The morning I met Nicole, before I’d left for school, my mom had given me a piece of paper with the address of the apartment we were moving into. It was one street over from my aunt’s place, a street full of duplexes just like ours, whitewashed, with overgrown front yards and chain-link fences and old cars parked outside. Ours was a 1975 Chrysler Cordoba a coworker had sold to my dad for five hundred dollars. It had no air-conditioning.
I told my mom about the Virgin on the window, and she said we could go see her when my dad felt better. I also told her about Nicole. She said she felt happy I had made a friend, and that it was good that she spoke English, and not Spanish, because my English would improve.
We dragged the sofa into the living room. Then I laid a sheet over it and claimed it as my bed for the night. My mom had already put some thick blankets and bed covers on the carpet of the master bedroom for my father, and that’s where she’d sleep too. The three of us drank iced tea and ate a pizza my mom had bought at the grocery store and heated up in the oven. The pizza was topped with tiny, spicy meatballs, which I hated, but the iced tea was sweet and cold.
After dinner, I finished what was left of my homework and lay on the couch, ready to sleep. The neighborhood felt wholly quiet in a way I wasn’t used to. At night, my neighborhood in Medellín was full of the sounds of passing cars and neighbors’ conversations and music and, even after people had gone to sleep, the steady whistle of the night watchman. Now all I heard was the hum of the air conditioner and the fridge, which made the apartment feel emptier.
In the middle of the night, I went back to the bedroom to ask my parents if I could spend the night on the floor with them instead. The couch, it turned out, was riddled with ants.
My dad’s accident happened three days before my aunt kicked us out and four days before I met Nicole. Only a couple of days after arriving in the States, he got a job at a recycling plant. He hadn’t even had time to visit the beautiful Clearwater Beach my aunt kept telling us about before he went to work. The day of the accident, one of the plant’s conveyer belts stopped working, and my dad, who had been a mechanic back home, offered to take a look at it. He climbed onto the belt, which was about two stories high, and removed stuff that had gotten it stuck, at which point, one of his coworkers, who didn’t realize my dad was up there, turned on the belt, and my dad fell into the machine at the end of it. His whole body went through the grinder before anyone could help him. He broke no bones, but he bruised some ribs, and when my aunt brought him home from the ER, he looked like someone in one of the many stories I’d heard back home of people being given scopolamine and taken to various ATMs around the city until their bank accounts were empty and they didn’t know who or where they were. His dark hair was gray with debris and his eyes were bloodshot and his shredded work pants barely covered his scraped-up legs. Upon seeing him, a flood of heat and tears rose in me, and he said, “Don’t worry. Things can only get better now.”
I’d never seen him so frail. Even on the day his brother was murdered on a street corner for helping as a messenger for one of Medellín’s branches of the liberal party, at a time when being open about any kind of politics made you someone’s deathly enemy, my dad had been sturdy as he grieved.
Now the sight of him told me the opposite of what his mouth said, and that’s what I should have listened to. If I had, I could have protected myself at least, but now it was me, in high school after having attended college; my mom, working two housekeeping jobs that kept her away from home from six in the morning until ten at night; and my dad, trying to heal his bruised bones even as he slept on the floor. We shared an empty duplex, and we had no one but each other.
Or at least I thought so. My parents wanted me to think otherwise.
“How do you think we got this car?” my mom said. “And who helped us get this apartment?”
We were sitting on the carpet, sharing another pizza. This one had only vegetables on it, and I liked it much more than the one before.
“Well, it wasn’t our family,” I said.
“Don’t say that,” my dad chimed in. “If it weren’t for your aunt, we wouldn’t be here.”
“Yes, but that’s money you still owe,” I said. “And how are you going to pay her now?”
A few days after we moved into the new place, Nicole asked if I wanted to go to her house after school, and when I said I couldn’t because I had to go take care of my dad, she asked what was wrong. As best I could, I told her about my dad’s accident and our empty apartment, about how we didn’t have pots and pans for our kitchen and how all our money had gone into paying a deposit and first month’s rent on the duplex.
“I’ll come visit. I promise I won’t stay long. I’ll get out of your way if your dad isn’t feeling well.”
That afternoon she showed up at the duplex with two men. One was overweight, dark-haired, and pink-skinned, the other tall, lean, and blond. They both wore baggy jean shorts and black shirts, though the big man’s shirt had bright-yellow and orange flames all around the bottom. Nicole’s hair was in a high ponytail, and she wore olive-green shorts, a red crop top with spaghetti straps, and huge gold-hoop earrings.
“This is my dad,” she said, pointing at neither of them. “I told him about you guys, and he wanted to help. God knows we have enough fucking stuff.”
“Hi, I’m Jake,” the tall, thin one said, shaking my hand. “This is my friend Cory. We brought you a mattress and some other things. The mattress is good, I promise.”
“Okay, thank you,” I said.
We all walked to the driveway, where a small silver trailer was hitched to a giant black pickup truck. Nicole’s dad opened the trailer to reveal a mattress on which my parents would surely be able to sleep, and an array of chairs, tables, kitchen things, and even a twenty-inch TV.
“All that is for us?” I asked.
“We have an air mattress in there too,” Nicole’s dad said. “Nicole’s going to inflate it for you. Listen, you have to tell your dad about worker’s comp. He should have some money coming. Do you understand?”
My cheeks, already warm from the summer heat, grew warmer with tears. I nodded and thanked him. I could hardly speak from sobbing.
“Now girl,” Nicole’s dad said, “let’s not turn this into some sappy moment. I know that whenever Nicole needs you, you’re going to be there for her. This is purely selfish, okay?”
“Like everything else he does,” Nicole said, and gave him a taunting grimace.
He didn’t react, instead stepping into the trailer to push the mattress out. I thought that was so strange. I could count on one hand the number of times my parents had hit me, but saying something like that to them would have surely added to the count. And here was such a nice man doing kind things for us at her behest, and this was how she treated him. I stopped crying, mostly from feeling like I should behave extra obediently to make up for Nicole’s brattiness. I decided to please Jake, to be as invisible as I could while they brought stuff inside. I let myself feel his kindness and the warmth of hopefulness.