Star in the Forest (4 page)

Crystal was not at the bus stop or in school on Monday. I wondered if she was sick. Their beat-up, junk-filled car wasn’t parked in front of their trailer.

That afternoon, Star and I hung out alone again.

That night, no lights or Animal Planet sounds came from Crystal’s windows. There was a terrible storm, the kind with thunder that makes you jump right out of bed. I stayed awake, long after Mamá and Dalia and Reina were asleep, all their raspy breaths overlapping each other.

I thought about Star in the storm and I hoped he was curled up under the rusty hood and wasn’t too scared and lonely.

I wondered where Crystal had gone and if
she’d come back and if there was a storm where she was.

I wondered if there was a storm in Xono, too. Rainy season would start in June, around when school ended. I remembered the storms in rainy season. I remembered being in the kitchen, which was a bamboo shack with slits of light coming through, and woodsmoke filling the space, and the room flashing with lightning, and Papá setting me on his lap and wrapping himself around me so I wouldn’t feel scared.

Papá was good at making me not scared.

After the dog bit me in Xono when I was five, two things happened. I got scared of the dark. And I started waking up in the middle of the night, having to pee really bad.

That was a big problem because to get to our outhouse, you had to walk through a creepy patch of woods. Dalia went with me at first and complained the whole time. “Zitlally! It takes a hundred years for your pee to come out.”

That was another problem. I was so scared in that outhouse, I couldn’t pee. I sat there and held the flashlight and shivered at the giant bug shadows. No pee came out. Dalia yelled at me from outside. “Come on, Zitlally! I’m freezing!” She threw back the curtain and glared. “I thought you had to pee!”

After Dalia wouldn’t take me anymore, Papá did. With his eyes half open, he picked up the flashlight and held my hand and creaked, “Let’s go,
m’hija.”

At the edge of the patch of woods, I stopped and listened to the howls and moans of hidden creatures. I squeezed his hand. “What if there’s a mean dog in there?”

Instead of rolling his eyes and pushing me and snapping
“Go!”
like Dalia did, he bent down and picked up a stick. It was as long as my arm, with some pointy nubs. “If a mean dog comes,
m’hija
, then hold up this magic stick. He’ll run away with his tail between his legs.”

I gripped the stick tight. Just holding it made the howls and moans disappear. And with the howls and moans gone, I could hear the cricket chirps, and a softer sound between them. Stars whispering. Now that I didn’t have to look for mean dog shadows in the woods, I could watch the moon shadows stretching in front of me and Papá. Big, tall, strong shadows.

Inside the outhouse, I sat on the wooden seat, holding my magic stick. Outside the curtain, Papá was whistling a low, starry tune just loud enough that I knew he was there. The pee flowed right out.

For a while, every night after that, Papá handed me a stick, a new one each time. He could always find magic sticks, even in the dark. Now that I’m eleven, I don’t believe in magic sticks, but I have to admit, they worked.

In jail, when I saw Papá looking small and scared through the plastic window, I wanted a magic stick. Even with those square ceiling lights
above, it felt dark in there, like it was the middle of the night and we were in the woods packed with mean dogs. I wanted Papá to find me a magic stick. And I wondered, if he couldn’t find one, could I find one myself? Could I find one for both of us?

Three days passed before Crystal came back. I peeked at the note from her mom on Mr. Martin’s desk.
Family emergency
, it said.

At recess, Crystal stood alone by the fence.

I walked over and said, “Where were you?”

She sighed, a big long sigh. “The dictator left.

His enemies found out where he was hiding, so he
took off. Probably to conquer another island. So me and my mom went to look for my dad.”

“In Antarctica?” I asked. Really, sometimes her lies went too far. I mean, you couldn’t even
get
to Antarctica in four days.

“Of course not. He just got back and we had to meet him at the airport. They located his research team with one of those GPS things. So we stayed with him at this fancy hotel for a few days, but now they’re sending him out on another mission. Africa this time. Madagascar. Studying lemurs.”

“Lemurs?”

“You know, like monkeys.”

“Oh, right. Lemurs.”

Later that day, in the forest, Crystal asked, “What about
your
father?”

“What about him?”

“I haven’t seen him around.”

I tried to think of something as glamorous as Antarctica or Madagascar, but my brain couldn’t
invent lies as fast as hers. “He had to go back to Mexico.”

“What’s he doing there?”

“In the summer he’ll pick mushrooms. They have good ones in the forest there. It’s like looking for treasures. They’re really rare and valuable.” And it was true, they were. If you sold them at the market you could get a lot of money. But we never sold them. We roasted them and ate them and felt like royalty.

“Cool.”

“And I used to go with him, and I had a really good eye for spotting them.” Although thinking about it now, I realized he probably spotted the mushrooms and told me where to look.

“What’d they look like?” she asked.

“Some are red and orange like a sunset. Some are blue green like the ocean. There’s all different kinds.”

Crystal looked at me long and hard. “You should talk more. You have good stuff to say.”

* * *

The next day at school, Crystal said under her breath in the lunch line, as though it was top-secret, “Don’t come to Star right after school. Wait until four o’clock, okay?”

“Why?”

“Just trust me, okay?”

“Okay.”

I watched TV until 3:50. Well, really I watched the clock on the DVD player that seemed to go so, so slowly I thought it was broken. I was by myself. I was hardly ever alone in the house and the air felt strange with no one else in it. Even the TV noise couldn’t fill the space.

