Once Upon a Quinceañera

  Dedication

  To Hira, who made me believe it

  To Anjali, who made it matter

  And to my family, who made me

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Monica Gomez-Hira

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  ONCE UPON A TIME, there was a sign.

  Three, actually. Too bad Mami missed them all.

  “That was your left,” I yelped as we passed our turn. The humid, flowered streets of Miami slid by.

  The wrong streets.

  “Coño, this street has three different names, Carmen!” Mami glared at me in her rearview mirror. My fault. As usual.

  Through six layers of sky-blue satin, my best friend, Waverly, muttered something about being late.

  “Maybe we’ll turn into pumpkins and I won’t have to dance with a guy wearing an animal head,” I said.

  “Maybe start taking this seriously?”

  Waverly and I worked as party princesses for a company called Dreams Come True. She usually played Cinderella, but since this was my first party, I didn’t have a “usually” yet.

  My buttercup-yellow Belle dress lay on my lap, as heavy as a baby, still smelling like dry cleaning fluid. As soon as Waves finished putting herself together, she had to help me with this monstrosity. This was the most formal dress I’d worn since my baptism gown, because I didn’t go to prom or have a quinceañera.

  I’m not exactly the buttercup-yellow-satin, bluebirds-singing-around-her-head type. Satin means sweat stains. And if there are birds around me, it’s because they’re in the arroz con pollo I’m eating.

  But here I am. Because I missed a few signs myself.

  Miami Heights High School requires that every graduating senior take a life-planning class called Life Visioning. And a requirement of the requirement was an approved internship with a vetted local professional. Between two hundred and three hundred hours and a final project that had to be approved in advance. Not enough hours? No diploma. Unapproved project? No diploma. The administration thought that this would teach us persistence and responsibility, and, in an ideal world, give us the opportunity to discover our future college majors and eventual career paths.

  This should have been a throwaway class—a guaranteed A that would let me sail across the graduation stage. That’s what everyone said. Just tick the box and carry on.

  Except . . . why not use the class as intended? I lobbied hard for my mentor match, a wedding photographer and videographer. It was the videography part I was excited about, because I had dim ideas of maybe turning my fandom-video-editing hobby into a college major. I remember Mr. Velez raising his eyebrows at my sudden academic excitement. I wasn’t normally that kind of student. I was an expert at doing the bare minimum. But this felt like it could be different. Like the hours I spent hunched over my ancient keyboard matching actors’ faces with a perfect song lyric could pay off. Like it could mean something.

  I feel dumb even admitting that now.

  My boss, Edwin, I probably don’t have to tell you, was not a happy, fulfilled artist. I have no idea how many mal de ojos he put on the various brides and grooms he worked for, but it must have been a lot. He also wasn’t much of a mentor. His favorite topic was his own brilliance. And the exact shape of my ass.

  Still, I’d taken a chance and shown him the final project I was going to submit. After he’d frowned through the whole thing, he’d said, “So jumbled . . . and why is it so blurry?”

  “It’s supposed to look dreamy.”

  “Well . . . that’s a choice, I guess. I mean, it’s for a high school class. Right?” Then he’d looked at it again. “Even for a high school class, though . . .” He actually rubbed his eyes like my video hurt them and sighed. “Honestly, Carmen, I expected you to take it seriously. Or did you just want to look cute at events?” He looked me up and down. “You managed that, at least.”

  He sort of made a move for me, so I ducked under his arm and decided right then that nothing could make me turn in that video. Or go back to working for Edwin. Ever again.

  I was only forty hours away from fulfilling the time requirement, and Edwin wasn’t big on keeping close track of the time sheets. So I declared myself done and wrote a paper to fulfill the final requirement. And yes, I knew that I wasn’t supposed to change the project without approval, but papers were the universal currency of high school. Like paying with a credit card in another country. They’d grumble, maybe just give me a technical pass, but they’d accept it. It was work, after all.

  But I probably should have run my brilliant plan past the teacher. Because he didn’t accept it. Neither did the vice principal. Or the principal. Or the Board of Ed, not even after Mami took a day off from work to come with me to plead my case.

  I offered to turn in the video, screw Edwin’s opinion of it.

  Except it turns out that Edwin had kept better track of my hours than I had expected. They all knew I was forty hours short. And, as I mentioned, there would be ice-skating in hell before I would make up those hours.

  Which meant I was missing one credit in order to get my diploma.

  Which means I’m technically not a high school graduate. Yet.

  Funny how Life Visioning class was all about the visions and rules that other people had about my life and, since I didn’t jump through their hoops, I was screwed.

  The Life Visioning class HAD taught me one thing. I didn’t know what I wanted to do next, and I didn’t want to waste money I didn’t have figuring it out.

  Luckily for me, between Hurricane Mami, Typhoon Me, and Tropical Storm Waverly, we managed to get the administration to agree to give me another chance to get my diploma. “You can work for Dreams Come True!” Waverly had said, and the school had agreed, after warning me that this was my LAST CHANCE. If I messed this up, I was stuck, no returns, no substitutions, no backsies.

