by Meg Medina
It doesn’t take too long before everyone starts gathering. Rachel joins us first and says I look nice. Then a couple of the boys show up: Chase, who likes to play outfield so he can daydream, and David, who’s wearing his T-shirt from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal. He and Chase went this summer. I’ve been dying to go, but with our whole family, it’s too expensive even with our Florida resident pass, so I ask him about it. At least we can talk about that for a while.
A little later, a van pulls up and Michael Clark hops out. Rachel is struck dumb midsentence. He’s wearing tan shorts and a dark blue shirt. I peek in the car and notice that the woman behind the wheel is basically a duplicate of him with long hair and glasses.
“You have your phone?” she asks. When Michael raises it in her direction, she waves at us and pulls away into the long line of cars.
“So, was that your mom?” It’s a dopey question, but an awkward quiet hangs over us now, and we need something to talk about.
“Yep,” he says.
“Duh. It’s not his dad,” Rachel says, elbowing me.
Michael looks around. “So, is this where everybody comes to the movies?” he asks.
“Sort of,” I say. Meaning, I have no idea. Mami still rents movies for us at the supermarket since it’s cheap and our internet is slow.
Standing this close I realize that I only reach to Michael’s shoulder. From here, I can also see that the Florida sun is already working its magic on him. He’s not the color of glue anymore, at least. There are bunches of freckles on his nose. If they connect, it might look like he has some pigment in him.
While we wait for the others, we all start talking about Iguanador and whether this one will be scary or just meh. David says the special effects are supposed to be better than the last one.
“Check this out.” I show them my latest bitmoji — wearing an Iguanador uniform and weapons. Even my cartoon hair is wild, and I added a patch on my eye to look especially menacing. They all want one.
“How do I make it?” Michael asks, so I show him where to click on the app.
After a few minutes, it almost feels like last year at our old lunch table, only with no one telling us to hold down our voices or clear our trays.
I like it.
Finally, a familiar black SUV with tinted windows pulls up. The license plate says FUT-ZEES.
The door opens, and Edna and Jamie slide off the cream-colored leather seats. They have their hair in the same messy buns. Edna is carrying a purse and wearing lip gloss. Jamie’s blue eyes are rimmed with eyeliner, and I notice she’s wearing makeup to cover her pimples. Her T-shirt says #OBVIOUSLY.
Dr. Santos leans over the steering wheel. A whiff of aftershave hits me. “Hello everyone!”
But Edna doesn’t even seem to hear. She slams the door and comes skipping in our direction. Her face is bright and happy.
“Let’s get the back row,” she says.
And I don’t know how it happens, but as soon as she says it, we all stop talking and follow her into the theater.
OK, it’s true that 3-D glasses are stupid, and Abuela would say I am destined for pink eye, but somehow it became fun to look like idiots together. Edna and Jamie kept asking me to take ridiculous photos of all of us in our wraparounds. We might have gotten a little loud, because one of the dressed-up ushers came over and pointed his flashlight in our direction during the trailers. “Restez tranquille, s’il vous plaît. In other words, chill out and be quiet or you’re out.” He jerked his thumb at the exit sign.
Anyway, the movie turns out to be even better than the last one. My favorite character was Lupa, the pterodactyl mutant, killed in the last five minutes by Jake Rodrigo with a saber to her cold, mechanical heart. And I wasn’t alone.
“She was sick,” Michael tells me as we dump our trash on the way out. “The claws at the end of her wings were like the bats back in Minnesota. There was a cave near my house. One got in my room once.”
“I saw you duck down when she came flying at us,” I say.
We start to laugh, but as soon as I say it, Edna pipes in.
“I was right next to Michael. He wasn’t scared,” she says.
The Milk Duds and popcorn churn in my stomach. “I didn’t mean like really scared,” I say. “You know . . . like fun scared . . .”
Jamie comes over and wedges herself near Edna.
“Well, duh, Michael is too big to be scared.” Her voice is so gooey that I’m sure I’m going to be sick.
Michael turns the color of watermelon.