Yesterday, Dalia and Mamá had gotten in a big fight and Dalia said she was moving in with her boyfriend and dropping out of school and Mamá said, “No you aren’t, you’re only sixteen,” and Dalia said, “I’ll do whatever I want to do.”

Then late that night, Dalia moved all her clothes and makeup and stuff into a trailer on the
other side of Forest View, and she wasn’t talking to Mamá and wouldn’t answer the cell phone when she called. So Reina stayed after school the next day with a neighbor lady. Luckily I am the perfect age. Mamá says I’m a year too young to babysit my sister, because who knows what the laws are in this country and the last thing she needs is the police coming and arresting her for leaving a four-year-old with an eleven-year-old.

But eleven is old enough to wander around the neighborhood without the neighbor lady knowing what you’re up to. I told her I was going to play with Crystal and she didn’t ask any more questions, just went back to her
telenovelas
while Reina messed with the remote control with no batteries.

Finally 3:50 came and I ran to the forest. Crystal was sitting next to Star. She looked excited about something, so excited she was about to burst. She jumped up when she saw me. She rocked back and forth on her heels with a giant smile. “Zitlally! Guess what?”

“What?”

“You’re going mushroom hunting today!”

And she handed me a basket, the kind with a handle that fancy bottles of bubble bath come in. Papá and I always just used plastic bags, so the basket made me feel like Little Red Riding Hood, but Crystal was so wound up it didn’t matter.

“Okay, go!” she squealed. “Look for them.”

“But they don’t grow here,” I said. “And even if I found a mushroom, I wouldn’t know if it was poisonous or anything.”

“Just look!” she shouted.

First I fed Star his cheese and petted him.

“Come on!” she said. “Go!”

I picked up the basket, unsure what to do.

“Look behind that tire, Zitlally, look!”

I peeked behind the tire and spotted a plastic Ziploc bag, and inside, a red and orange mushroom. It was the small kind that they sell here in the stores, the gray kind, but this was orangey red. I took it from the bag and held it close to my face.

Crystal ran up behind me. “Look! It’s sunset colored! Eat it! You can eat it!”

I looked at her doubtfully.

“It’s just food coloring. The red and the orange! I did it myself!”

I took a little bite. It tasted like Styrofoam, like all store mushrooms do. Not like the broken-plate memory I had of mushrooms roasted over a fire back in Mexico. I forced myself to eat the whole thing.

“There’s more!” she screamed. “Look some more.”

I looked around, under the bits of worn scrap metal, inside old hubcaps, and sure enough, there they were, hidden in nooks and crannies. Mushrooms in plastic bags, dyed ocean blue and green and sunset orange.

“I put them in plastic bags to be sanitary!”

I offered her one and she took it, grimacing as she ate it. “Needs salt,” she said.

I found all nine mushrooms and put them in
my basket, except one, which I gave to Star. He nibbled at it to be polite.

“I’ll eat the rest at home,” I said. “With salt.”

“And maybe mustard,” she said.

We started walking home down the path.

“And chocolate,” I said.

“Oooh! I know! You should microwave a Snickers on them.”

The whole way back we planned dyed-mushroom recipes.

“Thanks, Crystal,” I said before she went into her trailer.

She smiled. “That’s what best friends are for.” And she went inside.

First I thought,
You’re not my best friend
. Then I thought about how she took all that time to dye the mushrooms and hide them and how she did it for me, just to make me happy.

As I turned to go to my trailer, I heard her mom yelling. I could make out the words perfectly. “You left a frickin’ mess in here! Food dye everywhere!” Something bashed. “I should’ve left
you there with your dad, left you both to rot in jail.”

Jail. Crystal’s dad was in jail.

Just like my dad, only hers was still there. Her mom must have taken her to visit him because the boyfriend left. And here I was all wrapped up in feeling sorry for myself about Papá. Maybe things weren’t so bad for me after all. Papá was probably whistling under a blue sky in a green cornfield, working hard to pay his way back to us. And he
would
come back. And Mamá would
never
go out and get herself an evil dictator boyfriend. Papá
was
coming back, and we would all be happy again.

Crystal was the one who really needed a magic stick. Something to make her feel safe. Strong. Loved.

Maybe her lies were her magic stick.

Maybe Star was.

Maybe I was.

“We got to do it,” Crystal said. “We got to unhook Star’s chain.”

It was Saturday and we’d brought a bucket of water, a cup, a raggedy towel, a bottle of orange shampoo-and-conditioner-in-one, scissors, and an old hairbrush that Dalia had left behind.

Crystal was right. We couldn’t do a good job
washing Star if he was tied up. “He won’t run away?” I said.

“No way. We’re, like, his masters now. He’s our best friend forever till death do us part. Like you and me.”

I was glad I’d brought bacon. That was Star’s favorite. I fried it especially for him. Even if he tried to run away, I was sure I could lure him back with bacon.

I held my breath and pushed on the chain’s hook with my finger. The hook was rusty and kind of stuck, but I pushed as hard as I could until it moved. Then I pulled the chain from it and held my breath.

Star was free. He sat there, wagging his tail, smiling at me.

“See, Zit?” Crystal said. “Told you.”

I scratched his ears and said, “Good Star. Good, good Star,” while Crystal poured water over his fur. He squirmed a little, but he stayed. He looked smaller all wet, and you could still see
some long bumps that were his ribs. We lathered him up until he smelled like a big, fresh piece of orange Starburst. Then we rinsed him and dried him with the towel. With scissors, Crystal cut out the tangled, matted pieces of fur. Luckily he had enough fur that the rest filled in the gaps.