He stopped at a red light and looked right at me. “This is a really big deal for me.” Maybe he didn’t think I was excited enough, or fully understood. “I’d represent our whole state. In Washington, DC.”
“We’re moving?” Ricky asked.
“No. I would just work there. And here, too, sometimes. It’s exactly like when I go to Tallahassee.”
“So you’re moving? Out of Florida?” I said.
“You know that where I work and where I live are two different things, Mari. This will always be home. And I’ll visit every week.”
“You’d visit Washington?”
“He’d visit home, sweetie,” Mami said.
I didn’t understand. I thought visiting a place meant going somewhere that’s not home. But we’d gotten to the park, to the edge of the canal, and by then the conversation seemed over. Papi filled each of our hands with breadcrumbs and we took turns sprinkling them into the water, waiting for the ducks to come, one by one, to peck at the pieces before they got soggy and sank. My brother tossed in his entire fistful, and out of nowhere, the ducks swarmed us. It made Ricky laugh about as loud as the ducks were quacking. Maybe that’s why my parents thought I wouldn’t hear them as they stepped away from the water’s edge.
“I’m scared we’re losing sight of the things we stand for,” Mami said.
Their voices grew lower, but even though I could only make out Papi’s every few words, I’d heard some version of them enough times to fill in the blanks. “I’m just trying to make this a better world for all of us. For all the families that started out like we did, with nothing.”
“We never had nothing,” Mami said, raising her voice. “We had each other.” Ricky turned around.
My father smiled like nothing had happened and rejoined us. “How’s it going? Where’d the ducks go?”
The ducks had lost interest a while ago when we ran out of crumbs, but we hadn’t wanted our parents to know. Instead, we watched the sunset ripple over the water’s surface as the ducks swam farther and farther away.
three
We’re spending fourth period in the library because the guidance counselors are preparing us to write our community service project proposals for next year. We sit at tables in the center of the room with rows of computers all around us. Even though they split the sophomore class into four groups to fit us in, it feels like everyone in the school is here. They’re all staring at me, but not like they did in the beginning of the year. Back then, I was the new girl whose father was running for president. Vivi would post clips from his speeches online, with little arrows pointing at me clapping and smiling. I’d walk down the hall and overhear students’ excited whispers. Nobody bothered covering their mouths or looking away because they weren’t saying anything bad. Now, though, they all do these subtle double-takes. I feel people’s stares wash over me the way a warm undercurrent brushes against your knees in the ocean. It leaves me with the same uneasy feeling of suspecting someone peed in the water.
This morning, all anyone can talk about is the op-ed Jackie Velez published in the school paper. She basically turned her tweet into a five-hundred-word manifesto about how Miamians represent the best of what our country has to offer. “Not a bubble, but a sea of diversity,” she wrote. “Our voices are a current, strong and unstoppable.”
Maybe it’s just like Joe had feared—people are blowing Papi’s one misspoken comment out of proportion. It hasn’t even been a week but the situation completely snowballed and spiraled out of control like some sort of viral tornado, he said. Which kind of made me wish he would calm the eff down, and maybe learn not to mix his metaphors while he’s at it.
I’ll never admit this to his face, but I can kind of see where Joe’s coming from. I mean, Papi already apologized. And yeah, for someone who’s always telling me how I need to choose my words carefully, he really failed miserably at picking the best phrase to say on national TV. But, the nerves. The pressure. It’s not like I can’t relate.
I look around and catch girls rolling their eyes at me. I don’t even know most of their names, but they know mine. That’s what’s weird about going to a school with twenty-five hundred students: every day is just a bunch of strangers’ faces mixed in with a few that you more or less recognize from one or two classes. My last school was much smaller because it was private, and in each class there were maybe twelve of us. We all knew each other. Not just each other’s names but that Jason Burman was super into photography and Anita Valdez was vegan, and that the twins Blake and Hannah Cohen had a younger sister two grades below named Rebecca who looked nothing like them. Everybody knew everybody’s business. Then Yvette Martinez’s parents lost their house, and she said they blamed it on my father breaking his promises about property taxes years ago. That was all it took for the whole class to turn against me. Yvette made freshman year such hell for me, I was actually relieved when my parents decided to put me back in public school sophomore year. They said it’d look better to working-class Americans, and they figured I’d adjust easily since I’d gone to Grove Elementary up until fifth grade.
It was kind of working, too. Vivi reconnected with me right away; we’d been best friends until we were ten, but the second I was back she acted like we’d never drifted apart after I switched schools. The first week of the year, she introduced me to Zoey and told me to sit with them at lunch. Even though the whole student body had been gossiping about seeing me on television with my dad, neither one of them brought him up, not even once, until I did a few days later. I was starting to think I had a chance at carving out my own identity, until Papi’s debate debacle happened. Now I’m back to being Senator Ruiz’s daughter and everyone besides Vivi and Zoey hates me for it.
“Mariana, how are you, dear?” So, maybe not everyone hates me. Ms. Lindeli is super nice because she was Papi’s guidance counselor when he was a student here years ago. She has a picture of the two of them at his first town hall on her desk. He signed it, Thank you for believing in me.
“I’m okay. I mean, I’m fine,” I say.
She claps her hands to get everyone’s attention. We’re supposed to take this period to research organizations or causes we can volunteer for. Vivi, Zoey, and I have agreed to do our service project together. The computer desks get taken before we can grab one, so we decide to look through magazines and papers for ideas. We head toward the stacks, which are all the way at the back of the library, away from all the chatter.
“I don’t see what everyone’s so worked up about,” Zoey says. “Isn’t it a compliment? To say Miami’s not like any other place in the country?”
I can’t help but laugh. When she puts it like that—with her voice super hissy in a loud whisper—it doesn’t sound like a compliment at all.
“It’s complicated,” Vivi says. “But anyways, it’s not fair that people are taking it out on you. You’re not the one running for president, you know?”
“At least you think so,” I say, even though we both know it’s not that simple. In some twisted way, who your parents are matters, at least it does if they’re a big deal. It’s why everyone knows that Dania Charles’s mom is an anchor on Channel 7, and Patrick Franco’s dad is this super-in-demand plastic surgeon. People say he’s done Ariana Grande’s Botox, which is ridiculous because she doesn’t need it, and even if he had, none of us would actually know. There are laws against doctors disclosing who their patients are; it’s just like attorney-client privilege. I heard Papi say that to Joe a few months ago, but they changed the subject as soon as I walked into the room. I don’t know what they think I’d do. Tell the world on my private Twitter account with all of four followers? Give an exclusive interview to Jackie?