B0061QB04W EBOK (33 page)

“So what did you guys get?” Mago asked as we neared the house.

Carlos took a can of Aquanet hairspray from underneath his shirt. “They didn’t have much to choose from,” he said when Mago laughed.

“And you?” she asked.

I showed her what I grabbed, a bottle of Trés Flores Brilliantine.

“When have you seen Papi use hair polish?” she asked.

“Never,” I said. “But Tío Crece uses it. And so does Tía Güera’s husband.”

Mago groaned.

“It was the only thing for men I could see!” I said, defending myself.

“I can’t believe you guys,” Mago said as we turned the corner. “We went through all this trouble for those lousy gifts?”

The next day, we ended up giving the bottle of brilliantine to Papi and the hairspray to Mila. Their presents for us were much better, although they weren’t what we had asked Santa for. I got a pair of new Pro Wings tennis shoes. Mago got a pretty peach dress, and Carlos a yellow Tonka truck.

Santa never came. I kept waking up at night and glancing at the fireplace by our sofa bed. I was wondering if he was running late. I would tell myself he had many deliveries to make, and that was why he was taking so long. But what if he knew we had stolen things from the store? What if he decided we weren’t good kids and didn’t deserve his presents?

Two weeks later, there was still no sign of Santa. Papi called us over to the kitchen where he and Mila were going through their mail. “What’s this?” Papi said, holding a bill in his hand. “Who in the world did you call? Why is the bill so high?”

Mago, Carlos, and I looked at each other. We never used the phone. We didn’t know anyone here, so who would we call?

“We haven’t called anyone,” Mago said.

“Are you sure?” Mila said.

“Well, a few weeks ago we did call Santa,” Mago confessed.

“You did what?” Mila said, taking the bill from Papi to look at the number.

“He was on TV, and he said to call him,” Carlos said.

“And we asked him for things, but he didn’t bring them,” I said.

“I can’t believe you kids!” Papi yelled, standing up. We took a step back.

“We didn’t know we would get charged for the call,” Mago said. “We’re sorry, Papi.”

“And he didn’t bring them,” I said again.

“I’m still not done paying my friends back the money they let me borrow for the smuggler,” Papi said, one hand on his belt buckle. “Otherwise, I would put you all on the bus back to Mexico this very
night!” He took off his belt and gave us a few lashes with it before grabbing his keys and storming out of the house.

“Don’t ever do that again,” Mila said, writing out a check and putting it inside the return envelope. “Those are just scam artists trying to make money.”

“We’re sorry, Mila,” we said, wiping our teary eyes and massaging the stings on our arms. As we headed back to the living room, I wondered what Mila had meant.
Why would Santa want to make money off of us, when he has so much money he gives away toys to hundreds and thousands of kids?
I wondered.

Papi returned half an hour later and headed straight to the phone. He worked on it for a few minutes, and we didn’t know what he was doing until he was done and said, “There, now you can’t call anymore.” We walked up to the phone and saw the lock on it, so now we couldn’t turn the little wheel to dial unless we put in a key.

“What if there’s an emergency?” Mago asked. “How are we going to call you?”

But Papi was unmoved.

6

A
T
A
LDAMA, THE
girls in fifth and sixth grade were taken to the auditorium and shown a video about puberty. The girls around me kept giggling while watching the video, but I didn’t. I couldn’t understand the words much, but I could understand the meaning of the images on the screen just fine. Besides, I already knew about menstruation because Mago had told me all about it back in Mexico.

Mago still hadn’t become a señorita. Mila said it was because we were so undernourished in Mexico that Mago’s body didn’t do what it was supposed to do. Now that we’d been in the U.S. for eight months and had better food to eat, Mago prayed her period would come soon. I hoped mine would, too. Even though I was ten and a half, I couldn’t wait to become a señorita.

After the assembly, I was given a booklet with a picture of a girl
on it. I was also given a sanitary napkin wrapped in cellophane. My very first sanitary napkin! I showed it to Mago as soon as she came home from school.

“Look, look!” I said. “I am going to become a señorita very soon!” I stored my sanitary napkin in my dresser drawer where I kept my underwear.

Every day after Mago picked me up at Mrs. Giuliano’s, I would rush home and take my sanitary napkin out to look at it. I had also tried to read the little booklet I was given. There were many words I didn’t yet understand, and I had to keep looking them up in the dictionary. My favorite was “rite of passage.” It sounded important.

I was confused by this sentence: “Changes take place in a girl pretty fast.” For the life of me I couldn’t understand why the word “pretty” was there,
after
the word “girl.” Mr. López had taught me that an adjective goes before the noun, so it should have read “pretty girl.” But if that was so, I wondered if only pretty girls got their periods and not ugly ones. I stood in the mirror and looked at myself, wondering which category I was in. I was not pretty like Mago. Even Betty, as little as she was, was prettier than me. Cindy was way prettier than any of us.

“Am I ugly?” I asked Mago.

“Of course not!” she would say, but she’s my sister, so I knew she had to say that.

The following week, Carlos came to pick me up at Mrs. Giuliano’s instead of Mago. He said that Mago wasn’t feeling well, and she had ended up not going to school. She’d gotten off the bus in front of Burbank, turned around, and come back home.

When we got home, I did what I had always done, open my drawer to look at my sanitary napkin. But it was gone. I took out the drawer and looked behind the dresser wondering if it had fallen out, but it wasn’t there. Mago came out of the bathroom looking very pale.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

She went to lie down on the couch, clutching her stomach.

“I have a fever and really bad cramps,” she said.

I felt bad for her, but I wanted to know where my sanitary napkin
was. I asked her if she had seen it. “I’m sorry, Nena,” she said. “I took it.”

“But why?” I yelled. “That was my sanitary napkin. It was mine!”

“It’s just that I got my period this morning, Nena. I couldn’t find any pads here so I didn’t know what else to do.”

“I hate you!” I yelled, and then I ran outside into the yard to cry.

When Papi came home, he already knew that Mago had missed school because he got a call from Burbank at work. I had never seen my father so furious. He came barging into the house, and without asking for an explanation, he took off his belt and gave my sister the biggest lashing any of us had gotten thus far, right there on the couch where she had been writhing in pain all day.

“Papi, stop!” Carlos said, but Papi didn’t listen and the belt kept whistling through the air. What was worse was that Mago wouldn’t tell him what was wrong with her. She just said, “I’m not feeling well, Papi.” But those past months we had learned that according to Papi, being sick was no excuse to miss school.
But this isn’t a common cold!
I thought. Mago put her arms up to cover her face. Suddenly, I couldn’t take it anymore. I forgot I was supposed to be angry at my sister, and I rushed at him and pushed him.

“Don’t hit her!” I yelled. “She’s menstruating. She’s become a señorita. Stop it. Stop it!”

Then Papi steadied his belt and put it down. He looked at the three of us, and for a moment it was as if he had just awakened, as if that person who had just beat up my sister wasn’t the one who was now in the room with us. He blinked once, twice, then went into his room and didn’t come out.

Mila arrived half an hour later. She’d stopped at her mother’s house after work to visit her children. When we told her what Papi had done, she said, “Your father didn’t mean to. He doesn’t know any better. It’s the way he was raised.” She went to the store to buy Mago a package of sanitary napkins.