Star in the Forest

  Para mis queridos amigos Zitlally, Cuauhtemoc, Alejandro, y Erick … y todos los niños que están separados de sus familias por fronteras

  For my good friends Zitlally, Cuauhtemoc, Alejandro, and Erick … and all children who are separated from their families by borders

  Moquetzalizquixochintzetzeloa in icniuhyotl.

  La amistad es lluvia de flores preciosas.

  Friendship is a shower of precious flowers.

  —AYOCUAN CUETZPALTZIN

  fifteenth-century Aztec poet

  from the region of Puebla, Mexico

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not exist without inspiration from Gloria Garcia Díaz—a talented writer and close friend—and her lovely nieces Frida and Karla. Gracias, Gloria, for the conversations that led to this book, and for your enthusiastic feedback on the manuscript! I’m grateful to my friend Javier and his family for sharing Nahuatl expertise, as well as tales of magical forests, stars, and mushroom hunting. Thanks, also, to my ESL students, who teach me about the many facets of life as an immigrant.

  Heaps of gratitude go to Old Town Writing Group’s Carrie, Leslie, Sarah, Katers, and Lauren—who fill my writing life with laughter and fabulous critiques. Gracias to my bilingual educator friends Michelle, Paul, Martha, and Samara for their wonderful suggestions, and to the immigration lawyer Kim Salinas for vividly explaining deportation procedures. My extraordinary editor, Stephanie Lane Elliott, and her assistant, Krista Vitola, deepened this book with their creative insights. With each new book, I feel luckier to be working with the amazing people at Random House Children’s Books and with my magnificent agent, Erin Murphy.

  As always, my mom, Chris, gave me brilliant advice on every single draft of this book. She’s been encouraging my storytelling from the time I was a four-year-old chattering about butter ice-skating across a hot pan. My dad, Jim, has shown me the value of friendships between people of different cultures, and has always encouraged my travels. I’m grateful to my toddler son, Bran, for making me laugh and lick sunshine and love with all my heart. And the biggest thank-you of all goes to Ian, who (despite nagging about the dishes that pile up in the sink while I write) has made my life a sweet soul dream.

  PART ONE

  Star

  There is a forest behind my trailer, through the weeds and under the gate and across the trickly, oily ditch. It is a forest of very, very old car parts, heaps of rusted metal, spotted orangey brown, with rainbow layers of fading paint, and leaves and vines poking and twisting through the holes. Birds and snakes and bugs sometimes peek out from the pipes and hubcaps. My neighborhood is called Forest View Mobile Home Park. I think this must be the forest they’re talking about.

  On the day Papá was deported, that’s where I went.

  The police had pulled him over a week earlier, and while he was in jail, Mamá was on her cell phone all the time.

  Deportado, deportado, deportado, she said, in a hushed, dangerous voice.

  Deportado, she said to my aunts Rosa and Virginia and María.

  Deportado, she said over the phone to Uncle Luciano in Mexico.

  Deportado meant Papá would be sent back to Mexico, and it would be very, very hard for him to come back.

  The day before he was deported, I saw Papá at the jail. He stared at me through the scratchy plastic divider. The phone shook in his hand. He said, “Goodbye, Zitlally.” Then he whispered, “Ni-mitz nequi.” I love you.

  He looked strange in the blue jumpsuit, and even stranger because he was crying, right there in front of the other prisoners and their families and the guards. But my tears stayed hidden under a stone inside a cave inside me. I worried that Papá thought I wasn’t sad because my face was dry when I said goodbye.

  The next day, alone in the car part forest, I felt tears pushing out like a geyser.

  My name is Zitlally. Estrella. Star. That’s what it means in Nahuatl. Nahuatl is what Papá speaks to me in secret, even though I don’t understand. It is a soft language full of shhhhs and perfect for whispering at night. I used to think it was the language of the stars, what they whispered to each other. This year during the Mexico unit in school, I found out it was the language of the Aztecs. The Aztecs are supposed to be all dead. Maybe they’re the ones whispering. I didn’t tell anyone that their words aren’t dead. I know because Papá speaks them. Because he named me one. Because I hear the stars whispering. Shhhh.

