Star in the Forest (2 page)

The next day after school, I ran to the forest. Along the trail, little yellow flowers were pushing through. Daffodils. Someone, sometime had planted ruffly, sunshiny daffodils in the car part forest, and this cheered me up a little. I went under the gate and over the ditch and the tears were already coming because they’d been waiting all day, just pushing against their hiding places, and they couldn’t wait to come out.

And then I spotted him.

Gray fur.

It was supposed to be white but it was dirty and matted in places with brown stuff so he blended into the car part forest, like a chameleon. He was skinny, too. You could see the outline of his rib bones.

Usually, I am not a dog person. I have a scar the size of a blueberry on my thigh and another on my arm from where a dog bit me in Mexico when I was five.

But this dog seemed scared of me. Of
me
. He
whimpered and cowered and walked in a circle and curled up far from me, under a rusty rainbow truck hood. There was a chain tight around his neck and it was attached to a hole in the hood and he barely had enough chain to make the circle and lie down.

By now my tears had already come and I couldn’t go back, so I sat far from him and he watched me and I watched him. I cried and he watched me and after a while my tears stopped and he put his head on his paws. That’s when I noticed it. A black patch of fur on the back of his neck.

In the shape of a star.

The next day after school, I went to the forest. This time the tears weren’t pushing, because I was thinking about Star. Would he still be there? Was he okay?

I whizzed by crushed beer cans and Burger King trash and the daffodils. Their petals were a little more open today.

There he was! Under the rusty rainbow truck hood.

I sat closer to him than I had the day before. There was a dirty puddle of rainwater that he kept trying to reach with his tongue, but his chain wouldn’t let him. He made a high-pitched, desperate sound.

Nearby, a plastic bowl lay on its side, but it was cracked. I remembered the Burger King trash in the ditch. I said, “I’ll be right back, Star.”

I ran back and found the tall Burger King cup, and I tore off the top so that a dog’s tongue could reach in, and carefully, inch by inch, I moved toward the puddle. But I didn’t have to worry because he stayed back, far from me.

I scooped up water into the cup and put it on the other side of the puddle, so he could reach it. And then, quickly, I backed up, so quickly I stumbled in the mud. Then I sat against a torn-off truck door and watched.

Slowly, very slowly, he moved toward the cup,
reached out a perfect pink tongue, and lapped it up, politely, without spilling a drop.

After that came Saturday, and Dalia and Reina and I had to move our stuff into Mamá’s room and clean our room for two guys to come live in it. We couldn’t afford rent on the trailer now that Papá was
deportado
, so we had to rent out the room. The guys who moved in were drywallers. They each brought a garbage bag full of clothes in one hand and a six-pack of beer in the other. They dumped the bags in their new room, then sat on the sofa watching action movies and playing video games and drinking Coronas. Mamá’s lips made a tight, upside-down parenthesis, and she cleaned up the kitchen as fast as she could and then went into our room and watched
telenovelas
and
noticias
on the bed while we did homework.

There’s one more thing. On the day Papá found out he was going to be
deportado
, it was my eleventh
birthday. There was a cake waiting for me in the fridge, a
tres leches
cake from Albertson’s that said
Feliz Cumpleaños Zitlaly
. They missed the third
L
.

That night, all anyone talked about was
deportado deportado
and so my cake sat in the fridge, uneaten.

You have to be happy to sing
“Las Mañanitas”
and have a party, and nobody was happy. A few times over the next three weeks, Reina asked if she could eat some cake, but Mamá frowned at her. Mamá frowned a lot nowadays. She had to work extra hours, cooking the breakfast and lunch shift at IHOP and the dinner shift at Denny’s. She wasn’t home when we got home from school anymore. And she worked weekends now, too.

At three o’clock on that Saturday, Mamá walked past the drywall guys on the sofa and left for Denny’s. In our crowded room, Reina was still watching TV and Dalia was sulking on the bed because she wanted to be with her friends at the broken-glass park. Luckily, Mamá thought I was too young to look after Reina myself, so Dalia had to do it.

After Mamá left, I snuck into the kitchen and heaved the box of cake out of the refrigerator. It was enormous. No one noticed me and the cake going out the door.

On the way to the forest, I had to grip my hands tight around it. It was especially hard going under the fence and jumping across the ditch with the cake. I didn’t want it to get smushed or anything.

Star saw me coming with the cake and then he did something amazing.

He wagged his tail.

He wagged it!

My heart was booming. I sat down closer to him and balanced the white cake box on my lap, a little afraid to open the top. What if the cake was covered in green mold? What if it was ruined?

I lifted off the top.

Dazzling white with bright blue icing trim. A blue like pictures of the ocean in Hawaii. One side was a little mashed from when I’d tripped over a rock, and the icing was cracked and hard,
but at least there was no mold. Could you get sick from eating really old cake? I decided to risk it. I didn’t have a knife or fork so I just broke off a piece with my hand and took a bite. It tasted good. Dry, but good.

I made a silent prayer-bargain.
If I don’t get a stomachache from this, then Papá will come back
. I took a few more bites. My stomach felt fine.

