Hoop Earrings

I trail behind the crowd as they march the fleshy, bloated pig down the avenue of pastel houses. The new priest is at the front of the group with his silver beard and his creepy crawly caterpillar eyebrows. I close my eyes and imagine them coming to life, inching their way off his face entirely, even though Abuela says it's a sin to care so much about appearances. The last priest, the much better-looking priest, set his sights on seeing the world, so the town replaced him the same way my brother, Riel, replaced the old batteries in my butterfly night-light. Señor Castillo arrived from Havana two days ago, and Abuela insists on throwing a party to welcome him to Cienfuegos. The whole town is invited. 

The humidity makes me feel sticky and the last thing I want is for John to see me with frizzy hair, so I wander inside while my brother brings the pig around into our backyard. John is my brother's friend and I'm madly in love with him. There's nothing more romantic than being madly in love with someone. I used to curl up on the sofa next to Mamá to watch telenovelas and I've since decided to find true love, although most likely without the kissing part because kissing is just gross. 

I like the way John' hair falls into his eyes, the way he can pull off a leather jacket, even on the hottest days of the year. It doesn't matter that he's sixteen and I'm ten; I don't think the six-year difference between us will be too noticeable when we're older. 

I shut the door behind me and I'm greeted by the scent of baking flan. Sugary delight. It's an oddly delicious smell for a house that normally smells like moldy cement and wet carpet. If only it could fix the hideous grapefruit-pink wallpaper. I begged Abuela to change the colour, but she said it was pink before I was born and that it would stay that way until the day she was put into her grave. Talk about melodramatic. Still, our house is in better condition than many of the other ones in Cienfuegos. The flooding has forced some people to throw all their clothes into garbage bags and tie them to the ceiling. There have been days throughout the worst of it when all we’ve had to eat was sugar by the spoonful.

I kick off my ballet flats and one of them flings into the wall, rebounding into a potted plant. I fish it out and place it on the welcome mat next to the other one. The sweet aroma lures me through the hall and into the kitchen where my abuela is poking a toothpick into the center of the flan. I usually wait until she's baking to ask her for things because it's when she's most likely to be in a good mood. The trick to getting what you want is knowing when people are in a good mood. 

"Ramira told me she'd lend me her earrings. The big hoopy ones," I say. 

"Wear your golden stars, Nina. They’re so cute." 

"That's what you always say." 

I've been trying to convince Abuela to let me wear hoop earrings for months, but she reminds me every time that I'm just not old enough. Riel and me are stuck living with her because Mamá is off working as a nurse in Venezuela and Papá is nowhere. After three years of waiting, I’m starting to worry she'll never come back for us, that we'll become permanent orphans, so I preserve her memory like a firefly in my cupped hands, or a daffodil pressed into a book. 

Abuela wipes the flour off her hands, leaving powdery white streaks down the sides of the yellow apron wrapped around her waist. One of the bottom corners is burnt off—I swear I had nothing to do with it—but she says there's simply no reason to replace something that still fulfills its purpose. 

"I need you to bring the flan out to the backyard. If your tía sees me, she'll never stop chattering. I'm telling you that woman should've been a politician," 

I take the tray from her, disappointed that the hoop earrings are still a no-go. I’ll just have to keep asking until she gets annoyed. 

John and Riel are seated on the stoop in front of the backyard door, cigarettes wedged between their fingers. Riel is nothing if not a carbon copy of Papá, a man I have only ever seen in photographs. Most of them were taken with one of those cheap disposable cameras that turn eyes red, but they're clear enough for me to recognize that they both share the same dark hair, the same terrible posture, the same watchful gaze. I look nothing like Papá and people never guess that Riel and me are family—thank the Lord almighty. I have Mamá’s honey-coloured hair and good eyes. Riel wears glasses. 

"Why do you guys smoke so much?" I ask. 

"It's cool," John says. 

He exhales and a puff of smoke flurries into the air. It seems easy enough. 

"Pass me one," I say. 

I'm going to have to do things John enjoys if I'm ever going to get him to like me and there’s absolutely no way I'm about to let Riel be cooler than me. I’d rather die than become less cool than a guy who wears sunglasses inside. Balancing the tray with one hand, I reach for the box of cigarettes with the other, but Riel gets to it before me. 

"Beat it," he says. 

I stick my tongue out at him. He's always bugging me, like that time I fell asleep in a patio chair, and he snuck up behind me to dump a huge bucket of cold water over my head. When I tried to do the same to him, I got grounded for a week. Abuela says it’s because I used muddy rainwater, but I think it’s just because he’s a boy and boys are supposed to do things like that. Girls are supposed to make tea and say yes please and no thank you and braid hair and do dishes. 

It's tricky to find a place for the large tray among the empanadas, the platáno, the arroz con frijoles negros, so I pull a patio chair up beside the table and place the flan down, hoping the flies won't get to taste it before I do. 

The pig is tied to a tree in the center of the yard. It’s still trying to pull itself free, only to be yanked back by the rope each time it strays too far. I've always wanted a pet pig, but Abuela says no-one keeps them as pets because pigs are food. I just wish she’d give my lemonade stand business idea some serious thought—that would bring in the dough for sure and then we wouldn’t have to eat pigs. 

