a box of paletas. Josefina ignored her and dragged the cart toward the grocery store.
Marcos sprinted across the street towards Casey and Stacey. They cooed and giggled at him. He chatted them up and returned holding a popsicle. “You want some, Masi?” He licked it and pushed it toward me.
“You already put your tongue all over it.” I pushed his hand away. He devoured the rest of the popsicle and stuck the stick in the back pocket of his overalls. “That’s gross,” I added for good measure.
“Roll us home.” Josefina nudged the cart in Marcos’ direction.
“No, you’ll break it,” he said. I gave him a dirty look. Josefina gave him something even dirtier than my look. It involved a finger. Marcos shoved past Josefina. “Come on, Masi. Let’s race,” he said.
“No.” I shook my head, but thought better of it. Marcos had asked, and I had nothing better to do than to go home and stew in my own worry.
Take that other letter in my parents’ letter drawer that I didn’t want to think about. The school district had sent out a notice at the beginning of summer informing my parents that they were closing down American Academy. We would be bused to the next nearest school in the fall. Most kids might think there was nothing better than having their school close down. On test days, I wished it would.
But I didn’t want a new school or new friends. I already had a best friend.
Josefina and I had chosen each other to begin with. On the first day of kindergarten, I’d stuck to my mom’s side like a grease stain. “Look, don’t you want to make friends?” my mom had asked. Josefina noticed me crying beside my mom and came up to me. She grabbed my hand, and we walked into school together. We’d been as good as sisters ever since. As for Marcos, some days he was really nice. Some days he was unbearable. Josefina said that’s exactly what having a brother was like. I’d never told either of them about my sometimes crush. So he treated me no different than his sister. I tried not to think about how much I would miss the Nowaks if we didn’t save Pig Park.
“Wait,” I said to Marcos.
“Races don’t wait, Masi. That’s like asking the wind to wait.” Marcos tugged on my hair and sprinted past me toward the American Lard Company’s immense fenced-in parking lot, which sat barren as a desert on the north side of Pig Park.
“Whatever,” I yelled. I took hold of the cart’s plastic handlebar, tightened my grip and barreled after him.
My shirt clung to my skin as I ran. The gap between us grew wider and wider. He looked back and mouthed the words “toooooo sloooow.” It was as if to say that there was no point in chasing him—and, of course, that was true on more than one level. Marcos became a dot, then nothing. He was halfway to the equator. I gave up and stopped. That’s the way it always went with Marcos. I flipped the cart on its side and boosted myself up to grab hold of the windowsill of one of the company’s buildings. I peered into the darkness. I yelled my name through a broken pane, “Maaaasi!” Nothing came back, not even an echo.
“I don’t know how you can still move,” Josefina said over my shoulder.
I turned the cart right side up and pushed south. “I don’t know either.” I pulled at my sleeves and looked at my arms, but there was nothing to see. Not even a sunburn like Josefina’s.
“What does that doctor guy even know? He lives a million miles away from Pig Park,” Josefina said. She meant Dr. Vidales Casal, the man who had come up with the idea to build a pyramid in the first place. “I mean, I looked him up. His website says he’s president of the Autonomous University of New Mexico, on top of being a professor and a bunch of other stuff.”
“What about the president of Mexico?”
“You’re not paying attention.”
“Let’s stop for a second,” I said. I stretched out on a nearby patch of grass. I kicked off my shoes and wiggled my stubby brown toes through the cool blades. I pulled a tube of chapstick from my pocket and slathered on the melted strawberry-flavored balm.
Josefina plopped down on the curb. She rubbed her scalp with one hand and her neck with the other. “My hair hurts. I’m done. I’m not coming back tomorrow.”
It was a punch to the gut, as if I’d stumbled into a pile of bricks. My chapstick fell in the grass and rolled into the gutter. I let it vanish into the sewer, and just stared at Josefina.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said.
“It’s hard not to.”
“I don’t want to come back. My mom pawned all her jewelry—even the stuff my grandma left her when she died— to help pay for this scheme. She used to stare at that stuff and cry herself to sleep. She’s probably never getting it back. I don’t even care anymore. Look at what happened with Otto,” she said. Otto was a boy she’d fallen in love with the year before. His father had found a job downstate just before the summer, and they’d moved away. “It makes me want to leave too. It makes me not care about a lot of things.”
I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t know anything about that kind of love. I wanted to—I wished I could meet a boy who saw me as more than his little sister— but that obviously hadn’t happened.
But I did know something about a different kind of love. Josefina’s words made me feel like I didn’t matter. I was a speck of pollen drifting past her. I wanted Josefina to care and to want to fight to stay together. I wanted our friendship to mean something. I didn’t say anything. We sat there in silence.
“Hot, hot, HOT!” Josefina blurted. She fanned herself with her hand. “It’s time to go.”
I stood up. I wasn’t ready to let Josefina quit. She just needed to give it time. “Think about it,” I said. Josefina shrugged. I pushed the cart to the grocery store for her, then stomped off in the opposite direction towards the bakery.
A boy I didn’t recognize rounded the corner from one of the American Lard Company’s vacant buildings. His eyes drank in everything around him.
He was older, but not a grown-up. He wasn’t dressed to work like the rest of us. He wore pressed khakis, a plain but tidy blue polo shirt, and carried a backpack. His skin was the color of toast.
Maybe he was lost. Although the company’s buildings blocked Pig Park from the expressway and any major roads, the train stopped right here. People still rode those trains from their crummy downtown jobs stapling papers and cleaning buildings to get to the neighborhoods west of us, then back downtown the next day. I’d seen those train cars bursting at the seams like Josefina in her gym shorts. It was possible to get off by mistake.
Or maybe he was one of the people who were supposed to come on account of the pyramid. Never mind that we hadn’t even built it yet.
I looked at the train stop, then the boy, then back again. I closed my eyes and opened them. The boy vanished. Maybe the boy had been wishful thinking or a mirage. It was hot enough for it.
I made my way into the bakery. I was downright delirious.
“This is nuts,” my mom said to my dad. I tuned them out and climbed the back stairs to my
