Authors: Alicia Danielle Voss-Guillén
Love, Ben
If I was speechless before, I don't know what I am now. With shaking hands, I pick up the last piece of paper.
Hey Gory Tori,
Hahaha, just kidding! Sorry about dissing your letter to me. It really was nice of you to leave it. It stinks that you have to spend Halloween lying around in bed. That's gotta be the worst! I hope you know that deep down, I really wouldn't like it if you were gone. Okay, I'll say it: I'm glad you're my sister. You happy now? Hahaha!
Love ya!
Joey
That's about as touching as he gets, and let me tell you, I really am touched. For some reason, my eyes are all wet.
“Surprise!”
An hour later, as I'm sitting up in bed with a fresh plate of toast and a new cup of tea, still trying to digest the letters from my brothers, the door to my bedroom bursts open, and in rush Nate, Ben, and Joey themselves, dressed in ugly rubber Halloween masks and carrying trays full of cups of pop and the jack-o-lantern cookies Mom baked yesterday and cheese with crackers and salami!
Gina comes through the door next, still in her cockatiel costume, followed by Emily and Shannon who are both dressed as cheerleaders. (I told Gina so!)
“Happy Halloween!” they all cry in unison, and I'm so surprised I can't speak all over again.
“Once more, my unparalleled party-planning skills come in handy, “ jokes Nate, setting down his tray with a flourish.
“And Gina and Shannon and Emily and me collected lots of candy for you,” adds Joey, upending a bulging pillowcase into my lap.
My mouth falls open in shock as I weed through all the Snickers and Butterfingers and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and SweeTarts. “Thank you,” I manage to say.
Ben winks at me. “So, are we ready to par-tay?”
I glance around the room. “Where's Jaine?”
He follows my gaze and gives a laugh. “She'll be over in an hour or so to watch movies with me. What do you think, that we're Siamese twins or something?”
I don't answer that one. But I can't stop the mile-wide smile that's spread over my face. I stand up on my bed, letting all the candy rain off my lap, and reach out my arms.
Nate scoops me off the bed, and before I can blink, we're all part of a group hug--my brothers and me.
“Happy Halloween,” they say again.
“Happy Halloween!” I echo. And suddenly, this is the best one ever. I think about Stephanie again, and the advice she gave me. Well, it worked. I was nicer to my brothers, and they were nicer to me. And I sure found plenty to love.
Now this is a family to brag about! Tomorrow I'll start writing.
Tori and the New Girl
Chapter One
The minute I get home from school, I'm in a hurry. I toss my jacket over a kitchen chair and dash through the hall and up the stairs to my bedroom, where I throw my backpack on the floor.
“Whoa, Tori!” cries my almost-fourteen-year-old brother Joey, who can be a royal pain-in-the-neck. “Where's the fire?” He's down at the bottom of the stairs, and a moment later, Mom joins him.
“Tori,” she calls, “you were out of the car before I had a chance to put it in park! Don't you want a snack before you get your things packed?”
“That's okay!” I call back. “I want to be ready by the time Auntie Luz gets here!” Today is a special day. Never mind that it's a gray and dreary early-November afternoon, or that a cold, hard drizzle is falling from the sky. Tonight my cousin Gina and I are going to sleep over at our grandparents' house.
Abuelito and Abuelita live in Cicero, a small town that borders Chicago. It's about a forty-five minute drive from where Gina and I live in Forest Grove, Illinois. We see our grandparents often, and several times a year, the two of us are invited to spend the night. It's very special to have Abuelito and Abuelita all to ourselves for most of the weekend. And besides that, we love having sleepovers and staying up late!
I swing open my closet door and reach for my overnight bag which is lying on the floor in there. I'm not prepared for how heavy it is when I lift it, or for the loud yowl that comes from inside. I quickly set the bag back down, reach inside, and pull out Ebony, my cat.
She was obviously in the middle of one of the many naps she takes all day long, and does not look pleased that I've discovered her secret hiding place. Her green eyes narrow at me, and she swats at my outfit in her snotty way.
“Sorry, Ebs,” I say, stroking the soft black fur on her back. “I need to use my overnight bag, so you'll have to find somewhere else to sleep.”
As if she understands my every word (and I'm not always sure she doesn't), she picks herself up and stalks out of my room in a huff. Ebony is a pest and a brat, but I love her anyway.
