Paola Santiago and the Forest of Nightmares

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  Well, she’d done more with less time, that was for sure.

  As Johnny started the engine, Naomi leaned down to the window to say good-bye. Pao met her eyes reluctantly.

  She’d been hoping Naomi would change her mind, realize that she belonged with the Niños, and come along. Pao’s pointed comments about Marisa falling even more “in like” with Franco were supposed to have galvanized her.

  Unfortunately, it hadn’t worked like that.

  “Be safe, kid,” Naomi said, her brown eyes standing out more than usual against her silver hair. “You’ll be okay.” She went for a sort of side-five-slash-handshake, and when Pao reached out awkwardly to join in, Naomi slid a twenty-dollar bill into her palm, a move so smooth it reminded Pao of a magician who had performed at Ryan James’s sixth birthday party.

  That clown had been creepy, but Naomi was as cool as ever.

  “It’s not much,” Naomi said, “but it’s what I’ve got.”

  “Thanks,” Pao said, her mind racing. She wanted to step out and beg Naomi to come with them, but she knew nothing so blatantly vulnerable would ever work on a girl who’d left her entire biological family, and after that her chosen family, just because the vibe hadn’t felt right.

  Pao’s mom would have said something like She’s such a Sagittarius, but Pao didn’t know when Naomi’s birthday was, so she couldn’t blame it on astrology.

  Instead, Pao slid the money into her pocket and said, “Hey, if I see Marisa on my way north, I’ll tell her you say hi. Anything else you want me to pass along? To her or Franco? Or I guess both of them, since they’re sort of joined at the hip now, right?”

  A pang of something (annoyance? jealousy? real pain?) crossed Naomi’s face, but it disappeared so fast, Pao was almost sure she’d imagined it.

  “I said what I needed to before she left,” Naomi replied. “She didn’t want to hear it.”

  “Man,” Pao said, “I guess we’ve both changed. I keep secrets now, and you . . . give up? Who woulda thought.”

  “I did not—” Naomi began, but Pao tapped the back of Johnny’s seat.

  “We better get a move on,” she said as Dante turned the dial on the radio, trying to find a station that wasn’t half static or a radio evangelist. (Radiovangelist? Pao wondered. What were those guys called?)

  “Sure thing, pipsqueak!” Johnny said, and Pao bristled.

  Any ride is better than no ride, any ride is better than no ride.

  “Later, Naomi,” he said, looking up at her through his dark eyelashes. “Maybe when I get back we can—”

  “Just get them there safe,” she said, smirking affectionately. “And call me if you run into any more fantasmas, yeah?”

  “Sure thing,” Johnny said.

  Naomi gave Dante a terse nod, which he barely returned, and then the car was in gear, backing out of the garage and into the street. Pao watched out the rear window as Naomi got smaller and smaller, evidence that the first two plans she’d come up with had failed spectacularly. She was wondering what that meant for the rest of the journey, when suddenly . . .

  Naomi stopped getting smaller.

  In fact, she was getting bigger now, waving her arms to stop Johnny. He slammed on the brakes as she approached Dante’s window, panting.

  “Get in the back, hero boy,” she said, shooting a half grin back at Pao.

  “What?” Dante asked, clearly offended.

  “I’m coming with you. Let me in.”

  Despite Dante’s grumbling, Pao’s heart was growing like the Grinch’s. She’d only seen the movie once, at Emma’s, but Pao remembered the image so clearly. The tiny shriveled heart expanding until it burst out of its frame.

  Her plan had worked! She wasn’t useless, and Naomi was coming with them, and everything was going right again. Okay, it was only one thing, but still . . .

  Dante squeezed himself into the back seat beside Pao, staying as close to the window as he could and not looking at her directly, but also not saying anything mean, which she figured was a start.

  Naomi settled in the front and changed the radio station.

  Johnny said something cheesy about being happy to have her aboard.

  Naomi ignored him, turning around to look at Pao. “I don’t give up,” she said. “That much hasn’t changed.”

