CHAPTER 13

EXPECTING DAD TO BE IN THE KITCHEN OR IN HIS LITTLE recording studio, I unlock the front door and tiptoe upstairs to my room. On the way, I listen for his music and sniff for the aroma of dinner. Nothing. I go into my room and bounce a few times on the bed before turning on the computer, making enough of a mess that he’ll think I was in my room all along.

My stomach rumbles. All the bike riding and scary stuff have made me hungry. After finishing a page of social studies homework and watching the sunset from my window, I go downstairs.

The kitchen counter is bare. Dad leans against the back door, talking on his cell phone. I strain to hear what he says and if he’s talking to Mami. It’s Tuesday night, her usual night to call, but she already called on Sunday night this week. She didn’t say she was coming home.

“If I can get off work, I’ll come to New York . . . I’d like to get something started again.” Definitely not Mami. He turns his back. I expect him to say something about me. “Money’s tight. I have to get paid . . . Twenty bucks playing in the subway isn’t going to cut it.”

Nothing about me. He doesn’t even notice me. And he didn’t mention me, only that he’s trying to get off work to go to New York. What does he plan to do with me? Take me to New York to pass around a bucket on the subway while he plays?

Dad snaps his cell phone shut. I wait for him to turn around, but he stands frozen by the door, staring through the dark windowpane into the backyard. I know he can’t see anything with the kitchen light on except his own reflection. That’s what I see from the other end of the room—his reflection and above his shoulder, a tiny me.

“Where’s dinner?” I ask, breaking the silence.

He jumps. “Oh, hi there.” Not exactly the where were you? I expected.

“I’m hungry.”

He opens the refrigerator to reveal a bag of wilted lettuce, a carton of milk, and mostly empty shelves.

“That’s it?” Don’t push it, I tell myself. You were the one who disappeared all afternoon. Doing bad stuff too. But this time I can’t stop myself. My blood thumps in my ears. “Are we so poor we can’t afford groceries? Or you just don’t care?”

His eyes slice through me. I look away. “Maybe we should order a pizza,” he says.

“Mexican. We had pizza last night. You picked it up in Manchester after work.” I tap my fist on the edge of the counter, in time to the beat inside my skull. “The pizza in Willingham stinks.”

He flips open his cell phone. “Garcia’s doesn’t deliver, and I’m too tired to drive there.”

“I want Mexican!” I pound my fist on the counter as I repeat the words. The countertop is shaking—or is it me? I want to bang my head against the counter like I used to do when I was younger, because maybe if I bang my head hard enough, I’ll set free the thought that Chad tricked me into doing something evil and scary and my father didn’t even notice I had gone. And that when I came to the kitchen wanting dinner, he didn’t see me because I was invisible and the person on the phone was real.

• • •

“You’re too old to be throwing tantrums,” Dad says in his truck on the way to Garcia’s in College Park.

“I know. I’m sorry,” I mumble. I’m also too old to play with X-Men figures and kindergartners and to cry every time someone’s mean to me or things don’t go my way. But so far, Mr. Internet hasn’t given me any rules on how to stop.

“Think about what made you melt down tonight,” Dad says. “I’m sure it wasn’t the bad local pizza.”

I rub my aching hand. “You forgot about me. You always tell me not to interrupt, so I didn’t interrupt and you acted like I didn’t exist.”

I examine the pink mark on my fist that will be a bruise tomorrow, but out of the corner of my eye, I see him nod. “I should have noticed sooner. And praised you for not interrupting. But it was an important call.”

My stomach twists. Important call usually means change, and not in a good way. “Who were you talking to?”

“He’s an old friend in New York City. Someone I used to play with. We’re trying to get into some summer festivals.”

“What’ll you do with me?”

He hesitates for a long moment. “Bring you along. And your brothers too, if they’re free.” His eyes are on the road. Not on me.

I sniff. “Just don’t leave me with them.”

“Why? You’ve stayed with Eli and Max before.”

“I’m scared of Eli.”

Dad’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. “What happened?”

“I heard Eli say something to Max . . .”

“You know they don’t mean it when they call you the accident.”

“Except that I was.” I clench my uninjured fist. The other will only bend partway. “Why did you and Mami have me when you knew I’d be . . .” I spit out the last word. “Defective?”

He reaches toward me. I shrink away, press myself against the door. Rogue cannot touch or be touched. “You’re not defective, Kiara. You lost your temper and got into trouble at school. Ms. Latimer and I think it’s . . .” He takes a deep breath. “Nigel’s death. Dee moving away. Your mother leaving. Too much . . . stress for you.”

“That’s not what Mrs. Mac said.” I can’t believe it was only a week ago, when she told him the same things I’m telling him and he made the same excuses. “She gave me that book by someone who’s like me.”

“I agree that Dee’s trying to help, but—”

“What about in kindergarten, when I didn’t talk for six months? That’s one of the signs, you know.” Before then, I’d sing entire songs from TV in English and Spanish, and everybody thought I was a genius. But when I started talking again, my voice was funny. Off-key. Flat. And I had trouble pronouncing all the big words I knew. “What about . . . ?” I stop.

Suddenly, I don’t want to talk about it. The teasing. The kids who beat me up and the ones I beat up. Katie Lyon in kindergarten. Sammy Ortiz in second grade. Jason Karl in fifth. Emily Stein in sixth. Melanie Prince-Parker in March. And Chad yesterday. My face feels hot and damp, but when I think of some of the kids I gave it back to, I smile.

