Ballad & Dagger, page 8
“And maybe I was too busy trying not to die to notice, but I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about with me and Chela!” I break into my best impression of our English teacher, Dr. Kobrick, all hunched over and wizened, and squeak, “Can you cite an example from the text, eh?”
We’re almost to school, and the rising sun throws the long, flickering shadows of an elevated train onto a brick apartment building. My whole body still throbs with tiredness and nothing makes any sense at all, but three pasteles and some of Tams’s unapologetically ferocious coffee have done wonders for my mood.
“I just know things,” she says with annoying nonchalance.
Best friends, man. What’s even the point?
“Bigger question is,” Tams continues, “like her or not, your aunt gave you specific instructions to get close to her and find out what she knows. So how you planning to pull that off?”
I gulp. That is the bigger question, and I have no idea how to answer it. “Just use my natural whimsical charm?” I offer and then immediately trip over the curb and almost eat pavement.
Tams rubs her eyes. “Tragic.”
We’re standing in front of the school building, a colossal cement cube that takes up a whole city block not far from Tolo’s club. The architects must’ve thought, How can I combine the essence of drab with the notion of unfriendly in the form of a building and make it scream I don’t care about your life? Then boom: my school.
All the voices from last night, all the stares, rear up inside me again as we approach. School is hard enough on a normal day. This is where it’s most obvious that I’ve been gone for all the important parts of growing up Galerano. Everyone seems to have a whole secret language of hand signs, emojis, inside jokes, and references to things that happened online years ago, and I understand none of it. Seriously, you thought there was lore from before San Madrigal sank? Historians are going to be swamped for years trying to untangle the wild world of our Brooklyn diaspora secrets and codes.
They are, but I, sadly, am not. There’s only so much my brain can hold, and I think I filled it all with musical notes, cadences, chord changes, technique. That’s not a boast; sometimes I wish I hadn’t and that I could somehow figure out how to just vibe with everyone like Tams does. But I doubt that’s in my cards.
“You gonna do your thing?” Tams asks.
My thing. I have to smile. It’s become such a part of our walking-to-school routine, she rarely asks anymore, but I think after our talk last night, we both feel a little more like checking in about stuff. “You want to do it with me?”
She nods. “Sure.”
And we stand there, the regular traffic of kids flowing by, and take five deep, slow breaths together. It’s something my dad does before surgery, and when I told him I get nervous about school, he said to try it. “Ten breaths are too many,” he said over the grainy, delayed Skype call. He was laughing while he said it, but I could tell I’d worried him just by bringing it up, my nervousness. “But three won’t really get you what you need. Five, though—perfect. People think meditation means you have to take hours and hours of sitting still and not thinking. And, I mean, cool, but for us, that’s not gonna happen anytime soon. Meditation is literally one breath. One! If you do it intentionally. Can do wonders! Imagine how far five can take you!” Then he leaned in conspiratorially to the camera, like he was sharing a big secret. “It’s just science, of course. The deep breathing slows your heart rate and increases blood flow to your brain, so it calms you down some. Don’t tell my sister I said that, though.”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t think Tía’s a big meditation person, Dad.”
“Well, you know how she gets when I chalk up everything to science.”
The ongoing family debate: science or spirit. Normally, I’m team science, nodding along as my mom and dad get intricate about anatomy and physiology. Tía Lucia usually just rolls her eyes and shakes her head with a knowing chuckle, like she can’t be bothered.
But after last night…I don’t know. Everything I thought I was sure of is crashing down around me.
“Good?” Tams asks, five deep breaths of me overthinking my family later. At least I got better blood flow or whatever.
“Not good, necessarily,” I report. “But definitely better. You?”
She tilts her head noncommittally. “Not bad.”
I squint at her. “You want to talk about it?”
She laughs, shoving me away. “Ha! I really don’t have anything to tell you, but I promise when I do, I will.”