  Pao grinned. “Glad to hear it.”

  Naomi smiled back, showing her canines. “I want my twenty dollars back.”

  Riding in the Karmann Ghia was deeply cool for the first, like, thirty miles.

  After that, Pao started to notice how much the car rattled at high speeds. Pao knew a little about mechanics from the summer she was ten, when, after realizing she’d never get her hands on a real rocket engine, she started talking to a downstairs neighbor who was always working on his pickup in the parking lot.

  Cars, rockets . . . it was all combustion, and she’d figured some knowledge was always better than none.

  She hoped this rattle was from misaligned tires, or just minor body damage that was causing friction at high speeds. The alternatives—improper fuel octane or ignition timing, an overheating engine—were much more likely to derail this little trip before it truly got under way.

  Pao tried to focus on anything other than the rattling and the fact that sometimes Johnny laughed nervously as he cajoled the car from one gear to the next. Or how little room there was in the back, and how difficult it was, with Dante lost in thought beside her, to avoid even an unintentional elbow bump.

  Had they really been holding hands just a few months ago? Pao couldn’t help but compare the way they were now to the way they’d been last summer. Sure, they’d bickered then, and bantered, and flat-out disagreed sometimes. But she’d never really wondered whether he was on her side.

  Not until lately.

  Regardless, he wasn’t talking, and it was too loud in the car to chat with Naomi—Johnny insisted on keeping the windows rolled down because he didn’t want the car to “smell like people” when he gave it back to the owner. So Pao spent her time staring out the window.

  The trouble was, there wasn’t much to look at besides the flat landscape of Arizona turning into the flat landscape of eastern California. The most interesting thing Pao saw in the first fifty miles was a hitchhiker.

  But the hitchhiker was pretty interesting. Pao had to give him that.

  He was middle-aged and tall, with broad shoulders. He looked a little like the silhouette of Pao’s dad from her dream. That was the only reason she noticed him. Well, that and the fact that his pants and sweater were both bright red.

  Pao got the strangest feeling as they approached the exit ramp where he was standing, his thumb out in the universal sign for I need a ride. He wasn’t the first person she’d seen wearing all red today. But she couldn’t remember who that first person had been. . . .

  They pulled even with the man, the car’s engine chugging strangely. Johnny jiggled the gear shift helplessly as they lost speed, allowing Pao to make eye contact with the hitchhiker. He was staring right at her.

  After the red outfit, the first thing she noticed was his hair—long and dark, shot through with silver. He had it pulled back in a ponytail to expose high cheekbones and the deepest, most beautiful brown eyes Pao had ever seen.

  She was a little mesmerized. This man was everything she had imagined as a child when she’d dreamed of her father. A tall, handsome, distinguished-looking man who would never tire of her questions, who would share her experiments . . .

  When the hitchhiker smiled at her, Pao forgot the purpose of her mission. Señora Mata. The magic anomaly. Even her real father, and her multiple reasons for wanting to go north. All she could think about was picking him up.

  “We should stop,” she said quietly. And then louder, “We should stop!”

  The engine caught, Johnny whooping in victory as the car shot forward, leaving the man in its dust.

  “What were you saying, Pao?” Johnny asked as they reached highway speed once again.
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  Pao’s brain felt fuzzy. She didn’t know what Johnny was talking about. “What?” she asked, shaking her head like there was water in her ears.

  “You were saying something,” Johnny persisted. “When I was trying to get the car in gear. Did you want to stop for a snack break or something?”

  Pao’s cheeks heated up in embarrassment—and not just because Johnny insisted on talking to her like she was about eight. Pao didn’t know if or why she’d said whatever Johnny thought she said, but she felt everyone’s eyes on her, expecting an answer.

  “Yeah, uh, just because the car was acting up. Good job making it . . . work again.” Pao smiled feebly.

  Johnny shrugged, apparently satisfied with (or at least bored by) her weak explanation. Dante’s eyes, however, stayed on her a little longer.

  It was Pao’s turn to avoid eye contact now. She looked back out the window.

