And yeah, he did talk a lot about sports, but he could tell when I was getting bored, and he’d switch it up. He had no clue I’d rather talk about sports than about my family, any day. What? Was I supposed to tell him about how Tía Laura actually went through my closet while I was at school and “borrowed” a sweater because she was apparently freezing? Welcome to November in Boston, Tía. I admit, it was mad funny the other night when she tried on one of my old puffy coats. She looked like a blue marshmallow, but she sashayed around the apartment, thanking me repeatedly. It was pretty sweet.
* * *
Speaking of sweet, there Dustin was at my locker the next morning, with a fresh blueberry muffin for me! He’d stopped at the bakery on his way to school. He was going on about how this bakery used only Maine blueberries in their muffins, which was why the muffins were so good, and I mentioned that my brothers loved to cook. “You have brothers? You never talk about them—”
“Two,” I said, thinking, Please don’t ask me about my family.
“I have three!” he said, all happy. “Mine are older, in college and grad school. Another is married. How about yours?”
“Almost nine.” Please don’t ask.…
“Twins? That must be fun!”
“Er…”
“Lil?” He pretend-elbowed my arm. “You okay? You’ve gone one-syllable on me.”
“Yes. I am.” I grinned. “See? That was three words.”
“Ha—but each just one syllable!”
Now I pretend-elbowed him.
A teacher coming down the hall called out, “Good game yesterday, Dustin.”
I could see Dustin’s Adam’s apple twitch. Impulsively I reached out and touched it. He turned, and I swear he was going to lean in and kiss me, but the teacher was now two feet away. Dustin gave him a high five. I mean, it would’ve been rude to leave a teacher hanging like that, even though no one high-fives anymore.
After that, though, something shifted. There was more charge to every text, every glance, everything. And it was dope. And then, later, instead of our usual good night emojis—the sleepy one, the smooch-faced one, the monkey with his hands over his eyes—he wrote: Come over this weekend?
I stared at those four words in happy disbelief. Then the happy collapsed. Yeah, right. Like my mother would go for that. No dating until I was like, ninety, and plus, I think she was convinced I might get pregnant just by talking to a guy. I flopped back against my mattress, so annoyed.
You there?
I sat back up, said I’d check. Then, sorry, family plans, is what I told him.
Thing was, if Mom had known that I was hanging with Dustin, she probably would have pulled me out of METCO altogether. Or taken me to Bible study class like the one my cousins in Chelsea went to on Saturday mornings. I went with them once, and that was a blast. Not. A sweaty pastor in a too-tight suit sputtered proverbs in Spanish, after which we all descended to the church basement for punch and sugar cookies while the men played tambourines and guitars and the women sang church songs. Yeah, not happening again.
What did happen: going to the basement with Dustin.
It was during study hall. He texted me, asked me to meet him at his locker. Then he led us toward the stairs. On the way I spotted Genesis. She and two other kids were pinning theater performance flyers on the bulletin board. “Hey,” I said with a wave. She didn’t wave back, just watched as Dustin and I pushed through the double doors that led to the basement stairway, an odd look on her face.
We took two flights of stairs down, and then kept going… to the storage rooms? “The basement?” I managed a small smile. He responded with a bigger one.
We found a secluded spot behind a row of old lockers. Dustin leaned against the wall and pulled me close, so close that I could feel his chest rising and falling. If I looked up, our lips would touch. Maybe. Maybe I was crazy about him. And now he took my hand and squeezed it tight. He dipped his head.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I said back.
And then we weren’t saying anything at all.
17
Yeah… so I was kinda loving my social life lately. And yeah, it was a major distraction from worrying about Dad, and like, basically being tethered to my room because Tía Laura and Tío R. were so flippin’ loud with their card playing—usually Thirty-One or poker—and the phone calls they had with relatives on speakerphone. Why, oh why, did they have to use the speakerphone? I will never understand. But yeah, it was all a welcome distraction.
But there was something I was not loving. Believe it or not, keeping up my grades was hardest in Creative Writing class. I mean, I could have worked harder on my assignments, but five a.m. was killing me—so much that sometimes I fell asleep in my clothes. I did finish reading Enrique’s Journey for Mr. Phelps’s class, at least.
At my locker I pulled the book off the little shelf to give back to Mr. Phelps. Man, was that book gutting. I just kept imagining Dad riding the tops of the freight trains. And thousands of people did this—not one train, but as many as thirty!—to get through Mexico.… If people knew that it sometimes took over a year… If they knew that some folks went for days and days without eating… knew how migrants kept scraps of paper wrapped in plastic tucked into a shoe—scraps with telephone numbers of relatives in the US… If people knew these things, would they still assume immigrants just came here to cause problems?
I yanked out all the Post-its I’d written notes on for my “review” of the book. The orange squares fell to the ground like confetti. There were a lot. Maybe I wouldn’t pick them up. Maybe let some other kids find them and read them. Yeah, right. They’d step on them and leave them for the janitor. So I squatted down and picked them up one by one, and—no lie—it was like I could feel the weight of the words on the paper, bringing back scenes. I remembered how one father wrapped his eight-year-old daughter’s favorite hair band around his wrist before starting the train journey north.
I wondered what my dad might be holding on to.
(Okay. That wasn’t exactly a distraction from the situation with Dad.) Weekends? They were unpredictable, depending on Mom’s mood swings.
Mrs. Grew didn’t have swings. She was on permanent full force. She took off points for EVERYTHING—spelling, grammar, everything. Today she didn’t even say hi to the class, just wrote on the whiteboard: Write about a meaningful trip you’ve taken and explain why it was so meaningful. Use sensory details.
I wrote about my family’s vacation together, last April break. We drove down to Houston to visit my mom’s cousins. In a van we’d rented by using a Groupon, we drove and drove and drove, dipping down through states I’d only ever seen on a map—West Virginia, Tennessee, Louisiana. Instead of stopping at Pizza Hut or McDonald’s, like everyone else I knew did, Mom had packed enough homemade food into the cooler to last us the whole trip—pan con frijoles, hard-boiled eggs, arroz, pollo asado, plátanos, and tortillas—and some Vietnamese spring rolls on the side. We ate at the picnic tables at rest stops, where puddles with gasoline rainbows dotted the parking lots. Even though it took forEVER to get down to Houston, I loved those days in the van, the windows down, my hair all crazy blowing in the wind, me listening to music on my headphones, Benjamin and Christopher asleep with their mouths open, Mom talking to Dad or reading her magazines while we all passed around a bag of chips. So that’s what I wrote about.