Page 55 of Something in Between

“Do we have to leave?” Isko asks.

“I don’t know, Ko,” I say.

Of course my brothers don’t understand, but now that they’re witnessing our broken hearts, they’re sad because we’re sad. At least that’s a start for them.

The news is back. “That same ex–weather girl is still the political analyst?” Dad complains. “I don’t understand. Did she go to college for this? I could do her job.”

Mom’s smeared her mascara all over her cheeks from wiping her tears. I hold her even tighter, remembering how she would scoop me into her arms and hug me tight every time I fell off my bicycle and skinned my knees when I was learning to ride without training wheels.

“Will you stop that?” Dad says. “The weather girl talking politics. Now that’s something to cry over.”

“If you say that again, I’ll put chili powder in your meat loaf.” Mom sniffs.

I guess she hasn’t lost her sense of humor quite yet.

“I just want to talk about what we’re going to do,” Dad says. “Crying isn’t going to help.”

“It’s going to be okay,” I say again, but I don’t even believe my own reassurance.

The bill not passing doesn’t mean my family will automatically be deported, but we’ll have to continue to lie low. Maybe I’d be better off if we did end up going back to the Philippines. How can I hide the fact that I won’t be able to vote because I’m not a US citizen? How will I explain that my driver’s license will be a special one for undocumented immigrants? That’s not the kind of thing you can hide forever.

If the bill had passed, at least my family would have been able to apply for green cards and then citizenship. We could have become real Americans at some point. Now it feels like everything is spiraling out of control. Like everything I’ve been trying to do with my life, including dating Royce, is getting grounded before it even has the chance to take off.

Mom’s keeping her eyes trained closely on the news anchor.

“The vote wasn’t even close,” she says. “Why does America hate us?”

“They don’t, only some of them do,” I say. It’s too depressing to sit in the living room with my family. I leave for the comfort of my room, look at the bottles on the shelf and the quotes I’ve pinned to my wall.

There’s the one fromArmies of the Night, the one Royce let me “borrow.”

There is no greater importance in all the world like knowing you are right and that the wave of the world is wrong, yet the wave crashes upon you.

I wiggle my phone out of the pocket of my jeans and text him. I have to tell him the truth about me, and I can’t put it off anymore. Especially since I want to confide my fears in him. We’ve been dating for a while now, and spending every weekend together. He drives over and we hang out at my house, eat at Denny’s, go to movies, go bowling. When we hang in his neighborhood, we go to the Brentwood Country Mart and gawk at celebrities. Once we even ran into his famous reality–TV show cousin. She was sweet and we took selfies.

I talk to him every day; he’s the last voice I hear before I go to sleep. Sometimes I fall asleep clutching the phone to my ear. He knows everything about me, how much I want to win Nationals this year, that I already wrote my valedictorian speech, because I’m so confident I’ll be number one, that I’m worried that my mom still doesn’t have a job. Although I didn’t tell him why she lost it. And I know everything about him—that he had a dog when he was little and that, when it died last year, he buried it himself in his backyard, and that he wants to get another one but is worried he won’t be able to love it the way he did the first. I know that he’s turned in his Stanford application, deciding to go Early Decision for the best shot, since he’s worried he doesn’t have the grades, that he had to take the SAT at a special place because people with learning disabilities are allowed more time, and how embarrassed he was, that he felt like he was cheating or something. He knows Stanford is my first choice too.

So I text him. I refuse to believe he wouldn’t support a reform bill like this one, even if his dad was the main architect of its demise. It’sRoyce. Sweet, wonderful, amazing Royce,myRoyce. He can’t believe in his father’s politics, can he? He hates politics, he’s said so more than once.

His number is the first one on my phone. I send him a quick text.

jasmindls: OMG. The immigration reform bill didn’t pass. Can you believe it?

Royce hits me back immediately.

royceb: you’re worried about that? the immigration bill? why?

jasmindls: America needed this.

My phone buzzes again. Another text. My stomach churns as I read it.

royceb: maybe, but you know my dad was working against it.

royceb: he went through a lot of trouble lobbying to help kill it and put a lot of hard work into it.

jasmindls: That’s what you call hard work? Immigrants work hard too you know.

royceb: yeah, and so does my dad.

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