Hungry Hearts

by Elsie Chapman

  “Here.” Gael puts a fork into my hand. “Try this.”

  “What is it?” I ask.

  “A trial run,” he says. “I only made a dozen, the rest we brought in are black-bean mole or squash blossom or queso fresco. Same as always. But I wanted to try something new.”

  I want to ask him what, exactly, is wrong with black-bean and squash-blossom tamales, when he says, “Come on, you’re the deciding vote.”

  “Deciding vote for what?” I ask.

  “For whether I’m gonna make these again next week,” he says.

  I twirl the bit of tamal speared on the tines.

  I take it into my mouth.

  The fine grit of the corn dissolves. The flavor spreads over my tongue, and everything brightens.

  The string of lights in the window.

  The orange of the papel picado.

  The dark brown of Gael’s eyes.

  The way he was just wearing a bakery hairnet with no trace of self-consciousness, even though the bakery hairnets make us all look like a Renaissance faire troupe.

  The smell of cinnamon and tomato clinging to his hair and the shoulders of his jacket.

  You like him, sing the bite and sweetness of the chiles.

  You like him, agrees the soft give of the sweet potato.

  You like him, chimes out the resiny warmth of the pine nuts.

  You like him, whispers the spice that stays on my tongue, even through the crowd coming in for our first dinnertime rush.

  * * *

  I have always said in bread and pastry what I do not know how to say in words.

  I welcome a man to Rowbury with cemitas, because I do not know how to say, I am glad you are here, even though I take a sharper breath every time I pass this building, now that my family cannot afford to live here anymore.

  To a woman finishing chemotherapy, I bring magdalenas de maíz, because they might be both bland enough to keep down but with enough flavor to remind her that she can still taste. And because I do not know how to say, I believe you are going to live; we all believe it.

  This is what I try to tell Gael:

  With a puerquito, I try to say, The only other thing I think I remember about you is that you carried around that stuffed pig, the one with the ears gone soft by the wear of your hands.

  With pan de muerto sprinkled in marigold petals, I tell him, I’m sorry you lost your abuelo last fall; I lost my abuela in spring three years ago, and I know the empty place it leaves in you.

  With a concha sugared as teal as our bakery door, I whisper, I’m sorry I barely remember you, but I want to know you as you are now.

  He thanks me, each time. Each time, he tells me that the town where he lived the last ten years never had anything like this, not even at the panadería where he and his mother bought bolillos.

  But no flare or spark lights in his eyes the way I felt the spark and flare within my rib cage at the taste of those chiles and salt.

  Gael understands none of the ways I try to speak in vanilla and sugar.

  I may know how to nudge a man toward proposing, or how to hearten a tired mother. I may know who needs the sugar of violet pan dulce. But I don’t know how to fold my heart into dough or lace vanilla sugar with my secrets.

  I don’t know how to sprinkle a little of what is in me, like the color of the nonpareils.

  * * *

  Today Flora Merriman’s husband is retiring. Tonight there will be a party with silver and gold balloons. But right now I know Flora and her husband are worried that once he’s home all day, they will have nothing to talk about.

  I bring a box of cuernitos de crema to tell them they will love getting to know each other again, just as they did at the church dances when they met.

  They accept the box with small, hopeful smiles, and I carry the lit-up feeling of that smile with me down the hall.

  A door near the stairwell opens.

  The pretty blond woman steps into the frame.

  In her thin slacks and ballet flats that probably cost more than we make off a month of birthday cakes, she matches the remodeled building, the new flooring, the inset lights. Flora and her husband are among the few who’ve stayed, their rent control holding as the price for the other units climbs. The other apartments have been redone, the linoleum ripped out and replaced with chevron parquet, the chipped countertops torn away in favor of quartz.

  “Do you even live here?” the woman asks, her perfectly lined eyes half closing.

  I give her a sad smile I can’t help. “I used to.”

  I wait for her to melt back into her apartment. I wait for the pinched look of those uncomfortable with the truth that them moving in means families like mine moving out.

  “Well, you don’t now,” she says.

