The next day, Iliana stopped by my house so we could walk to the park together. Like me, she was skinny and had brown eyes, but Iliana wore gobs of mascara, so sometimes her eyelashes looked like spider legs. Our hairstyles were different, too. I had long brown hair, usually in a ponytail, while Iliana had short hair with lots of curls.
“OMG,” she said (she loved to speak text sometimes), “my brothers’ friends are so cute.”
“Your brothers are cute,” I said.
“To you, maybe. To me, they’re a pain. They are so protective. I have to tell them everywhere I’m going to be and when I’ll be back and they’ll probably still check up on me. They’re stricter than my parents. And they torture me!”
“How?” As far as I could tell, they were the nicest brothers in the world. At least she didn’t have to live with a walking encyclopedia.
“First, they invite their friends over to play video games. Did I mention how cute their friends are?” She didn’t let me answer. She just kept going. “Then, they shut me out. Literally. They close the door to their bedroom and tell me to stay out. So there I am standing with my ear to the door, just listening to all the video game sounds and to these really cute guys cheer after shooting some monster or who knows what, and then…”
I didn’t mean to tune out. Normally, I loved hearing about Iliana’s brothers, but how could I get excited about video games and cute boys when Mom was scheduled for surgery next week?
Suddenly, Iliana yanked me off the sidewalk, seconds before a skateboarder whizzed by.
“What planet are you on?” she said. “Didn’t you hear the skateboard? Didn’t you hear Chad call ‘Sidewalk!’ right before he almost bumped into you?” She held up two fingers to show me how close he’d been. “You have to pay attention because knocking a cute guy off his skateboard is not the best way to make a first impression, even if it is a close encounter of the fourth kind.”
“Close encounter” is how we describe our relationships with boys. We got the idea after Iliana did a report on space aliens and learned that scientists call UFO sightings “close encounters.” They even have different categories depending on whether you saw a vague shape in the sky or an actual life-form. Since boys seem as strange as aliens, Iliana and I decided to invent our own categories:
I still hadn’t experienced a close encounter of the first kind with Chad, which was disappointing because, with his blond hair and perfect tan, he topped my Boyfriend Wish List, along with Forest Montoya, Alejandro Guzmán, Lou Hikaru, Jamal Grey, Derek Smith, and Joe Leal.
I shrugged. “Chad’s never going to notice me,” I said. “I’m like that crack in the sidewalk that he jumps to avoid. I’ll have to become a skateboard ramp or a pair of Vans before he notices me.”
Iliana punched my shoulder. “Stop it, will you? Of course he’s going to notice you. You’ve got nice, silky hair and a cute figure.”
I had to disagree. “A lamppost has more curves,” I said, pointing to one.
She laughed. “Only because of the way you’re dressed. What’s with the baggy, uninspired outfit? Even your T-shirt seems depressed.”
I glanced at it, a faded brown V-neck. Usually, I wore T-shirts with punch lines or funny cartoons, but I couldn’t laugh when Mom was sick. I shouldn’t be going to the park, either. I should have stayed home and helped her. I offered, but she got mad just like the night before. She said, “Don’t start acting like your dad by treating me like an invalid,” and she ran me out of the house, even gave me extra money.
“You’re not listening to a word I say,” Iliana complained. And she was right. I had no idea she’d been talking.
“I got some really bad news,” I explained, immediately regretting it. Sometimes, I didn’t want friend-to-friend counseling sessions. They made me feel… weak. I could take care of myself, thank you.
“What happened?” Iliana wanted to know.
I shrugged. “Nothing. It’s no big deal. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
We turned a corner and the park came into view. I sped up, nearly jogging.
“Wait!” Iliana reached for my arm but missed. “Don’t you want to talk?”
“Sure,” I called back. “Let’s talk about boys.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she said.
I pretended not to hear. “Hey, look. There’s Patty waving us over.”
We headed toward a picnic table with the Robins, our special group of friends. We have five members: me, Iliana, Patty, Shawntae, and GumWad, whose real name is Roberto. He had a purple tongue today because of his grape bubblegum. He really grossed me out sometimes. And to think that without the gum, he could be a decent-looking guy. He wasn’t athletic and he didn’t wear anything more interesting than T-shirts with sports logos and jeans. But he had a cuddly type of body like a teddy bear and dimples when he smiled. Too bad the dimples were on either side of a rainbow-colored mouth.
The Robins were my best friends, though we didn’t choose one another—not at first. Our second-grade teacher put us together. Her classroom had four big tables, and in the center of each was a nest with a stuffed bird—one with a cardinal, another with a mockingbird, and another with a blue jay. Our table had a robin. When you squeezed its belly, it sang—cheerily cheer-up cheer-up. We’d have contests. Whoever finished an assignment first or made the highest grade got to squeeze the bird’s belly. It seems silly now, but in second grade, squeezing the bird was a big deal.
As we approached the table, Iliana and I gave our friends a big Texas “Hi, y’all.”
“Hey,” they replied, hardly missing a beat in their conversation about some movie. This time, I tried my best to pay attention, especially since Iliana had already forgotten about my bad news. After a while, though, I started to feel really hot. In San Antonio, the temperature regularly hits the nineties, and the humidity made it feel like a hundred degrees. I grabbed a rubber band from my pocket and gathered my hair for a ponytail.
