Sal and Gabi Break the Universe

by Carlos Hernandez

  Papi was being his usual logical self. But that “one calamitron is too many” business? I knew he was…well, not exactly wrong. He just didn’t fully understand it yet.

  Neither did I. But the truth was somewhere inside me. I only needed to dig it out.

  One step at a time. Today, I would go to school. I would have a nice, normal day, and everything would be fine. The hole in Yasmany’s locker would be smaller. Maybe it would even be gone by the time I checked it. I needed to stay calm. Be in control.

  I held a breath in front of the mirror, let it out slowly. Between my cargo pants, cargo vest, long-sleeved urban adventure shirt with sweat-wicking technology, and steampunk mad scientist’s belt, today’s outfit had even more pockets than yesterday’s. Whenever I felt nervous, pockets always boosted my confidence. Because I could fill them with tricks.

  So I went all-out Gandalf. I packed my clothes with bandannas and coins and dice and three decks of cards; putty, six mustaches, a bald cap, a Halloween makeup kit, and a pack of fake-blood capsules; six pairs of handcuffs again, in case I got to use them in Mrs. Waked’s class; foam balls, balloons, snappers, and other party favors; a laser pointer and a metal telescoping pointer; a mini megaphone, a joy buzzer, two whoopee cushions, and my old reliable GOTCHA! stamp; a fake tarantula, four fake cockroaches, and a rubber rat with red LED eyes; a ball of twine and a ball of rubber bands; those hokey X-ray glasses that everyone knows don’t work but are still great for misdirection; and a magic wand that turned into a bouquet of flowers.

  Ah, flowers. Almost forgot. I pinned a white carnation the size of a curled, sleeping kitten to my cargo vest, then loaded it with disappearing ink. The perfect finishing touch.

  In front of the mirror I made spooky magician’s eyes and tried out a few TA-DA! poses. “Do your worst, multiverse,” I told my reflection. “I’m ready for you.”

  Looking back, the mistake I made is clear. I’d forgotten how much Gabi Reál can mess with your life if you forget about her for even a second.

  WHEN YOU WALK to Culeco, you can’t see much of the school until you get past the tall brick wall that surrounds it.

  From the sidewalk, I could only see Culeco’s roof over the wall. And on the roof, standing proud, was a statue of the school mascot: an egg.

  Not just any egg. A twenty-foot, sickly-looking green-brown egg. It wore yellow wrestling pants with flames running up the sides, a yellow scarf-mask, and a yellow superhero cape that flapped in the wind. It had noodly arms and gloved hands like a cartoon character. One fist rested on its hip (if eggs have hips) and the other held up the school’s flagpole, making it look even more heroic. What didn’t look quite so heroic was the huge crack that the egg had running down its left side. All the steam the school generated was funneled into and escaped out of the shell through that crack. That steam-spewing, cracked super-egg looked plenty rotten.

  “Culeco” is a weird Spanish word. It can mean “proud” or “excited” or “gaga in love” or “nesting like a chicken” or, like, six other things. The only common thing in all the definitions is that if you’re culeco, you’re always a little out of your mind. So why would anyone call a school “Culeco”?

  American Stepmom looked up the answer. Seven years ago, the forming committee had tried to generate interest and support by letting the public vote on names for the school. And the good people of Miami had done what folks everywhere do when they’re asked to name something: They trolled the vote. “Culeco” got the most ballots by a landslide, even more than the swear words.

  But instead of calling the contest off, the school embraced it. The school founders said, “We are crazy proud and crazy excited and gaga in love—with learning!” And the school’s building used to be a poultry-processing plant, so even the chicken part of the meaning kind of worked. So, yeah. Troll or no troll, Culeco was the perfect name.

  And that’s why our mascot is basically a putrid Humpty Dumpty in a cape. Our motto is “Fiat Fetor,” which is Latin for “Let there be stink.” There are chicken and egg puns everywhere. Everything at Culeco is “egg-cellent” and “eggs-traordinary” and “egg-citing” and “eggs-quisite” and “eggs-treme, dude!” The first day of school, there were signs all over the place that read WELCOME BOCK-BOCK-BOCK! And carved into the stone above the main entrance is this:

  WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?

  TO GET A GREAT EDVCATION AT CVLECO!