  The words catch me, and freeze me.

  In the pinching of her glossed lips, I understand how she must see me.

  A girl with brown skin and hair tangled from hours in the kitchen, my lips flushed with plum lipstick I borrow from my mother’s purse, my footsteps skipping down the hall as lightly as if I lived here, because once I did.

  Everyone around here knows my family’s pastelería by our teal door and the way the air around the front counter smells like sugar and raspberry. They know it by how we don’t have a menu, just bakery cases full of galletas and fairy cakes.

  But they don’t know us. Sometimes it’s as though, when we step out from behind the register, when we take off our aprons or dust the flour from our shirts, we have ceased to be useful.

  “So stop coming in here,” the woman says. “Next time I see you, I’m calling the super.”

  “Hey.” A voice comes from behind me. “You can’t talk to her like that.”

  I look over my shoulder.

  The inside of me shrinks and crumples like baking paper.

  The woman’s sneer tightens. “Excuse me?”

  “You think because you come in with more money than us that you can talk to us like that?” Gael asks.

  “Gael,” I say.

  He looks at me, then at the woman.

  Then at me, and back at the woman.

  “Ya estuvo,” he says, throwing his hands toward the woman.

  Ya estuvo. His way of telling her he’s done, she’s not worth arguing with, even though she will not understand the words.

  By the time he looks back at me, I am already down the hall.

  The ways I slip into buildings without being seen are the same ways I slip out.

  * * *

  When Gael finds me sitting on the swing set in the Mallow Garden playground, I don’t quite know if I wanted him to or if I was hoping he wouldn’t. The playground is empty, the overcast sky scaring families off for the day, so I can’t even pretend to see someone I know.

  “You’re like a fairy or something, aren’t you?” he says. “I look away for one second and you vanish.”

  I stare across Dill Street at the library.

  Gael sits on the empty swing next to me. “I’m guessing that’s not the first time that’s happened?”

  “What were you even doing there?” I ask, not looking at him.

  “The Merrimans’ party,” he says. “I was bringing the tamales.”

  I let the wind sway me, my feet dragging across the wood chips.

  “You don’t talk much, do you?” he asks.

  “I talk,” I say. “I just don’t like words very much. I don’t like how people use them.”

  He laughs. “Yeah, tell me about it.”

  Heat rises in my cheeks.

  Of course he knows, better than I do, the way words cut and scrape. His family is Mexican like mine. And he is trans, which leaves him with raw, exposed places I can only try to understand, places he has had to harden against the world.

  “But words, they can be good too,” he says. “Kinda like salt.” He sways back and forth, just enough that I can feel the motion of him. “Just because too much can ruin something, doesn’t mean it’s all bad, you know?”
<
br />   * * *

  Gael does not walk me home from Mallow Garden Playground. He seems to know, without me saying it, that I don’t want him to.

  I find my mother in the kitchen, taking round cake halves from the oven for the Sunday orders.

  My mother would be the first to look the pretty blond woman in the eye until she understood: I am not nothing. You and everyone like you will not wear us down into nothing.

  My mother, who is unafraid to make cakes that spill out their hearts, because she has never feared doing the same.

  “Can I try?” I ask as she picks up the knife.

  She lifts her head toward the doorway, seeing me.

  “A piñata cake,” I say. “Can I try making one?”

  Her smile lights the kitchen. When she smiles like this, I can almost smell the blue mejorana my father adds to his coronas of rolls, bright as citrus and pine.

  She sets the knife in my hands and guides my cautious hollowing-out of the round halves.

  When my father comes into the kitchen and sees what we’re doing, he brings out every color candy we have.

  * * *

  The next time Gael comes in, I am not nervous and fidgeting. I do not shift my weight onto the balls of my feet.

  The point, I realized as my father and mother and I filled the center of the piñata cake, is not what one boy may or may not understand.

  The point is what I choose to say.

  I show Gael the piñata cake, covered with pink and turquoise coconut.

  I hand him a cake knife.

  “You want me to cut it?” he asks, hesitating.

