She's Got Game (3 page)

“SO, WHAT DO
you think?” Carmen asked on the ride back to reality.

“She's friendlier than I would've thought,” Alicia said.

“She's not friendly, she's fake,” Jamie countered. The fresh air and salt water had cleared her mind of Dash—mostly—and she was back on her anti-Binky bent. “And she's used to buying her friends.”

“I dunno,” Carmen said. “I get the feeling that Binky's the sort of girl who knows a lot of people, but doesn't necessarily have a ton of close friends.”

“Me, too,” Alicia concurred.

“Well, asking people, ‘How do you say good-bye in Latina?' is not the way to make friends,” Jamie said, clearly bothered. “It's, like, hello, Einstein, ‘Latina' isn't a language.”

“She was just joking,” Carmen said.

“Are you so sure of that?” Jamie asked.

There was a moment of silence as all three girls stared into the distance. The sun was setting, and the Mortimer island receded into the distance like a picture on a postcard or in a travel magazine. The air was sultry—the classic Miami mix of hot and humid—and the waters of Biscayne Bay glistened, emerald and aquamarine.

“I feel like I'm in a movie,” Alicia and Carmen said at the same time.

They both began giggling. “Jinx!” Alicia said.

“You owe me a Coke,” Carmen said.

Five seconds later, as if by magic, the waiter appeared with his silver tray. “Excuse me, ladies, did somebody ask for a Coke?”

They burst out laughing, happily accepting the cold drinks.

“Okay,” Alicia said. “Change of topic: how much was Binky's brother crushing on you, Jamie?”

Jamie tried to deny it. “It's not even like that.…” she began. But her face was getting hot, because she knew that the flirting had gone more than one way. In spite of herself, she found she liked him. Or at least, she hadn't been able to stop thinking about him since he'd walked away. But she'd gone down that route before—falling for a spoiled rich boy in New York—and it hadn't ended well.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me, she thought now.

It was best she played it cool.

“He was totally and completely into you; it was, like, love at first sight,” Carmen said.

“There's no such thing as love at first sight,” Jamie said, determined to sound as uninterested and cynical as possible. She knew her friends wouldn't let up if they knew she had even a particle of interest. And until she figured out how much interest there was on Dash's end, she wanted to avoid scrutiny.

“Come on, you like him, too, don't try to hide it,” Alicia said, not giving up.

“He's not my type,” Jamie said.

“And what is your type?” Alicia persisted.

“Let it go, and stop worrying about me,” Jamie said. “My Latino prince will come.”

Alicia and Carmen were intrigued. Did that mean Jamie would only date a Latino? She'd never implied that before.

“Dash's mother is Venezuelan. So he's half Latin,” Alicia pointed out.

“Whatever.” Jamie waved her hand as if she were flicking away a fly. “He doesn't even play a real sport. Golf? What's wrong with football or basketball? Even tennis has more flava than golf.”

Alicia groaned. “Here we go. It's the flava police again.”

“Give it up,” Carmen said. “You're an army of one with this whole flava thing. He's a cute guy.”

“And clearly not a player like his friend, Troy,” Alicia pointed out.

Carmen put on a deep voice, mimicking Troy: “One of you girls is going to leave your man for me.”

Alicia followed suit: “Which one? Doesn't matter. My conquests are all interchangeable. Just like my corny lines.”

“Hey, speaking of conquests, Domingo is working at Bongos tonight,” Carmen said. “Do you guys want to come? Free virgin daiquiris all night long.”

“We'll be there,” Alicia said, as the boat pulled up to the dock. “Gaz and I love a freebie.”

“Not tonight for me,” Jamie said. “I've got a new collection of kicks that I'm working on. But I'll see you guys for lunch tomorrow.”

Jamie started to walk away and then turned back around. “Oh, and, like, how do you say good-bye in Latina?”

“Shut up,” Alicia said, laughing in spite of herself.

“Give the
pobrecita
a break,” Carmen insisted.

“I think the one thing we can agree on is that Binky Mortimer is no poor little thing,” Jamie said.

“
Pobrecita
doesn't mean ‘poor little thing' in terms of the money you have in the bank,” Carmen said. “It has to do with the sadness in your life, and while her mansion may be bangin', Binky lost her mother, and that sadness is real. So is her loneliness.”

“True, dat,” Alicia agreed.

“I guess so,” Jamie said. But as she walked away, she still was not entirely sure she believed it.

After dinner that night, Jamie went out to her studio to work. The space was actually in the family garage. When they first moved in, Jamie's dad, Davide, had turned it into a shop for his woodworking. But as it turned out, since he was a limo driver who worked late most nights, he didn't actually have time to do much woodworking. As Jamie got more serious about her art, selling handmade items online and buying and selling vintage sneakers on eBay, she took over the garage space and turned it into a real artist's space. She painted the walls gallery white, and, instead of the single hanging bulb, filled the room with secondhand track lighting.

The studio was more than Jamie's work space. It was her hideaway. Whenever she was feeling stressed or confused about anything, she always felt better after she took out her spray paints and markers. She'd created a line of custom totes as party favors for Carmen's
quinceañera
, and the bags had been so popular that she was working on a new series, for her online shop on Etsy.com, a site where people could sell handmade jewelry, clothing, furniture, and all kinds of handcrafted items.

The new series was called Girls on Wheels, and the bags featured images of young women from all over the world on bicycles, motorbikes, and scooters. It was her favorite collection yet, and she hoped that it would sell out on Etsy. Just in time for the holidays.

