by Dahlia Adler
“I know, Mom.” But nausea creeps up my throat as I sign it. Truth is I’m barely three chapters in to the book, and the thought of picking it up again puts me to sleep. It’s not that I have trouble reading or anything, it’s just… I’d so much rather do.
I am so, so ready to do.
“I’ll get back to it. I promise.”
She smiles softly. “I know you will, sweetheart. We trust you. You know that.”
I do know it, and the last thing in the world I want is to let my parents down. Every single day I wake up in Kansas I remember what they’ve sacrificed for me to be happy and I really do want to make them proud, I just… can’t quite seem to do it this way.
But I have to try.
I excuse myself back upstairs, retrieve the belt from her closet—even when she forgets to return stuff, she’s always good about hanging it up—and get back to my work, pushing my clothing aside to make some space on my bed for me to curl up with Hemingway. Just nine more months of this, I remind myself as I slog through more white man problems. After that, it’ll be summer, and then…
I glance back at the pile of clothing I’ve shoved to the edge of my bed and smile. I may not have enough of the right clothes to be a sorority girl just yet, but I can fix that. I love dressing up, but neither in Tucson—where I spent the first fifteen years of my life—nor here in Charytan has my unparalleled fashion sense stopped people from making gross assumptions about me and my family based on the skin underneath.
It’s the total opposite of how most people think, I know, but I’m excited for the superficial stuff to make a difference. I’m excited for how I dress, how I look—how I make myself look—to matter. I’m proud of being Mexican; I’m just tired of it being all I am. And it was, to the girls in Tucson like Ashley Martin, who spoke English to me at a snail’s pace and made “jokes” about my family jumping the fence, despite both my parents being documented, and me and Javi having been born in the U.S. It is, to the other girls here, who pretend I don’t exist except when they wanna moan about affirmative action. It is, to the guys who holler “Caliente!” and “Mamacita!” at me. (Most of whom are definitely failing Spanish.)
But out there it won’t be. It can’t be.
We moved here for something different, and while it’s better here than it was in Tucson, it’s still not enough. I need to be more than this, and I’m not letting college be anything like high school.
Reagan and I are gonna rock Southeastern, and Ashley Martin and all the rest will be nothing but a bad memory.
“Victoria?” A hand gently nudges my shoulder, and it takes me a few seconds to realize I’ve fallen asleep and drooled all over Hemingway. “I’m guessing homework isn’t going very well?”
Whoops. “Guess not,” I say, shifting over in my bed so my father can sit down. “You’re a literature professor—can you just tell me what happens? Maybe write my paper for me, if you’re feeling especially generous?”
“I will never feel that generous, mija.” Still, he frowns at the book. “Hemingway. Always with the white men, that school.”
“Exactly! See? You understand why I can’t get through this thing.”
He chuckles, looking around at the piles of clothing heaped everywhere, the mess of my sewing table, and the sketches of my designs hung up on the walls. “Somehow, I don’t think that’s the problem.” He pats my hair and moves the book to my nightstand. “Did you call Abuela tonight?”
“Oh, no, how long have I been asleep?” I pick up my phone to check the time, and see that it’s after eleven. I also have a text from Reagan, apologizing that she’s skipping out on coming over. “I’ll have to call her tomorrow.” I hate to be late. I know she and my grandfather wait by the phone, and it’s hard enough for them having to coordinate with my brother, who’s halfway around the world (like, literally—he’s in the Peace Corps in Fiji); it shouldn’t be difficult with me, considering Charytan and Mexico City are in the same time zone.
Thankfully, Papi knows how bad I already feel, and he doesn’t dwell on it. “I’m sure she’ll be happy to hear from you. I know she wants to hear all about your fancy college visit plans with Reagan.”
Pretty sure my abuela doesn’t want to hear my real plans for this weekend, unless she’s magically changed her stance on boys, drinking, and parties. But I just say, “Not much to report until we actually go.”
“Are you looking forward to it?”
