American Road Trip by Patrick Flores-Scott

Author:Patrick Flores-Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (BYR)

TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 2009

Xochitl tells me to come out to the car after breakfast.

She’s all bright eyes and smiles. She reaches out. Puts a hand on my shoulder. “What do you think?” she says.

“It’s good Manny’s here. For Elena.”

“And it’s good he’s here for him,” she says. “I think he’s gonna make it.”

“Like you think he’s gonna not … do that?”

“Yeah, T. And I think he’s going to make it to Tío Ed’s farm in New Mexico, where he and I have jobs for the summer, which is what I been totally wanting to tell you since we left home.”

My muscles clench.

My jaw locks. You did not. You did not. You did not just say that. Then it’s like a missile launching from my gut. I wanna scream. I wanna kick that glove box door right through, blast it into the engine.

Xochitl sees it coming. She puts her hand on my chest and says, “I didn’t know what else to do, T. I found Manny’s note. I promised I wouldn’t tell Mami and Papi. I was alone with it, T. Completely alone. I needed help. So I called Tío Ed. He came back from Vietnam as sick as Manny came back from Iraq. Then he got better. He told me he could help. He said we could work on his farm and he knows what to do for Manny.”

“If you’d just told me all that stuff!”

“You wouldn’t have come, not in a million years. But that doesn’t matter anymore. I needed you and you helped get us this far. LA is a couple hours away. I have money for your bus ticket home. You got a hot date to make. You have a job to get back to. We gotta keep you college-bound, right? Manny and me, we’ll be fine. We’ll drop you off and then drive to New Mexico.”

I wonder how fine they’ll be.

Then I stop wondering and say, “Yeah, Xoch. Drop me off in LA.”

Xochitl tells me there was a point where she knew she had to take off with Manny. But she didn’t think she could do it alone. She needed me. So she went searching for my Kryptonite. She called Caleb, and because he’s always had a gross crush on her, he spilled everything about me and Wendy.

“I call her up,” Xochitl says. “I ask her how she’s doing. She tells me she’s taking college-level math and science. So I get this idea that maybe she’d be into a summer working on a farm in New Mexico and maybe she could be your tutor. And if she would do that, maybe you would do the drive down with me and Manny. I talked to Ed and he said he’d have enough paid work for everybody. All of us. For the summer.”

I tell Xochitl how pissed I am she did that behind my back.

But I can’t believe she tried to get me a whole summer with Wendy.

“I thought she was gonna do it. But I begged her not to say anything till she knew for sure.

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