Four-Letter Word by Christa Desir

Author:Christa Desir
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

14

Señor Williams sent us to the media center to do research for our upcoming oral reports on Friday afternoon. He assigned us to tables, and even though Chloe Donnelly stood next to Mateo like she assumed they’d be together, Señor Williams put her with a girl with a pixie cut and large eyes who also couldn’t speak Spanish nearly as well as the rest of us. Chloe Donnelly huffed, but Señor Williams crossed his arms and said, “¡Ni modo!”

Then he pointed me and Mateo to a table near the windows. Me and Mateo. For a second I thought I saw Señor Williams give me a wink, but I couldn’t be sure. I felt ridiculously giddy and I couldn’t really express why. Maybe Chloe Donnelly was right. Maybe something big had changed between us.

“What are you going to do your research on?” Mateo asked, when I’d dropped my bag and sat across from him.

“Glaciar Perito Moreno and how it’s able to maintain equilibrium with its icebergs in spite of climate change,” I said.

He laughed in this startled way. “Ambitious project.”

“I know. And I’m not even sure how I’m going to pull it off in Spanish, but it’s an area of interest for me. I mean, my dad got me into environmental stuff.”

“Oh yeah?”

I nodded. “Yeah, a little. He majored in biology with an environmental studies concentration at the college.”

Mateo looked at me but didn’t say anything. So I said, “What’s your dad do?”

I immediately saw the shutters drop over his eyes. He shrugged. “He works on a farm.” Then he stood and moved toward the computers. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Hadn’t I learned by now that Mateo didn’t like invasive questions?

I sighed and dragged myself to the computers, pulling a list of books to check out on climate and the Argentinian glacier. When I returned to the table, Mateo didn’t even look up from the book he was reading. I sat and mumbled, “Sorry.”

He glanced up. “I’m not really a sharer. It’s not you. My family is complicated, and mostly I feel like people who ask about them are digging.”

“Digging for what?”

“You tell me.”

My pits got sweaty and I was certain my cheeks were all pink. Was I digging, or was I just trying to be nice? I thought it was being nice, but maybe it read as nosy. “You don’t have to tell me anything about your family.”

“Okay.”

Then I opened my book and we didn’t say anything to each other for the next twenty minutes, though every once in a while our eyes met and I smiled a little. Chloe Donnelly kept looking at the two of us, but she must have figured out there was nothing to see, because she asked for a pass to the bathroom and then disappeared. As the end of class neared, I saw her standing outside the media center door staring at Mateo in this way that made me think she liked him as more than a friend. But how could that even be after

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