Sal and Gabi Break the Universe

by Carlos Hernandez

  “Welcome to detention!” said Gabi, as if it were a carnival.

  She held one of the glass double doors open, and I entered the library, ready for the worst.

  Detention was a carnival.

  The bookshelves, which were futuristic-looking white carts as tall as walls, had been all pushed to the sides of the room. That left space for the, what, like, fifteen big round tables. Board games were spread out on some of them—maps with tons of wood bits covering them. That made me drool a little. Other tables were carpeted by card games, mostly the Poocha Lucha Libre Collectible Card Game, which I hadn’t learned to play yet and really wanted to. One table had become a workstation for the advanced cosplay pace group from my Textile Arts class, where it looked like they were building some kind of turtle-squid-grizzly-tiger straight out of cheesy Japanese live-action kid shows. I saw Aventura there; she gave me a friendly wave, and I waved back. Five different tables had signs up advertising their club meetings. Four tables announced their book clubs, and the Fantasy and Science Fiction Book Club was reading A Wrinkle in Time, which is one of my all-time favorites. Kids at another table were busy building combat robots. They had an open space behind them where they could drive their robots around and test them and beat on other robots. I’ve always loved watching combat-robots shows, but I never thought I could make a robot myself—it’d be too hard. But now, seeing that there was a club at school where other kids did this for fun, it suddenly seemed possible. That’s a good feeling.

  Behind a glass wall at the back of the commons, looking like a zoo habitat, a soundproof study room with two long tables caged up the detention kids. Several teachers and librarians roamed around or sat next to students as they worked on their homework or whatever detention punishment they had to finish. Every once in a while, kids would rest their cheeks on their hands and look at all the fun everyone else in the library was having before they sighed and got back to work. Those poor schmucks.

  “That’s where you have to go,” said Gabi, pointing to the soundproof room. “C’mon.”

  Reluctantly, I did a death-row shuffle past the gamers and the makers and the readers, and followed Gabi to the door to detention. Again, she opened it for me. In I went.

  “¡Hola!” a man greeted me. He looked like a leprechaun reporter from the 1920s—green jacket, yellow vest, paisley tie, white shirt, brown tweed pants, and boots with way more buckles than were humanly needed. His hair shot up like a black flame. “I’m Daniel Miranda Rivero. I’m the chief learning coordinator. You must be new to Culeco. What’s your name?” He put out his hand for me to shake.

  I very politely went to shake his hand, when Gabi, yelling a slow-motion “Noooo!” jumped between us. She turned my hand over, checking for my GOTCHA! stamp, no doubt. When she didn’t find it, she straightened her hair and said, “Okay. Carry on.”

  I shook Daniel’s hand. “I’m Sal Vidón.”

  “So,” Daniel asked me, looking sly, “whatcha in for?”

  I put my left hand in my pocket and shrugged. “Scaring Gladis Machado to death.”

  “Oh, you’re the magician! Principal Torres told me about you.”

  “Really?” I scratched my head, tried to sound casual. “What’d she say?”

  “She told me to watch you with both eyes.”

  “Three, if you have them,” Gabi added, dry as moondust.

  “Won’t help.” I smiled. “Check your hand.”

  Daniel checked the hand we shook. I could tell he was hoping I’d done something. But he had to say, “I don’t see anything” after searching.

  “Not you, Daniel. Gabi.”

  The look of horror on Gabi’s face was everything. The howls she let out after she saw I’d stamped GOTCHA! on her palm were like music. “No! No! How? No! That is not how it works! No! When could you possibly have— Arrgh!” she said, stomping and flailing her arms, her hair tossing the sorceresses around like a tornado.

  I wish I could have watched her little tantrum from outside the study room. I bet it looked especially funny without sound.

  Detention was great.

  I mean, zapping Gabi got it off to a great start. But what was cool was how Daniel ran it. Kids could go in and out whenever they wanted to. Sometimes they’d go outside to the commons, join a game, or talk to friends, or watch combat robots kill each other for a while. And then they’d come back and pick up wherever they’d left off. The teachers in the room assisted everyone who needed it and left them alone when they didn’t. Other kids who didn’t have detention were there just to help their friends get done sooner. The mood was light and jokey and easy and not like detention at all.