“Very much,” I say with a smile I hope is just the right size to convey that he’s not misguided to be letting me go on my own with my best friend instead of him and my mother taking me, as they’d originally wanted to do. “Reagan has big plans for us to spend hours memorizing every inch of the library.”
“I knew I liked that girl.” He kisses my cheek and stands up. “Get some sleep, mija. You know the rule—if you’re not caught up by the weekend…”
“I know, Papi. Trust me, I know.”
“I know you know.” He lets himself out, closing the door gently behind him. I collapse back on my bed, send a quick reply text to Reagan to make sure she got home okay, and pick the book back up.
Six days. Six days is all I have to get through, and then I’ll get my first hint of proof that all of this is worth it, that there’s a point to Hemingway and Trig and Physics and hours spent studying for the ACTs with Reagan at the Joe’s counter, when I already know what I love to do and it doesn’t involve any of it.
Six days, and I’ll finally see what’s beyond this.
CHAPTER TWO
REAGAN
It’s a lot easier to pack quickly when everything you own fits into a six-by-eight room in a double-wide. If I repeat that to myself enough, maybe I’ll grow some patience with Vic instead of getting tempted to drive off to Southeastern without her. Much like my best friend, the sun is taking its sweet time showing up that morning. The clock on my dashboard hits 6:29, making it fifteen minutes since I pulled up in front of the Reyeses’ two-story, twice as long as it took me to throw a few things into a bag and drive over here.
My palms are itching to jam the horn, but it’s way too early and Vic already knows I’m out here; she’s given me the “one more minute” gesture from her window twice already. I can only hope visiting a college for a weekend will provide her with some much-needed counting skills.
Finally, her front door swings open and there stands Vic, laden with more bags than I even own.
“What the hell could you possibly need that much crap for?” I demand as soon as she gets close enough for me to pop the trunk. “Do you understand what a weekend is?”
“Do you understand what college is?” She tosses a huge purple monstrosity of a bag in the trunk and then yanks open the passenger door and slides in next to me. Yet another bag is tossed onto the floor and two others into the backseat. “Besides, you told me to bring snacks.” She waves a hand behind her. “Voila. Snacks. And…,” she says slowly, as if drawing out some kind of torture, “you wouldn’t want me to leave this behind, would you?” She reaches into her bag and brandishes the one thing she knows I couldn’t make the trip without.
“Gimme gimme gimme!” I reach out and yank her phone from her hands. She promised she’d fill it with music for our road trips, and I’m relieved to see she made good on that. “Does this actually have good music on it now or am I going to be listening to boy bands the entire way to Southeastern?”
“First of all, One Direction is good music,” she declares, buckling herself in as I scroll through the playlists, “and second of all, I told you I would throw on some of your screaming banshees and I did.”
“I dare you to call Janis Joplin a screaming banshee to her face. Metaphorically speaking, of course.” I live without plenty of things most consider essential, but music for a road trip isn’t one of them. Since buying a car wiped out every dollar that wasn’t earmarked for the Reagan Forrester College Fund, and the radio is nothing but country music and political talk shows about how Vic’s fellow Mexicans a
re ruining the country, I’m sadly reliant on someone who thinks Rihanna is the greatest lyricist of our time to provide it.
“I’m not afraid of any chick named Janis,” says Vic, yanking down the sun visor to expose the mirror and pulling lip gloss out of her bag. “I’ll gladly say it to her face.”
“She died in 1970.” I pull away from the house just sharply enough to make her draw a jagged line of Petal Pink on her face.
“Then she’s probably not going to argue with me, is she?” Vic says sweetly, wiping the gloss from her cheek. “Unlike a certain someone, who is going to lose her best friend status realllly quickly if she tries that again while I’m doing my eyeliner.”
“You do your eyeliner in a moving vehicle and you deserve whatever’s coming to you.”
She sighs. “You are a sadist.”
