Come On In

by Adi Alsaid

  He said, “We did come here on visas. But we were lucky. My aunt Maria and her husband have lived here since 1976 and they were able to send an invitation to my mom. My mom then got invitations for my sisters and me.”

  The whole thing about invitations was so confusing. It’s like being a citizen was an exclusive club. I still couldn’t understand why we got lucky or why Gabby’s friend wasn’t. Suddenly that citizenship diploma in my closet felt different. It was like my permission slip proving that I was allowed to be here forever.

  It seemed almost silly to be excited over a party after something like that had happened to her friend. But Gabby couldn’t cancel her quince. She was going to turn fifteen and had been planning hers since she was six and attended her first quinceañera. In Ecuador, the party is a neighborhood-wide ordeal. But in Queens Village, they had to rent a hall and there was a limit of people they could invite. I don’t think that I want to have one next year. My mom works like twelve hours a day to barely pay the mortgage and basics, why would I want to spend a gajillion dollars on a single party?

  Gabby says it represents womanhood and family and blah blah blah. But she doesn’t understand because her dad has a job at a bank and she has both parents to take care of her. My dad is in Ecuador. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t feel like I’m missing my father at all. I have my uncle and my grandmother and my mother. My family is different than others, but they are enough. It would just be nice if my mom didn’t have to work so hard. I hope that when I’m older I can get a good enough job to help her so she can just relax.

  Okay, yes, I’m stalling because I’m afraid to write about the thing that I did.

  When Gabby needed to replace one of the members of her “quince court,” tía Felicia suggested Horacia.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Why not?” Ronaldo asked. “I have to dance with her anyway.”

  Gabby shook her head and smacked her teeth. “Because I don’t want her. She’s stank and rude.”

  “She isn’t to me,” he countered.

  “Then you should pay more attention and see how she treats other people.”

  “Me,” I said. “I’m other people.”

  That turned into a whole fight. But I’m glad that Gabby had my back. I only wish that things had been different and that I hadn’t ruined her party the way I did.

  Alyssa just happened to be at the house when Gabby was struggling with finding a replacement for her friend. We were going to watch The Craft, which we rented at Blockbuster while my grandma was at church. “I can do it.”

  “What do you know about quinceañeras?” Ronaldo asked her. I don’t know why he acted like he didn’t check out Alyssa every time she walked into a room.

  Alyssa scratched her nose with her middle finger to flip him off on the down low. “I’m Pinoy. Filipinos have these parties, too. Except they’re called Debuts and we have them when we’re eighteen. Put on a fluffy puke-colored dress and spin around with a guy wearing too much Abercrombie & Fitch cologne who steps on my feet all night. Been there.”

  “You’re hired!” Gabby said.

  With Alyssa taking part in all of this, I wasn’t afraid to look stupid wearing the puke pink dress. So we practiced and danced around learning all the steps. I can’t tell you how many times we listened to “Tiempo de Vals” by Chayanne, or how many dress fittings we had where the seamstress practically turned me into a voodoo doll. But the routine felt nice and I understood what Gabby meant about quinces being about family.

  Horacia was PISSED that she wasn’t invited to be one of the fourteen damas who made up the court. Why did she want to be a part of it so much? She didn’t even like our family. And she was already invited because she was Ronaldo’s girlfriend.

  Horacia started being meaner and angrier to Alyssa and me when no one was around. But I ignored her because that’s what ñaño Toto told me to do. But I don’t think that always works. Sometimes people are so unhappy and so miserable with themselves that they have to make others feel the same way.

  Last week before the quince, Alyssa and I stayed after school on the Corner. The Corner is what everyone calls the defunct bus stop. Alyssa and I shared earbuds and listed to a scratched No Doubt CD on her portable CD player. Here, my baggy clothes and messy hair fit in because everyone dressed like that. No one made fun of my hand-me-down jeans or shoes. Instead, we all took turns drawing on our clothes with sharpies. I decorated the sides of my pants with safety pins. I drew on the white parts of my bootleg Converse, and then everyone started asking me to do theirs—flowers, Pokemon, the Rebel Alliance symbol. My drawings were actually pretty good. At least, Miguel thought so.

