After Peaches (2 page)

CHAPTER 2
Build Your Own Adventure

“You're going to love it!” Julie sat on her bedroom floor, munching on a cookie and sticking one hand deep into her backpack. I leaned back against one wall, nibbling my cookie. Her room had green walls, a green bedspread and a bumpy beige carpet. In the middle of her spotless black desk sat a computer with a big screen, and all around were shelves with enough books for a small library.

She pulled a thin colorful library book from her backpack and slid it across the floor toward me.
How to
Make Your Own Book
it said on the cover. I placed my cookie on one leg, brushed the crumbs off my fingers and flipped through the pages. I liked making things myself, and I loved the idea of making books instead of always having to buy them in the store, but I didn't see how this would make our summers any less lonely. Besides, where would I get the pretty paper and thick thread that we'd need? I hated asking my parents for things they couldn't afford.

“Isn't it fantastic?” Julie wanted to know.

I nodded. “The books are pretty. Will you make one this summer?”

“We could each make one,” she said. “That's my plan.”

She looked like she was waiting for me to stand up and cheer or something, but when I didn't, Julie let out an impatient sigh. “This summer, we could each write a whole book!” she said. “We can make notes on everything that happens to us while we're apart, and then in September, we can write a good copy and add photos and drawings and stuff, and then we can make books and give them to each other so we'll each know exactly what the other person did over the summer.” Her face lit up like a firecracker on a Mexican Christmas Eve.

I tried to share her excitement, but I was never any good at lying. “I don't know enough English to write a book,” I said.

“Oh, don't worry about the English,” she said, passing me the plate of cookies. “I can help you make it perfect at the end, if you want.” She wrinkled her forehead, like she was working hard to stay excited. “Don't you want to make your own book?”

“I do,” I said quickly. She knew how much I loved writing stories and making things with my hands. She knew that I dreamed of growing up and writing books in English and in Spanish, stories like those that filled the library shelves. I knew I wasn't ready to write a book now though. Even if my English was perfect, what was I going to write about? As soon as I said I did want to write a book, Julie leaped up to pull a new notebook from a stack in her closet. Then she poked around in a desk drawer for a pen, and I was pretty sure she was about to design a plan of action. Julie made plans of action for every project she started, from building a kite to helping her mother make banana bread.

Instead of opening the notebook, Julie handed the book and pen to me.“You're going to need these,” she said.“We have to keep notes on all the exciting stuff we do this summer.” I held her gift gingerly on my knees and felt embarrassed heat creeping into my cheeks. I thought of giving the book back and telling Julie I had plenty at home. But of course she'd know I was lying. She knew my parents always bought what I needed for school, but there was no money for extra supplies.

And I knew my parents wouldn't approve of this gift. They didn't believe in charity. Even when the government invited us to come to Canada, paid for our flight and offered to pay all our expenses for a year to help us get settled in our new country, my parents worked as hard as they could to learn English and find jobs so they could start paying for everything themselves before the year was over. They were always talking about honor and how important it is to stand tall and know you can look after yourself.

I didn't want to give the notebook back. With its shiny blue plastic cover and a long wire spiral down one side, it was fancier than anything my parents bought me. Writing in a book like that would make me feel like I
could
write a whole book. Hadn't Ms. Bower said that my writing was “exceptionally insightful” for my age? (I had to look up both words in the dictionary, and then I had to look up the words in the definitions. In the end, I decided it meant I wrote things that most kids didn't think to write about.)

Julie pulled another notebook and pen from her backpack, stretched out on her tummy and held her pen over an empty page. “If we try hard, we'll have lots of stories for our books by the end of the summer. We might even have to make
two
books each!”

I laughed so much that I sprayed cookie crumbs. Julie frowned, and I apologized. “It will be easy for you,” I said, opening my book to my own first smooth page. “You'll have an exciting summer in Vancouver. I don't know what I will write about.”

She looked up at me, surprised. “But your life is way more interesting than mine,” she said. “I'm just hanging out with my dad all summer. You get to go to work with your parents, and pick flowers, and grow vegetables, and do stuff that kids around here never do.”

“They don't do it, because they don't have to,” I said. Sometimes kids went to the fields to pick flowers or vegetables, but they only went once. I didn't know any other kids who had to work the whole summer with their parents. “What will I write? A story called
How to Grow a Kiwi
or
How to Pull
”—I searched for the word and couldn't find it—“
How to Pull Bad Little
Plants from a Garden
.”

“Weeds?” Julie asked.

“The little plants that the farm doesn't want,” I said. “Is that weeds?”

She nodded. I took an almost-full notebook from my backpack, flipped it open near the end and asked her to spell the word. Then I wrote it down with its translation in Spanish,
hierbas malas
. I'd remember it that way.

I was going to miss Julie. I didn't have any other friends my age, and since the only person I spoke English with was leaving, I had decided not to speak English at all that summer. I would speak only Spanish with my parents and the other farm workers who had come from Mexico to work on the farm. When I was alone, I would practice my English words to myself, saying them over and over until I said each one like a Canadian. I didn't want to write any of that into my book. I wanted to be a Normal Canadian Kid, with Normal Canadian Kid stories.

“You'll find something good to write about,” Julie said. “You'll see. And if you don't find any adventures, you'll just have to make them up.” She got a
Eureka!
look on her face and scribbled something in her notebook.

