The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara

Author:Joseph Cassara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-12-11T00:00:00+00:00

JUANITO

When he was seven, he already had a routine down pat. When he came home from school, he’d watch Sesame Street on the television for a little bit. Then he’d go to his room and take the Barbie doll from her secret hiding spot—in the drawer where his sweatpants were, in the very back corner—and play with her.

“Guess what, guess what,” he told Barbie one night. “When it’s summertime, I’m gonna go see my father in Puerto Rico, can you believe it?”

He fashioned a comb out of five paper clips that he bent into a new shape. It didn’t really look like a comb, but it had the prongs and kind of worked. As long as her hair looked fabulous, he was perfectly content.

He felt like Barbie was the only one who could listen to him. And she always had that pearly white sonrisa, even if he told her the sad stuff. He felt like his mother was always out of the house, working at the Jacobs’ apartment on Park Avenue, too busy being a mommy to those two blonde girls who were so pretty. So much prettier than Juanito thought he could ever be. When he went to visit his mother one afternoon at work, and the two girls told him he couldn’t play with their Barbies because he was a boy, he thought, Oh yeah? I’ll show you. And he stole one of the Barbies just to spite them.

One day at school, a boy named Steven came up to Juanito and said he heard that Juanito was gonna go meet his papi on the island, and was it true? Juanito nodded his head yes. Steven shrugged and said he was hoping to see his primos on the island too. Then he told Juanito to go up to Catalina and push her into the wall when they were walking down the hallway. Their school had red tape on the ground in a line, and the teachers always told them to stay on that red line or things would get combobulated. Juanito kept his head down and stared at the line as they walked back from gym class to Mrs. Caruso’s second grade room. Mrs. Caruso was not simpática, ever since she called Marisela a monster because she ate a crayon. And Marisela cried quietly for the rest of the day, too scared to show Mrs. Caruso her tears.

As they walked down the hallways, Catalina was in front of him and Steven was behind him. Juanito could hear Steven making throat noises. He even felt Steven nudging his shoulder at one point when they marched past the bathrooms. Juanito looked down at the red line, looked over at Catalina’s black Mary Janes. “You better do it, Juan,” Steven said. “Or else.”

Juanito wanted to scream, What for? Why do I gotta do this? Why does it need to be done in the first place? He wanted to scream, You’re being a bully, Steven, and leave me alone.

The perfect moment came when they were lined up outside Mrs.

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