Amor and Summer Secrets

by Diana Rodriguez Wallach

  Judging from my watch (I was still wearing my red T shirt and white capris from the night before, along with all my jewelry), Uncle Miguel would still be in the kitchen eating breakfast, probably unaware that I was slowly dying from a piña colada overdose.

  I slumped off the side of my bed, landing on my hands and knees.The cement floor was blissfully cold. I lazily sprawled out, lifting my shirt to expose my stomach to the cool, hard surface and allowing the feeling to melt into my still burning flesh. Once I had warmed the cement and it had stopped cooling me, I peeled myself off. My head throbbed as I stood, and I stroked it with my palms hoping to ease the pain inside. With the balance of a one-year-old taking her first steps, I inched down the hall in my bare feet. The kitchen was glaring with light at a level I didn’t remember the sun ever shining before. I squinted my eyes and held my hands in front of my face as I stumbled in. A roar of laughter quickly greeted me.

  “¡Ay, Mariana! ¡Ay, pobrecita!” yelled Uncle Miguel as he rushed to my side.

  He wrapped a tan arm around my shoulders and guided me to a kitchen chair, chuckling the entire time. I groaned, fell into the vinyl seat, swung my elbows onto the table and rested my head in my hands. Uncle Miguel ran to the sink and filled a tall glass with water. He rushed to my side, shoved it in front of me and loomed above as I chugged. Then he darted off to the bathroom and returned moments later with two aspirins. I had been on a high-aspirin diet since my sunburn kicked in, so the pills were of no surprise. He filled another glass of water and I gulped down the medicine.

  My mind was blank and unable to absorb any information until Uncle Miguel placed a heaping plate of ham and cheese scrambled eggs before me. Even with my nauseated belly, the grease on those eggs never looked so good. I grabbed my fork and ate while Uncle Miguel filled me in on the details I had blocked. (At this point, my great uncle had perfected speaking slowly in basic Spanish and I could almost understand everything he said—a fact that would have made my Spring Mills Spanish teacher very proud.)

  Apparently,Vince had arrived about thirty minutes before my uncle returned home from the hotel (actually the bar, but he would never admit that). At that point, I was lying on the porch floor croaking “coqui” noises while my brother searched for frogs to put on my head so he could take a picture.Thankfully, my uncle stopped him. And while Uncle Miguel and Vince were arguing on the lawn, I passed out cold. Lilly and Alonzo nudged me a few times to make sure I was still breathing, and when I yelled and swatted at their hands, everyone figured I was fine. My uncle carried me, like an infant, to bed.

  Now, I had experienced embarrassing moments before in my life, but tripping up the steps or dropping a tray at lunch paled in comparison to becoming a belligerent drunk in front of distant relatives who were going out of their way to host me. Even worse, all of these relatives would now see me as “that girl” who drinks too much and makes a scene. I was not that girl. Really, I wasn’t. At least I hoped not.

  I pressed my hand to my forehead, looked at my uncle with complete desperation and pleaded that I was sorry. He immediately rushed to my side and laughed while hugging me close to his chest. He mumbled something about how rum can be “el enemigo,” and swore that what had happened last night was not important. If anything, he said, it showed that I was part of “la familia.”

  “¿Bien?” he asked, looking down at me in a way that reminded me of my grandfather.

  “Sí,” I responded, wiping at my damp eyes.

  After that, the subject was dropped. He dove into stories about my father, telling me about the house he grew up in and how smart he was in school. Uncle Miguel also complimented my improved Spanish and said that when my grandparents left for New Jersey neither one spoke any English. It amazed me that they were able to make a life for themselves when they couldn’t speak the language. It must have been grueling for them, and I wondered what my grandparents disliked about their lives here so much that they would uproot their entire family for a world so foreign. My grandfather spent twenty years in Camden working as a short-order cook for a mediocre restaurant; he could have done that here. And my great aunt and great uncle’s house might seem like bare-bones roughing it compared to Spring Mills, but compared to low-income housing projects, it was practically a five-star resort. I couldn’t picture myself ever being so selfless as to give up my entire life for the prospect that my kids might someday, possibly, have something better.

