The Other Half of Happy

by Rebecca Balcarcel

  “Stand up,” shouts Mr. Green. “Spines straight!” He sits at the piano and rolls out chords. He lands on a C, and its weight pulls us in. All of us become one pitch. The room stills and we are C. I give myself to the note. C sweeps through my body; worries fall way. A dozen thoughts disappear.

  Mr. Green cues each section, and sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses take their notes, building a chord. Ahhh vibrates my bones.

  Mr. Green closes his eyes, and our forty voices hold. I feel popped out of myself and centered in myself at the same time. My eyes scan the room, and I see short hair, long hair, kids with glasses, kids with braces. I see a Minecraft kid, a Latina from lunch, and a boy with cowboy boots next to a boy with high-tops.

  The C chord locks, perfectly in tune. For this single wide second, we’re all one.

  I FINISH MY HOMEWORK Friday night alongside Mom at the dining table, within sight of two Guatemalan weavings and Lake Atitlán on the wall. I’m starting to like that lake a bit, and the blue volcanoes rising around its edge. A bit.

  Normal families do things like watch movies on Friday nights, but we’re not all that normal. Dad reads or plays his guitar; Mom studies. When I don’t have homework, I do origami or take pictures or do something Mom and Dad think is “productive.” Either that, or play. Mom and Dad are big on play. They’ve always let me play Lego or tea party for hours. Right now, though, I’m playing the big kid and Memito is the one playing games. He spins nearby on his Sit ’n Spin, a toy that whirls him around when he turns a wheel in the middle.

  Dad wanders in, wiping his hands on a dish towel. He looks over my shoulder and shouts, “¡Poesía! Why didn’t you tell me you were writing a poem?”

  “Don’t help me, Dad.”

  He looks a little hurt, but says, “Of course. It must be your own work.” He turns to Mom. “‘¿Qué es poesía?’” he quotes. It must be a love poem because Mom looks up from her work and they share a kiss. Sheesh. They’re always in Romance Land. Even with Dad holding a dish towel.

  My phone vibrates.

  Hey Q. Jayden here. How goes it?

  My thumbs tingle as I type.

  Parents in a lip-lock. Ew.

  Haha!

  “What’s up, Qui?” Mom says. “You look happy as a cow in clover. Who’s texting?”

  My breath halts. She probably thinks I’ll say Kirsten or Olivia, since we hung out last year, but we stopped texting over the summer. I hear the drone of Memito spinning, spinning. “Just Jayden.”

  “Jayden?” Dad squints. “I want to meet this Jayden.”

  “Dad. He’s my friend; he’s in my English class.”

  “I want one of those shirts,” Dad says to Mom.

  “One of what shirts, mi alma?”

  “The ones that say DADD. Dads Against Daughters Dating.”

  “Not funny, Dad.” How hover-y can he be? I just know he’ll be impossible when I do date someday.

  “Oh, this isn’t dating.” Mom chuckles, turning back to her work. “I called boys when I was her age. We bought an extra-long phone cord so I could talk in my room.”

  “See?” I say. Thank you, Mom.

  Dad frowns. “My father interrogated every boy who came to see my sisters.”

  “You can do that in a few years.” Mom gives me a wink. I hope she’s kidding.

  The next morning, I let the sunshine wake me. Saturday stretches out in all directions, my unexplored island. I sing the choir song as I spin on the swing in the backyard. I imagine writing a movie script, starring Jayden. Memito plays rodeo on his stick horse, and I think about when we took him to the real rodeo. We hauled him to the petting zoo, the milking parlor, and the birthing center where piglets and calves toddle around and nurse, but he spent the whole time covering his ears or his face. Then he pitched a fit and wouldn’t ride the ponies. I love him up the hill and down the mountain, but he’s definitely different. Sensitive, I guess.

  On Sunday, my Saturday shimmer turns to rust.

  “Ready to go?” Dad says brightly, poking his head in. It’s the worst way to be woken up.

  I don’t say no, but I think it.

  Tía Lencha, Tío Pancho, and my three cousins have settled in across town, and we’re invited to a “reunión,” which Dad pronounces ray-oon-yone. It sounds like what Mom would call a shindig and I would call a party.

