“Oh, hi, Lili. I’m actually glad to see you—” Mr. Rivera began.
But I interrupted him. “Are you going to throw that away? Mr. Rivera, are they? This isn’t right. You know, a lot of students—” And that’s when I noticed he was standing beside a girl I’d never seen before. Latina?
Mr. Rivera cut me off. “That’s why I’m glad to see you. I have great news! A reporter from the local paper wants to write a story on this… wall. And she plans to bring in a photographer. So we’re just bringing it to the main office for a couple of hours, where there’s better light.”
I blinked. “Really?”
“Yes. And then we’ll probably put part of it behind Plexiglas. It’s now a part of our school history.” He smirked. “Kudos to you.”
I didn’t know what to say.
I couldn’t wait to tell Dad.
And now I could.
At home.
Today.
“Liliana? You all right?”
Then, I didn’t care if it was appropriate or whatever, but I rushed over and gave Mr. Rivera a big bear hug. Just as I turned to leave, Mr. Rivera said, “Oh, and Liliana, meet Yasmina. She’s a new METCO student.”
She had short brown curly hair. Her eyes were… green? She blinked like crazy behind dark-rimmed glasses. And she wore a faux leather jacket—it was cute! But the peep-toe heels were a little much. Why was she dressing like she was on a movie set of a high school rom-com? Whoa. Back up, Liliana, I checked myself. Don’t be so judgmental. Ha. I thought of Dorito Girl that first day on the bleachers. I thought of Holly and the gum on her shoe. So I reached out my hand. “I’m Liliana,” I said, with a big smile.
35
On the first Saturday after Christmas, I heard three knocks and a loud “Yo, Liliana!” from Jade’s window.
“Hold on!” I hollered back. It had snowed last night, and it was mad windy. I needed a coat. And my water bottle—and yeah, I had the Guatemalan cover on it, the one Tía Laura and Tío R. had given me. But I needed my notebook. Needed. The purple one. The one with the story that I wanted to workshop. I couldn’t find it. It was already ten to nine, and the workshop started at nine. It would take fifteen minutes to walk over there, less if we ran. But still. Miss Amber had said that if we were late, she wouldn’t let us in.
“Hold up, J!” I bellowed again, slamming through drawers.
A minute later Jade was at my bedroom door, wearing new purple kicks.
“Girl, help me,” I said. “I can’t find my notebook.”
“You know what time it is, right? I’m not going over there just to have Miss Amber close the door in my face. I mean, what’d I wake up so early for, then?” I had convinced Jade to take this writing class with me in exchange for me attending a few art workshops at the Urbano Project with her.
Where was that stupid notebook? I dug a hand between the mattress and the wall. Boom! There it was. “Let’s go.” I grabbed my coat and we raced for the front door.
On my way past the kitchen I smelled mint. I stopped short. Mom stood at the stove, stirring. “Mom, are you making pho?”
She stopped stirring and grinned all crazy like—happy crazy! Mom was making pho! Mom was making pho!
“Mom…” I couldn’t help it. My eyes watered.
“Give me a kiss good-bye,” she said.
“I’m on my way to the writing center. I gotta go!”
“A kiss,” she repeated.
A kiss. Then, “Bye!”
In the hall I ran right into Dad. He was holding a newspaper.
“Whoa!” he said. “Where are you flying off to?”
“The writing center! Mom knows!” I hugged him until Jade hollered “Come on, girl!” from the front door.
“Bye!”
“Be careful, mija.” There was so much in his voice.
“I will.”
Then I heard Dad again. “Liliana?”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe next weekend, we can all go somewhere. It says here”—he waved the newspaper in the air—“there’s free admission at the science museum.”
“Sounds great, Dad.” It did. It really did.
As Jade and I pounded down the stairway, I inhaled the stale weed smell, but also the smell of Doña Rosario’s insane cooking (mmm… sancocho?), and I practically floated out the front door. It slammed behind me, and I swore if it was made of glass, it would have broken, but they didn’t put glass doors in apartment buildings like ours—the landlord was too cheap. Don’t get it twisted. I wouldn’t trade living there for anywhere else. Not now anyway. There was so much going on all the time; I’d never run out of things to write about or build. I’m hip.
I broke into a run. We had like a negative minute to get there. Jade was yelling and laughing a few feet behind me. That little Spanish dude—correction, Dominican dude; he wasn’t from Spain, hello—with the mustache in front of Lorenzo’s Liquor was whistling at us. I know what I must have looked like, like some crazy teenage girl with flushed cheeks running with her coat unzipped in fifteen-degree weather. Thing is, now more than ever, writing was like oxygen to me. Ha. Got you. I would never write that; that’s a cliché. At 826 I was learning all about those things—clichés, tropes, narrative distance, and adding FAT (feelings, actions, thoughts) to dialogue. Stuff like that.
We dashed across the street, not even waiting for the light to blink, and raced for the door. We buzzed, and Vicky (she was fifteen but acted like she was twenty-one) opened the door enough for us to see her wag a sanctimonious (vocab word) finger and say, “Naughty-naughty. You’re late.”
Whatever. We pushed past her.
Inside the center, framed close-up photos of kids’ faces greeted us. So many stories inside them. Inside us. Inside this space, where we workshopped our stories and had open mic sessions. Where stickers and neon flyers covered the podium: we are a nation of immigrants. no deportation. no wall.
My stomach rumbled. I hadn’t had breakfast. Someone had set up bagels and cream cheese and empanadas on paper plates in the back. The bagels were piled high, but the empanadas, they were almost gone. Someone needed to make more next time. Wait. Maybe I could? I could ask my brothers for help. And Dad would try the first one, and say something like, You really did this? And it wouldn’t sound like a question at all.