“It’s impolite to mention things to people when they’re not invited.”
“He is invited,” I say.
Mom looks surprised. “Oh. He is?”
I can tell she’s dissatisfied by this, though I’m unsure why, so I smile. “Yeah,” I say. “He is.”
And for the first time, I feel a little excited about my birthday party.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
“Would it be bad if I showed up to my party in pajamas?” I ask.
Amelia and I are seated on her bed. Tonight’s my birthday and we should be getting ready for it.
She is. I’m not.
Amelia stops applying her mascara to look at me and what I’m wearing—a matching top-and-bottom pj set with puppies on them. “You know I’m normally all about hanging out in our pajamas. But this is your first grown-up birthday party.”
My eyes widen at her. “It sounds scary when you say it like that.”
“It is, though! We’re not doing a slumber party like we normally do. This is, like, people coming over to have a good time.”
“I guess.”
She wrinkles her nose at me. “Don’t get all weird about it.”
“Well, now I feel all weird about it! So much pressure. I definitely can’t wear this. I need to wear something like what you’re wearing.”
I probably look at her longingly. But it’s hard not to. While I never ended up finding the right outfit for tonight, Amelia—whose night it isn’t—looks incredible. Her toned body is snugly wrapped in a black sheath dress; her coiled curls are perfect; and her winged eyeliner is so precise it seems more mathematical than artistic. She’s the epitome of what I want to be. Especially tonight, when all eyes will be on me, at least while they’re singing “Happy Birthday.”
“What do I do?” I ask, feeling suddenly desperate.
“Well, I can’t believe you didn’t choose an outfit before now! What happened to all of those clothes we’d been looking at online? You never ended up taking me up on my zillion offers to go shopping!” She’s right. Before the disastrous shopping adventure with my mom, I was too nervous, and after, too discouraged. Amelia finishes applying her mascara. Then her face brightens. “Why don’t you look through my closet? You can wear whatever you want! What’s mine is yours.”
It’s a sweet thought, but I can feel my palms get sweaty at the suggestion. I’d be lucky to be able to fit my leg in any of Amelia’s dresses. Why can’t she see that? She makes suggestions like this all the time, offering to let me borrow a sweater if I’m cold or a T-shirt and leggings if I’m staying over. Once she suggested I use her bathing suit when I forgot mine. All moments so kind and well intentioned. All moments that leave me feeling so ashamed of my size. Does she really not see how different our bodies are?
Maybe Old Me would let this well-meaning comment slide completely, not even acknowledging the difference in our sizes. But New Me doesn’t feel like she should let this moment pass.
“You’re the best, Amelia. Thank you,” I say. “But you must know that nothing in your closet would fit me, right?”
She looks over at me with a frown. “Oh,” she says. “Well…”
“Let’s try my closet,” I say. “I know you’ll be able to help me find something in there. I mean, just look at you! You look amazing.”
Amelia bites on her bottom lip. “Really? You think?”
“Really. I know.”
“This is the first official party I’m going to with Kira as my girlfriend,” Amelia says. “I want to look nice.”
Aw. “Well, you nailed it.”
Amelia smiles. “Thank you, Charlie. Now, let’s head to your house and get you something to wear!” She looks at her phone. “We have an hour. Go, go, go!”
We go—straight to my house and right to my closet, where Amelia starts rifling through everything I own. She starts to make a pile of maybes on my bed. When she’s finished, we look through the heap. None of it goes together.
“Maybe the sweater and some leggings?” Amelia suggests. She grabs the sweater and tells me to try it on. I put it on over what I’m already wearing and look at her to see if it’s any good. Her face tells me all I need to know.
“It’s terrible, isn’t it?” I ask.
“Not at all. Just not exactly the look we’re going for, right? It’s good for school and stuff, but for your birthday party, it’s a little…”
“Boring,” I finish. “Totally.”
“No worries. I think one of these dresses could work!” She points at the few she’s laid out on my bed: a floral empire-waist dress, a polka-dotted wrap dress, and a sweet (though young-looking) Peter Pan–collar dress. “They’re all really pretty.”
