Free Tell Me Something True by Leila Cobo Page A

shelf. Their eyes meet briefly, his move on, and it occurs to her, for the first
     time, that he might not even remember her.
    But as quickly as his eyes move on, they move back, and his mouth slowly, knowingly, curves into that sideways smile that
     reached her three nights ago.
    “Gabriella,” he says simply. It’s not a greeting or a question, but a statement, and she knows, unequivocally, that she, too,
     has been a part of his waking days.
    “Angel? Angel!” The voice interrupts the answer she’s unable to give, and the girl that steps onto the aisle with his name
     on her lips is beautiful in the way well-kept girls with straight blonde hair and fake breasts can be.
    With her box of tampons and her ugly sweats Gabriella is utterly at a loss.
    Only the arrival of Edgar, competent, commanding, practical, reminds her that she’s not a player in this contest. “It’s nice
     to see you, Angel,” she says demurely as she slides by him on her way to the register and out the door.
    Later, many days later, he told her he’d had one of his bodyguards follow her home.
    But that afternoon, he only sends the roses. Five dozen red roses that the doorman brings up through the back door with a
     card inside a sealed envelope.
    “Some things are really more beautiful up close. Angel.”
    “Who is this Angel?” Nini asks when she comes home that evening and sees the outrageous bouquet.
    “Just a boy I met, Nini. At the party,” Gabriella says shortly.
    “Do I know him?” presses Nini. She always presses.
    “I don’t know,” says Gabriella, deliberately evasive.
    “I need to know who he is for you to go out with him,” says Nini, who thinks every stranger is a possible kidnapper.
    Gabriella doesn’t remind Nini that she’s twenty-one years old and can go out with whomever she pleases. In this house, that
     wouldn’t fly. And if Nini knew who Angel’s father was… Well, Gabriella truly can’t imagine what the reaction could be.
    “Nini, I met him at the party,” she reiterates simply. “With Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos knows him.”
    That night, she lies on her bed and looks at the roses, which she’s insisted on placing in her room. No one has ever sent
     her five dozen roses before, and the extravagance of the gesture thrills her.
    She turns on the light in her room and looks at the card once more.
Some things are really more beautiful up close,
it reads in bold, block letters, and she knows that he wrote it himself, that he can get anyone to do anything for him, but
     that this, he’s done alone.

Helena

    H is face was framed by the lens of my camera.
    He had black eyes and blacker hair that he combed straight back, exposing a widow’s peak he inherited from his Spanish grandfather.
     From the passenger seat of his black Ford Explorer I trained my lens on him patiently, zeroing in on the thin nose that’s
     very slightly hooked and haughty. But then he looked at me sideways and smiled, displaying a surprising dimple beneath his
     mouth, and the arrogance of his profile dissipated. He drove with his elbow propped on the open window, steering with one
     hand, smoking with the other, never taking his eyes off the road as he pushed in the cigarette lighter by the stereo, waited
     until it popped out, lit the cigarette, and inhaled deeply.
    He liked to talk. To pontificate. I liked it. I was lulled by his running commentary. How the endless row of tall acacias
     that divide the road in two is the work of a group of radical, well-educated bourgeois women, who had raised the money to
     plant the trees after countless accidents happened at night, because drivers were blinded by the bright lights.
    He told me how the sugarcane is not cut by machinery, but by the hands of dozens of shirtless men wielding machetes relentlessly
     under the Andean sun. How they were paid by the weight of their cut cane. How in their rush to cut more and more, accidents
     frequently happened: lost fingers, slashed calves.
    How, how,