Sal and Gabi Break the Universe

by Carlos Hernandez

  She pulled her head back and crossed her eyes for a second. Then, not freaking out, not having any kind of panic attack or anything, she smacked the thing off her mug without a care in the world. For a second, I thought my revenge had fallen flat.

  She casually gazed down at the ground to see what she had slapped off her nose. There were maybe three or four seconds when she didn’t understand what she was looking at. Slowly, her faced assembled itself into the dictionary definition of horror, one section at a time: first her pupils growing huge, then her forehead crumpling, then her nose scrunching, then her mouth gaping, then the scream repeating over and over, then her hands in the air, waving uselessly.

  This was all good, I thought. She was scared. Got her. Ha-ha.

  But her face changed again. The horror evolved into…what? Hopelessness. Agony. Knowing you’re going to die, and the torture of knowing. It’s hard to describe. She became so open, so purely afraid, that she didn’t care who saw her ugly-cry. She fell back on her butt and scooted away from the spider with a kind of desperate, clumsy crab walk. (It’s hard to crabwalk backward fast.) She kept falling and staggering to her feet again. Her clothes were getting dirty as she scraped along the walkway. A strap broke on her bookbag; it fell off her back. She howled the whole time. She screamed. She drooled.

  The sun stopped in the sky. Nobody laughed or pointed or moved. Nobody thought this was funny.

  Gabi slipped one last time and stayed on the ground, noticing finally that the tarantula hadn’t so much as twitched a leg all that time. She stared at it, shaking still, a mouse in its hole, watching the cat.

  “It’s fake,” I kind of whisper-laughed. “It’s just a toy. It can’t hurt you.” I got under the tarantula with my toe and flipped it onto its back. Gabi flinched mightily, and so did half the schoolyard. But then, when Gabi saw it didn’t wriggle or try to flip itself over, she leaned toward it. The underside had raised writing on it: FOOL ME ONCE NOVELTY CORP. MADE IN AMERICA.

  “It’s fake?” she asked, her terrified eyes reading the spider.

  “Yes! It was just a joke, I swear!”

  “Just a joke,” she repeated. And once she’d digested my words, she regained her composure enough to bury her face in her hands and weep uncontrollably.

  My peripheral vision informed me that kids were starting to move toward us. Some might have been coming over to console her; others, friends of hers who maybe wanted to fight me. But I couldn’t tell who was which. My instincts told me to run.

  So I did—right over to Gabi. I fell to my knees in front of her.

  I locked my fingers together in a single fist of prayer and shook it at Gabi like a mighty maraca. I didn’t think, I just let the words flow. “I am so sorry I am so sorry I had no idea you were that scared of spiders I mean I knew you were a little scared but I didn’t know anyone was that scared of spiders I am the biggest jerk in the world I will make it up to you I’ll do whatever you want I’m sorry please forgive me.”

  She didn’t answer at first. I wasn’t sure she had even heard me over her heaving, heartbreaking sobs. She hadn’t removed her hands from her eyes, so she probably couldn’t tell that new shadows were falling over the two of us. We found ourselves surrounded by a tight Stonehenge of kids tall enough to block the morning sun.

  Gabi’s crying petered off. She took deep, snotty breaths that rattled on the way in and on the way out. She nodded once, exhaling, like she had decided something. Then her hands flipped open like the doors of a cuckoo clock. Her face was a squished-clay version of itself.

  “Sal. Vidón. You. Go. Too. Far.”

  “Never again,” I said. “I am so sorry.”

  Gabi started to stand, and four different hands reached down to help her up. She straightened and smoothed herself over, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, filled her lungs a few times. I looked at the other kids in the circle. They glared back, a jury of heroes and monsters and robots and even some plainclothes kids, all of whom thought I was a terrible person.

  “Lots of people are a little scared of spiders,” Gabi said with queenly composure. “You could not have known that I am an arachnophobe. I also recognize that I may have hurt your feelings with the story I wrote about you, which caused you to lash out. Mind you, I am not apologizing, as I believe too strongly in freedom of the press. But I understand that, in a moment of hurt feelings, you may have lashed out more than you had intended.”

