Alyssa scratched her nose with her middle finger to flip him off on the down low. “I’m Pinoy. Filipinos have these parties, too. Except they’re called Debuts and we have them when we’re eighteen. Put on a fluffy puke-colored dress and spin around with a guy wearing too much Abercrombie & Fitch cologne who steps on my feet all night. Been there.”
“You’re hired!” Gabby said.
With Alyssa taking part in all of this, I wasn’t afraid to look stupid wearing the puke pink dress. So we practiced and danced around learning all the steps. I can’t tell you how many times we listened to “Tiempo de Vals” by Chayanne, or how many dress fittings we had where the seamstress practically turned me into a voodoo doll. But the routine felt nice and I understood what Gabby meant about quinces being about family.
Horacia was PISSED that she wasn’t invited to be one of the fourteen damas who made up the court. Why did she want to be a part of it so much? She didn’t even like our family. And she was already invited because she was Ronaldo’s girlfriend.
Horacia started being meaner and angrier to Alyssa and me when no one was around. But I ignored her because that’s what ñaño Toto told me to do. But I don’t think that always works. Sometimes people are so unhappy and so miserable with themselves that they have to make others feel the same way.
Last week before the quince, Alyssa and I stayed after school on the Corner. The Corner is what everyone calls the defunct bus stop. Alyssa and I shared earbuds and listed to a scratched No Doubt CD on her portable CD player. Here, my baggy clothes and messy hair fit in because everyone dressed like that. No one made fun of my hand-me-down jeans or shoes. Instead, we all took turns drawing on our clothes with sharpies. I decorated the sides of my pants with safety pins. I drew on the white parts of my bootleg Converse, and then everyone started asking me to do theirs—flowers, Pokemon, the Rebel Alliance symbol. My drawings were actually pretty good. At least, Miguel thought so.
Miguel was the angry boy with the combat books. He’s a year older and has blue eyes and a gap between his teeth. I wonder if that’s why he doesn’t smile much. On his backpack he’s got a Puerto Rican flag stitched next to his Metallica patch. Whenever I’m around him my tongue feels like the Arizona desert. Not that I’ve ever been to the desert.
The other day, I had dropped a Star Wars pin from my backpack and he picked it up. He said “cool pin” and I stared at him like he’d just sprouted three heads. My insides felt like a sarlacc beast lived in them, like the one that almost ate Han Solo in Return of the Jedi. I took my pin and ran away. Literally ran. Alyssa teased me all the way to quince dance practice.
Okay, Yoda. I think this is the day everything really started going wrong. I noticed how Alyssa and Ronaldo were finally getting along. The two of them were the best dancers of all fourteen damas and chambelans. I don’t know a lot of things, but Ronaldo was look looking at Alyssa the way Aragorn looks at Arwen. Like she’s wondrous and made of magical elvish light. I sensed trouble.
When he was packing up his things, I caught him off guard.
“What are you doing?” I asked Ronaldo.
He shrugged and raked a hand through his floppy curly hair. “Packing up? Why are you being weird?”
I rolled my eyes. “No. With Alyssa. I see you flirting. It’s not fair to her or Horacia, as much as I hate her.”
“I’m not doing anything.” Ronaldo scrunched up his face. “Not everyone is your dad.”
“Wow, that’s rude,” I said. For as long as I can remember, any time my father was mentioned, tía Felicia would go off on what a cheating bastard he was and that she was glad he stayed in Ecuador. Most of the time, I’m glad too. My mom deserves the best of everything. But I wonder, can I be mad at him and still find a little part of me that loves him at the same time? Maybe when I go visit next year I’ll find out.
“I’m sorry. Things with Horacia are weird. She’s always mad at me for not calling her when I get home from practice, but I was tired and had to help my mom do laundry. And she knows if I don’t pass Social Studies I’ll have to repeat it. But still, that was a low blow.”
“I know you’re not like that,” I said. “But if you like Alyssa, why not just say something?”
Ronaldo glanced around nervously. “Do you think she likes me? I mean, has she said anything? About me, specifically.”
“She said you were cute but that you had a girlfriend.”
“Why do you hate Horacia so much?” He was serious. He was the cousin I’d grown up with my whole life, who shared his last Eggos and Dunkaroos with me. “You used to be together all the time and then one day nothing. I asked her once and she said you ditched her because you act better than everyone else.”
Remember that thing I wrote about from 7th grade? The reason Horacia and I stopped being best friends? Well, I never told anyone until that moment. I took a deep breath.
“She called me a stupid ugly FOB. We were in class and she whispered it to her friends so I could hear it. I didn’t even know FOB meant ‘fresh off the boat.’ I know that as insults go, everyone refers to kids as FOBs. Like that kid from Guyana who just moved over? People call him that and then they laugh. They think it’s a joke and it’s no harm done. But no one saw him crying in the hallway after and I wanted to say something, but I didn’t know how. It just made me feel really shitty.”
Ronaldo shook his head and gave me a hug. I hadn’t realized how much that had bothered me until then and it was nice having my cousin there. “The other day I was in class and this kid called me a spic because it was unfair that I got straight As in Spanish since it was cheating. It sucks. I’m sorry.”
We went home and, he didn’t tell me, but he broke up with Horacia that night.
That explains why the next morning Horacia showed up at my house with her mother and asked to speak to my mom. It was the weekend, and my mom’s only day off, but she let them in. They said it was important, that Mrs. Móntes was thinking about our family’s “well-being” and that she’d want to know about my behavior. See, Horacia had brought over this photo of me. She’s obsessed with these disposable cameras and she took one of me at the Corner with Miguel. It was at the exact moment that he handed me my Star Wars pin. But because of the angle and the cigarette tucked behind his ear, it looks like he could be handing me anything. Specifically, DRUGS.
”I’m not doing drugs!” I shouted as soon as I shut the door on Horacia’s self-righteous, lying ass.
Nothing I said seemed to matter. My mother was yelling about me being one of “those girls” from bad neighborhoods who have no business being around boys. That she watched on a news special on Telemundo how even the scent of marijuana would cause me to become a zombie and ruin my life. As punishment for something I didn’t even do, I couldn’t leave the house except to go to the quince rehearsals and I was lucky I even got to do that. And they tell me that TV will rot my brain.