  “And I only need to make up the last forty hours, right?” I’d asked, hopefully.

  Mr. Velez sighed and looked over his glasses like I was confirming every disappointing thought he’d ever had of me. “This is a completely different internship, so no. It’s a second chance. A fresh start. From the beginning. And you need to turn in a final project that ACTUALLY gets approved.”

  Truthfully, it was fine. I didn’t want to work for a princess party company, but I also didn’t not want to. My best friend already did on weekends, and I could spend the summer sorting invoices for my diploma and writing a five-page paper about how the experience had change
d my life. Simone, the new boss, hadn’t liked that idea, though. She said, “Believe me . . . I can’t even begin to express how excited I am to have an actual assistant in the office! Thrilled is an understatement! But . . . you can’t really be a Dream behind a desk. The only way to really understand my business is to perform! And we’ll record a performance of you as a Dream for your project!” Which meant working days as Simone’s assistant (and I had just started that part of the internship), and nights and weekends as an official Dream, dancing and singing (once Simone had verified that I could actually do both) at the birthday parties of various rug rats.

  Adorable rug rats, sure, but rug rats nonetheless.

  At least I’d get paid for the performance part of it. Waverly made it sound like it paid a lot better than the Cupcake Chicas at the mall.

  And that’s why I was here, on the first Saturday afternoon in June, two weeks after I should have graduated, in the back seat of my mother’s car, wriggling into a ball gown and pinning my wavy brown hair into a half updo.

  “Thanks again for the ride, Ms. Mirella,” Waverly said as she zigzagged the tie on the back of my bodice. We’d only been friends since the end of junior year, so she was still kind of formal with Mami. “My car is in the shop, and my parents are out.”

  “Yeah, maybe we’ll make it to the party before the kid graduates from college,” I grumbled.

  “Listen, Carmencita, I could have made you take the bus. I have plans, you know, and I—” Mami said, then stopped as something caught her eye in the window.

  Oh no.

  We were driving past Coral Gables Park, a popular place to take outdoor pictures. A troop of teenagers was there, all dressed up, the boys in tuxes and the girls in slinky maroon tube dresses and matching heels. And even though I couldn’t see her, I knew that somewhere in that nest was a girl, probably dressed in a gown that looked like mine and Waves’s, wearing a huge-ass tiara that weighed her head down almost as much as the twenty pounds of Aqua Net they’d put on her hair to keep it from frizzing in Miami’s humidity.

  A quinceañera.

  “Mira, Carmencita . . .” Mami breathed out. “¡Que linda! Pero, maybe a few too many ruffles? You can barely see her head. She looks like one of those cozies that your abuela used to put on the spare roll of toilet paper in the bathroom.” Mami honked at them and waved with a huge grin. Toilet Doily did a small curtsy back, and almost fell over. No one ever seems to practice the curtsying part in heels.

  Waverly craned her neck past me to get a better look. I just stared straight ahead. I wasn’t going to risk us missing the turn again.

  Mami caught Waverly’s interest and said, “Ay, Waverly, that’s right! You hadn’t moved here yet!”

  I could practically hear the sad violin music in the background as Mami started her tale. “The story of Carmen’s non-quince is an actual tragedy! It was . . . well, it was . . .”

  “Actually, Carmen told me all about the canceled dinner, Ms. Mirella,” Waverly said brightly. Bless her, thinking that Mami could be stopped mid-rant just because you’d already heard the rant before.

  “We were all so excited, Waverly. We’d rented a dress and hired a photographer to do a photo shoot on the beach in the afternoon before the dinner. Really planned to do it up.” She glanced back at the party, now arranging themselves in a lineup like they were about to be brought in for questioning.

  “Not we, Mami. Tía Celia. And when Tía Celia giveth, she can also taketh away.”

  “And whose fault was that?” Mami snapped, her voice bristling with indignation.

  “Yeah,” I grumbled, “you weren’t too happy with her either, if I recall.” Mami and Tía Celia’s fights were always legendary, but THAT one . . . let’s just say everyone on my block learned a few new curses that day. In two languages. Maybe three. I’ve blocked out a lot of it.

  “Eh, Cecilia overreacted. Pero tú, Carmen . . . what you did was inexcusable.” Mami twisted around so she could make eye contact with Waves. “And did Carmen tell you what she did to make my sister flip her wig and cancel everything?”

  “Actually, Ms. Mirella—” Waverly began, still optimistic that she could derail the Mami Express.

  “A party! She took her twelve-year-old cousin to a HIGH SCHOOL party! With drinking! And then her cousin recorded it and my sister found everything on her phone!” Mami waved a hand. “Did you know that? Or did my Carmencita tell you un cuento al que le faltan muchos pedazos?”

  Waverly looked confused, so I translated. “Mami is implying that I may have left out some crucial details.”

  “Oh, she told me everything, Ms. Mirella. And that she felt so guilty.” She laid it on thick, even as she gave me big eyes that seem to say, Maybe you did leave out some things.

