Realizing he’d never see him alive again hit Yadriel with a fresh wave of grief.
“What if we can’t find him?” Andrés asked, breaking the quiet. He was a skinny, freckle-faced boy, and also Diego’s best friend.
The muscles in his dad’s jaw tensed. People exchanged looks.
“Keep searching. We need to find his portaje,” Enrique told them. “If we can summon his spirit, we can ask him what happened.” He rubbed his fist across his brow. Clearly, his dad didn’t think Miguel had died and simply passed peacefully to the afterlife. Yadriel agreed, he just couldn’t see how that could’ve happened with how violently his death felt. “Hopefully, it’ll be with his body.”
Yadriel’s stomach clenched at the idea of finding Miguel’s lifeless body lying somewhere in their cemetery.
Andrés’s face turned an impressive shade of green. Yadriel couldn’t believe he used to have a crush on him.
Enrique picked up his portaje from the counter. It was a hunting knife, much larger and more severe than Yadriel’s, but still understated compared to the style of the young brujos’ portajes.
Like Diego’s and Andrés’s. Their knives were longer, with a slight curve, too big to be practical or easily concealed. They got their names engraved into the blades and added flashy charms. A small cross hung on a one-inch chain from Andrés’s hilt. Diego’s had a gold-plated calavera. “Gaudy,” Maritza called them. Adornments were impractical and completely unnecessary.
“We need to get going,” Enrique said, and everyone started to move.
This was it.
He would help them find Miguel and lay his cousin to rest in the brujx graveyard. This was the duty of the brujos, so he would do it. Now that he had his own portaje, maybe Yadriel could even be the one to release Miguel’s spirit to the afterlife.
Yadriel stepped to follow his dad, but Enrique held out his arm to stop him.
“Not you. You stay here,” he instructed.
Yadriel’s stomach plummeted. “But I can help!” he insisted.
“No, Yadriel.” A loud ringing had Enrique digging his cell phone out of his pocket. He swiped his thumb across the screen and lifted it to his ear. “Benny, did you find him?” he asked, expression tense.
Everyone in the group stilled. Yadriel could hear rushed Spanish on the other side.
But his father’s shoulders slumped. “No, we haven’t, either.” He sighed, rubbing his forehead. “We’re trying to gather more people to help search—”
Yadriel leaped at the opportunity. “I can help!” he repeated.
His dad turned away from him and continued to speak into the phone. “No, we haven’t—”
Yadriel scowled, frustration boiling over. “Dad!” he insisted, stepping in front of him. “Let me help, I—”
“No, Yadriel,” Enrique hissed, frowning as he tried to hear the voice on the other line.
Normally, Yadriel wasn’t prone to arguing with his dad, but this was important. He looked around to the brujos in the room, for someone to listen to him, but they were already filing out. Except for Tío Catriz, who gave Yadriel a puzzled look.
When his dad made for the front door, fierce determination made Yadriel step in his way.
“If you’d just listen to me—” Yadriel wrestled his backpack off his shoulder and yanked open the zipper.
“Yadriel—”
He plunged his hand inside, fingers grasping the hilt of his portaje. “Look—”
“¡Basta!”
Enrique’s shout made Yadriel jump.
His dad was an even-tempered man. It genuinely took a lot to get him rattled or for him to lose his temper. It was part of what made him a good leader. Seeing his dad’s face so red, hearing the sharpness of his voice, was jarring. Even Diego, standing just behind Enrique, was startled.
The room fell silent. Yadriel felt every pair of eyes on him.
He snapped his mouth shut. The cut on his tongue stung, sharp and metallic.
Enrique jabbed a finger toward the living room. “You stay here with the rest of the women!”
Yadriel flinched. Hot shame flooded his cheeks. He released the dagger, letting it fall to the bottom of his backpack. He glared up at his dad in an attempt to look fierce and defiant, even though his eyes burned and his hands quaked.
“The rest of the women,” he repeated, spitting the words out as if they were poisonous.
Enrique blinked, anger flickering to confusion, as though Yadriel were suddenly coming into focus before him. He removed his cell phone from his ear. His shoulders sank; his expression went slack. “Yadriel,” he sighed, reaching out for him.
But Yadriel wasn’t going to stick around to listen.
Maritza tried to stop him. “Yads—”
He couldn’t take the look of pity on her face. He veered out of her reach. “Don’t.”
Yadriel turned and shoved past the onlookers, escaping through the door that led to the garage. It banged against the wall before slamming shut behind him as he stomped down the small set of stairs. The lights sputtered on, revealing organized chaos. His dad’s car was parked off to one side.
Seething, Yadriel paced back and forth over the oil-stained concrete, his breath ragged as his ribs strained against his binder. Anger and embarrassment warred inside him.
He wanted to scream or break something.
Or both.
His dad’s face—the look of regret when he realized what he’d said to Yadriel—flashed in his mind. Yadriel was always forgiving people for being callous. For misgendering him and calling him by his deadname. He was always giving them the benefit of the doubt, or writing it off as people not understanding or being stuck in their ways when they hurt him.
Well, Yadriel was tired of it. He was tired of forgiving. He was tired of fighting to just exist and be himself. He was tired of being the odd one out.
But belonging meant denying who he was. Living as something he wasn’t had nearly torn him apart from the inside out. But he also loved his family, and his community. It was bad enough being an outsider; what would happen if they just couldn’t—or wouldn’t—accept him for who he was?
Frustration broke in Yadriel’s chest. He kicked the tire of the car with his combat boot, which did nothing but make pain explode in his foot.
Yadriel cussed loudly and hobbled over to an old stool. Wincing, he sat down heavily.
Stupid move.
He scowled at the black sedan, and his angry reflection stared back at him from the windshield. All the running had made his hair fall out of place. Short on the sides with a swath of hair on top, Yadriel put a lot of time into styling it. His hair was one of the few things about his appearance he could control. While he couldn’t get button-up shirts to fit right—either they were too tight across his chest and hips, or comically huge—he could at least get his hair faded and use what little allowance he got on Suavecito pomade. It was the only stuff that could wrangle his thick mass of wavy black hair. He couldn’t thin out his round cheeks, but he could grow his eyebrows in thick and dark. The combat boots were as much practical as they were aesthetic. They gave him an extra inch of height that, while minuscule, helped him feel less self-conscious about how short he was compared to the average sixteen-year-old boy. It was small changes, like mirroring how Diego and his friends dressed or wore their hair, that made him feel more at home in his own skin.