My little primo, Noel, is tossing seeds at the chickens. He really can’t throw very far at all, so they start to peck at his feet, and I say it serves him right for not wearing shoes. Noel turns to run, but they’ve got him cornered. He falls backwards and the entire bag of seeds spills in his lap. They continue to close in on him. 

"The chickens are gonna eat me!"

All little kids ever do is eat, sleep, poop, and cry. I don’t see why everyone thinks he’s so cute, but I’m glad his cheeks are the ones getting pinched at these parties instead of mine. 

Abuela enters the backyard in a flowery dress that looks suspiciously like our living room curtains. She is carrying a spool of string and a bundle of old newspapers. It's tradition for the kids to make newspaper kites at our family parties and even Noel stops crying to join in. The children search the yard for the perfect sticks to tie together for the frame of the kite. 

When I was six, my tío taught me to make my first kite, but I could never quite get it into the air, no matter how hard I tried. He said it was just because the wind wasn't strong enough, but no one else had any problems, so I knew it had to be because of my horrible bad luck. I like to imagine that I have been cursed by a harrowing wizard, that I am really a princess from some faraway land, but the ratty kitchen carpet would never match a princess dress, so that can’t be true. 

"Nina, you better come inside before all the newspapers are gone," Abuela says. 

My cheeks become flushed and I’m glad John is no longer sitting on the stoop to see. Abuela winks at me and follows the children inside. Instead of going with them, I escape to the front of the house to watch as the last of the guests arrive. The priest has positioned himself at the door to greet them, and his tight grin makes him look constipated. His posture sure doesn't help. 

My prima, Ramira, is sitting in a rocking chair near the entrance, looking down at her phone. Her hair is curly the way mermaid hair must be and her shorts are just the right length to show off the tie-dye heart tattoo on her thigh. If I ever get a tattoo, it'll be something cool like a licorice-black raven or a fairy. Once I convince Abuela to let me wear hoop earrings, I’m going to push for a tattoo. It’ll be on my leg, just like Ramira’s. 

"Hoop earrings as requested," Ramira says, handing me a pair of neon pink hoops out of one of her tiny pockets. They’re the most beautiful earrings I have ever seen. I put them on, hoping Abuela will be too distracted entertaining the guests to notice. She'll have to yank them from my ears to get me to take them off. 

"How do they look?" I ask her. 

"Fabulous," she says. 

"Fabulous," I repeat. 

Once all the children are inside making kites, my brother begins to make dinner preparations. I'm on the stoop that he and John have since abandoned, sipping a glass of lukewarm lemonade. Ramira is across the yard with her boyfriend, José. I don't know much about him, but it's stupid that he wears a belt and still can't manage to keep his pants all the way up. 

John and my Riel approach the tree together—John is the one holding the baseball bat—and the pig becomes even more aggressive as they close in. It charges in every direction. It is screeching. It sounds like a baby. I want to jump in between them, to tell everyone that there has been a terrible mistake, that they'll just have to find another pig, but I force myself to watch as he raises the bat high into the air and brings it down on the pig's head. My eyes shut as it drops to the ground, unconscious. Riel inserts a knife into the throat. My brother holds the pig's body down and I can't help but think about all the other pigs that have been killed in our yard and all the blood that has seeped into the grass throughout the years. Where does it all go? 

Once the pig is dead, the rope is untied from the tree. Buckets of boiling water are carried out of the house and poured onto the body. Steam rises into the air. John shaves the pig by scraping a knife along the skin and Riel uses a blowtorch to singe the rest of the hairs off. I try not to think about the last priest’s sermons about hell, but I'm sure that's where we’re all headed after this. I want to throw up. I can smell the charred skin. Ramira and José are holding hands in a corner, discussing some dumb movie while the priest chats up my tía, complaining about how much his taxi driver charged him for the ride from Havana. I want to smack the caterpillar eyebrows right off his face, but I figure hitting a priest must be considered a sin. It seems that lots of things are considered sins nowadays. When I asked about the reason behind God's dislike of miniskirts, Abuela threatened to throw a bible at my head; not very holy if you ask me. 

John sharpens his knife against a metal rod as Riel hoists the pig into the tree by its back legs. The way the body sways through the air sends shivers down my spine. John' feet are covered in the same mixture of blood and dirt as the body, but he doesn't seem to mind. There’s no way I’ll be able to stomach him cutting the head off, so I sneak back into the house and shut the screen door behind me. The laughter of the children at the craft table seems even more unholy than hitting a priest. I go up to my room in search of silence, of solitude. 

Instead of silence there is music: salsa, bachata, merengue. Everyone has moved onto the grassy lawn below my window, and they are dancing, cans of Mayabe beer swishing back and forth in their hands as they move. I search for John in the crowd and spot him spinning around some girl who's not me. Looking at him now just makes me think of the knife, the blood, the squealing. I want to go down there and punch him right in his big freckled nose, but I'm not very good at punching—I can never remember if I'm supposed to keep my thumb inside or outside my fist. 

The newspaper kites soar underneath the moonlight, like tiny ghosts in search of their souls. I want to disappear into the sky and live on a fluffy cloud. 

“Take me with you,” I whisper. I want to go with them. 

But the kites don’t answer, and the wind dies down, sending them plummeting to the ground. I’m stuck here. The party has gone on entirely too long, so I wipe my lip-gloss off on a tissue. I change into my Barbie pajamas. Before crawling into bed, I bury my new hoop earrings at the bottom of a drawer and put the tiny golden stars back into my ears.