  Yeah, pretty sandwich. But sometimes bad jokes are just another way for people to tell you they love you.

  Culeco felt right. This wasn’t your mama’s namby-pamby art school. It had guts, and no cares about what people thought. It had laughed right back in the community’s face, and now the community loved the school.

  Everybody at Culeco is an artist. From day one, I’d been surrounded by actors and illustrators, sculptors and musicians, writers, performers, and makers of all stripes, doing whatever they loved doing best. They did it publicly and proudly. Literally out in Culeco’s courtyard, even before school started.

  Maybe my favorite thing about Culeco was the costumes. I mean, just about all the students seemed to dress up, one way or the other. Sometimes it was subtle, like Gabi’s barrettes. But a lot of the time the cosplay was just plain incredible. Each day so far, as soon as I headed through the school gate, I’d been treated to a courtyard full of heroes and villains from every single novel or movie or comic book or video game you could think of (or at least that I could think of). I’d seen mechs made of so much actual machinery that they kind of actually were mechs. In the mix were some student originals, too, which looked as pro as anything you could stream or tube or watch on TV, except they were sharper, meaner, scarier, glitterier, over-the-toppier, and way too cool for the mainstream. Those were the best.

  Yeah, yesterday had been brutal. But I knew as soon as I saw Culeco’s schoolyard full of artists arting, ballerinas balleting, thespians thespianing, and cosplayers cosplaying, I’d be 100 percent again. The brick wall was like a curtain before a performance. Eager to start the show early, I picked up the pace, half ran to the gate, and jogged through.

  And stopped dead.

  Every kid in the courtyard—every caricature artist, mime, saxophone player, Broadway hopeful, alien smuggler, robot warrior, spandexed defender, and magical sailor from various planets and moons—stood around reading the school newspaper.

  Like, hundreds of kids. In almost perfect silence. Sometimes they stood in groups of two or three, peeking over each other’s shoulders. Occasionally someone giggled or whispered, but then they immediately fell silent again, reading and rereading the front-page news. Just the front page. No one was reading the inside of the paper.

  Something ain’t right with that thar picture, I thought Texas-ly. If you ever need a quick dose of courage, speak with a Texas accent. It really works!

  No one seemed to notice me at first—they were too busy reading. But as I cat-footed up the walkway, doing everything I could not to be noticed, kids froze in place as I passed them. Some slowly lowered their papers to make staring at me easier. They still whispered to each other, but now they leaned together like tipping bowling pins and never took their eyes off me.

  Gabi, I thought, glaring back at the mouth-breathers until one by one they looked away. I had to get a paper of my own and read what she’d written about me, stat.

  When I turned forward to march into school to find a paper, Señorita Reál herself blocked my path. She’d come out of nowhere, and her patented shark smile was covering the entire lower half her face.

  Clearly, she had snuck up with the idea of spooking me. Not. Gonna. Happen. “May I help you?” I asked her like the snootiest British butler in the world.

  Today her T-shirt read “PEOPLE CALL ME A FEMINIST WHENEVER I EXPRESS SENTIMENTS THAT DIFFERENTIATE ME FROM A DOOR MAT…”—REBECCA WEST, and her volcano-eruption hair—orange and yellow streaks today—was studded with dueling-sorceress barrettes. “I have a present for you!” she said. And she
pulled from behind her back my very own copy of the school paper, the Rotten Egg.

  I swiped it out of her hand, barely saying thanks, and snapped the front page tight. It was devoted to a single story with a one-word headline: “POULTRYGATE!”

  “What does that mean, ‘Poultrygate!’?” I asked. I instinctively knew you always had to say it with an exclamation point.

  “You know,” Gabi replied, smug as a sandwich. “Like Watergate? Gamergate? Cheetogate?” And when she saw I wasn’t getting it: “It means ‘scandal.’ In this case—”

  “A chicken falling out of a locker. Yeah, got it.”

  I had scanned half the article by that point. In “what represented the biggest mystery in Culeco’s history,” a whole chicken that “sources report was of the golden-fryer variety” fell out of “noted dancer Yasmany Robles’s locker,” landing in an “explosion of blood and chicken bits” and “generating unprecedented mayhem and confusion amongst the students of Culeco.” They “ran screaming in all directions” creating “pandemonium in Culeco’s sacred halls” and a “school-wide hysteria that lasted for the better part of fifth period.”