  “It’s what it’s for,” I say.

  “But it’s pretty,” he says, the apprehension of a boy more acquainted with making sure tamales stay together and taste as they should than with the careful decoration of cakes and galletas.

  “It’s a cake,” I say. “You eat it. To do that, you have to cut it.”

  “Okay,” he says, still unsure.

  He slides the knife in.

  On the second cut, he hears it, the rattle of bright candy at the center.

  He looks at me.

  I shrug at the knife, to tell him, I’m not telling you. See for yourself.

  When he pulls the first piece away, revealing the inside, his breath in is low and quiet. But it’s enough of that same birthday-party wonder that I can picture him as a little boy.

  “How’d you do that?” he asks.

  And I smile my mother’s smile, glinting with secrets and mischief.

  I wonder, just for a second, how it will taste on Gael’s tongue, the cinnamon and chile en polvo laced into our vanilla cake, the spice a little like what he adds to his family’s tamales.

  But as he tries the cake, I do not look at him. I cut pieces for my mother and my father, so they can taste this first piñata cake my hands have ever had a part in. I put together a bakery box so Gael can take the rest of it home, to the mother who thinks I am tall, and to the father and sisters he stands alongside, their hands covered in masa.

  I want them to know me, all of them. I want my mother and father to know the hidden heart of me. I want Gael’s family to know who I have become in the years that Rowbury has changed around us, becoming a place where family recipes and storefronts hold on, but so many of us have had to move out to where highways meet fields.

  Gael’s soft laugh makes my fingers fumble with the box’s corners.

  He’s staring at the space where the wall meets the floor, shaking his head like he’s realizing something he can’t believe he missed.

  “What?” I ask.

  He kisses me, the taste of sugar on my lips, and salt and spice on his.

  This is my heart, says the warm sugar of the vanilla.

  This is the inside of me, murmurs the cinnamon.

  This is everything that hurts, confesses the bright edge of chili powder, and everything I miss and everything I hope for.

  This is everything I do not say but that I hold in me, whispers that breath of salt at the end. This is my hidden heart of color and sugar, the things you might miss if I did not show you they were there.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  “A BOUNTIFUL FILM” BY S. K. ALI

  S. K. Ali is the author of the young adult novels, Saints and Misfits, a 2018 William C. Morris award finalist, and Love From A to Z. She’s also the co-author of a picture book, The Proudest Blue, written with team USA Olympic fencer, Ibtihaj Muhammad, releasing in the fall of 2019. Not to be limited to picture books and teen novels, she’s co-editing an upcoming middle grade anthology featuring joyful tales, including her own donut-ilicious story. She lives in Toronto with her family and a very talkative cat named Yeti.

  “MOMENTS TO RETURN” BY ADI ALSAID

  Adi Alsaid is the author of several young adult novels, including Let’s Get Lost, Never Always Sometimes, and North of Happy. He was born and raised in Mexico City and is currently traveling the world with his wife, spilling things on himself in exciting new places.

  “KINGS AND QUEENS” BY ELSIE CHAPMAN

  Elsie Chapman grew up in Prince George, Canada, and has a degree in English literature from the University of British Columbia. She is the author of the young adult novels Dualed, Divided, and Along the Indigo, and the middle grade novel All the Ways Home, and co-editor of A Thousand Beginnings and Endings. She currently lives in Tokyo, Japan, with her family. You can visit her online at elsiechapman.com.

  “SUGAR AND SPITE” BY RIN CHUPECO

  Rin wrote obscure manuals for complicated computer programs, talked people out of their money at event shows, and did many other terrible things. She now writes about ghosts and fantastic worlds but is still sometimes mistaken for a revenant. She is the author of The Girl From the Well, its sequel, The Suffering, and The Bone Witch trilogy. Find her at rinchupeco.com.

  “GIMME SOME SUGAR” BY JAY COLES

  Jay Coles is a young adult author, a composer for various music publishers, and a graduate of Vincennes University and Ball State University. His debut novel, Tyler Johnson was Here, which has been featured in EW, Teen Vogue, Bustle, BuzzFeed, the New York Times, and other publications, is based on true events in his life and was inspired by Black Lives Matter and police brutality in America. He currently resides in Indianapolis, Indiana. You can find more information at jaycoleswriter.com.

