“When did you and Poppy get here?”
I’d been hiding out in my parents’ bedroom for the past hour, staring out the window in the direction of Stick’s house, not that he’s home or that his house is close enough to see from my house but I was hoping to use my chakra to spiritually summon him to text, which didn’t work, my prowess at ninjutsu is about as advanced as Naruto’s in the first weeks of his training under Jiraiya. I may have also watched a mini-marathon of Naruto Shippuden on my parents’ television.
“It’s two now, Mommy,” my mother says. “You got here an hour ago.”
Nana blinks and strains to find the clock, across the room by the table where my cousins are fixing sangria. Mom and Titi have quit arguing and are now laughing loudly over the stove, stirrers posed like weapons on the counter, in a row beside the pots.
“You want to taste the rice?” Mom offers.
“Sure,” I say, and she shoves a long wooden spoon into the oversized metal pot to grab a chunk with her greasy fingers.
“Eww,” I say.
“Relax, I wiped your butt with these hands.”
“Oh god, Mom. That’s gross.” I lean back to avoid her hand and she tries to force it on me, so I jump further away, swatting her arm away, dancing back around the kitchen, and I hear Titi laughing.
“I knew I liked this kid,” Titi says as she reaches out to rub my head. I hate when people rub my head, like I’m still a little kid, but I don’t mind when Titi Alana does it. She’s my favorite.
“And he’s so handsome,” Nana says. I cringe.
“Yeah, well clearly he gets the looks from our side of the family,” Mom says and it’s true, or I mean it’s true that Mom’s side is the attractive one—Titi used to be a model when she was younger—but I don’t look anything like the women in my family.
“Does he have a girlfriend?” one of the cousins from the table asks, the Sangria pitchers filling at a slower rate than their glasses. “I bet all the girls at school are after him.”
They’re not. They’re really not. I don’t think a single girl has looked at me for half a second since we moved to Woodbridge. Not that I’ve looked at them either but I’m not tall or remotely muscular and I need braces for my teeth—my mouth is so crowded now that the two front teeth to the right of the middle are growing over each other, beaming out like a lighthouse every time I smile. I try not to smile much.
“He doesn’t tell me about girls,” Mom says. She keeps her grip on that spoon like a sword but I’m hiding behind Titi.
“He’s waiting for the right one, I’m sure,” Titi says, trying to save me.
“I wish he would grow his hair out,” Mom says, retreating to the stove. “He looked so good with longer hair.”
“No. I didn’t.” I tried to grow out my hair this year, the way Stick lets his hair grow out, but my Puerto Rican curls went into full bloom—what Titi calls the “rainy day fro”—so I shaved it off like it’s been since I was thirteen, close and tight with a little peak at the front like a little freak I think, too hideous for the girls in Woodbridge and probably for Stick, he must have been so high he lost his mind when he let me kiss him. When he kissed back.
“Oh crap, the fish,” Titi says and pushes my mother out of the way to rip the oven open. Steam comes streaming out.
“What the hell is that?”
My mom reaches out to slap me, but I avoid her again and there’s a whole freaking fish lying on a pan by the stove, head on, eye sticking out and staring at me from across the kitchen. I dive behind Nana.
“It’s the sea bass,” Titi says.
“Nope. Nooooooooo,” I say as she spins around with the sizzling pan and steps closer, the fish’s purple eye following mine, and its lips—it has freaking lips!—pink and puckered and pressed in my direction.
“See …” Titi says.
“Get that away from me!”
The Sangria women start laughing and Titi steps closer until I’m all the way in the corner behind Nana and she’s laughing too. The stench of the sea bass shoots straight through my senses, killing the flavor of the rice and the hope that I might ever enjoy food again.
“Why is that in our kitchen?”
“It’s for dinner,” Titi says. “It’s really good.”
“That’s it. I’m not eating,” I say.
“Oh god, you’re so dramatic,” Mom says. “It’s not that bad.”
“Not that bad?” Sangria-ville is cracking up in their chairs. “That’s a whole live fish right there. Right there!”
“It’s dead!” Titi screams and she can’t hold her laughter in.
“Noooooooo.”
More roars from everyone, even my mom through her glowering, Nana holding on with her good arm as I duck behind her tiny frame to keep the sea bass away. I hate fish—Mom knows I don’t mess with seafood in general and I’m talking about the stuff they serve at restaurants, filleted and breaded and never with the heads attached. There’s a whole entire fish with its gross stinking head and its bulging eye following me around the kitchen.
“Stop it!”
The laughter continues but I don’t mind, I’m in on the joke this time, and most of the time the women in my family find me hilarious—I mean, who wouldn’t, even Stick thinks I’m funny, that has to be the reason he spends so much time with a skinny freak with bad hair and questionable teeth.
“You’re being ridiculous,” Mom says and heads back to the stove as Titi sets the fish on the counter. I step out behind Nana.
“Sammy?”
“Heyyyyy,” he says, kind of slow and dramatic and trying to be cool, or cooler than he is. He said he was coming by, but I forgot in the midst of the sea bass debacle.
“Hi Sammy,” Mom says and moves over to embrace him. Puerto Ricans love to hug.
“Hello, Mrs. Tirado.”
“You like fish?” Mom asks, reaching for the pan.
“No, stop!” I say. “Sammy’s not insane.” I grab his shirt to pull him away from the kitchen and all the laughing women down the hall through the party up the stairs, as far from the deadly fish as I can get. Sometimes I think it would be nice to live in a normal family.
Sammy’s dressed in a white soccer T-shirt and oversized shorts that cover most of his legs, which are really hairy—hairier than any guy I know from school and he’s pretty self conscious about it so he doesn’t ever wear shorts but it’s hot as hell outside so I guess he ditched the jeans.
“Who was that fine Latina in the kitchen?” Sammy’s planted on my bed, made nice and neat today because Mom insisted, once she stopped yelling for me to get ready for the party. “The chick with the fish.”
“Umm … my aunt?” I say, and I know he means Titi because he’s met my mother a million times and everyone else in the room is way old. And ewww.
“Yeah, she’s sweet.”
“That’s sick.”
My bedroom is smaller than the one at my old house and I shift the clean clothes Mom laid on my chair to the floor. She does my laundry but she refuses to put it away so the clothes end up in loose piles around the room, without a home, mixtures of clean and dirty and sort of clean spread out on the carpeting, and the only way I can tell the difference is the sniff test, which isn’t the best, but I have no time for home organization.