Sal and Gabi Break the Universe

by Carlos Hernandez

  I kicked an imaginary pebble. “What about me? When Monday comes, I’ll be stuck with mean-girl Gladis again.”

  “No es fácil,” she said sympathetically. “Bu’ you be okay. I know you, Sal. Is tha’ other Gladis better be escare!”

  Oh yeah. My Gladis would be coming back here now, too. That made me suddenly nervous. “What kind of day do you think my Gladis had in your universe?”

  Gladis nodded sagely. “A twenny-Pampers day.”

  Yeah. This was not going to go well.

  Both my phone and Gladis’s dinged at the same time. My text was from Gabi. You’re coming to the hospital right after school, right? I have to do my homework right away, because I don’t know how much my family is going to need me this weekend, and I have to be there for them, and Iggy. Oh, but don’t worry. Iggy’s doing better! That little bugger is as tough as an overcooked potato. But you can see for yourself when you come, so come quick! And, oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to ask, ARE YOU AND GLADIS MACHADO GOING OUT?!?! You sly dog. TELL ME EVERYTHING!

  I rolled my eyes—word gets around fast. I was about to answer Gabi, when Gladis said, “Tha’ was Sal. He’ coming in li’e ten seconds. He say, ‘Get ready, girl!’ Ha-ha-ha.”

  I double-took. “What, like, right here?”

  “I guess so.”

  “He can’t! Text him back, quick. The hallway’s full of cameras!”

  “Cameras? In Culeco?” She set a new text-writing record with her thumbs. “Tha’s somet’ing differn’ in this universe! Wha’ shou’ I say?”

  “Tell him—” I looked around frantically. No, no, no—yes! “Tell him to use the all-gender bathroom!”

  She gave me the cacaseca. “He can use the bathroom af’er he bring me back, Sal.”

  “Not use use the bathroom. Use it to make the switch.”

  But she’d already started texting him. “I know. I just messy wi’ you.”

  We trotted over to the restroom. Gladis went first and held the door for me. But I pointed to the cameras. “Probably not a good idea if I go in with you.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. She looked at me sadly, but clown-funny-sadly. “Then thees is goo’bye. Oh, Sal, i’ wa’ so fun! I weesh you cou’ come with me!”

  I wiggled my phone at her. “We’ll always have messaging.”

  She brightened. “Oh yeah! Tex’ me to le’ me know if Gladis is okay, okay, Pipo?”

  I said yes, and in she went to the bathroom. The last thing I heard her say was, “¡Guao! Thees the cleanes’ bathroom I ever see!”

  I really wished I could have gone in with her. But with Mr. Zacto still in admin and Mr. Milagros prowling around somewhere, I couldn’t risk it. Which sucked. I had so many questions for that other Sal. He seemed to be a lot better at relaxing than I was.

  Yeah, maybe I was a little jelly, a little salty. I punched my hand with my fist.

  My punch landed in a surprisingly soft cushion of yarn. Because I was still holding the mal de ojo scarf that Gladis had come all the way from another universe to get!

  I lunged for the bathroom door and flung it open, saying “Gladis! You forgot your—”

  And there, standing in the door, looking like she was a robot that had just gone online for the first time, was Gladis.

  Same clothes as before, but this Gladis had one more accessory: an ojo turco necklace.

  And when she spoke and I heard her American accent, I knew for sure I had my old Gladis back. “Sal. It’s you. Is it you? Who are you?”

  “It’s Sal,” I said.

  “The brujo?” she asked.

  I bit back the frustration on the tip of my tongue. “That’s what you keep calling me.”

  She leaned toward me, squinted. “No. You’re not the brujo. The brujo Sal is in the rainy place. He’s a very scary boy.” She turned to look out the open double doors of Culeco’s entrance. “It’s sunny here. So you must be a nice Sal. Are you a nice Sal?”

  There is only one way to answer that question. “Yes. I am a nice Sal. The nicest Sal of all.”

  She nodded. “You made me the protection scarf. That was nice of you.”

  Protection scarf? Um. Sure. Yes-and, baby. “Yes, I did.”

  Her face clouded over. “But I didn’t know it was a protection scarf. I wish I had known. I wish I’d had it with me when I went to the rainy place. That other Sal is a brujo, you know.”