  The day after Papá was deportado, Mamá was on the phone saying deportado, deportado and crying and Reina was watching a murder movie on TV and Dalia was hanging out with her friends at the edge of the park that no kids are allowed to go to because of the broken glass and needles. Usually Mamá would frown and Papá would say that Dalia couldn’t hang out with them and that Reina couldn’t watch murder movies, but now that Mamá was always on the phone, saying deportado, deportado, she didn’t notice much.

  I brought my math worksheets outside and sat on the ripped Astroturf porch, leaning against the tin side of our trailer. I shivered and wished I’d brought a sweater. It was a little cold because it was April.

  Fractions. Four-fifths. The fraction of my family here. Papá used to look over my shoulder as I did math homework and help me. He didn’t do problems the way Mr. Martin did on the board. He had his own system. He was a framer and always had to cut wood perfectly, down to the exact one-eighth of an inch, and not waste any wood. He was a master of fractions.

  Something crashed, something glass. It came from next door. Then came a waterfall of bashing and breaking and yelling. It was that girl, Crystal’s, mom and her mom’s boyfriend.

  I never talked to Crystal at school.

  My best friend, Morgan, said that Crystal shopped at garage sales.

  My second-best friend, Emma, said she had poor dental hygiene and chronic halitosis.

  And my third-best friend, Olivia, said she used to pee in her pants in first grade.

  Since they were my best friends forever, I knew where my loyalty was. When Crystal tried to talk to me at the bus stop, I just shrugged and smiled with no teeth and looked away.

  In the two years we’d been friends, Emma and Morgan and Olivia were always inviting me to go ice-skating or to the mall or to the movies or something. It was hard work being their friend. It made me feel like a nervous squirrel, always with my eyes big and my ears perked up.

  I had to watch their clothes to know what to wear. Watch their hair to know how to do mine. Watch how they stood and sat and walked so I could do the same. I had to listen to which words they used so I could use them, too. Listen to how their voices went up at the end of a sentence so I could make mine an echo.

  There’s a reason squirrels do dumb things like run in front of cars. They’re all muddled up from so much watching and listening.

  In the weeks after Papá was deported, sometimes I accidentally wore the same pair of jeans two days in a row. Sometimes I didn’t bother brushing my hair in the morning. When Morgan told jokes, sometimes I forgot to laugh. I was usually staring at a thin line of dirt under my fingernail. Or the tiny scar on my knuckle. Or a raggedy cuticle.

  When Olivia asked me to the indoor pool, and Emma asked me to sleep over, I mumbled excuses. At school, no one wanted me in their reading group anymore. I stared at my hands instead of talking. My words were starting to disappear, the way the last bits of snow were melting into mud.

  One day, Emma invited me to ride bikes in the park—not our broken-glass park—they never came to my neighborhood—but the nice park by her house.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  Good question. Why not? And I thought, I just can’t. I can’t remember the right words to say or the right way to stand. I can’t smile or laugh
with them. I can’t pretend.

  I had run out of excuses. I said, “Because my dad had to go back to Mexico.”

  “When’s he coming back?”

  I shrugged. They thought he could just get on a plane and come back. They didn’t know he would have to cross the desert again. They didn’t know that I crossed it with him and Mamá and Dalia, before Reina was born. There was a secret part of me that they didn’t know about, that I would never tell them.

  Then one day at lunch, after I didn’t laugh at Morgan’s joke about the cafeteria lady’s gigantic Easter bunny earrings, my friends dumped me.

  “Zitlally turned boring,” Olivia said to Emma and Morgan in a loud whisper.

  Sometimes I used to wonder what would happen if I stopped trying. This was it. I picked up my orange tray and moved to another table, an empty one, and decided to let myself turn more and more boring until I became nothing at all.

  I found Star in the forest exactly two weeks after Papá was deported. I know because that first night, the moon was disappearing just like I wanted to disappear. But the next night, a sliver appeared, and each night after that, the moon grew and grew until it was full and perfect. And when I saw that moon full and perfect and not missing even the tiniest sliver, I fell asleep hoping that something good might happen.