  “Way more,” I agreed.

  She stood unsteadily. Her friends braced her up. “I am going to go to the bathroom to freshen up. I will accept your apology if you accompany me there and carry my bookbag. And if, on the way, you let me punch you on the arm seven or fifteen times.”

  When the jury heard Gabi would accept my apology, they backed off enough so that sunlight came flooding back into the circle. I hustled to pick up her bookbag by its one good strap, hustled back over to her, and rolled up a sleeve. When I was done, I saluted and said, “Ready for my punching, ma’am.”

  I WAITED FOR Gabi under a blue-and-white sign announcing that the bathroom was gender-neutral. It depicted a variety of people icons with these words underneath: WE DON’T CARE. JUST PEE NEATLY.

  I wore my bookbag and hugged Gabi’s to my chest, rocking on my heels, looking around, trying to be cool. But I had the after-adrenaline jitters. Every ten to twenty seconds, goose bumps would ride up my back like a motorcycle gang. I couldn’t see my own face, of course, but from the inside it felt serious, quiet, thoughtful. I had that weak-in-the-knees feeling, only all over. I was so un-hungry I wasn’t sure I still had a stomach. Maybe it had eaten itself.

  I was so caught up with my body that I almost didn’t see Yasmany turn the corner into the hallway. And head straight for me.

  Thing is, I didn’t care. I hadn’t run from him yesterday, though I’d wanted to. From here on out I was never going to run from him, or any bully.

  He passed by, pretending not to look at me, and then stopped a few feet away to lean against the wall, putting his hands in his blue track pants. He wore a basketball tank top, a crucifix, and the same sneakers as yesterday. He looked straight ahead. So did I.

  “Class in twenty minutes,” he said.

  I blinked. Not the opener I had expected. So, okay, let’s see where this goes, I thought. I said, “Yep,” and hit the p so hard it was its own syllable.

  “I went to detention yesterday. They help you with your I-have-to-write-a-paper-on-diabetes, thanks to you.”

  Thanks to me, dude? Did you learn nothing? Whatever. I wasn’t going to engage. I just said, “You’re welcome.”

  He looked like he was counting the number of tiles in the ceiling. “I’m learning a lot.”

  Why was he telling me this? What was he even doing here?

  Easy, Sal. Stay calm. One-word answers. “Terrific,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He faced me. “You really have diabetes?”

  I swallowed down all the WTFs threatening to shoot like bullets out of my mouth and just said, “Yeah. I really, really do.”

  “That sucks.”

  “I appreciate your concern.”

  A tumbleweed rolled down the entire length of the hallway.

  “I saw what happened out there with you and Gabi,” he said after a while, quietly, and to his shoes.

  Okay. Now we were getting somewhere. But again, I just played it cool. Specifically, I snorted. “You and the whole maldita school.”

  He made a face. “My mom says ‘maldito.’ That’s, like, an old-lady word.”

  “Well, I say it. So it’s also a Sal Vidón word.”

  He jammed his hands in his pockets and shook his head. “You just give feero zucks what people think about you, don’t you?”

  Feero zucks. I’d have to remember that one. “What makes you say that?”

  “I mean”—and he turned to face me now, taking his hands out of his pockets and spreading them in a gesture of pleading confusion—“back there with Gabi. You knew everyone was wa
tching you. But you still got on your knees and said you were sorry. On your knees. In front of the whole school. How’d you do it?”

  I couldn’t help smiling a little, but I was genuinely confused, too. “What do you mean, ‘how’? I just did it.”

  “I mean…” And he had to stop for a sec to search for what he meant. “I mean, how did you not care what everybody thought? Everyone’s talking out there.”

  I blinked like a cat at him. “What are they saying? That I’m a brujo?”

  “No. Everyone thinks you like Gabi.”

  I sighed with relief. “Oh. Good. That’s all they’re saying? That’s fine. I do like Gabi.”