  She took a woozy step into the hallway and discovered she knew how to walk. She nodded approvingly and looked around. “This is the Culeco Academy of the Arts.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is it time for school?”

  Oh, dear. “School’s over for the day.”

  “Oh,” she said, pouting. “I was hoping that all had been a dream. I guess there really is an evil Sal and a nice Sal, then. You’re the nice Sal.”

  “Super nice.”

  She nodded in agreement before she added, “I think I would like to go home now.”

  “That’s a good idea. How will you get home? Do you have a ride?”

  Gladis thought. I could hear clocks ticking as I waited for her to answer. “My dad will pick me up. I will text him. Maybe I will wait outside for him. It would be nice to feel the sun on my face.”

  “Okay.”

  She grew briefly happier. “The sun is out here. It was raining in the other place. That is the place with the brujo Sal.”

  “Nothing but blue skies here, Gladis.”

  She went from glad to unreadable. “Good. Well. Thank you for my scarf,” she said. Then she took it out of my hand—I just let her—and wrapped it three times around her neck, so that the words “Mal” and “de” and “ojo” were stacked perfectly, one on top of the other. “That’s nice. I’m protected now. See you Monday, Sal.”

  And with that, she toddled to the exit and left Culeco.

  I stood watching her leave for a few seconds when I got an AnyUni alert. Other Gladis had texted: Don’t keep me in suspense, Pipo! How is Gladis doing?

  I looked at the exit, then my phone, then the exit, then my phone. Then I texted back: Youre gonna have to get your scarf back from Gladis yourself

  PRINCIPAL TORRES WAS sitting on the edge of the cafeteria’s stage, kicking her feet like a kid. She had turned off most of the fluorescent lights, which made the tables look gray, the brown stage browner, and her blue suit black. Shadows blotted out whole chunks of the room, like a video game in which the whole scene wasn’t rendered yet. To Principal Torres’s left, a tiny red-and-white milk carton provided the only bright colors in the room. To her right, she’d set down her glasses so that they wouldn’t get in the way as she rubbed the bridge of her nose.

  I walked in and said, “Heard you could use a friend.”

  Principal Torres looked up, and once she squintingly realized which kid had interrupted her solitude, she smiled a little, blinked a little. “Shouldn’t you be in detention, Mr. Vidón?”

  I took out Daniel’s note and waved it as I walked toward the stage. “Mr. Miranda Rivero sent me. He wanted me to ask you if you sent Yasmany home. He said he’d keep the commons open if Yasmany was going to show up. He wants to help him with his diabetes paper.”

  She sucked her lips and chose her words carefully. “Yasmany won’t be at detention today. I’ll let him know.”

  “I can do it.” I boosted myself onto the stage next to her, the tiny, bright carton of milk between us. “He asked me to text him. If that’s okay with you?”

  She smiled, but she couldn’t hold it for more than a second. “Thanks, Sal. I’d appreciate it.”

  I texted Daniel, then pocketed my phone and pulled out a bag of Skittles. I tore it open and shook the bag at Principal Torres, smiling like a devil. “Some sweet, delicious Skittles?”

  She put up a hand. “Thanks, but I’m on a diet.”

  “Why?”

  She smiled as if to say, Really, chacho, you’re going to make me say it out loud? And then she did say it. “Because I’m fat.”

 
I ate some Skittles. “My stepmom calls herself fat sometimes. And then my papi will hug her from behind and say, ‘You’re not fat. That’s just American society brainwashing you. You’re light as a feather!’ And then he lifts her up and carries her around the house.”

  She stuck out her bottom lip and nodded approvingly. “Yeah? Does it make her feel better?”

  “Yeah. But then she has to run away, quick.”

  “Why?”

  I got up and started acting out the scene onstage. “Because once he puts her down, he goes, ‘Okay, now, you carry me!’ And Papi is the size of, like, three grizzly bears fighting over a ham. And my stepmom is all like, ‘I can’t lift you!’ And he’s like, ‘Are you calling me fat?’ And she’s like, ‘Yes, you are fat and beautiful, and I love you, and I am not picking you up!’ And he starts chasing her around with his arms out wide and shaking his belly, going, ‘Aw, c’mon, mi vida, just throw me over your shoulder and carry me to the kitchen, ’cause baby I’m soooo hungry!’ And then they run all over the house for like twenty minutes.”

