Copyright © 2006 by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
All rights reserved.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group USA
1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Visit our Web site at www.lb-teens.com
First eBook Edition: October 2006
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
ISBN: 978-0-7595-6889-1
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
dedication
To Samantha Morris, who happens to be a teenager now, but who will always be one of the coolest people I know at any age. I am blessed to be Sam’s aunt, and prouder of her than words can say. And to my brother Ricardo and sister-in-law Susan: You raised an incredible child, because you’re incredible people. I love you all.
acknowledgments
Thanks to my agent and buddy, Leslie Daniels, for suggesting I write for a young audience and making this book happen in a big way once I did. Thanks to über-editor Cindy Eagan for her sensitivity and intellect, for championing this book from the start, and for fighting so hard to bring Paski-de-Taos to her very happy home at Little, Brown — all while recovering from one of the worst ice-slips in recorded history. Hello? Who cracks her skull and still manages to be the finest editor in teen lit? And to Miss Phoebe Spanier, an assistant editor I envision taking over the world someday because she is brilliant, meticulous and kind. To everyone at Little, Brown who read this book and helped shove it into shape — dudes, if any of you wears a ring, I shall gladly kneel to kiss it. (No tongue, I promise.) Finally, thanks to the sixteen-year-old me, for keeping such detailed diaries, from which the current me was able to borrow. Don’t think I coulda done this if my inner teenager had not been a writer, too, connecting with me now through time and space with thoughts (and loves) I’d long since forgotten I’d had. . . .
And I ask myself: Who do I want to be?
Do I want to throw away the key
And invent a whole new me?
And I tell myself, no one, no one
Don’t want to be no one
But me . . .
—Aly & AJ
1
You know it’s bad news when your dad comes back to Taos from a two-week business trip to Los Angeles wearing designer sunglasses and a velour Juicy men’s tracksuit.
Oh, and by the way? He’s got a goatee, too, and wears the giant sunglasses on his head like a girlie headband. Well, it’s not exactly a goatee. It’s like he tried to sculpt his facial hair, like he’s trying to look like a twenty-year-old pop star. I’m not sure what he’s got going on his feet. I think they’re supposed to be trendy athletic shoes, but they’re, like, way too shiny and, if I’m not mistaken, a little on the high side. High-heeled sneakers and a goatee, with sunglasses — at night? Uhm, hello?
Basically, my dad looks like an idiot.
I’m not the only one who thinks this, just so you know. We’re standing in the hot blast of air in the entry of the Apple Tree restaurant, and even the overdressed Texan tourists stare at my dad like he’s some kind of freak. Keep in mind that the Texans are wearing poofy little ski-bunny clothes with cowboy boots, as skiers from Texas often do. They think this is what people in Taos, one of the best mountain ski towns in the world, wear. (We don’t.) Anyway, the tourists look sorry — but not as sorry as my dear old dad, apparently. This tells you more or less exactly how sorry Dad looks. It’s like he’s on meth or something.
“Two for dinner?” asks the big-eyed hostess. She looks up for a second, smiles blankly as if she’s never seen us, and then does a serious whiplash-causing double take. “Mr. Archuleta? Is that you?” She looks at me like we’re in the middle of an emergency together and she doesn’t know what to do, like she’s in a panic. I shrug to let her know it isn’t my fault.
“Hey,” says my dad, smiling at the hostess, narrowing his eyes as he tries to remember who this person is. He doesn’t know the girl’s name, I can tell. He smiles the same way every time one of his old art students recognizes him. Dad, a cartoonist, teaches art at the middle school when his money runs low. “How are you? Still drawing?”
The hostess looks Dad up and down, and I swear to God it looks like she’s trying not to laugh. She, like me, is used to seeing him in jeans and a stained T-shirt. She, like me, doesn’t know what to make of this new Rudolfo Archuleta. There’s a good spot in heaven for me, for having a dad like this. I’ll tell you that much.
Anyway, the hostess tells Dad she’s not drawing anymore, which, I should say, I might have guessed from the fact that she’s working here. Then she tells Dad he looks “different.” Yeah. That’s one way of putting it.
Dad and I get to our table, sit down, and look over the menus. I decide on the chiles rellenos, because they are basically the only halfway normal thing on the menu here. Dad rubs his goatee thing and tells me he’s going to have the fish tacos.
Now I know I’m in trouble.
The other couple of times we’ve been here, Dad has ordered the tempeh. Tempeh is this vegan cake thingy that looks like bad skin and tastes like moldy cardboard. It was the kind of thing that went really well with my dad the way he used to be, like, last week. Last week my dad was a struggling artist who hung out with other local artists and complained about how conservative National Public Radio was getting. He was the kind of guy you might call “granola” as an adjective. Crunchy. Taos is a funky little artist-heavy town in the Rocky Mountains of New Mexico. The houses and buildings are almost all single-story brown mud squares, adobe. It’s really pretty here, actually. The town sits in a valley with mountains rising all around. In the summer it’s very green, with wild strawberries growing everywhere, and you almost want to skip over the hills yodeling or something. In the winter — like now — the city is usually covered in a layer of snow that looks like frosting on the old adobe buildings. The air smells clean, laced with smoke from people’s fireplaces. We burn pine logs up here, and they smell really good.