I groan. “But everyone’s seen me in them before. Not exactly turning-seventeen material.”
She sighs, looking around my room. “Well…” Her eyes land on something and she jumps to her feet. “Have you been holding out? Is that a bag of new clothes?” She snatches a torn-open bag from my closet floor, a leftover package from my Charlie-experiments-with-fatshion shopping spree that I haven’t yet gotten around to returning.
“There’s nothing good in there,” I protest.
“I will fully be the judge of that,” Amelia says, dumping the clothes out on my bed. She starts sifting through the items. “Oh! How about this?”
She holds up a wine-colored pleated miniskirt. I bought it hoping it might offer a nice alternative to the body-hugging silhouette I wasn’t quite ready to dive into. The pro: it nipped at my waist pretty nicely, actually. The con: I wasn’t sure I’d have the guts to wear it, so, in a huff, I decided I would just send it (and everything else I’d ordered) back.
“With?” I demand.
Amelia goes to my closet and picks out a short-sleeve black V-neck. “This,” she says, handing them both to me. “Try it on. Now!”
I grab a bra and slip into the bathroom, where I wiggle out of my pajamas and pull everything on, tucking the shirt into the skirt. I squeeze my eyes shut before I take a look in the mirror, afraid to disappoint myself.
Only, when I look up, I think I look…cute?
Amelia knocks. “Well?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, opening the door.
She lets out a little gasp. “Charlie! Don’t be silly! You look so amazing!”
“Really?” I bite my lip, walking over to the bed and getting a little excited.
“Yes!” She digs through my jewelry and hands me a long necklace and huge hoop earrings, which I add to the outfit. Amelia claps her hands together. “Yes! Charlie! I can’t believe you’ve been hiding this beautiful outfit this whole time. God, you make me so mad sometimes.”
“I wasn’t sure it would work on me,” I admit.
Amelia shakes her head. “Enough of that. Now, let me do your hair and makeup, and you’ll be even more of a knockout. Come on! We’re running out of time.”
We listen to music as she starts curling my hair. The songs help distract me from the butterflies in my stomach.
Amelia’s putting a little highlighter on my cheekbones when the doorbell rings.
My eyes widen. I thought I had more time. “Oh, God,” I say.
“We’re done here, anyway,” she says, picking up my mirror and showing me my face. “Well?”
I’m a little surprised by my reflection. The makeup looks precise, just like Amelia’s, and my hair is beautiful: the loose curls cascade around my face and down my shoulders. There’s a reason I always insist that my hair is my best feature. And that highlighter? The blush? The sharp-as-glass eyeliner? Divine.
I smile at her. “You did a great job. Thank you.”
“Charlie!” I hear my mom yell from down the hall.
“Ready?” Amelia asks.
I take a deep breath. “As I’ll ever be.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Mom is parading her date, Fernando, around my party, which is surprisingly bumping…with everyone Mom’s invited. She’s already a
few drinks in; she was actually a few drinks in the moment she called out to me to come see who was at the door.
“Nerves,” she’d whispered to me as she held up her wineglass. All I could smell was the alcohol on her breath.
She’s had at least two glasses since then, and now she’s got her both of her arms wrapped around one of Fernando’s and she’s giggly and gazing up at him with big eyes, even if he seems a little distant, even if his hands are shoved in his pockets. She’s gushing to anyone who will listen. She’s bragging about his job—he’s a professor, don’t you know?—and running her hands down his chest.
Amelia and I exchange a glance. She pretends to gag and I give her a small smile. I feel like I could actually gag. I want to be supportive of my mom’s new relationship, but…the way she’s acting is too much.
Mom is wearing a skintight dress and modeling it in front of her friends from her weight-loss group, who ooh and ahh over her body and beg her to share her secrets. It’s nothing, she says, just diet and exercise!
I eye her in envy. Moms shouldn’t be prettier than their daughters. It’s not fair.