  One of the ways you know if an adult has been broken by life is if they never laugh anymore. Principal Torres? That woman bellowed. I mean, she laughed like the Loch Ness monster would, if it existed.

  When she had wiped the last tear from her eye, Principal Torres picked up her milk and leaned it toward me. “Your papi is a proper caballero. Here’s to him.”

  I clinked her milk with my bag of Skittles. She poured milk down her throat, and I poured Skittles into my mouth.

  We sat quietly, kicking our legs and looking out at the abandoned cafeteria, watching the second hand of the huge clock on the far wall glide the time away. I broke the silence by saying, “Mr. Zacto says you can call him if you need to talk to someone.”

  She laughed away her surprise. “Mr. Miranda Rivero, Mr. Zacto—you’ve been busy. Got your fingers in a lot of pots, don’t you? And it’s only the first week of school.” She smiled, brought her milk almost to her mouth for another swig. But before she drank, she added, “Can’t wait to see what travesuras you’ve pulled by the end of the year.”

  I touched my hand to my chest. “Principal Torres! I am planning to pull no travesuras in your school. Zero travesuras. This will be”—and I gestured in a complete circle—“a no-travesuras zone.”

  Her glasses slipped down her nose. “Do you know what a travesura is?”

  “No clue.”

  She bellowed again. Of course I knew what a travesura was. Back when Mami Muerta was Mami Viva, she used the word “travesura” on me more than she used my name. But I wasn’t passing up a good punch line for anything.

  Principal Torres took her time enjoying the laugh. But when it was over, her mood had gone back to a sad place. “I don’t want to know how you do your tricks. Really, I don’t. You keep your secrets, Sal. That’s your privilege, as a magician. I actually love not knowing. I love magic.”

  “Cool, cool,” I replied. Where was she going with this?

  She slugged back more milk, then set her jaw. “Did you know, Sal, that the number one predictor for criminal behavior is abuse at home? Not video games, not movies, not music, not all the other cacaseca people try to blame it on. You want to know how kids get messed up? Look at their family life.”

  She was talking about Yasmany. Suddenly it felt like someone was wringing out my stomach like a dishcloth.

  Kicking her legs again and looking at the fluorescent lights, she said, “I want this school to be a sanctuary. I want it to be a place that encourages all the students to make magic happen.”

  “It’s a good school,” I said.

  She looked at me hopefully. “Yeah? You think so? Because, you know, you haven’t had the easiest first week here.”

  Tell me about it. But to her I said, “I’m making friends. And I like my classes, too. I’m learning a lot.”

  “Now that is music to my ears, Mr. Vidón. Tell me something interesting you learned today.”

  I knew just the thing. I pulled out the two masks I had in my backpack and put one on. Each was a broad, white, mouthless face with a long chin that ended in a point. The eyes looked like sideways teardrops, the nose had huge, flaring nostrils, and mean-looking eyebrow bones jutted out of the forehead. “We started a unit on masks in Mrs. Waked’s class today. She gave us these.”

  Principal Torres turned to face me full-on, sitting cross-legged and leaning forward. She instantly looked a thousand times happier. “That, Mr. Vidón, is no ordinary mask. That is a Venetian bauta mask. And it wasn’t just for actors. People wore them all the time to disguise themselves.”

  I held the other one out to her. “Want to try it on?”

  Smiling, she took it and slipped it on.

  And changed. The way she cocked her head at me, she seemed like a totally different type of creature: still as smart as a human, but not really human anymore. Kind of a bird that was as smart as a monkey that liked hunting as much as a female lion. It was…unsettling.

  I like unsettling.

  Principal Torres popped up and started acting out her words as she spoke, using an excellent Italian accent. “You see, Mr. Vidón, back in the day in Venezia, anyone could disguise themselves in a bauta mask: ricco o povero, uomo o donna, it didn’t matter. You had to treat everyone in a bauta mask with respect, because you never knew whose face was underneath. It was a way for everyone to play, to have fun together, to make everyone equal, for a little while, anyway. This mask, it was a tool for freedom.”

