“Venga por aquí, m’hijita,” says the guy by the big machine. He leads me out the kitchen door, to an alley behind the restaurant. I nearly hug him.
He asks if my father is coming to pick me up. I tell him not to worry. But I can’t imagine calling my father, with the multitude of lies I’d have to admit to him. The wind bites at my legs. I make my way to the alley and out to the side street, out of sight of anyone at the front of Green Man.
I open my recent texts. Altagracia. I can’t bother her while she’s at her party. She’s done way too much for me already. My mom. My dad. Nope.
What am I going to do?
I skim past the nauseating final text from Harrison. See you then! All exclamation-point-y. I had let myself read that as such a tone of enthusiasm. Like he was as excited to see me as I was to see him.
Neo. I click on our most recent conversation. There’s a Merry Christmas text. Then, before that, us debating whether to add nineties movies to Mr. T.’s list.
Neo. I could call Neo.
The wind whips up, sending ice into my sleeves, down my neck. I can’t feel my fingers. Texting feels like trying to move blocks of wood at the ends of my hands.
Are u there? I ask.
The response comes back right away. Yes. Happy New Year.
I take a deep breath. This is so colossally stupid. But when it comes right down to it, I just can’t think of who else I’d rather tell this to.
Neo, I need help. Can you pick me up?
Luckily he doesn’t wait for me to say more. I will be there right away.
I share my location with him so he can see where to go.
The wind thrashes down from the river, slicing chills into my ankles, my fingers, my core. I will never go out without a full snowsuit ever again, even on New Year’s.
And, because this night can’t get any colder, a light snow begins to fall.
I jump up and down as I wait. The snowflakes really are flakes, delicate, lacy, rapaciously cold. I have never been in snowfall before. I want to relish the magic of it—it does look like magic—but I would like it a little better if I could feel my face.
I look up and down the road, watching for oncoming lights. Finally, a thin whine appears in the distance. I squint at it. But, no, it’s some person on a scooter, the kind that I’ve seen delivery guys drive, the kind in old European movies. Who would ride such a thing in this weather?
The scooter draws closer, its whine turning into a more full-throated hum. It’s green, with a big purple patch on its side. It reaches the corner. I focus on the driver’s face. It’s Neo.
Neo on a green-and-purple scooter.
He stops in front of me. I stand still, a girl in a tiny black dress with snow swirling around me. I must look ridiculous.
“You look cold,” he says, taking off his jacket, dusting the snow off me and wrapping it around my shoulders. His jacket is warm from his body.
“No, you’ll freeze,” I say. He’s in just a long-sleeved T-shirt underneath.
“It’s okay. My place is not far.” He smiles and motions to his scooter, takes a mock bow. “My dragon.”
I laugh and I climb on behind him as elegantly as I can, which is to say: not very. My legs and hands are still frozen, but my middle thaws out under his thick, warm jacket.
“Hold on,” he says, and I lean into his warm, wiry back. Relief comes over me. I close my eyes and try to forget the reel of Jessica leaning up to kiss Harrison that spools over and over in my brain.
“Efgaristo,” I say as the wind hits my face. Thank you. It’s the one word of Greek he’s taught me.
Welcome to My Palace
Neo lives just a couple of blocks from the school, over a shop with a cluttered window full of vacuum parts and half-disassembled televisions. It is on an industrial strip I’ve driven by before, but which I didn’t realize had any apartments. A train track runs behind it. I wonder how loud it is when a train rumbles through.
We make our way up a set of stairs that list decidedly to the left, covered in what must have once been brown carpet but looks more now like old felt.
“You’ve seen my dragon, now welcome to my palace,” he says as he opens the door. It may be a little sexist to say, but it looks like a place without women. Nothing on the walls. An old green couch, a television on milk crates. A lamp with a bare bulb. Our house is humble, but my mother has brought fancy hand towels from home. She has hung pictures of us from our old lives. Our place looks like a family lives there. This place looks like no one in particular lives here.