  “I’ve already told you everything you need to know,” I whispered to her.

  Waverly’s phone pinged with a text. She held it up to me and frowned. “Simone just says, ‘Beast Late. New.’ Weird. She must mean Matt? Tran isn’t new.”

  Mami sighed like she knew she was losing her audience. “Guilty should only have been the start of it!” Then her phone buzzed, thank the technology gods. “Speaking of . . .” Mami said before she silenced it.

  Must have been Tía Celia. It wasn’t a secret that she and Mami were talking again. But I didn’t have to like it.

  It wasn’t even the canceled quince that still hurt. Or the canceled photos. It was the canceled people. People like Tía Celia, Tío Victor, my cousin Ariana, and her brother, Cesar, aka the “good” side of the family.

  And I wasn’t going to get into the boy I blamed for all of it.

  Mauro Reyes. The host of the high school party in question. My dishonest former pseudo-boyfriend. My worst mistake.

  I was saved from my badly wandering brain by the blessed GPS. “You have arrived,” she intoned in her perfect android voice.

  “Finally. We’re here.”

  Yes, my first party as an official princess. Beauty. Belle. Me.

  Except thanks to the parts of Mami’s history lesson that I couldn’t drown out, I felt more like the Beast.

  Not the one who was apparently running late.

  He would be the one wearing the mask you could see.

  Cinderella had to pee.

  This was not as straightforward as it sounded. My training was a jumble in my head, but I could remember Simone telling me over and over again that we were NOT to do anything to destroy the fantasy for the kids. And have you ever seen Cinderella pee? Exactly.

  Still, I didn’t much remember what Simone had suggested we say if we did have to pee.

  I told Simone I wasn’t ready for this party.

  Waverly downed her second glass of “fairy tea,” aka apple juice. “The kids are like little pushers, believe me, pushing drinks and slices of birthday cake and Cuban sandwiches and everything else on you,” Waverly had told me. I hadn’t believed her. I should have.

  “Maybe you should say that Cinderella is trying to keep her tea consumption down. She’s having trouble sleeping, and the prince is tired of her jumping him,” I whispered to her, keeping my Belle-ific smile plastered to my face. I didn’t blame Cinderella for overindulging—it was hot and gross and fairy tea was better than nothing when your tongue was sticking to the roof of your mouth. I’d only been here twenty-five minutes and already my too-long dress felt heavy with sweat and my feet were swollen in my four-inch heels. And let’s not even talk about the funk around us that you could probably smell from space. Simone was supposed to double-check that the houses had air-conditioning, a must in Miami when you are wearing layers of satin and crinoline, but somehow, she forgot to confirm more often than not.

  Apparently, princesses have to suck it up a lot of the time.

  “Belle!” Cinderella said, choking on her tea. Then, in a lower voice, “Not. Funny.” She twitched her blond bun toward a group of little girls, all dressed in miniature versions of our outfits and all watching us as though they had to dissect us la
ter.

  Cinderella shifted underneath her ball gown and glanced at the clock. “At least thirty more minutes of mingling, pictures, New Guy shows up as a surprise, last song, then back into our carriages,” Waverly whispered to me. Or the city bus, since Mami had been a one-way ticket here. “And I don’t think I’m going to make it.” She was practically doing the pee-pee dance at this point.

  “Oh my God, please don’t leave me alone here. Just don’t think about water at all . . .” I clutched at her with my clammy hands.

  I shouldn’t have said the W-word, because she paled and practically mowed down two small six-year-olds to find the parents, who were off having their own party in the kitchen. Eight little pairs of eyes pinned me to the wall as if I were a butterfly, and my stomach fluttered like it was full of them. “Is Cinderella sick?” one of them demanded, her lip already stuck out and quivering. Ay, mi madre. I cursed Edwin’s objectifying ass again and took a deep, shaky breath. Had Simone said anything about addressing questions about a sick princess?

  If I didn’t come up with something soon, these niñitas were going to riot.

  “No!” I said brightly. “Of course not. Cinderella noticed a little rip in her gown and went to call some bluebirds to fix it!”

  I held my breath as they stared, and I stared right back. Sweat trickled down my back and all of Simone’s words played like bad Auto-Tune in my head.

  I would run if I had to.

  But then they nodded. Of course Cinderella couldn’t bear to have a ripped dress, and naturally the bluebirds needed a GPS location and time to travel.

  “Oooh,” said another little girl, whose bright pink Sleeping Beauty gown was already stained by the fairy tea she’d spilled all down the front. “I wanna see!”

  Shit. I looked around the room for rescue. Where the hell was Waverly? Did these people have an outhouse? And where was Tran—the guy I’d spent the last two weeks rehearsing with? Had he tried to reach us on the phones we weren’t allowed to have on us? Panic made my dress stick closer to my skin.

  I heard the doorbell. Oh, thank all the saints. He was here. My Beast! He’d distract them.

  I opened my mouth to tell our curious little Sleeping Beauty why she couldn’t watch Cinderella’s magical dress alterations, when suddenly a voice next to me came to my rescue.