My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories(23)

“What?” I asked.

She meowed.

“Look,” I told her, “you’re gonna have to start speaking English around here.”

She stuck out her front paws, stretched her multicolored back, and crept away.


Angels in the Snow

Haley was back early the next morning with her bathroom bag, a change of clothes, and a fresh towel. “I don’t mean to keep interrupting … whatever it is you do down here,” she said, “but I kind of had an accident in the kitchen.” She held out the front of her gray Columbia sweatshirt. There was a large catsup stain between the m and the b.

I motioned for her to come inside. “You can just leave your stuff in there if you want.”

She forced a laugh. “Yeah, I don’t think so. That would be taking it way too far. Besides, how do I know you’re not the kind of person who snoops through people’s things?”

“I don’t even shower in there. I use the one in the spare bedroom.”

“That’s what they all say.” She looked down at her catsup stain again. “I know technically this is more of a laundry issue, but I feel dirty.”

“Like I said, you can shower down here whenever you want.”

She set her stuff on the dining room table and reached down to pet the cat. “You’re a friendly one, aren’t you girl? Oh, yes, you are.”

“Her name’s Olive,” I said.

Haley looked up at me. “We’re on a first-name basis now, I see.”

I shrugged. For some reason I wasn’t feeling like my usual laid-back self. I think the hunger was making me irritable. But at the same time, I was happy to be talking to Haley again. Being hungry is bad news. Being hungry and alone? That’s when people start Googling info about suicide hotlines.

She stood up and put her hands on her hips, like she was waiting for something. That unbalanced feeling I got whenever we made eye contact was no longer confined to my stomach. It had moved up into my chest.

“What?” I said.

“You go first this time,” she said.

“We’re doing that getting-to-know-you thing again?”

“Yep,” Haley said. “Every time I come down here, we have to share one new thing. Those are the rules. And ideally it should be something highly personal. The last thing you shared was kind of boring—no offense to your sister.” She glanced over my shoulder, into Mike and Janice’s kitchen. “What are you doing for meals? It never smells like you’ve cooked anything, and I usually hear the takeout guys when they’re coming up the steps.”

“Oh, Mike left a stocked fridge for me,” I lied. “The cupboards are all full, too. They made this big grocery-store run to the new Whole Foods before they left and said I should eat as much as I can.”

“Nice,” Haley said. “But I’m guessing you don’t actually cook.”

I shook my head. “I mostly make sandwiches. And cereal. Easy stuff like that.” My stomach cramped so aggressively at the thought of these mythical meals I winced in pain.

“You’re welcome to eat with me. It’s just as easy to cook for two as it is for one.”

For reasons I didn’t fully understand, Haley’s offer made me want to cry.

I broke eye contact and kneeled down to pet Olive. I was so hungry now I constantly felt lightheaded. My arms and legs felt like Styrofoam. I’d finished off the hot dog bun and baby carrots and the yogurts the night before. When I awoke in the morning, I had half of the chocolate bar. I still felt hungry, though, and drank glass after glass of tap water thinking it would fill me up. It didn’t work.

“Well?” Haley said. “Do you want to come up and have dinner tonight? I was thinking of making vegetable lasagna, my mom’s special holiday recipe.”

My mouth started watering.

Real food.

“I can’t,” I told her.

“What do you mean you can’t?”

I didn’t know how to answer this truthfully. Maybe it was stupid pride—the one thing I had picked up from the rest of the Espinoza men. Or maybe it was a fear of being found out. I constantly felt like an imposter among the other students at NYU. When were they going to figure out I didn’t belong here, that some lady in admissions had made a mistake, had offered a scholarship to the wrong guy? I probably spent as much time trying to hide my ghetto as I did on homework.

“I’m supposed to talk to my family back home,” I said.

“Then come up after.”

“No, like my whole family,” I told her. “Since I won’t be there on Christmas. But I totally appreciate the offer.”

She just stared at me for a few long seconds. “You’re weird.”

I guess she had that part right.

“Anyway.” Haley grabbed her stuff off the table. “You go first this time.”

I still felt oddly emotional, which wasn’t like me. In fact, I hadn’t cried for over a year, since my mom’s funeral.

Maybe that’s what I could tell her, I thought. How when I saw my mom lying in the casket, my dumb ass broke down … in front of everyone. How I started shouting about the world being a f*cked-up piece-of-shit place that I was done with, too. How a few relatives tried to get me to calm down, but all I did was turn my wrath on them. “Who you talking to?” I shouted in my uncle Guillermo’s face. “You don’t know shit about me!” When he reached for my arm I smacked his hand away. I could tell Haley about that. How tears were streaming down my face, even though my expression never changed, not even a little. And I kept shouting, “I don’t give a f*ck about anything! You hear me?”