“You look hot,” GumWad announced.
“Ooh, Erica,” Shawntae teased. “Roberto thinks you’re hot.” She made a sizzling sound.
“That’s not what I meant,” GumWad said. “She’s not sexy or anything… just hot, like overheated, like there’s sweat running down the back of her neck.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said. “You sure know how to flatter a girl.”
“I was just noticing you were hot. I wasn’t trying to flatter you.”
“Obviously,” I said.
Shawntae punched me. “Leave the poor guy alone.”
“You started it, Shawntae, with all those sizzling sounds you made.”
“Yeah,” GumWad said, taking my side. “You started it. Erica’s not the only one who’s sweaty. We all are. Look.” He lifted his arms to show us round, damp splotches on the underarm parts of his T-shirt.
Patty pinched her nose. “Quit giving the skunks competition.”
“Do I smell that bad?” GumWad said, full of dismay.
Patty, Shawntae, and I nodded, but Iliana said, “Don’t listen to them. They’re picking on you because they don’t have anything better to do.”
“I can think of something better,” Patty said. “Let’s go see who’s skateboarding.”
Her suggestion reminded Iliana about our close encounter with Chad earlier, and as we walked toward the ramps, she told the group about it. We reached the skateboarding park and sat on some bleachers just as she finished her story. Then we scanned the cement hills before us. “There’s Alejandro,” Iliana said, pointing.
In fact, several cute guys from school were showing off grinds, kickflips, and ollies. We had fun watching them, giggling when they stumbled or fell and sighing when they took off their shirts. At one point, Forest stopped by. He said, “Hey, girls,” and we said “Hey” back. Then he turned to GumWad. “Where’s your board?”
“Left it at home.”
“You should bring it next time.”
“Sure thing.”
When Forest skated off, Patty hit GumWad’s shoulder and said, “You don’t have a skateboard.”
He shrugged.
“So why’d you lie?”
He shrugged again and glanced at me. He seemed embarrassed to be caught in a lie, but I could totally understand.
“I know why,” I said. “It’s a lot of trouble saying ‘I don’t have a skateboard’ to a guy who thinks skateboarding is life. Then you have to explain why when there isn’t a reason. You have nothing against skateboards. They just don’t interest you. But try telling them that. They’ll think you’re weird, which can cause all kinds of awkwardness. So it’s best to pretend, get them off your case.”
“Yeah,” GumWad said as grateful as someone who had just been rescued from an overturned ship.
Just then, we heard bells from the paleta man, a guy who hauled an ice chest between the back wheels of a three-wheel bike. He stored paletas in there, frozen fruit bars. They cost one dollar each.
“You want one?” GumWad asked me, but before I could answer, the other Robins were handing him money.
“Thanks for offering,” Iliana said. “You are so sweet,” she cooed.
Shawntae jumped in. “Yeah, you’re as sweet as… as sweet as…” She snapped her fingers, my cue to finish the sentence.
“As sweet as a cookie dough pizza topped with chocolate chips, marshmallows, and caramel.”
Everyone smacked their lips as they imagined it, except Patty. She rolled her eyes and said, “You’d have to run ten marathons to work off all those calories.”
Patty looked like the sweetest girl on the planet with her freckles and blue eyes, but if she won a million dollars, she’d focus on the extra taxes instead of the extra fun she could have.
“Well, I guess I could get some for all of us,” GumWad said, taking the not-so-subtle hint. We told him which flavors to buy, and he took off. The skateboarders and kids from the playground and pool had already formed a long line in front of the bicycle. That paleta man knew exactly when to show up.
While GumWad waited in the line, Shawntae, Iliana, and Patty went on and on about boys, which was usually my favorite topic, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Mom. How could she be sick? She seemed perfectly normal, full of energy. I couldn’t imagine cancer eating away part of her body, especially when she hadn’t complained about pain. Maybe it didn’t hurt till it was too late. Maybe cancer was like a termite, silent and invisible until you noticed the walls falling down.
“Erica!” Iliana said. “This is the second time you totally ignored me.”
“I ignored you?”
Patty explained, “You didn’t answer when Iliana asked who was cuter, Alejandro or Chad. You were looking right at them, but your mind was somewhere else.”
Just then, GumWad returned and passed out the paletas. I had ordered banana, but the other girls got strawberry, while GumWad got mango.
“Fess up,” Iliana said. “Time to tell us about your bad news.”
“What bad news?” Shawntae wanted to know.
“It’s private,” I said.
The Robins stared at me, silently eating their fruit bars and waiting. If I didn’t tell, they’d spend the whole day pestering me.
“Okay,” I said. “If you really have to know.” I paused, secretly hoping they’d let it go but knowing they wouldn’t. Taking a deep breath, I said, “My mom has breast cancer.”
If I was scared about cancer before, I was more scared now, because all of them stopped eating, stopped breathing, it seemed. They were as frozen as the paletas we held in our hands, but like the paletas, their initial shock was quickly melting away. “When did you find out?” they asked, and “How serious is it?” and “Is she in the hospital?” and “Is she… is she… is she going to die?”
