“Yes! I don’t need you to start worrying, okay? Look, I did everything I could to come to school today, but my mom is just being a total nut. And we seriously don’t need to get on the wrong side of Officer Dirk right now, so I’m going to hang up before you get detention.”
And she does. I feel as alone as Graciela when she was lost in the forest and living in a cave. I try to remind myself that I’ve been through worse, such as the four weeks last summer that Sirina went off to her epilepsy camp, leaving me lonely and miserable, a shell of myself. Even though it was nearly impossible, I somehow did manage to stay alive. So I should be able to handle one day without her.
I look down at my purple tunic. I look down at the heels I borrowed from my mom’s closet. And suddenly I feel like an eighth grader in costume instead of the Mighty Mariela I was last night. It’s like without Sirina, I have no Mariela powers at all.
Amelia’s my lab partner in second-period Biology. Despite my saggy, soggy, heavy heart, today’s The Big Day. Today is The Day We Dissect a Worm. I’ve prepared for this day. I’ve said good-bye to my last enjoyable gummy worm. I’ve come to terms with the idea that I will cut into the flesh of a real being. I’ve even thought about whether I should have whooping cough today or not, and have decided that I should not. For today is a rite of passage.
Also, turns out I was vaccinated against whooping cough.
Other people are naming their worm things like Pepe or Brutus, or even Bait, but Amelia decides we should name our worm either Pat or Terry, because it’s both a boy and a girl. I don’t like either choice. “How about something like Kai or Drew?”
She makes a face and considers my suggestions, then declares our worm Dylan. “So, do you want to watch or cut?” she asks me.
Cristina would watch. But Mariela—now, she would cut.
So I say, “Cut.” I put on my gloves and stand over the worm.
“Now,” our teacher, Ms. Frederick, says, “as you begin your dissection, think precision. Steady hands. Remember, class, you are not cutting into a Hot Pocket. You are performing surgery on a delicate and lovely creature.”
I hold my hand out. “Scalpel,” I say to Amelia. She looks at me strangely, but hands over the knife, and I slice carefully into Dylan. This is no butter knife. And I see it for myself. Five tiny little hearts.
“Look!” I say to Amelia. “Isn’t this amazing?”
Amelia leans over to look closely, then recoils. “Ew!” she says. “Gross! What is that?”
“Dylan’s hearts,” I say. “They’re fascinating.”
“Honestly, Mabry, you’re the only person I know who would think worm guts are ‘fascinating.’”
Kipper, sitting across the lab table, glances at me shyly. “My worm has some dirt in its crop.” Then he smiles. “Her name is Glenda.”
“It’s not a she,” Amelia corrects him.
“Kipper’s just getting all excited about the girl parts!” Brian Stead, his lab-partner-slash-bully, says, whooping with laughter. The other guys around us laugh and bump fists, until Ms. Frederick tells them, in teacher language, to shut up.
Kipper looks up at me and smiles with quiet dignity. I smile back. Sirina was right. He did deserve some positive press.
In the stretch of hallway visible over Kipper’s shoulder, I see Nicolás. He walks slowly, and his face is blotchy and almost as red as his sweatshirt, like he’s been crying. The teasing must still be going on. It’s like someone’s picked a little scab off my heart and it’s bleeding again.
I force my attention back to the gentle Dylan and his various and magnificent parts.
It’s a bit ironic. You always think of love conquering all. But I’m starting to wonder if that’s true. I mean, just look around the room of one-hearted, mean-spirited creatures like Brian, cutting open the bodies of five-hearted, gentle-spirited creatures like Glenda and Dylan.
Forget doves. Why isn’t the worm the universal symbol for love?
I make a quick stop to change at my locker between fourth and fifth periods. As I’m changing out of the heels and into flats, a boy voice says, “Heard you’re doing an article about the crime scene.”
I spin around. It’s Abe. Patrick stands just behind him.
Abe continues. “Dude, you should talk to us. It was manic.”
