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phone calls cost a lot of money,” he said. To which my mom, the receiver still in her hand, the coiled cord stretched across the room, said, “We could afford them if you would let me get a job.” To which my dad thundered, “Ya. ¡Basta, Celia! I don’t want to hear about it anymore!” Which sent my mom wailing, and him bellowing in return.
    The day I finally met the Rivera girl, I’d broken free of my parents’ latest argument to sit outside on the curb and play Tetris on my phone, when my mom stormed out.
    “Ven,” she said when she saw me.
    “Where?”
    “I can’t be in that apartment anymore.”
    “But where are we going?”
    “Anywhere,” she said.
    We ended up at the Dollar Tree, mostly because the day before, someone had stolen our entire load of laundry from the washing machine at the Laundromat. Along with a pair of my mom’s pajama pants and a few pairs of my boxers, my dad’s dingy white briefs and white undershirts had been in the load, too, but my mom, in her simmering anger toward him, told me on the bus on the way to the store that he could buy his own underwear if he wanted it. “He’s so good at doing everything for himself, let him do that, too,” she said.
    We were walking through the aisles, me with an econo-pack of boxers under my arm like a pillow, when I caught sight of her. She was skinny and petite. Big, full lips and a long, thin Indian nose. Black hair that reached down her back in waves. Long-as-hell eyelashes.
    I stopped and stared. She was standing in the aisle with all the cheap dinnerware, looking bored while her mom turned over a package of plastic silverware.
    “What?” my mom said, glancing at me.
    “Nothing,” I mumbled, and made a move to keep walking.
    But my mom backtracked to see what had snagged my attention. “Who is that?”
    I tried to distance myself further. I would just talk to her another time, I thought, preferably one when my mom wasn’t around.
    “Are those our new neighbors?” my mom asked. And before Iknew it, she was marching toward them, her pocketbook bouncing against her thigh.
    “Buenas,” she said when she reached them.
    The mother turned, surprised.
    “I’m Celia Toro and this is my son Mayor,” my mom said in Spanish. “You live in our apartment building, no? The Redwood Apartments?”
    Sra. Rivera smiled. She was small and plump. Her wavy black hair was slicked back in a ponytail. “Ah! Sí. Redwood. I’m Alma Rivera. And this is Maribel.”
    Maribel, I said to myself. Forget about how she was dressed—white canvas sneakers straight out of another decade and a huge yellow sweater over leggings—and forget about the fact that her black hair was mussed like she’d just woken up and the fact that she wasn’t wearing any makeup or jewelry or anything else that most of the girls in my school liked to pile on. Forget about all of that. She was fucking gorgeous.
    My heart was jackhammering so hard I thought people from the next aisle were going to start complaining about the noise. Then I remembered the package of underwear I was carrying. In case there was any question, across the front of the plastic in big, black letters, it was labeled “Boxer Shorts. Size X-Small.” I shuttled the package behind my back.
    “I hope you’re not looking for food,” my mom said. “You won’t find much of it in this store. There’s a Mexican market nearby, though. Gigante. It probably has everything you’re looking for.”
    “We bought food at the gas station,” Sra. Rivera said.
    “The gas station! Ay, no. And what have you been eating for dinner? Gasoline?”
    This was my mom’s attempt at a joke, and thankfully Sra.Rivera laughed. “Almost as bad,” she said. “Canned beans and hot dogs and something the Americans call salsa.”
    “Wait until you try the American tortillas,” my mom said. “Horrible.”
    I was trying not to look at Maribel, or at least to pretend like I wasn’t looking, but my gaze kept brushing over her,