Read Online Party Girl by Lynne Ewing - Free Book Online Page B

“My mama was a lot like Ana. Do you remember her?”
    “No,” I lied, not wanting to remember the only time I’d met her.
    I scratched his back until he fell asleep. Then I got up and looked out the window. The wind had scattered the fog, and the few remaining clouds looked white against an indigo sky. Shadows hovered close to the apple and avocado trees.
    I had a strange feeling that something really bad was going to happen—worse than Ana’s dying. I didn’t know why I should feel so afraid. Nothing could be worse than losing Ana, but my hands started trembling and a lump I couldn’t swallow grew in my throat. Nando said you can’t miss something you never had, so there must have been a time when I felt safe.
    I crawled back into bed, and when I glanced back out the window, I had the unshakable feeling that someone had been standing there, watching me. A small mark smudged the outside of the window like an angel’s fingerprint.
    My curandero grandfather had told me that in ancient times spirits and angels traveled in our world, but when people stopped believing in the spirit world, the door between the worlds closed. Now spirits and angels couldonly make the passage into our world by twisting through the keyhole and screwing their beauty into scary shapes: werewolves, vampires, and ghouls. Geists, my grandmother called these spirits that invaded our world.
    My grandfather told me this when I was afraid of the invisible creatures I sensed lurking in the darkness around my bed. He protected me then, but now his power had faded into the black-and-white photographs that hung above my bed, and I didn’t know who could protect me.
    “Jesucristo, Redentor mío, ¿por qué me has desamparado?” I muttered, praying to God. “Why have you abandoned me?” But I didn’t expect an answer. He couldn’t hear me. I was lost to Him.
    The next day I woke up alone. Ana was still dead. Pocho had left sometime during the night.
    Sunshine turned the morning fog metallic and dusted the leaves with gold. Then the gold glare lifted and the fog disappeared the same way it had come, from nowhere and in silence like some mysterious force. It made me sad when the fog disappeared because I no longer had an excuse to stay in bed.
    I got up and went to the kitchen, my bare feet cold on the linoleum floor, to make a cup of coffee for Mom. The faint smell of peanut butter and coffee lingered over thedirty dishes Pocho had left on the counter. Water dripped from the faucet onto a knife in the sink. I rinsed the dishes and left them on the drainboard, then boiled water and made a cup of coffee. I shook a vitamin from each of the jars and took the pills and coffee to my mother’s room.
    I pressed against the door. The room smelled sour, of stale love and beer and broken promises. The blinds were drawn against the sun. I crept inside to where Mom lay, tangled in her blankets.
    Mom was awake and staring at nothing, her face pressed into her pillow. When I was a girl and she did that, I would run to her and shake her, afraid she was dead. Now some days I prayed for her to die because it was so hard to care for her, but then I would hate myself and pull back the prayer as if it were a kite sent out in a too violent wind.
    I sat on the edge of the bed. I could feel the warmth and comfort of her body through the blankets. I wanted to crawl in bed with her and cry, but I was too afraid she might push me away.
    The puppy was under the covers with her, its head bobbing, lifting the sheet as it shook the pouch I had stolen from the botánica.
    “I’m sorry about the check,” she said finally. “Krandel scares me.”
    I shrugged. “He scares me, too. He’s a kuntur,” I said.That made Mom smile. I think kuntur means “bad-assed dude” in Quechua.
    “You remember that Christmas you wanted the doll with the clown face and I wouldn’t get it for you because I didn’t like it?” she said.
    I nodded.
    “I gave you a Barbie,” she