  The next day after school, I ran to the forest. Along the trail, little yellow flowers were pushing through. Daffodils. Someone, sometime had planted ruffly, sunshiny daffodils in the car part forest, and this cheered me up a little. I went under the gate and over the ditch and the tears were already coming because they’d been waiting all day, just pushing against their hiding places, and they couldn’t wait to come out.

  And then I spotted him.

  Gray fur.

  It was supposed to be white but it was dirty and matted in places with brown stuff so he blended into the car part forest, like a chameleon. He was skinny, too. You could see the outline of his rib bones.

  Usually, I am not a dog person. I have a scar the size of a blueberry on my thigh and another on my arm from where a dog bit me in Mexico when I was five.

  But this dog seemed scared of me. Of me. He whimpered and cowered and walked in a circle and curled up far from me, under a rusty rainbow truck hood. There was a chain tight around his neck and it was attached to a hole in the hood and he barely had enough chain to make the circle and lie down.

  By now my tears had already come and I couldn’t go back, so I sat far from him and he watched me and I watched him. I cried and he watched me and after a while my tears stopped and he put his head on his paws. That’s when I noticed it. A black patch of fur on the back of his neck.

  In the shape of a star.

  The next day after school, I went to the forest. This time the tears weren’t pushing, because I was thinking about Star. Would he still be there? Was he okay?

  I whizzed by crushed beer cans and Burger King trash and the daffodils. Their petals were a little more open today.

  There he was! Under the rusty rainbow truck hood.

  I sat closer to him than I had the day before. There was a dirty puddle of rainwater that he kept trying to reach with his tongue, but his chain wouldn’t let him. He made a high-pitched, desperate sound.

  Nearby, a plastic bowl lay on its side, but it was cracked. I remembered the Burger King trash in the ditch. I said, “I’ll be right back, Star.”

  I ran back and found the tall Burger King cup, and I tore off the top so that a dog’s tongue could reach in, and carefully, inch by inch, I moved toward the puddle. But I didn’t have to worry because he stayed back, far from me.

  I scooped up water into the cup and put it on the other side of the puddle, so he could reach it. And then, quickly, I backed up, so quickly I stumbled in the mud. Then I sat against a torn-off truck door and watched.

  Slowly, very slowly, he moved toward the cup, reached out a perfect pink tongue, and lapped it up, politely, without spilling a drop.

  After that came Saturday, and Dalia and Reina and I had to move our stuff into Mamá’s room and clean our room for two guys to come live in it. We couldn’t afford rent on the trailer now that Papá was deportado, so we had to rent out the room. The guys who moved in were drywallers. They each brought a garbage bag full of clothes in one hand and a six-pack of beer in the other. They dumped the bags in their new room, then sat on the sofa watching action movies and playing video games and drinking Coronas. Mamá’s lips made a tight, upside-down parenthesis, and she cleaned up the kitchen as fast as she could and then went into our room and watched telenovelas and noticias on the bed while we did homework.

  There’s one more thing. On the day Papá found out he was going to be deportado, it was my eleventh birthday. There was a cake waiting for me in the fridge, a tres leches cake from Albertson’s that said Feliz Cumpleaños Zitlaly. They missed the third L.

  That night, all anyone talked about was deportado deportado and so my cake sat in the fridge, uneaten.

  You have to be happy to sing “Las Mañanitas” and have a party, and nobody was happy. A few times over the next three weeks, Reina asked if she could eat some cake, but Mamá frowned at her. Mamá frowned a lot nowadays. She had to work extra hours, cooking the breakfast and lunch shift at IHOP and the dinner shift at Denny’s. She wasn’t home when we got home from school anymore. And she worked weekends now, too.

  At three o’clock on that Saturday, Mamá walked past the drywall guys on the sofa and left for Denny’s. In our crowded room, Reina was still watching TV and Dalia was sulking on the bed because she wanted to be with her friends at the broken-glass park. Luckily, Mamá thought I was too young to look after Reina myself, so Dalia had to do it.