  “Exaggerate much?” I asked Gabi.

  “‘You must both ‘inform’ and ‘entertain,’” Gabi said, making air quotes, a faraway look in her eyes. She reached over the top of the paper and jabbed at the article. “Read this part. You’ll like it.”

  Her finger pecked at a paragraph in the center of the article that began “At the center of these inexplicable events stands a mysterious new student, Salvador Vidón.” Apparently, I dress like “a nature-show host in training” who “only needs an Australian accent and a death wish to complete his outfit.” Apparently, I use my “unnerving, mesmerizing eyes” to “stun and stupefy anyone foolish enough to return my gaze.” “‘It is he,’” I read out loud, “‘who caused poultry to plunge precipitously from its perch and propagate a possible food-poisoning pandemic.’”

  “I’m particularly proud of that passage,” said Gabi, bouncing on the balls of her feet.

  “This is a total hit job!” I didn’t yell. I think yelling is a sign of weakness, because it shows a lack of control. I am always in control. I was just feeling very…passionate at the moment. “You saw for yourself, Gabi. There was no chicken. It was a trick.”

  Her eyebrows boinged up and down. “Keep reading!”

  I did keep reading: aloud again. I mean, very loud. I might even have been yelling, only I don’t yell. “‘Perhaps, however, Vidón’s greatest illusion lies not in making a chicken appear out of nowhere, but rather in making it disappear again. Neither the shrewd mind of our beloved Principal Torres’…Man, you are such a suck-up.”

  “Am not! She is shrewd!”

  “…‘nor the keen eyes of Mr. Milagros, Culeco’s crack custodian, could find any trace of raw poultry by the lockers. More shocking still in this age of camera phones is that not a single photo nor video was taken of the incident. It’s almost as if there were a rich and powerful secret society using every resource at their disposal to hush this matter up.’”

  “See? I told the whole truth.”

  “In the lying-est way possible! You’re making it sound like some big conspiracy! Oh, and look at this! ‘As of the publication of this article, Robles is awaiting punishment for his attempted bullying of Vidón, as Principal Torres, a moral lighthouse amid a sea of wayward ships’…Oh, come on! That is some chupamedia writing right there.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. That is a beautiful metaphor.” And then, a second later: “What’s a ‘chupamedia’?”

  My eyes rose over the top of the paper like two angry moons. “It means ‘brownnoser.’ Literally, it means ‘sock sucker.’ That’s you.”

  “I do not suck socks!” Her hair flattened a little, like the ears of a dog being scolded. She was getting flustered. Good.

  I went on: “‘…as Principal Torres, a moral lighthouse amid a sea of wayward ships, considers the facts of the case. The editors of the Rotten Egg only hope that she will show Robles mercy so that he can try to make amends for his unacceptable actions.’ Right. ‘The editors.’ You’re the editor, Gabi. You’re just using the newspaper to cover for your friend, who also happens to be a repeat bully. You support bullies, Gabi.”

  “He can change,” she said, her voice shaking, unsure. “Everyone deserves a second chance, right?”

  “‘And as for Vidón,’” I continued reading, flamboyant and sarcastic, almost dancing, “‘what to make of him? Did he really pull off the greatest magic trick in Culeco history, fooling a hallway full of students, the finest custodial team in Florida, and the school administration with one mighty illusion? Or is there some greater power at work here? Perhaps Vidón’s illusions aren’t illusions at all, but actual magic: some powerful, arcane spell that he used to conjure and then disappear a haunted, hoary hen. No one knows—yet. But the Rotten Egg is committed to pursuing this amazing story to its weird and spooky conclusion.’”

  Gabi looked at me hopefully. “So now you get it, right? You see how much I helped you?”

  I balled up the paper as viciously as I could. “You just called me a brujo in front of the entire school! Thanks to you, Gabi, everyone is now going to think I practice black magic.”

  Gabi’s head shot back, like she was dodging a kick. “Nooo!” she said, holding the o. She was just beginning to realize what I’d known in an instant. She didn’t believe in black magic, and I didn’t believe in black magic. But a lot of people do believe in black magic. I’d learned that the hard way the day before in Textile Arts, and a long time ago from my mami.

