Free The Queen of Water by Laura Resau Page B

guitar music strumming fast and passionate, then flute music trilling and waving and rising and falling like the mountains and rivers.
    I imagine MacGyver and me dancing at the end of the episode. He spins me and dips me and runs his fingers through my long, loose hair. And then, like a gust of wind, the music picks us up and we are flying in hang gliders like birds over the mountains, swooping in valleys and rising over peaks. Over rich earth and sun-warmed stone and sparkling, sunlit streams.
    After the song ends, he turns down the volume a little. “Well, what do you think?”
    Niño Carlitos and the Doctorita and the other teachers nod politely. “Oh, very nice.” But I can tell that it hasn’t reached in and grabbed their souls the way it has for me and MacGyver.
    “Where’s this group from?” Niño Carlitos asks.
    “An Indian village in the Andes,” MacGyver says. “It’s indígena music.”
    Indigenous music.
    And just like that, the music turns dirty. Ugly and cheap and coated with mud. Barefoot and ridden with lice and fleas. Something you want to hide in a cardboard box, something to stamp out of your mind.
    MacGyver passes around the tape case, and I catch a peek of it over Niño Carlitos’s shoulder. There are three men with long hair in braids, wearing wool ponchos and hats, the same as the men from my village. The same as my father. A sick feeling spreads through my insides. The music fills the room, something haunting now, like a ghost that echoes and rattles in my bones. I look at the tile floor and wish the music would stop.
    After one more song, MacGyver tucks the tape back into his shirt pocket. They chat a little more, and then the Doctorita gives little bags of guavas to MacGyver and the other teachers and says goodbye.
    I run upstairs to the balcony to spy on them leaving. Below, the door opens and MacGyver emerges, chewing on his guava, shaking hands with the other teachers. Then he spits the skin onto the ground and heads down the street. After he disappears around the corner, I race downstairs and out of the house and snatch up the guava skin.
    Back in my room, I sit on my bed and brush the sticky skin on my cheek, touch it to my lips. His mouth touched this skin, and now it’s touching mine, and it’s almost as if he’s kissing me. And I don’t care if he’s really just a regular man, a normal teacher instead of a TV star or secret agent; still I hear him say, Oh, Virginia, my beautiful spy, come with me on my next mission, far from the Andes, north, to America.
    That night I sleep with the guava skin beside me on my pillow. As I drift off, I hear that indigenous music and try to make it stop, but it scoops me up like the winds of the Andes and makes me fly. And again, I struggle against it, but in the end it is too strong, and it carries me away.

chapter 11
    I ’M WALKING BESIDE THE COW on the colegio ’s grounds in a gray drizzle. I like the cow’s company. She moves slowly and munches on the grass and looks at me once in a while with her gigantic eyes. Now that Jaimito is in kindergarten and Andrecito is in preschool, I’m alone more during the day. The house feels strange with no little boy babbling or laughing or whining or crying or shouting or tugging on my skirt or reaching his arms up to me. More and more, I find myself hovering at the edge of the schoolyard, always with an excuse, like picking avocadoes from the trees by the fence, or pasturing the cow.
    The Doctorita’s science class is about to start, but she hasn’t arrived yet. The clouds hang heavy over the low, flat roof of the colegio, hiding the mountains, giving everything a dull metallic sheen. A bunch of seventh and eighth graders in wine-colored uniforms are crowded outside the building, beneath the overhang, trying to stay dry. They’re holding their books open and talking with animated gestures. They seem wound up about something—maybe the rain, maybe an exam, maybe a dance coming up.
    If I were in