  After Mamá left, I snuck into the kitchen and heaved the box of cake out of the refrigerator. It was enormous. No one noticed me and the cake going out the door.

  On the way to the forest, I had to grip my hands tight around it. It was especially hard going under the fence and jumping across the ditch with the cake. I didn’t want it to get smushed or anything.

  Star saw me coming with the cake and then he did something amazing.

  He wagged his tail.

  He wagged it!

  My heart was booming. I sat down closer to him and balanced the white cake box on my lap, a little afraid to open the top. What if the cake was covered in green mold? What if it was ruined?

  I lifted off the top.

  Dazzling white with bright blue icing trim. A blue like pictures of the ocean in Hawaii. One side was a little mashed from when I’d tripped over a rock, and the icing was cracked and hard, but at least there was no mold. Could you get sick from eating really old cake? I decided to risk it. I didn’t have a knife or fork so I just broke off a piece with my hand and took a bite. It tasted good. Dry, but good.

  I made a silent prayer-bargain. If I don’t get a stomachache from this, then Papá will come back. I took a few more bites. My stomach felt fine.

  Star was watching me and licking his chops. It was probably safe to give him. Chocolate could hurt dogs but this was all pure white and blue. I tore off a big chunk that included the Z of Zitlally. He liked it so much I gave him two more pieces. We watched each other and ate the cake and the fur around his mouth turned blue and I smiled at him and stuck out my tongue to show him the blueness. I could see the tip of it if I kind of crossed my eyes and looked down. It looked like I’d licked off a piece of the ocean.

  When I looked up again, I swear, Star smiled back.

  No one ever made fun of my name until that Monday. Cayden called me Zitface. “Zitlally, Zitface, Zitlally, Zitface.”

  I don’t even have any zits. Not a single one.

  I didn’t say anything. I was used to not talking by now. When Mr. Martin asked me about it, I made some coughing sounds and whispered that I had a permanent sore throat from allergies. He raised his eyebrow and said maybe I should talk to Mrs. Cruz, the counselor, but then another teacher came in asking for the key to something and
he forgot about it. Which was fine because Mrs. Cruz smells weird because she drinks about ten cups of coffee a day.

  So when Cayden said “Zitface” again, I chewed on the insides of my cheeks and studied my knuckles and wondered how it would feel to punch a person.

  Then Crystal said to him, “Dude, Zitlally’s face is perfect. Like a movie star’s. Like some model in a magazine.”

  My cheeks turned warm.

  Then she said, “Dude, I know Zitlally’s family. They live next door to me. She comes from a family of models. Like, all her aunts and cousins are models. But there are, like, these gangs there in Mexico, enemy gangs of beautiful models, so Zitlally’s family had to flee. It was tragic. It was like they were just too beautiful.”

  Cayden screwed up his face. “You’re such a liar, Crystal.”

  She was a liar. Everyone knew not to believe nine-tenths of what came out of Crystal’s mouth. Most of her lies were just good stories, but it was hard to get past the fact that she was lying. Still, Cayden didn’t call me Zitface again.

  Two class periods later, during a science experiment about static electricity, Crystal was rubbing a balloon on her hair. Dirty-blond strands stuck out in all directions. She looked like a lying lunatic. But her wild hair also looked a little like a golden halo that you might see around the Virgin Mary’s head, the thing that shows she’s holy.

  Crystal stuck the balloon to the wall, and there it stayed, a little miracle, like walking on water or multiplying loaves of bread or something.

  From across the room, she looked at me and smiled. I smiled back and even let some teeth show.

  Did she really think I looked like a model? It was possible. Every once in a while, you do see a brown-skinned model. I walked a little taller that day, threw back my shoulders, and pursed out my lips in a bee-stung model’s pout.

  The cake lasted three days. I didn’t want to give it to Star all at once in case it made him sick. His stomach had probably shrunk, since he was starving. By the fourth day, maybe it was my imagination, but I swear he looked healthier, more meat on his bones, less space between his ribs. And he had a ring of blue fur around his mouth like lipstick.