“The way I see it,” Tams whispers to me as Mr. Varheesy rambles on about…something civics-related that would be interesting if it weren’t being discussed by someone with the personality of soggy cardboard, “you guys are like the ultimate San Madrigal power couple.”
“First of all,” I snarl back at her, “we’re not a couple yet!”
Tams raises her eyebrows just as I realize my mistake.
“Wait! I didn’t mean yet as in—”
“You said what you said, Mateo. It’s okay that you have a crush. I, for one, am happy for you both. Just don’t let it get in the way of your mission.”
“Ah, which brings us to the, ah, legislative branch,” Varheesy drones. “Mmm, indeed, indeed.” I’m pretty sure he can trace his roots back to the first Dutch invaders of what became New York, if he wasn’t there himself.
“I do not have a crush on her!” I hiss.
Vedo’s freckly face appears between us. “Have a crush on who?”
“I have a crush on you minding your business,” Tams says like she’s been waiting her whole life to drop that line.
“Cute, but seriously who?”
“No one!” Tams and I both growl.
“Ah, is there a problem back there?” Mr. Varheesy is glaring at us over his glasses, bushy eyebrows all furrowed.
“All good,” I say.
Tams looks thoughtful. “Wasn’t today a video day, Mr. Varheesy? I think you said you were going to show us The English Patient again.”
“Ah, yes, yes.” Varheesy scratches his extremely dyed blond mustache and spins back to the whiteboard. “Indeed! Let me set up the TV.”
With Tams’s distraction tactic in full motion, we continue our conversation. Or we would’ve been able to. Instead, Vedo prods, “Is it Chela?” his face still between us.
I pinch the top of my nose, like people in movies do when they’re stressed. It hurts and does not relieve stress. Why do people do that?
“Why?” Tams counters. “Do you have a crush on Chela?”
“I…” Vedo turns red.
“Sure looked like it last night,” I say.
He retreats quickly. “I just said she’s fine! And she is!”
“You’re not wrong,” Tams says, then twists around to glare at him. “But it’s also clear you have a crush on her, too!”
“Right!” I say. “Wait, no, not too!”
If anyone ever tells you it’s time to do burpees, run. Run like your life depends on it, because it does.
The only, I repeat only, reason someone wants you to do burpees is to murder you, because that’s all the push-ups of death coupled with leaps are good for.
It’s fourth period, which means gym class, which means Ms. Bonsignore is trying to murder us again. Death by burpee. The slowest, most grueling way to go.
I’m coming up from my third one, soaked in sweat and seeing triple, when Tams decides to revisit our earlier conversation.
“Point is…” She pauses to pant, jumps up, and then goes back down for another push-up. “Whew, man!”
“See? That’s what you…” I pause to pant, jump up, and then collapse into a writhing heap. “That’s what you get…for…trolling me…during torture hour….”
“Less talking, more dying slow, horrific deaths!” Bonsignore barks. And that’s why, even though she’s always trying to kill us, everyone loves her. She’s honest, at least. “And don’t think I’m unaware that the fete ended early last night for you Galeranos!” That’s the other thing: she’s one of us, our only teacher from San Madrigal, and we love her as much as we’re terrified of her. “Because news flash: I was there! So you have no excuse, scallywags.” Obviously, she’s a little too enthusiastic about her pirate heritage. All the non-Galerano kids just roll their eyes and keep it moving.
“What are we trolling Mateo about?” Maza asks with a glint in their eye. They’re barely even winded, athletic ass. Ugh.
I struggle to my feet. “We’re…not!”
“Oh, we are…” Tams pants, mid-push-up. “But the best-friend code prohibits me from…revealing his…dark secrets….” She pops back up and winks at Maza over my head.
Maza winks back, then executes an impressive burpee. “I respect that! But we could make up some new stuff to troll him over, potentially, yes?”
