“You know,” Mari says, “we need, like, a vow or something. To make it official.”
“What are you talking about?” Lourdes ties her long hair into a bun at the base of her neck. She looks like Mom.
Mari hops off the sill and grabs the book. “A contract. Something that ensures no Hernandez will ever get her heart broken by a Vargas again.”
“Not to be totally obvious here,” Lourdes says, “but Juju hasn’t even kissed a boy. And you never got your heart broken by a Vargas.”
“Not true.” Mari thumbs through the book. “Jack Ramirez, right here. One of their cousins. I had a crush on him in eighth grade.”
“Ramirez isn’t Vargas,” Lourdes says. “And a crush hardly qualifies as a broken heart.”
“He didn’t like me back.”
“Mari, he was gay!”
“Technicality,” Mari says. “We’re doing this for Celi and Juju. Johnny’s still around, and there are other brothers. Who knows how many. Juju could go back to school this fall and walk right into their trap.”
Celi sniffles. “There’s another brother two years ahead of Juju. And that’s not counting the rest of their cousins.”
“Let’s do it.” Mari flips to a new page in the book. She reads out loud as she frantically scribbles: “We solemnly swear that as long as we live, we shall be united in this promise against all that is scheming, lying, cheating, slimy, conniving, and worthless—”
“And stupid, hormonal, amoeba brained, and useless,” Celi says. “And ugly.”
Mari’s forehead wrinkles. “Celi. The Vargas boys are not—”
“It’s my heartbreak.” Celi takes another drag from Mari’s cigarette and exhales toward the open window. “Write it down,” she croaks.
Mari writes it down, followed by the vow we’ll each have to say out loud. When her Sharpie finally stops, she turns to our oldest sister. “Lourdes. Hair.”
Lourdes rolls her eyes again, but she doesn’t protest. She yanks a hair from each of our heads, finishing with her own, then winds them together and drops them into the glass candle holder. They pop and curl and fill the room with a burnt plastic smell, shriveling into nothing.
Next Mari shreds another photo and burns the tiny pieces one at a time, blowing the smoke toward the window. “Give Celi that flower.”
Lourdes scoops the orange bloom from the floor and drops it into Celi’s hand. The petals, once bright and beautiful, seem suddenly fragile, withering against Celi’s skin as if they’ve only just realized they’ve been clipped from their roots.
“This is the last night we will ever speak of Johnny Filthy Vargas,” Mari says. “Crush it, Celi.”
Celi holds the flower a moment longer, then folds her fingers over it. Tears fall freely down her cheeks, and she passes the broken bloom to Mari, who tapes it into the book.
“Now we say the chant and bind ourselves with blood,” Mari says.
Blood? My stomach flip-flops.
“Someone’s been watching Buffy reruns,” Lourdes says.
“Quit being babies.” Mari turns the knife, blade flashing in the candlelight. “I’m not staking anyone through the heart. Just a prick.”
“Mari, I’m not sure . . .” Celi keeps shaking her head.
“You guys! It’s a pinprick. We did the same thing with the Birch sisters at Celi’s birthday party. Remember?”
“Yeah, to become blood sisters.” Celi crushes her spent cigarette into the sill next to Mari’s. “And I was, like, ten.”
“What ever happened to the Birches?” Lourdes asks.
“Hands,” Mari says. “Juju, you first.”
I hold out my hands, palms up. Mari pricks the first one right in the fleshy middle part. It stings at first, but I clamp my hand shut, waiting patiently for her to do the other hand, then Lourdes’s. Celi’s. Her own. When we’re all sufficiently bleeding, we press our palms together and form a tight circle around the candle, Archangel Michael staring at us blankly, his red sword pointed at the sky. My sisters each recite the solemn vow, and when it comes to me, they watch expectantly.
I square my shoulders and take another deep breath. “I, Jude Hernandez, vow to never, ever, under any circumstances, within or outside of my control, even if the fate of humanity is at stake, even if my own life is threatened, get involved with a Vargas.”
A breeze floats through the open window and the candle flickers, sealing our promise. My sisters smile at me; even Celi seems a little lighter.