  Yasmany’s head almost fell off his neck. “Yo, chacho!”

  “Ohhh,” I answered. I really am a little slow sometimes. “I don’t like like Gabi. I mean, I just met her yesterday.”

  Now he looked at me like I’d just held out a used tissue that I wanted him to eat. “Here you are, hugging her bookbag like it’s your baby, and you gonna tell me you don’t like her?”

  “A second ago you couldn’t believe I liked her.”

  “No, I couldn’t believe you admitted you liked her.”

  “If I liked her, why wouldn’t I admit it?”

  He frowned. “Because.”

  This was getting fun now. “Because why?” I asked innocently.

  “Because,” he clarified. Then he coughed. A few seconds later, he came clean. “Because you’re a guy, chacho. And guys don’t…don’t—”

  “Tell the truth?” I finished helpfully.

  “Naw, it’s not lying. It’s…” And when he couldn’t find a way to end his thought, he gestured to me to finish it for him.

  Sure, why not? “Express their feelings?”

  “Yeah. Like, yeah, kind of. I mean, they do some. But not, like…” And again, he held out his hands for help.

  “But you just said I’m a guy.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So if I’m a guy, and I got on my knees to say sorry to someone for scaring them half to death, that means that it’s something guys sometimes do. Or at least one guy. This guy.” For emphasis, I used both thumbs to indicate me.

  “I know. That’s what I’m saying.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “I have no idea what you’re saying!”

  “I’m saying it was…it was so decent what you did.”

  The second he said the word “decent,” my whole body responded. Relief lit my brain like a gas stove igniting. I felt pins and needles in my shoulders and knees. I pushed off from the wall and for a few ticks enjoyed the feeling of being more alive than before. I had done a decent thing, apologizing to Gabi. It was so decent that Yasmany, even with his fists-first approach to life, could tell it was decent.

  So okay, Yasmany. I’ll be even more decent. I’ll tell you how I did it. The whole truth. “I didn’t let my brain talk me out of it. I did the right thing before I could make up excuses.” And then I realized something about myself. Not a good thing. “I make up excuses. I got to work on that. I mean, we’re performers, you and me. Our whole life is making ourselves look good. But this time? What I did was too terrible. I had to make it right, no matter how bad it made me look. As fast as I could.”

  “You’re doing a pretty good job,” said Gabi from behind me.

  “Ha!” said Yasmany, clapping and cracking up. “Busted!”

  I mean, did he really think I’d be embarrassed now, after what I had just told him? Chacho needed to learn how to listen. I turned around to Gabi—all the sorceresses in her hair had been straightened and looked ready to go back to dueling—and said, “I am super sorry. Really.”

  “So make it up to me.” She grinned, taking her bookbag back from me.

  “How?”

  She’d thought this whole thing through in the bathroom, I could tell. “Let me interview you for the next issue of the Rotten Egg. It’s what my readers will want to read about, in my ongoing coverage of Poultrygate! And you can share your side of the story. You can set the record straight. We both win.”

  That…actually made sense. So I put out my hand to her. “Deal.”

  She shook my hand once, very formally. “Done and done. When should we do the interview? It should be right away. Reporters have deadlines, you know. How about after school? I want to record you, so somewhere private, where there won’t be a lot of noise.”

  “Well, I live fifteen minutes away.”

  “We’ll walk there after school. Perfect.”

  “You’re going to his house?!” asked Yasmany, as shocked as any abuela watching her telenovelas. He tsk-tsked and added, “You two so like each other.”

  We both rotated our heads to face him, like two owls who had no time for his nonsense. “Sal is”—Gabi looked at me before she finished the thought, smiling—“a friend. The fastest friend I have ever made, in fact.”

  “Same,” I agreed.

  “Friends don’t hold hands for ten minutes,” said Yasmany.

  We had never let go of our handshake. But we did now—our hands shot apart like same-side magnets. “We were sealing a deal!” Gabi protested.

  “That’s how adults interact with each other,” I added. Was it getting hot in here?