This is weird, you see. It’s not that the twins ignore me—that would imply that I exist. But I’m barely there—espíritu—and I don’t take it personally that they never talk to me. (Okay, a little, but not from them.) No one besides Tams talks to me, not really, so it’s not one person’s fault or another. What I’m saying is I don’t hold a grudge, but I do find it very odd that suddenly it’s like everyone is in on some joke that I’m supposed to be in on, too. But I’m not.
Tía said people would be looking to use me. Maybe this is that.
I like Maza, though, from far away. They have a shock of bright blue hair that dangles in a smooth dollop over their face, and the rest of their head is always shaved smooth. They move through the world with a dancer’s grace and are usually busy inventing some complicated new app on their phone.
I don’t want to think of them as an opportunist, even if they never acknowledged I existed until today.
“Two more!” Bonsignore announces. She’s always chuckling a little bit, no matter what she says. “Then we’re pairing up for the obstacle course of doom!”
I hate it here.
“I’ll have—whew!—to check the code.” Tams pretends to think for a half second. “Yep, that works.”
Vedo leans over, dripping sweat on everybody. “He likes Chela Hidalgo.”
That’s it! I’ve had it! I scramble to my feet, soaked and gasping, and yell, “FOR THE LAST TIME! I DO NOT LIKE CHELA HIDALGO!!”
Everyone stops mid-burpee and stares at me, including, of course, Chela Hidalgo.
“That’s great,” Bonsignore says, still, as always, chuckling. “You can tell her all about it, since you’re partners for the obstacle course of doom.”
BRING ME THE PERSON WHO invented obstacle courses so that I may punch that person in the neck.
A regular little jump-over-the-sandbox-and-then-turn-around-three-times routine would be bad enough, but clearly Bonsignore has been watching too many of those daytime TV All-American Athletic Barbarian Demon Warrior shows. She’s transformed the gym into a multilevel boot-camp-style death trap full of impossible heights, random truck tires, and even what looks like…an Edgar Allan Poe pit-and-pendulum type situation. Aggressively ominous.
My thing is: Why work so hard to make the worst part of school even worse? Nothing like that toxic combination of body odor, nonsensical physical exertion, and pure malevolent chaos to take all the regular Mateo eeks and aches and ratchet them up 200 percent.
I already told you I’m long and unnecessarily awkward. Gym shorts only accentuate that. I feel like a pile of sticks that someone velcroed some rocks to and said, Let there be life. Doesn’t help that people keep sneaking peeks at me out of the corner of their eyes. It’s like a million little pocket addendums to that horrible moment last night when the entire world was staring my way.
Yes! I want to yell. It’s me! The guy you barely saw in elementary school except when he was playing music at special events. The guy who doesn’t get the jokes and doesn’t know how to move, the same one who just found out he has a connection to a spirit that he didn’t even know about but everyone else did. Hello! Nice to meet you!
Of course, I can also add another qualifier to that little bio: the guy who just announced that he doesn’t like Chela Hidalgo to a full gymnasium, including Chela Hidalgo.
Chela Hidalgo, who has both killed a man and comforted me in my darkest moment, all within the span of a few hours.
Chela Hidalgo, who I’m supposed to get close to and find out info from but not, under any circumstances, trust.
Chela Hidalgo, whose big eyes are full of secrets—secrets she seemed eager to tell me last night.
Chela Hidalgo, who stands beside me right now, aiming those big eyes anywhere but at me.
I can feel the icy chill coming off her like a thousand air conditioners on high.
It’s pure hate.
And I can’t even be mad. I just proclaimed that I don’t like her to the entire class, and she was just minding her (murderface) business.
We’re in line, side by side, about three pairs away from the starting line, when I finally turn to her and say, “Look, what I meant was—”
She cuts me off with a simple hand swipe, still not looking my way. “Save it.”
“But I—”
Now she turns and looks up at me with an inscrutable stare. It’s just blank. Which is terrifying.
