“She saw you going down to the river with him, Dian.”
I wince. So much for anyone in Cucubano ever having any respect for me again. Like I said, girls never spend time alone with guys before getting married. Dates are chaperoned. Girls are supposed to arrive at their weddings without ever having been kissed. Aracely was appalled when I told her what North American teenagers get up to. And now everyone for miles around will be talking about what a slut I am. Somehow that bugs me even more than the whole marimacho thing. At least it’s true that I like to climb trees and swim in the river. I’m the very furthest thing from a slut.
“She told me to stay away from you.” Aracely whispers and holds both of my hands, like friends here often do. “I mean, she’s told me that before too, but that was because she was afraid I’d turn into a marimacho. Now she says being seen with you could ruin my reputation.”
I gape at her. The world’s turned inside out, and nothing makes sense anymore. How can everyone be happy to marry off a fifteen-year-old and at the same time hate me for talking to Nerick?
Aracely squeezes my hands. “I don’t believe any of it, but I thought you should know what people are saying.”
I want to tell her I don’t care, that I won’t be around long enough for it to matter to me, but we’d both know I was lying. I can fly all the way to Canada and beyond, and I’ll still take these stories with me. I’ll think about them and wonder if I should have been more careful, should have thought more about where I was and who I was with and how my actions might affect Aracely, before I went down to the river with Nerick. I went because I needed someone to talk to, but I should have cared more about the consequences.
“So will you have to avoid me now?” I try to make my voice sound casual, joking. It’s kind of an ironic question since we were barely on speaking terms until a few minutes ago.
Aracely opens her mouth just as someone cranks up Orlando’s ghetto blaster. The song is one of Aracely’s favorites. For a moment, she looks at me, considering. Then she links her arm with mine. “Let’s go, Dian. Let’s dance.”
Arm in arm, we step out into the sunshine. I raise my head to match the proud, unabashed tilt of hers.
Eleven
"Dian, we’d like to talk to you.”
Mom and Dad are sitting on the edge of the bottom bunk. It’s the end of July, about a week after Aracely’s engagement party, and I’m sweeping the floor where Nerick and I dismantled a bike wheel an hour ago. Usually, by this time, my parents are making a few final notes in their medical journals and getting ready to turn out the light. Tonight, though, they sit staring at me, wide awake.
I lean the broom against the wall and dust off my hands. “What is it?”
My parents glance at each other. Dad nudges Mom’s foot with his. Mom takes a deep breath. “We’d like to ask you about Nerick.”
I feel a tingle of dread but tell myself not to worry. Even if the Eye has said something to them, they know me well enough to understand that he and I are just friends. Maybe they want to hear his plans for the future, to see if there’s any way they can help him like they were going to help Aracely.
Mom leans her elbows on her knees and smiles the way I imagine she smiles at her patients—a confident, trustworthy smile. “We want to hear how things are going.”
I shrug. “You heard what he was saying about Wilkens maybe leaving for the city. Nerick’ll have to work twice as hard until his brother gets a city job. So they could use some help, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“Mm.” Dad nods. Mom sits waiting, like she expects me to say more.
“He misses his father a lot,” I offer. “He doesn’t talk about it much, but I think he’s still pretty angry at him for leaving, and I bet he’s afraid his brother will do the same thing now—take off and never come back.”
More nods. More awkward silence.
“Dian,” Dad says, “you know you can come to us about anything, right? Anytime you need help or support.”
“You’re growing up now,” Mom adds. “You’re reaching an age of experimentation, and it’s perfectly natural to—”
Oh god. “You’ve been talking to the—to Miralis Vargas, haven’t you?” My voice is angry, what I’m sure my mother would call argumentative, but what do they expect? Are they honestly worried about the rumors the Eye is spreading?
“No, no,” Dad says too quickly. “I mean, we haven’t been talking to her any more than usual. But we’ve been hearing some things in general that we weren’t aware of. About you and Nerick.”
I close my eyes. This whole conversation is making me very tired—tired of being in a place I never wanted to come to, tired of people spreading lies about me and, most of all, tired of my parents not having a clue about who I really am and what I want.
“…come to us about anything,” Mom is saying. “Anything you need.”
The way she says anything makes it clear she’s not talking about only spiritual guidance. They keep a big box of contraceptives in a corner of the clinic. They bring it every year, just in case someone shows an interest. And now the town gossip’s convinced them that their thirteen-year-old daughter should be their next candidate for birth control.
“You think I’m having sex with Nerick.”
My mother’s cheeks turn first-aid-kit red, Dad passes a hand over his eyes and won’t look at me, and some part of me is marveling that I managed to say the words sex and Nerick in the same sentence without choking in embarrassment. The tired numbness I felt a few seconds ago is totally gone. “You’re worried Miralis Vargas knows more about your daughter than you do.”
Dad’s head snaps up. Mom places a hand on his knee. “I don’t want to talk about Miralis right now,” she tells him. “I want to talk about Dian.”