Star was watching me and licking his chops. It was probably safe to give him. Chocolate could hurt dogs but this was all pure white and blue. I tore off a big chunk that included the
Z
of
Zitlally
. He liked it so much I gave him two more pieces. We watched each other and ate the cake and the fur around his mouth turned blue and I smiled at him and stuck out my tongue to show him the blueness. I could see the tip of it if I kind of crossed my eyes and looked down. It looked like I’d licked off a piece of the ocean.

When I looked up again, I swear, Star smiled back.

No one ever made fun of my name until that Monday. Cayden called me Zitface. “Zitlally, Zitface, Zitlally, Zitface.”

I don’t even have any zits. Not a single one.

I didn’t say anything. I was used to not talking by now. When Mr. Martin asked me about it, I made some coughing sounds and whispered that I had a permanent sore throat from allergies. He
raised his eyebrow and said maybe I should talk to Mrs. Cruz, the counselor, but then another teacher came in asking for the key to something and he forgot about it. Which was fine because Mrs. Cruz smells weird because she drinks about ten cups of coffee a day.

So when Cayden said “Zitface” again, I chewed on the insides of my cheeks and studied my knuckles and wondered how it would feel to punch a person.

Then Crystal said to him, “Dude, Zitlally’s face is perfect. Like a movie star’s. Like some model in a magazine.”

My cheeks turned warm.

Then she said, “Dude, I know Zitlally’s family. They live next door to me. She comes from a family of models. Like, all her aunts and cousins are models. But there are, like, these gangs there in Mexico, enemy gangs of beautiful models, so Zitlally’s family had to flee. It was tragic. It was like they were just too beautiful.”

Cayden screwed up his face. “You’re such a liar, Crystal.”

She
was
a liar. Everyone knew not to believe nine-tenths of what came out of Crystal’s mouth. Most of her lies were just good stories, but it was hard to get past the fact that she was lying. Still, Cayden didn’t call me Zitface again.

Two class periods later, during a science experiment about static electricity, Crystal was rubbing a balloon on her hair. Dirty-blond strands stuck out in all directions. She looked like a lying lunatic. But her wild hair also looked a little like a golden halo that you might see around the Virgin Mary’s head, the thing that shows she’s holy.

Crystal stuck the balloon to the wall, and there it stayed, a little miracle, like walking on water or multiplying loaves of bread or something.

From across the room, she looked at me and smiled. I smiled back and even let some teeth show.

Did she really think I looked like a model? It was possible. Every once in a while, you do see a brown-skinned model. I walked a little taller that day, threw back my shoulders, and pursed out my lips in a bee-stung model’s pout.

The cake lasted three days. I didn’t want to give it to Star all at once in case it made him sick. His stomach had probably shrunk, since he was starving. By the fourth day, maybe it was my imagination, but I swear he looked healthier, more meat on his bones, less space between his ribs. And he had a ring of blue fur around his mouth like lipstick.

There’s something I didn’t tell you about Papá being
deportado
. I didn’t tell you because I wanted you to think he’s a good person. Because he is. But if I told you right away that the reason the police pulled him over was because he was speeding, then you might think he’s bad.

Even Mamá thinks he’s bad. Not all the time, but sometimes. He always promised Mamá he
wouldn’t drive fast because if he got caught, he’d be
deportado
. But he went fishing in the mountains and caught the biggest trout in the Poudre River. Maybe even in
any
river. And on the way home, he was so happy he was singing along with the
ranchera
music on the radio. He was so happy he didn’t notice the needle going up past thirty-five all the way to fifty. Next thing he knew there were flashing red and blue lights in his rearview. And all his happiness disappeared like that.

So that’s why Mamá is so mad she won’t take his phone calls from the little phone booth store in Xono, Mexico. That’s why she won’t send him two thousand dollars to pay for the coyote to bring him back across.

Emma and Morgan and Olivia wouldn’t understand. They would think,
Oh my god, your dad is an illegal criminal speeder construction worker immigrant!

But that’s not who he is.

He is a man who whispers to me in star
language, in the language of an ancient civilization that built pyramids for the sun and the moon and tracked the patterns of stars.

Papá’s favorite thing in the world is mushroom picking. I don’t remember too much from Xono, but I remember when he took me mushroom hunting. It smelled like rain and mud, and the ground squished beneath our feet, and it was just me and him because Dalia didn’t like walking very far.

The last time we went mushroom hunting together, I was six. We were deep in the forest, where hardly any people ever go, and he said, “Zitlally, why don’t you look behind that rock there?” I did, and there was a sunset-colored mushroom that I dropped in my bag. I collected little sticks and he found big logs and we built a fire. We drank from a thermos of tea and roasted mushrooms on sticks over the fire. And then, after they cooled, I felt like I was eating little magical pieces of forest.

Once our bellies were full and happy, he said, “Zitlally, your
mamá
and I are going to
el Norte.”

I leaped into his lap, held his arm fiercely. “I’m coming, too,” I said. Lots of kids in Xono lived with their grandparents or aunts or uncles because their parents were working in
el Norte
. My worst nightmare was that Dalia and I would become two of those kids.

He looked at me for a while and said, “Can you walk for a long, long time, Zitlally?”

“Yes!”

“Can you walk through a desert that is hotter than you can imagine in the day?”

“Yes!”

“And colder than you can imagine at night?”

“Yes!”

“And not complain?”