Then I remember the last birthday party I went to, and my smile fades.

• • •

Fourth grade. Emily Stein.

We weren’t friends, but her mother took Spanish lessons from Mami. Mami bought me a new puffy-sleeved dress with seams that stuck out on the inside, and it itched like crazy. In the car, I chewed on one of the sleeves to take my mind off the itching.

At Emily’s house, I sat in a corner of the living room and kept chewing because none of the girls talked to me. When they lined up for Pin the Tail on the Donkey, I got in line too because the winner was supposed to get a prize.

“The back of the line is that way, Kiara.” Emily pointed to where I’d been sitting.

“No, it’s not,” I said, because I hadn’t cut in line. I saw no one in back of me.

“Emily’s right,” one of her friends said.

Another girl joined in. “You have to wait your turn. Like the teacher always says.”

“You’re just making me sit down again. You don’t want me to play.” They never did. At school they always said they had enough people when I tried to get into the jump rope line or their kickball games.

Emily whispered to her friend, but loud enough that everyone could hear her. Including me. “I didn’t want to invite her. But I had to. On account of her mom teaching my mom Spanish.”

My eyes watered, and my cheeks stung.

“Look, she’s crying again,” someone said.

Quickly I wiped my face on my sleeve. My upper arm felt damp, and I didn’t have to look to know why.

“Hey, there’s a big hole in her sleeve.”

“She was chewing her dress.”

“Yuck!”

“Like a billy goat.”

One of them poked her finger through the hole and touched my arm. I trembled, then let out a scream. The film over my eyes cleared, and I saw not the girls but the table where the birthday cake sat. It had green icing and a maypole with little figures dancing around it. All the figures in one happy circle. No one left out.

I ran to the table with the maypole cake and flipped it over.

Never invite Crybaby Kiara to your birthday party, or you’ll be really, really sorry. For the next two years, Emily and her friends told everyone so and the reason why. Because of her I never got invited to another party again. Which was why I had to yank out a handful of her frizzy brown hair and bloody her lip one morning before school, while all her mean friends tried to pull me away.

• • •

Dad’s no longer driving. He turned off the road somewhere and cut the engine, and now he holds me in the still, dark truck cab, his arms squeezing my shoulders, his soft beard against my forehead.

“You got cured, but there’s no cure for what I have,” I say.

And I finally tell him what Mr. Internet told me about Asperger’s syndrome, that it’s not something you can take a pill for. “It’s probably genetic. You weren’t supposed to have any more kids.”

In my mind, my genes are a giant twisty ladder—two parallel strands connected by crosstrees—the way Mr. Internet showed me. Sometimes they’re red, blue, green, and yellow—colorful and pretty. Sometimes they’re dark and ugly. Mine are always broken—strands bent and crosstrees knocked out. That’s what poison chemicals do. Dad’s broken genes making broken copies.

“What exactly did your brothers say?” Dad’s voice is hard, like he plans to get both of them in trouble.

“Just Eli.” I don’t want Max in trouble for nothing. Especially now that I know he’s Antonio’s friend. “He learned about it in one of his classes. That the chemicals they gave you to get rid of the cancer cause genetic mutations.”

A couple of cars pass by our parked truck, their headlights turning everything inside shadow and silver. “I’m sure Eli thinks he knows everything now that he’s in that premed program. But there’s no proof that what they gave me causes birth defects.” Dad’s chest rises and falls against my upper arm. “At least once the treatments are done.”

I swallow the knot in my throat. Eli had a special class about all this stuff. He should know. Dad quit college in his sophomore year and said he cut most of his classes before then to play music or do what he called solidarity work. Mami’s smart, but she probably couldn’t understand the doctor because she doesn’t speak much English. “Whatever. At least you guys wanted me.” I swallow again. “Just don’t change your mind on account of what you got.”

Dad squeezes me tighter. Any more, and my eyes will pop out. “Never.”

“What about Mami?”

“Your mother loves you.”

“Then why did she leave me?”

Dad releases me from his death grip. “She has to make a living, which she can do in Montreal but can’t do here. More than anything, she misses you.”

I fold my arms against my chest. “If she misses me so much, she should come home.”

• • •

I wish Dad wouldn’t keep talking about Mami at dinner, but he does, even if what he mainly talks about is how Garcia’s isn’t real Mexican food and how Mexican food is different from Salvadoran food. It makes me miss Mami’s pupusas, thick tortillas filled with beans or cheese and served with tomato sauce and pickled cabbage called curtido.

“You still love Mami, right?” I ask him on the way home.

He nods but doesn’t say anything.

“And she still loves you, right?” When they first met, he didn’t speak Spanish, and she barely spoke English, and they didn’t seem to learn much of each other’s language over the years. Sometimes when Mami got mad at Dad, she’d yell at him in Spanish and English and he’d sit there quietly as if he didn’t understand either language. But whenever they played music together, I could tell right away that they loved each other. They didn’t need words—the music said everything.

“If your mother could be here with us, she would,” Dad finally says.

I don’t think he wants to hear me tell him how in X-treme X-Men, Rogue left Gambit even though they loved each other because she had to kill the evil Vargas, who had attacked them. Gambit almost died while Rogue was gone, but she got back just in time to save him. Once right after Mami left, he yelled at me because I talked about nothing but X-Men, so I imagined myself writing a sticky note saying, Never talk to Dad about X-Men and slapping it inside my brain.