Chapter OneTHEN
“Wake up!”
Mom is yelling at me from the other side of my bedroom door. The New Mexico sun slices its way through the blinds, even with the blades pulled tight.
It’s Sunday.
We pile into the car: me, Dad, my brother Bernie, and a million trash bags full of protein bars and toothbrushes and tampons that Mom bought in bulk when she got her check for this pay period. Last night she spread everything out on the table, and we assembled individual gallon-sized ziplock bags, to be distributed today with our neighborhood mutual aid group. We do this once a month instead of going to mass, trading stuffy clothes and organ music for deep blue desert skies and the parking lot by the library, where the group helps keep up a community fridge and pantry.
Mom’s driving. Her long black hair is loose and blowing in the breeze. Dad takes her hand at red lights. When she releases his in order to make a turn, he drums his thumbs against the dashboard. He hasn’t had time to shave—Mom hustled us out the door too quickly—so he looks somewhat less like a big dorky math teacher today, but only somewhat.
“I love non-church Sundays!” Dad says.
“It’s not non-church,” Mom says.
She changes lanes, glancing at the rearview mirror in movie-star sunglasses.
“Your lola used to say,” she says to us in the back seat, “everything is church.”
I squint into the sun, coming up over the mountains. Only church is church. Long hours listening, and chanting, and praying, and muttering and also with you. It’s a singularly awkward experience. How is everything church?
Bernie is tilting dangerously far over to one side, so I shove him away before he has a chance to drool on me. He’s in eighth grade this year, and I’m a sophomore. He’s only eighteen months younger than me, but it feels like he’s twice as tall; he doesn’t need to lean far before he’s within drooling range.
“In the Philippines, we had a group like this,” Mom is saying. “On Christmas Day we assembled bags and bags of groceries, rice, vegetables, everything, and we’d go door to door, singing, singing—”
“Oh my God,” Dad says, turning up the radio. “Remember this one? I haven’t heard this in forever.”
Mom doesn’t talk about her childhood in the Philippines or our lola too much, and whenever she does, Dad finds some way to interrupt her before she gets too sad. Bernie and I were both born here in Albuquerque, and we’ve never even been to Colorado, let alone Manila, so I wish he’d just let her talk, but now he’s singing to her, some weird old song, and Bernie pulls his beanie down over his eyes.
“Stop!” Mom says, but she’s grinning at Dad.
“Yes, please, stop!” I say.
But they’re not listening. They’re both singing now, horribly, and I kind of want to die, even though no one else can hear them because we’re in the car, but then we’re pulling into the parking lot of the library, and who is standing there next to the bike racks but Joel Duran.
Looking perfect in the sun.
He’s folding an empty tote bag and stuffing it into his backpack.
I feel all the blood drain from my body.
Joel Duran doesn’t talk a whole lot in school, and neither do I. So I remember the first time I ever heard his singing voice. Clear and unwavering. And when we sang a duet in “El Burrito Sabanero” at our fifth-grade holiday concert, I was so nervous in front of the crowd, under the hot lights, I was afraid I’d pass out and fall off the back of the risers, but he looked at me and subtly mouthed my part and then I remembered the words. Then there was the time when he told that one teacher how to say my name right, and the time when Bernie tripped on the way into school and Joel grabbed him by the backpack to steady him, careful, little homie, and the time last week in geography when he was listening to music with his giant headphones, black hair curling at his ears, and he was twirling his pencil between his fingers and I thought I would kill to know what song it was so that I could listen to it over and over.
Dad is begging Mom to leave the car on so we don’t miss the best part of the song, and Mom is telling him he’s an idiot. I sink down into my seat until only my eyes are visible and peer out the window at Joel.
“Oh, look, who is that?” Mom asks.
I’m screaming internally because it’s Joel Duran.
“Mom,” I say. “Please don’t talk to him.”
She twists around, her brow furrowed in deep confusion at the sight of me all shrunken down below the window. Bernie is snoring against one of the trash bags.
“Why not?” she asks. “He just dropped off something for the fridge.”
“Just leave him alone, please.”
Joel Duran is swinging his leg over his bike and clicking his helmet into place, thank God, but then my mom is rolling down the windows, no, no, no.
“Hello,” Mom calls out. “Fridge group?”
And now he’s coming over here. I can’t believe this is happening. Why is this happening to me?
Text copyright © 2023 by Shannon C. F. Rogers.Illustrations copyright © 2023 by Katty Heurtas.