But only one thing actually matters about Neo’s place: it is warm.
“My father is working,” he says.
I realize now why Neo had asked what I was doing during the holidays. Maybe that’s why he seemed sad when we talked about it. I wonder how he felt all alone here on New Year’s. “I’ve never seen your scooter before,” I say instead.
“I just got it. Off Craigslist. A guy was moving and sold it for nothing. The engine is good. Needs a paint job.”
It would be rude to agree, so I don’t say anything.
We sit down on the couch. “So what happened?”
I explain. What I thought tonight was. What it actually was. Neo listens quietly. He seems to tense when I mention Harrison.
“I am sorry, Ana,” he says.
I am finally warm enough to take off his jacket. I hand it to him and thank him. It’s warm enough that I also take off Altagracia’s for-show black belted jacket.
I realize how tight my dress is now. “Do you have a . . . comfy shirt?” Embarrassment crawls up my neck. He’s never seen me dressed anything like this. He goes in the next room and gets me a big beige T-shirt with an old-timey brown truck on it. Then he says, “How about a Greek movie? With English subtitles. You learn a little about my language tonight.” He smiles. “Then maybe we find one in Spanish.”
I smile. “Sure.” He flicks on the TV, and it’s tuned to the Greek channel already. On the screen, people are around an azure infinity-edge swimming pool, a glistening sea beyond, a yacht moored within view. A woman with beautiful black hair and an asymmetric blindingly white bathing suit is saying something to a man in a pink button-down, who holds a thick-bottomed glass half full of amber liquid. Neo hasn’t turned on the subtitles yet, so I don’t know what they’re saying, although I want to laugh at how different the scene on the TV is from this frozen night in Neo’s modest apartment.
Neo turns to me, his eyes earnest, the tips of his ears still red from the cold outside. “You look very pretty,” he says. As if he’d been wondering what the right thing to say was since I took off the jacket.
“Thank you,” I say and he turns back to the TV, the reflection of the blue pool lighting up his blue, blue eyes.
My heart flutters a little, and I look for something to say. “I found you a word,” I blurt out. “For your list. The Glossary of Happiness.”
If he’s surprised, he doesn’t show it. “What is the word?” he asks.
“Tarab,” I say. “It’s Arabic. A happiness that comes from music.”
He smiles. “I like that.” He pauses the movie and jots it down in the notes in his phone. Then he turns to the TV. “You see what is happening?” He gestures at the screen.
“Not even a little bit,” I confess.
“He loves this woman, but he cannot tell her. You see? Her father is big boss. He is just worker. It is very sad.”
I study him. He seems to be talking about more than the movie.
“Have you loved?” he asks. “A boy back home?”
I smile. “My parents don’t like me dating,” I say. “They never let me, at home. And here . . .” I trail off. I think back. One boy I kissed at an outdoor dance near las viñas. Another one I met at an amusement park and he insisted on buying me a giant stuffed animal. Where did that go? Left behind with all my other things. I’ve liked boys, for sure. But love? No. He must know how I feel about Harrison, but I feel stupid saying it, especially af
ter what happened tonight.
“It seems easier in the movies,” he says.
I smile. I motion with my chin that he should put the movie back on. “Does he finally tell her? Do they get together?” I ask.
“Watch!” he says, laughing. We settle into the couch as the beautiful beach vistas play on the screen.
The apartment is warm, the T-shirt soft over my dress. That, and the comedown from all the tension and the cold, makes me as sleepy as I remember ever feeling. Neo is warm next to me. It makes me want to shift closer to him.
I don’t know when I doze off, but all of a sudden I feel my head on his shoulder. It startles me awake. I look up at Neo, ready to apologize, but he is looking at me, a small smile on his lips.
“It is the New Year,” he tells me. “I didn’t want you to miss it.”
I turn to the TV. He’s put on the channel with the celebration from New York. Two men, one with white hair, laugh and jump up and down. The camera shots change. The ball shines. The number of the new year flashes. Neo turns up the sound. A song starts to play. The camera pans the crowd.
