Page 38 of Raspados & Regret

“No.”

He squints. “Who are you texting?”

“No one.”

My phone buzzes again, and my tío’s eyebrows climb. I drop down onto the creeper and slide back under the Altima to hide my face. The new message glows on my screen.

Lalo.Con.Limón

See you Friday, crop top papi.

He’s seen the video.

I drag both hands over my face and realize, with a kind of calm horror, that getting Elías out of my system did not, in fact, work.

All I did was make room for more.

FOUR

ELÍAS

Fabián Salcedo has been in my DMs for three days, and I’m handling it with dignity. When I say “dignity,” I mean since I got to work, I’ve checked my phone six times in the past ten minutes, and Anita just threatened to drown it in a container of chamoy.

It’s a small problem.

Tiny.

Manageable.

Barely worth mentioning.

Who the fuck am I kidding? This is unacceptable, embarrassing even. The kind of personal failure that makes me want to throw my phone into the Bay and pretend I never learned how to read.

I’m supposed to find him irritating. I’m supposed to hate that little gray bubble that pops up under his name. And I’m supposed to roll my eyes when he sends me a dry, rude, emotionally constipated response to something charming and generous I said first.

Instead, I’m standing behind the counter of our family’s prep kitchen, slicing mango, waiting for him to answer my last message like some tragic Victorian widow with slutty glasses and a knife.

The mango did nothing to deserve this.

It sits on the cutting board, innocent and yellow, minding its own business, while I stab at it like it personally told Fabián to leave me on read.

My mom looks up from where she is filling squeeze bottles with chamoy. “Elías.”

“Hmm,” I mumble.

“You’re murdering the mango, mijo.”

I mumble under my breath about it being the reason he won’t grow a pair and message me back. “It knew what it did.”

Anita snorts from the other end of the counter, where she’s labeling syrup bottles with her daughter strapped to her chest in a little floral carrier.

Fatima, the adorable traitor that she is, giggles.

I point the knife at both of them, a piece of mango at the tip.

Anita lifts one hand. “Don’t threaten my baby with fruit.”

“She laughed at me.”