Dad looks down again, fuming at the floor. Then he takes a deep breath and stretches his legs, and I can almost hear the clunk of his thoughts shifting gears. “It’s not like we believed the gossip hook, line and sinker, you know.” He gives me a half smile, as if this is all quite funny, and I see where he’s going with this. Chapter two of Raising a Confident Teenager recommends injecting humor whenever possible. Catching more flies with honey than with vinegar or something. Someone should tell Dad that humor doesn’t work if he’s clearly terrified that the joke might be the truth.
But Dad hasn’t clued into that detail, and he keeps talking. “One of our patients warned us about your relationship with Nerick. The way this person told it, you’d be pregnant by the end of the summer, and we’d be bringing Nerick home with us as the father of our grandchild!” Dad forces out a laugh, and his eyes are begging me to laugh too. Beside him, Mom doesn’t crack a smile. She’s staring at me as if her eyes could bore into me and let the bad spirits out, like doctors in the Middle Ages did with crazy people.
The whole situation is so ridiculous that part of me would like to laugh with my father. We’d be laughing for different reasons, but I’m not sure he’d notice.
I stay silent. None of this feels like it has anything to do with me. It’s all about my parents—who don’t know me at all—and the Eye, who has too much time on her hands and hates either me or Nerick or both of us.
“Dian?”
They’re both looking at me. “Aren’t you going to say anything?” Dad asks.
“What do you want me to say?”
Mom frowns. “We’re here to listen, Dian.”
“Really?” I stalk across the room and snatch a water bottle, toothpaste and toothbrush from the teacher’s desk. “If you’re here to listen, then how could you possibly think I’m having sex when I’ve spent the whole summer talking about Aracely having to grow up too soon?”
They at least have the decency to look embarrassed. Neither of them looks at me as I head for the door. I pull it open, step into the darkness and wave across the road
at the Eye in case she’s peeping through the slats of her shutters in my direction. Behind me, my parents say something, but I’m not sure what, because I spend almost an hour outside looking at the stars. I don’t go back inside until the light’s off and I can hear them snoring.
* * *
I wake that night to the sound of sniffling. I can’t recognize whose it is because neither of my parents ever cries. I hear the squeak of the bunk beds as someone gets up and then my dad’s voice. “…be okay…be okay.” I don’t know if he’s saying he’ll be okay, or if he’s telling Mom she will be.
When I was little, I had nightmares. My parents would take turns sleeping beside me to scare the monsters away. Mom gave me a superhero anti-monster ring. Dad gave me a book about a brave princess who outsmarted a dragon to save her best friend. They both sang me lullabies.
Here, in the darkness, I want them to sing me lullabies again, to say that everything will be all right, that nothing will ever scare us again.
Instead, I’ve become their monster. And I’ve got a whole slew of my own.
Twelve
It’s dawn, and my parents are still snoring when I get up. I push away the mosquito netting, reach out with one arm to grab my slippers, flip them upside down and shake them. When no flash-drive-size cockroaches come ka-thunking out, I swing out of bed, shake my clothes and get dressed.
I feel like I haven’t slept at all. My brain feels foggy, and I’m convinced I’m a terrible person. I’m angry at my parents and angry at myself for being angry. Everyone loves them. This village depends on them. The future of the world depends on people like them. And sometimes I hate them for all that. I wish they’d just ignore the world, make a cup of hot (fair-trade) chocolate with me, and sit and talk, like Grandma does.
I wish I were the kind of person who brought that out in them. Instead, I make them suspicious. I scare them. I make them cry.
If we go through breakfast pretending nothing happened last night, though, I’m going to scream.
I grab a cloth bag, drop in a water bottle and some of the fruit we keep in a big plastic box, and tiptoe over to the teacher’s desk to find a pen and paper. Good morning. I woke up early and wanted to go for a walk. I’ll be back in time to make lunch. And don’t worry. I’m not visiting Nerick. D.
I know they wouldn’t want me to go, that they’ll spend the whole morning freaking out about where I might be and what kind of trouble I might be getting into. But I’m hoping that by lunchtime, I’ll either know what to say to them or, more likely, they’ll be so full of stories of what could have happened to me that they won’t be waiting for me to say anything.
* * *
It’s not our place anymore, not one we share. I came here because I knew it would be too early for Aracely. Right now, she’s probably at home, cleaning up after breakfast and starting preparations for lunch. But even without her here, this is her place. Her herbs—even more of them now—are hanging from the ceiling. Her altar is still in one corner, her drawing book on the table in the other. The floor is swept clean. I thought I’d find solitude, but now I feel like I’m torturing myself with one more place I don’t belong.
I’m sitting in the middle of the floor, arms wrapped tight around my knees, when she comes in. The light behind her marks the curves of her body, and if I didn’t know, I’d think she was a grown woman. This will be her house one day, and she will come through this very door, in just the same way, to be with her husband, her children and maybe, someday, her grandchildren. This is where she most wants to be in the world. Her forever place. I don’t know what it feels like to have a place like that.
