“Did you know Diana’s mom ran off with a wallpaper heir?”
“You’re gonna miss me, you know.” Lucia sighs, and when she does, I wonder if she’d rather be arguing with Umberto and Roberto back home instead. I think she’s talking about when I go off to college, but later I find out that’s not what she’s talking about at all.
* * *
On Saturday, Lucia invites me and my parents out to dinner at her favorite place, which is this perfect Chinese hole-in-the-wall with questionable service and actual Chinese people eating there. As we slurp and my mother finishes her second glass of rice wine, she tears up and tells Lucia how grateful she is for everything she’s done for us over the years and that we truly consider her part of the family.
Then Lucia awkwardly blurts out, “I have some big news.”
For a second, I’m afraid she’s gonna say that she has cancer, or that something terrible has happened to Umberto or Roberto, or both. I feel my stomach drop all the way down to my knees. Lucia is my best friend, even more than Heather or Courtney or all of them. I don’t want to lose her. I can’t.
She pauses for a second as though she’s summoning up the courage to say what comes next. “I’ve decided to go back to Guatemala… for good. Now that the girls are grown… I… think it’s a good time for me to go home.”
My father reaches across the table and grabs Lucia’s small hand in both of his.
I start right then and there to blubber loudly in the restaurant, with all those Chinese people staring at us.
“Please don’t leave me.” I got snot going down my face, which isn’t my best look, but I don’t care. Not now.
Lucia turns to me and places her forehead against mine, which is what she used to do when I was little; she would say she was taking my sad thoughts away and replacing them with her happy thoughts for me.
After that, we crack our fortune cookies open and look at Lucia, hoping hers says something like “A great adventure awaits you,” but all it says is “You are beautiful,” which isn’t even a fortune at all.
Lucia’s lived with us for thirteen of the seventeen years I’ve been alive. For her twenty-fifth birthday, my parents gave her a very expensive bottle of champagne, and I broke it while playing in her room. Our birthdays are only a few days apart, and so after my birthday party, I gave her two of my new dolls to replace her broken bottle. Then Lucia and I played with them together in her room until it was time for bed.
When we get home, I fiddle through Lucia’s records until I find one and place it on the turntable. The record clicks and scratches as it begins.
“Are you going to nanny other kids in Guatemala?” I ask.
“I won’t have to be a nanny there,” she says quickly, and it’s like a punch to the gut, even though I know it shouldn’t be.
“What about your car?”
“Enough with the questions,” she says.
“What about Umberto and Roberto? What do they think? Are they happy?”
“Of course they’re happy! I’m their mother,” she says, and we both grow quiet. “Let’s talk about something else.”
Before Lucia left Guatemala, a bunch of indigenous farmers and student activists barricaded themselves inside the Spanish Embassy to protest the kidnapping and murder of peasants by the army. Instead of negotiating with them, the government cut off the electricity and water. While the police were trying to smoke them out, the embassy caught fire and instead of fighting the fire, they actually prevented the firefighters from attempting to put out the blaze and purposefully left the peasants and their Spanish hostages to die. The Spanish ambassador escaped through a window, and one of the demonstrators survived but was badly burned. Twenty or so men took him from his hospital room, tortured him, and shot him dead. They dumped his body on the campus of the university Lucia was attending. There, she and the others saw what was left of the demonstrator and read the sign hung around his neck: BROUGHT TO JUSTICE FOR BEING A TERRORIST.
She left school after that. Not too much later, she left the country itself.
Lucia sings “Nothing Compares 2 U.” It’s all full of longing and heartbreak, and how sometimes the thing or person you want most is the hardest but maybe it’s worth it? I’ve heard the lyrics a million times, but also hearing her sing them right now, it’s like I never really heard them at all.
I want to tell her about Michael. About what happened Friday, and last week, and before. I’d told Lucia everything I’d ever done until about a month ago. Harrison makes Jo feel like she can fly. I want that one day, I think. Somebody whose love is like wings. I don’t want to be somebody’s dirty little secret. I’m not even sure I’m that much. I might be nothing at all.
Instead, I join in, and Lucia and I sing together.
When Lucia gets really into a song, sometimes I wonder if she’s singing for a man, or for home. But sometimes a song is just a song.
A coyote ambles past the pool toward Lucia’s window. It pauses, yellow-eyed and mangy, right in front of us.
I shit you not: It sits down and listens.
CHAPTER 4
THE NEXT FEW days are a blur after Lucia’s announcement. After our run-in with the police officer, we don’t ditch, and instead of hanging out after school, I go home to spend time with Lucia—so all the days kinda blend together. Until the day of the crickets.
When the first cricket hops past, it freezes and I freeze, and I swear, at that moment, it looks up at me like my own personal Jiminy Cricket.
As I bend closer to look at him, Curtis Mayfield’s voice swells in my headphones. He’s singing about how no matter who you are, what race or religion, if there’s a hell, we’re all headed there. It’s dark but also funny. Plus it’s got a killer beat. I think it’s supposed to be about racism and politics and how we’re all connected to each other, even when we don’t think we are, even when we don’t want to be.
I excavated the cassette, and a whole bunch of other stuff, from the rubble of Jo’s room last week after my parents went to bed. My sister has weirdo taste in music—like some shit by this group called Skinny Puppy I tried listening to—but some of it’s kinda good, like this. Before I can get any closer to Jiminy, a ratty Converse sneaker covered in doodles of aliens and tits steps within inches of him, scaring him off.
“Watup, Ash?”
Michael takes the headphones from my ears and puts them to his own.
“You never told me how that dinner with your sister went.”
Michael is the only one I tell anything real to these days. We sit in his car and talk shit and smoke pot and tell each other secrets that we would never tell anybody else. It’s easier to talk to him than to Kimberly, Courtney, and Heather sometimes. When you’ve known somebody too long, it’s like they’re talking to a version of you from years ago, even though you’ve updated all your software. You’re the same program, except also you’re not. It’s a little easier around somebody who doesn’t know you as well, who doesn’t remember that one bad haircut from fourth grade, or the first kid you had a crush on. Somebody who doesn’t feel comfortable calling your parents by their first names. Somebody who doesn’t know your parents’ names at all.