  “SIDE WORK” BY SARA FARIZAN

  Sara Farizan is the author of the young adult novels If You Could Be Mine, Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel, and Here to Stay. She also has short stories in the anthologies Fresh Ink, All Out: The No-Longer Secret Stories of Queer Teens Throughout the Ages, and The Radical Element: 12 Stories of Daredevils, Debutantes & Other Dauntless Girls. She lives in Massachusetts and thanks you for reading her work.

  “RAIN” BY SANGU MANDANNA

  Sangu Mandanna was four years old when an elephant chased her down a forest road and she decided to write her first story about it. Seventeen years and many, many manuscripts later, she signed her first book deal. She is now the author of The Lost Girl, A Spark of White Fire, Color Outside the Lines, and more. Sangu lives in Norwich, a city in the east of England, with her husband and kids.

  “PANADERÍA ~ PASTELERÍA” BY ANNA-MARIE MCLEMORE

  Anna-Marie McLemore learned how to cook from her mother, abuela, and tías. She writes fairy tales and magical realism, and watches “The Great British Bake Off” while trying to perfect her pan dulce. She is the author of The Weight of Feathers, a finalist for the 2016 William C. Morris Debut Award; Stonewall Honor Book When the Moon Was Ours, which was longlisted for the National Book Award; Wild Beauty, a Kirkus Best Book of 2018; and Blanca & Roja, a Junior Library Guild Selection.

  “THE GRAND ISHQ ADVENTURE” BY SANDHYA MENON

  Sandhya Menon is the New York Times bestselling author of When Dimple Met Rishi; From Twinkle, with Love; and There’s Something About Sweetie. A full-time dog-servant and part-time writer, she makes her home in the foggy mountains of Colorado. Visit
her online at SandhyaMenon.com.

  “BLOOM” BY PHOEBE NORTH

  Phoebe North, a graduate of the University of Florida’s MFA program in poetry, is the critically acclaimed author of Starglass and Starbreak. A new novel will be forthcoming from HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray in 2020. Writing from a home in the Hudson Valley, North also enjoys gardening, spending time with family, listening to obscure music on outdated formats, and fighting off the fear of death by curating an astonishingly comprehensive social media presence. Find North on Instagram at www.instagram.com/phoebenorthauthor.

  “HEARTS À LA CARTE” BY KARUNA RIAZI

  Karuna Riazi holds a BA in English Literature from Hofstra University, and is an online diversity advocate, blogger, and educator. Her work has been featured in Entertainment Weekly, Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, Book Riot, and Teen Vogue, among others. Karuna is fond of tea, Korean dramas, and baking new delectable treats for friends and family to relish. She is the author of The Gauntlet, which released in March 2017 from Simon and Schuster’s Salaam Reads imprint, and its upcoming companion The Battle.

  “THE SLENDER ONE” BY CAROLINE TUNG RICHMOND

  Caroline Tung Richmond is the award-winning author of The Only Thing to Fear, The Darkest Hour, and Live In Infamy. She’s also the program director of We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit that promotes diversity in children’s literature. A self-proclaimed history nerd and cookie connoisseur, Caroline lives with her family in the Washington, DC, area. Visit her online at www.carolinetrichmond.com.

  “THE MISSING INGREDIENT” BY REBECCA ROANHORSE

  Rebecca Roanhorse is a Nebula and Hugo Award-winning speculative fiction writer and the recipient of the 2018 Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her novel Trail of Lightning (Book #1 in the Sixth World Series, Saga Press) is available now. Book #2 Storm of Locusts is out April 2019. Her middle grade novel Race to the Sun (Rick Riordan Presents) drops Fall 2019. Her short fiction can be found in Apex Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, and the New Suns anthology. She lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband, daughter, and pug. Find more at rebeccaroanhorse.com and on Twitter at @RoanhorseBex.