“We have to sign this.” Celi loops her name at the bottom of the page. “Official and binding under penalty of—”
“Death!” Mari raises her fist like some kind of revolutionary.
“Holy issues, Mari. You seriously need therapy.” Lourdes signs her name and passes the book to our death-mongering sister, waving the pen in her face. “Try not to stab anyone.”
My sisters giggle as Mari pretends to jab us with the pen, but at my turn, I’m deadly serious. My fingers tremble as I sign the page. I still haven’t fulfilled most of their “she who looks upon the book” requirements—never had a crush, never saw a dirty movie, never danced naked under a full moon—but tonight they handed it over anyway. It’s weighty and cold in my lap, and seeing my name there fills me with a new sense of belonging. I’m a part of them now, memorialized in the book, which Celi finally shuts and slides back under her bed with all the shoes.
She’ll give it to me before she leaves for New York. She has to. And I’ll keep it religiously, documenting every broken heart, tiny or significant. And even though I don’t know what it feels like to fall in love, I do know this: When I finally christen the book with the story of my first broken heart, it definitely won’t be from a Vargas.
No matter what happens after tonight, I will never, ever . . .
Five years later, Celi’s once vibrant orange flower had faded to pale yellow, crushed and forgotten like the ancient pages themselves. Remembering it now, beyond the innocence of my twelve-year-old self, I knew that Araceli was utterly devastated that night. The knife and blood and the burning of Johnny’s pictures were props, a temporary sideshow to cheer her up before the long and broken road she’d soon face: canceling the engagement party. Explaining to my parents and her friends why the wedding was off. Sorting through the rest of Johnny’s things, the once-shared dreams that would have to be untangled and rerouted for one instead of two. After that night Celi had spent weeks in bed, hardly eating, never going outside. Mari extended her stay to help care for her, and Mom took time off work to do what she could.
Her sobs woke me at night. They seeped into my dreams, turned them into nightmares. I felt like a voyeur accidentally spying on her private pain.
Even now I couldn’t imagine what it had felt like for her, what it meant to be hurt by the one you loved most. Dylan and I hadn’t been in love. We basically got bored with each other, broke up mutually over lunch. We’d even stayed friends—at least until the BHS picnic. After Dylan, I’d had a few random dates, a few stolen kisses at play parties, but nothing close to Celi and Johnny. Nothing like love. Never.
I ran my hand over the page again, traced the papery flower. Even if they’d passed the book on to me when I turned sixteen, like I’d always wished, it would still look exactly the same. I never would’ve filled up the last pages.
I’d never had a broken heart.
Images of Celi flickered behind my eyes again, all those tears, all that pain etched in her face. But what remained now from that night in her bedroom wasn’t Celi’s pain. It wasn’t the Vargas threats or the smell of Mari’s cigarettes, the blackened photos or crushed flowers or all the spent tissues. It wasn’t our signatures scrawled in this relic of a book, or all the stories of heartbreak it chronicled.
It was the oath itself, the solemn promise that none of us would reopen Celi’s crippling wounds by falling for the brothers of the boy who nearly destroyed her.
As if to remind me, the pinprick scars in the center of my palms ached.
/> Emilio Vargas. Regardless of whether he disappeared after we’d finished the bike and I never saw him again, regardless of whether Araceli ever knew he’d been here . . .
I broke the oath.
The day I walked out of Duchess knowing we’d just hired the last of the Vargas brothers, knowing that he and I would spend most of the summer together, knowing that we might even become friends . . . that’s the day I’d betrayed my family.
Hot guilt surged through my chest, but when I thought of calling it all off, when I imagined tucking the Harley under the tarp and telling Papi it was back to Scrabble and fishing, I saw Papi’s own broken heart bright red on his sleeve. I saw him giving up, succumbing to the demon and letting the memories of Valentina slip into the darkness, swirl into the confusing gray soup where everything else would one day, if the doctors were right, go to die.
And I knew, no matter what happened with my sisters, I’d never call it off.
Never, ever.
Chapter 12
“He takes it black,” I said.
