“No!”
Now she was hand-talking. “Liliana.” Hands sweeping toward me. “Do you know how many kids are on that waiting list?” Hands in the air. “It’s one of the few programs that doesn’t have requirements like certain grades, income, or… other things.” Hands on her hips. “Listen, you’re going. Besides, your father and I—”
And there it was. Dad did know. I looked at my mother’s beaming face and imagined him having the same reaction.
Truth. My dad has been MIA since the end of the summer. All Mom would say about it was, Your papi went on a trip. There’s really nothing worse than being lied to by your own parent. Why couldn’t she just tell me the truth? I could handle whatever it was. What? Dad left to go live with another woman and her dumb-ass kids? Dad left on a bender and Mom didn’t know when he’d be back? Dad took some shady job in some other part of the country? He’d left before on those sorts of jobs, but he’d always come back. Then he and Mom would spend the whole day in their bedroom (ew), and that night we’d all go out to dinner at someplace like Old Country Buffet or Olive Garden.
But he’d only ever been gone for a week, tops, before. Never this long.
“Bueno,” she finally said, giving the pamphlet a kiss, I kid you not. “You’re going. Punto.”
I slammed the door to my bedroom, put on my headphones, and played music so loud I swear my hair was vibrating. Why did I need to go to some school an hour’s drive away? Where I didn’t know a single person? I pictured myself eating chips all alone at a table in a sea of strangers.
I planned to protest in my room all night—except I got crazy hungry. I needed to get me some Honey Buns from the corner store, is what I needed to do. But they had six hundred calories in each one, and two come in a package, and once you ate one, it was virtually impossible not to eat the other. So—not. I knocked on my window for Jade, trying to distract myself from my growling stomach. No answer. So I took out my notebook. Something that always made me feel better: writing. I have always capital L Loved writing. Even more than sleep. I’d stay up late and I’d wake up early to write, even on the weekends. Like, I had to. I’m not talking about some five-paragraph bull they always be giving us at school to practice for the state tests.
I’m practically the same way about reading. Right now I was totally into books by Sandra Cisneros. From her website she seemed cool, but in that way where the person wasn’t trying to be cool, you know? She didn’t have a dozen piercings or anything, but she had a tattoo of a Badalupe on her left bicep. She wore BRIGHT red lipstick and lots of mascara. And sometimes she had really short bangs. If I even tried to have bangs, then my whole head would just frizz. Not cute.
Something else I capital L Loved—and this is kinda weird, but whatever—I capital L Loved building miniatures. Houses and buildings. Like, out of cardboard, or cereal boxes or receipts, scraps of paper, shopping bags, stuff like that. That obsession started way back when I wanted the Barbie Dreamhouse soooo bad. Mom said it was too expensive, but then one day she came home with a big cardboard box—a lady she was cleaning house for had just gotten a new TV—and helped me make my own. Like I said, Mom = smart. Then, when I was in fourth grade, Dad took my brothers and me to the Children’s Museum, and a lady was offering a free art class in one of the studios. She showed us this one artist, Ana Serrano, who made little hotels, stores, and apartment buildings. But this was like, next level. She only used cardboard! I’m talking teeny tiny air conditioners, teeny tiny potted plants, and even teeny tiny satellite dishes on teeny tiny rooftops. All. Made. Out. Of. Cardboard. So crazy! So cool. And boom, I was obsessed. Under my bed is like half a city’s worth of teeny tiny buildings. I was building a bakery now—Yoli’s Pasteles y Panadería—but that night I didn’t have the patience to focus on it. My stomach was mad growly.
So I gave up and left my room. Mom was in the living room, whisper-yelling into her phone. All of a sudden, she began crying like someone had died! I couldn’t tell if I was hallucinating from how hungry I was. Wait, maybe someone had died, someone in Guatemala or El Salvador or Arizona (about one hundred relatives I’d never met lived in these places), or hello, my dad. It was hard to hear exactly what she was saying between the wails, but I caught phrases: too dangerous, too expensive, I just don’t know.
What was too dangerous? What was too expensive? METCO was a free program. She couldn’t have been talking about that, and besides, who was she talking to?
Afraid she would hear me snooping, I speed-walked to the kitchen, grabbed two granola bars (what? the cheap kind are small), and hightailed it back to my room, thinking, thinking. No. She wasn’t talking about METCO. That news had made her happier than she’d looked all week. When had they signed me up, anyway?
As I thought about it, it started making sense. See, every February when I was in elementary school, my dad had dragged me to a charter school lottery. The last time we went, I think I was ten. I remember because Dad got us a blue raspberry Coolatta from Dunkins, even though it was snowing. The school basement was packed. I even recognized a girl from my grade. She was with her grandmother, who clutched a rosary as she prayed. I was kind of scared at first, but Dad explained that we were there to put in our application for a spot at the charter school. I didn’t know what a charter school was, and to be honest, I still don’t really understand how it’s different (besides the fact that they make you go to school longer, sometimes even in the summer). But Dad was all psyched about it.
Like the other parents, Dad filled out a form and received a poker chip with a number on it. Then we sat and waited on benches for, like, ever, passing the Coolatta back and forth until finally a lady at the front of the room said it was time to start the lottery. Inside one of those big round bingo cages were poker chips that matched the ones that had been handed out. That cage was packed with chips!
“Let me tell you how this is gonna work,” the lady announced. “I’m gonna call the numbers, and if your number is called, your child gets a spot. At the end, we’ll put the rest of the names on the waiting list.”
“How many spots are there?” a man with red cheeks asked.
“Twenty-eight.”
“How many poker chips have you given out?”
“Two hundred and twelve.”
The audience gasped. I looked at Dad, who rubbed at his knuckles. No lie, I was ready to be done with it. My butt hurt from sitting so long. And I had to pee. As the lady called the numbers and the spots filled up, some parents cried tears of joy. The sleeping babies woke up in a daze. The old people clapped. But as we got to the twenty-third and twenty-fourth slots, other families—most families—began to weep into crumpled tissues. This must be one special school, I remember thinking. And when she called the number for the twenty-eighth slot, a man screamed, “¡Así es!” as around him the weeping grew louder.
The lady at the front looked around—I gotta admit, she looked really sad—and said, “Thank you all for coming. If your number hasn’t been called, you’ll be added to the waiting list.”
Dad’s nostrils opened and closed like a bull’s in a bullfight. In a low, calm voice he said, “Let’s go.”