“If I were a sadist, I would keep driving right on past Joe’s and deprive you of the sugary goodness I know you’ve been craving since you woke up this morning.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“No,” I admit, “I wouldn’t. No chance I’m making the two-hour drive to Southeastern without a super tall black coffee in my system.” I pull into the parking lot at Joe’s two minutes later, feeling almost guilty at the number of cars already there, belonging to customers I won’t be serving today. While Vic rims her eyes with black pencil, I scan the parking lot, looking for the dirty navy-blue pickup truck with a “Kiss Me, I’m Irish” bumper sticker I know won’t be there.
I do, however, see an equally familiar and very unwelcome junker a few spots down, with some even more unwelcome bodies emerging. If Vic doesn’t hurry the hell up with her eyeliner…shit. Too late.
“Boys, look who it is! Ragin’ Reagan, the killer lay!” Sean Fitzpatrick’s voice is nails on a chalkboard, magnified by a PA system.
“Are you sure she’s any good?” Drew Ballard brays, and for the first time in my life I’m relieved that when Vic applies eye makeup, she gets into a zone, especially pre-coffee. The shit from these guys has gotten way worse in the past few months, and I hate, hate, hate the idea of the only person in this town I actually respect hearing it. When she first moved here, she used to ask why people gave me such a hard time; I said they were just giving me shit because I’m on food stamps, knowing bringing money into it would make her uncomfortable enough to stop asking. Which she did soon after. “Wouldn’t your brother have stuck around if she was?”
The guys crack up into laughter, finally drawing Vic’s attention, but before she can take stock of names, faces, or the fact that I’m their target, I tell her we have to go.
She whimpers and tosses the pencil back in her bag. “We can’t leave yet. If I don’t get a coffee right now I will literally die.”
“I really hope they teach you the meaning of ‘literally’ in college too,” I mumble under my breath as I drag her into the diner. We force ourselves to smile brief greetings at everyone present because in a town like Charytan, nearly every face is a familiar one, especially when your dad’s been a day laborer here for twenty years. I’m relieved to see Steve—aka Freckles, for reasons that are obvious if you’ve ever so much as caught a glimpse of him—behind the counter; the guys never dare to be dicks to me when he’s around.
I glance behind me before we dodge around a passing trucker to get in line. The boys are still shooting the shit in the parking lot, and thankfully can’t be heard through the glass. Finger-combing her long brown waves while she scans the pastry racks, Vic remains blissfully oblivious. “So what is it you hope to get out of visiting Southeastern, seeing as you have zero interest in parties, sororities, or anything else that actually sounds like fun?”
“They still have that nunnery, right?” She sticks out her tongue at me, and I return the gesture before resuming the age-old quandary of a banana-nut muffin or a somewhat more well-rounded-sounding egg ’n cheese. Hmmm… “I’d love to sit in on a class,” I answer, sniffing to see if I can determine which is fresher. “There’s an Intro to Sociology lecture that meets at one today, if you’re interested in joining.”
“Are you kidding? First of all, I don’t even know what Sociology is, and don’t pretend you do. Second of all, why would you want to hang out with a bunch of kids who were crazy enough to take class on a Friday?”
Before I can respond, Freckles motions for us to step up.
“Hey,” I greet him with a smile that requires a whole lot more effort now that I’ve started my morning off with a Sean Fitzpatrick sighting. “How’s it going on the early shift?”
“About a thousand times slower than when you’re working,” he teases, though he’s probably lying. Freckles is the morning-est morning person I know. It’s sick, really. He pulls out the old-school pad he loves to use even though he has a crazy memory for orders. “Lemme guess. Super tall black coffee and a banana-nut muffin?”
“You think you know me so well.” I sniff. “I’ll have you know, I was considering an egg ’n cheese instead of the muffin. Care to be the deciding vote?”
“Tell you what. How about I slip you the egg ’n cheese on the side? You deserve it for all your years of dedicated service.”
I should say no. Not that Freckles is a thief—Joe’s totally down with us helping ourselves occasionally. (I’d say we were the kids he never had, except he has two kids; he just doesn’t like them.) I just don’t like the idea of being someone’s charity case.
