4. nova
nova
Cracks
The Number That Changes Everything
Marisol is eating cereal at the kitchen counter and talking about a boy in her algebra class who smells like Doritos when I open my banking app and stop breathing.
The number on the screen does not make sense. I blink. I tilt the phone. I check the account name at the top to make sure I have not accidentally opened someone else's life, because this number does not belong to mine.
It is more money than I have seen in one place — ever. More than a month of tips. More than three months. Enough to cover rent and the past-due electric bill and Tomás's shoes and Marisol's graphing calculator and still leave a cushion.
Cushion. A word I have never used in the same sentence as my bank account. A word that belongs to people who do not count fives by touch in stairwells at two in the morning.
"Nova." Marisol is looking at me. Spoon paused halfway to her mouth, milk dripping. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing."
"Your face is doing the thing."
"What thing?"
"The thing where something is wrong and you say nothing.
" She narrows her eyes. Thirteen years old and already sharper than half the adults I have met.
She got that from our mother — the radar, the ability to read a room by reading the person standing in it.
She got the best parts of a woman who left us the worst possible lesson.
"Eat your cereal, Mari."
I put the phone facedown on the counter.
The screen clicks against the laminate and I leave it there and turn to the cutting board where Tomás's lunch is half-assembled.
Turkey on wheat. No mayo — he hates mayo but will not tell me because he thinks I will be upset that I bought it.
Carrots in a sandwich bag because the doctor said he should eat more vegetables and I cannot afford the organic snack packs the other kids bring.
I slice the sandwich on the diagonal the way he likes it.
My hands are steady. The knife moves clean through the bread and I focus on the sound of it — the small wet resistance of turkey, the scrape of the blade against the board — because if I stop focusing on my hands I will pick up that phone and stare at that number and something inside me will rearrange itself in a way I cannot undo.
He did this. Romeo Rivas. The man with the green eyes and the dead father's watch and the mouth that tasted like whiskey and burned like a promise.
He sat in that back office and offered me a transaction and I accepted it and now the transaction is sitting in my bank account turning every number I have memorized — every deficit, every shortage, every gap I have been plugging with my own body for eighteen months — into something that looks like breathing room.
I wrap the sandwich in foil. Pack the carrots. Add a juice box and a napkin with a note I write every morning — You're my favorite weirdo. Love, Nova. He pretends to be embarrassed. He keeps every single one.
Marisol rinses her bowl. Grabs her backpack. Gives me the look one more time — suspicious, searching, the look of a girl who learned young that good mornings sometimes turn into gone afternoons.
"I'm fine, Mari. Go to school."
She goes. The door sticks behind her.
I stand in the kitchen with my hands flat on the counter and the phone facedown six inches from my fingers and I do not pick it up. I already know the number. It is already burned into my skull.
A man I told to stay out of my world just made my world livable.
And that terrifies me more than the poverty ever did.
The Rule He Breaks
The knock is wrong.
The landlord knocks like he is apologizing for existing — two soft raps, then silence, then the shuffle of his shoes retreating down the hall before you can answer.
The neighbor across the hall knocks with the flat of her hand, impatient, always needing sugar or a phone charger or someone to watch her cat.
This knock is firm. Confident. The knock of someone who has never once wondered whether they are welcome.
I dry my hands on the dish towel and cross the living room and open the door and every thought in my head catches fire.
Romeo Rivas is standing in my hallway.
He is wearing a black jacket that costs more than my security deposit and he is too tall for the doorframe and the fluorescent light above him — the one the super has never replaced, the one that flickers and buzzes like a dying insect — is casting shadows across his cheekbones that make him look like a painting hung in the wrong gallery.
He does not belong here. Every line of him screams it. The watch. The shoes. The way he holds himself in this narrow hallway with its peeling wallpaper and stained carpet like he is standing in a boardroom and the building just has not caught up.
My blood goes hot.
"I told you—"
"I know what you told me."
"Then what the hell are you doing at my door?"
He opens his mouth. I watch him reach for the charm — the grin, the deflection, the smooth line that gets him out of every corner he backs himself into. I watch him find it, hold it, and then something behind me makes him lose it entirely.
"Hey."