“I don’t know!” I said, throwing my paleta to the ground. “This is why I didn’t want to tell you guys. I knew you’d have a million questions that I can’t answer.” I got a lump in my throat, the one that meant tears were on their way, so I swallowed hard and breathed deeply. I was not going to cry. Sure, these were my friends, but that didn’t mean I should act like a baby around them. “All I know for sure,” I said, more calmly, “is that my mom’s going to have a mastectomy.”
“What’s that?” GumWad asked.
“It’s an operation,” Patty said. “They cut off your breast.”
Iliana, Shawntae, and I winced and crossed our arms over our chests as we imagined the pain. GumWad winced and crossed his arms, too.
Then he said, “My uncle had an operation last year. He had a stone in his gallbladder.”
“How did he get a stone in there?” Shawntae asked.
“I don’t know. He didn’t swallow it, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s something his body made.” He blew and popped a bubble before going on. I couldn’t believe he was chewing gum while eating a paleta. “They took out his gallbladder,” he went on, “and then they put the stone in a little jar with some formaldehyde and gave it to him—like a souvenir. He keeps it by his computer and he named it Bob.”
“That is so weird,” Shawntae said.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s like having a pet rock.”
“Yeah!” GumWad smacked a little more quickly. “You’re the first person to get it!”
Maybe I understood pet rocks because of the Chia Pet zoo in my kitchen.
“Is your uncle okay now?” Iliana asked.
GumWad nodded.
“See?” she said to me, putting her hand on my shoulder. “Lots of people have surgery, and they come out okay. I’m sure that’s how it’ll be for your mom.”
“But it makes you wonder,” Patty said. “What do they do with the breast after the operation?”
“Patty!” Shawntae punched her. “That’s so rude!”
I shivered, suddenly feeling cold even though it was ninety-plus degrees. The image of Mom’s breast displayed in a jar on someone’s desk was freaking me out. But Patty had asked a good question: When ladies had mastectomies or when soldiers had arms or legs cut off, where did the body parts go? Were they sent to some crazy scientist’s lab? Or were they thrown away, like garbage? And was that what we became when a part of us died or when our whole body died? I looked at the fruit bar I had thrown on the ground, how quickly it was melting, how the banana had been plucked from its tree.
We sat silently for a while. The Robins knew my mom and were probably feeling worried like me. Soon the skateboarders returned, and I focused on the sounds of their wheels, how they rolled and thudded after jumps.
Finally, Shawntae leaned forward and said, “You’re not going to believe this, but…”
“Not another dream!” I moaned, because this was the one thing that bugged me about Shawntae.
“I can’t help it,” she said. “I have psychic powers. You guys are just jealous because you can’t predict the future like me.”
“It’s not a prediction,” Iliana explained, “when you tell us your dreams after the fact.”
“This isn’t after the fact. I had the dream last week.”
We knew she’d tell us about it, so we slumped in our seats and sighed. Only GumWad seemed interested.
“So what did you dream?” he wanted to know.
Shawntae straightened her shirt and smoothed back her hair like an anchorwoman with a news flash. “I saw Erica’s mom wearing a bikini, but she had a thermometer in her mouth. Who wears a bikini and sticks a thermometer in her mouth? So I thought she was at the beach and the thermometer was a symbol of how hot it was. But now I get it. The thermometer meant she was sick. Like when the nurse takes your temperature.”
“You didn’t have that dream,” I said. “You’re just repeating stuff from our conversation. That’s what you do. You take a few clues, and you make something up.”
“I did have that dream. Last week.”
“Why didn’t you tell me then? This is serious, Shawntae. My mom has cancer. What’s the point of seeing the future if you can’t warn your friends?”
“That’s not how psychic powers work.”
I stood up. “How many times do we have to tell you? You do not have psychic powers!”
I stomped away, heading to my house, but Iliana caught up to me. “Don’t be mad,” she said. “We’re just trying to help.”
“Then tell me why my mom’s sick.” When she didn’t answer, I repeated myself. “Why is she sick, Iliana?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s right. Nobody does,” I said, realizing that I wasn’t angry about Shawntae’s dream. I wasn’t angry with my friends at all. What bugged me, what really bugged me, was that no one knew the answer to the most important question: Why did cancer choose my mom? After all, cancer had always been the big, scary end to bad habits. If you smoked, you got lung cancer and a hole in your throat. If you drank beer, you got liver cancer and yellow eyes. If you went to the pool without sunscreen, you got skin cancer and a dark mole creeping over your body. But what bad habit made breast cancer?
As far as I knew, Mom lived right. Several times a week, she pushed aside furniture and did a step aerobics tape. She drank eight glasses of water each day, and when she felt like coffee, she drank the decaffeinated kind. She didn’t eat doughnuts or chocolate bars or syrupy pancakes. She never sped past the yellow lights or told lies or cheated or cursed or stole.
And every night—every single night—after saying “sweet dreams” to Carmen and me and singing lullabies to Jimmy, she made the sign of the cross, clasped her hands, and prayed.