I looked around her room and thought about her summer in the city—going to the park, the pool and maybe even a summer camp. Her summer would be full of Normal Canadian Kid adventures.

Stories about
my
summer would only make me feel weirder than ever. A normal Canadian kid would never write about working in flower fields, or eating beans and rice, or speaking Spanish. What was the point of speaking English perfectly if everything I wrote about was weird anyway? Even with perfect grammar, I couldn't imagine what I could write that anyone— even my best friend—would want to read.

CHAPTER 3
What's Normal?

I got home just as my parents pulled up in their ancient green station wagon. It was secondhand, rusty and twice as old as me. Even here, in the cheapest part of Victoria, no one had a car this old, but my parents were proud of it. We had never been rich enough to own a car in Mexico.

“
Hola, mi amor
,” Papá called, climbing out of the front seat. Beside him, Mamá rummaged around on the floor, collecting the bags full of plastic lunch containers.

I ran to Papá and almost knocked him over with my hug. He kissed the top of my head, and I breathed in his smell: plants, sweat and sunshine. To me, that was the smell of happiness, no matter where we were living. When my parents first started working in Canada, it was winter and so they got indoor jobs. For a while, instead of smelling like fresh earth, they smelled like the bleach they used to clean floors and toilets in office buildings. They were grumpy and pale and didn't smile much, and I was relieved when they found work in the fields in the spring. My parents were happier with suntanned faces and dirt in their hair. “How is my favorite daughter today?” Papá asked in Spanish, pushing me away from him so he could see my face.

“Your
only
daughter is just fine,” I said, and he tweaked my nose.

I laughed and ran around to the other side of the car to help Mamá with the bags. It was good to hear my father joke again. He used to make that favorite daughter joke all the time, and he had called my only brother, Ricardo, his favorite son. Ricardo was seventeen when he was killed in Mexico three years ago, and for a long time after that, Papá stopped joking altogether.

Soon after Ricardo died, when I was seven, my parents started whispering to each other in the kitchen of our little house in Mexico. From my bed in the corner, I heard words like “persecution,” “escape,” “safe place,” and “Guatemala.” The first words made sense after Ricardo was killed. No one knew exactly who had killed him, but people talked. They said my brother had been speaking out against the Mexican government, and someone got angry and shot him. They said people might suspect my family of disagreeing with the government too, and we'd better be careful. My parents didn't want me to know any of that, so I pretended not to know…and not to be scared.

But I didn't understand why my parents were talking about Guatemala. The country next to ours was even more dangerous than our part of Mexico. Why would anyone want to escape to
there
?

I stayed awake trying to hear every last word of my parents' whispers, but they still didn't make sense. One day, Papá left the house right after supper, and I followed him to the end of our street. When he stopped in front of
el viejo
Claudio's house, I hid around the corner where I could still hear them. Old Claudio looked a million years old and always sat outside on a stool, talking to passers-by. I had no idea why Papá would want to talk to him, but my father must have whispered a question because
el viejo
looked thoughtful; then he answered in his raspy voice. “It's a tough journey,” he said, “and once you arrive, there's no guarantee they'll accept you. You might have to wait for years, and in Guatemala, you'll be worse off than here,
m'hijo
.”

My father had his back to me, so I couldn't see the look on his face, but I was smiling. I had been right all along. No matter how scary things were here, my parents couldn't be crazy enough to move to Guatemala.

“But if Canada does accept us,” my father said, “they'll pay for our flight there?”

I almost fell out of my hiding place when he asked that. Had he said Canada? That was so far north, it was almost at the end of the map on the wall of our classroom. What did Canada have to do with us? And what was this about flying? Weren't they talking about Guatemala only a second ago? If I hadn't been so worried that my father would discover me eavesdropping, I would have run the three blocks to
Abuela
's house to tell my grandmother that Papá had gone crazy.

Later, I sometimes wished that he
had
gone crazy. At least there are medicines for craziness. There's no cure for leaving your country, your home and everyone you've ever known. Of course, I never said any of that to my parents. When Papá explained that he wanted to take us to that big country at the end of the map, I didn't say anything at all. He explained that the best way to get to Canada was to go to Guatemala first because the Canadian government had an office there. We would tell the Canadians what had happened to Ricardo and that we were in danger too. “If the Canadians understand why we had to leave Mexico,” Papá said, “they'll invite us to their country. Canada sometimes pays for people in danger to go to Canada so they can be safe.”

If that was true, then why didn't everyone go to Canada? “What if they don't believe us?” I asked. “Or what if too many people want to go to Canada? What then?”

Papá looked at me, and I saw the fear in his eyes before he could hide it. “I don't know,
m'hija
,” he said. “I don't know, but one thing is certain. We can't stay here.”

The trip from Mexico to Guatemala was awful. We couldn't carry much food, and we passed through lots of places that were far more dangerous than our town. Thieves attacked us, and Papá got beaten pretty badly. When we finally made it to noisy, crowded Guatemala City, we were tired, hungry and sick, and still we had to wait for almost a year before we got to talk to the Canadian Embassy. All that time, my parents said again and again that they were doing this for my future. So that I would have a future.

Everyone knows there's no point arguing when adults are talking like that.

“
Qué día
,” Mamá said now, getting out of the station wagon. With the fingers of one hand, she ruffled the dirt out of her short black hair. “It's been a long day.
Cómo estás,
Rosario?”