“This is so delicious, Mrs. Florez,” I said. “It’s so much more flavorful than anything we eat at my house.”
“My mother’s cooking has a sabor Cubano,” Daniel said, rolling his Rs in that way I thought was so charming. “It means a Cuban flavor.”
I knew that the dinner was cheap to make, mostly just rice and beans with one or two big pieces of chicken shredded into it, but that didn’t matter. It was better than a lot of expensive steaks I’ve had.
“Daniel told me that he was born in Cuba?” I asked his mother.
“We come from Cienfuegos, southeast of La Habana,” she said. Her accent was a lot stronger than Daniel’s, and sometimes I had to strain to understand her. “In English it means one thousand fires. I was a school teacher, and Daniel’s father was an engineer, and we lived in an apartment that looked out over the Bahia de Cienfuegos, like a big lake.”
It was sweet the way she pronounced his name, with the accent on the last syllable, like his name was Danielle. But I bet that really bugged him when he was a kid.
She smiled and had a faraway look in her eyes. “Even before Daniel started school, we knew he was especial,” she said. I noticed that she added an extra “e” before her “s” sounds, and wondered if that was common among Spanish speakers, or if it was just her. I could look it up, I thought.
Then I realized I was acting like a geek.
She took a forkful of chicken, then continued. “Daniel could learn anything quickly. He was reading books with chapters when the other children were still learning the alphabet. When he started school his teacher was surprised at how smart he was and made a report about him."
“A report?” I asked.
“In Cuba, they watch everything. The government there is not like here. There the politicians and the police are in charge of everything. They make all kinds of decisions that people here make on their own.”
I didn’t say anything. It sounded like a terrible place to live.
“You are going to college, Melissa?” she asked.
I nodded. “But I don’t know where yet.”
“You see? You are free to make your choices. If you were Cuban, you would already know what they are going to do with you.”
She put down her fork. “When Daniel started school, he was five. Very soon people come to our apartment, to talk to me and his father, to examine him. Daniel’s father and I are nervous. We worry they would take him away from us.”
Across from me, Daniel squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. I didn’t know why. It wasn’t like his mother was showing me bare-bottomed baby pictures of him or anything.
“Take him away?” I asked. “Why?”
“Because he is so smart. We think the government will want to put him in a special school, and that we will not see him again.”
“That’s terrible.”
She looked sad. “My husband, he had gone to the university for engineering, and me for my teaching degree. But if they know how smart Daniel is, they will never let us keep him.”
She dabbed her napkin at the corners of her eyes. “We know we must take Daniel and leave Cuba. But that is no easy task. We must find the right person to smuggle us away, and pay a great deal of money.”
“Wow.” Daniel’s life story sounded just like a movie.
“It was very dangerous. And then, my husband was killed just before we leave.”
She blew her nose with her napkin. “But we talk about happier things. Daniel says you are very good in your math class.”
“Oh, no, Daniel is the genius. He’s just helping me study.”
“But you understood that proof on Wednesday,” he said. “That one I was having trouble with.”
It was true. I was reading ahead in the book and I figured something out that Daniel hadn’t gotten to, and I got to teach him something for a change.
“That’s just because you hadn’t read that part yet.”
“Maybe you can convince Daniel to take the college test,” she said. “He refuses, because he knows we do not have much money. But I am sure if he tests, then a college will offer him a scholarship.”
“Mami, we have gone over this already.”
“You haven’t taken the SATs?” I asked Daniel.
He shook his head. “It costs money, and it’s useless. I’m just going to work at ComputerCo full time after I graduate and save up some money. Then maybe I’ll go to college after that.”
“I tell him I will pay for the test,” Mrs. Florez said.
“I said no, Mami. Comprende?”
I was surprised to hear Daniel speak so sharply to his mother. He sounded like me, and I realized how snotty I must sound when I talk to my parents. It’s a good thing the Big Mistake is even worse than I am.
I wanted to help with the dishes, but Mrs. Florez insisted that I sit in the living room with Daniel. We sat across from each other, him on an old sofa, me on a floral-print armchair with bad springs. I could feel one of them digging into my behind but I didn’t want to be rude and say anything.
When she was out of the room I said, “You should totally take the SATs. You’d probably get like a perfect score.”
“And what good would that do?”
“What if I take it again with you,” I said. “We could compare our scores. See if your brains really have rubbed off on me.”
“I don’t know.”
“I do. On Monday we’ll both sign up for the next testing.”
He didn’t look happy, but at least he didn’t argue. “I am sorry my house is not as nice as yours,” he said. “There is no den for us to go into, no Xbox or big screen TV.”
“I don’t care about that stuff, Daniel. Your house is very nice, and your mother obviously fills it with a lot of love.”
Mrs. Florez called us back to the table for tiny cups of espresso she called cafecitos and slices of my carrot cake. Despite my confidence over understanding the recipe, I was scared as I took the first piece into my mouth. But it was moist and delicious. The raisins were plump and juicy, the shredded carrots sweet. I thought of my parents eating the baby cake at home and hoped they liked it too.
