The Last Tree Town Read online

  To my sister, Cristina

  Summer

  1 The Way Hearts Do

  On the first day of seventh grade, I calculate the distance between my sister and me. We’re five miles apart. If it were last year, Daniella would be somewhere in this building, taking notes on Joan of Arc in history class or picking cheese off cafeteria pizza. Now a great gust of wind has swept her 26,400 feet away, to Mapleton High School.

  I dial the combination for my new locker. 13-27-31.

  It’s been thirty-one days since I sat cross-legged on my bed while Daniella painted my nails sparkly blue. (Twenty-seven days of August, plus four days in July.) This can’t be what teachers mean when they say we’ll use math in real life. Adding the number of days since you last heard your sister’s laugh. I stuff my binders into the locker and shut the door.

  “Gah,” I blurt. Mr. Garrison, my sixth-grade algebra teacher, is standing in front of me with a wide grin and a fluorescent pink piece of paper in his hand. His tie has division symbols on it.

  “Congratulations, Cassi,” he says as if I’ve done something extraordinary. As if I didn’t just make a noise in his face like one of those screaming goats.

  “For what?” I try to catch my breath.

  “Your grades from last year qualify you for Math Olympics.” He hands me the piece of paper. “What do you think?”

  I would dance up and down the hall if I could. But I have about as much rhythm as a raisin.

  “I’ll be there,” I say, instead of the dancing. A smile stretches so wide across my face that I can almost see my cheeks. Mom says Daniella and I have the same smile, sister smiles, but I think that’s because we have the same bottom teeth. Crooked, but not quite enough for braces.

  Mr. G high-fives me. Almost all the blue polish on my nails has chipped off, but one tiny speck still clings to my thumb like it can’t let go. I use an old piece of tape to hang the flyer in my locker. Things look brighter now. For the rest of the day, I trace the word “Math” on the flyer every time I take out a binder.

  * * *

  I find Mom in the kitchen after school. Mondays are her day off from working at the Mapleton Library.

  “Mom, guess what?” I take the chair next to hers. Her fingers wind up in her black hair the way they do when she’s stressed. The last time I saw her sitting like that was when the town council wanted to cut the library’s budget in half. Mom fought back, going to all the town meetings and typing emails on her laptop late at night until the council changed its mind.

  A newspaper sits on the table, opened up to the puzzle page.

  The smell of burnt coffee in the kitchen + mistakes on Mom’s sudoku (difficulty level: two out of five stars) = Nothing good.

  “Tell me, mi amor,” she says. Mom writes the number six in a box, looking too tired to fight against town councils or anything else.

  “It can wait.…” I let my voice fade away. I fold over the edge of the place mat, a laminated parrot. “There’s already a six in that row.”

  Mom sits in front of the blue jay place mat. We have a whole set of bird place mats, each one shaped as a different kind of bird. It’s like our kitchen table is a bird sanctuary. She studies the puzzle and then smiles at me in a watery way.

  “Will you try to talk to your sister? I told your dad to bring home her favorite pizza for dinner.”

  My stomach dips.

  “She won’t listen to me,” I tell her. She’s ignored me for thirty-one days.

  “Please.” Mom doesn’t say it like I have a choice. I shove the chair back. The movement shifts the parrot-shaped place mat, so that it looks like it fell onto its face.

  Daniella’s room is across from mine. Three feet apart. A sign on the door spells out her name in tiny, turquoise seashells. We collected the shells with Buelo and Buela in Mayagüez, the town in Puerto Rico where they lived until Mom turned thirteen. I have a name sign like Daniella’s too. “Cassandra” is spelled out in pebbles. No one calls me that, except this sign, and my cousin Jac when she wants to be dramatic. Which is often.

  I knock once, twice, three times. A shell is missing from one of the Ls. I knock again. When she doesn’t answer, I open the door. Daniella’s doorknob has a malfunction. It was installed the wrong way, so it only locks from the outside. Dad is always telling Daniella he’ll fix it. I secretly like that she can never lock herself away from me. Not completely at least.