Edna checks her phone and drops me from her jaws without a second thought. “Let’s get ice cream,” she says. “We have time.”
The line is endless, but we don’t mind. Edna springs for all the ice cream with a fifty-dollar bill she pulls from her purse. All night, she laughs the loudest and tells her stories while we listen. She makes the night crazy and funny as we eat our cones, trying not to get brain freezes. She makes Michael have a taste of her raspberry-chocolate-macadamia scoop.
When her dad picks her up, she and Jamie hang out the side windows, waving and yelling good-bye. The rest of us stand on the sidewalk, laughing. But when the car disappears, there’s a strange quiet that’s left behind. We look at one another, and suddenly our mouths feel sticky from sugar and empty.
Bye. Gotta go. There’s my mom. Later.
It doesn’t take long before we’ve scattered.
I tell Roli all about the movie on the drive home, just in case Mami and Papi ask.
“Notwithstanding the bad science, it sounds pretty good,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“Genetic mutation of that type is impossible, Merci,” he says.
“For now,” I say. It takes me a few streetlights to get him to admit that there are plenty of things that science called crazy before they were done.
We pull into our driveway around ten thirty, my lips still tasting of chocolate-almond. Papi’s van isn’t back, so the game has probably run long, or else, without me, they’ve stopped for a cold beer on the way home. The lights are on in our living room, so I know Mami is waiting up. But as we start up the path, it’s Lolo and Abuela that I spot first. They’re sitting on their porch glider in the dark, and they’re staring up at the sky. The only light is from the citronella candles they’re burning to ward off the bugs.
“Um . . . hi,” I say, glancing up.
“Buenas,” says Abuela.
“What are you guys doing out here?” Roli asks. He’s too polite to mention that they’re outside in their pajamas, usually a big no-no. Abuela is always reminding us about what’s decent. No undershirts or pajama pants in public. No chancletas in church. No curlers outside the yard. Never, ever go inside a fast-food restaurant barefoot or in a bathing suit.
She purses her lips. “El viejo was pacing all evening. I think it was all the therapy exercise your mother did with him. It got him all worked up. I was afraid he was going to wear a hole in the floor and fall through. Who can sleep with that?”
“Exercise usually calms people, though.” Roli sticks his hands in his pockets and shrugs.
“Is something bothering you, Lolo?” I sit down next to him.
Abuela waves my question off with her hand before he can say anything. “Niña, olvídate. Don’t worry yourself about this. We came out here to look at the beautiful stars, like young romantics.” She pats Lolo’s hand. “Right?”
The bruise on his eye is still there, although it’s starting to fade. I put my ear on his chest and listen like I used to do when I was little.
“You went to the movies?” His voice echoes in there, along with his heartbeat and the rhythm of air in his lungs.
“Yes. It was crazy and scary, but good.”
“So, you had fun with your friends?” Abuela asks. I lean my head back and look up at the dark blue all around. My mind wanders to Hannah, Edna, and the others, even over to Michael, flinching when that beast came soaring.
“
Yes,” I say.
“That’s good. You’re a young lady now, going out to places on your own.”
I yawn; all the fun of the night is dying down, and my eyes are growing heavy. All around us the toads are croaking to one another in their strange night song.
“Look. Mars.” Roli points it out and then starts in with mumbo jumbo about summer triangles and degrees of brightness.
Lolo listens for a while. Then he sighs and gives my shoulder a squeeze. “You went to the movies tonight?” he asks again.
I stay very still, listening to the echo of his odd question.
Abuela’s voice is low in the dark. “Shhh,” she says. “Of course she did, viejo.”
And then, with a careful quiet wedged between us, Lolo and I stare up at the stars.
“PUT THIS ON MICHAEL’S DESK,” Jamie whispers.
She holds out a triangle made of folded loose-leaf paper. The corners are tucked in tight like a paper football we might have flicked through straw goalposts last year. But this one is different. The initials MC are written on the outside in glitter markers.
“What is it?” I ask.
She glances at Edna and then presses it into my hand. “A note, silly. Go.”