  A few hours later, my hangover subsided, or at least was more manageable, and Lilly and Vince finally awoke with their own aching heads and puky stomachs.

  “I can’t believe I drank so much,” Lilly moaned.

  “Me neither,” Vince added as he flopped into a kitchen chair.

  “How you feelin’?” Lilly asked, peering at me through glazed eyes.

  At this point the color had returned to my cheeks and the buzzing in my head had quieted. “I’m a little better now. Thought I was dying this morning, though.”

  “How long have you been up?” she asked, as she filled a glass of water.

  “Since around six o’clock. I couldn’t fall back to sleep. It was torture.”

  “Oh, that’s happened to me before,” Lilly groaned.

  “Your sunburn better?” Vince asked.

  I had already decided that I was still angry with him, so at the sound of his voice I swiftly turned my head in the opposite direction.

  “The silent treatment, really? I thought we were older than that,” he snapped.

  I wasn’t. Actually, I thought the silent treatment was good for all ages and quite effective. After the party he threw last year, which ultimately landed us here, I didn’t speak to him for a solid week.At first he said it didn’t bother him. He pretended as if it were funny. But eventually he cracked when he realized he had no one to complain to about our parents.

  “Fine, so I’ll ask,” Lilly said. “How’s your sunburn?”

  “It’s better now,” I stated, looking directly at Lilly as I spoke. “Alonzo’s friend really knows what he’s doing. All that stuff he brought worked—”

  “Alonzo’s ‘friend’?” Lilly interjected, her eyebrows raised.

  “Yeah, José.”

  Wasn’t that obvious? We had been hanging out together all night.

  “Um, he’s not Alonzo’s ‘friend.’ ” Lilly formed air quotes around the word with her fingers.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mariana, please . . .”

  “What?”

  “Are you serious? Have you not noticed that José eats dinner here all the time?”

  “So?”

  “And that they eat off each other’s plates and that he lives in Alonzo’s house . . .”

  “They’re roommates,” I stated, matter-of-factly.

  “For the love of God, woman. They’re gay!” yelled Vince, joining the conversation despite the fact that he wasn’t invited.

  “What?” I shouted.

  “Alonzo and José are gay,” Lilly stated plainly, as if she were saying the sky was blue.

  “No way.”

  “Mariana, they wear matching outfits. What types of guys do you know who wear matching outfits?”

  I paused. They did wear a lot of pink, but everyone in Puerto Rico wore pastels. Of course, their shorts were rather tight and their hair was meticulously styled. And now that I thought about it, last night they were smiling at each other a lot, and I saw José touch Alonzo’s face and drink out of his glass and pat his thigh.

  “They’re gay?”

  “Yes, they are two gay men in a gay relationship,” Lilly explained like I was a three-year-old.

  “Huh. So I know a gay person?”

  “Wait, these are the first gay people you’ve ever met?”

  “Well, yeah. I think so—at least that I know of.”

  Of course I knew that gay people existed. I watched Will & Grace and I followed the “don’t ask don’t tell” struggles in the military. But I had never met a gay person. I thought they wer
e kind of like celebrities: I knew they lived in the world, but I never expected to meet one in person.

  “That makes me kinda cool, doesn’t it? That I know a gay person?” I asked.

  “¡Ay, Americana! You two live in a bubble,” Lilly said.

  “Hey! Don’t lump me into this,”Vince snapped.

  “Oh, please! What gay people do you know?” I asked in my brattiest tone.

  “So you’re speaking to me now?” Vince smirked.

  I grunted. It was a momentary lapse in judgment, but it blew my silent treatment out the window. Once you broke the vow of silence, even if accidentally, it was permanently shattered.

  “Mariana, the tennis coach at our school is gay,” Vince explained.

  “Mr.Wolf! Shut up!”

