Flying Lessons & Other Stories(34)

But none of it makes me feel happy.

It makes me feel worse.

—

I tell Nani I made friends. That I had a great time.

“Did you?” she says, sounding surprised as we slide into a taxi. “Well, you must want to come back tomorrow, then.”

“No, it’s okay,” I say quickly. “It’s our last day tomorrow. Let’s do something else.”

She doesn’t reply.

Two hours later, we’re standing side by side in a vast, smoky kitchen that reeks of olives and Iberian ham.

I’d asked her if we could go somewhere less fancy for dinner tonight. Somewhere that wasn’t filled with rich, old couples.

This is my punishment.

“Santosh, you’ll have to chop a little faster if you want our dish to actually be served,” says Nani, dressed in a sequined pantsuit as she stirs the paella rice.

I look up at all the other teams at their cooking stations, hovering over their patatas bravas, boquerones, and paquetitos. It’s an authentic Catalan cooking class, taught entirely in Spanish, so Nani and I only catch every eighth word. (“Couldn’t you have asked Yamila for something taught in English?” I growl. “And cook with tourists?” she flares.)

Nani commandeers our paella—she’s both a brilliant cook and quite competitive, already throwing darting looks at the other teams—while she leaves me the lone task of chopping the shrimp. So far I’ve managed to slice three of them. My mind is still somewhere on the beach.

“You don’t think they have garam masala, do you?” I hear Nani saying. “Or at least some red chilies…”

I ignore her.

“By the way, what were the names of the friends you made?”

I snap out of my stupor and see her sprinkling parsley over the pan.

“What?”

“I asked you the names of your friends,” she repeats, not looking at me.

“Oh, I can’t remember,” I say, suddenly focused on my shrimp. “They were complicated names. Spanish ones.”

“I see. And what did you do with these nameless friends?”

“Swam and played ball. Usual stuff. You should put the mussels in, Nani. I think he said to put those in before the—”

“Did you speak to them in Spanish or English?”

“I don’t see what—”

She glares at me. “Or did you sit in the same spot for two hours, watching a boy play ball with his friends after that very same boy offered you a chance to join in and you refused?”

I gawk at her, eyes wide. Then I notice her hands. Hands bearing yesterday’s nail polish. Hands that never made it to the Pink Peony.

“You were spying on me?” I yell.

The whole kitchen goes quiet. Teams leer at us, their dishes already plated.

Nani and I shove a lid on our furies and finish the paella.

Well, Nani finishes. I just stew.

Neither of us speak in the taxi ride back to the hotel, which is fine by me, because my stomach feels like a kettlebell. I should have pretended to eat the other teams’ plates, like Nani did, and just made do with the olives and prosciutto.

“I wasn’t spying on you, Santosh,” she says finally. “I felt bad you spent yesterday in a cave, so today when I dropped you off, I waited to make sure you were okay. Then that boy hit you with his ball and I was about to run down into the sand and give him a beating…but then I saw you talking to him. He even held out the racket, as if he wanted you to play. When you pushed it away, I thought it was because you don’t like sports. Your mother hates sports too. Like your grandfather. But then instead of going for a walk or swimming or buying more ice cream, you just sat there, staring at that boy after he left. I waited so long for you to get up that I almost missed my lunch. But you never moved.”

My stomach cramps tighter. I can feel my armpits sweating. “I wasn’t staring at him,” I say coldly.

She smiles at me. “The wonderful thing about Europe is that you can stare at whoever you like and no one cares.”

I don’t smile back. “Grandma. I wasn’t staring at him.”

The poison in my voice is so toxic the lightness vanishes from her face.

Nani nods, biting at the edge of her lip, before she peers through her window and I turn to look out mine.

I relish the silence.

“Though it’s a funny thing,” she says. “At your age, sometimes it’s hard to know whether you like someone…or whether you just want to be them.”

I turn sharply, but her eyes are locked out the window, where they stay for the rest of the ride.

—

The next morning, I can still feel dinner sitting in my stomach.

Nani has some last-minute shopping to do, so I tell her I’m going to read in the park until lunch. But I don’t go to the park. Instead, I slip my still-wet swimsuit under my shorts and ask pretty, bubbly Yamila at the concierge desk to call me a taxi to the beach. She looks a touch wary of sending me off on my own, but I smile and tell her Nani’s sleeping and it seems to do the trick.

An hour later, I’m in my usual spot, clutching vanilla ice cream and watching Tomas down the shore, tanning in the sun next to the skinny blond girl who’d been playing paddleball with him the day before.

Tomas spotted me when I arrived. He craned his head, his eyes flicking over my toothpick frame before he yawned and lay back down on his towel.