Free Red Glass by Laura Resau Page A

Alone, without Pablo, I couldn’t think of anything to say. This was like a date. Almost. A date with a bleached-orange-haired chaperone at the next table over who periodically sent us disapproving glances. Once she called over, “You childrens have good conversation, no?”
    Dessert came free with the meal. They called it
gelatina
, which sounded classier than what it really was—red Jell-O in a clear plastic cup. I looked at it closely to make sure there were no flies or roaches in there. Little ripples and bubbles were caught inside like a frozen lake. Some light bounced off the surface and some light sank in, and for a second I saw a whole world inside the cup of Jell-O. Maybe that was what Dika saw in her red glass, a distant world of light and joy.
    “Hey, lime-girl. You gonna put lime on that
gelatina
?” Ángel said. “’Cause I have another extra one.” He gave me a weak smile, as though he was making a big effort. I heard that if you smile even if you don’t feel like it, you might trick yourself into being happy.
    “No thanks.” I dug my spoon in and slurped it up and felt it dissolve on my tongue. Then I took a deep breath and said, “You’re quiet.”
    “So are you.”
    “But I’m always quiet,” I said.
    “Are you?”
    “Come on, Ángel. What’s wrong?”
    He tapped his fingers on the wooden box. “Just a lot on my mind.”
    “Like what?”
    I figured he would say something about his mom or the jewels or the box, but instead he said, “Someone like you wouldn’t be friends with me in Tucson.”
    I stuck my spoon into the Jell-O and let it stand there, alert like a dog’s tail. “What does that mean—someone like me?” I was truly curious. What would someone like me be like? I’d wondered, of course, how other people saw me. Maybe it would be like when you hear your voice on an answering machine and it doesn’t sound anything like how you think you sound. I hoped so. Mostly I figured other people didn’t notice me. Other times I thought they noticed me enough to see that my clothes didn’t fit right and my hairstyle hadn’t changed since I was five, and that I never knew exactly how much to swing my arms when I walked.
    Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dika throw her head back and guffaw. I wondered if she would be surprised at how other people saw her. Probably she wouldn’t care. Probably she looked at her reflection in the windows by the pool and saw a curvy sixteen-year-old in a sexy bikini. And who knew, maybe Mr. Lorenzo saw her that way too. Maybe he saw her draped in Christmas lights and gold tassels and glitter.
    “Sophie, in wood shop, you never talked to me. You never even learned my name.”
    I looked into the lenses of his sunglasses, trying to figure out if he was joking. His mouth looked serious, no hint of a smile. “But, Ángel—”
    “You only talk to me now ’cause you’re stuck with me,” he said.
    “I didn’t think you cared if I knew your name.” It had never occurred to me to talk to him. He’d seemed too different, with his long black coat and the heap of gold chains around his neck. If I’d tried to talk to him, I figured that instead of really hearing me, he’d just be noticing how I never got slang right. In English class, we read a book with a passage I underlined that said when it comes to explaining to other people what’s deepest and truest and most important to us, each person is trapped in her own tower and everyone speaks a different language, and the only words we share are things like “It’s going to rain. Bring an umbrella.” How can you express your heart’s deepest feelings with words like that?
    At the table next to us, Dika and Mr. Lorenzo were holding hands. Her cup of Jell-O was empty. He was feeding her spoonfuls of his own Jell-O and she was giggling and licking the spoon, then licking her lips seductively. Pablo was oblivious. He bounced up and down in his seat yelling “My turn! My turn!” until Mr. Lorenzo gave