I wait a few moments, and now we’re two pairs away. “It’s not that I don’t like you.…Heh, I mean, I don’t even know you, really! What’s not to like?” Besides homicide, of course, but let’s not talk about that right now. “I was just saying that I don’t like like you, you know? I mean, I’m not even saying that, either, because I don’t know that, either! I mean like a crush, though, right? Because…” I stop because I’m definitely making it worse. And anyway, she hasn’t responded.
Bonsignore blows the whistle, and the next pair goes.
I take a deep breath. “What I’m trying to say is, I’m sorry!” It sounds more exasperated than apologetic, but it is true. “I didn’t mean to announce to the whole class that I don’t like you.”
She looks up at me again, thoughtfully this time, then says, “But what do you really want to say?”
“Say? I…huh? That. I did.” Barely even sentences. I long for a piano in front of me to make sense of things with, but music class is still three periods away.
Bonsignore’s whistle shrills out again. We’re next.
“Ask me what you want to ask me.”
“I…I just…” Why did you murder that dude? “I mean…”
Another whistle. That’s us. Chela rolls her eyes and hurtles forward, bouncing easily through the array of tires like she’s floating over them. I clear half with one long step and the rest with another.
“I saw that, Mateo Matisse Medina!” Bonsignore calls out from her lifeguard chair. No pool in sight, but she’s gotta sit two stories up just so she can reign from on high. “Don’t think being tall will get you out of every problem life throws at you!”
Never crossed my mind, honestly, but I don’t have the time or breath in me to get snappy. Chela’s already clambering up the mountain-climbing wall like she was born with wings. Didn’t even bother putting the safety rope on.
I jog to the wall, grab the closest handhold, and heave myself up, already at the same level as Chela. She snorts out a breath, but that might just be because she’s winded. I know I am.
“What I want to say is—whew!—I don’t really have any idea what’s…what’s going on.…Seems like the whole world changed last night in ways that everyone understands except—hooo!—except me!”
We pull ourselves up to the top level, and I lean over, hands on my knees, trying not to sweat and pant on her. Chela just looks at me, her shoulders rising and falling a little faster than usual, but otherwise fine. “Like what?” she says quietly.
I’m so startled by her question I just keep panting for a moment.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!!” Bonsignore yells from her throne. “Time is moving forward, but you lot are not!”
I groan. Thoughts, questions, and weird memories of last night all run chaotic laps around my head, bumping into one another, cursing one another out. A whole mess.
“The clock keeps ticking, but y’all ain’t kicking!”
“Like that someone’s trying to raise the island,” I try.
“Yep.” That’s clearly not what Chela was getting at. Too obvious, and I know it. Then she turns and leaps into the air, grabbing the first monkey bar and swinging to the next with an aerialist’s grace.
“The seconds continue to pass,” Bonsignore yells, “unlike your lazy a—”
“Okay!” I growl, and throw my whole long self at the bars.
“Don’t interrupt me when I’m cursing you out!”
“I’m on a mission,” I say to Chela. I’m right next to her, moving along just two or three bars at a time so I don’t shoot ahead.
She glances over, one eyebrow peaked. “Oh?”
Don’t trust Chela Hidalgo. Is this one of those things I’m not supposed to talk about? It was unclear to me for so long that it doesn’t even feel like my secret to tell.
But it’s about me, so it is mine.
And how else am I supposed to get her to trust me if not by revealing long-lost truths about my childhood?
That’s how people get close to one another, right? Normal people?
We reach the far end of the monkey bars, and Chela looks at me again with that quirked eyebrow. Bonsignore’s busy yelling at some other poor fool, and everyone else is trying not to die at one part of the obstacle course or another. So, for a moment, it feels oddly like it’s just us, even in this loud gym full of yelling and panting and squeaking sneakers and shrill whistles. Somehow, an immense feeling of calm comes over me. So, quietly, almost in a whisper, I say, “I’m trying to find out who the other initiated children of the island spirits are.”
Both of Chela’s eyebrows go up now, and her face seems to open. She studies me unabashedly, as if there’s light radiating from some secret source within me and she’s determined to find it.
