Original Fiction 3: Yellowed Musty Pages
Set in the same San Antonio 'verse as Pins and High and Left.
Elisabeth Maria Elena Black Dog del Manzano Lopez has a deep, dark secret.
She loves history.
It's cool to be an athlete (she is) and to like music (she does). It's cool to follow fashion (she doesn't care, and her mother knows how to dress so she just does what her mom tells her) and to act all disaffected and like the world hates you and stuff (which is stupid). It's cool to fuss over hair (also stupid, but she can fake it) and pretend that the boys in the class are smarter than her (which is really stupid, and also wrong).
Elisabeth draws the line at acting stupid because people expect her to. She has standards.
She's also a little lazy, which is okay, since there are only so many hours in the day. If playing up being a defender and listening to Carly Garza gives her enough street cred to avoid the Nerd Zone, that's less time she spends dealing with idiots and more time she can spend tracing the past that makes her present.
See, it's fabulous. Her mother's father and his family have been in the USA since the Conquistadors. Her mother's mother's family has been in the area even longer than that, and while Elisabeth doesn't see herself ever going to live on the rez permanently, it's exciting to know that she gets to spend this coming summer with the Apache relatives. They have a fish farm up in the mountains of Arizona where her cousin Anita works, and Anita says she can have a job there. How many of the people she pretends to care about hair with to get them to ignore her get to go work on a fish farm? Most of them, if they're old enough, will spend their summers working at Taco Cabana or Pizza Hut.
And that's just her mother's family. On her father's side, they're Cuban. Her grandparents came over in a boat in the early 1970s when her grandmother was six months pregnant with her dad. The US wasn't the paradise they expected, in no small part because, well, black people get treated bad in Florida, even Cuban black people, maybe especially Cuban black people, which is how her father wound up in the Air Force which took him to Davis AFB which is where he met her mother who was working a summer job out there trying to pay her way through university. Her grandmother is still alive and tells her every chance she gets about Cuba before and after the revolution...actually, she's the only person who knows how much Elisabeth loves history, and she's cool, Mami never breathes a word of it to anybody.
When Elisabeth goes to college, she is totally going to major in history.
Elisabeth has been so good at keeping her secret from everybody but her grandmother that she forgets just how smart Mia is. Mia doesn't miss a single living loving thing. Mia's always the one who knows who is dating who, and who is fighting with who, and who needs a bit of help in math class, and who is having trouble at home. Elisabeth knows for a fact that Mia is the one who told the principal that José Garza's dad was the reason José was always late for school and wore long pants to hide the burn marks on his legs, and that Mia pieced that together after watching him in geometry class and seeing him twice at church and once after a football game. She isn't sure if José knows or not. She's not sure if he would want to know, or if it would break what was left of his broken heart.
Anyway, Mia is super-smart, and they're at Elisabeth's house getting ready for the quinceaňera party and that's when Elisabeth sees Mia looking at her bookshelf. There's a small notebook in the corner that says “family,” and that's what Mia is looking at.
Elisabeth cringes. Normally there's a scarf covering the bookshelf, but not today. Aside from being super-smart, Mia is one of the cool people and they're not supposed to like things like history. Mia doesn't notice that Elisabeth sees, she's busy braiding her hair with one half of her brain and looking through the rest of Elisabeth's books with the other.
Elisabeth decides it's time to go help Lacey into her dress. She knows Lacey from the base school at Hickam Air Base in Hawaii, back when they were both nine years old, and Lacey lives in San Antonio now and her parents are retired now too. Lacey's mom flew jets and her dad was the stay at home dad who cooked the best steak ever. Lacey's also one of the cool ones. It's like a daisy chain of girls getting dressed: Ynez is giving advice to Adie, who is wearing a sort-of-grownup dress for the first time. She is so sweet and awkward with her braces and her big eyes and hair that just won't quite hold still and her excitement. Lacey is still in her bra and panties and stockings, trying to fasten Ynez' necklace.
Elisabeth fetches Lacey's dress and when Lacey finishes with Ynez, helps her into it. All of her court are dressed in deep-ocean blue, and it's a tossup as to whether Lacey or Ynez look the best. Lacey has red hair that shines against the blue and Ynez, well, the special dress the dressmaker gave her just rocks. Mia, she notices, has moved away from the bookshelf and is fixing Adie's hair. That's okay, she's not looking into Elisabeth's most private secret anymore. Neither of them say anything.