Now that my bag is empty, I can start packing. I pull my p.j.'s out from where I tucked them under my pillow this morning, and drop them into the bag. I add a change of clothes for tomorrow--jeans, a purple hoodie, a pair of underwear, and purple-and-black zebra-stripe socks--and my hairbrush, a couple of hair elastics, my stuffed dragon Starfire, and a flashlight.
I hurry down the hall to the bathroom, grab my toothbrush, pop it into a travel case, and drop that in, too. As an afterthought, I pack my MP3 player and a library book just in case. There is no need to worry about a sleeping bag or pillow, because Gina and I always share a guest bed when we visit our grandparents.
I zip up my overnight bag, sling it over my shoulder, and clatter down the stairs. “I'm ready!” I announce.
Mom laughs. “You've still got half-an-hour before Auntie Luz and Gina get here. Are you sure you don't want a snack now?”
“Okay,” I agree, sighing. Half-an-hour seems like an eternity! I follow Mom into the kitchen, where she pours me a glass of juice and I fill a small plate with the last of the jack-o-lantern cookies leftover from Halloween, which was nearly a week ago now.
It sure was an interesting Halloween, the first in my life that I didn't go trick-or-treating. I was sick and had to stay in bed and miss out on wearing the gypsy costume I'd been so excited about. I was very depressed, until my brothers came through for me by throwing a very unexpected last-minute Halloween party in my bedroom! They can all be unbelievably obnoxious, but I'm starting to learn that, somewhere deep down, they just might be human.
I finish my cookies and juice, rinse the plate and glass in the sink, and load them into the dishwasher. Then I sit back down at the table and stare at the clock on the microwave, wishing the minutes away.
Half-an-hour finally passes. When the doorbell rings, I make a beeline from the kitchen to the entryway, nearly colliding with Joey, who is headed in the same direction.
“Watch it, squirt,” he says, then pushes past me to answer the door himself. The human side of him is definitely in hiding right now. Then again, that's only typical.
“Hey, Auntie Luz,” my brother greets our aunt. “Hey, Gina.”
“Hi,
corazón
,” Auntie Luz replies in her sing-song way, dropping a kiss on Joey's short brown hair.
The Salinas side of my family is Peruvian-American. Abuelito and Abuelita were born in the South American country of Peru, and moved to the United States in their early twenties to start a family. But even though Dad and Auntie Luz and the rest of their siblings were born in Chicago and are proud American citizens, they keep alive the Peruvian customs and the Spanish language, which they blend nicely into their American culture.
Because Dad married Mom, my four big brothers and I are half-Latin-American and half-Caucasian, a mix of dark and light with olive skin, brown hair, and brown eyes. But Auntie Luz married my Uncle Gabe, who is Puerto-Rican, so Gina and her little sister Sofie are fully Latin-American, with caramel-colored skin, black curls, and black-brown eyes.
Gina is not only my cousin, but my very best friend. She and I are two months apart, and in the same fifth-grade class at Forest Grove Elementary School. We're very different in a lot of ways, but where it really counts, we're alike, and we try to do as much as possible together. There's nothing better than having your best friend built right in to your family!
Now I rush over to give her a hug. I saw her just an hour ago at school, but it feels like much longer. Time has a way of dragging when you're really looking forward to something.
“I'm so excited!” she exclaims, dancing on the rug inside the front door.
“Me, too!” I cry. “Let's stay up all night and tell ghost stories!”
Gina shivers. “We can definitely stay up all night...but your ghost stories scare me. They seem so real!”
Mom walks in from the living room, smiling at Gina's remark. “That's the actress in Tori,” she says. “She can bring any character to life.”
I love to act. I go to drama day camp for two months out of every summer, and I've taken several theater and improv classes with the YMCA and the park district. I blush happily at Mom's compliment.
“Some characters are better off
not
coming to life,” jokes Gina, and we all laugh.
Auntie Luz shakes her head. “All I can say is, you girls had better get
some
sleep tonight!”
“I agree,” Mom adds. “Or else we'll have two sleepyheads on our hands tomorrow.” She bends down to kiss me goodbye. “Have a wonderful time, sweetheart. Be good for your grandparents. We'll see you tomorrow!”
“I can hardly wait for
that
,” Joey mutters under his breath. “Laters, Gory Tori.”
