Chapter 41
The next day, Lilly trudged up the stairs with her empty laundry basket in hand and a suspicious grin on her face.Vince was sitting on his usual stool watching Spanish soap operas and I was dusting the hotel’s front desk, for the fifth time that morning.
“Hey, Mariana, I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” Lilly said, as she opened a closet door and tossed her basket inside. “You know my friend Javier? Well, he’s starting at UPR in a couple weeks and he doesn’t know much about computers. He’s all freaked out that he’s gonna look like an idiot. I was wondering if you could show him some stuff.”
“Why me?” I asked, my nose crinkled.
“Well, you have your own laptop and you’re pretty good with the Internet . . .”
“Well, what does he need to know? I’m pretty good with computers,” Vince offered from across the room.
“He just wants to learn some Internet and e-mail stuff. Pretty basic, that’s why I thought Mariana could help him.”
“I guess. When?”
“Today, at lunch,” Lilly said quickly.
“Where, here?”
“No, I told him you’d meet him at the Internet café around one.”
“Gee, thanks for asking me first,” I mumbled.
“Well, it’s not like I thought you’d say no.”
“Is it because I’m that predictable? Or because I’m a loser with nothing else to do because the one guy who liked me dropped off the face of the earth?”
Vince groaned. “Not him again! How could you possibly have more to say on this topic?”
“Really, this Alex thing has gotten worse than your back in Spring Mills stories from the beginning of the summer,” Lilly mocked.
“I know, sorry. I just thought he liked me.” I tossed my hands in the air.
“I’m sure he did. But you’re still having fun without him, right?”
“Oh, yeah. Definitely.” I nodded.
But the truth was, it was kind of hard to have fun when I was spending every second thinking about what he could possibly be doing at that exact moment. Maybe he had gotten in some horrible accident and was unconscious in a hospital somewhere, unable to contact me. Or maybe he went on a sudden trip with his family and didn’t have time to tell me before he left. Or maybe he was kissing some other tourist he met at a different Quinceañera.
“But don’t you think it’s weird he hasn’t called you?” I suggested, peering at Lilly. “It’s one thing for him to avoid me, but you’re his friend. Wouldn’t he still want to see you?”
“Alex and I never saw each other every day.We only hung out that much because of you guys,” she said.
I sighed. I knew I had to accept that there would probably be no explanation for his sudden lack of interest and that I would probably leave for the States having no idea why he stopped wanting to see me. But knowing that didn’t make it any easier.
Javier was rather computer illiterate. I sat in the Internet café teaching him how to change the settings on his e-mail messages. He wanted to use my laptop, because he had never used one before, despite the fact that it was in English and the desktops at the café were in Spanish. This only made my tutorial more difficult.
“You go to ‘Edit,’ then ‘Preferences,’ ” I explained, showing him commands with my index finger. “Then click on the tab ‘Messaging.’ ”
Javier followed my instructions. Every once in a while he’d look at me and smile, proud to have finally understood what I had been trying to explain to him for several minutes. He was a nice guy, but even with our limited communication skills, I got the impression that he wasn’t very bright. And he smelled a little funny. I had never seen him smoke, but he reeked of cigarettes, and his breath had a weird kosher pickle aroma. I held my breath when he spoke directly facing me.
I glanced at my watch. It was almost two o’clock. We had been at this for an hour. I hadn’t designated a time when we were going to wrap it up, but I was thinking that time was rapidly approaching. Any more of this and I would start counting the freckles on my arms.
“Ya know, you really shouldn’t pick a cursive font for your e-mails,” I explained when I saw the messy, bolded, swoopy text message he had composed. “It’s kinda annoying to the people reading your messages. Why don’t you change it to something standard, like Times or Arial? You remember how to change the font, right?”
He blinked at me like I had just suggested he solve a logarithmic equation off the top of his head.
I reached my hand out and rested it on top of his. I moved my finger slowly on the laptop’s mouse pad to show him where the fonts were on the toolbar. But before I finished scrolling through the drop-down menu, something near the café’s front window caught my eye. I swiveled my head and saw a glimpse of a guy standing outside on the sidewalk. As soon as he met my glance, he quickly turned and sped away. It was Alex.
“Holy crap!” I yelled, jumping to my feet.
I ran out of the café without saying another word to Javier, pushing open the heavy glass door and darting down the sidewalk. Unlike most cities I’d been to, Utuado didn’t have a lot of foot traffic. I didn’t have much trouble spotting Alex.
“Alex! Alex!” I yelled, charging after him.
He kept moving.
“Alex, stop! I want to talk to you!”
He paused but didn’t turn around. It took only seconds for me to close the gap between us. I stopped in the shade of a palm tree.
“Alex, why’d you run away?” I puffed, catching my breath.
He turned around slowly.
“You were busy . . . with Javier,” he stated curtly.
“I know, I’m helping him learn some computer stuff.”
“Is that all?” he asked, his dark eyes squinted like tiny slits.
“Yeah, what’d you think?”
“I don’t know,” he mumbled.
“Alex, where have you been this past week? Why haven’t you stopped by?”
I thought for a moment that I should be more subtle, beat around the bush until I quietly figured out why he was ignoring me—be more like a regular girl. But I didn’t have much time left on this island and I had zero experience playing “games” with boys. I wanted to know the truth, and frankly, it just seemed silly not to ask.
“Where have I been? What are you talking about?”
“Alex, you came to this big family dinner then, poof, you disappear. What happened?”
“What happened was you not wanting to see me anymore!” He shook his head at me like I was an escaped mental patient still wearing the straightjacket.
“What? Why would you think that?”
He paused and examined my face for several moments. His head jolted back. “You really don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
“That Lilly called me the morning after the dinner and told me you got freaked out by how the family reacted to us. That you thought we were going ‘too fast.’ ” He sneered slightly. “She said you asked her to call me to tell me to back off. That you came to Puerto Rico to have fun, not to get wrapped up in some serious relationship.”
My mouth fell toward the gray cement sidewalk about as quickly as my stomach did. I could hear the words he was saying, but my brain couldn’t conjure up a single rational thought. How could I respond to that?
Alex stared at me.
“You never told her to say any of that stuff, did you?” he asked, raising his hand to his dark hair.
I shook my head no, slowly dusting the cobwebs off my brain.
“¡Ay Dios mío!”
“Oh. My. God,” I stuttered in response.
We stared at each other for several seconds, not saying anything.
“Alex, I thought you lost interest in me. I couldn’t figure out why you stopped coming by. I thought it was something I did—”
He quickly leaned in and kissed me, cutting me off mid-sentence. I tried to kiss him back but my mind was still dizzy.
“I never lost interest. I thought I was pressuring you. I wanted to give you space,” he whispered when he pulled away.
“Wait, then why did you come by the Internet café? Or was that just a coincidence?”
Alex took a deep breath and slowly sighed. I had never seen him angry before, but I was guessing from the heat of his breath and the look in his eyes that he was struggling to contain his emotions.
“I stopped by the hotel. I wanted to see you. It had been a while, so I thought it would be okay. But I ran into Lilly. She said you were at the café with Javier. And that I shouldn’t go there, that I should just let you guys be together,” he snipped through gritted teeth.
I sighed and shook my head. I couldn’t look him in the eye. I felt like such an idiot. I’d trusted Lilly completely, and this wasn’t a one-time lapse in judgment on her part. It was an ongoing deliberate plot. She had set me up as recently as this morning.
“I can’t believe I listened to her,” he mumbled.
“I can’t believe she lied.”