  Two miles later, she saw a cross posted beside the road, with roses piled underneath it. QUERIDO ALáN, it said in blue script. They were moving too fast for her to read the birth and death dates.

  Goose bumps erupted along Pao’s arms, and she didn’t know why. Was it because they’d been so close to engine failure on this same stretch of road? The fact that it could have been their names on the cross?

  Or maybe she was just understandably wary of dead people after her brush with the fantasmas at the hospital.

  Either way, she decided to stop looking out the window for now.

  Eavesdropping, unfortunately, didn’t prove much more interesting. Dante was as silent as ever, his jaw tightening more and more the farther they got past the California border, like there was something in Fresno he was absolutely dreading.

  Which made no sense, Pao thought, frustrated. From what she knew about Dante (which was a lot, she liked to think), he’d never been to California, either.

  Knowing it was a risk but feeling strange and off-balance after her brief memory lapse earlier, Pao took out her phone and turned it on.

  Immediately, three notification windows popped up. Another twelve missed calls from her mom, and a couple of texts from Emma.

  Pao dismissed the missed-call alerts and went straight to the texts.

  Status update, the first one read. Señora Mata’s situation hasn’t changed. They’re chalking up the weird readings from the brain activity machine to a malfunction or rare complication. At my insistence, they’ve called in some fancy specialist from Seattle and are borrowing a different brain scanning machine from a hospital out of state. Both will take a few days to get here, but HURRY!

  Twelve minutes later, she’d sent another:

  Status update two: Hospitals are dead boring. Almost makes you wish a ghost would show up. She’d added a winking emoji, followed by a ghost sticking out its tongue.

  Pao laughed a little, drawing Dante’s eyes.

  “Your abuela’s okay,” Pao said, quietly enough to be heard only by Dante but loudly enough to carry over the engine and freeway noise. “Emma got the doctors to call in a specialist to stall for time.”

  “Great,” Dante said, and Pao couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or sincere.

  As if he’d heard the thought, he turned to her, his eyes open wide, his mouth sitting funny on his face, like he hadn’t decided whether or not to tell her something.

  Pao waited, hating the fact that she was holding her breath.

  Finally, he said, “Thanks for checking on her,” and looked back out the window.

  Pao let out her breath, feeling her whole body deflate along with her lungs.

  Her phone buzzed. Another message from Emma, sent just now.

  How’s the quest? Dante over his grumpy mood yet? She added a GIF from the movie Inside Out—the angry red guy with his head on fire.

  Pao smiled, but it faded almost immediately. Not sure, she replied. Things are weird between us. We got a ride to a sort of halfway point. The driver is annoying and the music sucks, but it could be worse.

  Emma sent a sad-face emoji. You guys will make up, she said. You always do.

  It’s different this time, Pao sent back. He’s different. I don’t know what to do.

  I thought it was good? Emma asked. You guys seemed so cozy when we got back from everything this summer, I just figured you were an *item* now.

  Pao cringed at the word item. Probably not a good sign. Not at all, she typed quickly, hitting Send and immediately beginning another message. A long one. I thought so, too, kind of, at first anyway. But he’s been distant and weird all year. We were probably better as friends? I don’t know if I’m even ready for anything else. Maybe I’m just scared.

  She had never admitted that to anyone before. Something about the lull of the car noise, the impersonal background of the text thread, and the fact that it was Emma on the other end made it easier to be honest.

  Feeling reckless, and a little brave, she hit Send again.

  This time, the three dots that meant Emma was typing appeared, disappeared, and appeared again twice. Pao was about to revise her opinion about how easy being honest was when the message finally came through.

  You were all alone, she wrote. I had no idea. I’m sorry.

  It was Pao’s turn to type and delete and type again.

  It wasn’t your fault, she answered finally. I just never wanted to get in the way of you being happy.

  I’m happy with you, Emma wrote back immediately, and this time, Pao’s smile lingered. She double tapped the message until the little heart appeared and hit it.

  I gotta get offline, Pao wrote reluctantly. Mom’s probably gonna call again any second. Check in soon?