  Miguel was the angry boy with the combat books. He’s a year older and has blue eyes and a gap between his teeth. I wonder if that’s why he doesn’t smile much. On his backpack he’s got a Puerto Rican flag stitched next to his Metallica patch. Whenever I’m around him my tongue feels like the Arizona desert. Not that I’ve ever been to the desert.

  The other day, I had dropped a Star Wars pin from my backpack and he picked it up. He said “cool pin” and I stared at him like he’d just sprouted three heads. My insides felt like a sarlacc beast lived in them, like the one that almost ate Han Solo in Return of the Jedi. I took my pin and ran away. Literally ran. Alyssa teased me all the way to quince dance practice.

  Okay, Yoda. I think this is the day everything really started going wrong. I noticed how Alyssa and Ronaldo were finally getting along. The two of them were the best dancers of all fourteen damas and chambelans. I don’t know a lot of things, but Ronaldo was look looking at Alyssa the way Aragorn looks at Arwen. Like she’s wondrous and made of magical elvish light. I sensed trouble.

  When he was packing up his things, I caught him off guard.

  “What are you doing?” I asked Ronaldo.

  He shrugged and raked a hand through his floppy curly hair. “Packing up? Why are you being weird?”

  I rolled my eyes. “No. With Alyssa. I see you flirting. It’s not fair to her or Horacia, as much as I hate her.”

  “I’m not doing anything.” Ronaldo scrunched up his face. “Not everyone is your dad.”

  “Wow, that’s rude,” I said. For as long as I can remember, any time my father was mentioned, tía Felicia would go off on what a cheating bastard he was and that she was glad he stayed in Ecuador. Most of the time, I’m glad too. My mom deserves the best of everything. But I wonder, can I be mad at him and still find a little part of me that loves him at the same time? Maybe when I go visit next year I’ll find out.

  “I’m sorry. Things with Horacia are weird. She’s always mad at me for not calling her when I get home from practice, but I was tired and had to help my mom do laundry. And she knows if I don’t pass Social Studies I’ll have to repeat it. But still, that was a low blow.”

  “I know you’re not like that,” I said. “But if you like Alyssa, why not just say something?”

  Ronaldo glanced around nervously. “Do you think she likes me? I mean, has she said anything? About me, specifically.”

  “She said you were cute but that you had a girlfriend.”

  “Why do you hate Horacia so much?” He was serious. He was the cousin I’d grown up with my whole life, who shared his last Eggos and Dunkaroos with me. “You used to be together all the time and then one day nothing. I asked her once and she said you ditched her because you act better than everyone else.”

  Remember that thing I wrote about from 7th grade? The reason Horacia and I stopped being best friends? Well, I never told anyone until that moment. I took a deep breath.

  “She called me a stupid ugly FOB. We were in class and she whispered it to her friends so I could hear it. I didn’t even know FOB meant ‘fresh off the boat.’ I know that as insults go, everyone refers to kids as FOBs. Like that kid from Guyana who just moved over? People call him that and then they laugh. They th
ink it’s a joke and it’s no harm done. But no one saw him crying in the hallway after and I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know how. It just made me feel really shitty.”

  Ronaldo shook his head and gave me a hug. I hadn’t realized how much that had bothered me until then and it was nice having my cousin there. “The other day I was in class and this kid called me a spic because it was unfair that I got straight As in Spanish since it was cheating. It sucks. I’m sorry.”

  We went home and, he didn’t tell me, but he broke up with Horacia that night.

  That explains why the next morning Horacia showed up at my house with her mother and asked to speak to my mom. It was the weekend, and my mom’s only day off, but she let them in. They said it was important, that Mrs. Móntes was thinking about our family’s “well-being” and that she’d want to know about my behavior. See, Horacia had brought over this photo of me. She’s obsessed with these disposable cameras and she took one of me at the Corner with Miguel. It was at the exact moment that he handed me my Star Wars pin. But because of the angle and the cigarette tucked behind his ear, it looks like he could be handing me anything. Specifically, DRUGS.

