Pina is still looking at my mom, clearly feeling hard done by. Mom studies my face carefully and then raises her arms.
‘You might be right,’ she says, before disappearing from the window. For a minute we think she might reappear at the screen door, but we can only see our reflection, which shimmers on the glass in the sun. When you look at all of us three together in the glass, we don’t look that different. No more than corn does to bean, or bean to squash.
Marina lights a cigarette and every now and again, without saying anything, passes it to Pina, who takes strategic drags facing away from my house. Smoking is a dumbass thing to do. But a dumbass thing that right now makes me feel pretty jealous. I don’t want those two to be friends. I can’t believe they’re sharing the cigarette and the hula-hoop and they haven’t even insisted that I try, all because I said it was a dumbass thing to do. Although it also bugs me the way Marina is so awkward every time she sees Pina. Something went on there that no one will tell me. One day everything was fine, then Marina did something and my mom ran her out the house, and suddenly there were no more English classes, and no more babysitting. Every time Pina and I ask my mom what happened she just raises her eyes and starts singing, which is her way of summoning her powers of discretion.
Before leaving, Marina says to me, ‘I made you a color.’ Then she whispers in my ear, ‘Gleenery.’
‘Shall we go grab an horchata?’ Pi asks.
‘I’m on a diet.’
‘Quit it, will you? You’re not fat.’
‘OK, but you’re buying.’
‘OK,’ she says. ‘I’ll see you at the bell in an hour.’
God knows what she’s going to do all that time. Probably her hair. Since she came back, Pina spends her life grooming herself. She walks off and I stay outside reading Euphues and His Anatomie of Wit. But ‘reading’ is a manner of speaking really: it’s more like deciphering a code. But thou Euphues, doft rather refemble the Swallow which in the Summer creepeth vnder the eues of euery houfe, and in the Winter leaueth nothing but durt behinde hir: or the humble Bee, which hauing fucked hunny out of the fayre flower, doth leaue it and loath it: or the Spider which in the fineft web doth hang the fayreft Fly. For a millisecond, I wish my brothers were here. If I were reading out loud to them with a British accent, Olmo would be chuckling and Theo would be composing a song for our non-existent band, The Honey-Fucking Bees.
When the sun gets too much for me, I go in. It feels cool, almost cold, and unlike outside, it’s dark. I can’t see two centimeters in front of me when I go through the door, and I trip over something. It’s Mom. She’s on the floor. I yelp. She laughs.
‘What are you doing there?’ I ask.
‘Oh, just my jujitsu,’ she says.
‘Doesn’t jujitsu involve some movement?’
‘Not this kind, no.’
*
We’re all eating dinner when Pina brings up the launch party.
‘It’ll be open to the public and pay-on-the-door,’ she adds.
‘Are you kidding me, Pi?’ Mom says.
Dad pours Beto some wine, then some for Mom, and he says to her, ‘You used to sell lemonade.’
‘Different times,’ Mom says. ‘Different country.’
‘You and I sold crickets, do you remember?’ Pi asks me. ‘You’d trap them and I made little holes in the containers so they could breathe.’
I stare at Mom and, without knowing what exactly I’m referring to, say to her, ‘I’ve earned it.’
‘Totally,’ adds Pina. ‘The girl’s been slogging away. Look at her arms, she’s bionic!’
I flex my right bicep. Dad feels it and pretends to be impressed.
‘Beto and I bought your crickets off you then let them go in Alf’s milpa once you were asleep.’
Beto whistles and says, ‘I’d forgotten all about that.’
‘Can we have an inauguration?’ I ask.
Mom is wearing a blue rag. She smiles at me, does Protestant hand, but in the end says, ‘Fine.’
‘But only once your brothers are back,’ Dad adds.
‘Duh,’ Pina says, almost offended, as if we’d already taken that into consideration.
‘And by invitation only,’ Mom says. ‘And free entry.’
‘Voluntary donation?’ Dad pitches in. ‘Hey, if people want to help, why stop them?’
Mom takes one slow, deep breath, which I know means ‘OK’. Dad holds out his hand to me, then to Pina.
‘Deal,’ we say, and shake on it. But on the inside, I say something else. On the inside I say, ‘Squeeze!’
*
Pina and I go over to hers. The adults stay in my living room. Dad said we had to celebrate Pina and Chela’s reconciliation, hence tonight’s dinner, but only Pi, my parents and I know that. We told Beto it was in honor of us starting high school next week.
Pina passes me an envelope with some photos she developed. It’s pretty weird seeing her mom again. Was she always so good-looking? I tell Pina that the beach looks great and how jealous I am that she got to see hatching turtles. Then I let her braid my hair because she swears on her life she knows how. She doesn’t of course, but this is a necessary experiment. Daniela gave us elastic bands from her brackets. (She looks terrible, pregnant with brackets.) She told us that if we sleep with our hair in braids then take them out in the morning we’ll have ‘created volume’. We need volume for the yard inauguration. Pina braids and braids and tells me all about the beach at Mazunte and the people there and the turtles. Eventually she tells me that the weirdest thing is that the same thing happens as when she was little: when she’s with Chela, she doesn’t dare speak. Like she wants to say the right thing, but she thinks about it so much that in the end she doesn’t say anything. She says that this doesn’t happen with anyone else; apart from boys she likes. She says she bucked up the courage to ask her mom what the notorious letter said, and Chela told her that she didn’t remember.
‘Did she say sorry for leaving?’ I ask her.
Pi shakes her head, looking at me in her dressing-table mirror.
‘Did you get a boyfriend?’ I ask.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Men our age are all useless, Elizabeth, Liz, Lizzie; from now on I’m going to call you Lizzie.’
‘Men our age aren’t men yet, Pizzie.’
‘What are they?’
‘They’re youths.’
‘They’re what?’
‘They’re fayre flies with fucketh for brains.’
*
Pi has been asleep for hours. I can’t sleep because my braids are itchy and because the things she told me are crushing down on my chest. I don’t know if I could see Chela again; if I could manage not to hate her till the end of time. Or maybe I can hate her so my friend doesn’t have to. I could be a hate surrogate and Pina could let it all go and just forgive her. Maybe she has already. Not only for leaving, but also for what Chela confessed to Pina and Pina just told me now, before falling asleep: that last year, for her birthday, Chela came all the way here but didn’t get farther than the doorway. She was here and just left without a word. That makes me angrier than anything. That, and what the letter said.
It’s easy to hate Chela, but I can’t sleep at the same time as I do that; I keep waking up and it’s all still there, all jumbled up inside me and it’s like when Luz died: like I want to go back in time, open the door to the mews and catch Chela hesitating in front of the entry buzzer and make her ring the damn thing. At some point I notice the window is no longer black. I get up to look at the stereo: it’s five thirty in the morning. I get dressed, go downstairs and cross the larynx barefoot, stopping to touch the bell with my toes. It’s much colder than the floor. I stay like that for a while, like a charactress from a movie: standing alone, the dawn sky spelling sadness over me.