“Dian?” She smiles like she’s not at all surprised to see me.
“Sorry. I wasn’t going to touch anything. I just wanted—”
“It’s okay.” She sits down beside me. “What’s up?”
I hesitate. Can I really complain about anything in my privileged life when she might be married and pregnant at this time next year? And how can I go on about my own stuff when my reputation is causing her problems?
I think about getting up, apologizing again and leaving, but when I look at her face, it’s the same Aracely who sat here with me last summer, the same one who listened to me, and laughed with me, and shared all her own secrets. She’s the same person who was going to come to Canada and be my best friend forever, even if all that’s changed now.
I tell her about my parents. She listens, winces in all the right places, and when I’m finished, she says, “I can’t believe it. Don’t they know you at all?”
I shrug. “They think they do. They ask what I think about stuff all the time, but every time my opinion is different from theirs, they assume I don’t know what I’m talking about. And they never ask how I feel. What I feel doesn’t matter at all. It’s what the rest of the world is going through that’s really important.”
She looks at me without saying anything for a second. Then she says, “I’m sorry, Dian. I wish none of this had happened.”
“Me too.” I wish Aracely was still coming to Canada. I wish the Eye would get a life and stop inventing stories about everyone else’s. I wish my parents still listened to me like they did when I was five, instead of going through the motions.
“And you know you can come here whenever you want, right?” She waves a hand at the herbs and at the walls around us. “It’s good to have friends here. It keeps the house happy.”
I laugh. “I’m not sure how happy the house is to have me here, all angry and frustrated.”
“It’s all part of life,” she says, and for some reason I remember the drawing she did of herself and Vin in front of this house. All part of life. Her life. The life that she’s chosen. The image of that life isn’t so shocking to me anymore. It feels kind of inevitable. I hope she can be happy.
And as I look at her smiling back at me, I want to believe that there’s no reason why she wouldn’t be happy. She is the same strong, passionate, adventurous Aracely I’ve always known.
She gets up and goes over to a bundle of herbs hanging in the far corner. “I came to get some ruda for my cousin. She’s run out.”
I get up too and dust myself off. “I’m glad you came,” I say. I want to tell her I’ve missed her, but I can’t bring myself to say it. I don’t want her to whip around and remind me that I’m the one who started fighting with her. She told me her plans, and I got mad.
Every time my opinion is different from theirs, they assume I don’t know what I’m talking about.
I was describing my parents, but I might as well have been describing how I’d treated Aracely when I found out about Vin.
“I’m sorry, Aracely. About everything I said, and making you mad, and hurting your feelings.”
She scans my face, and this time I guess she can see that I mean it. “I’m glad I came too,” she says.
I walk with her as far as her cousin’s. She asks me if I’m free on Saturday to help her bring herbs to market.
I smile, and she laughs. “And guess what? If you promise to behave yourself, and if you stop taking off down to the river with boys, I might be willing to learn a few words of English. I’ll butcher the language so badly that you’ll ask me to stop anyway.”
I grin, and I’m still smiling as I cross the beet field and step between the coffee trees of the cafetál. I don’t know how Aracely and I can be so different and so close at the same time.
It’s wonderful, though, that it is possible.
* * *
“You should be ashamed of yourself.”
If I were standing, Miralis Vargas would only come up to my nose, but right now the Eye is towering over me, Aracely and Nerick. We’re arranging bundles of herbs on a mat on the ground at the Saturday market, and she’s blocking out the sun, hands on hips, scowling at me.
“I thought you’d be m
ore careful, now that everyone’s talking. And you, Aracely, I thought you had better sense than to keep their company.”
Aracely is on her feet before I can make sense of what’s happening. She steps over the mat like she’s ready to pounce, but when she opens her mouth, her voice is sweet, almost childlike. “Yes, it’s strange how people are talking, don’t you think? The person who started the stories clearly knows nothing about Dian or Nerick, or about their friendship. That person invented all sorts of details. Who would be so mean, do you think?”
Nerick’s behind Aracely now, arms crossed, and I stand too, readying myself for whatever might happen next.
The Eye’s face turns a funny shade of red, and she balls her hands into fists, but she can’t accuse Aracely of disrespect without admitting to having started the rumors.
“I’ve always hated rumors,” says Nerick. “When my father left, someone told all sorts of stories about where he had gone and why. Not a single one of them was ever true.”
“How do you know that?” the Eye snaps.
“I asked around,” Nerick says. “Every time I heard something, I got all excited that this time it might be the truth. It never mattered to me how terrible the story was. I thought that if it had even a speck of truth, it could help me get my dad back. That’s all I cared about. And with every new story, I got my hopes up, but every time, I found out that the rumor couldn’t be true for one reason or another. It’s a terrible thing to spread lies and make a bad situation even worse.”
Not a Chance Page 7
