to have you along. If not, I’ll go be kind on my own.”
Mami and Beli jumped into action.
“I’m ready!” Mami said, putting on her boots.
“Wait for me!” said Beli, tying one of Papi’s Real Salt Lake blue-and-red soccer scarves around her neck. It clashed with her green jacket, but fashion always took a step behind warmth for her.
The three of them stared at me, three drops of water. They had the same dark curly hair, shiny brown eyes, and rich bronze skin that no self-tanner lotion could replicate, no matter how I tried. I looked like Papi, with boring straight hair and paler skin, which turned greenish in the cold winter for the lack of sunshine.
“Are you coming?” Mami asked, and it sounded like she really meant it.
There was a heartbeat of a pause when my tongue got ready to say yes, but then Julieta rolled her eyes.
“No,” I said, “I don’t feel like spreading … randomness.”
“Kindness,” Julieta said.
Mami shrugged, but instead of insisting that I come along, she started lacing her boots.
Julieta was already heading out to the carport. “Come with me, Beli,” she said, grabbing all her bags with one hand and holding Beli’s hand with the other. “I have a blanket waiting for you in the car so you’ll be comfy.”
“Ay, mi niña, always so thoughtful!” She took Juli’s arm and then turned to look at me as the cup of cocoa got cold in my hands. “Put some more Vicks VapoRub on your chest, Nati. I promise, one more dose and the froggy throat will be a thing of the past.”
Before I replied that Vicks didn’t work against older-sister sassiness, Mami came up to me and kissed me on the cheek. I knew it was a trick to make sure I didn’t have a fever.
“Lock up and call me if you need anything,” she whispered, as if these were secret rules and not what she repeated every day before going out.
Soon, I heard the rumble of the car going away. I finished drinking the cocoa to wash the bitterness off my tongue, and went back to Reuben’s messages on the computer. He was offline. His last message had been one of his silly jokes.
I don’t think a cat could eat all those chickens unless it was a meowtain lion in disguise.
I only laughed because he wasn’t around to see me.
A few minutes later, when I hadn’t replied, he’d said, Get it?
I laughed even more and dialed his number on the house phone.
On the third ring, a horrible howling sound made me freeze, as if I were one of the icicles hanging from the gutters. I perked up to listen. It sounded like the crying of a demon baby, and something else, hissing and growling back.
The noise came from the shed. I ran to the window to see what was happening, but it was darker now that the snow had started falling. Under the dim glow of the neighbors’ light, I could just make out a raccoon standing in front of the shed door. I had left it open after all! If that raccoon ransacked Mami’s things, I’d be grounded until the end of the world. But why wasn’t it going in?
Then I saw the small cat blocking the raccoon’s path, arching its back as if it were trying to make itself look bigger and more menacing.
“Hello! Hello,” Reuben’s voice blared from the phone.
It scared me so badly, I shrieked and dropped the phone. It bounced once on the tiled kitchen floor, and then the battery flew out from the back, cutting Reuben’s frantic voice off.
The cat howled again, and when I looked up through the window, I saw the raccoon lunge at it. I didn’t think. I grabbed the broom from the closet and ran out of the house in my slippers. The snow seeped through the thin fabric and burned my naked skin. I screamed at the top of my lungs, half because of the cold, and half trying to scare off the raccoon.
As soon as it heard me coming, the raccoon ran away from me, across the street, and into the Rogerses’ bushes. The cat darted into the darkness of the shed.
I had to shoo the cat away before I locked up. In spite of the cold, sweat prickled under my arms. When I found the hanging electric cord with the light switch in the middle of the room, I was panting. This wasn’t the moment for a meltdown. I had to keep my wits, or what was left of them.
I pulled on the cord and the air reverberated with energy. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the brightne
ss of the light bulb.
“Gato?” I called.
More silence, and then I heard a tiny meow.
I followed the sound all the way to the old armoire, where Mami kept old coats and baby toys. My chest heaved as I stood in front of the semi-closed door.
“Are you there, kitty?” I asked, moving the coats aside.
At the sound of my voice, the cat’s tiny face popped out from the coats and jackets, startling me.
“Hey,” I said, relieved it didn’t look ferocious like when it was fighting the raccoon. But then my attention flickered to the rest of the cat. At its feet were several tiny … creatures. My mind struggled to count, but there were a bunch. They were all different colors. Pink, whitish, multicolored, and striped, but the one thing they had in common was long pink tails.
Mice?!
The cat lay curled in a crescent moon position and, with a swift move of its arm, gathered the creatures close to its tummy.
“What’s going on?” I whispered.
The cat blinked its yellow eyes slowly, and then I understood.
Kittens. The cat and the raccoon had been fighting over newborn kittens.
Blizzard Besties
Random Acts of Kittens
Shaking Up the House
Copyright © 2021 by Yamile Saied Méndez
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First printing 2021
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e-ISBN 978-1-338-68467-4
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