He sits up. “We dance?”
I laugh and stand up. He stands up too. It’s awkward. I’m not sure what kind of dance he means. He puts his arm around my waist gingerly. He takes my other hand in his, the old-fashioned way of dancing. I step in closer and we sway slowly. The music is a little sad, about people you’ve lost or things you’ve forgotten, but it’s being played in a loud and festive way. On the screen, couples kiss.
I look up at Neo. He’s so close, a few inches away. He looks at me steadily, his eyes on my face. “Happy New Year,” he whispers. I feel myself pulled in. His lips look perfect, the dimple in his chin a little shadowed where he missed a spot shaving. I run my eyes over his face. I’ve never been this close to him.
The air suspends, everything slows down. The din from the television fades. It is a new year. I am in a place I didn’t expect to be, looking at someone I didn’t expect to be looking at. Maybe life is like this, the moments that come, not the ones we try to make.
My phone clangs. My text tone. Is it always that loud? I look down. On my lock screen, there it is. Harrison’s name. There’s a happy new year wish from Valentina too. I scrunch down to look closer.
Hey, where’d u go? Happy New Year! I wish you were her.
Is that a typo? Or a confession? I scrunch down to look closer.
Neo takes a step back. “I’ll let you get that. Sprite?” he asks. He walks to the kitchen. The moment, whatever the moment was, is gone.
Qué Vergüenza
It is my first day back from vacation, and I am actually dreading math class. I haven’t seen Harrison since the mess on New Year’s. He texted me, all those times that night, a few times the next day, another yesterday. I ignored the texts because I didn’t know what to say. To the one yesterday, the what happened? I figured I’d have to say something because I’d be seeing him in school today. I answered, sorry, something came up. I don’t want to explain any of it, how I misunderstood everything. How I felt at seeing him with Jessica. How everything that night was like believing I could speak English only to learn I understood nothing at all.
I keep thinking about Neo, too, and our almost-kiss. Was it an almost-kiss? It felt that way, but maybe I misunderstood. And if it was an almost-kiss, did I want it to be an actual-kiss?
Harrison slips into his seat. I look down at my notes intently, like I’m studying. Embarrassment crawls up my neck with prickly feet.
“Hey,” he says to me. The teacher isn’t here yet, and there’s a low hum in the room.
“Hey,” I say.
“You okay? ####### understand what happened.” His eyes look genuinely worried. The kind of look I might have taken for some other kind of interest, before.
“Oh, yeah.” I wave my hand breezily, like I am often in the habit of midparty kitchen escapes. “Something came up. Had to go.”
“Sure, yeah . . .” He looks down at his hands and then glances back at me. “Well, I was wondering if you’d be around on Thursday after school, to study? Quiz on Friday.”
I look at him. He is still so handsome in a burgundy hoodie and unshaved fuzz on his jaw. For my own sake, I should stay away from him. Also, if he’s with Jessica, that is their business. And, more than anything, I am tired of thinking I understand this new language, this new world, only to discover I am a foreigner all over again.
“I can’t,” I say.
“Oh. You want to do Wednesday instead?” he asks.
I shake my head. I once thought it would be bananas to spend time with Harrison. Now I realize it was bananas.
All I know is I can’t let myself do it again. “Sorry,” I say, and turn back to my book.
Hay for the Camels
Los Reyes is strange this year. It’s a holiday, but no one seems to know it is. I guess I understood this but wasn’t completely prepared for it. School is open. Everyone is walking around. It pulls at me that no one knows that half a world away, it is one of the most important days of the year.
I don’t stay for a movie or to tutor Harrison. My dad doesn’t pick me up, which he does some days. Although I don’t usually mind the walk, that oversight stings today too. Maybe he’s forgotten as well.
The apartment is still when I open the door. For a moment I wonder if my mom is out shopping. When she’s home there’s the sound of her voice talking to people back home, almost always, or wooden spoons clanging inside pots. But today there’s none of that. She’s sitting in the kitchen, quietly looking at the window, as if the window didn’t give only a view of a wall.
