As she walked into the room behind him, Pao remembered Dante’s blush and her own fizzy feelings of curiosity last night, and she wondered if things would be awkward between them today. But apparently the weirdness was like bioluminescence: harder to spot in the daylight.
Well, that was one hypothesis, anyway. She’d have to keep working on it as more data came in.
Dante tossed her a lukewarm can of Coke and a PlayStation controller before flopping down into his nest of twisted blankets and changing the racing game to two-player. Just like always.
“Emma coming by?” Dante asked.
“Nah,” said Pao as she selected the pinkest car and the driver with the nineties high ponytail, just so it would be more annoying when she beat him. “She has a piano lesson today, then lunch with her parents at the club.”
Dante nodded, and Pao immediately felt bad for using her phony posh voice. Emma never sounded like that. That was her life, the same way this one was Pao’s. It just felt strange that they were so far apart sometimes, like Emma was in a world Pao couldn’t reach.
Case in point: The only time Pao had ever eaten lunch with the Lockwoods at the country club, she had accidentally ordered duck—which was called something fancy and French she’d been embarrassed to ask about. Then she’d used the wrong fork, as Emma had gently informed her in a whisper. Pao hadn’t had the guts to go back there since, and she still apologized under her breath every time she saw a live duck.
In the too-small bedroom, which was already heating up, Pao won the first two races without even trying. They talked sparingly as they continued the tournament, Dante managing to get by her in one round and doing a horrifying victory dance.
When Señora Mata called “¡Almuerzo!” an hour or so later, Pao was grateful for the break. It was only a matter of time before Dante would get sulky about losing.
Pao knew some girls let boys win just to keep them interested, but beating Dante was one of the great joys of her life. No amount of new nocturnal boy-girl strangeness was going to replace that.
Dante’s arm brushed hers as he stood up. Pao’s stomach and all the organs around it seemed to swoop.
I’m still not letting him win, she told her stupid body.
The layout of Dante’s apartment was identical to Pao’s, but while Pao’s mom had left their main room open to hold all her bookshelves and small altars, Señora Mata had divided hers into a living room and dining area.
In this house, we don’t eat in front of the TV like heathens, the señora liked to say, ignoring the fact that the only thing that separated the table from the TV in question was a floral-print couch. Not to mention the fact that the TV was always on.
During lunch, Pao had to use a lot of brainpower to keep her elbow from touching Dante’s. Unfortunately, it wasn’t distracting enough to block out the news broadcast. Pao always found the local news depressing, and today was no exception.
According to the anchor, it was the one-year anniversary of Marisa Martínez’s drowning in the Gila River. Her body had never been found.
“Such a shame,” the señora said, in accented English for Pao’s Spanish-challenged benefit. “She was so beautiful.”
Pao hated it when people talked about Marisa, though she did her best to hide it. Marisa had been the town darling. Latina, but blond and barely sun-kissed, so everyone could feel good about loving her. She’d been popular in school, while Pao was the weirdo with only two friends and the I NEED MORE SPACE T-shirt.
Regrettably, Pao had been the butt of one too many of Marisa’s jokes. Two years older, Marisa had always made fun of Pao’s obsession with “goofy space stuff,” and her tendency to “smell like hierbas.” She also mocked Pao’s mom for looking “out of it” at fundraisers and school programs.
It was strange when someone you didn’t like died prematurely. Pao was sorry about what had happened to Marisa, of course, but she always had a squirming guilty feeling when anyone brought it up.
Today, though, the guilt was second to the reminder of Pao’s strange experience at the river yesterday. The ripple-less splash. The nightmare that had followed…
The news moved on, reporting on a string of child abductions up north, near Mesa. As the anchor talked excitedly about a possible suspect in the kidnappings, grainy security-camera footage showed a tall, lanky figure with dark hair and pixelated features. A shiver traveled down Pao’s spine. The guy in the video didn’t look much older than the teenage boys who hung out in apartment F. Pao knew he couldn’t be one of them, though—Mesa was too far away.
She tried to listen to this story, but Señora Mata was still clucking about beautiful Marisa.
“Yeah, it was a tragedy,” Pao said, irritation buzzing in her chest like a swarm of yellow jackets. “But not because she was blond and pretty. Because she was a person, and people’s lives are valuable whether they’re beautiful or not.”
Señora Mata’s mouth fell open, revealing a piece of green pepper stuck to her dentures. The air in the room seemed to evaporate, and Pao felt an entirely different kind of swoop in her stomach—fear, this time. But the angry buzzing was still there, too.
“Well, I think that’s enough lunch!” Dante said, grabbing Pao’s plate and standing up between his abuela and his friend before either one could get seriously injured. “Pao was just leaving, weren’t you, Pao? Good-bye! See you next time!” He nudged her toward the door with his foot, still holding both of their plates, three-quarters of Pao’s meal untouched.
At the door, he said in a sharp whisper, “You can’t talk to her like that! She’s just old. She doesn’t know any better.”
“That’s no excuse,” Pao said, her own brown skin and dark hair glaring at her from the mirror that Señora Mata had hung by the door to ward off bad energy. “If we don’t talk about our messed-up beauty standards, how will they ever change?”
As Dante’s expression hardened, Pao knew she would take all the boy-girl weirdness in the world over the storm clouds gathering between them. But she wasn’t wrong, so she didn’t apologize.
Some things are worth standing up for, she told herself, even though her chest ached.
“Not every fight is your fight!” he said, still clearly frustrated as she opened the door.
“Oh yeah?” she asked, her temper flaring. “And what’s your fight, Dante?”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re my fight, Pao.”
Pao wasn’t sure what he meant by that, so she didn’t answer before he shut the door behind her. Through the open window, she could hear his abuela berating him in Spanish. Probably asking why he bothered with such a loudmouthed girl when he could be searching for a silent blond supermodel girlfriend who did nothing but cook.
If I had a dog, Pao thought, I’d train it to pee on her doormat.
All afternoon, Pao tried to forget what had happened at lunch by brainstorming natural sources for rocket fuel and eating what had to be her body weight in Starbursts. When she ran out of pinks, she just kept going—reds, oranges, even a dreaded yellow.
A sign of emotional distress if there ever was one.
All she managed to put in her notebook was a sugar-smudged sketch of the river. If she unfocused her eyes, she could almost see a ghostly hand rising out of the water, like in her dream.