  I shook my head in amazement. Mr. Wolf was hot, like celebrity hot, with buzzed blond hair and a scruffy goatee and huge blue eyes you could spot from space. He was barely out of college and wildly popular with the student body, mostly because he had the sense of humor of a stand-up comic. Guys would walk around the halls quoting him all day: “Dude, your life is like Chinese. I don’t understand it,” or “Lose some weight, you’re lookin’ trans fat.” Mr. Wolf was the coolest authority figure our school had ever seen.

  “How do you know Mr. Wolf is gay?”

  “How do you not know? It’s not a secret. His boyfriend comes to all the team’s matches. Everyone was trying to convince them to go to Massachusetts to get married. It was this big thing. Where the heck have you been?” Vince shook his head.

  “I guess I don’t pay attention to gossip.”

  “No, you just don’t pay attention. Unless it has something to do with Madison or Emily.” Vince whispered their names like forbidden words.

  “Oh, my God! I never wrote Madison back!” I screeched. “I can’t believe it! I have to go.”

  Before Lilly or Vince could protest, I was already halfway down the hall.

  I hadn’t e-mailed Madison or Emily since they dumped the Orlando Bloom photo spread in my inbox. They didn’t know about the Quinceañera or my crush on Alex or my third degree sunburn or my friendship with Lilly.

  I rushed into the Internet café and clicked on my laptop. It had been days. I wasn’t consciously avoiding them . . . well, at first I was. How could I not be jealous of Orlando Bloom? But then I just got busy.

  It was like the diary I received as a gift before entering middle school. At first everything was so scary and confusing that I wrote in it every day. I needed the outlet. But by the end of seventh grade, I hardly used it. I had grown accustomed to my new school and schedule and friends. Now I only wrote in it when something major happened, like when my grandparents died. My obsession with e-mail was very similar.

  I logged on to my account.

  I expected my box to be clogged with more tales from the legendary Sweet Sixteen, only it wasn’t. There were only three new messages. The first asked if I had received their photos and whether I had listened to their radio interview. They were dying to know my reactions. The second asked if I was getting any of their messages and had the word “TEST” in the subject line. The third message expressed their confusion at my lack of communication and assumed that I had lost Internet access due to my “Bumblehump” location; they asked that I message them as soon as I got online.

  My stomach tightened. If they knew the truth, that I had just forgotten to contact them, they would hate me. If they knew how much fun I had at Lilly’s Quinceañera, they’d feel betrayed. Major things had happened to them, yet I had completely neglected their existence.

  So I lied. I opened a new message, flew my fingers over the keys and told them the Internet café had suffered a power outage. I pretended to be angry about how long it took to fix, and then went on endlessly about how I wished I could have attended Madison’s birthday party. I wrote about how amazing her photos were, how incredible the Orlando Bloom appearance was, and how happy I was for her party’s success. I raved about their radio interview and included as many quotes from the broadcast as possible to prove that I had listened. Then I told them about Lilly, Alex, the Quinceañera, the beach, the drunken incident, everything.

  The message was enthusiastic, but almost forced. I stressed over what to write so I would sound like the girl that they remembered. I needed to make sure that I included enough references to our inside jokes and silly slang words, and that I didn’t sound too happy so they’d know that I still missed them.

  But the whole time I couldn’t stop thinking about Alex. It was as if Emily and Madison were wiped clean and all my memory space was being used for a new purpose, for a new life.

  Chapter 36

  My sunburn healed. It took a few days, but I finally looked like a normal-colored person, which was cause for celebration.

  Early this morning, Lilly called Alex and Javier and we all headed for one of the island’s main tourist attractions, El Yunque Rain Forest. It was an opportunity for redemption after my drunken spectacle, and I couldn’t wait to be alone with Alex in an exotic tropical locale. But as soon as we pulled into the forest, water droplets tumbled from the sky (I don’t know why this surprised me, the word “rain” is in the location’s title). I was forced to buy a fluorescent orange poncho that looked like a cross between a trash bag and a crossing guard belt. It wasn’t the most attractive look and the thick muggy air in no way helped the rapidly frizzing mop on the top of my head.