Tomás. Standing three feet behind me in his sock feet and his pajama pants with the rocketships on them, holding a half-eaten granola bar, looking up at the man filling our doorway with the wide-open curiosity of a kid who has never learned to be afraid of strangers because he has never had enough of them in his life to build the reflex.
"Who are you?" Tomás asks.
Romeo's face does something I have never seen it do.
The charm dissolves. The armor drops. For one unguarded second he is looking at my little brother the way you look at something that hurts to see — tender and startled and completely unprepared.
He came here braced for my anger. He built his defense on the walk up four flights.
He had the words ready, the excuses sharpened, the smile loaded.
He did not prepare for a ten-year-old boy in rocketship pajamas asking his name.
"Romeo," he says. His voice is quieter than I have ever heard it. "I'm — a friend of your sister's."
Tomás looks at me. Looks at Romeo. Takes a bite of his granola bar.
"Cool," he says. "Do you want to play Mario Kart?"
Romeo looks at me. I see the question in his eyes — do I stay or do I go — and I hate him for putting it there, because now the choice is mine and both answers cost something.
Tomás is already walking back to the living room.
I step aside.
The Kitchen That Unmakes Him
He steps inside and immediately everything is off scale.
Romeo Rivas in my apartment is like a wolf in a shoebox.
His shoulders nearly brush the hallway walls.
His shoes — Italian, leather, worth more than my refrigerator — look absurd on my linoleum.
The ceiling feels lower with him under it.
The couch looks smaller. The whole apartment, which has always been tight but mine, suddenly feels like a doll's house with a real person shoved inside.
I close the door behind him and lean against the kitchen counter and cross my arms and wait for whatever excuse he has rehearsed.
He does not give me one. He is too busy watching Tomás dig through the basket of tangled cords beside the television.
"Okay so this one is yours." Tomás holds up the second controller — the one with the cracked left joystick that sticks if you push it too hard. "Have you played before?"
"I have not," Romeo says.
"Seriously?" Tomás stares at him like he just admitted to never eating pizza. "It's easy. I'll show you. Sit down."
Romeo looks at the carpet. Looks at his jacket. Looks at me — one quick glance, searching for a signal, a read, anything to tell him how to behave in a room that has no rules he recognizes. I give him nothing. This is my house. He broke in uninvited. He can figure it out himself.
He takes off his jacket. Folds it over the back of my kitchen chair — the one with the wobbly leg — and sits on the floor. Cross-legged. Controller in both hands like he is holding a grenade with the pin pulled.
Tomás drops beside him and starts explaining the controls with the intensity of a surgeon briefing an intern. Romeo listens. Actually listens — leaning in, frowning at the screen, asking which button does what with a seriousness that would be funny if it were not so disarming.
The race starts. Romeo's kart hits the wall within four seconds. Tomás howls.
"You have to steer."
"I am steering."
"You're driving into the ocean!"
Romeo drives into the ocean. Tomás laughs — the real laugh, the belly laugh, the one I have not heard in weeks because ten-year-old boys who have panic attacks on bathroom floors do not laugh like that very often anymore.
I watch from the counter with my arms still crossed and my chest doing something dangerous.
Romeo Rivas. Heir to the Rivas empire. Carrying a cracked chess piece and a dead father's war and a thirty-day countdown to something I do not fully understand yet.
Sitting on my carpet with his sleeves pushed up and his two-hundred-dollar shoes tucked beneath him, losing at Mario Kart for the third consecutive race while my brother laughs until his face turns red.
He does not know how to do this. I can see it in every clumsy movement — the way he holds the controller, the way he flinches when Tomás grabs his arm to point at the screen, the way his smile keeps faltering like a muscle he forgot he had.
He has no script for this. No charm to deploy.
A ten-year-old in rocketship pajamas has stripped him down to parts and he is sitting in the wreckage trying to figure out which ones are real.
Tomás wins again. Throws both hands up. Romeo shakes his head and something crosses his mouth — a grin, genuine, unguarded, the first real one I have seen on him — and it hits me like a slap.
Stop it, I tell myself. Stop watching him like that.
I turn to the sink. Run the water. Wash a dish that is already clean.
What She Sees, What He Sees