“What happened?” I ask. I know Sirina wouldn’t approve of me talking with the rumor mill, but what else do we have at this point?
“Okay,” Abe says. His head bobbles and his eyes are wide. “So we were downstairs, just, you know, practicing fight moves—”
“Yeah,” Patrick says, crouching suddenly. “Hi-yah!” He completes a series of stiff hand movements that seem to go on way too long.
“So you two were doing karate when this happened?”
Abe says, “Yeah, well, Nick too, and we—”
“Wait. Nick?” My Nick?
I have a memory flash from Wednesday, the day it happened. The same day as the band rehearsal. Abe calling Nick to come downstairs. Nick running right past me without even a moment’s glance. My heart pangs now just as it did then.
“Yeah, we were doing some fierce spin kicks—”
Patrick snorts out a laugh. “Yeah, I got Abe in the cojones!”
“Yeah, dude, I still owe you one!” Abe says, and makes a false kick in the general direction of Patrick’s pants, while Patrick squeezes his knees together and squats.
Mere children. Both of them.
“Anyway,” I say.
“Anyway, so then we heard this loud crash. Dude, it was, like, really loud.”
“Yeah, it was like a cannon,” Patrick adds.
“So I looked over and saw the guy who broke the window. He was huge,” Abe continues, “like a giant, and I was like, ‘One step closer, dude, and I’ll open up a can of roundhouse on your—’”
“No way, you said that?” Patrick says, in sincere amazement. He holds his fist out for a bump.
Abe looks at me, and back to Patrick, his head bobbling a little. “Dude, you were there!” He looks back at me and sighs, flustered. “I did say it. He probably just didn’t, you know, hear me.”
“Okay,” I say, “so what else? Can you give me a description?”
“Oh. Yeah.” Abe brightens back up. “Okay, so I stand on my left leg,” he says, demonstrating. “And then I bend my right knee and bring it up—” He looks like a dog about to pee on a fire hydrant.
“Abe? I mean a description of the guy who broke the window. Not the can of roundhouse.”
Patrick cackles.
“Oh,” Abe says, putting his leg back down. “I mean, the guy looked huge.”
“What else?”
“Humongous,” he adds.
“Like the Hulk,” Patrick says, holding his arms out wide.
“Can you give me any other details? Like his hair? His eyes? Anything like that?”
“Um.” Abe bites his lower lip and looks toward the ceiling. “Well—it happened so fast.”
I wait a moment, but he doesn’t offer anything else. “Okay, well. Then what happened after the guy broke the window?” I ask.
“I mean, so, like, me and Patrick—”
“We’re not idiots—we took off,” Patrick interrupts.
“Dude, we didn’t ‘take off,’” Abe says, impatient. “We went to find Officer Dirk! You make it sound like we ran away!”
“Well, we didn’t want to get blamed for it,” Patrick says.
“What about Nick?” I ask.
Abe shrugs. “What about him?”
“Did he run off with you?”
“We didn’t,” Abe seethes, “run off. We went. To get help. Big. Difference.”
“Yeah, and Nick couldn’t keep up with us. We were like bullets. Pyooooo,” Patrick says, his finger ripping through the air in front of him.
“Dude,” Abe says, slowly shaking his head. “Just. Shut. Up.”
I realize I’ve got to interview Nick. Even if I wasn’t already dying to talk to h
im, I need him for this story. But then I remember that it’s pretty much impossible to interview someone who has been avoiding me at all costs. So I ask Abe, “Can you get Nick to call me?”
Abe looks at me. “You don’t need me. Just call his mommy,” he says, and he and Patrick crack up. I start to point out that Nick is one of his best friends, but Abe’s already tuned out. He and Patrick start karate-chopping themselves away, until Abe cripples Patrick with the crotch-kick payback he’s been waiting for.
yo escribo
tú escribes
ella escribe
nosotros escribimos
ellos escriben
I am a sharp-dressed reporter with shiny hair and a cinched-waist dress. He is a tousle-haired eyewitness to a terrifying crime. We meet in secret, in a back alley, behind the lavandería. A nightgown, drying on a line, flaps in the breeze. “Tell me what you know,” I say. Dígame. He looks into my eyes—deeply in them—and he says, “Mi querida, my darling, I will tell you anything.”
