“Fuck, you’re right,” Rosina says. “He’s never going to be on our side.”
The cop behind the front desk has mysteriously disappeared. There is no one with any authority anywhere to be seen. Just a roomful of outraged girls and one boy. They are teenagers. They’re just kids. They are not worthy of being listened to.
“Fuck it,” Abby says. “No one cares. I don’t care.” And she walks out the door.
“I have to get home before my parents suspect anything,” Elise says. She hugs Grace. “This isn’t over. I’m not giving up.”
Within minutes, the station is empty. Everyone is on their way home, where they will have to pretend today was any other day, where they will have to decide if it’s worth it to keep fighting, where they will sit through dinner wondering what you’re supposed to do when the person you ask for help says no.
Melissa drives Grace and Rosina home. “You did a really great job today,” Melissa says as she pulls up in front of Grace’s house.
“Not good enough, though,” Grace says.
“That wasn’t your fault,” Rosina says. “That asshole made a decision to not help us before he ever set foot in the station.”
“Yeah,” Grace mumbles. “Maybe.” But all the fight in her is gone. She’s exhausted. She wants nothing more than to sit on the couch watching TV and eating ice cream out of the carton with her mom. She wants a world where that is enough.
ROSINA.
Rosina doesn’t get out of the car when Melissa pulls up to her house. The sky has exploded into a full-on thunderstorm, and the car reverberates with the pounding rain. “I’m not going in there,” Rosina says. “I’m running away.”
“Don’t you need more than your school backpack if you’re going to run away from home?” Melissa says.
“Good point.” Rosina leans her head back and closes her eyes. “I am so fucked.”
“Maybe it won’t be as bad as you think. Maybe you’re not giving your mom enough credit.” Melissa reaches over and takes Rosina’s hand in hers. “It’s going to be okay.”
“You don’t know that.”
The car is full of the thick echoes of raindrops and the warmth of their bodies. Thunder shakes them, pulls them closer together.
“So, are you, like, gay?” Rosina says. “Or are you going to realize next week, ‘Oh I was just experimenting, let’s just be friends’? Because that would be really lame. Because the more I know you, the more I don’t want to be your friend. I mean . . . You know what I mean.”
Melissa takes off her seat belt, leans over, and kisses Rosina. Not a peck. A long, slow, soft kiss. Not a friend kind of kiss at all.
“Rosina,” Melissa whispers. “You are not an experiment.”
It takes Rosina a few moments to open her eyes.
“Okay?” Melissa says.
“Okay.”
“Call me and tell me what happens with your mom.”
“Okay.”
Rosina enters her house, floating. The usually irritating sight of Lola watching TV on her couch doesn’t even bother her.
“Is Abuelita sleeping?” Rosina asks her.
“You owe me twenty bucks,” Lola says.
“Hello to you, too.”
“I had to watch her because you skipped work so my mom had to go in.”
“Yeah, looks like really hard work.”
Lola sticks out her hand. Rosina sighs and fishes in her wallet for a twenty. Normally, Rosina would fight, but she’s saving her energy for Mami. Just one minute with a member of her family, and it’s like Rosina’s kiss with Melissa never even happened.
Rosina goes up to her room and waits. She doesn’t bother trying to go to sleep because she knows Mami will wake her up as soon as she gets home from work. She picks the strings of her guitar softly for a few minutes, mindlessly experimenting with various chords and rhythms and patterns, until that mysterious force she cannot name and never talks about seems to speak through her fingers, directing Rosina, making decisions for her. Thirty minutes later she is somehow playing the loose structure of a new song—three arpeggiated chords of a verse and another three of a chorus. She is humming the beginnings of a melody as she thinks about Melissa, about her lips, how Melissa seems to glow whenever she enters a room, how the light of her makes Rosina’s shadows bearable.
But then knock, knock, knock, knock. Rosina’s room shakes with Mami’s fist on her door. Before Rosina has a chance to say “Come in,” the door swings open and Mami barges in.
“What the hell were you doing that was so important?” she growls.
“I can’t tell you,” Rosina says. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” Mami says, shaking her head so violently Rosina thinks it might fly off. “That’s not acceptable. You do not get to do that.”
“I’m sorry” is all Rosina can think to say.
“Who do you think you are?” Mami says, marching closer. She grabs Rosina’s guitar out of her hands and throws it on the floor. The wooden frame knocks and the strings chime dully as it hits the floor. Rosina’s eyes go wide. Not her guitar. Anything but that.
But Rosina suddenly feels a strange calm. She stares at her mother’s red, furious face, and she almost feels sorry for her, sorry for her angry, lonely life. What’s the point of meeting her rage with more rage? What’s the point of fighting someone who’s always angry no matter what happens? Rosina could have dropped a plate on the floor. She could have been two minutes late. She could have killed someone. And Mami would still be the same kind of mad.
Rosina skipped work tonight and won’t tell her mother why. She knows Mami has a right to be angry. But Rosina also has a right to own her decision. She accepts her mother’s anger, but she does not have to fight it.
Rosina says nothing. She looks into her mother’s eyes, her face blank, free of defiance, free of shame.
Mami is the one to look away first. “You make me sick,” she spits. She spins around and walks out of Rosina’s room. The door simply closes behind her because it is too light to slam.
Rosina’s room is silent in Mami’s wake. She picks up her guitar to inspect it for damage, and finds that it just needs a slight tuning adjustment.
Her instinct is to be alone. But there is something new, something stronger than instinct.
Rosina picks up her phone and calls Melissa. It’s nearly midnight, but somehow she knows Melissa is still awake.
“Hey,” Melissa says after two rings.
“I just had a fight with my mom. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Oh, Rosina. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s actually kind of okay,” Rosina says, confused by her own words. “I think.”
“Yeah?” Melissa says. “That’s great.”
“Let’s talk about something else,” Rosina says. “Let’s pretend nothing sad happened today.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“I just want to hear your voice.”
“Oh, okay.”
Silence.
When Melissa giggles, it feels like butterfly wings fluttering everywhere in Rosina’s body, blowing the pain away.
“Say something,” Rosina says.
“Do you want to come over to my house for dinner sometime?”
The butterfly wings stop fluttering. The butterflies are stunned stupid. “Like, with your parents?” Rosina says.
“Yeah.”