  It’s funny. When I saw the room for the first time, I’d thought the kids were trapped in there like zoo animals. I’d assumed they were miserable, but that was just because I was feeling salty and didn’t want to be in detention. Now that I’d seen it from the inside, I had a whole different perspective.

  Emotion literally changes your eyesight. I would have to remember that.

  While I worked on my apology to Gladis, Gabi toured the room, glad-handing teachers and helping other students with their homework. She completed her circle of the room just as I finished my letter.

  I gave it to her to read. But when her eyes started scanning it, I added, “Can you read it out loud? I want to hear if it sounds good.”

  Gabi’s eyebrows touched her hairline. “Are you sure? Isn’t this, like, private?”

  I don’t think Gabi had noticed Yasmany coming into the detention room just then. But I sure had. I’d seen him coming the second he walked into the commons. “I’m sure, Gabi,” I said.

  Gabi gave me one of those it’s-your-life tilts of the head and then read the letter out loud.

  Dear Gladis,

  I started studying magic when my mami died. It was a way for me to cope with the pain and try to take back control of my life. I didn’t know at first how happy magic can make people.

  That’s why I love performing tricks now. I love to see people’s eyes fill with wonder. I love it when they ask, “How did you do that?” I think the best thing I do with my time is go to the hospital and perform for sick children. It’s because of the joy I see in their eyes that I know I have learned how to take the tragedy of my mami’s death and turn it into something good.

  But today, I misused magic. Instead of using it to make people happy, I made you feel afraid with it. That goes against everything magic is for. And the worst part of all is, if my mami were alive today, she would be disappointed in me. That’s almost more than I can take.

  I am sorry for the trick I played on you today. I will never play another trick on you again. I won’t ask for your forgiveness, but I hope you will forgive me anyway. If you can’t, I understand. I will just leave you alone and be sorry that I did something mean to you that you can’t get past, and try to learn from it.

  Sincerely,

  Sal Vidón

  Gabi read it beautifully. I knew she would. The whole room had stopped to listen to her, even Yasmany, who had pretended not to listen. Too school for cool.

  When she reached the end, Gabi slapped the letter against her legs and looked at me with a wishy-washy smile that I knew could turn into an ugly cry any second. “That was a very good apology, Sal,” she said.

  “I’ll say,” said Daniel, smiling softly. “Where’d you learn to write from the heart like that?”

  “Not the heart,” I said, patting my belly. “From the stomach.”

  FOR THE REST of detention, Gabi and Daniel and I helped Yasmany finish his paper. He and Gabi had already started it, so Gabi pulled it up on her laptop and made Yasmany sit in front of it. Daniel found books and docs on diabetes that we all scoured for information. I was the resident expert and shared how I managed it day to day. I also checked my blood sugar right there, so Yasmany could see how it was done. Dude almost fainted.

  Yasmany, man. His main contribution to his own paper was to say things like, “What?” or “Real
ly?” or “Nuh-uh,” or “[cussword that expressed sympathy but also relief that he wasn’t type one]” whenever he learned something new about diabetes. I’m not sure he even knew he had a pancreas at the start of detention. But he sure as heck knew by the end of it. So mission accomplished, I guess?

  By the time we were halfway done with the paper, detention had been over for half an hour. Yasmany ran off as soon as he noticed the time: dance practice again.

  What was weird was that basically everyone else was still there. I mean, not just the detention kids, but the gamers and makers and cosplayers and readers, too. Everyone was just hanging out at school.

  “I know,” said Daniel, reading my mind. “No one wants to leave. It’s a strange and beautiful sight, don’t you think, Sal?”

  “Speaking of leaving,” I replied, “I still have one more day of detention, but I finished my apology. Do I have to come back tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “But what I am supposed to do?”

  Daniel gestured widely with his hands, encompassing all the possibilities the commons offered. “Anything you want!”