Me and my dad live in a lopsided two-bedroom adobe off the plaza that’s about four hundred years old, and every inch of every wall inside of it is covered with his drawings of superheroes. Oh, I forgot to mention Dad’s not just a cartoonist — he’s got a couple of graphic novels and a comic book series. So the house is decorated in sketches of Squeegee Man; Squeegee Man’s archenemy Prince Flatulence; the always buxom sadist Darkleena, queen of the underworld; and the pure and willowy She-Nha, who, if you ask me, is a li
ttle too influenced by the wrong kind of Japanese animation. But nobody asks me. Anyway, my point is, until recently, my dad seemed to realize he was a hopeless geek. Then he got a call from a Hollywood movie studio that wanted to option Squeegee Man for a movie, with Dad as one of the animators. He went out last week to meet them, and now here he is, a changed being. You see what I’m getting at here?
Fish tacos? I didn’t know you could put fish in a taco. I didn’t know anyone would want to. I don’t know who this man is.
“Dad?” I say. “Are you okay?”
Dad grins at me, and I swear his teeth look whiter than they used to.
“Did you do something to your teeth?” I ask.
Dad closes his mouth and puts a hand over it. I swear it looks like he’s blushing. He pushes back his upper lip and touches a couple of teeth with the tips of his fingers. Eew? I know he doesn’t smoke ganja like lots of other artist parents, but I swear he looks baked.
“Are you on drugs?” I ask him. He gives me that “ha-ha, very funny” sarcastic look and ignores the question. He thinks I’m too grown-up sometimes. I wish he were more grown-up sometimes, so I guess we’re even.
“I had them laser-whitened while I was in California,” he explains. He bares his teeth like a cornered coyote. I think he’s trying to smile. Then he talks through his teeth like his jaw is wired shut. “What do you think?”
I shrug, because it wouldn’t be polite to tell my dad what I think right now. What I think is: I recently got highlights in my shoulder-length brown hair, and that was a big deal for me. I’m not sure how I feel about it. It’s fine to better your appearance, but I thought my dad’s teeth were fine before, for a dad.
Thankfully, the waitress comes. We order, and then I start to whistle and look around the restaurant for something, anything, to distract me from the disturbing sight of my father falling into what I think is a midlife cartoonist’s crisis. His latest girlfriend just dumped him, and I think this all has something to do with that. I think it was a blessing, her dumping him, because she was completely postal. She thought we were, like, best friends or something, and always came crying to me after they’d had a fight, like I was her therapist or something. One time she started to talk about how my dad gave the best massages, and I was, like, “Hello? Shut up? You’re making me sick?”
“Pasquala,” says my dad, with full-on heavy-duty Spanish accent. He does that when he thinks there are lots of “gringos” around. It’s totally lame.
“Paski, please,” I say. I hate my name. Pasquala. What kind of sixteen-year-old has a name like that? I’ve only ever seen that name in abandoned graveyards in northern New Mexico. Oh, and it gets worse, just so you know. My full name? Are you ready for this? Here goes: Pasquala Rumalda Quintana de Archuleta. Bunk, right? My mom and dad, at the time they named me, were on this whole Mexican power trip, and they thought it was okay to name me like that. Mom’s not in the picture anymore. Actually, since I was ten, she hasn’t been in the picture.
My dad’s cartoons from back then are nothing but a bunch of bald-looking guys in long shorts with long socks, and chola women in skinny stilettos. Me? I don’t care one way or the other about Mexican power. I don’t know why my dad is all “I’m Mexican” when he doesn’t even know how to speak Spanish, but you can’t argue with him about it. To me, people are people, and some get better names than others. You know which side of that I fall on, anyway.
“I have to talk to you about something serious,” says Dad, totally ignoring my request for a name correction. Usually, Dad’s a pretty good listener, one of those touchy-feely parents. He’s raising me alone because my mom, sort of an art groupie who wanted to be a singer, had her midlife crisis and took off with a biker dude. She’s a mess, my mom. I don’t think about it too much because I don’t see the point. Some people get moms that care. Some don’t. I happen to be one of the ones who got a mom that didn’t care. I mean, she did care, but not about me. She cared about boyfriends and pot and drinking. And that’s about it. Dad, as you might have guessed, has bad luck in the lady department. I think he should stop picking the kind of lady with shoulder tattoos and tube tops, but does he listen? Nope. Not my fault.
I sip my iced water and wait for Dad to talk. The last time I felt scared like this was when he told me Mom had left the state without letting us know. There’s never something good coming when Dad tells you there’s something “serious” to talk about. There is no less serious dad in the world than a cartoonist.