It takes only seconds, but it feels like years. Not in a bad way. Definitely weird, though. I feel seen.
We’re almost to school, and the rising sun throws the long, flickering shadows of an elevated train onto a brick apartment building. My whole body still throbs with tiredness and nothing makes any sense at all, but three pasteles and some of Tams’s unapologetically ferocious coffee have done wonders for my mood.
“I just know things,” she says with annoying nonchalance.
Best friends, man. What’s even the point?
“Bigger question is,” Tams continues, “like her or not, your aunt gave you specific instructions to get close to her and find out what she knows. So how you planning to pull that off?”
I gulp. That is the bigger question, and I have no idea how to answer it. “Just use my natural whimsical charm?” I offer and then immediately trip over the curb and almost eat pavement.
Tams rubs her eyes. “Tragic.”
We’re standing in front of the school building, a colossal cement cube that takes up a whole city block not far from Tolo’s club. The architects must’ve thought, How can I combine the essence of drab with the notion of unfriendly in the form of a building and make it scream I don’t care about your life? Then boom: my school.
All the voices from last night, all the stares, rear up inside me again as we approach. School is hard enough on a normal day. This is where it’s most obvious that I’ve been gone for all the important parts of growing up Galerano. Everyone seems to have a whole secret language of hand signs, emojis, inside jokes, and references to things that happened online years ago, and I understand none of it. Seriously, you thought there was lore from before San Madrigal sank? Historians are going to be swamped for years trying to untangle the wild world of our Brooklyn diaspora secrets and codes.
They are, but I, sadly, am not. There’s only so much my brain can hold, and I think I filled it all with musical notes, cadences, chord changes, technique. That’s not a boast; sometimes I wish I hadn’t and that I could somehow figure out how to just vibe with everyone like Tams does. But I doubt that’s in my cards.
“You gonna do your thing?” Tams asks.
My thing. I have to smile. It’s become such a part of our walking-to-school routine, she rarely asks anymore, but I think after our talk last night, we both feel a little more like checking in about stuff. “You want to do it with me?”
She nods. “Sure.”
And we stand there, the regular traffic of kids flowing by, and take five deep, slow breaths together. It’s something my dad does before surgery, and when I told him I get nervous about school, he said to try it. “Ten breaths are too many,” he said over the grainy, delayed Skype call. He was laughing while he said it, but I could tell I’d worried him just by bringing it up, my nervousness. “But three won’t really get you what you need. Five, though—perfect. People think meditation means you have to take hours and hours of sitting still and not thinking. And, I mean, cool, but for us, that’s not gonna happen anytime soon. Meditation is literally one breath. One! If you do it intentionally. Can do wonders! Imagine how far five can take you!” Then he leaned in conspiratorially to the camera, like he was sharing a big secret. “It’s just science, of course. The deep breathing slows your heart rate and increases blood flow to your brain, so it calms you down some. Don’t tell my sister I said that, though.”
I rolled my eyes. “I don’t think Tía’s a big meditation person, Dad.”
“Well, you know how she gets when I chalk up everything to science.”
The ongoing family debate: science or spirit. Normally, I’m team science, nodding along as my mom and dad get intricate about anatomy and physiology. Tía Lucia usually just rolls her eyes and shakes her head with a knowing chuckle, like she can’t be bothered.
But after last night…I don’t know. Everything I thought I was sure of is crashing down around me.
“Good?” Tams asks, five deep breaths of me overthinking my family later. At least I got better blood flow or whatever.
“Not good, necessarily,” I report. “But definitely better. You?”
She tilts her head noncommittally. “Not bad.”
I squint at her. “You want to talk about it?”
She laughs, shoving me away. “Ha! I really don’t have anything to tell you, but I promise when I do, I will.”
“The way I see it,” Tams whispers to me as Mr. Varheesy rambles on about…something civics-related that would be interesting if it weren’t being discussed by someone with the personality of soggy cardboard, “you guys are like the ultimate San Madrigal power couple.”