  Her desk is straight ahead, facing the window. Daniella sits looking at the sunset. She is bronze shoulders, yellow tank top straps, dark curls hanging over the chair. A sister in pieces.

  My heart hollows out the way hearts do when they see something so sad that it’s almost unbearable.

  “Dinner soon,” I tell her.

  “Okay.”

  Her backpack spills out on the throw rug by her bed. I see a navy pencil case, a wooden ruler, a textbook. The spine says The Chemical Property of Life. It seems like the kind of book that would answer big, important questions. Like how my sister could swipe blue polish across my nails one night, and be somebody else the next morning.

  I want to ask Daniella everything about her first day of high school, like if she got placed in American Studies and had the same lunch period as her friend Jenna. She told me she was worried about that.

  “I’ve been told there will be Pepper’s Pizza. Extra crispy, extra pepperoni, light cheese.”

  “O-kay.”

  The word cuts sharp, like stepping on a broken shell. I stop myself from thinking that Daniella is a broken shell. Because she’s not. Because she can’t be. My hand hovers above the doorknob. I guess it doesn’t matter whether something locks from the inside or outside. No one can get in either way.

  2 Pepper’s Pizza

  My family sits at the table that night at our bird place mats. The pizza box is open between us. Pepper’s Pizza puts a single red chili pepper in the center of all their pizzas. Daniella used to pick it off and wave it in front of my face.

  “Five dollars if you eat this,” she said.

  “Three days of math homework if you eat it,” my sixth-grade self answered.

  “No TV if you keep playing with your food,” Mom chimed in. Dad nodded like he agreed but half smiled while doing it.

  Daniella and I paused for a second, laughter trapped in our throats, and then she stuck the pepper into her mouth. She looked at me, victorious, while she chewed. Her dark brown eyes began to water from the spice.

  “Geometry for you,” she teased.

  Tonight the pepper sits on the pizza, curved like a skinny, red smile.

  “Big day, mi amor,” Mom says to Daniella. “High school. Did you like your teachers?”

  “Sure,” Daniella answers. Her hand balls into a fist on the toucan place mat. Her eyes are fixed on its long, orange beak, like she wants it to say something. When we first got the bird place mats, Daniella claimed the toucan because she was obsessed with Froot Loops cereal.

  “Did you find your way around okay?” Dad adds.

  “Yes.”

  I stare so hard at the pepperoni slices that they turn to deep, dark holes. I want to disappear inside one and end up in a world where Daniella still dares me to eat spicy peppers.

  “So a good day, then?” Mom pulls another piece of pizza out of the box and puts it on Daniella’s plate, even though she hasn’t finished her first one. Mom’s movement makes the red pepper flip over. It’s frowning now.

  “It was fine.”

  Dad flinches. Mom opens her mouth and closes it again. I reach quickly for the pepper and scarf it down. It tastes like fire. Daniella looks at me for a second before turning back to the toucan. It doesn’t look anything like the one on a Froot Loops box.

  The kitchen is quiet with the so
und of no one knowing what to say. I take a bite of my pizza and pretend the tears on my face are from the spice.

  3 Sunburn

  My cousin Jac dyed her hair blue with Kool-Aid. She said she read about doing it in an article online, and that it was supposed to wash out in five days. It’s been three weeks. I sit outside the cafeteria at a picnic table with her and our friend Ben Chay. We get twenty minutes of free time after lunch. The late August heat presses down on me. I take off my cardigan.

  “You even burn through sweaters,” Jac says, and pokes my shoulder, where a red blotch blooms across my ivory skin.

  “So do you,” I remind her.

  “Yeah, but you’re the one with Puerto Rican genes.” Jac is my cousin on my dad’s side, which is where I get my copper-colored hair and skin that burns easily in the sun. Buela calls me “Fantasma,” which means “Ghost.” Take care of this skin, Fantasma, she reprimanded during our trip to Puerto Rico when I was nine, while she slathered my arms in SPF 70. Her accent wrapped around the word and made it sound pretty.