“You know I went to L.A. to meet with the movie studio,” says Dad. I nod. “Well, it went really well.” He smiles, happier than I’ve seen him in a very long time. I hold my breath. “I mean, really good, Paski.”
I nod and look around the restaurant some more.
“Hey. Look at me. Over here.” He’s pointing to his eyes with two fingers, like I don’t know how to find them. Dad’s a nut about eye contact. I look at him and wince. He belongs on that show Jackass.
“They want Squeegee for a movie,” Dad says. “They aren’t the only ones. The studios all wanted it. We had a bidding war, Paski. And they’re talking sequels.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about. Dad leans forward across the table with a crazy smile. “It’s my big break, Chinita,” he says in a low voice, as if the Texan tourists are listening and might, what, report it to the government or something. Chinita is one of the many dreaded nicknames Dad uses for me, because he thought I looked “Chinese” as a baby. “They want me to head up the animation team.”
“So?” I ask. He’s gloating, and I hate it. I don’t know what the big deal is. And honestly? I’m sick of him wanting me to congratulate him all the time on everything he does. Isn’t that what Grandma is for? It’s his job to congratulate me. Sometimes the whole parent/kid thing gets blurred in our house.
“So, we’re moving to L.A.,” he says.
I choke on my water. “We’re what?”
“Moving to Los Angeles,” he says, like I might not have understood what “L.A.” meant.
“Why? When?”
“Because I have to live there to do the show. As soon as possible.”
I feel a pit open in the center of my belly. Moving? I can’t move. I’m having my seventeenth birthday in less than a month, and I was planning to spend it with my best friends at a concert in Santa Fe. I’m the editor of my school newspaper and the co-captain of the school mountain bike team. Granted, there are only three of us on the team, but still. It’s January, the start of the new semester. They need me. Then there’s Emily and Janet, my two best friends. I love them like sisters. How could I live without them? And then, after months of wondering whether he actually liked me or not, I just got asked to go to a party by Ethan Schaefer — only the hottest-looking guy in the eleventh grade at Taos High School. You can’t leave town with Ethan Schaefer falling in love with you! That would be way crazy.
“I can’t go with you,” I say, knowing as I say it that I probably don’t have a choice. Actually, I know I don’t have a choice. I’ve had this weird feeling for the past couple of days that something big was going to happen to me, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. I’ve been dreaming about a huge yellow pyramid, and the dreams have felt scary. I’ve known something bad was coming.
“You have to go with me. I’m your dad.” Oh, really? And all this time I thought he was my pet. My father, the master of stating the obvious.
“I’ll stay with Grandma.”
My father looks hurt. “But it’s California, Pasquala.” He says “California” as if everyone in the world wants to live there. He sits up and smiles. “Beaches? Sunshine? Surfer dudes?”
I shake my head. Taos is fine with me. I love the mountains and the sky here. In my free time, weather allowing, I ride my bike in the mountains. And not just any old ride. I ride forty miles at a pop. I’m what you’d call a serious cyclist. I go up the sides of things nobody should go up the side of on a bike, and somehow I stay on. I jump things. I spin the b
ike in the air. I call it bike-dancing. You blast your iPod and go. I like the solitude here. Dad looks like he might cry, which would be pathetic. He might stain the velour. Wait a second. Did he really just say “surfer dudes"? I can’t deal.
“Your grandma’s pretty busy with her business,” he reminds me. “And you know how she is now. She can’t really take care of you.”
I look around the restaurant some more. He’s right. I was bluffing anyway. I wouldn’t want to live with my crazy grandmother and all her spirit friends.
Spirit friends? Yeah. My grandma is sort of a local celebrity astrologer, tarot-card queen, witch doctor, communicator with the dead. People come from all over the world for her readings and cleansing and God knows what else. She’s even been on Oprah for helping the local police solve a murder one time. That’s the “business” Dad’s talking about. I think Dad uses words too generously sometimes. As a newspaper editor, I am very specific about the words I use. My grandma and “business” don’t match. At all.
My grandma. Basically, she’s a sweet new-age guru lady who thinks every little thing you do is super significant. I love her to death, but if you think my dad’s open and funky, you have to meet his mother. It’s a little much for me sometimes. She’s also got about six boyfriends, all of them these crazy artists or diehard hippie guys who smell like something died in their pants. And, worst of all, she thinks I’m a psychic like her, just because I’ve had a couple of dreams that came true. She’s always, like, “You have the gift, you are the chosen one.” Blah blah blah. This is why I never tell her my dreams anymore. Oh, and she wears only purple. You see what I’m saying, anyway. She’s adorable, but I’m pretty sure she’s a little Looney Tunes. I’d go insane living with her, now that I think about it.
“I know,” says Dad. “It’s going to be hard to leave your friends. I don’t want to leave my friends, either. But we have to go, Pasqua — Paski.”
“We don’t have to,” I say. “You could just stay here.”
“No,” he says, adjusting the sunglasses on his head. “We have to. I already signed the deal, and I got us an apartment. It’s really nice. And I already registered you at Aliso Niguel High School.”
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