Then my mom is telling everyone that her daughter is so great, doesn’t she have such a lovely face, and she’s so smart in school—yet my mom doesn’t even bother to look at me as she speaks because I’m not there, not really, not to her. Her friends reiterate what a smart girl I am, how impressive my academic achievements are, what a great job she did raising me, and how, because of her, I turned out to be something real special.
I’m doing my best to smile through it all. Let her parade me and Amelia around. Try to ignore the way she and everyone else fawn over Amelia’s striking beauty (“Ooh, you’re a tiny little thing!” one says) yet can only muster up compliments about my brain and my schoolwork, not my appearance.
I keep checking the time. It’s dragging.
Amelia squeezes my hand. “They’ll be here soon,” she says to me, thinking I’m watching the clock because I’m worried that the people I’ve invited won’t show. Really, I’m wondering how long I’ll have to keep enduring this nightmare.
When I reach for another handful of chips, my mother, in front of everyone, tsks me, and my hand recoils to my side.
I escape away from her and into the back room, where Fernando is looking through some of the family photos that are hanging on the wall. He must’ve needed a break, too. My mom can be a lot.
Fernando the Professor is a decent-looking dude—light-skinned, muscular, dark eyes, goatee. I make a mental note that he should totally grow the goatee out into a full beard because this isn’t 1992, but then I chide myself for being so catty when he’s done literally nothing wrong.
“Hey, it’s the birthday girl. Feliz cumpleaños,” he says with a smile. Well, whoops. “¿Hablas español?”
“Oh. No,” I say.
“No?” Fernando asks, looking shocked. “But you’re Puerto Rican, no? That’s what your mother told me.”
“Oh, yeah, I am—I just don’t speak Spanish. My dad never taught me,” I reply, then feel like a jerk for throwing my poor dad under the bus. To my mom’s new boyfriend. Sorry, Papi.
“That’s a shame,” Fernando says. “But there’s still time to learn. You should!”
“Yeah, maybe,” I say. “Sorry, excuse me.”
I sneak off to the bathroom and I lock myself in. God, shamed for not speaking Spanish at my own birthday party? I wish I could say this is the first time that’s happened, but it happens all the time. Many who speak Spanish—particularly fellow Puerto Ricans—are disappointed when they learn I don’t, like I’ve committed some grave sin or maybe am even lying about being Puerto Rican. My cousins still make fun of me.
And then the thought of waiting around for my cousins and tías and tíos to make their appearance and devoting tons of attention to my mom makes me cringe. They’ll gas her up, she’ll bask in it, I’ll have to try not to vomit. I take a deep breath and slowly exhale.
In the mirror, my cheeks are flushed and my eyeliner is already a little smudged. I dab at the corners of my eyes with my finger to clean it up a little. It helps me look better, but it certainly doesn’t help me feel better.
“I can’t do this,” I say to my reflection.
And then I decide I won’t.
I text Amelia from the bathroom.
New plan, I write. Let’s leave.
Now? she writes back. Then there’s a soft knock at the door.
“It’s me,” Amelia says, and I let her in. “I am also having a terrible time, but we can’t just leave. Your cousins aren’t even here yet!”
I shake my head. “They won’t be, not for a few hours. They’re always late. So we should just go. This is awful.”
“But what about everyone who’s still coming? What about Brian?”
“They can meet us somewhere else. It’s my birthday, right? And this”—I motion toward the craziness unfurling in the living room and kitchen—“is not what I had in mind for my party.”
“Where would you even want to go?” Amelia asks, watching me.
“Let’s text everyone to meet us at Jake’s,” I say. “I just want to hang out. Away from all of this. What do you think?”
She’s quiet for moment. “I think that sounds a hell of a lot better than sticking around for what has clearly turned into your mom’s party.”
The acknowledgment that this party has gone off the deep end sends a wave of relief through my body. Sometimes I worry I pick fights with my mom about things I should just let go, but when others around me see the same things—see that my mom is wrong—it helps me feel sane. I could hug Amelia just for saying that.
So I do. “You get me.”
