Huh. Probably my brothers were playing so many video games now because Dad wasn’t around to play with them.
“When’s dinner?” Christopher asked. Good question. I went into the kitchen. The sink was full of dirty dishes. Great. But I washed and dried them and put them away. Then I stared into the cupboard. Cooking… wasn’t exactly my strength. I had only ever made rice once before, and it had come out more like soup. Mom said I had added too much water. See, my parents never followed recipes. They always just eyeballed amounts. I’d tried to do the same. But ended up with rice soup. So this time I measured and timed and stirred, and twenty-five minutes later, the rice was done. It looked like rice! Until I tasted it. Bland-o! It wasn’t savory like when Mom made it. Then I remembered that Mom put onions and tomatoes and other stuff in there. Bouillon? Garlic? Salt! I could add those things now.
I took the pot off the stove, cut up a tomato and an onion, and stirred them in. Then I opened a bouillon cube and mashed it using a fork. Why are those things in cubes, anyway? Ohhh! They’d make good little presents if I made a Christmastime miniature room; I’d have to remember that. I got out the big container of salt and was sprinkling some in when Benjamin burst into the kitchen, shouting “You need to sign my reading log!” He scared the heck out of me, and I accidentally poured way too much salt into the pot.
“Benjamin! You just made me spill it!” I tried to scoop the cloud of salt out, but it was already sinking, dissolving into the rice.
“Me? It’s not my fault you can’t cook.”
I gave him a dirty look.
“So, can you sign it?” He waved a green paper at me.
I scanned it. “Did you actually read for thirty minutes?”
“No.”
“Then I’m not going to sign it. Go read.”
“You’re such a—”
Beep! Beep! Beep! What the—the smoke alarm! Christopher barreled in with his hands over his ears, followed by Mom, the blanket around her shoulders. “What’s going on? Liliana!”
“I was making rice—” I looked around frantically. Damn! I’d never turned off the stove. I switched it off, grabbed a dishrag, waved it at the alarm, and braced myself to get yelled at.
But Mom was peering into the pot, an enormous smile on her face. Then she took a bite. “Oh, Liliana.” She gave me a Thanks for your help; this rice stinks look. And so it was worth it—the annoying smoke alarm and all. Mom opened the windows and the door that led to the basement stairway. She even opened the refrigerator! Then she spooned out the top layer of the rice—where, according to her, most of the salt would be. She added more water to the pot and a bunch of frozen chicken thighs from the freezer, and she set it all to simmer. “Come get me in half an hour,” she said, heading back to the living room. “Don’t forget.”
“Okay,” I said, turning toward Benjamin. “You can start reading now. And don’t stop until I say.”
He put on a protest pout, but got his backpack and sat at the table. “You know,” he said. “I am taking a cooking class. So I could help you with the rice next time.”
“Now you tell me?”
He grinned and opened his book. “Oh yeah,” he said. “I also thought of something you could use for the barbed wire above the panadería you’re making.”
“Yeah?” He was actually thinking about me outside his universe of video games and reading logs? Aw…
“The inside of a pen. You know, for the spirals. Just pull it loose a little bit.”
“Benjamin! That’s a great idea! Thanks!”
And once the rice and chicken were done, and I’d eaten a bowl and a half—it was pretty good, and only a little too salty—I knocked on my window three times for Jade. She wasn’t home. Thought of texting Dustin, but then remembered he had a game. So instead I went right to work on Yoli’s Pasteles y Panadería. I took apart an old pen and used the silver spiral just like Benjamin had suggested. It was perfect.
10
With Mom watching news nonstop (which made me worry about Dad nonstop), school was almost a relief. On the ride in, I noticed there wasn’t a single pastelería in Westburg, only Starbucks and one bakery on Main Street called—you guessed it—Main Street Bakery. And it sure didn’t advertise sillas y mesas for rent on a handwritten sign in the window like at Yoli’s. I guess Westburg customers didn’t need to rent any tables and chairs. And that, folks, was my takeaway on that morning’s bus ride to school. Oh, and Dustin texted me eleven times, just sayin’. He really wanted me to go to a game. I really wanted a different mother. Joke, joke. But…
In third-period World History—I couldn’t believe it—we were starting a unit on Central American immigration. It was part of a larger unit on immigration as part of a yearlong theme of Reading Like a Historian. Guess who finally read that syllabus? I noticed that this school gave unique names to their courses, instead of the basic English, art, math, history, etc. Like, there was one senior English course called American Rebels and Romantics. And yeah, Central American immigration. But ugh, why couldn’t we just study the Civil War or the Vietnam War or some other war? There were enough of them. At the same time, I was kinda curious. Maybe I could learn more about, I don’t know, how my family got here—about Dad? At the same time, I didn’t want the extra attention on me, because, sadly, it didn’t seem like there were any other METCO kids in the class. So I knew the attention would be on me. Because, yeah. Double ugh.
Our teacher, Mr. Phelps, started things off by holding a class debate. First he projected this onto the whiteboard from his computer:
The United States federal government should substantially increase its legal protection of economic migrants in the United States.
He read it out loud a couple of times. All I could hear was the hot hum of his laptop. Why was he showing us this? Because of the president’s Build a Wall obsession? What kind of wall, anyway? And who would actually build it? Okay. If getting our brains spinning was his goal, he’d succeeded.
As if he’d read my mind, Mr. Phelps tapped his keyboard, and up came a picture of the president wearing a blue suit and red tie and speaking into a microphone. A speech bubble said:
We want a great country. We want a country with heart. But when people come up, they have to know they can’t get in. Otherwise it’s never going to stop.
WTF?! I glanced around, but no one else seemed as outraged as I was—or else they had freakin’ good poker faces. Next Mr. Phelps played a short clip from a documentary about child migrants trying to flee Central America to the US by climbing cargo trains that traveled up through Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico. In the clip, two teenage boys were lying on top of a massive train, the wind flattening their hair, the sun in their eyes, as they tried desperately to hang on tight as the train blasted through a tunnel in a mountain. I gasped out loud. The clip ended right before the train moved into the darkness.
This time everyone moaned. Someone shouted, “Oh, come on! You can’t do that! Play the rest of the video!”
Mr. Phelps looked all smug, like his unit “hook” had worked. Well, it had. We were interested. Invested. Sitting up.