“Hola, mi niña,” she says.
“Pasa algo?” I ask. It is both strange and liberating that she’s not even giving a nod to the English-only rule.
“I couldn’t find hay,” she says. And she puts her face in her hands and cries.
Hay. For the three kings’ camels. On Three Kings, we always put a little bit of hay and a bowl of water out for the camels. I stopped believing in that years ago, of course, but somehow we kept doing it. At first I was annoyed. I thought the fact that my mom wanted to keep doing it meant she thought I was still a baby who believed the three kings were really coming. But, eventually, I came to like the ritual of it. Somewhere, thousands of years and even more thousands of miles away, there had been camels, and putting out a little bit of hay was an acknowledgment to the tradition the men on those camels started. She always made the hay and water disappear by the next morning, filling me with the feeling of maybe. Maybe it’s okay to believe, even when you don’t. I know camels and kings aren’t coming, but I want to live in a world that celebrates they do.
“Ma,” I say, “Don’t cry.”
“I went to the store. None of them had it, like at home. I tried to ask, but I . . .”
“Ma, come on. Don’t be sad. I have an idea.”
She comes meekly, which makes me even sadder. I arm myself with her kitchen shears and walk her down to the little courtyard outside our building. The grass has long since dried out.
“In the United States, the camels have learned to eat dry grass.”
Her face is still splotchy from crying, but she smiles through it and nods. I crouch down and cut a few handfuls. We take it up to the apartment and put it on a plate, along with a bowl of water, near the window that won’t open because it’s painted shut and which no one wants to open much because it faces a wall. But still, she smiles.
The next morning, the grass and the water are gone.
Reyes Magos,
Ha pasado mucho tiempo y estoy a muchos kilómetros de distancia. Do you speak English? I’m trying. If you’re a magic king, you must speak English, no? At least as much as Spanish.
I’m sorry I stopped believing in you. I thought it was part of growing up. But in this place, I need you. We need you. I think my mother needs you even more than I do.
Holding on to you feels important. The stories we tell ourselves make us who we are, an
d you are who I am. I close my eyes and see you crossing the long distances, far away from home, looking for the truth lit only by a faraway star. I understand you. There will always be a place for you with us. I will always leave hay and water for your camels. Don’t forget me.
The Elephant in the Room
Altagracia runs up to me squealing and grabs me by the wrists and jumps in front of my locker. A few kids turn around with quizzical looks, but she doesn’t seem to care.
“What?” I ask, jumping with her. Her enthusiasm is contagious.
She lands and crouches a little, as if preparing to be tackled. “You just can’t, under any circumstances, guess the goodness of this day.”
“You got a good grade in chemistry?” I ask.
She throws her hands up. “Bigger! Much bigger.”
“New car? Cool vacation?”
“No, no. What’s like the thing I want more than anything?” She is positively vibrating with the news.
“Beyoncé reposted one of your videos?”
She shakes her head. “Okay, the second most?”
“Sponsorship?”
“Sponsorship!!!” she squeals in a pitch close to one only dogs can hear.
“Congratulations! Tell me everything.”
So she does. But she insists on doing it while we do something called aerial yoga. She has signed us up for some type of torture involving fabric ribbons attached to the ceiling. She drives us there after school giving me the blow-by-blow of how the sponsorship happened.
We pull up to the studio, a little storefront in the next town over. It’s got purple fabric draped in the windows and a blue stone statue with a rhinestone necklace on it sitting on luxurious reams of orange fabric. As we step inside, the door makes a gentle tinkling sound, like a crystal bell.
“This place is so cool,” I tell her.
“My dad’s new girlfriend owns the studio,” she whispers.
The woman running the class is long and muscular. She leads us through a series of stretches, using the fabric ribbons hanging from the ceiling. She makes it look like she’s floating and the ribbons just artfully twirl themselves around her. Altagracia and I are far less graceful but she gives us time to get the hang of it.
Love in English Page 11