“Too acidic.” Mari sloshed a bunch of milk into Papi’s morning brew. “With all the meds, his stomach is more sensitive.”
How do I not know that?
Mari set the mug on the kitchen table with Papi’s new breakfast staples: lumpy oatmeal, a small bowl of applesauce, a hard-boiled egg, and a Sudoku book. His pills were there too—same ones I’d been giving him, but she had them arranged in a neat little row, smallest to largest.
“Order and repetition are important,” she said when I raised my eyebrows at the spread.
My shoulders tensed, and I had to remind myself that this was Mari’s way—swooping in, upending, reestablishing the rules.
Still, not everything needed to be reestablished. Maybe I messed up about the coffee. Maybe I let Papi cheat too easily at Scrabble, watch a little too much television when he should’ve been puzzling out the crosswords to sharpen his brain. But Mari had to see that I was good for him, that the motorcycle project and our western marathons made him happy.
Didn’t she?
I looked at her hopefully, and Mari touched my shoulder as if she could read my thoughts. “You’re doing a great job, Juju. I’m just trying to help.”
“I know. You are helping.”
Mari tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. “I’m sorry if I came on a little strong last night. I guess . . . I don’t know. Seeing Emilio Vargas all chummy with you and Papi? Talk about Twilight Zone.”
“Yeah, but the motorcycle’s super important to him,” I said. “Ever since I found it, it’s like he’s . . . younger again. Back in Argentina, maybe, like he can remember—”
“I know, Juju.” She smiled and squeezed my shoulder, but the light didn’t reach her eyes, and I waited for her to say something about the book she’d left in my bed last night, or maybe about my sisters—how we’d better cancel things with Emilio before Celi and Lourdes found out.
“Tell Papi breakfast is ready, okay?” Mari nodded toward the living room, where Papi was dozing in front of Good Morning America, and I did as she asked, no objections.
“After breakfast,” Mari said as we ate, “we’ll walk to the river, and then—”
“Papi watches the Western Channel after breakfast,” I said. Only it came out more like pamphwafchanfast because the oatmeal Mari’d dished up was like wet cement.
“He shouldn’t flop on the couch right after he eats.” Mari rested her hand on Papi’s arm. “You need to get in some physical activity every day, okay?”
He shrugged without looking up from the oatmeal, a few blobs of which he’d dribbled on his place mat, probably to avoid eating it.
“After that,” Mari said, “I have some manuscripts to review, so you and Juju can—”
“Work on the Harley?” I said.
Mari leaned over to refill Papi’s orange juice glass. “Tell you what. Let’s get settled into a routine, then we’ll think about how the bike fits in. Fair enough?”
I opened my mouth to argue, but she was being so uncharacteristically reasonable that I couldn’t speak. The coffee, the medications, the Sudoku book . . . Papi liked working on Valentina, but maybe she was right. Maybe we needed more time for exercise and puzzles.
Fishing and board games.
I stared at Papi’s face and wished I could read his thoughts, wished I could follow the demon’s path of destruction straight to its lair. I’d hunt it down, smoke it out, watch it evaporate through his ears. Then Papi would shake it off like a bad dream, stand up from his chair, and clap his hands once. ¡Bueno, queridas! Who’s ready for some fun?
“Mariposa, do you know what my odometer reads?” Papi stabbed his breakfast with a spoon like it was the least edible thing on the planet. “Nineteen thousand four hundred and six point one. All but three hundred and ninety are my miles. I rode through Argentina and Paraguay and Uruguay, nineteen thousand miles of roads and jungles and waterfalls and people. I started when I was about Juju’s age. Did you know that?”
Mari shook her head. Lourdes probably didn’t know the stories either; he’d never talked about his biking days until I’d discovered Valentina. I wondered if Mom even knew half this stuff, these formerly buried memories suddenly unearthed, yanked into the sunlight.
“It’s true.” He dropped his spoon into the bowl. “So I think I’ve earned the right to decide what to do with my afternoon, and today my decision is to work on that Harley, which has been waiting for some attention for, let’s see . . . How old is Lourdes, Juju?”