  I closed my eyes and inhaled the scent of summer: fresh wet grass on a hot day. I thought of Vince playing baseball—and as I slowed my mind, I could almost hear the crack of his bat above the hum of tropical birds and swirling insects. It was odd that something so foreign could remind me of something so American.

  “Hey, La Mina’s this way.” Lilly pointed as she led us down one of the forest paths.

  “So, have you ever seen a waterfall?” Alex asked as he strolled beside me.

  “Nope. I’ve actually never been in a rain forest before,” I admitted. “We don’t have too many of those in Philadelphia.”

  “Ah, right.You have the Liberty Bell and Paul Revere, verdad ?”

  “No, Paul Revere’s from Bahston,” I said in my best Massachusetts accent. “We’ve got Ben Franklin and Betsy Ross.”

  “Who’s Betsy Ross?”

  “Who’s Betsy Ross! She sewed the first American flag. I’m surprised you don’t know that. I figured she’d be an important figure in Puerto Rico; you guys obviously ripped her off.” I curled my lips into a sly smile.

  “What?” he shouted.

  “Come on, your flag—red, white and blue with a star. That’s gotta be some sort of copyright infringement.”

  “Hey, we’re a part of the United States.”

  “Oh, yeah. A ‘territory.’ ” I grinned. “Why don’t you just commit? Put your star on our flag.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he said, suggestively raising a brow.

  “Are you trying to make a conversation about patriotic flags dirty?” I asked, sounding shocked and appalled.

  “Why? Do you want me to?”

  He smiled at me in a way no other guy ever had. I almost wanted to pull out my camera and take a picture of the moment so I’d remember it forever. But somehow I knew I wouldn’t forget.

  The waterfall was huge—at least two stories high—and gushing white water. Thick streams surged down a cliff of black, jagged rocks until it landed in a clear, cool pool at the bottom. All around it was a glow of green—leaves, trees, bushes, flowers, even an emerald parrot with a red-tipped head swooped above the falls. I had never seen anything like it outside of Hollywood movies. If I couldn’t smell the water (it had a scent, not salty like the ocean, but fresh like laundry detergent mixed with earth) and feel the spray, I wouldn’t have believed it was real. I stared silently. It amazed me that something so massive, beautiful and natural could exist, and that there were people who would go their whole lives not seeing it. I felt very small.

  “Mariana, c
hica! Come on!” Lilly yelled as she ventured off the path.

  “Where are you going?” I watched her, Vince and Javier head toward the water.

  “Swimming,” Alex explained.

  He was holding my hand and had been for the past five minutes. It was an unfamiliar gesture. Once when I was a flower girl in my cousin’s wedding, I had to hold the ring bearer’s hand, but aside from that (and the occasional ballet partner) I had never held hands with a male romantically. In that moment, I felt like his girlfriend despite the fact that we hadn’t kissed and we barely knew each other. His attention was focused solely on me, asking if I was happy, thirsty, tired, etcetera. And everyone else felt like spectators—they were present at what was happening between us but we didn’t really need them.

  “I don’t have a bathing suit on.”

  I looked down at my olive shorts and yellow cotton tank top—I had borrowed the outfit from Lilly. I hadn’t expected to go swimming. If I had, I would have worn my bikini or at least a shirt that wouldn’t immediately become transparent at the slightest hint of water.

  The rain had stopped midway through our hike and Alex was carrying my poncho. It was an act of consideration I usually only got from my father. It was nice to have a guy carry my stuff again, not that I was being anti-feminist (I considered myself a feminist because, being a female, I didn’t see how I could possibly be against women’s rights. I mean, weren’t all women feminists?). It wasn’t like I was incapable of holding my things; it was just nice not to have to.

  “That’s okay, we don’t have to go in,” Alex said, squeezing my hand.

  “Well, no. If you want to, go ahead. It’s cool.”