Star in the Forest (5 page)

“I’m just going to layer his hair a little,” Crystal said. She walked around him, fluffing his fur here and there, studying it like a hairdresser about to try a new style.

“He already looks good like this,” I said.

“Listen, Zit. A few years back, my mom was, like, the owner of this chain of super-fancy beauty salons. She taught me everything she knows. I’m a whiz at layers. I can give his hair a windblown look.”

I snatched the scissors from Crystal’s hands and stuck the brush there. “You can brush and style. But absolutely no layers!”

“No problem,” she said. “I can work magic with a brush.”

At first I didn’t believe her because of her
scraggly mess of hair. But as she styled Star’s fur, I had to admit, it looked like she knew what she was doing. And Star was sighing with delight the whole time. Maybe Crystal’s mom had worked at the Supercuts in the mall for a while or something.

When Crystal was done, she said, “Tah-dah!” Star seemed to hold his head higher, like he was proud of his new look. He did look sensational. His fur was white as the moon. The star on his head was black as the night. We ran around and played with him. I admit I was nervous he’d take off, but he never left our sight. When it was time to go, we hugged him goodbye and hooked him back up to the chain.
“Hasta mañana
, Star,” I said, and blew him a kiss.

On the way back from the forest, Crystal said, “Tell me a story, Zit.”

That was a first. It was as though she was out of her own stories. Luckily, I did have plenty of stories: stories Papá would tell me.

“About what?” I asked.

“About, um …” She looked at Star. “Animals.”

I thought. “Well,” I said, “my dad told me how in the time of the great-great-grandparents, people used to have special animals. When a baby was born, they’d figure out what its special animal was. And if something happened to the animal, like it got shot, then the person would get hurt, too. He would feel the animal’s pain. And if the animal died, the person died, too.”

“That’s awful!” Crystal said.

“But also,” I said, “if a person needed extra strength, like superpowers, he could think about his animal and use its powers. Like if it was a deer, he could run really fast.”

Crystal was nodding and thinking and listening closely. “So their fates were tied up together.”

I nodded.

“You think Star is someone’s animal?” she whispered. “That there’s some human out there who has his same fate?”

I shrugged.

But inside, I knew. I knew who shared Star’s fate. I’d known ever since the day he wagged his tail at me. And every time he licked me, I felt more sure. It wasn’t just a coincidence that I met Star right after Papá left. Papá must have asked his special animal to stay with me.

This made me feel good.

But Star was illegal, too, like Papá. No license, no papers. If the dog cops came, I couldn’t prove Star was really mine. And if the person who thought he was Star’s owner took him, there was nothing I could do. This scared me. Star could disappear at any time, just like Papá.

When I got home, the drywallers were still at work, and my sisters were watching TV in the living room. Mamá and Dalia had started talking again because Dalia had broken up with her boyfriend and said she wanted to come home. We’d all missed her a lot anyway, and she did help out with Reina after school.

Mamá was zipping around the kitchen, frying meat and heating beans and tortillas for dinner. She wore a short jeans skirt and a silky black top and dangly golden earrings. And she was wrapped up in a haze of perfume that nearly drowned out the sizzling meat smell.

“Where are you going?” I asked. She was too dressed up for work.

“Out with my girlfriends. Dalia’s watching you and Reina.” She was stirring and flipping and grabbing cups and forks so fast she didn’t even look at me. “I’ll be back late.”

This made me red-hot furious.
What?!
I wanted to scream.
Reina and I aren’t good enough to hang out with on a Saturday night?!

I decided I wouldn’t talk to her.

She snatched a plate with one hand. With the other hand, she scooped out beans and slid some meat onto the plate. She did the same with three more plates, then plopped them on the table. “Dalia! Reina! Dinner!”

I picked at my beans and didn’t say a single
word to Mamá. Not even
Pass the salt
. I didn’t even nod or shake my head. Reina went on and on about Dora the Explorer and her magical stars while I glared at Mamá from the corner of my eye.

She didn’t notice. She scarfed down her food, wiped her mouth, grabbed her purse, and called out good night over her shoulder. The screen door slammed behind her, and I started thinking,
Maybe I should start getting bad grades so Mr. Martin will call her and she’ll send me back to Mexico to live with Papá
. But when I thought of that, my stomach tightened into a hundred thousand knots.

Papá’s truck is red with an American flag on one window and a Mexican flag on the other. It says
Mora
in big, fancy letters across the back windshield because that’s our last name. He used to wash his truck every Sunday after church and Reina and I would help.

The week after Dalia moved back in, Reina got sick with a fever and white spots all over her throat. So we all got in the truck, Reina and Dalia
and Mamá and me, and we went to Urgent Care. It turned out Reina had strep throat, and we had to drive to the pharmacy to pick up her medicine. On the way to the pharmacy, Reina was asleep and Dalia was listening to music on her earphones and Mamá was telling me how we’d have to mix the medicine with Coke so Reina would take it.

That’s when I noticed it.

The red flashing light, and then the siren, right behind us.

My heart started booming.

Then Mamá noticed the light and the siren. She stopped talking about the medicine and started saying,
“Jesús María José Jesús María José …”
She pulled over and whispered the names of the entire Holy Family over and over and over again until the cop came to her window.

“License, insurance, and registration, ma’am.”

She opened the glove compartment. Her hands were shaking bad. She held out the pieces of paper. They were shaking bad, too.

The cop watched the papers shaking, like it was proof she was guilty.

She said in English, “I forget license. In my home. I very sorry, very sorry, mister.”

My face got hot. She talked like a baby in English. Plus, she was lying about the license. She never lied, but now she was lying.