The final bell has just rung and I’m hiding in an empty classroom across the hall from Nicolás’s locker. Okay, so I’m stalking him just a little bit. I’m not nearly as bad as Elisabet, who I’ve seen in an episode lying in wait, carefully watching for her dead sister’s husband, from underneath his own bed.
It’s just that every time I see Nick, it’s like trying to corner a squirrel, so I’m going to have to catch him off guard. Okay, fine. Like Elisabet.
And then he appears! He’s still a little blotchy, like he was earlier, and his hair looks barely brushed. Even so, my lungs inflate and every noticeable cell in my body goes on high alert. I make myself wait until he’s opened his locker and is reaching for something from the top shelf before I tiptoe out of the classroom toward him.
But then—oh no! No!
Our eyes catch in the reflection of the mirror glued inside his locker door.
His head whips around.
“Nick.” I try to speak calmly. “I mean no trouble.” Which, it hits me, are EXACTLY the same words Elisabet used. “I’m doing a story for The Vindicator,” I say quickly. “About the window incident? I talked to Abe and Patrick. They told me you were there.”
“Oh. Yeah.” His eyes dart around, like they’re trying to escape from mine.
I look over at the empty classroom. “Can we go in there and talk for a few minutes?” I do my best not to sound like a smitten girl who is practically weak with love.
He hesitates, but then nods, shuts his locker, and follows me.
I sit down at a desk, and he finds a desk away from me and begins tracing his finger over a carved-in T, while my heart cries out silently. Estás tan cerca, pero tan lejos. You are so close, but so far away.
But I gather myself, remembering Mariela.
“So,” I say. “You, Patrick, and Abe were downstairs.”
“Yeah, well, we were practicing karate moves. Down by the mechanical arts room.” He looks at the wall as he speaks to me, and I jot down his words in my notebook. “Patrick meant to kick me but he ended up accidentally kicking Abe in the—well, you know. We were kind of joking around and then we heard the window break.”
“They said they went to get help.”
“Well, they just went running off in the opposite direction. And I—I mean, I looked up and saw someone for a second, but the guy tore off. He had a sweatshirt on. It was blue, maybe. Or black. One with a hood, so he was kind of shadowy. It was hard to see.”
I write it down. “Abe and Patrick said he was huge,” I tell him.
“They barely saw him. But he was tall, I guess.”
“So what did you do?” My heart starts to crawl out of the little pit down deep in my chest. “Did you give chase?”
“Do what?”
“Give chase? Like, run after him?”
“I mean, not exactly. The guy flew through the emergency exit. He set off the alarm.”
“You mean, before you could get to him,” I prompt.
“Um.” He leans back in his chair. “Sort of. Yeah.”
So courageous!
“How far did you chase him?”
He sucks his lips in, activating a little dimple-like dent in his left cheek. My heart squeezes.
He smacks his lips apart. “Um? Not too far, because Officer Dirk came down and cleared the area.”
“Did you see where he went after he went through the door?”
“It looked like he ran for the woods.”
You are so brave, my love. My unsung hero. You are brimming with valor.
“What?” he asks.
“Oh! Nothing,” I say, suddenly aware that my thoughts were trying to make their way toward him. Like my heart. “I mean, wow. Running after him.”
“Oh.” He lets out a little panting laugh. “Well, I mean, I didn’t exactly…” He shrugs, smiling shyly, still avoiding my eyes.
A bell rings—the one that rudely demands that you leave the building, after you’ve been required to be there all day.
He shuffles in his seat. “I better go,” he says.
“Just one more question,” I say. “What was going through your mind?”
His eyes shift left.