“First of all,” I snarl back at her, “we’re not a couple yet!”
Tams raises her eyebrows just as I realize my mistake.
“Wait! I didn’t mean yet as in—”
“You said what you said, Mateo. It’s okay that you have a crush. I, for one, am happy for you both. Just don’t let it get in the way of your mission.”
“Ah, which brings us to the, ah, legislative branch,” Varheesy drones. “Mmm, indeed, indeed.” I’m pretty sure he can trace his roots back to the first Dutch invaders of what became New York, if he wasn’t there himself.
“I do not have a crush on her!” I hiss.
Vedo’s freckly face appears between us. “Have a crush on who?”
“I have a crush on you minding your business,” Tams says like she’s been waiting her whole life to drop that line.
“Cute, but seriously who?”
“No one!” Tams and I both growl.
“Ah, is there a problem back there?” Mr. Varheesy is glaring at us over his glasses, bushy eyebrows all furrowed.
“All good,” I say.
Tams looks thoughtful. “Wasn’t today a video day, Mr. Varheesy? I think you said you were going to show us The English Patient again.”
“Ah, yes, yes.” Varheesy scratches his extremely dyed blond mustache and spins back to the whiteboard. “Indeed! Let me set up the TV.”
With Tams’s distraction tactic in full motion, we continue our conversation. Or we would’ve been able to. Instead, Vedo prods, “Is it Chela?” his face still between us.
I pinch the top of my nose, like people in movies do when they’re stressed. It hurts and does not relieve stress. Why do people do that?
“Why?” Tams counters. “Do you have a crush on Chela?”
“I…” Vedo turns red.
“Sure looked like it last night,” I say.
He retreats quickly. “I just said she’s fine! And she is!”
“You’re not wrong,” Tams says, then twists around to glare at him. “But it’s also clear you have a crush on her, too!”
“Right!” I say. “Wait, no, not too!”
If anyone ever tells you it’s time to do burpees, run. Run like your life depends on it, because it does.
The only, I repeat only, reason someone wants you to do burpees is to murder you, because that’s all the push-ups of death coupled with leaps are good for.
It’s fourth period, which means gym class, which means Ms. Bonsignore is trying to murder us again. Death by burpee. The slowest, most grueling way to go.
I’m coming up from my third one, soaked in sweat and seeing triple, when Tams decides to revisit our earlier conversation.
“Point is…” She pauses to pant, jumps up, and then goes back down for another push-up. “Whew, man!”
“See? That’s what you…” I pause to pant, jump up, and then collapse into a writhing heap. “That’s what you get…for…trolling me…during torture hour….”
“Less talking, more dying slow, horrific deaths!” Bonsignore barks. And that’s why, even though she’s always trying to kill us, everyone loves her. She’s honest, at least. “And don’t think I’m unaware that the fete ended early last night for you Galeranos!” That’s the other thing: she’s one of us, our only teacher from San Madrigal, and we love her as much as we’re terrified of her. “Because news flash: I was there! So you have no excuse, scallywags.” Obviously, she’s a little too enthusiastic about her pirate heritage. All the non-Galerano kids just roll their eyes and keep it moving.
“What are we trolling Mateo about?” Maza asks with a glint in their eye. They’re barely even winded, athletic ass. Ugh.
I struggle to my feet. “We’re…not!”
“Oh, we are…” Tams pants, mid-push-up. “But the best-friend code prohibits me from…revealing his…dark secrets….” She pops back up and winks at Maza over my head.
Maza winks back, then executes an impressive burpee. “I respect that! But we could make up some new stuff to troll him over, potentially, yes?”
This is weird, you see. It’s not that the twins ignore me—that would imply that I exist. But I’m barely there—espíritu—and I don’t take it personally that they never talk to me. (Okay, a little, but not from them.) No one besides Tams talks to me, not really, so it’s not one person’s fault or another. What I’m saying is I don’t hold a grudge, but I do find it very odd that suddenly it’s like everyone is in on some joke that I’m supposed to be in on, too. But I’m not.
