“Suit yourself,” he says.
I don’t follow Roli upstairs. Instead, I walk toward the pool. The old ladies who usually bob in the water aren’t here. They might have been scared away by the heat, or maybe they’re praying for Do?a Rosa at the funeral parlor in Lake Worth. I let myself in the gate and sit at the pool’s edge with my legs dangling in the water. Roli and I used to do handstands in here. We used to dive for pool sticks. But now all I see is an ugly pool. Leaves are floating on the surface, and I’m pretty sure there’s a dead frog in the deep end. The deck chairs are lopsided, and the scummy water is warm enough to poach you. I think of the pretty office at Seaward Pines, the fountain with cherubs spitting water, and feel mad all over again.
I don’t know how long I sit there, but finally, someone opens the gate behind me. “Mami says to come up.” Roli has changed into shorts, and he’s barefoot. “She wants you to eat.”
“I’m not hungry.” I go back to watching lizards dart around the pool deck.
Roli stays quiet for a few seconds. Then he walks over to where I’m sitting and curls his toes over the edge.
“Hunger strike, huh?” he says. “How long you think you’ll hold out?”
I give him my darkest look.
Roli considers the water as a beetle paddles near our legs. He walks to the supply closet at the shallow end of the pool and finds the net. I watch him circle the perimeter, cleaning away the mess. He even scoops up the frog and hurls it like a lacrosse ball into the bushes. When he’s done, he walks back to me. I can feel a fight between us.
“Merci…,” he begins.
But I strike first, hard and fast. “Seaward Pines is a dumb school,” I blurt. “I’ll hate it. And I hate Papi, too.”
Roli sighs. He’s quiet for a long while, which makes me uncomfortable. My brother has always been strangely good at reading my mind. Can’t he see how awful it felt to be unimportant, to watch Papi stand there like a chump?
“What did you want Papi to do, Merci? Pitch a fit and blow your free ride?”
Without warning, tears spring to my eyes. He pretends not to notice. Instead, he cups my scalp with his enormous hand and gives a squeeze. “Try to let this idea into your thick cranium. Papi chose to be invisible today so you won’t ever have to be.”
I look up at him guiltily.
“That’s harder to do than shooting off your mouth, Merci.”
Without warning, he yanks off his shirt. He has Papi’s same shape, even if he’s a little skinnier. There are still tiny dots of paint in his hair, a smear at his elbow.
He cannonballs into the pool and makes a spray arc that soaks me to my underwear. For a second, I’m stunned. I want to shout at him, stay enemies, but instead, I take a deep breath and let the water offer what relief it will.
“Race?” He bobs back up to the surface, grinning. “Come on. Show me what you’re made of.”
I hesitate, my shame holding me still. But in the end, I stand up and shimmy out of my overalls until I’m just in a T-shirt and panties. I jump, arms wide, eyes open. Then I paddle after him, reaching and gasping into the deep end like mad.
Secret Samantha
TIM FEDERLE
It’s a lot of pressure to pick a good elf name.
When I was little, I never stuck my pets with average names like Spot or Rover. It was more like Peanut Brittle or Sir Hop-a-Lot. But having to name myself for our Secret Santa week at school is kind of stressing me out—and it’s almost my turn in the circle.
(I always seem to go last, which is just my luck.)
“Yoo-hoo, Samantha?” Miss Lee says.
Gah, I hate when people don’t call me Sam, and it throws me off. I open my mouth, but my elf name doesn’t come out the way I want it to. I want my elf name to be Flame, because I like the way fire changes from orange to blue to smoke, without even warning you.
“Um…Sparkles,” I say.
“Sparkles?” Miss Lee asks, probably because my voice is so small.
“Yeah,” I say. “Sparkles. The elf.”
It’s no Flame, but it seems safe enough.
Still, a few of the boys begin telling some kind of Sparkles-themed joke. They’ll find anything to make fun of. Like when I said I wanted to be called “Sam” last year, and they all said, “Is that because you look like a boy?”
Maybe I should have expected it. I had really short hair then, which I’d begged my mom to let me get cut when we moved here. She warned me not to: “Kids can be cruel, honey,” she said, and she was right. They called me Sam the Man.
Which doesn’t even rhyme, by the way.
Anyway, I let my hair grow back out and I stopped telling people to call me Sam, and here we are.