  “Look,” said Yasmany, smiling like a mob boss, “I ain’t gonna tell anyone your little secret.” Gabi and I started protesting again, but he talked over us. “For now.”

  Gabi slit her eyes. “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “That’s not what I saw.” And then he made kissy faces.

  That’s when Gabi attacked Yasmany.

  Don’t worry, it was all play-fighting. Gabi jumped on Yasmany’s back (and Yasmany helped her get up there) so that she could, and I quote, “pound it into your thick skull that I don’t like Sal, except as a friend.” She immediately turned around to assure me that I shouldn’t feel bad that she didn’t like like me, because “being my friend carries with it all sorts of benefits.”

  “Benefits?!” Yasmany asked. “You’re friends with benefits?!”

  Rawr! roared Gabi. She pulled Yasmany’s ears, noogied him fast enough to start a fire, and gave him the sickest, wettest willy I have ever seen in my life. Seriously, I gagged. I’m gagging right now, remembering it.

  After each little torture, she’d ask him, “Do I like Sal?”

  And he’d reply, running down the hallway, holding her legs to make sure she didn’t fall, “Yes, you love him, he is your boyfriend, he brings you roses, you bought your wedding dress, what are you naming your baby?!”

  I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a teensy bit jealous. Not because I wanted Gabi to give me wet willies or anything. Blech. I wanted to jump all over them and play-fight and laugh and have fun, too. You know. I was the new kid.

  But Gabi and I had just declared our friendship, like, five seconds ago. And I wasn’t even sure what Yasmany was to me. It was too soon for name-calling, play-fighting, running, and jumping. Maybe that would happen, with enough time.

  But for now, I had my dignity. I stopped following after them like a puppy and took the long way to my locker. The first bell would sound any minute, and I was determined to be a perfect student today.

  “Great to see you, Sal,” said Principal Torres, wiping her glasses clean. “You made it more than half the school day before you got sent to my office. Is that a new record for you?”

  “On Tuesday I made it until seventh period,” I replied, shrinking in the orange plastic seat in front of her desk. “It’s only sixth period now.”

  “Oh, but Tuesday wasn’t your fault,” she said, her eyes huge with sarcastic sympathy. She inspected her glasses, then put them back on and pushed them up her nose in a way that made me feel even more in trouble. “Neither was Monday, and neither was Wednesday. I can’t wait to hear how it wasn’t your fault today, either.”

  I sighed. “Today was my fault.”

  Principal Torres tilted her head. Clearly, she hadn’t been expecting me to admit guilt. �
��Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re taking responsibility?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well,” she said, considering. “Do you want to say anything in your defense?”

  I thought about that. “If I defend myself, will that sound like I’m making excuses? I don’t want to make excuses.”

  She nodded, rubbing her chin in consideration. “I appreciate the question. I appreciate you taking responsibility. But it’s not excuses. It’s just giving me all the information I need to give you a fair punishment.”

  Making sure to look and sound hangdog sorry, I said, “Then in my defense, Principal Torres, I was trying to be nice.”

  “Nice?!” Principal Torres stood up and leaned over her desk. Ain’t gonna lie: I flinched. “You nearly scared Gladis to death!”

  I shrugged. “The road to heart attacks is paved with good intentions.”

  AFTER NEARLY SCARING Gabi to death and having to beg her for forgiveness, my day had gotten much better—at least before sixth period. In English, we started reading an old-timey play where a guy makes a deal with the devil to get magic powers. Couldn’t wait to find out how it ended. Math had us working on geometric proofs, which had become my new favorite math. In science, I found out that three hundred million years ago on Earth, there was only one huge continent called Pangea, and that in another three hundred million years, all the continents might float back together and form a new Pangea. I really want to be around to see that happen. In American history, we were studying all the nations that existed in North America before Columbus came. I left that class with my head full of names, places, myths, legends, and the music our teacher played: flutes and hide drums and a high, jumping voice that sang words I didn’t understand but sounded like the most important thing in the world. It gave me the same sense of wonder I felt when I relaxed and could see into alternate realities. And bonus: no universe-breaking required!