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said in disbelief.
    "No, really," he said as one hand absently rubbed the front of his stomach. "Back in high school. There was a guy, Romeo Garcia, and his girlfriend was Julieta Mendoza. They were an item."
    As she drank, Marisa stared at her father through the bottom of her glass of iced tea. Her father seldom veered far from the truth. She listened as he told her how Romeo loved his Julieta until this other guy came along.
    "Who was this other dude?"
    He looked her straight in his eye. "It was me."
    Marisa's mother slapped his arm. "
Mentiroso.
You were too busy chopping cotton to have a girlfriend."
    "Chopping cotton." He chuckled with both hands on the ball of his stomach. "That's how I met Julieta." He winked at his daughter and went for a second helping.

    Marisa was in bed, near the edge of sleep with her math book in her face, when her cell phone rang. She rose up onto her elbows and plucked her phone from the headboard, where she kept her stuffed animals.
    "Yeah?" she asked, face draped with her hair. She swept it out of her eyes, which were still closed but suddenly opened when the voice asked, "How's Alicia?"
    Roberto—the rat,
la rata.
    "Why are you calling?" Marisa glared at the clock on her chest of drawers. The clock glowed
10:18.
    "I'm calling because Alicia won't answer her phone."
    "She don't want to see you. You broke her leg. Worse, you cheated on her and Alicia told me that girl in the photo was
muy fea.
" She snapped closed her math book and set it roughly onto the floor.
    Marisa could hear Roberto swallow. He muttered, "How come our school ain't good enough for you?"
    She clicked off the phone as she muttered, "
Tonto
jerk." But a second later the phone rang again. She picked it up and roared a frosty, "I said she don't want to talk to you."
    "You don't want to talk to me?"
    It was Rene, a lamb with no sins except bad taste in clothes.
    "Oh, Rene, it's you! I'm sorry." Marisa sat up and rubbed the hammer of her right fist against her sleepy eyes.
    "I'm calling you because..."
    "Because you like me?" Marisa risked. "You're so sweet."
    "Yeah—" He giggled. "And because I got up to doing fifteen push-ups without stopping."
    "My Terminator!" Marisa crowed.
    "Oh, come on, Marisa, I'm not really that strong yet."
    Marisa could see him bashfully lowering his face. She pictured him doing each of the fifteen push-ups and shaking from the pain as he touched his nose to the floor.
    "Yes, you are!"
    "Oh, my," Rene whispered and then told her that his mother had bought him a pack of blue socks.

Chapter 6
    After school Marisa leafed through a worn copy of
Romeo and Juliet
and was smart enough to figure out that neither she nor Rene could play the leads, though she had a faint inkling that perhaps they could bring a new angle to those roles. After all, couldn't Juliet be fat and Romeo skinny? And weren't they in love?
    They were straddling a bench under a tree that had given up all its leaves. The school campus was nearly empty. Somewhere a janitor was vacuuming a classroom. Somewhere kids were playing football on a brownish field.
    "I could be a really, really skinny Romeo," Rene remarked. He handed Marisa a stick of gum.
    "Then I'm Juliet." Marisa unwrapped the gum from its silvery foil and folded it into her mouth. "Thanks for the gum, Romeo." She turned her attention momentarily to a lone skateboarder riding halfway up a cement wall nicked with wheel skids.
    "The gum is from my trick-or-treat candy."
    Marisa shoved him. "Getta outta here! You didn't go trick-or-treating. Anyway, Halloween ain't for another week."
    "It's from my last year's stash."
    Marisa rolled the gum onto the carpet of her tongue and was ready to deposit it into her hand when Rene said, "Just kidding."
    "What's your mother like?" Marisa asked.
    "Tall and kind of strict." He chewed his gum loudly. "What's yours like?"
    "Short and sometimes really angry about things." In truth, her mother had softened. She was glad about her daughter's new