Maybe things happen for a reason. Everyone says that but I can’t tell what’s true or what’s an accident. If my dad had never cheated on my mom, would she have wanted to stay in Ecuador? If I hadn’t had a fight with my mom, would I have dyed my hair? If I hadn’t caused a complete and utter scene I wouldn’t have had my Uncle Toto drive me home and I wouldn’t have stayed alone in his car while he went to get gas.
I wouldn’t have seen his cell phone light up with a message from someone named David that said: Everything will be all right. I love you. You are my life.
I remembered the name on the lease right next to my uncle’s. David Santos. David who loved my uncle. David who was the real reason my ñaño Toto was in a better mood. I wonder, what does it mean to be someone’s life?
When he got back in the car, I sat with my sticky hands on my lap staring at the car in front of us. He turned on the music—our favorite Enanitos Verdes song. He drove and gripped the wheel tight. He didn’t bring up the mess I’d made or what I had said to him about not being my dad. I wanted to take it back, because he is what my father could never be. He was there.
But I don’t know how to talk about things that matter. Sometimes I wonder if silence is something you can inherit from your family like dark hair or the shape of your teeth or the nose you think you’ll never grow into. I wonder if you can leave the bad things in a country you will maybe never see again. I wonder if I’m too young to think about these things, but I don’t know what else I’m supposed to be thinking about when no one talks.
“I was going to tell you about David,” Ñaño Toto said. “I wanted to tell you before the others. You know you’re my number one person.”
“Then why are you leaving?” But I knew why. I had a feeling in my gut. Also, I had read the text message that wasn’t meant for me.
“Because I met someone. I love him and we want to start a life together.” He looked at me. I made sure that I didn’t look away when I told him that I loved him.
We drove in silence all the way home. My mom and grandma and Lily would come home with tía Felicia way after midnight. But for a few hours we had the house to ourselves. We knew that things were going to be different. Or maybe they wouldn’t. But no matter what, I’ll be there because my uncle will need me when he brings David home to meet the family, and I will be there just like he was for me my whole life.
Get ready for a new school year, Yoda. There’s the Halloween dance at the end of next month, and I have to bake a cake to make up for the one I ruined. I have to decide if some friendships are worth saving or letting go. I have to try to teach my family to speak, because now I’m certain of how powerful words can be. It’s a whole lot of firsts. I feel like I’m changing, and I don’t know if I’m ready for all of it to happen at once. But I can only ever be the girl I’ve always been. Ecuadorkian and proud of it.
Love,
Paola
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Zoraida Córdova is the author of many fantasy novels including Incendiary, Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge: A Crash of Fate, the Brooklyn Brujas series, and the Vicious Deep trilogy. Her novel Labyrinth Lost won the International Latino Book Award for Best Young Adult Novel in 2017. Her short fiction has appeared in the New York Times bestselling anthology Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View, Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women and Witchcraft, and Come On In. She is the co-editor of the anthology Vampires Never Get Old. Zoraida was born in Ecuador and raised in Queens, New York. When she isn’t working on her next novel, she’s planning a new adventure.
FLEEING, LEAVING, MOVING
Adi Alsaid
For Shmuli to exist, borders had needed to be crossed.
Now came another. He had a student visa printed into his passport that told him so, made the move official, despite his trepidation. He would not die on the crossing, there was no risk of that at all. The plane, maybe, but no more risk than anyone took on any given day.
This was merely a matter of paperwork and lines at the airport. This was not like the Syrian border in 1948. His grandmother, a baby then, had wanted to wail for the discomfort of the journey, but a hand had been clamped over her mouth so that the British soldiers, the Lebanese soldiers, the many men out there looking for human beings not allowed to go from one place to another, would not hear her distress. That hand might have almost killed her, his grandmother always said, but it saved her, too. Silenced her into survival.
No such danger for Shmuli, though there had been a moment when his earphones weren’t all the way in and he hit Play before boarding the flight, and someone had cast a dirty glance his way.
Yes, without mere survival, without that hand clamped over his grandmother’s infant mouth, Shmuli would not be on that plane, would not be on the planet at all. 1948, notably, would have ended him, and 1941, too; probably many other examples could have been dug up before that. Years when the world would have ended Shmuli’s grandparents or great-grandparents or some other descendant had they not escaped from one place to the other. The accounts of many of those years, however, were simply lost. His great-grandparents had survived 1941 and 1948; they had crossed away from danger, and so Shmuli existed.
Shmuli, though, did not exist on mere survival. He was a specific human being, unmatched by any other human being who was living during his time, or, indeed, any who had come before. Not in skills, or any particular sort of excellence (although he was a terrific sleeper, and not too shabby at video games and school), but merely in the specific details that made him who he was. The way, for example, that after a meal he pushed himself away from the table, turned parallel to it, and crossed his legs as he digested. He did this only because he had learned the behavior from his father. His father learned the behavior from his own father, who had done it only because the dining room where he’d lived in Yaffo did not have space between the table and the wall to properly relax after a meal the way he had been able to do in Plovdiv, and so he was forced to turn parallel to the table.
Shmuli would not have been Shmuli if he did not sit this way after a meal. Anyone who knew him would say so. His friends constantly pointed it out, laughed about it, would miss it now that he was leaving them and no one was there to turn awkwardly away from the table.
And for Shmuli to sit this way after a meal, be it kebab or falafel or bife de chorizo, his grandparents had to have left Bulgaria for Israel. Yes, yes, his grandparents would have died if they had not left. But the kitchen. The kitchen taught Shmuli’s grandfather, Solomon, to sit this way.
And Shmuli’s father, Itzhak, watched him do it over and over again—push himself back, lean one elbow on the table, turn his body, and cross his legs. Sometimes he would chew languidly on a toothpick while he did this, and sometimes, tired from his day at work, he would cover his eyes with his hand and briefly nap. But always, he sat this way. For years and years, Shmuli’s father watched Solomon and learned the behavior the way children so naturally pick up their parents’ quirks. By the time Itzhak was a teenager running around the beaches of Tel Aviv, a surfboard tucked beneath his armpit, he was doing it too.