“Suit yourself, Mother,” Sophia said, keeping that infuriating smile. “If you want to bury your head in the sand, you have no problem. We live in the desert.”
Tía Isabela slammed her spoon down, rose, her breakfast half eaten, her coffee nearly untouched, and marched out in a fury.
I looked at Sophia. She was so content with herself for getting to her mother that I had to wonder if they ever loved each other. Did she ever cling to her when she was little? I couldn’t remember a time since I was here when she and her mother kissed or hugged.
“Satisfied?” she asked me, as if I had been the one to cause the trouble.
I didn’t reply.
Two days later, without my saying a word to anyone who might have said something to Danielle, Sophia received an invitation to her party. She came into my room that night wearing a very deep, satisfied smile.
“Well, look what came in the mail to me,” she said, showing me the invitation.
I started to deny having anything to do with it, but she stopped me.
“I know it wasn’t you. It’s my mother’s doing,” she said. “She was worried about her status in society, I’m sure.”
And then she tore the invitation in half and threw it into the wastebasket, just as she had done to mine. She spit on it as well.
“I wouldn’t be caught dead there,” she said. She turned and marched away, slamming my bedroom door behind her.
The following Saturday, however, she was out shopping for a new dress that would outdo mine, no matter what the price.
She wouldn’t be caught dead going to the party? I guessed she’d hired a hearse to bring her to it, I thought, and laughed to myself. It felt like I had won a small victory and any victory, no matter how small, was an achievement in this house.
But I should have remembered what she and her girlfriends were so fond of saying all the time.
“He who laughs last laughs best.”
2
Christian Taylor
“Bonjour, Delia. Comment allez-vous?” Christian Taylor asked me as we were entering French class.
This was the one class that Sophia and I did not share at the private school.
Considering her opinion of Mexicans, I found it ironic, even amusing, that Sophia had chosen Spanish class over French class, something most of the students at the school actually had done. There were only eight students in our French class, but because this was a private school, the class could still be conducted.
Of course, the students who chose Spanish, thinking it was far easier, claimed they chose it because it was more practical to learn Spanish in our community, with so many Latinos working and owning businesses here. There weren’t only people from Mexico. There were people from Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Costa Rica, as well as some other Central American countries.
“Je suis très bien, et vous?” I replied.
“Bien,” he said, and then looked worried that I would continue speaking only in French. I could see it clearly in his face, a face I would be the last to deny was quite handsome, with his luminous blue
eyes highlighting his classic Romanesque nose, high cheekbones, and strong-looking firm lips. He had rich light brown hair gently swept behind his ears and halfway down his neck. Six feet tall, with a lean swimmer’s physique, he was the school’s track star and thought to be a shoo-in for a sports scholarship at some prestigious college. Most of the girls in our class and the class below swooned over him, and the problem I saw was that he knew it far too well. He had an arrogant strut, and when he walked through the hallways, he wore a self-satisfied smile that, in truth, put me off despite his drop-dead gorgeous looks. I thought that conceited smile was just another mask.
Ironically, avoiding him seemed to be just the right thing to do to win his attention. Either it bothered him very much that I wasn’t doting on him as were most of the other girls, or he was genuinely intrigued and interested in me for being so indifferent to him. Whatever the case, I was not going to become another one of his conquests, nor would I forget Ignacio to be with him. In fact, just thinking about Christian made me feel guilty.
He tried to ask in French if I were going to Danielle’s party but gave up after “Etes vous” and added, “going to Danielle Johnson’s birthday bash?”
“Mais oui,” I said, and then hurried to my seat.
Monsieur Denning, our teacher, had entered. He was very serious about the class, annoyed if we wasted a second of our time. We were at the point where he wanted us all to try to say anything in class in French and would make a student look up the words and attempt the correct pronunciation, no matter how long that took.
I glanced at Christian, who was sitting two rows over, and saw him smiling at me warmly. I also saw how some of the other girls in the class were looking at me with shadows of envy darkening their faces, but I did not smile back at him.
Just before I had celebrated my quinceañera, my fifteenth birthday, in Mexico, a birthday that was very significant for us, a time when we were moving from being a girl to a woman, my mother passed on some of her advice about men.