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spends time with hombres .” “What!” “Yeah,” she said. “He’s gay!”
    “But you just said he’s bisexual.”
    Why isn’t a harp female? I’ve only seen the one in Lotería . Every time we play on Sundays at Buelita Fe’s house they give me a chance to deal, and so when it comes I throw it down on the table and call it out with confidence, “¡La Arpa!” But Estrella laughs at me, and then everyone else does too.
    “Why is everyone laughing?”
    Papi says to me, as if he’s my guidance counselor, “ El arpa, mija. Not La arpa .”
    “How are you supposed to know?” I ask them.
    They say the same thing all the time, that if a word ends in “a” it’s probably a feminine word. And if it ends in anything else it’s masculine. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes a word that ends in “a” is masculine, and other times, it’s feminine. How am I supposed to know what is woman and what is man simply by the arrangement of letters? It’s like at school when they teach you the rules of how to speak, then later teach you how to break those rules. Like you can’t say, “Look what the cat drug in.” You say, “Look what the cat dragged in.” Stupid verbs, stupid rules. But the point you’re trying to make is there, right there in front of you as you stand and stare at it. Pointing. La luna. El luna .
    The moon!

LA MUERTE

    I didn’t go to breakfast today so by nine-thirty there was a knock on the door. I didn’t answer but the door opened and Julia’s head popped in. “What are you doing?” she asked. “What does it look like I’m doing, pendeja ?” That’s what I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I was at my desk with the Lotería deck in front of me and La Muerte turned over. My journal was tucked under my mattress, but I was trying to think of what to write. I turned to her and opened my hands, like if to say, “What the hell do you think?”
    Then she closed the door.
     
    After the bones shattered I had a cast on my arm for about a month and a half. I was supposed to cover it with a plastic bag when I showered, and I did, but it got wet anyway, and when it dried it itched and so I pulled the cotton out from inside.
    When the doctor, Dr. Roberto, took it off he said it had never happened before. He asked me if I took care of it the way I was supposed to. I told him, yes, I’d taken care of it the way I was supposed to. He threw his clipboard on the counter and picked it up and threw it down again. My wrist was dislocated. He’d put it back in place when he’d put the cast on but now it was too late. I hadn’t taken care of it the way I was supposed to and there was no way to fix it. I was just going to have to live with a dislocated wrist. He said all of this to Mom, not me, even though I was standing right there next to her.
    I grew a lot of hair on my arm during the time I had the cast on. Once it came off my skin was white. But I was happy I didn’t have it on anymore. The first thing I did was grab a pen and write my name. To make sure I could write at least. I looked at him and said it was fine. I didn’t care if it was dislocated.
    I wanted to leave, but Dr. Roberto started talking to Mom. So I went to the waiting room and there were those children’s magazines, Highlights , with the games in the back where you have to find hidden objects in a picture. I did all of them, and when I was done they were still talking in the hallway. I heard laughter. When I looked over she was standing up straight and pulling her shirt down so it’d look ironed. In the car I asked her what they were talking about.
    “I think I just got a job.”
    The way she said it, maybe it was her face, maybe it was how excited she seemed. She hadn’t had a job. It wasn’t that she couldn’t speak English. She spoke fine, better than Papi, but it never came up, her having a job. Now she was going to work for Dr. Roberto, the man who said I didn’t take care of my wrist the way I was supposed