Page 6 - The Truth Is

show up for a visit. Two thousand years is a long time to wait on
a porch. Yeah, I’m bitter a little bit.
When the water is steaming hot, I step into the shower
stall full of lotions and creams Mami stocks in here so I will
smell like the botanical gardens. Because all girls are supposed
to want to smell like flowers. Be a flower. It’s true I got stems.
Like my moms, I got the mile-long legs. She had to wear flats
around my dad so she didn’t tower over him. But just like stems,
I’m hairy. I don’t like sharp, stabby, prickly legs. Blanca’s legs
always felt like a cheese grater if it got cold. Mami keeps threat-
ening to wax me, por que we girls can take natural too far,
she says.
I lather up with my loofah, covering up the scar above my
knee with bubbles. I rub and rub, imagining the scar—the hole
torn in my leg and my life—has disappeared.
I step out of the shower into the mist. I love looking in the
mirror and seeing me in the clouds, immaterial. They don’t got
homework in the clouds, do they?
I picture my moms and me sitting on clouds after we both
die. “Pero, like, if you take one more class, you could be an
archangel.”
Once my hair—which Blanca used to call The Entity, like
she was one to talk—is braided to my satisfaction, I head to the
kitchen, where my moms is waiting for me with cafe con leche.
She likes to have a convo with me before she’s off to work. She
always sits straight, rigid, like a beautiful statue that survived
the volcano but got left alone in the ruins.
“Morning.”
“Good morning, Verdad.”
I pull out my chair—across from Mami’s and next to the
place that’s been set for Abuelo for the past three years—and

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