Delia takes a grape one. Tonya chooses lime. I shake my head. None for me, thank you.

“Mary Kelly invited us to the base pool Saturday,” Delia says.

Mary Kelly smiles at me. “You can come, too.”

I stare at her a long moment, then ask, “Why aren’t you sitting with the Brains?”

She looks at Delia and Tonya. The three of them smile at one another. “I like to laugh,” she says.

Impostor

In choir, Mary Kelly sings the “Guam Hymn” louder than anyone else. When we sing the new song, the one that the sisters let us snap our fingers to, she leans forward and shakes her shoulders.

Mary Kelly winks and smiles at the boys when they raise their eyebrows at her. She makes Lola look like a saint.

She eats green mangoes dipped in hot sauce and salt without squinting. She dances with Olivia and the little kids at recess. She even talks like us now, her words slipping up and down.

“Mary Kelly is one of us,” Delia says. Tonya agrees. Not me.

Who does this haole think she is, pretending to be a Chamorro?

No-show

Teresita’s mother didn’t show up the other day.

“Should’ve known,” Teresita says. “She couldn’t remember to feed me when I lived with her. How could she remember to visit?”

“Maybe something came up,” I say, but I’m thinking the worst. Maybe she got a hit of ice. I hear that stuff is bad.

“Oh, she called the next day. Her counselor said she wasn’t ready yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“Who knows? Who cares?” Teresita picks up a rock and throws it toward the jungle. That means end of subject.

Olivia’s Crab

Olivia catches a land crab and brings it to me in a bucket. I shake my head, frowning. “You know you’re not supposed to catch crabs until we go crabbing on the full-moon night. Tata will be angry.”

Olivia ignores me. “I’m going to feed my crab coconut for two days and make him fat before I eat him.”

“And who is going to cook one crab?” I ask.

She puts him inside Tata’s crab cage in the cabana. For two days she feeds him coconut and for two days I wait to hear Tata say something about it. But he never does.

Wednesday night, Auntie Bernadette comes to our house. She fills our smallest pot with water and puts it on the stove.

A few minutes later, I ask her, “What are you making?”

“Olivia’s dinner,” she says, then drops the crab into the boiling water.

Don’t You Remember?

Auntie makes fried rice in our kitchen while she asks, “Don’t you remember when your mother tried to enroll you in ballet class, but you cried so much, she brought you home?”

“No,” I say.

Olivia is sitting at the table, trying to open her crab’s claw with a nutcracker. “Why didn’t she put me in ballet lessons?”

Why didn’t she? I wonder.

Auntie stirs the scrambled eggs into the rice. “Do you remember when your mother taught you to swim at the pool by the mayor’s office?”