I am an American. And yet I am a slave.
“How much?” I choke out.
“El Libertador requires fifteen thousand US dollars for each person he smuggles across the border.” Julio says this as if he’s talking about the number of cracks in the ceiling or the variety of scuffs on our linoleum floor. He even shrugs a little, as if the blast radius of the bomb he just dropped wasn’t catastrophic.
Mama. Papi. My brother and sister.
Sixty thousand dollars.
I swallow. Once. Twice. But the bile slides up and down my throat like an enraged serpent. I try to translate sixty thousand dollars into shifts worked at the Uppity Rooster and Breeze Mart but my brain won’t do the math.
“Was I wrong?” Julio says softly. “Was I wrong to tell you? That price includes getting them across the desert, you know.”
I shake my head and brace my forearms on the counter in front of me. I wonder whether this sideboard can hold me up, what with this new weight of the world on my shoulders. “How … How much do we already have saved?”
At this, Julio perks up. “We have nearly fifty thousand saved, bonita. You see how much progress we’ve already made?” There is a flash of pride in his eyes, and why shouldn’t there be? He’s the reason we’ve got even that saved up. I’m impressed. My Breeze Mart checks hardly buy groceries each week. And that’s stretching each deflated dollar to its death.
Plus, we send money home every week. So all of that savings came from Julio. He is the true slave.
Julio seems relieved to have shared this with me. As if by sharing the information, the actual accounting of it, he’s also sharing the burden of responsibility. This should feel like a privilege and I know it. Julio has deemed me fit to speak about adult things with him. He’s truly making us a team, instead of just saying it all the time. He’s bringing me into the proverbial loop. I should see it as an opportunity to prove myself.
But all I see is how much work it will be, how much work it’s already been.
And I don’t know how much longer I can do this.
But my family is worth the sacrifice.
Sixteen
Arden slips into his seat in social studies and tries not to look at Carly, who is already doing a fantastic job of pretending that he doesn’t exist. He’s come to accept this weird relationship of theirs, that they aren’t to acknowledge each other in school. She claims to not want the attention, and he can’t help but feel relieved at that. The more questions people ask him about their relationship, the more questions he would have to ask himself.
Because the truth of the matter is, he’s not sure what it all means yet. Or if it means anything more than the sum of the parts: They hang out. They cause trouble. They laugh while doing it.
Still, he can’t ignore that these past few weeks he’s felt like he’s been having an affair with life. He thought he’d been truly living before Carly Vega. He thought Amber’s death had scared life into him, had stirred up the need to do more than just exist. But he’s coming to realize that life can be lived in fractions and he has been portioning some of it out to merely existing after all, despite his best intentions.
All those nights riding around in the police car with Deputy Glass, when the conversation fell quiet and so did the incoming calls. Staring out the window as Glass drove round after round throughout town. He would have called that living; it was rare, something only an insomniac had the pleasure of seeing, the world at rest. At peace with itself.
Even when he’d devised his own entertainment, the fun was lacking by exactly half. He just didn’t know it at the time. But now he does. And he can’t stop thinking about why.
And he can’t stop thinking about why it even matters, but the answer whispers back at him almost immediately: Because what if you lose this too?
He pushes the thought aside, all thoughts in fact, until class is over and he can finally align himself with Carly in the hallway and pretend not to be talking to her. She stops at her locker to shift books and folders around, which is her version of appearing too busy to notice him.
She opens her locker and proceeds to shuffle the contents in an almost predictable way. He leans against the locker to her left. “Is this even necessary anymore?” he says, keeping his voice low. “Everyone thinks we’re a couple. Maybe we should act like one. Then all the mystery and curiosity is gone and they’ll eventually stop talking about it. Poof. No more attention. Isn’t that what you want?”
Carly raises a well-defined brow at him, briefly giving him the pleasure of looking directly into her mischievous eyes. “If they thought we were actually a couple, they’d feel obligated to talk to me and invite me to their stupid parties and sit at their secret society table at lunch. Poof. Ten times the attention. You’d put me through that?”
Yes, in a heartbeat, if it meant his friends would stop wondering if Carly Vega is taken or not. Is this what a crush feels like? “I don’t even go to their parties anymore. And I don’t eat lunch here, remember?” He still drives to Taco City, even though he’d stay and eat the palatably challenged cafeteria food if she asked him to.
But she never does.
“How can I forget that you waste five bucks a day on lunch?”
“Three ninety-nine. The special is three dollars and ninety-nine cents. Geez.”
“Speaking of three ninety-nine,” she says, slamming the locker shut. A brilliant smile shimmers across her face. “Are we still on for this afternoon?” Arden can’t help but smile himself. He promised to take her to Best Buy in Destin. She’d finally skimmed enough cream off the top of her tips to buy a laptop—without Julio ever questioning where the money had gone. Now she won’t need to borrow the school’s laptop anymore—something Arden knows means a lot to her.