The quinceaňera is great. They even have a horse and carriage. Two of them, actually. The boys ride in one and laugh every time one of the horses poop. The girls ride in the other, pulled by a white horse who eats peppermints and counts to five. The driver is really cool, with razored blue hair and lots of piercings and her horse likes to stand with her head against her shoulder, ears up and it was obvious they love each other. The horses take them to the River Walk and they all ride a private boat around the river, and eat dinner somewhere, and finally go to an ice skating rink way up in the north end of town. Elisabeth is exhausted and so are her court and they all fall asleep in her dad's van on the way home.
Three days later, they are all at practice and the weather stinks. It's cold, actually honest-to-goodness cold, which Elisabeth hates. It's also windy. The chill runs through her clothes into her bones, and her skin howls in protest. She isn't the only one. Maddie's lips are blue and poor little Jeannie looks like a popsicle. The exercises they do are just barely enough to keep Elisabeth's blood moving. Mia lets more balls past the goal than normal. It's just awful.
Elisabeth is so relieved when her father comes to pick her up.
“Good practice?” he asks.
“Whatever,” Elisabeth shoots back. It's one thing to pretend that life hates you and everything sucks when it doesn't. It's quite another to flounce around about life hating you when it's eighteen thousand degrees below zero outside and your nose is red and dripping with snot. And when your dad is being stupid.
At home, Elisabeth opens her bag to put her cleats back inside, and sees a small thing that didn't used to be there. She pulls it out. It feels like a book, and has no note or label. It's wrapped in the Sunday comic pages.
Only Mia does that.
Elisabeth tears off the paper. Inside is a book, like she guessed. It's an old book, a musty yellow-paged smelly old book with red fabric on the outside and gold leaf on the pages, titled, “The Great Galveston Disaster.” Elisabeth's hands quiver and she presses it to her chest, to take to her room away from the prying eyes of her family.
With the door securely closed and ceiling light off and just her little desk lamp for light, Elisabeth launches herself onto her bed and opens the book. She's so excited she can barely think. It was published in 1901-first-hand accounts, direct observations-and there are even image plates.
And then she finds the card. It's tucked away at the back of the book, in a purple envelope that Mia has spritzed with some of her perfume. The card itself has a grinning purple cat wearing sunglasses that kind of looks like Elisabeth....Mia must have drawn it herself...and inside, it says,
Feliz 15 anos
Why didn't you say so?
Love, Mia
XOXOXO
Elisabeth smiles-okay, grins like an idiot-and tucks the card back into the book. Her mother will make her come down for supper soon but Elisabeth wants to read as much as she can before then.
Elisabeth Maria Elena Black Dog del Manzano Lopez has a deep, dark secret.
She loves history.
It's cool to be an athlete (she is) and to like music (she does). It's cool to follow fashion (she doesn't care, and her mother knows how to dress so she just does what her mom tells her) and to act all disaffected and like the world hates you and stuff (which is stupid). It's cool to fuss over hair (also stupid, but she can fake it) and pretend that the boys in the class are smarter than her (which is really stupid, and also wrong).
Elisabeth draws the line at acting stupid because people expect her to. She has standards.
She's also a little lazy, which is okay, since there are only so many hours in the day. If playing up being a defender and listening to Carly Garza gives her enough street cred to avoid the Nerd Zone, that's less time she spends dealing with idiots and more time she can spend tracing the past that makes her present.
See, it's fabulous. Her mother's father and his family have been in the USA since the Conquistadors. Her mother's mother's family has been in the area even longer than that, and while Elisabeth doesn't see herself ever going to live on the rez permanently, it's exciting to know that she gets to spend this coming summer with the Apache relatives. They have a fish farm up in the mountains of Arizona where her cousin Anita works, and Anita says she can have a job there. How many of the people she pretends to care about hair with to get them to ignore her get to go work on a fish farm? Most of them, if they're old enough, will spend their summers working at Taco Cabana or Pizza Hut.
And that's just her mother's family. On her father's side, they're Cuban. Her grandparents came over in a boat in the early 1970s when her grandmother was six months pregnant with her dad. The US wasn't the paradise they expected, in no small part because, well, black people get treated bad in Florida, even Cuban black people, maybe especially Cuban black people, which is how her father wound up in the Air Force which took him to Davis AFB which is where he met her mother who was working a summer job out there trying to pay her way through university. Her grandmother is still alive and tells her every chance she gets about Cuba before and after the revolution...actually, she's the only person who knows how much Elisabeth loves history, and she's cool, Mami never breathes a word of it to anybody.
When Elisabeth goes to college, she is totally going to major in history.