  You got this, Emma replied. I’ll be here whenever you need me.

  As long as I’m an eighth-grader named Alex who likes eating out of the trash.

  Emma sent three laugh/cry emojis, and Pao reluctantly turned off the phone again. With Dante still gazing stonily out the window, Pao couldn’t help but wish it was her other best friend in this car with her, even if said best friend didn’t have a magical ghost-smashing club.

  Three hours into the trip, the only change was that the little mountains had become kind of medium-size mountains.

  Pao was hungry and tired, and she had to pee. Were they ever going to stop?

  She was about to ask when a blessed blue sign appeared:

  REST AREA—2 MILES

  Pao would just have to hope they had a vending machine or something, because they couldn’t risk going into a town for food. Not when they were barely out of Arizona and Pao’s mom had undoubtedly alerted the authorities by now.

  The rest area consisted of two bathroom buildings (gendered again, ugh, Pao thought), a bright-red awning over some picnic tables, and a little grassy area where dogs could do their business. Pao found herself missing Bruto terribly. Even picking up his monster-size demon-dog turds would have been worth it just to have him along.

  The surrounding area was flat for miles, hills standing sentry in the distance. Johnny parked the car, looking around shiftily (probably for cops, Pao thought, doing the same thing herself). Apparently satisfied, he pocketed the keys and climbed out, folding down the front seat and allowing Pao to escape and finally, mercifully, stretch her legs.

  “Ten minutes,” he said, his voice a little tense. “I want to be back on the road as soon as possible.”

  Pao couldn’t argue with that. She made a beeline for the bathroom, trying not to notice Dante moodily wandering off past the dog section instead of partaking in any of the rest area’s amenities.

  In the little building—which was mostly a glorified outhouse—she took her time washing her hands, not eager to get back in the little red torture chamber for another five hours. But she knew they were sitting ducks if they weren’t in motion.

  When Pao got back to the car, Johnny and Naomi hadn’t returned yet, and Dante was nowhere to be seen, either. There was a prickling feeling on the back of her neck—they were exposed here, vulnerable, and she was worried about Da
nte.

  Chill, she told herself. Just because he’s avoiding you doesn’t mean something’s wrong wrong.

  Her stomach growled. Forcing herself to stop scanning the parking lot for her friend, Pao dug in her pocket for her last three dollars (left over from the sunglasses in Rock Creek) and went off in search of a vending machine.

  At first, she didn’t see one. But then, about fifty yards from the rest area proper, she spotted it, near the fence that bordered the highway. Pao thought it strange that it would be so far from the rest of the amenities, but her stomach told her to make for it anyway.

  Up close, she saw that the vending machine was purple, the lighting inside it bright green. The candies and drinks all had Spanish names Pao didn’t recognize. Things like dulce de muerte and golpe de veneno.

  Pao squinted inside, hoping to get a clue as to what kind of snacks these packages contained. She’d finally settled on something called botana de protección when she realized the keypad was strange as well. Where the selection numbers should have been, there were just symbols.

  Some of them Pao recognized from her mom’s tarot cards and books, but many were totally foreign to her. She put a dollar into the money slot and, as directed by the display, pressed the button in the very center, where the five would have been.

  This symbol, Pao knew. It was the mal de ojo—a circular eye that her mom claimed protected you from jealousy or evil energy. The vending unit started whirring and blinking like a slot machine, but nothing fell from the shelves. Instead, all around Pao, the green paper-doll ghosts from her dream began to rise from the ground, encircling her, beginning the mad dance she was growing all too familiar with.

  “Oh no, here we go again,” Pao moaned, pulling her bandanna-bound knife out of her sock, unwrapping it, and holding it at the ready. She couldn’t see beyond the ring of spinning green shapes to know whether wide-eyed tourists were pointing their phone cameras at her yet, but it was only a matter of time.

  “What do you want?” Pao shouted, jabbing with the knife, unsure if it would be of any use against these things—which seemed, as ever, to be made of light.