I didn’t bother with my hair. I tried to avoid looking at it altogether. Damian watched me the whole time. I followed him back to the room like a good girl, and let him lock me up. I even smiled as he shut the door on me.
Then I fell back on the bed and let out a deep breath. The uncertainty was killing me. I’d braced myself for another painful encounter, another round of humiliation and degradation before I earned my privileges. I’d held the possibility, all tight and tense, in my shoulders and neck. But Damian had done the unpredictable, and that was far worse than a patterned system of abuse, because now I was in a state of constant alert, fearing what would come and fearing when it didn’t.
How do we kill him, Esteban? I closed my eyes and remembered the two of us, plotting in my room. I’d been an earnest eight year old, four years younger than him, but an equal instigator in all our adventures.
He gave my question considerable thought before responding. I liked the way he twirled his hair when he was deep in thought. His hair was long and dark, and when he let it go, it left a little curl. MaMaLu was always after him to cut it and the times she succeeded, he came home with nowhere to hide his face.
“I don’t think we have to kill him,” he said. “Just teach him a good lesson.”
Gideon Benedict St. John (pronounced Sin Gin), formally nicknamed Gidiot by Esteban and me, was the bane of my existence. He was ten, but bigger than the two of us combined, and when he pinched me, he left big, blue bruises on my thighs.
“Esteban?” I fake-smiled in the mirror. “Would you make a tooth for me?”
He was stretched out on my bed, folding and unfolding a sheet of paper, trying to figure out how to turn it into a giraffe.
“You want a paper tooth to hide the gap between your teeth?” he asked.
I nodded and went back to examining it in the mirror.
“He’s just going to find another way to tease you, güerita.” Esteban called me güerita. Blondie. “And how are you going to make it stick?”
“Make it out of cardboard and I’ll tape it in the back.” I opened my mouth and pointed to the spot I’d picked out.
We both jumped when the door opened and MaMaLu walked in.
“Esteban! You’re supposed to be in school.”
“Going!” he yelped, when she smacked him.
MaMaLu hit Esteban a lot, but she hit him like she was swatting a fly, out of irritation and frustration. Esteban got swatted a lot because Esteban misbehaved a lot. He propped a half-finished giraffe up on the sill, scrambled out the window, and shimmied down the tree. MaMaLu slid the glass pane down and watched as he high-tailed it across the garden.
“How many times have I told you not to let him in? If Se?or Sedgewick finds out—”
“He won’t,” I said.
“That’s not the point, cielito lindo.” She picked up the brush and started combing my hair. “You and Esteban . . .” She shook her head. “The two of you are going to get me in trouble one day.”
“Can you do my hair like yours?” I asked.
MaMaLu had thick, dark hair, which she braided and folded into a bun. I wanted to crawl into the ‘U’ it made on her nape because it looked like a little hammock.
“That’s old lady hair,” she replied, but she sectioned off two side braids and combined them in the back, leaving the rest of my pale, blond hair loose.
“So beautiful,” she said. She removed a small, red flower from her hair and tucked it into mine.
“Gidiot says I’m a witch because witches have gaps between their teeth.”
“It’s Gideon,” she chided. “And when God made you, he left that space so your true love could slip his heart through it when he finds you.”
MaMaLu was full of stories; there was a tale behind everything.
“Then how did Esteban’s dad give you his heart? You don’t have a gap between your teeth.”
Esteban’s father had been a great fisherman. He died at sea when MaMaLu was pregnant, but she told us all about his adventures—about magic and monsters and mermaids in the sea.
“Well then, I probably never had his heart.” She smiled and poked me in the nose. “Run along now. Miss Edmonds is already here.”