Elisabeth has been so good at keeping her secret from everybody but her grandmother that she forgets just how smart Mia is. Mia doesn't miss a single living loving thing. Mia's always the one who knows who is dating who, and who is fighting with who, and who needs a bit of help in math class, and who is having trouble at home. Elisabeth knows for a fact that Mia is the one who told the principal that José Garza's dad was the reason José was always late for school and wore long pants to hide the burn marks on his legs, and that Mia pieced that together after watching him in geometry class and seeing him twice at church and once after a football game. She isn't sure if José knows or not. She's not sure if he would want to know, or if it would break what was left of his broken heart.
Anyway, Mia is super-smart, and they're at Elisabeth's house getting ready for the quinceaňera party and that's when Elisabeth sees Mia looking at her bookshelf. There's a small notebook in the corner that says “family,” and that's what Mia is looking at.
Elisabeth cringes. Normally there's a scarf covering the bookshelf, but not today. Aside from being super-smart, Mia is one of the cool people and they're not supposed to like things like history. Mia doesn't notice that Elisabeth sees, she's busy braiding her hair with one half of her brain and looking through the rest of Elisabeth's books with the other.
Elisabeth decides it's time to go help Lacey into her dress. She knows Lacey from the base school at Hickam Air Base in Hawaii, back when they were both nine years old, and Lacey lives in San Antonio now and her parents are retired now too. Lacey's mom flew jets and her dad was the stay at home dad who cooked the best steak ever. Lacey's also one of the cool ones. It's like a daisy chain of girls getting dressed: Ynez is giving advice to Adie, who is wearing a sort-of-grownup dress for the first time. She is so sweet and awkward with her braces and her big eyes and hair that just won't quite hold still and her excitement. Lacey is still in her bra and panties and stockings, trying to fasten Ynez' necklace.
Elisabeth fetches Lacey's dress and when Lacey finishes with Ynez, helps her into it. All of her court are dressed in deep-ocean blue, and it's a tossup as to whether Lacey or Ynez look the best. Lacey has red hair that shines against the blue and Ynez, well, the special dress the dressmaker gave her just rocks. Mia, she notices, has moved away from the bookshelf and is fixing Adie's hair. That's okay, she's not looking into Elisabeth's most private secret anymore. Neither of them say anything.
The quinceaňera is great. They even have a horse and carriage. Two of them, actually. The boys ride in one and laugh every time one of the horses poop. The girls ride in the other, pulled by a white horse who eats peppermints and counts to five. The driver is really cool, with razored blue hair and lots of piercings and her horse likes to stand with her head against her shoulder, ears up and it was obvious they love each other. The horses take them to the River Walk and they all ride a private boat around the river, and eat dinner somewhere, and finally go to an ice skating rink way up in the north end of town. Elisabeth is exhausted and so are her court and they all fall asleep in her dad's van on the way home.
Three days later, they are all at practice and the weather stinks. It's cold, actually honest-to-goodness cold, which Elisabeth hates. It's also windy. The chill runs through her clothes into her bones, and her skin howls in protest. She isn't the only one. Maddie's lips are blue and poor little Jeannie looks like a popsicle. The exercises they do are just barely enough to keep Elisabeth's blood moving. Mia lets more balls past the goal than normal. It's just awful.
Elisabeth is so relieved when her father comes to pick her up.
“Good practice?” he asks.
“Whatever,” Elisabeth shoots back. It's one thing to pretend that life hates you and everything sucks when it doesn't. It's quite another to flounce around about life hating you when it's eighteen thousand degrees below zero outside and your nose is red and dripping with snot. And when your dad is being stupid.
At home, Elisabeth opens her bag to put her cleats back inside, and sees a small thing that didn't used to be there. She pulls it out. It feels like a book, and has no note or label. It's wrapped in the Sunday comic pages.
Only Mia does that.
Elisabeth tears off the paper. Inside is a book, like she guessed. It's an old book, a musty yellow-paged smelly old book with red fabric on the outside and gold leaf on the pages, titled, “The Great Galveston Disaster.” Elisabeth's hands quiver and she presses it to her chest, to take to her room away from the prying eyes of her family.
With the door securely closed and ceiling light off and just her little desk lamp for light, Elisabeth launches herself onto her bed and opens the book. She's so excited she can barely think. It was published in 1901-first-hand accounts, direct observations-and there are even image plates.
And then she finds the card. It's tucked away at the back of the book, in a purple envelope that Mia has spritzed with some of her perfume. The card itself has a grinning purple cat wearing sunglasses that kind of looks like Elisabeth....Mia must have drawn it herself...and inside, it says,
Feliz 15 anos
Why didn't you say so?
Love, Mia
XOXOXO
Elisabeth smiles-okay, grins like an idiot-and tucks the card back into the book. Her mother will make her come down for supper soon but Elisabeth wants to read as much as she can before then.