AMY
I’M STANDING ON my front porch, breathing in the cold, soaking in my last few moments of quiet before going inside. Just one … more … minute.
Inside, it’s a circus.
“This one is mine, and you know it!” one of my sisters screams at the other one. They’re fighting over a pink hairbrush in the middle of the living room, and when I close the door behind me, they both turn to me immediately.
“Amy!” Gabriella screams. “Tell Marisa this is my hairbrush! She bought the purple one, remember? The pink one is mine!”
“No!” Marisa screams back. “I didn’t even want a purple one! I want the pink one! You take the purple one!”
I walk around them and into the hallway. “Where’s Mama?” I ask, because she’s usually wrangling my little siblings into their pj’s about now.
“Javi’s crying because he swallowed a tooth,” Gabriella says. “They’re in Mama’s room.”
I turn in the direction of my parents’ room, but before I can knock, the door is thrown open, and Hector runs out of the room and directly into me.
“Ow!” I say, but he’s already taking off past me. “You stepped on my toe.”
“Sorry,” Hector calls over his shoulder as he runs down the hallway.
“Mama?” I call, tapping a knuckle against her doorframe. I hear someone hiccupping from inside.
“Amy?”
I push the door open.
“Hi, sweetie.” Mama still has her arms around a crying Javier when I come in, but I ignore my little brother. Gabriella swallowed a tooth last month, so this isn’t the first time we’re going through this little calamity. “How was job hunting?”
I halt a few steps inside her room. I know I don’t have any right to be upset that she asked me to get a job, but now that I’ve had time to let it sink in, to think about how this is going to derail me, I think I’m upset anyway. Upset that this happened, and that I have to help deal with it.
Not to mention, I’m afraid I’m going to hear a chorus of see I told you so’s from her and my stepfather, Carlos, when I tell them I got a job at Spirits. They know how much I like it there, and I know they’ll be smug about it. They’re always trying to get me to do “teenager things,” but they don’t get that I don’t have time for “teenager things” if I’m going to get the hell out of Missouri when I graduate. This job is not about “teenager things.” It’s about money, plain and simple.
And maybe it’s a little bit about music.
I glance down at Javier, still trembling in Mama’s arms. “Well. Actually. I got a job at Spirits. Okay, well, it was great talking to you. Bye.”
She frowns at me, but I shut the door. Out in the living room, Marisa and Gabriella are still screaming over the pink hairbrush, but now Hector has joined in, taking Marisa’s side, and trying to help her wiggle the brush out of Gabriella’s hands. I walk over to them and snatch the hairbrush out of the middle of the battle.
“Now you get to share the purple brush,” I tell them, and Marisa and Gabriella start screaming for Mama while I take off for my bedroom. I toss the pink hairbrush on my dresser and collapse on my bed, aware of the textbooks I set out before I left so that I could get back to them when I got home. But I’m exhausted.
Mama comes into my room and shuts the door behind her. Down the hall, I can hear Javi crying still.
“Amaría, tell me about your job,” she says, and I hate the tone of her voice. She always gets this tone when she has opinions, and I don’t particularly feel up to listening to the “You should have done this a long time ago” lecture right now.
“Mama, don’t worry about it, okay? I have homework to do.” I get off my bed like I was going to do the homework I have instead of vegging out, but she ignores me.
“You’re mad at me. Why? Because I made you get a job, like a normal teenager?”
I slam my textbook shut. “Okay, first of all, normal teenager? That is so offensive. And second, why didn’t you tell me Carlos lost his job? You waited a whole week!”
“It wasn’t something you needed to know.”
I throw my hands up. “Not until you need me to get a job. You totally blindsided me! I have to focus on school, Mama. And now, I have another thing to worry about.”
“Well, maybe you should be more worried about this than about scholarships and class rank.”
I scowl at her. “What does that mean?”
Mama crosses her arms. “Mija, I’m not trying to start a fight with you. I just…” She trails off and sighs, that same sigh I know so well, followed by words I know so well. “Baby, you know you might not get into Stanford. It’s not that I don’t believe in you, but getting into Stanford is hard. Would it really be so bad to have a backup plan? Have some job experience under your belt? What happens if you don’t get that scholarship? You know we can’t afford—”
I ball my hands into fists. “I’m going to get into Stanford, and I’m going to get the Keller Scholarship, and I’m going to move to California. All I have to do is make valedictorian, and I have been first in my class for two years. Why can’t you just be on my side for once?”
She sighs and comes to stand in front of me, setting her hands on my shoulders. “I am on your side, mi amor. But I don’t want you to be heartbroken when things don’t go your way.”
She always says it like that, so gentle. But every time, all I hear is You can’t do it.
Before I have a chance to call her out on this, there are four small children stampeding through my room, shrieking at the top of their lungs.
“Girls!” Mama shouts after them. “Boys! Stop running! Get out of your sister’s room!”
The two sets of twins, two girls and two boys that are my half siblings, ignore Mama and continue chasing one another in circles around her legs like we’re in a Tom and Jerry rerun.
I slam my hands over my ears. “Get out!” I shout at them, trying to get them to at least slow down, but they don’t. Finally, Mama snatches up a wriggling Hector and shuffles him out of the room, and the other three kids follow close behind, a choo-choo train on a sugar rush.
I slam the door behind all of them and lock it. I don’t want Mama to come back in and remind me how big the chances are that this will all blow up in my face.
And then I lie back on my bed and call Jackson. He answers on the first ring.
“I don’t think I can do this,” I tell him, and I hear him sigh in that way that he does when I’m upset. A sympathetic sigh.
“What’s wrong?” Just the sound of his voice seems to calm some of the unease inside me.
I shrug, immediately feeling stupid for calling him at all. Jackson doesn’t need to hear me complain again about the job and about Mama and about everything.
“Why is that everyone else can handle working and school and a social life, and I can’t?”
On the other end of the line, Jackson snorts. “Because everyone else isn’t pushing themselves as hard as you are. You want to come over?”
I sigh. “No, I have homework.”