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the floor with them. You wouldn’t have known by looking at us that we had two parents working in El Otro Lado. If our grandmother hadn’t kept the money my parents sent for us, perhaps we would have been like Élida, who was always flaunting all the pretty clothes and shoes she bought with the money her mother sent from El Otro Lado, and no one would have dared to call us orphans.
    We ran to the store with an empty bottle to exchange for a new soda. When we got back, Mago handed Doña Paula the Fanta, then we watched her drink it. She had the strangest way of drinking sodaI’ve ever seen. She would raise the bottle two inches from her lips and would tilt it just enough for the liquid to cascade down into her mouth. She never touched her lips to the brim of the bottle, saying that since the bottles were used again and again by the soda company, other mouths had touched the glass. She would drink half of it and then hand the bottle to her boys, who’d finish it off while she unloaded the containers and dumped the water into the tank.
    After drinking the soda, Doña Paula told her sons to go play with us while she visited with my grandmother. We loved playing in the backyard, but Mago didn’t want to play with Doña Paula’s sons that day, and I didn’t either. So they went off on their own to the backyard, and we went to the north side of the house where the alley was, and there, right by the rock corral encircling Abuela Evila’s property, was a big pile of caca. We could tell whoever had pooped there had recently eaten black beans because we could see little pieces of bean skin peeking out from the caca.
    Mago yanked my arm and said, “Nena, go get me two tortillas.”
    “What for?”
    “Just do it, and heat them up.”
    I sneaked into the kitchen, being careful not to get caught. I didn’t know what Mago was up to. I ran back to Mago and gave her the hot tortillas. She jumped over the corral and scooped up some caca with a stick and buttered the tortillas with it. Then she rolled them up and went to find Doña Paula’s boys. Realizing what she was about to do, I pulled on her arm and begged her not to. She pushed me away so hard, I fell to the ground. She looked at me, and for a second, my little mother was there, worried that she had hurt me. But then the anger came back into her eyes, and she walked away and left me there on the ground. I got up and ran after her. It was one thing to call them names, but a completely different thing to feed them poop.
    “You boys hungry?” she asked. The boys said they weren’t, but Mago forced them to take the tacos.
    “We don’t want any,” they said, eyeing the tacos with distrust, as if they knew Mago was up to no good.
    She held her hand up and curled it into a fist. “If you don’t eat them, I’m going to beat you up,” she said. “I mean it.”
    “Mago, cut it out,” I said, but Mago pushed me away again. I watched in horror as she bullied those boys into taking a bite out of the tacos.
    Their eyes widened with disgust as they chewed. “What’s in them?”
    “They’re just bean tacos,” Mago said.
    “We don’t want them,” they said, tossing the tacos before running back to their mother.
    We watched Doña Paula do her usual routine—first she picked up the older boy, kissed him on the mouth, and put him on the donkey, then she bent down and picked up the other one. But this time when she kissed him, she made a face. She sniffed and sniffed and then wiped something off the corner of his mouth.
    “You smell like caca, mijo,” she said. She sniffed the finger she used to wipe his mouth and then said, “It is caca. Why do you have it on your mouth?” The little boy pointed at us and told her we had given them bean tacos. “You stupid brats, why did you feed caca to my sons?”
    We didn’t wait to hear what Abuela Evila said to her. We raced to the backyard and climbed up the guamúchil tree and didn’t come down when our grandmother called us.