  ”I’m not doing drugs!” I shouted as soon as I shut the door on Horacia’s self-righteous, lying ass.

  Nothing I said seemed to matter. My mother was yelling about me being one of “those girls” from bad neighborhoods who have no business being around boys. That she watched on a news special on Telemundo how even the scent of marijuana would cause me to become a zombie and ruin my life. As punishment for something I didn’t even do, I couldn’t leave the house except to go to the quince rehearsals and I was lucky I even got to do that. And they tell me that TV will rot my brain.

  I kept the photo that Horacia left behind. Miguel didn’t look angry. He was smiling. AT ME. It sparked something in my gut. I didn’t care about Horacia or her mom. I didn’t care that my own mother didn’t believe me. The more I stared at that photo the more I realized I was different than the girl Horacia once knew. I was a good girl, even if it didn’t match the definition my mom had. A wild sensation stirred in my heart, waiting to be unleashed, and I knew just where to start.

  I asked Alyssa to come over the next day with the supplies I needed. Bleach and pink hair dye. We went down to my uncle Toto’s basement apartment because he’s hardly ever home. It took five hours, but my hair turned out the exact color of Gabby’s quinceañera dress. I stared at myself in the full-length mirror while she looked at the picture he had framed of me and Lily on the coffee table.

  “Hey doesn’t your uncle still live here?” Alyssa asked.

  “Yeah, why?” I asked.

  She picked up a stack of papers from the coffee table and handed it to me. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, but it said Astoria Apartments and it had my uncle Toto’s government name and someone else’s. “Who’s David Santos?”

  Alyssa shrugged. “Looks like a new apartment lease.”

  My uncle was leaving us. He was moving out. Why hadn’t he said anything to anyone? There was already so much happening that I couldn’t handle it. I left the papers there and went back upstairs. There was a slick, hot sensation in my heart that told me things were about to change in ways I wasn’t ready for.

  The next morning, my mom saw me and freaked out. “Why? ¿Por qué? Why?” She kept saying. Good Ecuadorian girls don’t dye their hair without permission. They don’t act out, apparently.

  “We’re going to church,” she shouted.

  “Why do you care what I do now?” I yelled back. “You’re never even home!”

  That might have been too much because my mom stopped yelling. Ecuadorians love yelling. It’s actually our normal tone of voice. It’s how we communicate anger and love and friendship. But mostly anger. So when my mom shut down and turned away, I knew I’d said something wrong.

  Ñaño Toto walked in at that moment. He looked flustered and hesitated. “You can’t talk to your mother like that, Paola.”

  I was tired of everyone. I know I shouldn’t have said it. But I was mad at him too. What was I supposed to do if he left? Who would I have? Gabby and Ronaldo lived upstairs but they had their own family unit. All I kept thinking was the stack of papers with his new home. He hadn’t even told us he was leaving. He’d made this decision already and we didn’t matter. I was helpless and my only weapon was my words. Words can hurt just as badly as any punch, remember?

  “You’re not even going to live here anymore so you can’t tell me what to do! You’re not my father.”

  He was too shocked to reprimand me. He never yelled at me. I was more than his niece. I was his friend. His little sister. His daughter. All of those things in one.

  It’s hard to explain the anger that I had in my chest that day. I could blame everything on Horacia, but I know that I didn’t have to say those things to my mom and Toto. I know that there are things I don’t understand like why my mom bottles her feelings or why my uncle kept such a big secret from us. I want to understand so much. But sometimes it’s easier to just lash out. To let that anger loose. The only problem with that is that now I’m left with the aftermath and I’m not sure what to do.

  We kept living with that silence. School and work don’t stop just because feelings are hurt. Besides, there was a quince to celebrate, and my mom had already put the deposit down on the dress.

