Free Kia and Gio by Daniel José Older

 
    Â 
    I don’t know why I can’t stop thinking of Giovanni today. I opened the botánica early, even though it’s Saturday, because I couldn’t go back to sleep, and lying in bed with the sunshine creeping over me just wasn’t cutting it. Now that I’m here, it’s like there’s a tiny Gio hiding behind all the little potion vials and sacred pots on the shelves around me.
    Yes, I have homework to do. And Baba Eddie doesn’t have any readings till noon, which means he’ll waddle in at 11:58, sipping his coffee. But here I am. The sunlight finds its way through the saint statues in the window display, lands on me, and warms my skin. I feel old even though I’m not. Giovanni.
    I should probably give up and admit he’s dead. Everyone else has. A boy like that, that bright a fire, they figure it’s too much to ask to have him around for more than a decade or two. Instead I make up stories about where he ended up: Giovanni in Amsterdam, whoring around gleefully with poets and painters, smoking hash and making fun of American tourists. Giovanni in India, writing plays while riding elephants. Giovanni in Tunisia, fermenting a lusty new remix of the Arab Spring.
    When I was ten and he was—what? Sixteen?—I was still plotting how to get him to marry me. I’d done all the math, checked and rechecked it: he would be twenty-three when I made seventeen, the legal age to marry in New York. That seemed doable: seventeen and twenty-three. Shit, Uncle Freddie got married when he was fifteen and Aunt Bea was twenty-eight and they’re still going strong. Then again, Uncle Freddie’s been known to swallow his own teeth on purpose. Anyway, I scratched the equations out on my little Powerpuff Girls notepad and arrived triumphantly at the conclusion that it was doable, mathematically at least. The other concerns—that he obviously had no interest whatsoever in girls and that we’re first cousins—those all seemed like secondary problems. Sex was gross anyway, right? Who wanted all that?
    I’m gonna be seventeen next week, and Giovanni is … nowhere.
    *   *   *
    A woman comes in, ignoring the CLOSED sign on the door. I can’t tell if she’s white or Puerto Rican or … white and Puerto Rican? She’s got loud purple lipstick on and she’s almost perfectly round. Maybe she’s been here before—Gina? Louisa? Then she opens her mouth. She’s definitely Puerto Rican. “Hola, mi niña. Lissen, you have those collares for Babalu I asked about before? It was maybe two weeks ago, yes?”
    Oh yeah, she was here before, but it wasn’t no two weeks ago. Two months, maybe. “We already sold ‘em out, Iya.” I use the respectful term for an elder santera, even though I don’t know if she’s initiated or not. Whatever, one way or the other, she’s older than me.
    â€œAy, mi madre, but I put in the order and everything.” A sing-songy whine enters her voice. I want nothing to do with it so I end the conversation quick and she finds her way to the door. And then: Giovanni. Giovanni dressed in a hundred shades of violet, fro unruly. We’re on our way home from school. He’s rolling his eyes because he got cast as the swan again in the ballet school’s version of Swan Lake . “Gayest role ever,” he said, sipping a cup of milk and sugar with a splash of coffee in it. “So stupid. Why can’t we do a ballet based on Ishigu ?”
    I jumped up and down and did little pirouettes around him. “Ishigu! Ishigu!” That’s the manga we both loved. Well, I loved it because he loved it, and everything he loved was a holy relic to me. Plus, Ishigu was half-boydemon, half-android, and surrounded by the hottest anime chicks in the Robot City. Gio could be Ishigu and I could be Maiya, who carried a staff with a talking ram head on top that she used