I ask her to text her friends. I text Brian and Benjamin. Then we sneak out of the bathroom, slip out the back door of the house, hop into my car, and drive away.
When we arrive at the coffee shop, Brian’s already there, waiting outside.
“Happy birthday!” he says when he spots me. I watch as he takes in what I’m wearing, his lips spreading into a smile. “You look…amazing.”
I grin. After that slow, lingering look from him, I feel pretty amazing. “Thank you, Brian. How’d you get here so fast?”
“I was already on my way to your house when you texted.”
My eyes go big. “Were you texting while driving?!”
“I was at a stoplight!” he insists.
“Don’t do that,” I say, serious.
“You could die, you know,” Amelia says. “And we wouldn’t want that.”
Brian puts his hands up in defeat. “Okay, okay. Got it. You’re both right. So what’s going on? Why the sudden location change?”
I shrug. “We wanted to keep things exciting.”
“You just wanted a clever way to finally get me to Jake’s. You could’ve asked me straight up, Charlie, although this is good, too,” he teases.
We walk toward the entrance and he holds open the door for the two of us. Amelia immediately starts pushing tables together, enough for our group to sit. Brian offers to get some coffees for the table—I give him my order and try to put a few crumpled dollars in his hand, but he refuses to take them.
“The birthday girl doesn’t pay,” he says, and I relent.
Instead, I sit at the table, still trying to shake off the bad feelings from my mom’s party when I see our friends walk into the coffee shop. When they spot me, I’m greeted with a round of cheerful “Happy birthdays.” Kira tells me I look nice, Liz compliments my outfit, and I’m caught up in the flurry of hellos and the relief that everyone actually came. No one even mentions it’s weird that my birthday party moved last-minute to the local coffee shop.
Instead, we sit around our tables and make fun of Khalil for how sweet he likes his coffee.
“It’s basically milk and sugar with a dribble of actual coffee,” Maddy says. She and Khalil have been dating for a while, and they seem pretty adorable together.
Khalil shrugs. “I’m weirdly
fine with that. It tastes good.”
Liz wrinkles her nose. “It’s too sweet. I can tell just by looking! See how light it is?”
“I just don’t like the taste of coffee! It’s bitter!”
“To be fair, the taste of coffee does take some getting used to,” Brian offers.
“Thank you, man! Someone who has my back.”
It’s then that Benjamin walks into Jake’s, and I call out to him. “Benjamin! Over here!”
Amelia looks surprised, whispering, “He came!”
I grin, waving him over. “We’re pals.”
“Benjamin!” John shouts, and Amelia gives him a quizzical look. “Love that guy. Kid’s hilarious. We’re in AP calc together.”
“You’re in AP calc?” Jessica asks.
John just flips her off in response as I get up to give Benjamin a hug. We’re not typically the hugging type of friends, but I’m suddenly in a really good mood, and I definitely want him to feel welcome.
“Come, sit.” I grab an empty chair and squeeze it in beside mine. “Thanks for coming!”
Benjamin gives me a small smile, pushing his glasses up, looking a little embarrassed by the big greeting he received. “Thanks for inviting me.”
“Do you know everyone?” When he shakes his head, I do a quick round of introductions. “Now you do.”
“Can’t promise I’ll remember everyone’s names, but I’ll try. Kinda wishing I hadn’t spent so much time memorizing the periodic table and left some room for things like that, but we all make choices,” Benjamin says, and we laugh.
Out of nowhere, I feel a kick under the table and glance at Amelia, who nods toward Brian. He’s gotten up from our table and is standing near the counter, half-heartedly looking at the display case of baked goods. I shoot her a confused look and she mouths, Jealous?
While the others continue to chat around me, I shoot her a text.
What?! I write.
Her reply reads Brian looked real puppy dog when you gave lil Benny a hug and includes a shrug emoji, hair-flip emoji, and nail polish emoji.
I bite my lip, trying to hide a smile. Jealous? Really?
I excuse myself from the table and join Brian at the counter. “That blueberry muffin might be calling my name.”
Fat Chance, Charlie Vega Page 18