It’s Tuesday, and we’re all in school mode again, like Cinderella and the mice coachmen all gone back to their ordinary form. I’m returning the pop quizzes for Ms. Tannenbaum, whose back is turned to us as she hangs up our finished maps. Our group got an A, so it’s going up on the bulletin board, which is newly decorated with fake fall leaves to remind us we’re in September. There’s another map made entirely from seeds, and one made from cut straws of different sizes and colors, too. Those, and ours, are the best ones.
“Finish up, please, Merci,” Ms. Tannenbaum says. “We have a lot of exciting material to cover today.”
I turn back to the stack of papers. The next one belongs to Lena, who got a C even though her group’s map is probably the best. It’s the one made of seeds. I guess I’m not the only one who struggles with tests sometimes. Luckily, she sits on the same side of the room as Michael. I return Lena’s quiz and walk by his desk. When I get close enough, I drop the note like a bomb. Michael looks up at me, but he doesn’t make a move for it.
“It’s not from me,” I say, and hurry back to Ms. Tannenbaum’s desk with the no-name and absentees’ papers.
I can’t help it. I think about that note all morning long, even as they march us down to the auditorium for an assembly.
What was in the note, exactly? Maybe it’s an invitation to a party that I don’t know about.
I keep thinking back to last year, when Carlee Frackas had a birthday party. Carlee was Edna’s friend, but she skipped sixth grade and went straight to seventh, and now she doesn’t hang out with Edna at all. I was invited to her party because Edna was my Sunshine Buddy and she put in a good word for me. It was a big deal, Edna told me, and I should be thrilled. Carlee’s dad owned Frackas Yachts in Jupiter, in case I didn’t know. She lived near the beach — in a mansion, practically — and she had a pool with a slide in her yard.
But what Edna was most excited about was that it was a boy-girl party, the first one she was going to. I thought that was weird. My own birthday parties have always been boy-girl. They’ve been young-old, too. That’s because my whole family is always invited, from the tiniest screaming cousin who lives in Tampa to Abuela’s sister, Concha, who is almost ninety. Mami’s brothers come from up Hialeah to spend the day. Even Doña Rosa, when she was alive, used to drag her walker across the street for cake.
Carlee’s party was different. The adults said hello at the door, but after that, it seemed to be just kids. We swam in the pool and took turns going down the slide in a long train we made by holding on to one another’s slippery shoulders. We ate pizza and drank as much soda as we wanted. After, we lay around with fizzy stomachs playing video games on a gigantic TV screen in something Carlee called her media room. I couldn’t believe a house that big was only for three people. I got lost when I went to find the bathroom. One of the ladies who work for Mr. and Mrs. Frackas had to help me. Her name was Inés, just like Tía, but she was quiet and serious, which isn’t like Tía at all. “This way, miss,” she said in a thick accent, handing me a fresh towel and leading me down the long hall. I was in bare feet and dripping the whole way. I half expected her to scold me the way Tía would have done. But no. This Inés led me as if I were an important guest.
Anyway, Dr. Newman is onstage looking cheerful, the way he’s supposed to since he’s trying to get us pumped up about the gift-wrap sale this year. I look at the catalog of prizes. Not bad. A top seller can win a giant stuffed ram, our school mascot. Not that I have a chance. Mami will probably buy just one roll to be nice, but that’s all. We get our wrapping paper at the Dollar Store. She says it’s only going to be ripped to shreds anyway.
I notice the huge fund-raising thermometer behind Dr. Newman. It’s for the first PTA meeting next week where they’ll start asking for money. The mercury is at $5,000, but the goal is $250,000, which is in big red numbers on top. YOUR DONATIONS MAKE THE EXTRAS POSSIBLE, a sign next to it says. There’s a collage of pictures: the crew team with their new equipment, the kiln in the art room, and even one of those high-tech security cameras that are all over campus now. It also has the words SUNSHINE SCHOLARS.
“This year, our goal is to have all of you involved in the gift-wrap sale,” Dr. Newman tells us. “Remember, no effort is too small. What matters is your commitment to the Seaward Pines tradition. Go Rams!”