  “Will I have to speak Spanish?” I ask.

  “You can manage ‘por favor’ and ‘gracias,’” says Mom. “Being polite goes a long way.”

  “Mom, ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ are not going to help much.”

  “Just do your best. You know more than you think you do.”

  I don’t know what to say to this. The main thing I know is how much I don’t know.

  “You could wear your huipil.” She uses the same voice as when Memito won’t eat his okra.

  “I’m good,” I say. I’m sticking with capris and a T-shirt. Even if I’m nervous on the inside, I can be comfortable on the outside.

  I hear the apartment even before we get to the building. Man, did Tía Lencha and Tío Pancho invite the whole complex? My breath gets shallow, and Memito whines to be picked up and burrows his head into Mom’s shoulder.

  When the door opens, the warm smell of corn tortillas greets us. From a cluster of people, a man bounds forward. “Hermano,” he says, pulling Dad into a tight hug. Dad hugs his brother for a long time. When they part, tears stand in their eyes. I guess this move is a bigger deal than I thought.

  We’re barely in the doorway when Mirabel, Raúl, and Crista crowd around me, saying, “Hey! Check this out!” Mirabel clicks a phone app to turn a lamp on and off. They’re sixteen, thirteen, and nine. Mom says I met Mirabel when I was little, but I don’t remember that. I might have met Raúl if he weren’t going to the other junior high. They bundle me off to another part of the apartment. “This is our room,” they say, pointing to three mattresses on the floor and a wall full of animal posters.

  Tía Lencha calls out something, and they answer in fluent Spanish. Then a few sentences that sound like half English and half Spanish zip between them. I listen hard, but I can’t keep up.

  “We have our own game system in here,” Crista says.

  “Have you played Raft Racer?” Raúl asks. “What about Catapult?”

  “Give her some space!” Mirabel says and turns to me. “They’re just excited, is all.”

  Finally, we plop down on a comforter with a unicorn on it; I’m guessing it’s Crista’s.

  “So Quijana, where are the horses?” Raúl asks. His black hair stands thick on his head like a push broom. “I keep asking, but no one will tell me.”

  “Huh?”

  “Is this Texas or what?”

  “Oh!” I squelch a laugh. “Most people don’t own horses here.”

  “Yeah, not a single person rode a horse to school.” He’s shaking his head.

  “Not that different from Chicago?”

  “I’m really bummed,” he says. “Tssss.”

  Mirabel leans in. She’s in high school and wears makeup, and her wavy hair, I notice, is stiff with gel. “Our friends up home were convinced we’d ride to school on horseback.”

  “I like your hair, Quijana,” Crista says.

  “Yours is pretty, too,” I say. In fact, we have similar hair. Long, dark brown, and thick enough to hang hot on our necks in summer.

  “Can I braid it?” Crista asks.

  “Hey!” Raúl jumps off the bed. “Rubber-band wars!” Crista hops up, and even Mirabel runs across the room and reaches behind a dresser.

  “What’s . . . ,” I start.

  They pull out giant rubber bands and start stretching them across bars of wood on homemade rubber-band guns. A clothespin on the end of the device holds the rubber band until it’s released.

  This has possibilities!

  “I can share with you, Quijana,” offers Crista.

  “Wait,” says Mirabel. “Here’s Dad’s,” she says, handing me another rub
ber-band gun.

  With the parents buckled into their conversations in the living room, the rest of the apartment is ours. The only rule is no aiming for faces. We run rooms, we climb counters. We hide behind doors and ambush each other. My best move is when I hide behind a recliner and land a rubber band on Raúl’s shin, even if I take a double hit from Crista and Mirabel. We fall down on one of their mattress beds laughing. I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun.

  Finally Mirabel announces, “All right, chicos, I have some people to talk to,” and disappears behind her phone.

  The rest of us decide to sneak up on the grown-ups. “I’m not shooting Mami,” Crista says.

  “Of course not,” Raúl says. “Just hit the wall near her head. First we’ll do some reconnaissance.”

  “What?” Crista says.

  “You know, get the lay of the land. Scope out the enemy.”