I stick my tongue out at him. “I'm not exactly thrilled to be coming home to you, either,” I say.
Mom gives us both a withering look.
“Sibling rivalry at its finest,” Auntie Luz says. She reaches out and gives my hair a playful tug. “You ready to go, Tori?”
“She's been ready all week,” Mom answers for me. She helps me into my jacket, then hands me my overnight bag.
“Bye, Mom,” I say. “I love you.”
And we're off! Gina and I huddle with Auntie Luz under her big designer umbrella. Auntie Luz, you see, does everything with style. We make a beeline through the cold rain to my aunt and uncle's SUV, parked in our long, winding driveway.
Auntie Luz throws open the doors, and my cousin and I scramble inside, where two-and-a-half-year-old Sofie is waiting for us in her car seat. We slam the doors shut as quickly as they were opened, and I toss my bag into the cargo hold. Then I slide into the space between Gina and Sofie, and begin cooing and ooh-ing to my littlest cousin.
“Hi, Sofie-boo!” I say, poking her button nose.
“Toe-wee!” she cries, the closest she can get to “Tori.” It rhymes with “Joey,” in fact, which is super-unfortunate. “We go see Lita an' Lito.”
“That's right. We are going to see Abuelita and Abuelito,” I reply. “Well, at least me and Gina are.”
We all settle in for the long drive to Cicero. What normally takes forty-five minutes takes over an hour, because everyone's getting off work and going home or going somewhere, because it's Friday.
Gina and Sofie and I watch out the windows as the houses and yards change. At first, in the unincorporated area of Forest Grove where I live, the houses are big and the properties stretch around them for acres. Our house used to be a farmhouse, built back in the early-1900s, and it's large and wandery and drafty in the cold weather.
As we get back into the incorporated areas of Forest Grove and other towns, the houses and yards turn smaller, meaning that if you lived in one of them, like Gina does, you could stand on your front porch and have a good view of all your neighbors' houses. Most people can do that, but I've grown up acres away from my next-door neighbors!
And as we get nearer and nearer to Cicero, meaning that we're also nearer and nearer to the Chicago city limits, the houses and yards change again. Now they're really small, and so close together that you could lean out your window and your next-door neighbor could lean out hers, and you'd be able to shake hands! A lot of the houses, like Abuelito and Abuelita's, are brown-brick and have only one room upstairs. A long time ago I asked Dad why the houses were like that, and he said they're called “bungalows.”
At longest last, Auntie Luz turns onto Clementine Street, and we are able to see our grandparents' house, the very last one on the left.
Auntie Luz walks Gina and me to the front door, balancing Sofie on her hip beneath the big umbrella. Before she has a chance to ring the bell, Abuelita pulls it wide open.
“My darlings!” she cries in her heavily accented, but very good, English. “Come in, come in!” She steps aside to let us into the house, and then she takes Gina's and my bags and jackets and starts to make a fuss over all of us.
Like Abuelito, she's in her seventies, healthy and full of life. She's small, with shining eyes and hair that used to be dark-brown but now is gray, twisted into a roll at the back of her head. Her soft caramel-colored skin is creased with wrinkles. Abuelita is very dignified, “a true lady,” Mom says. Even the way she walks is elegant.
Now she wraps Gina and me up in her arms, kissing our cheeks, and greets Auntie Luz and Sofie the same way.
Sofie is happy and excited, waving her arms and crying, “Lita, Lita!”
Auntie Luz laughs. “I think Sofie wishes she could spend the night, too,” she remarks. “But she'd miss her
mami
and
papi
at bedtime, wouldn't you, baby?”
My little cousin hugs Auntie Luz's neck, agreeing.
“Someday when you are older,
cariño
.” Abuelita drops an extra kiss on Sofie's chubby cheek. She turns to Gina and me, winking to let us know she'll be right with us and that our special time together will soon begin. Then she turns back to Auntie Luz, who is her youngest daughter, and they chat for a few minutes, half in English, half in Spanish.
Partway through their conversation, Abuelito comes down from the bedroom upstairs, whistling a tune. Abuelito is always in a good mood, always smiling. Nothing gets him down for too long, which is part of what makes him so much fun. He's shorter and heavier than Dad, with skin the same color as Abuelita's, but more leathery. His eyes are deep-brown, and his hair is thick and white, but Dad tells me it used to be blacker than black.