Tía said people would be looking to use me. Maybe this is that.
I like Maza, though, from far away. They have a shock of bright blue hair that dangles in a smooth dollop over their face, and the rest of their head is always shaved smooth. They move through the world with a dancer’s grace and are usually busy inventing some complicated new app on their phone.
I don’t want to think of them as an opportunist, even if they never acknowledged I existed until today.
“Two more!” Bonsignore announces. She’s always chuckling a little bit, no matter what she says. “Then we’re pairing up for the obstacle course of doom!”
I hate it here.
“I’ll have—whew!—to check the code.” Tams pretends to think for a half second. “Yep, that works.”
Vedo leans over, dripping sweat on everybody. “He likes Chela Hidalgo.”
That’s it! I’ve had it! I scramble to my feet, soaked and gasping, and yell, “FOR THE LAST TIME! I DO NOT LIKE CHELA HIDALGO!!”
Everyone stops mid-burpee and stares at me, including, of course, Chela Hidalgo.
“That’s great,” Bonsignore says, still, as always, chuckling. “You can tell her all about it, since you’re partners for the obstacle course of doom.”
BRING ME THE PERSON WHO invented obstacle courses so that I may punch that person in the neck.
A regular little jump-over-the-sandbox-and-then-turn-around-three-times routine would be bad enough, but clearly Bonsignore has been watching too many of those daytime TV All-American Athletic Barbarian Demon Warrior shows. She’s transformed the gym into a multilevel boot-camp-style death trap full of impossible heights, random truck tires, and even what looks like…an Edgar Allan Poe pit-and-pendulum type situation. Aggressively ominous.
My thing is: Why work so hard to make the worst part of school even worse? Nothing like that toxic combination of body odor, nonsensical physical exertion, and pure malevolent chaos to take all the regular Mateo eeks and aches and ratchet them up 200 percent.
I already told you I’m long and unnecessarily awkward. Gym shorts only accentuate that. I feel like a pile of sticks that someone velcroed some rocks to and said, Let there be life. Doesn’t help that people keep sneaking peeks at me out of the corner of their eyes. It’s like a million little pocket addendums to that horrible moment last night when the entire world was staring my way.
Yes! I want to yell. It’s me! The guy you barely saw in elementary school except when he was playing music at special events. The guy who doesn’t get the jokes and doesn’t know how to move, the same one who just found out he has a connection to a spirit that he didn’t even know about but everyone else did. Hello! Nice to meet you!
Of course, I can also add another qualifier to that little bio: the guy who just announced that he doesn’t like Chela Hidalgo to a full gymnasium, including Chela Hidalgo.
Chela Hidalgo, who has both killed a man and comforted me in my darkest moment, all within the span of a few hours.
Chela Hidalgo, who I’m supposed to get close to and find out info from but not, under any circumstances, trust.
Chela Hidalgo, whose big eyes are full of secrets—secrets she seemed eager to tell me last night.
Chela Hidalgo, who stands beside me right now, aiming those big eyes anywhere but at me.
I can feel the icy chill coming off her like a thousand air conditioners on high.
It’s pure hate.
And I can’t even be mad. I just proclaimed that I don’t like her to the entire class, and she was just minding her (murderface) business.
We’re in line, side by side, about three pairs away from the starting line, when I finally turn to her and say, “Look, what I meant was—”
She cuts me off with a simple hand swipe, still not looking my way. “Save it.”
“But I—”
Now she turns and looks up at me with an inscrutable stare. It’s just blank. Which is terrifying.
I wait a few moments, and now we’re two pairs away. “It’s not that I don’t like you.…Heh, I mean, I don’t even know you, really! What’s not to like?” Besides homicide, of course, but let’s not talk about that right now. “I was just saying that I don’t like like you, you know? I mean, I’m not even saying that, either, because I don’t know that, either! I mean like a crush, though, right? Because…” I stop because I’m definitely making it worse. And anyway, she hasn’t responded.
