Magic in Costa Rica

Part II. Plaid

"Alma? Don't you have to wake up for school?" I opened my eyes groggily to see my dad standing over my bed, and turned my head to look over at the clock: 6:30am.

"Crap!" I realized I had massively overslept and shot out of bed like a rocket. My dad stepped aside as I dug an outfit out of my closet and ran to the bathroom to change. I couldn't be late on the first day, not again. I threw on a pair of leggings and a blue, knee-length shift dress I had gotten at the mall with Carla over the summer. My hair was an absolute mess, but I didn't have time to shower, so I tied it into a messy bun and ran a wet comb through to get rid of any stray curls. I looked in the mirror and sighed. I looked fine. Not as great as I wanted to my first day of junior year, but it didn't matter. Tomorrow would be the first day I would see Mr. Miller since June, and that was when I actually wanted to look nice.

The thought of Mr. Miller brought a smile to my face, but also put my stomach in knots. I was nervous to see him for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I was worried that he wouldn't like what I had written over the summer. I had started off vacation determined to finish a whole book by September, but my plans were quickly derailed. I started working a lot more, and I mean a lot. Stewart's was even busier during summer months, and I was working five days a week almost every week. It was exhausting, but I made good money, and I liked having something to do. However, I could have done without the extreme heat. It's a lot harder to be a waitress when you have to stop to wipe the sweat off your forehead fifty times a shift. When I got home from working, I was too exhausted to write, and on my days off, I mostly just hung out with Carla, who always took me on some crazy adventure. Besides, even when I did have time to write, I just wasn't inspired most of the time.

That changed towards the end of July. Carla's birthday was the twenty-fifth, and her parents, wanting her to be a part of the workforce as soon as she turned sixteen, got her a job at a frozen yogurt place through a family friend. To our dismay, she usually ended up working on my days off, but that meant I had more time to myself than I had at the beginning of summer, which I used to cook, clean, and do other household chores, when I should have been writing. One morning, I was going through all the stuff in my closet in an effort to clean my room, and found the old notebook I had written in right after my mother's death. I opened it, and was immediately transported back to my life in Costa Rica, which I hadn't thought about since I was a little girl. I spent the whole rest of that day typing up every word on every page of the notebook, with some difficulty, since my handwriting was almost unintelligible, and the pages were yellowed and warped with time. Nevertheless, by evening I had transcribed every story onto a one hundred page long document, which I entitled, Magic in Costa Rica.

Nine-year-old me was not as much of a literary genius as she thought she was, so I set to work revising each and every tale from my time in Costa Rica, which now seemed like a distant, but fond and real memory. Some of the stories were silly and happy, but some were sad and meaningful, and all of them were exceedingly different from one another. I wanted to combine them in a way that made it one, cohesive storyline, but there were so many gaps in my amateur narration, that I had trouble doing so. Finally, about a week before the first day of school, I had an idea that I thought would bring it all together. I decided that I would make the narrator an old woman, reflecting on her time growing up in Costa Rica as a child. I named her Paula, which was the name of my maternal grandmother, and wrote the whole thing as if she were telling stories to her granddaughter, Silvia, which was my mother's name.

For seven days and nights, I frantically wrote, during every possible spare moment in between work and sleep, trying to finish by the time school rolled around. I wanted to walk into Mr. Miller's classroom with every chapter perfectly edited, and lay it on his desk, all tucked neatly into a folder. But now, that folder lay, practically empty, on my bedside table, as I had only completed five chapters in total. They were good chapters, and I knew I could weave the rest of my childhood stories into something wonderful, but I needed more time. I shrugged at my reflection in the mirror. I guess that was the point of this whole 'vocational study' thing: to give me time. I left the bathroom, and hurried into my room to get my backpack and phone before going to school. On my way out the door, I heard a little whoosh sound coming from my phone, and I stopped to check it. In my inbox was a single email from Mr. Miller. My heart skipped a beat, and I quickly put a hand over my chest to keep it from bursting out. I opened it and started reading quickly, still worried about being late.