Daniel walked me out to my mom’s car when dinner was over. “Thank you again. Your mom is a great cook and it was really nice to meet her.”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t have a date by ourselves, though. I’d like to go to the movies with you.”
“I have a feeling you don’t want to watch the movie.” We both smiled at each other shyly, and then he stepped forward to kiss me. Though I didn’t feel those electric flashes between us again as our lips touched, I knew I wasn’t going to let Daniel Florez go for a long time.
Freaks
On Sunday I went on line and signed us both up for stand-by slots for the SAT on Saturday, at a testing center near Philadelphia. I told Daniel Monday morning as we were waiting for Mrs. Ash to find her lecture notes.
“I changed my hours at ComputerCo so I can stay after school with you every day but Tuesday, when you have literary magazine.”
I could tell other people were registering that Daniel and I were a couple. Mindy Kagan asked him a question after math class, and Brie smiled at him as we passed her table at lunch.
I found some SAT practice tests online, and we sat next to each other in the library that afternoon. Daniel whipped through all of them faster than I did. When he finished, he found a research site from a big university medical school that was doing brain experiments.
“I e-mailed you an article,” he said when I submitted my last answer. “It’s not exactly what we’ve been going through but it’s not far off.”
The article was about identical twins and the way their brains worked. Scientists had connected sensors to each twin and given them identical stimuli, to which they had reacted very similarly. Then the sensors were disconnected, and one twin was given material to learn, while the other wasn’t.
They were tested on the material, and predictably, the twin who had been taught the material
did markedly better on the test than the twin who hadn’t.
Then the scientists repeated the experiment, giving one twin material to learn while the sensors connected him to the other. When they were both tested, the twin who hadn’t been taught the material still scored very close to the twin who hadn’t.
“What does this mean to us?” I asked. “We’re not identical twins.”
“But it shows that learning can pass between two people who are linked to each other.”
“Daniel, we kissed. We weren’t connected with electrodes or anything.”
“I’m trying to find anything I can,” he said, and he turned back to his computer.
I still had literary magazine on Tuesday afternoon, so Daniel worked then, but Wednesday and Thursday we studied together. We had midterms coming up so we had to focus on studying, but every day we tried to take a few minutes to look for more brain studies.
“Look at this one,” I said to Daniel on Thursday afternoon, just before we had to leave to catch the late bus. It was a study about giving pregnant women hormone treatments and how those could affect the baby’s ability to learn.
It was an old study, and the doctor who pioneered it died when the first babies were only three and four years old, so there wasn’t anything conclusive. But he demonstrated that babies whose mothers received the injections responded more quickly to stimuli and seemed to learn better.
“You think my mother could have gotten some kind of shots when she was in Cuba?” he asked when he had finished reading.
“You could ask her. She said that you were a smart baby right from the start.”
“She doesn’t like to talk about Cuba at all. And you know the kind of medicine they have there, it’s not exactly cutting edge.”
“But you should ask anyway.”
“I will.” He walked me down to the bus dock. Both our buses were waiting there, and just before I stepped onto mine Daniel leaned over and kissed my cheek.
It was our first PDA—public display of affection. Pretty soon we’d be all over each other, like some couples. Not.
Saturday morning I rolled out of bed before the sun was even up, grabbed a chocolate-chip muffin from the counter (vegan and gluten-free, of course, and with chips made of carob instead of chocolate) and snuck out of the house like a thief.
My parents knew where I was going, of course; I had told them I was taking the SATs again. But it was too early to deal with any parental crap. I knew that if my mother said anything about the test—even a good luck—I would probably explode. I guess I had gotten so accustomed to being ignored that any contact drove me nuts.
I picked Daniel up, and before we got on the highway I treated us to breakfast from McDonald’s. Pancakes made with real flour, bacon made from real pigs—it was heaven. And I justified it because we needed good nutrition if we were going to perform well on our tests, right?
The testing center was in northeast Philly, in a former grocery store in a strip mall. You could still see where the refrigerated cases had been along the walls. We registered and got lucky; they had enough computers available for both of us. I remembered taking the test a couple of months before; I had been so stressed about doing well, and it had seemed pretty hard.
I had scored high enough to be competitive for the schools my parents wanted me to apply to, though I wasn’t in the top percentile or anything. My verbal scores were better than my math.
This time, though, I thought the test was a breeze. It was an interesting challenge, and I enjoyed it. Daniel finished before I did, though not by much, and as we drove back home I asked him how he thought he did.
“Okay, I guess. I understood everything and I think I answered the way I was supposed to.”
I told him how much better I felt about this testing than the one I’d done in the spring. “They send your scores direct to the colleges?” he asked.
“Uh-huh. Which did you put on your form?”
“I haven’t applied anywhere.”
“Daniel. At least you should apply to the community college. You can take a class or two while you work at ComputerCo.”
He shrugged. “We’ll see.”
As we drove back toward Levittown, I asked, “Did you talk to your mother about that article we read—about the shots?”
