Free Red Glass by Laura Resau Page B

him a spoonful. If any people were from different towers, it was those three. But they’d found a way to connect. You could almost see little waves of warmth floating between them.
    I looked at Ángel. “I’m not stuck with you. You’re the one who’s stuck with me. You’re the cool one, even Pablo can see that. I’m just—” I was going to say “an amoeba,” but then he’d think I was hopelessly weird.
    “You really don’t know, do you?” he said.
    “What?”
    He smiled. “You have
chispa
, even though you try to hide it.”
    I have a spark? I flushed. I didn’t know what to say.
    A shadow passed over his face. “I wish…” He didn’t finish, just swallowed his last spoonful of Jell-O, looked at his box, and breathed out. The kind of sigh that said it was too late for whatever his wish was.

The White Dress
    The next day we went to the single tourist attraction in town: ancient ruins of a Mixtec city, complete with temples to climb on. It was a hot, cloudless day, and I’d forgotten my hat. We’d left in the cool green morning before the sun was strong. But within an hour, by the time we reached the top of the hill, the sun was shining relentlessly overhead. I’d forgotten my sunscreen, and my face was already burning. Normally I would have hidden in a little patch of shade, swept up in a panic over skin cancer—all it takes is one bad burn, they say—but Ángel said my cheeks looked pink and nice. “Taste the berries and forget about falling off the cliff,” he told me.
    We watched Pablo jump from stone to stone, run along walls, up and down steps, breathless, sweating, laughing. A wild thing. All the pent-up energy from a year of sullenness suddenly let loose. Dika and Mr. Lorenzo sat under a gnarled tree looking at the sea of rooftops in the valley, pointing and speculating on our hotel’s location.
    Ángel and I wove around spiky shrubs toward the temple, and sat on a stone step. There were no shadows here in the center of the ruins. Everything was exposed.
    “I don’t feel empty anymore,” he said. “Like I did last night.”
    “Good.”
    He set down the wooden box on his lap and absently ran his fingers over it. “You know, I never feel completely empty,” he said. “My mother’s always with me.” Then he tilted his face to the sun and said, “This place reminds me of dying of thirst. You know what it’s like to be dying of thirst?”
    Pablo used to stare at the aquarium for hours at night, hypnotized by the sound of gurgling water. I said, “I imagine, sometimes, how Pablo felt.”
    He nodded. “The third time I almost died was when my dad and I crossed the desert to come to the U.S. The coyote suddenly took off. He left us there. Some people went one way, some another. Me and my dad went off one way, what we thought was north. We ran out of food and water—the coyote had told us it would only take a few hours to cross. But twenty-four hours had passed when he abandoned us. Then another day passed. All I thought about was my mother. I thought of her when my guts were empty, all tied in knots. My tongue was dry and felt huge in my mouth. My lips were cracked and bleeding and when I tried to speak only creaks came out. I thought of my mother and the towels she would put on my head when I had a fever, green scraps of towels that felt cool and wet.
    “We passed a little pond. It was dark and murky, with things hidden underneath, hairy plants, green slime. My dad said, ‘Don’t drink it,
hijo
.’ But he couldn’t resist. He ran and scooped water into his mouth. ‘Don’t drink it,’ he said. Water was running down his chin, down the front of his shirt. But I drank it anyway. It stank but we didn’t care. A minute later, our stomachs were cramping like fists squeezing everything out of us. Vomit poured out of our mouths and we shook, and the whole time I thought of her, watching me, the way she watched me sleep when I was sick. The way the beads on her necklaces clinked