The Van Pact

9: Valerie

It was the first Saturday morning of our senior year, and Jan was determined to avoid going to college. His ongoing plan is to become YouTube famous (he's never gonna make it, and I never say never). He texted me at the crack of dawn and BEGGED me to be in one of his videos. I decided to help. It was a parody he pitched as The Force Awakens meets How I Met Your Mother. I wasn't sure exactly what that entailed, but one of my general policies is if it helps out a friend, why not? He needed one more lightsaber (which I had lying around somewhere) and somebody to play Maz Kanata. I wasn't gonna play Maz Kanata. My plan was to convince him to let me be Poe Dameron because that is the type of character I am. I get Poe. Also, I am half Hispanic. I have the right look. I might not be as gorgeous as Oscar Isaac (be still my heart), but that doesn't mean I don't got some kinda swagger.

So I was foraging around in my closet for my lightsaber when my mom walked into my room, yapping at me in Spanish. She likes to do this from time to time because she thinks it'll keep me connected to my heritage. Lulz. I mean, I already gravitate to Poe Dameron. (Then again, my attraction to Poe has more to do with the fact he's a BADASS than Oscar Isaac's ethnicity, but Mom doesn't need to know that).

Fun fact: my mom speaks Spanish with the most white bread Americana accent you'll ever hear. Grams makes jokes about that to me, when Mom's not around. The story behind that is that both Grams and Grampa (RIP) came from Puerto Rico to Linden Valley as kids in the forties. They grew up here, met each other here, got married here, Grampa got a job at the steel mill, and Grams got pregnant. They made the decision not to teach Mom or her sister Spanish, because they thought it would help them integrate more with the rest of the town. That's Grams' official excuse whenever people grill her about it. To be frank, though, I don't think she or Grampa really cared all that much. They had other things to do than make sure Mom and Aunt Rosie were eloquent, native speakers of two languages. Like pay bills and hand-sew prom dresses and go to Mass and whatever. Mom ended up taking Spanish at high school, and got SUPER into it. She joined all these Latina groups in college and is now part of some Linden Valley Latinx Medical Association. She made sure my brothers and I were as bilingual as we can get (which, admittedly, isn't thaaaat bilingual). Still, I've got a better accent than she does. Grams told me so. I like to watch her snicker every time Mom trills her rs.

"English, por favor?" I requested, still in my closet. I found a rolled up poster of Zayn Malik, but no lightsaber yet.

"Fine," my mom said, but it wasn't actually fine, because then she groaned. "Would you look at me when I'm talking to you?"

I set down my poster, turned, and looked at her.

"Were you listening?" she sat on the trunk at the foot of my bed.

"Not really," I admitted. As soon as I hear the words 'college applications,' whether in English or Spanish, my brain kinda zones out. It's a problem I have. I'm not as bad as Jan, but I could stand to be more like Stevie when it comes to the future.

"Have you given any thought to what you want to do?" I noticed some lines on my mom's forehead that weren't there before. I couldn't tell if they were a permanent feature of her age or part of the worried expression she had plastered on her face for the morning.

"Not really," I said. Annnnd there were more lines on her forehead. These ones were definitely from worry.

"You've got application deadlines," she said, "and what school you should apply to depends on what you want your major to be."

"I figured I'd kinda make stuff up as I go," I said.

My mom massaged her temples.

"What's Stevie going to do?" she asked. "Has she thought about it?"