  Crista still looks confused, but I imitate Raúl, who drops to his stomach. A row of folding chairs marks the front lines, and we crawl up to eavesdrop. Crista giggles, which makes me giggle, too.

  “Shh!” says Raúl.

  “Sorry,” says Crista, still laughing. “Shh!” she says to me.

  “Shh!” I say back, also laughing. Even Raúl presses his lips together to hold back a chuckle.

  It’s more giggles and shushing each other until I hear my father mention my name. I listen more carefully. The Spanish is sounding less like a string of noise and more like individual words. I catch a few that I must have learned from children’s songs. Then I understand a whole sentence, spoken by my aunt.

  “¿Nunca te llama Papi?” She never calls you Papi?

  My father answers, “No, ella me llama Dad.” She calls me Dad.

  The adults move on, paddling their conversation out of that eddy, but open water stretches between me and my cousins as they turn to stare. “You say ‘Dad’?” Raúl asks.

  “Sure. Don’t you?” I know the answer.

  Raúl sits up and looks at Crista, then confirms, “We say ‘Papi.’”

  “So?” I sit up, too.

  “Leave her alone,” Crista says, taking my arm.

  “But it’s weird. Like, he never said ‘Call me Dad,’ did he?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Then why do you?” Raúl throws his rubber-band gun aside and stands up.

  “I was born here,” I say, standing up, too.

  “But your papi wasn’t.” He shakes his head and wanders to the kitchen.

  “Raúl!” Crista shouts, watching him go. “He can be a jerk. Want to keep playing?”

  “Nah.” I feel a little sick, but I shrug as Crista starts putting away the rubber-band guns.

  Why does he care? We’ve played in English this whole time. Still, Papi, Papi repeats in my head. Raúl is being a jerk, but what if he’s right? Does Dad want to be called Papi? He didn’t call his own father “Dad,” and he’s obsessed with showing me exactly how he did things as a kid. Now the word sounds flat to me: Dad. The “a” seems smashed. Papi sounds rounder, more like a hug. Does more love fit in that open-mouthed ah? Why do I suddenly feel like I can’t do anything right?

  Memito starts crying, bored of Mom’s lap and the grown-up talk. “I’ll take him,” I say. I gather him up, and we step outside by ourselves. Just concrete and parked cars out here, but I don’t want to go back in. Memito likes the quiet, too. He squats down to pick up a leaf and looks at it up close.

  I send Jayden a text, but he doesn’t answer. I reread our texts from Friday night and don’t feel any better. A string of silly emojis from Grandma helps a little.

  Memito whimpers, and I see that his overall strap is twisted. When I fix it, his face shows relief, but soon he drops his leaf and whimpers until I have to take him in. I think of getting a bottle of bubbles out of his toy bag, but this day is definitely a popped balloon because he immediately wiggles till I put him down, and then he runs straight toward Crista. You’re welcome, Memito.

  Where’s Mirabel? She wasn’t part of the Papi-Dad mess, and she has movie stars on the wall above her bed like a typical teen. She and I could breathe blue-jean air and trade Coca-Cola talk. But when I find her in the kitchen, Raúl is already talking to her at the counter, in Spanish of course. Raúl stops mid-sentence when he sees me, but then continues and smirks. Is he talking about me? He leaves the room, still grinning.

  Finally, Mom’s voice carries in from the living room. “Time to go!” she says. I’m more than ready to leave. I whisk up Memito and walk into the living room just as Mom’s saying, “I can’t believe we never made it to Chicago!”

  “We understand,” Tía Lencha says. “All of us, we always working.”

  Mom agrees, nodding as she hugs Tía. “We’ll have to do this again soon!”

  Great.

  When the cousins line up to hug us, they act like nothing’s happened. Nothing really has, for them. I’m the one who can’t switch languages like bike speeds. Grandma Miller says to never apologize for who you are, but who even am I? My cousins have something I’m supposed to have, too.

  Everyone adioses but me. I stubbornly say bye. I look at Memito. He’s lucky. No one expects him to say anything.

  In the car, I put my earbuds in. I can’t find a just-right song, so I sit in silence. Unfortunately, this means I hear Mom gushing on and on about how amazing my cousins are.

  “Those kids are something!” she says. “So polite and speaking English like they’re native-born.”