Bonsignore blows the whistle, and the next pair goes.
I take a deep breath. “What I’m trying to say is, I’m sorry!” It sounds more exasperated than apologetic, but it is true. “I didn’t mean to announce to the whole class that I don’t like you.”
She looks up at me again, thoughtfully this time, then says, “But what do you really want to say?”
“Say? I…huh? That. I did.” Barely even sentences. I long for a piano in front of me to make sense of things with, but music class is still three periods away.
Bonsignore’s whistle shrills out again. We’re next.
“Ask me what you want to ask me.”
“I…I just…” Why did you murder that dude? “I mean…”
Another whistle. That’s us. Chela rolls her eyes and hurtles forward, bouncing easily through the array of tires like she’s floating over them. I clear half with one long step and the rest with another.
“I saw that, Mateo Matisse Medina!” Bonsignore calls out from her lifeguard chair. No pool in sight, but she’s gotta sit two stories up just so she can reign from on high. “Don’t think being tall will get you out of every problem life throws at you!”
Never crossed my mind, honestly, but I don’t have the time or breath in me to get snappy. Chela’s already clambering up the mountain-climbing wall like she was born with wings. Didn’t even bother putting the safety rope on.
I jog to the wall, grab the closest handhold, and heave myself up, already at the same level as Chela. She snorts out a breath, but that might just be because she’s winded. I know I am.
“What I want to say is—whew!—I don’t really have any idea what’s…what’s going on.…Seems like the whole world changed last night in ways that everyone understands except—hooo!—except me!”
We pull ourselves up to the top level, and I lean over, hands on my knees, trying not to sweat and pant on her. Chela just looks at me, her shoulders rising and falling a little faster than usual, but otherwise fine. “Like what?” she says quietly.
I’m so startled by her question I just keep panting for a moment.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!!” Bonsignore yells from her throne. “Time is moving forward, but you lot are not!”
I groan. Thoughts, questions, and weird memories of last night all run chaotic laps around my head, bumping into one another, cursing one another out. A whole mess.
“The clock keeps ticking, but y’all ain’t kicking!”
“Like that someone’s trying to raise the island,” I try.
“Yep.” That’s clearly not what Chela was getting at. Too obvious, and I know it. Then she turns and leaps into the air, grabbing the first monkey bar and swinging to the next with an aerialist’s grace.
“The seconds continue to pass,” Bonsignore yells, “unlike your lazy a—”
“Okay!” I growl, and throw my whole long self at the bars.
“Don’t interrupt me when I’m cursing you out!”
“I’m on a mission,” I say to Chela. I’m right next to her, moving along just two or three bars at a time so I don’t shoot ahead.
She glances over, one eyebrow peaked. “Oh?”
Don’t trust Chela Hidalgo. Is this one of those things I’m not supposed to talk about? It was unclear to me for so long that it doesn’t even feel like my secret to tell.
But it’s about me, so it is mine.
And how else am I supposed to get her to trust me if not by revealing long-lost truths about my childhood?
That’s how people get close to one another, right? Normal people?
We reach the far end of the monkey bars, and Chela looks at me again with that quirked eyebrow. Bonsignore’s busy yelling at some other poor fool, and everyone else is trying not to die at one part of the obstacle course or another. So, for a moment, it feels oddly like it’s just us, even in this loud gym full of yelling and panting and squeaking sneakers and shrill whistles. Somehow, an immense feeling of calm comes over me. So, quietly, almost in a whisper, I say, “I’m trying to find out who the other initiated children of the island spirits are.”
Both of Chela’s eyebrows go up now, and her face seems to open. She studies me unabashedly, as if there’s light radiating from some secret source within me and she’s determined to find it.
It takes only seconds, but it feels like years. Not in a bad way. Definitely weird, though. I feel seen.
