Our Own Private Universe. Robin Talley

she was talking to us. She sounded calm. Demure, almost. “We’re very sorry, sir.”

      The pastor came over to us, looking with a frown at our uneven paint job. “I don’t think it’s really going to take all three of you to finish what’s left of that wall. You two are Benny’s kids, right?”

      Drew and I nodded, keeping our sighs to ourselves. Preacher’s kids never got a break.

      “Come out here and we can get you to work on the ditch.” The pastor nodded to Christa. “You can finish up that wall on your own.”

      “Yes, sir,” she said, still in that strange voice.

      Stop, I wanted to say to Christa. Wait. Tell me what this means.

      “Come on, Sis,” Drew said. Preacher’s kids did as they were told.

      I tried to catch Christa’s eye before we left, but she didn’t look my way. She’d already turned back to the wall.

      She was out of sight long before I’d stopped shaking.

       CHAPTER 4

      I poked the rice with my fork. It looked like rice, anyway. It was hard to tell. There was all sorts of...stuff in it. Beans, and other things I didn’t recognize.

      Mexican food in actual Mexico, it turned out, wasn’t anything like the Mexican food at Taco Bell. Everyone around me was gobbling down whatever was on their plates, but I preferred to be sure I knew what, exactly, I was putting in my mouth.

      Lunch had been torture. We’d split up into groups and gone to the local families’ houses to eat. A nice Mexican lady kept putting more and more food on the table in front of me, but all I could do was nibble on some corn. Then I’d gotten a lecture from Lori’s aunt Miranda about being respectful of local cultures.

      At least for dinner we didn’t have to eat in people’s houses. Instead we were sitting at a row of picnic tables near the church. A whole team of ladies had set out big bowls full of rice and vegetables and tortillas and stuff. It was really pretty outside at this time of day, right when the sun was going down. Beams of light shone through the scraggly trees that dotted the hillsides to the west. Plus, this time I didn’t have to worry about getting a talking-to from a chaperone about what I was eating. The adults were at their own table, so far away we could barely see them.

      A big pile of toast stood in the middle of the table, still in a plastic bread wrapper. I grabbed three slices. Maybe I could make it through four weeks in Mexico eating nothing but corn and prepackaged toast.

      “Hi, Aki.” Jake, the guy I’d met at the party last night, swung into the seat next to me.

      “Hi.” I tried to smile through my mouthful of toast crumbs, but I could feel my face arranging itself into an embarrassing half smirk instead. “Did your day go okay?”

      “Yeah. I’m beat, though.”

      “I know. Me, too.”

      I tried again to smile, but it still wasn’t easy.

      I hadn’t seen Christa all afternoon. Not since the “boyfriend” thing.

      She’d told Lori she was into girls. Sure, maybe she was bi, but still—why had she been flirting with me last night if she already had a boyfriend?

      All afternoon I’d worked outside, digging that stupid ditch with Drew and the others. When the work day ended I waited for Christa to come out so we could talk, but I never saw her. She must’ve been avoiding me.

      I’d thought this summer was going to be when my life actually started to happen. Now I was right back where I’d started.

      “I didn’t know Benny was your dad,” Jake said.

      “Yep.” I leaned over the table for more toast. “Want any?”

      “Yeah, thanks. That stuff is great.” Jake held out his empty plate. A fellow picky eater. “Hey, cool bracelet.”

      “Thanks.” It was one I’d made last year, when Lori and I were into embroidery. It was emerald with white stitching that said, Music should be your escape. “It’s a Missy Elliott quote.”

      “Super cool,” Jake said. I could tell he had no idea who Missy Elliott was. “So, he’s going to be a delegate at the national conference, right? Your dad, I mean?”

      I shrugged. “All I know is that he’s going. He wanted to take some pictures to show there.”

      Dad, true to his word, had rounded up half a dozen girls from the local church for our first jewelry-making workshop. They’d been gathered on a blanket near the work site waiting for Lori and me when we got back from lunch with our supplies. Dad was already taking pictures. The girls were mostly around seven or eight years old, and I couldn’t understand a single word they said. Lori managed to talk to them, though. She and I had taken the same Spanish class with the same teacher and gotten the same grades, but Lori was the only one who could say more than “¿Hola?” and actually have people understand her. We’d planned to make beaded safety-pin bracelets, but the girls had trouble getting the tiny beads we’d brought onto the pins, so Lori told them to stick with fastening the safety pins together to make loops. The girls loved it. They’d kept giggling and stringing safety-pin chains around my arms. One of them thought my baseball cap was so cool I wound up trading it to her for a safety-pin necklace.

      The problem was, now we were out of safety pins and I had no idea what to make with them tomorrow. Plus, Lori was irritated with me. She’d had fun with the girls, but she kept complaining that she was having to do all the work since she was the only one who could talk to them. I thought I’d helped plenty, so whatever.

      “No, he’s definitely a delegate,” Jake said. “He’s on the list on the conference website.”

      “You got onto their website?” I put my toast down and turned to Jake. “Do you get internet on your phone here? Can I borrow it?”

      “No, I, uh.” Jake scratched the back of his neck. “I printed out the list of delegates before I left home.”

      I smiled again. “You’re really into this conference thing, huh?”

      “Yeah, our little Jakey’s a big old nerrrrrrrrd,” the guy sitting across from us said, dragging out the word in a way that I was sure he found hilarious. This guy looked older, maybe Drew’s age, and he was wearing a T-shirt with an American flag on it, even though we weren’t in America. “He’ll talk to anybody who’ll listen about that stuff.”

      I didn’t like the way the guy was grinning at Jake. I didn’t like the way Jake was staring down at his toast, either.

      “Do you go to the church in Harpers Ferry?” I asked the guy across the table.

      “Yep.” He waved his fork at me. “I’m Brian.”

      “I’m Aki. I go to Silver Spring.”

      Brian frowned at me. “How do you spell your name?”

      I sighed. “A-K-I.”

      “Oh,” Brian said. “So it’s Ahh-kee?”

      I sighed again. This had been happening my entire life. I told someone my name, and they told me I was pronouncing it wrong.

      It was my brother’s fault. When I was born, he was four and still learning how to talk. (When I told people this story, I always said he was actually still learning how to talk now, but if Drew was nearby that was a good way to get a sharp elbow in my rib cage.)

      My parents had just brought me home from the hospital. They put my baby carrier on the floor next to Drew and told him I was his new sister, Akina. Drew didn’t even try to say my real name. He pointed at little me, turned to Dad, and said “Ack-ee?” Apparently the way he said it was so cute, Mom and Dad decided to call me that from then on. Thus sentencing