Jamie loved the smell of paint on canvas. When she was a little girl, her mom, Zulema, had taken her to the museums in New York. Jamie would go up to all of the beautiful paintings and not only admire the images, but smell them. She wanted to smell the moon in Van Gogh's
The Starry Night
and the folds of Frida Kahlo's suit in
Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair
. It was a strange thing, she knew. But to her, it was like cooking. All of those layers of paints, all of those swirls of color, should smell like something—something good.

To satisfy her desire to experience art with her five senses—well, four senses, actually, since she didn't usually taste the art—her mother signed her up for an artist-in-residence program at El Museo del Barrio in New York City when Jamie was in the fifth grade. Every Saturday, she met with kids from all over the city and with her teacher, Trini Mayaguez. And one Saturday a month, they did studio visits and met with real artists in the apartments and studios where they worked.

It was at the Museo del Barrio where Jamie began to learn all the different techniques: portraiture; large-scale figure painting; and pictorial composition. But it was also that year when she learned that real paintings didn't have to have the quiet polished marble smell of a fancy museum. Paint fresh off an artist's brush smelled strong, bossy, bold, almost acidic, like lemonade without any sugar. Like Jamie herself.

“Knock-knock,” Jamie's mother called through the garage door. “Up for company?”

“Sure,” Jamie said, not surprised to see her. Her mom would often come in after dinner to visit. At the moment, Jamie was working on a character inspired by Alicia. But she was having a tough time getting the waves in Alicia's hair just right. It was a good time for a break anyway.

“I made hot chocolate,” Jamie's mother said, handing her a cup.

Jamie was a miniature version of her mother, except that her mother's skin was a darker shade of mocha. Her stylishly close-cropped hair accentuated her high cheekbones. Where Jamie's style was hip-hop chic, Zulema favored clothes that had simple elegance, accessorized by her signature large silver hoop earrings.

“Gracias, Mami.”

Getting up from her work desk, Jamie took a seat on the old sofa that her mother had given her for the studio. The sofa had belonged to Jamie's grandmother, and as long as Jamie could remember before that, it had sat in her great-aunt's apartment in the Bronx, with a plastic slipcover on it. The first thing she'd done when the sofa arrived was to take the slipcover off. The mustard-colored upholstery was old and kind of ugly, but it still looked brand-new. Or, as her mother liked to say about hand-me-downs, “
Nuevo para ti.
New for you.”

“So, tell me about your visit to the Mortimers. Do they really own an entire island, just for one family?” her mother asked. “You know, they devoted a whole episode to the Mortimers on
Miami Mansions, Townhouses and Villas
. I love those real-estate shows.”

“Mom, it was crazy,” Jamie said. “North pools, south pools. East wings, west wings.”

Her mother laughed. “And I bet it's not like a Latino family, where you've got half a dozen kids, the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, all under one roof.”

“Of course not. Just Binky, her brother, and their parents, and it's bigger than a college campus!” Jamie exclaimed. “It's like the place is designed so that every person in this tiny family has their own share of a giant kingdom. It's kind of disgusting.”

“So, what inspired Binky to have a
quinceañera
?” her mother asked. “Doesn't seem to fit.”

Jamie rolled her eyes.

“What?” her mother asked.

“It turns out that Binky's mother was Venezuelan,” Jamie muttered.

Her mother grinned. “
Fíjate.
I love it.
The
Binky Mortimer is a secret Latina.”

Jamie scowled. “She doesn't know anything about being Latina. She's a rich blond WASP who's dabbling in my culture.”

“Whoa,
chica
,” her mother said. “Who died and made you head of the Latina police?”

“I'm just saying…”

“No,
niña
,” her mother interrupted. “Latinas come with all different backgrounds, skin tones, and hair colors. A lot of people look at me and think just because I have dark skin that I'm not Latina. You know the prejudice I've encountered from my own people. I will not stand for you holding Binky's money or her complexion against her.”

Jamie stood and picked up her paintbrush. She didn't want to have a fight now. Not over Binky. Staring at the drawing in front of her, she thought about all the paintings she'd done of her mother's beautiful brown face. There must have been dozens. It made her sad that sometimes ignorant people treated her mother badly because they hadn't got the memo that the world was full of black Latinas. Maybe her mom had a point.

Perhaps sensing her daughter's discomfort, Zulema got up and walked over to the canvas. “I love your brush technique here,” she said gently.

“Thanks,” Jamie said.

Her mother looked as though she wanted to say something more, but she hesitated.

“Give Binky a chance,” she urged finally. “Look at Alicia. Not every rich person is a carbon copy of the kids you knew when you went away to boarding school.” She squeezed her daughter's shoulder.

“Whatever,” Jamie muttered.

All of a sudden, she felt an inexplicable need to clean all of her paintbrushes. She took them from the Bustelo coffee can that sat on the old wooden table next to her easel and walked over to the sink. She didn't want to talk about
it
. The past. She
never
talked about her past. She hoped her mother would get the hint and leave her alone.

No such luck.

“
Hija
, you know we were only trying to give you the best by sending you to that school.”

Jamie was trying hard not to lose it, but it wasn't easy. If she had had a dollar for every time her parents had said they were trying to give her “the best” in referring to that stupid place, she wouldn't have had to sell sneakers on eBay for extra cash. And now, her mom was bringing up all that pain all over again.

As she continued carefully washing her paintbrushes with Johnson's Baby Shampoo, just as she'd learned to do in her Saturday morning art classes at El Museo del Barrio, she flashed back to sixth grade. They had still been living in the Bronx then. Everything had been a mess. A ten-year-old kid had pulled a gun on a teacher when she asked him for his homework. The gun wasn't loaded, but the incident had been front-page news all over the country. Metal detectors were installed at the school. Officers patrolled the outside of the school as well as the lunchroom.