“I don’t know. I guess she did.”
“Why didn’t they call you?” I could tell Sam was pissed.
“I don’t matter to them.”
“Screw them,” I said.
“Yeah.” And then there were those tears on his face again. “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to be a downer and shit.”
“You’re not,” I said. “You know what? Let’s get the car keys and get us double chocolate mochas with whipped cream.”
Fito shot me a crooked smile. “I could go for some of that.”
“Me too,” Sam said.
I wondered if drinking double chocolate mochas at nine thirty at night was related to that whistling-in-the-dark thing. Maybe so.
Snow. Cold. Fito. Mima.
I TEXTED SAM WHEN I woke up: It’s snowing.
No answer.
So I called her. “It’s snowing.”
“No way.”
“Look out the window.”
We were both up and dressed in a nanosecond.
Dad was drinking coffee, and Marcos was sitting across from him. I shot my dad a look. He looked back at me and said, “No, he didn’t spend the night.”
“So what if he had?”
Sam walked into the kitchen and shot Dad and Marcos a smile.
“He didn’t spend the night,” I said.
“So what if he had?”
Marcos rolled his eyes. “Couple of clowns.”
Then I said to Marcos, “Thanks for helping Fito.”
Marcos had a puzzled expression on his face.
“I mean, for helping to get him to see a therapist.”
“It’s no big deal,” he said.
“It kind of is,” I said.
Marcos nodded. “That kid deserves a break.”
“Yup,” I said. “He’s a good guy.”
“Yup,” Sam said. “We love him.”
Dad had a great smile on his face. I looked out the kitchen window. “It’s really snowing.”
“You can go play in it. There’s no school today.”
One thing I loved about El Paso was that if a couple of snowflakes fell on the ground, school was canceled. Sweet. Sam was already texting Fito. I poured myself a cup of coffee and thought about Marcos sitting there. I really wanted to know why he was here so early in the morning, but I would have looked like a real idiot if I started asking too many questions. It wasn’t any of my business. But it sort of was. And, well, I wasn’t used to this boyfriend thing Dad had going on—?even though I had wanted him to have someone. I guess me wanting Dad to have a boyfriend really was just theoretical.
It was coming down hard when Sam and I stepped outside. Fito was on his way. Sam started dancing around in the snow in the front yard, and I took some pics of her on my phone, then started dancing around too. I thought of Mima’s yellow leaves. And then I felt a snowball smack me on the side of the head.
I looked up and saw Fito laughing his fool head off. That was, until Sam got him right in the face with a snowball of her own. We started having a huge snowball fight in the middle of the street, and we were running around, ducking behind parked cars, teaming up with each other, then betraying each other, and a few of the other neighborhood kids came out and joined the fun, and then it seemed like there were kids coming from everywhere, from every house, from every nearby street—?and even Dad and Marcos were having a snowball fight in the front yard, and I thought, How great is this?
And it was all so fantastic.
We were playing! We were playing!
One minute there was a fight in a funeral home and ugly words were flying through the air like bullets—?and a few days later there was a snowball fight and the sound of Sammy squealing with laugher and Fito kneeling on the ground because he couldn’t stand up straight because he was laughing so hard.
God, it really was beautiful. Really, really beautiful.
Rat
I WAS HOPING for less drama in my life. And hoping it would be calm. Yeah, I was going for calm. But no. Something else had to happen. Sure it did. So on the last day of school before the Christmas break, it happened. On my way to lunch, I got a text from Sam: Get to Fito’s locker now!
I trotted down to Fito’s locker, and Sam was at her drama best, waving a note in front of Enrique Infante’s face. “You spell faggot with two g’s, you ignoramus.”
I got right in the middle of it. “Hey, hey, what the—”
“This asshole was pasting this”—?she showed me the piece of paper with the word FAGOT it on it—?“on Fito’s locker.” Just then Ms. Salcido, my English teacher, joined our little group. Sam was too busy cussing out Enrique Infante to notice, yelling, “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kick your bigoted little ass.”
“Try it, bitch.”
And that was it. Sam slapped him so hard he fell back, stunned. I knew he was gonna go for her, so I stepped between them, and I was about to pop him one right between the eyes when Ms. Salcido was all over us like chocolate icing on a cake.
“In the principal’s office right now!” Mr. Montes and Ms. Powers had shown up as reinforcements. Enrique Infante wasn’t helping himself by repeating, “I can’t believe that bitch slapped me,” and it took everything I had not to hit the little shit. As we marched to the principal’s office, Sam was holding tight to the evidence and was explaining to Ms. Powers that Enrique had it coming. Fito and I, well, we were keeping our mouths shut.
When we all filed into Mr. Cisneros’s office, he shook his head. He looked at me and Enrique and said, “I thought you two were supposed to keep away from each other.”
I don’t know what got into me, but I was feeling feisty. I mean verbally feisty, not, you know, fist feisty. “Well, it didn’t quite work out according to plan,” I said. “A couple of weeks ago I passed this clown in the hall and he calls me a faggot. Apparently he’s fallen in love with that word.”
Sam jumped right in. “And when Fito and I were walking toward his locker, this joker”—?she pointed at Enrique—?“was taping this note to Fito’s locker.” She placed the evidence on Mr. Cisneros’s desk. “And on top of everything else, he can’t even spell.”
I could see Ms. Powers trying like hell to keep from smiling.
Mr. Cisneros smiled a snarky smile at Sam. “Well, we’ve been here before, haven’t we?”
Then Enrique Infante chimed in, “And she slapped me. I mean, she slapped me, like, hard.”
“You deserved it,” I said. “And you were about to go at her. You were about to hit a girl. And you would’ve if I hadn’t stepped in. You’re lucky I didn’t mop the floor with you, buddy. You have some class, don’t you?”
Mr. Cisneros looked at the teachers. “Which one of you was first on the crime scene?”
Ms. Salcido spoke up. “I heard an argument, stepped out into the hall just as Mr. Infante let out the B word in reference to Ms. Diaz.”
Mr. Cisneros looked at me. “Are you going to have your dad in here again?” That’s when I knew that Dad must have really gone off on him—?in a good way, a very Vicente Silva kind of way. “That depends on how this goes,” I said.
Mr. Cisneros looked straight at Enrique. “You’ve been in this office, what? Four times this year? Apologize to Mr.”—?he looked at Fito—?“what was your name again?”