  We went to the party. Everyone stared at me. I’ve been so used to trying to blend in, to make myself small, to watch. I wasn’t used to having people examine me like a display at a sideshow. Gabby really loved my hair and her opinion was the most important one that day. I’m glad someone was happy with me because my mom was seething. All my life I thought that she had two modes: busy or tired. But I realized that, until yesterday, I’d never truly seen my mother angry.

  My grandmother said I had no respect and “nice Ecuadorian girls don’t act like you.” But aren’t I supposed to be a “nice American girl” now? What does it mean to be Ecuadorian when they didn’t even show me how to do it? I’m not the one who packed up all our things, got on a KLM flight, and started a new life. I’m not the one who chose this, so why am I the one who is left to figure it out on my own? What does it mean to be American when everyone we know is an immigrant? Is it the same exact thing? Can I be both things? It feels like I’m just supposed to have the answers to these questions but how am I supposed to figure anything out when it seems to me that communication is not one of the languages my family speaks?

  Anyway, we get through the dance like we practiced. The chambelan who escorted me only stepped on my feet once. I think he was my tía’s coworker’s son. He didn’t talk much, which was a relief. The twenty minutes of dancing were the quietest I’ve had in forever.

  But then, it was all over, and I saw him. Miguel. My brain went foggy and all the strobe lights and confetti made me feel like I was in the middle of a music video. Why was he there? His familiar frown split into a smile when he saw me. Warmth spread from my aching toes to my belly and settled right in my chest.

  Miguel was starting to walk over to me when Horacia blocked his path and faced me.

  “You made Ronaldo break up with me,” she shouted over the music.

  “I didn’t do anything! I told him what you called me.”

  “You’re such a little kid, Paola,” she said. “Why can’t you just take a joke?”

  “Because some things aren’t funny. You can’t just say things like that and act like you’re not trying to hurt someone. I don’t know what I ever did to you, but I don’t want to be your friend.”

  The next part I’m not so clear about. I know that in that moment Ronaldo and Alyssa were dancing. He spun her around and they looked happy. Sweet, even. Horacia whirled away from me. I thought that she was going to make a scene, so I grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her. At the same time, she shoved me away.

  I should have let go
.

  I should have done a lot of things differently. I should have tried to understand my mother more. Tried to be a better cousin to Gabby for her quince. Figured out how to use my voice to speak without having to write it down. I should have tried to learn to walk in heels. If I had, then maybe I wouldn’t have lost my balance and tumbled right into the five-tiered cake covered in buttercream flowers. I might have saved the cake table from flipping over and landing on top of three other damas, and then in turn, stopped those damas from crashing into a waiter carrying a giant tray of drinks.

  Maybe things happen for a reason. Everyone says that but I can’t tell what’s true or what’s an accident. If my dad had never cheated on my mom, would she have wanted to stay in Ecuador? If I hadn’t had a fight with my mom, would I have dyed my hair? If I hadn’t caused a complete and utter scene I wouldn’t have had my Uncle Toto drive me home and I wouldn’t have stayed alone in his car while he went to get gas.

  I wouldn’t have seen his cell phone light up with a message from someone named David that said: Everything will be all right. I love you. You are my life.

  I remembered the name on the lease right next to my uncle’s. David Santos. David who loved my uncle. David who was the real reason my ñaño Toto was in a better mood. I wonder, what does it mean to be someone’s life?

  When he got back in the car, I sat with my sticky hands on my lap staring at the car in front of us. He turned on the music—our favorite Enanitos Verdes song. He drove and gripped the wheel tight. He didn’t bring up the mess I’d made or what I had said to him about not being my dad. I wanted to take it back, because he is what my father could never be. He was there.

  But I don’t know how to talk about things that matter. Sometimes I wonder if silence is something you can inherit from your family like dark hair or the shape of your teeth or the nose you think you’ll never grow into. I wonder if you can leave the bad things in a country you will maybe never see again. I wonder if I’m too young to think about these things, but I don’t know what else I’m supposed to be thinking about when no one talks.