Uh-huh.
You can just take one look at Dr. Newman’s expensive suit to know he doesn’t really mean it. Not that Lolo didn’t try to test the idea. “The man said we could give as little as a dollar to the annual giving campaign,” Lolo argued last year. “And I’m already giving him the two most priceless things in my life: Roli and Merci!” Abuela wouldn’t hear of it, of course. She called him a tacaño and made him get the checkbook anyway. Lolo never did tell me the amount they donated, but it couldn’t have been that much. I looked in the program at the year-end awards assembly. Suárez Family was listed in the very last bunch of names. Frackas, on the other hand, was in big letters and had its own category, since they donated the new chairs in the auditorium. Santos and a few others were in the front, too.
Mr. Dixon gives our row a warning look. The girls are whispering.
“Edna says she likes Michael. Does he like her back?”
We all hear it thanks to the clear-as-a-bell acoustics in here.
“Quiet, please, girls.” I flinch as a little piece of spit flies out of Mr. Dixon’s mouth and lands on my arm.
Jamie scowls and turns to face front again.
I delivered a love note?
I don’t know why, but the thought makes me mad. The idea of Edna and Michael liking each other is gross. Like liking comes with giggling and walking people to class. And more. Will he ask her to the dance in the spring? Meet her at the movies alone? Kiss her like those eighth-graders I saw?
When the bell rings, we wait for Dr. Newman to dismiss each class by row. When it’s our turn, the boys file out in front of us. Michael walks by quickly, without a word or even a glance at the girls. It’s like he can’t get away fast enough. It’s David who slows down when he gets to Edna. He waits for Mr. Dixon to look away.
“Michael says maybe.” Then he runs off after the other boys.
Next to me, Rachel’s eyes have become saucers. “He maybe likes her,” she whispers, tugging on the ends of her hair.
Jamie and Edna, meanwhile, break into grins. I don’t get why they’re smiling, though.
“Maybe likes? Well, that’s dumb.”
I don’t even realize I’ve said it aloud until the girls ahead of me swivel their heads in my direction.
Edna’s dark brown eyes get beady. “What’s that supposed to mean, Merci?” In all the time I’ve known her, I’ve never made Edna blush. But here she is, her cheeks flaming.
I swallow hard and feel my eye start to pull away from me. “I’m sorry. It’s just that maybe seems like a silly answer. You either like someone or you don’t. Doesn’t he know?”
No one says anything for a minute, but I notice that Hannah gives me a worried look and then sighs, like she’s waiting for a big ka-boom.
And sure enough.
“What do you know anyway?” Edna snaps. “No offense, but you’re not exactly up on these things. Look at you, Merci. You’re like a little kid with that stupid crush on Fake Rodrigo.” She rolls her eyes. “I swear, sometimes I think you still play with dolls.” She says that last part in a really loud voice. Every word seems amplified.
Now it’s my face that feels like it’s on fire.
“I don’t play with dolls,” I say just as loudly. “I never did.” My words are sharpened to angry spears now. “I know this, though. When my mother says maybe, she usually means probably not.”
Edna flinches. And I won’t lie: It feels good, just this once, to know that my words have pinched her hard for a change.
“Who cares what your mother says?” she says.
“Nobody at all,” Jamie adds.
“Guys, we have to move,” Hannah says. “Let’s go.”
Mr. Dixon snaps his fingers to signal us. “You’re holding up the line. Come along, ladies.”
Edna and I glare at each other. Then, without another word, we file out of the auditorium like we’re supposed to.
FOR MOST OF LAST YEAR, Roli was in scientific competition with Ahana Patel, whose dad is a physicist at NASA. They took turns edging each other out for the number-one spot in the junior class. Every time he talked about her, Roli rolled his eyes and seemed to spit tacks. She challenged his answers during class discussion, he said. She used “questionable reasoning” (his words) in her research paper. She was annoying and obsessed with being valedictorian one day.
So imagine my surprise when junior prom time rolled around and Mami told me Roli’s date was none other than Ahana Patel.