  “What if what I want is not to come?”

  Daniel looked at me like I’d just told him his dog had run away. “You don’t want to come to detention?”

  “No, no,” I answered. “I love detention. I’ll definitely be here tomorrow.”

  Man. Never thought those words would come out of my mouth.

  Gabi grabbed the back of my cargo vest. “You. Me. Interview. Now!” she said, and pretty much dragged me out of the library.

  I needed to put stuff away, so we headed for my locker, just around the corner from the library commons. To get to my locker, we had to pass Yasmany’s. Gabi headed straight for his, and started working the dial of the lock.

  “Hey, you better not,” I said. “I got in trouble with Mr. Milagros yesterday for doing that.”

  Gabi turned on me like a tiger. “Aha! That’s how you knew it was Iggy’s birthday! You read the note I put in Yasmany’s locker, didn’t you?”

  I swear, I have never been busted so many times in one week. Was I losing my touch or something?

  All I could think to do was shrug and say, “Sorry.”

  “Wel-l-l-l,” she said, drawing out the l’s, “I’ve been known to peek at other people’s letters when I probably shouldn’t have. A folded note is very hard to resist. Apology accepted.”

  Gabi, I was noticing, was a very forgiving person. I’ve noticed that sometimes smart people aren’t. They’re more interested in being right, being on top, and they think that means crushing the competition with their huge brains. But Gabi didn’t need to put others down to raise herself up. Interesting.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.” She curtsied.

  “So, what are you planning to do in Yasmany’s locker?”

  She opened the lock and held on to it as she answered, “The same thing I do every day: nag him like the mama he wishes he had. Mr. Milagros knows what I’m doing. So does Principal Torres. They know I’m just trying to help him get his act together.”

  “Okay, cool, cool. Don’t let me stop you.”

  “I wasn’t going to.” She opened the door, but then side-eyed me. “Why are you staring?”

  “What? I’m not staring.”

  I was too staring. I wanted to see if the hole in the universe, there in the back of Yasmany’s locker, had closed itself. I didn’t think it had—I was pretty sure I could still feel it, like a breeze through a car window—but I wanted to see if it had at least gotten any smaller.

  “Don’t you have to put stuff in your locker?” asked Gabi, clearly waiting for me to get lost.

  Whatever. I went to my locker, dumped some books in there, and was contemplating which trick props to keep in there and which to take home, when Gabi said, with a voice like a fake Discovery Channel ghost hunter who realizes—too late!—that the house is actually haunted, “What is that what is that what is that what is that what is that?”

  I looked over. Gabi was on her butt crabwalking backward for the second time today, this time away from the lockers.

  Thoroughly trained on not being a jerk since this morning, I ran to the locker and investigated. It was mostly empty, just a couple of thin books left. “What, there a spider in there? I’ll kill it for you.”

  When Gabi didn’t answer right away, I turned to face her. She paused mid-crabwalk, her face as stunned-looking as a bowling ball. “You don’t see them, Sal? The chickens? The flying chickens?”

  “Oh, those,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Yeah, stupid hole doesn’t want to close. It’s a lot smaller now, thank goodness, but—” I stopped talking. Now it was my turn to have bowling-ball face. “Wait, Gabi. You can see the hole in the universe?”

  “‘Hole in the universe’?! What do you mean ‘hole in the universe’?!”

  I reached out a hand to her, the way I would a scared dog, so it could sniff me and know I was a friend. “It was there yesterday, too. Why didn’t you see it then, when you put the note in Yasmany’s locker?”

  She took my hand, and together we carefully got her on her feet. “I was busy. There were a lot of books in the way yesterday. I am short, okay?”

  “Hey, no judgment. I’m short, too.”

  She moved past me to look inside the locker again, on tiptoes. Chicken bodies just kept zipping on by. “You weren’t lying yesterday. You didn’t beat the lie detector…. You were telling the truth.”

  “Yeah. Where’d you get that thing, anyway?”