But today, I’m so wired with excitement, I decide to take him up on it. “Freckles, my man, you are the greatest co-worker a person who generally hates co-workers could ever ask for.”
He grins and calls back my sandwich order to Hector, the line cook, while he gets to work making my coffee. Next to me, Vic heaves a dramatic sigh. “Hello, I’m here too,” she mutters. “Yeah, skim milk, please. Thanks.”
“Hey, Freckles, can we also get a large coffee with skim milk and a powdered sugar donut?”
“You got it, Pepe.” Pepe, as in cartoon skunk Pepe Le Pew, for the white streak (actually a lack of pigment) that runs from my front-most curl down in a stripe through my right eyebrow and lash, which I guess is obvious if you’ve ever so much as glimpsed me.
“Tia Maria, he has such a crush on you,” she huffs, examining the ends of her own glossy hair. “It’s like no one else is even here.”
I can’t help cracking a smile, though Vic’s way off base. I used to think Tia Maria was such a charming substitute for a swear word…until I met Vic’s Aunt Maria. Now I want to cover children’s ears when she says it in their presence. “He does not; he just knows me because we’ve worked together for three freakin’ years. He’s a nice guy.”
“Whatever.” She leans against the counter and taps her foot impatiently while we wait for our order. A couple of minutes later, we have our drinks and assorted sugary, fatty goodness and we’re back on the road.
“Do you think whatever college guy I hook up with tonight will make it impossible for me to ever go back to high school boys?” Vic asks dreamily as she swipes a bit of powdered sugar from her lip.
“I was just wondering the same thing about the library.” I fiddle with the phone, clicking triumphantly when I discover she’s actually put the Runaways on it. “Do you know that the Southeastern library supposedly has over fifteen thousand books? Fifteen thousand! Can you imagine if the Charytan High library had fifteen thousand books?”
“You are such a nerd.” Vic examines her cuticles. “How are we friends?”
The actual answer is that Vic had arrived at Charytan High at the beginning of sophomore year, exactly when I desperately needed a new friend who knew nothing about me and had no attachment to the ex who’d ruined my life. I didn’t have much competition for the role of her BFF because people were too scared of her—gasp!—brown skin and Hispanic last name to get to know that she’s a fiercely loyal, eerily resourceful fashion savant who’s so damn full of positive energy it actually manages to infect me of all people on occasion.
There�
�s no need to say it, though, and I simply roll my eyes and turn up the volume.
Two hours, several bathroom breaks, infinite rest-stop selfies, and lots of bickering about music later, we arrive at the gates to Southeastern Kansas University. “Holy crap, this place is huge,” I observe immediately, and Vic nods in silent agreement. We emerge slowly from the car, staring up in awe at the huge buildings and lush green lawns. Compared to the scraggly grass and dirt roads of Charytan, Southeastern may as well be the most beautiful place on earth.
“This is so ridiculously gorgeous.” I inhale deeply, taking in the tall, leafy trees, just beginning to change; the beautiful white-trimmed red brick; and colorful banners proclaiming everything from upcoming blood drives to general welcomes. Everything just looks so… bright here. Breathing in fills my lungs with the scent of freshly cut grass rather than cooking fumes and truck exhaust. Part of me is nervous to set foot on the campus, like the second I do, everyone will see just how drab I am against the vibrancy of real life. But then Vic hooks an arm through mine, and I remember that I’m walking in with plenty of vibrancy by my side.
“So gorgeous,” Vic agrees, squeezing my arm. When I follow her line of vision, she’s looking at a hulking blond guy wearing a deep-green T-shirt that spreads three Greek letters across his broad chest.
“Jesus, Vic. You have such a one-track mind.”
“I do not; I’m interested in girls too. As in, which girls wanna be my future sorority sisters.” She runs her fingers absently through her hair while her warm brown eyes scout the campus, and I pretend my stomach’s not twinging at the thought of all the new friends she’s gonna make at college while I’m hanging out with books every night. “And I think I’m gonna try going by Tori in college. It sounds so much more adult than Vic, no?”