  She dropped her hands and held them out, pleading, “Sal, you’re taking this all wrong. Sure, I got a little…creative, there in the end. But with a stroke of my pen, I have made you the most famous magician in all of Culeco.”

  “Oh yeah? How many other magicians are there in Culeco, Gabi?”

  “Well, you’re the only one.”

  I started to walk away.

  She grabbed my arm. “But now everyone knows how powerful and mysterious you are! You defeated a bully with magic! Your reputation is set.”

  Yeah, my reputation was set, all right. I remembered all too well the big eyes Mami would shine at me when she told me the many ways a brujo could ruin your life. So yeah, people would be watching me now, but not they way they’d watch a showman, laughing and enjoying the performance. They’d watch me like I was a threat.

  I was seething. The heat of my anger made my words evaporate before I could say anything. I tried to walk away again. I needed time to think.

  Gabi clutched my arm even harder and said, “Hey! Don’t be mad.”

  I really wished she hadn’t touched me. She should’ve let me walk away. It would have given me a chance to calm down. Count to ten. Relax.

  Instead, I shook free of her. “Mad? I’m not mad, Gabi! In fact, I want to thank you for all your help!” I smoothed out the newspaper ball against my right leg, then snapped it taut a few times for effect. The kids near us perked up; they could tell I was starting a magic trick.

  While I made the paper into a large cone, I spun around to address my growing audience and said, “Behold the sun, good gentlefolk. It is the ultimate giver of gifts, for it gives everything on Earth the gift of life: humans, animals, and even—”

  I stopped spinning in front of Gabi. Pop! A huge bouquet of silk carnations suddenly filled the newspaper cone.

  “—flowers.”

  Ooh, aah, applause, applause! Gabi smiled, relaxed, touched her chest in a thank-you gesture. “That’s so sweet, Sal!”

  “Ah, but they smell even sweeter, m’lady.”

  I dipped the bouquet toward her for easy sniffing. She closed her eyes and brought her nose in for a mighty whiff.

  And then I flicked a tarantula on her face.

  THE HUGE CARNATION on my shirt was filled with disappearing ink. I could have tricked her into sniffing the flower and sprayed her with disa
ppearing ink. The whole purpose of wearing a squirting flower filled with disappearing ink is to mildly embarrass someone without doing any lasting harm. Everything would have been so much better if I had.

  But the anger I felt could not be quenched by mere disappearing ink. I was tarantula angry.

  So look. I know some people are scared of spiders. That’s why fake spiders exist: so people like me can mess with those people. Like Nurse Sotolongo. Part of the reason I was working up a Flying Tarantula trick was because I knew it would scare her bald. Or take Papi. He’ll jump so high he’ll smash into the ceiling if, for instance, you slip a fake spider onto his dinner plate, or you, just as an example, lob one over the shower curtain right after he shampoos so he can’t keep his eyes open long enough to figure out whether it’s real or rubber. And he gets me back, too—both he and American Stepmom. They hide around corners and in the kitchen pantry and in closets. I scream like a goat, every time. That’s my weakness. I startle easily.

  American Stepmom doesn’t scare easy at all, but Vaseline in her bra really grosses her out, as does Vaseline on her steering wheel, and basically Vaseline anywhere. Papi and I go through a lot of Vaseline.

  They’re pranks. They’re funny. And so I guess I thought that’s how fear works. It lasts for a few seconds, then you laugh, then you plot revenge. Everyone has a good time.

  I even knew Gabi was afraid of spiders. I mean, I kind of decided to flick a hairy spider at her because of the weird sound of her voice when I’d mentioned my Flying Tarantula act back at the hospital.

  But I swear I didn’t know that some people live in utter mind-erasing terror of spiders. People, as it turns out, like Gabi Reál.

  The one I launched at her was the highest-quality novelty tarantula I have ever seen. It had been lovingly airbrushed tan and black, its hair felt velvety and genuine, and though it was actually too heavy for a tarantula (my fifth-grade class had kept one for almost a half year, until we snuggled it to death), its heft probably felt more convincing to people who’d never actually picked one up. Clearly, Gabi had never, ever, not even once picked up a tarantula in her entire life. So she had no way of knowing that the piece of silk-haired rubber that landed on her face weighed way too much to be real.