  “One of my dads hooked me up. Stop changing the subject. You’re telling me I am looking at an actual doorway to a parallel universe.”

  “Yeah.”

  “A parallel universe full of chickens.”

  “All you can eat.”

  She faced me, shaking her head. “I’m a vegetarian. Ew.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “Fine! Don’t eat the extradimensional chicken. That’s not exactly the point right now.”

  She stood beside me, both of us facing the locker, watching the conveyor belt carry chickens away. “What is the point, Sal?”

  “The point is, you’re the only other person I’ve ever met who could see a rip. My papi can’t, and he studies these things for a living. American Stepmom can’t, Yasmany can’t, Mr. Milagros can’t. That means you’re like me.” And to myself I added, Yes! There’s finally someone else like me.

  She turned to me, looking low-key scared. “Is that a good thing?”

  She had me there. “Beats me. But it makes me wonder what else you can do.”

  “What do you mean, ‘do’?”

  I walked over to the locker, moved the books out of the way, and then, on tiptoe, reached my hand through the locker until I was spanking the chickens on the conveyor belt. “I mean, like, do this.”

  I turned back to the locker and threw myself halfway into it, hands forward, almost like a dive.

  I heard Gabi squeal behind me. “I’ll save you, Sal!” she whooped. By the time I had plucked a chicken off the conveyor belt, she was holding both my legs, and a second later, she yanked me out of the locker. We both fell sprawling to the floor.

  She sat up, looked at me, and then saw what I was cradling in my hands. “Sal, is that—”

  “Extradimensional poultry? Yep.”

  We got ourselves up from the floor. Gabi never took her eyes off the chicken, never quite shut her mouth all the way. I decided to experiment. I threw the chicken in the air and caught it, like a basketball. Her eyes went up and down with each throw.

  This was kind of fun. It gave me an idea. “Hey, think fast!” I said as I no-look-passed the chicken to Gabi.

  She caught it, then immediately started hot-potatoing it. “Ew! Ew! I just told you two seconds ago I’m a vegetarian!”

  She might have kept on yelling at me, except just then an angry woman’s head poked out of the locker.

  “Ah!” screamed Gabi.

 
; “Ah!” screamed Sal. It scared me so much, I felt like I was out of my body watching myself being scared.

  The woman was middle-aged and wore big safety goggles, a protective paper mask, and a hairnet. She looked kind of exactly like Principal Torres.

  She scanned the room quickly before locking her gaze on the bird carcass. “¡Ey!” she yelled.

  “¡Ey!” is a very special Cuban expletive. I’m not even sure how you spell it. It’s not the kind of word you write down. Also, it’s hard to translate into English, because it can mean a lot of things. But this time it meant something like “What’s going on here? Oh, you think you can make a fool of me? How about I rip out your heart and stick it in your ear so you can hear yourself die?”

  Gabi, now cradling the chicken like it was her baby, asked the lady, “Who are you?”

  The lady, being a full-grown woman, looked like a human cannonball stuffed into an itty-bitty cannon. She had to wriggle and fight to get even one of her hands out of the opening in the back of the locker. When she did, she shook her fist at us. “¡Devuélveme ese pollo, o vamos a tener un problema tremendo!”

  “What’s she saying?” Gabi asked me.

  “She’s demanding the return of her chicken.”

  “¡No le tengo miedo a nadie!” said the squirming, struggling lady, trying and failing to bring her other arm forward. “¡Ser humano o demonio, no me importa! ¿Creen que me pueden robar sin consecuencia? Voy a mandarlos al infierno con tres patadas en sus nalgas infernales.”

  I stood there listening, fascinated. I hadn’t heard Spanish that angry since the last time one of the Mami Muertas had lost her chill. It felt kind of like home.

  “Sal!” elbowed Gabi. “What’d she say?”

  “She thinks we’re evil spirits, or devils, or something. She says she is going to kick us in the butt three times and send us back to hell.”

  “Exactly three times? That’s very specific.”

  “If she ever figures out how to pull herself all the way through the locker, I imagine she will kick our butts a lot more than three times.”