  From my spot in the shade, I noticed for the first time how Daniella’s skin glowed when she lay on her striped towel. Like she was made of gold and Mayagüez sunshine. I was made of freckled white sand and SPF 70.

  “Tell us about Math Olympics,” Ben says. He shimmies to the song pouring out of his headphones, eyes bright brown, his dark hair cut neat around his ears. His T-shirt says Caution: May Spontaneously Burst into Song in letters that look like spray paint. A very accurate warning.

  “It’s boring,” I lie.

  “If it matters to you, it’s not boring.” Jac smiles. The corners of her mouth curve into her cheeks like carvings. I shiver, which is exactly what she wants. She knows her smile is spooky, and she embraces it wholeheartedly. I think about Jac and Ben and Daniella and me sitting outside by the fire pit Dad built in our backyard. The last time we were out there, Jac held a flashlight under her face and grinned.

  “You’re supposed to say something, Jac. Not make faces. Tell us a story,” Daniella said with a mouth full of s’more. The air smelled like smoke and summer.

  “Are you not still scared?” she asked, letting her smile sink deeper.

  “I am not.” Daniella laughed while Ben and I quietly compared our goose bumps.

  We called ourselves the Chordays, a combination of Ben’s last name and ours, like we were our own family. Like a day of the week that no one knew about but us.

  I shove away the thought.

  “Okay. Well, you can’t join until seventh grade, and we get together every week to work on different kinds of problems that might show up on the monthly evaluations, which are like mini practice competitions, and after we take those, our correct answers get added together as a group, and then that number gets sent to the Math Olympics committee, and if we get enough correct answers, then we can qualify for Regionals and States and even Nationals.”

  It comes out in one big breath, everything I didn’t get to say at dinner last night. When I’m done, I feel like I’ve been underwater for a while.

  “You’re right. That is boring.” Jac smiles again. The sun hides behind a cloud.

  “Jac! Don’t be mean to our genius,” Ben says.

  “Cassandra knows I’m kidding. If I’m mean to the genius, who’ll do my algebra homework?”

  “Maybe… you?” he replies.

  I laugh. Sometimes I wonder if Jac and Ben would be friends if they didn’t grow up in the Lakeside Townhouses together. Or if Jac and I would be friends if we didn’t share an age and a last name. Or if Daniella only hung out with us because she felt like she had to. But maybe it doesn’t matter how we all became friends or if we should’ve been. It only matters that we were. Are.

  “Come over after school,” Ben says to me. “Mom made kimchi for Dad’s birthday. It’s fully fermented.”

  My mouth waters at the thought of Mrs. Chay’s kimchi, spicy and sour at the same time. She makes big Tupperware containers of it for special occasions, like birthdays and Daniella’s eighth-grade graduation.

  “I can’t. We’re visiting Buelo,” I answer. “But tell Papa Chay happy birthday.”

  “Is Dani going with you?” Jac’s eyes drop to the picnic table, like she might find Daniella there.

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t she?”

  The question falls, as heavy as a rock, between us.

  Jac pokes my sunburn again. Ben fidgets with his headphones. I do a quick calculation. It’s been forty-seven days since our last night of s’mores and scary stories. The number forty-seven has too many sharp edges.

  “Are you going to forget us when you go to high school?” Ben asked in the voice he uses during school plays, strong enough for the back row to hear him.

  “Hey.” Daniella held up her hand. “You all can’t get rid of me that easy.”

  The bell rings to signal the end of free time. All us seventh graders shuffle like a herd of sheep back into Eliza T. Dakota Middle School. I want to stop thinking about the way Daniella looked at dinner, so different from that night around the fire. Like every part of her face was working hard not to crumble.

  I focus on the back of Jac’s head. Her hair matches the sky.

  4 Kindly Vines

  Kindly Vines Nursing Home smells like reheated vegetable soup and bleach. Breathing the air in makes my stomach hurt a little. I walk with Mom and Daniella down the maze of halls to Buelo’s room, number 201, across from a sitting area with uncomfortable chairs. Sometimes we pick Buela up from her condo on Smith Street before we come, and sometimes she drives herself in her little gold car. She has to sit on two pillows to see out the front window.