“She shut me down completely. Just like I expected.”
“Really? Not a word?”
“Nothing. She won’t talk about anything from back then.”
Well, that was irritating. Parents. They’re always after you to talk, but when you want to quiz them, they shut up.
During the next week, we studied together when we could, sat next to each other in class and at lunch. I sat with Brie on the morning bus and texted her every night. She was still obsessed with Military Boy, and I had to struggle to get a few characters in about Daniel. The only thing I didn’t tell her was about the changes in my brain. That was just between Daniel and me.
The next Saturday was my Aunt Rita’s birthday, and the whole family had to leave that morning to trek up to Scranton to celebrate with her. We stayed in a motel and didn’t get home until late Sunday afternoon, so I didn’t get to talk to Daniel all weekend. Since he didn’t have a cell phone we couldn’t even text each other.
It made me irritable all weekend—either that, or just the fact of having to be in Harrisburg, or having to share a motel room with the Big Mistake. Scranton isn’t exactly a tourist capital, you know. There is absolutely nothing to do there besides a couple of lame museums and a couple of coal mines. Not that I could escape my aunt’s house anyway.
Robbie had a boy cousin his age who was also mad for video games, and the two of them took over the den, playing loud games, shouting, and elbowing each other all the time. My mom and my aunt had the kitchen staked out, cooking and gossiping, while my father and my uncle sat in the living room. That left me like a girl without a country, wandering from room to room trying to find a place where I could just be left alone.
I finally settled on this little corner of the upstairs hallway that my aunt used as an office, where she had a computer with a dial-up modem. Fortunately I had brought my laptop with me, and I was able to steal a Wi-Fi signal from a neighbor with an open connection. I tried to do some more brain research but my heart just wasn’t in it. I wanted to be sitting with Daniel at the library, ready to turn to him any time I found anything interesting.
My father is only half-Italian, and so is his sister, but she married a man whose family came from Puglia, which I preferred to call Uglia. It’s the heel of the boot, which my uncle insists means that Puglia supports the whole country. Their kitchen was decorated with grape vines and fake stone like it was some kind of cellar in the old country. A big red, white, and green Italian flag hung in the den, along with a relief map of Italy, with Brindisi, the town where he’s from, marked with a series of silver stars. Between him and my mom they’ve got the Common Market covered.
The only good thing about going to my aunt’s house is that they drink wine like my mom drinks coffee, and they insist that Robbie and I drink some too. They try to water it down, but Robbie and I always manage to keep them topping up our glasses, so by the end of the night on Saturday we both had a pretty good buzz on.
It was after eleven by the time our parents dragged us back to the motel. When we were little, my parents used to make Robbie and me share a bed next to them—but that was back when he was a wild child, so I never got any sleep. Now they get a second motel room next to theirs, the kind with the adjoining door, and trust the Big Mistake and me not to kill each other while we’re unsupervised.
I went into the bathroom and changed into my nightgown, and by the time I came out Robbie was already tucked in, the covers pulled up just under his neck. If I hadn’t seen his T-shirt and jeans thrown on the floor, I’d have guessed he was fully dressed under there.
I turned out the light and crawled under the covers myself. “You like Daniel, don’t you?” he asked.
; “Why do you care?”
“Just asking. Geez, don’t get all defensive.”
“I like him,” I said, after a while. “We get along. He gets me, you know?”
“Like we don’t?”
“It’s different. Your family, they have to put up with you. It doesn’t mean they can see inside your soul or anything.”
“And Daniel can?”
I thought back to that first deep kiss, when my brain started crackling with electricity and some part of Daniel’s brain seeped into mine. “Yeah, he can.”
“I like Jennifer Terrazzini, but I don’t think she can see into my soul,” he said, unexpectedly.
“Jennifer Terrazzini? The one with the frizzy brown hair and braces?”
“She’s getting them off next month.”
I turned to him. “Have you kissed her yet?”
“Melissa.”
“Hey, you started this.”
“Just a little. She kissed my cheek.”
“That’s a good sign,” I said.
“You think so?”
“Sure.” I slid back against the pillow. “Go to sleep, Robbie.”
“Good night, Missy.”
I grabbed the bolster pillow and threw it over at him, then turned on my side and went to sleep.
When I met up with Daniel at the library on Monday, he said he had quizzed his mother again about getting shots when she was pregnant with him. “It was weird. She said no, but she changed the subject fast. I think she did, and that’s what happened to me.”
“You make it sound like it was some kind of tragic accident. It made you smart.”
“It made me a freak. Until I kissed you and made you a freak too, I didn’t know anybody else whose brain worked like mine.”
“But why would some kind of shot that your mother took work on me?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. But we have a math test on Wednesday we have to study for. And we won’t have any study time tomorrow afternoon.”
We spent the next couple of hours testing each other on math. It was very cool the way I could just look at a problem and immediately see how to approach it. I’d never been that great at math before; like my father had pointed out, I could memorize formulas, I just couldn’t always put them to work.
Soul Kiss Page 8