  I hopped to my feet. “That’s like what Mrs. Waked said. She said that most of the time, people put on a mask to pretend they’re something else. But before you can change into something else, first you have to become everything.” I opened my arms to my nonexistent audience. “She said, ‘The first thing you should do when you put on a mask is get rid of your boring little soul and become a sky god, and look down on all of Creation, and only, like, kind of care about it.’”

  “She literally said ‘become a sky god’?”

  “Yeah.” I switched my posture to impersonate Mrs. Waked. “Literally she said, ‘You children are practically demigods already. I’ve never seen so many skilled and brilliant actors in one place. But today you must ascend to the heavens and throw off your Earthly concerns. Look down on this planet you hath wrought, ye sky gods, and decide Earth’s very destiny!’”

  Principal Torres leaned back and laughed. “I love that woman! Okay, then. I’ll be a sky god, too. Gloria Torres is gone!” she announced. She moved behind me and spoke first in one of my ears, then the other, and her accent now became musical and otherworldly, the way you’d expect a friendly god to speak to humans. “Only I, Principalia, patron saint of principals’ principles, remain! I look down from the heavens and answer the prayers of confused educators everywhere!” She reached over my shoulder and spread her fingers to the stars.

  Inspired, I ran over to Principal Torres’s glasses, still lying there on the stage, and put them on over my mask. “And I,” I said, doing an over-the-top Cubana accent, “am Gloria Torres, principal of Culeco Academy of the Arts, the best middle school in America! And I have many questions, Principalia.”

  Principalia gripped its chin and nodded wisely. “Ah, yes, Principal Torres. I have been following the events of your school with great interest. Ask me your questions, mortal!”

  I ran over to her and held my hands out to the empty tables and benches. “Great Principalia, my students hate the cafeteria lunches! They call it dog food!”

  “On Monday, you must feed them real dog food! That way, they will truly know the difference!”

  “Great Principalia, I have a power-hungry student council president who will stop at nothing before she takes over the school. What should I do?”

  “Make her a mentor to other girls so they’ll be more assertive and ambitious!”

  We were having fun, jumping and dancing around the stage. But all the jumping and dancing was making the masks slip. Hers had gone disturbingly
crooked on her face. But I made myself stare straight into her eyes when I asked Principalia, “What’s going on with Yasmany?”

  A bauta mask looks angry and beaky, like the skull of an eagle that died p.o.ed. But the way Principalia cocked its head at me was half mother and half priest. “I can’t tell you that, Sal. I can’t share private details about other students.”

  That’s all she said. But the way she said it reminded me of a movie where a soldier belly flopped on top of a grenade to save the rest of her unit.

  Principal Torres squatted down so our eyes were level. “But this much I know.” She removed her mask, plucked her glasses off my mask and put them on, becoming fully herself again. “Yasmany needs all the friends he can get right now. Gabi’s done so much for him, but he needs guys in his life, too. Maybe you could find it in your heart to be a friend like that.”

  She held out her mask to me, but I was reluctant to take it back. The problem with pretending is that eventually you have to stop. It never, ever, ever lasts long enough.

  “WHY ARE YOU wearing that creepy mask, Sal?” asked Gabi from across the hospital cafeteria table.

  I didn’t answer. I kept my hands folded in my lap and looked at her with a chicken’s one-eyed curiosity.

  She went back to flattening with a fork—not eating—the piece of red velvet cake in front of her. “You’re kind of freaking me out, dude.”

  As Google had taught me on the walk over to the hospital, chickens can’t move their eyes. They have to move their whole heads to look at something. I snapped my whole head forward so I could focus both eyes on Gabi like a chicken.

  “Fine. You don’t want to talk? We don’t have to talk. I can stare right back at you all day long.”

  She stared and I stared and she stared and I stared.

  “Say something!” she yelled.

  I didn’t.

  Her dimples filled with evil glee. “Vee have vays of making you talk,” she said. And then she ducked beneath the cafeteria table.

  I ignored her and passed the time looking around. This place could seat two hundred people, easy. Each round white-top table was surrounded by eight cushionless yellow chairs. My guess is that the hospital didn’t want to encourage people to stick around for long. Looked like it was working.