I try again. “I mean, Abe and Patrick just took off in the other direction. But not you. Why not? Was it because of a sense of school safety? Justice?”
His eyes shift right. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, I didn’t want anyone to get hurt or anything.” Then he looks at me, as I commit his words to paper. “But I really better go. My mom—” His voice skids on the word, and he cuts himself off. “My ride’s probably waiting.”
We stand up to go, and I say, “Maybe you would have caught him if Officer Dirk hadn’t gotten in the way.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Well,” I say to his bouncing-around eyes, “thank you. And let me know if you think of anything else—”
“Like what?” he asks.
“Like a more detailed description of the intruder.” I think about La Vida Rica. When Paolo was robbed by a road bandit, it took about four episodes for him to recall exactly what happened and realize the man behind the kerchief was none other than his own half brother, Roberto! “Sometimes more details come to you afterward.”
He nods. And we part ways. I turn around to see if he’s watching me, but he’s not. But I could swear he’s walking a little taller.
Maybe Kipper Garrett isn’t the only person who deserves a little positive press.
I go straight to Sirina’s house after school. She answers the door in her pajamas, eating a pickle, a copy of Mental Floss in her hand.
“You look like you’re on vacation.”
“More like house arrest,” she says, standing back for me to come in.
“How’s the aura?” I ask as we go into the kitchen.
“Totally gone. It was barely there in the first place. Remind me not to tell my mother next time, unless we’re doing standardized testing, okay?” She says this purposefully loud enough for her mother to hear.
“I heard that!” her mom calls from the living room.
“Anyway,” Sirina says to me, sitting down on a stool at the island. “What did I miss? Any developments?”
“Actually…” I smile.
“Mabry, what?”
“I got the story!”
“Officer Dirk talked to you?” Everything on her face lifts upward. Her eyebrows, the corners of her mouth, her cheeks.
“Well, no, but—”
Her thrilled face melts into annoyance.
“You talked to Abe,” she says. Her voice flattens with disap-pointment.
“No, listen. Abe and Patrick came looking for me. For us. They heard we were working on the story. They were all like, ‘Yeah, you should have been there!’”
She snorts. “Let me guess. They pulled out all their Bruce Lee moves and scared the intruder out of the school?”
“Yeah, kind of.”
“See? That’s why I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction in
the first place!”
“But, hang on, they told me something else.”
“No doubt,” she says.
“No, listen,” I say. “They told me Nick was there. He was with them.”
“Oh, great. So it was the whole trifecta. Okay, so what did they do? Did they organize a warrior army against this poor criminal? Did they save the school—no, wait, the world—from the wrath of this killer? We’re still talking about a killer, right?”
“It was basically the Incredible Hulk,” I tell her, smiling a little.
She smirks. “Okay, well, at least this is entertaining. What else happened?”
“Oh, you know, some roundhouse kicks and stuff, but it was hard to get any information about what really happened now that they’re all down on Nick.”
“They are?”
“Well, you heard the diaper comment yesterday,” I say.
She shrugs. “Yeah, well, that was from Jason Murray. He’s just as bad as Brian Stead. But Abe and Patrick? His friends?”
I nod. “Yeah, them, too. I asked them if they could get Nick to call me—you know, as a witness—and they were like, ‘Oh, just call his mommy.’”
“So are you going to?” she jokes.
“Ha-ha,” I say. “I already talked to him.”
“Mabry,” she whines.
“Before you try to shame me, listen. This is actually where the story starts.” I smile. “While Abe and Patrick were running away, Nick practically chased the guy down.”
She looks at me skeptically. “Chased?”
“Well, I mean—”
She rolls her eyes. “So what do we actually have for this story besides the Incredible Hulk and your hero?”
I pull out my notebook. “Are you ready to get to work?”
She pauses. “Well, we can start—but I still want to get something from an official source.”
“Well, fine, you can wait for that ‘high road.’ But that hallway’s closed.” I look at her. “And at least the low road’s wide open.”
How to Break a Heart Page 7