“Thirty.” Inside I was like, Hells yeah, Papi! But I totally sat on my hands because clapping might’ve been a little over the top, especially since it was Mari’s first full day.
“Thank you, Juju. Thirty years. And another thing, my butterfly.” He pushed his bowl toward Mari. “Is this what they call breakfast in the big city these days? Dios mío, it’s prison food.”
A full, genuine smile slid across Mari’s face, and Papi cracked up at his own joke. Mari hopped out of the chair and rummaged for some half-moon pastries Mom had brought home from the bakery in Willow Brush.
“No use letting these get stale.” She set the bakery box on the table like an olive branch, a do-over on the whole day.
As our oatmeal crusted over, we dug into the medialunas. I was about to grab a second one when Pancake started spazzing with his nose up against the screen door.
Seconds later a low rumble announced Emilio’s approach.
Mari’s eyebrows shot up under her white-blond bangs. “He’s back?”
“We hired him. It’s his job.” I said it all cool and collected, but my nerves stood on end. My guilt over the oath hadn’t disappeared entirely—Mari’s trick with the book last night made sure of that—but a thin fog was creeping in, shadowing the details.
Attention, wayward travelers: You are now entering the twin cities, Moral Ambiguity and Gray Area. Enjoy your stay!
“That’s the only reason he’s here? Right.” Mari waited for him to turn off the bike, and when he reached the kitchen stoop, she pushed her way outside.
“Mornin’.” He tried to peek over her shoulder, but she shifted to block his view. “Jude here?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be working for my father?” Mari said.
“Just wanted to talk to Jude a second.”
“Why?”
Emilio sighed. “I need a favor.”
“Sorry, she’s not here.”
“She coming back today?” he asked.
“She’s never coming back. She’s totally gone.”
“Yeah, all the way to the kitchen table,” I called out. I scarfed down the last pastry and tried to get outside, but Mari wouldn’t budge from the doorway.
“We need to clarify the terms of your employment,” she told Emilio. “You think you can come in here with your . . . your dimples and . . . that bandanna and that bad attitude? I got news for you, Vargas.” She crowded into his space, poking him in the chest with every syllable. “My bab
y sister was not put on this earth to do you any favors. She’s off-limits for favors. My whole family is off-limits. In a hundred years I still wouldn’t let our great-grandkids play with yours in the sandbox, so why don’t you turn around and march yourself into the barn and stop worrying about my sister.”
Jeez. If Mari wasn’t being such a melodramatic asshole, I would’ve been highly entertained. Maybe even impressed. But the fact remained. . . .
“Mari, you’re being a—”
“Go back inside, Juju. I’ll handle this.”
“But—”
“Emilio!” Papi appeared behind me, his face bright and warm, shirt dotted with crumbs. “Thank God you’re here. These women are driving me crazy.” Papi grabbed his favorite flannel from the back of his kitchen chair and followed Emilio out to the barn. Pancake stumbled out the doggy door after them, DOOR FOR PANCAKE ONLY—DO NOT USE.
Clearly, Papi wanted some male-bonding time with Emilio, so I grabbed my tackle box and pole and caught up with Pancake to go scare away some fish. He was really good at it—stuck his snout in the water like he could sniff them out, and then he’d come up sneezing and shaking like, Blasted! Dogs can’t breathe underwater—how could I forget? We don’t have gills and we can’t . . . Hey, what’s this? Water? Oh boy oh boy I wonder if I can sniff out fish?
I was pretty sure the fish saw us coming a mile away.
When we were both sufficiently wet and bored, I gathered up the gear and hiked back to the barn. Pancake trotted in first, straight to Papi with a big shake. I brought this river back for you! Do you like it? Do you? Do you? Do you?
I went to check on the bike. When Emilio saw me, he held out what looked like a balled-up paper bag.
“Hornets’ nest,” he said. “It was in the tailpipe.”
I backed away, but he laughed and stuck it inside his shirt like a single lopsided boob. A sliver of tan skin peeked out above his jeans, and my eyes followed it across that long, rough scar on his abdomen.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Ain’t any hornets left.”