  “Lencha and Pancho must be proud.” Dad shakes his head. “Wow.”

  I feel a pinch on my heart, and I pick a loud song to drown out whatever they say next.

  I’VE NEVER BEEN SO GLAD to get on the school bus Monday morning. As we jostle along, I check my messages.

  Make your day amazing! says Grandma.

  You too, I type back.

  I snap a selfie, holding my sea turtle bracelet near my face. SEND. The bus turns the last corner, and no new messages. I decide to ask.

  Any test results yet? As I exit the bus, my phone vibrates.

  Not yet. The spider orchids started blooming down at the bog, the blossoms you called hoodie fairies—a much better name! Remember how you pressed them in the pages of my chemistry book?

  I send Grandma a smiley face and a woman-scientist emoji.

  Maybe today can be amazing, but not until after second-period Spanish. Now that I’ve heard the Carrillos, learning Spanish seems harder than ever. All three kids can talk the legs off a chair in either language. And faster than Dad. As I walk down the hall, I focus on the black-and-white clock at the end and brace myself for what’s becoming my least-favorite subject.

  “Bienvenidos, clase!” Señora Francés sweeps out from behind her desk. As soon as the bell rings, she’s at the whiteboard and talking. After some chalked charts and a PowerPoint presentation, we’re supposedly ready to practice vocabulary and conjugations aloud. I’m not. I read the book’s examples again.

  “Número uno.” Señora Francés looks over the top of her teacher’s-edition textbook and sweeps her gaze around the room.

  Since we’re in the second week of school, there’s no more easy stuff like Spanish-izing our names and greeting each other. Last week, it was all about “Suzy” turning into “Susana,” Ms. French into Señora Francés, “¡Hola!” and “¿Como estás?”—fun because I knew it all. Now I see that all the Spanish I know fits into one week of class. A thimbleful of ocean.

  At least Ms. French is nice. She joked about her name the first day. “My name is Ms. French, but I teach Spanish. I keep hoping I’ll meet a Ms. Spanish who teaches French. We’d be mirror twins!” We laughed. Week one was fun.

  No one is laughing now.

  “Anyone?” Señora asks. I lower my head. “Quijana?”

  My skin goes cold because in other classes I am the hand-raiser, the one who likes knowing answers. But now the answer is a dollar lost in the sofa cushions. I’m still searching when she says, “Just say wh
at sounds right to you.”

  Sounds right? All the answers seem like Monopoly money.

  I look up to see a smile that seems to say, “This is easy for you, right?”

  An Oh unlatches. I see myself as my teacher does. She thinks my dark brown hair knows the answer. She’s betting my toasted skin can conjugate verbs. She looks at my name and thinks “Latina.”

  My mind leaps back to a woman at the park last summer. As I caught Memito on the slide, she said, “You people are so good with children.” I like compliments, but that one felt prickly. Was it even a compliment? Now it’s happening again, that prickly feeling. Guess what, Ms. Francés, the j in my name doesn’t tell me the answers. At the same time, I shrink in my seat, knowing she’s partly right. Look at my name, my dad, my cousins. I can’t even get number one? This would give Raúl something to smirk about.

  I’m stalled out at the diálogo in our textbook. I don’t know what Alberto asks Maria or how to say he was born in Bolivia. What if I can’t learn this? I think of Mirabel and Crista talking like bullet trains. Me stuck at the station.

  Señora Francés moves on to the girl behind me and makes her way down each row. She runs out of questions before she runs out of kids, but nobody’s off the hook because she shouts, “Clear your desks!” A quiz.

  I plug in as many conjugations as I can, erasing a few answers before rewriting my original ones. When time is up, I’ve written at least a guess in each blank, but my head hurts.

  “Time to trade and grade,” says Señora Francés. She calls out the answers, and the student next to me gleefully marks big x’s next to my wrong words.

  Suddenly the bell rings, and I’m saved from more embarrassment. Into a recycle bin I drop today’s quiz with its huge C on top.

  At Port 3, Jayden finds me right away. My day brightens, just seeing him.

  “What’d you write about?” he says. We exchange poems, and I read about a hot-fudge sundae. Zuri shows us her pizza poem.