  A few women from Saint Anthony’s are in Buelo’s room already. They wear polyester pantsuits and gush over Daniella and me. One of them, Ms. Sonia, taught the Communion class I took at the church in fourth grade. Buela walked me in on the first day.

  “This is Fantasma,” she said. I started to write “ Fantasma” on the sign-in sheet but crossed it out and wrote “Cassi.”

  I sat down in a circle with some of the girls in my class. They whispered in Spanish that my hair looked like the inside of a scarecrow’s arm. When Ms. Sonia had us go around the room introducing ourselves, I said, “ Soy Cassi y yo hablo español.” I’m Cassi and I speak Spanish. The girls shifted in their seats. Maybe my hair sort of looked like scarecrow stuffing shooting out in frizzy directions, but I’d never thought too much about it until I’d heard their whispers.

  That night I rubbed globs of Daniella’s gel into my dry hair to smooth down the sticking-out parts. But I just ended up with stiff tangles.

  The women side-kiss my cheeks, speaking with rich, tilted accents. “Que linda. So pretty and grown-up.”

  “Gracias,” I say. I may speak Spanish, but I can never make it sound natural. Not like Mom or Buela or the women from Saint Anthony’s.

  “I am a lucky man.” Buelo’s raspy voice comes from behind the wall of church women. I politely step around them. Buelo looks small, and his tan skin is papery. I’m careful when I hug him, because sometimes I worry his bones will break if I squeeze too hard.

  “Hi, Buelo,” I say.

  “My corazónita. Daniella,” he whispers into my ear.

  “That’s Cassi, Pico,” Buela reminds him from the rocking chair next to his bed.

  I try not to let his slipup hurt. I’m his corazónita too, and he still remembers that part. I step away from Buelo’s bed so the real Daniella can hug him. Buela takes my hand. I can smell her powdery perfume. She has short silver hair and the world’s softest skin.

  “Thank you for coming,” she says. A blue paperweight holds a balloon down on the table behind her. The balloon says Keep Your Chin Up.

  “I come all the time,” I say.

  “Sí, but you don’t have to. You could grow right up and forget your grandparents.”

  The way Buelo is forgetting me.

  “Never, Buela.”

  I want to smile or laugh, but it�
��s hard with the sharp, soupy smell and Buelo’s wheelchair in the corner. It reminds me that we might not collect seashells or pebbles again. That he might never tell another story. Buelo has lots of stories, but the one he told us the most was from his first day of school, when his teacher decided his name wasn’t real. Buelo tried to explain to his teacher that “Pico” was a real name, because it was his name, but she didn’t listen. She said from that point on he would be Eduardo, and he was. His high school diploma even says “Eduardo.”

  “That can’t be true,” Daniella said when he first told us the Eduardo Story, and I nodded in agreement.

  “I mean it, corazónitas.” Buelo’s smile touched his glasses.

  Sometimes I want to ask Buelo to tell the Eduardo Story, but I’m too scared he won’t remember it.

  “Why don’t you step outside for a second, Cassi,” Mom says. She puts a hand on Buela’s shoulder. “It’s crowded in here.”

  The church women call me linda again on my way out. I don’t see Daniella in the room anymore. I pause outside the door for a second, and the hushed voices start behind me.

  Kicking me out of the room + quiet talking = Things are bad with Buelo.

  I step into the bathroom that’s a few feet away from Buelo’s room. Daniella is there at the sinks in a black dress. She turns to me, her face blank, my sister but not quite. Like a smudged pencil drawing of herself. I walk to the sinks.

  “It must be weird for you,” she says.

  “What do you mean?” Nerves gather in my stomach.

  “To be around all these Spanish people when you don’t look Spanish at all.”

  I glance at her reflection.

  “But I am.” I force a laugh. “I’m the same as you.”

  “Just saying.” Daniella shrugs.

  “Buela is teaching me to roll my Rs better. And it’s not my fault I’m sensitive to the sun.” I press my hand to a red, burnt spot on my arm, trying to cover it up.