The cop talked slowly, like she was a little kid. “Ma’am, it’s against the law to drive without a license. If you can’t locate it, I recommend you get a new one or stay off the roads.” He stared at her hard, like he knew she was illegal. Like she was a stray dog without tags, something you would send to the pound, except it wouldn’t be the pound, it would be Mexico.

Tears started pouring out of her eyes, and my hot feeling got hotter. I looked at Dalia. Her face was stony. Her earphones were in her lap and her fingers were twisting around the wires.

This is it
.

We’re all going to be
deportadas
now and they’ll
send us straight to jail, then straight to Mexico, and will I have time to say goodbye to Star and even Crystal, because yes, maybe she’s my best friend after all, and maybe she’ll take care of Star, I know she will, and what about Reina, because she was born here and she’s legal and what if they make her stay and make us go, because even though she’s a pain sometimes, I like having her around, and who will make sure she takes all ten days of antibiotics and know that you have to mix it with a little Coke for her to swallow it
?

The cop said, “Ma’am, are you aware you have a headlight out?”

Mamá didn’t understand. My mouth was stuck shut, so Dalia translated.

“No, mister,” Mamá said. “I don’t know light broken.”

He gave her back the little pieces of paper. “It’s your lucky day, ma’am. Just promise me you’ll get that headlight fixed. And stay off the roads if you don’t have a license.”

“Yes, yes, mister, thank you, thank you.” Except she said it like
Tank you
. But I didn’t feel too embarrassed this time because I was so glad we weren’t going to be
deportadas
.

By the time we got home, my heart had stopped booming enough that I could do my social studies homework and only once in a while did a picture come into my head of Mamá’s hands shaking.

The next day, Mamá said her heart kept booming, like it was stuck, like when a clock alarm’s beeping and you can’t find the Off button. Finally, she said she wasn’t going to drive anymore in this country because it was giving her
nervios
. And she started saying she missed Papá, and maybe she’d send him that money if he swore not to speed again.

For a few days, Papá’s red truck sat in front of our trailer, looking lonely. I passed it every day on the way to the bus stop, and coming home from the
bus stop, and on the way to the forest, and on the way home from the forest. I brushed my hand against it every time I passed, and a thin layer of dirt rubbed off on my fingertips.

After church on Sunday, we were walking home from the bus stop when I saw the drywaller guys peeling off the Mora sticker with a knife. They were putting on a sticker of a beautiful lady in a swimsuit instead.

Mamá frowned at the new sticker, but she didn’t tell them to get their hands off Papá’s truck.

I pressed my lips together, tight and furious.

Inside, Mamá started scrambling eggs.

I couldn’t hold it in anymore. “Did you sell Papá’s truck to the drywall guys?”

“Yes.”

“You want us to forget about him, don’t you?”

“He’s coming home, Zitlally,” she said. And she smiled in a shiny-eyed way that made me sure she wasn’t joking. “I sent the money from the truck to your father. Money to pay the coyote. He’s coming home. Probably in a week or so.
Si Dios quiere.”

I was so dizzy with happiness, I couldn’t find words.

“We wanted it to be a surprise, Zitlally,” she said. “We wanted him to just show up at the door and see how happy you’d be.”

There was so much happiness in me now, the trailer was too small to hold it all. So much happiness it was bursting out the windows and through the screen door. So much happiness the only thing I could think to do with it all was grab some stale tortillas and run next door to Crystal’s.

Usually Crystal was the one who knocked on my door, but this time I knocked on hers. She answered the door in pink leggings and a purple T-shirt that was too big for her.

“My dad’s coming home!” I said. “Want to go to the forest to celebrate?”

“Woohoo!” she shouted. “Woohoooooo!”

She put on some sparkly flip-flops and we took
off running down the path and I didn’t even feel embarrassed that her outfit looked like pajamas. It was full-fledged springtime now. Red tulips with velvety black stars inside had opened up next to the daffodils.

When we got there, Star was wagging his tail like crazy. I gave him a hug and a tortilla and unhooked his chain.

“Hey!” Crystal said. “I got an idea!”

“What?”

“Let’s train Star. We can put on a dog show for your dad!”

“You know how to train dogs?”

“Duh!” She said it in a nice way, though. “My dad trained like nineteen hundred sled dogs in Alaska a few years back. You know the ones in those races?”

I nodded.

“Well, he trained, like, all the winners. And he taught me, too.” She nuzzled her nose against Star’s. “Plus, we had a puppy once named Poopsies, and she peed everywhere and chewed up
everything and my mom’s boyfriend said if Poopsies didn’t get good fast he was gonna put her in a sack filled with stones and throw it in a river.”

“That’s awful!” Now that I thought about it, I remembered, a couple of years back, a puppy yapping and whining in their trailer.

“I know. If my dad was there he would have kicked the dictator’s butt and made Poopsies into a blue-ribbon sled dog. But he was working with kangaroos in Australia, so I got out a bunch of books from the library and started training Poopsies myself.”

“Did it work?”

“I practically got that dog to talk!” she said.

“Where’s Poopsies now?” I asked.

Crystal looked away, at grass poking through an old engine. “With my dad. He fell in love with her since she was so well-behaved. So I said he could take her along on his trips. He gets sad sometimes without me, you know?”

I knew where her dad really was. But it seemed too late to tell her now. It seemed like something
a person shouldn’t do to her best friend. So I decided to let myself believe her dad really was a sled-dog-training, lemur-studying, polar-bear-saving world traveler. Who got sad sometimes.

Crystal must have learned something from those library books, because the first day of training, with just some Cheerios, we taught Star how to sit! And on the second day, with lemon wafers, how to lie down. And on the third day, with Doritos, how to roll over. He was such a smart dog.