A few seconds later, she said, Oh my god, look over there. She gestured with her cup to Zoila, who’d followed us outside and was now hoisting up her shirt. She pressed her breasts together, each of them encased in a black lace-striped cup; her nipples peeked at us from behind the stripes like neighbors through slats of a fence. Our mom and the other older cousins watched as Zoila shoved her breasts up under her neck and shouted, Once I have the surgery, they’ll be like this but bigger.
Leidy and I looked back at each other, shock melting into stifled laughs. It felt like Zoila’s wedding again—before Dante, before her plan to get Roly to commit had backfired so fantastically, before I’d even heard of Rawlings College—the two of us on the same team. If there’d been a way to hold on to that—to stop Neyda from hustling across the cement to us, Dante’s spit all over her halter top—I would’ve used it then.
—Okay, so your kid? I think he shit or something.
—Maybe it’s your upper lip, I said into my cup again, but Leidy didn’t seem to hear me that time. She handed me her drink and reached out for Dante. She stuck her finger down the back of his diaper and just said, Nope.
Neyda clapped her hands like she was dusting them off and said to me, So is Omar coming later?
Omar had impressed my family last year by being handsome and just showing up, but I was still surprised Neyda remembered his name. Then, right away, I wasn’t: I remembered what I looked like to them this time a year ago; I was graduating high school soon, Omar had a decent job, and the family probably circled the word around the yard that they expected him to propose or get me pregnant by the time summer rolled around. Come on, mira la otra, they’d probably snickered, throwing an eyebrow at Leidy’s belly. It was worth their time to remember the name of someone at whose wedding reception they planned on having too much to drink.
—We broke up, I told Neyda. I shrugged and sipped, wondering if it was true.
—Oh no! she squealed. That’s so sad, oh my god! Who dumped who?
—She dumped him, Leidy said, the him having the same ugly sound around it as it did when I’d given her the envelopes earlier, when the him was our dad. She kicked him to the curb, Omar’s a loser, she said.
My stomach cramped and I wanted to blame the sangria, but I knew it was the loser that made me put my hand to my gut. Even though I half believed the things I told people at Rawlings about him, hearing Omar’s name roll out of my sister’s mouth as part of another lie to help me save face made me need to turn away from them talking and put the cup to my mouth. But I couldn’t swallow another drop. I tilted my head back to mime drinking, the sangria lapping a cold band against my lip. Above us, an airplane was coming in to land—Zoila’s house sat underneath the flight path of anything coming from the north and touching down at Miami International—and I wished the roar of it were worse: that it would cover up the new shouts in my head defending Omar, block the rush of him, how we’d known each other so long and so well. I wanted those feelings gone, smothered by sound, so that I could lie to myself and believe I would forget Omar, that he wouldn’t matter to me months and years from that day. And I wanted the noise to block out the fact that though I hadn’t called Omar since coming home, he hadn’t bothered to call me either—that maybe I was the loser. But the plane overhead was a small one, the wail of it too high-pitched to flood the backyard completely and make everyone stop talking for the four or five seconds it usually took to fade away. People shouted over it; I could hear Leidy laughing and saying, Right Lizet? My stomach churned again. I watched the sky until the plane disappeared behind the canopy of leaves shading the street. I made myself nod.
—He was not a loser! Neyda said, and I swallowed to make sure those words hadn’t come out of my own mouth. He had a car and stuff! And irregardless, he had a job, right?
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. It had taken exactly one big red oval around an irregardless in an early discussion paper in biology for me to leave that word behind, sequestering it for good to my Miami Vocabulary. I slid a step away from this cousin, impressed with myself for hearing now how stupid that word sounded in someone else’s mouth.
—He has a job, I said. I just haven’t talked to him lately. You know I’m away at college, right?
I looked at Leidy, hoping she’d stick up for me again, though I wasn’t sure for what this time. She rolled her eyes, took a long gulp of sangria from her cup. When she pulled it away from her face, a red smear arched across her upper lip. She sucked it in to clean it off, but the stain remained. I drank from my glass—careful, now that I saw what the drink could do, to avoid it lapping over my lip again—the punch burning all the way down.