Autorentext

Nik Korpon and Jorge Enrique Paz

Leseprobe
1

Bienvenidos a Colombia.

The cat outside our class window had his paw so far up in the air I was pretty sure he was going to fall off the wall, but he kept his balance, like that was a totally normal thing to do. I was trying to draw his paw pads in my comic book, how they looked like little pink jelly beans stuck in his orange-­and-­white fur. Then he looked over at me, the orange M over his eyes narrowing. Our eyes met for five or six seconds before he got bored and started cleaning himself again.

Don’t ask me how I knew he was a boy. Mamá always said I had a connection to animals. When I was three, she found me digging through a pile of palm leaves in an alley. She said to get out before a rat bit me, but when I turned around, I had a tiny bird cupped in my palms. Her right wing was broken, so I splinted it, then fed her until she could fly again. After that, I’d come home with a hurt or abandoned animal every week or two. I’d keep them until Mamá found them a home with a friend or we’d let them go in the park, since they were wild animals and all.

I liked to think that was my origin story, because all superheroes need an origin story.

But I’m not a superhero. I’m just a boring thirteen-­year-­old ñoño in el barrio San Antonio in Cali, Colombia. Ñoños are hard to describe. Definitely not the popular kids or the ones with good hair like an anime hero. They’re the ones you pass by without noticing, the ones who sketch the superhero version of people en el Bulevar del Río for some extra pesos to help their mamá out.

Y’know, the ones like me, who were drawing a comic book about a lone orange-­and-­white cat trying to save the world with the help of a beautiful warrior who’s misunderstood by most of the city. And if you’re wondering how a lone cat can save the world with somebody, you need to read more comics. It makes sense when you go with it.

Anyway, I’d always wondered if being on the outside had something to do with my Tourette’s. And no, it’s not the kind you see in movies with people shouting bad words as they walk down the street. With mine, I notice patterns everywhere and have twitches I can’t control.

As I was finishing the final curve of the paw on my cat—­which was now a battlecat—­something slammed into the back of my arm, making the line go straight through the head of the warrior girl. I sighed hard but didn’t need to look up to see what had happened.

Brayan Uribe happened.

Brayan Uribe always happened.

When I “tripped” in the cafeteria, spilling all my food.

When the class guinea pig mysteriously disappeared and then showed up in my backpack, leaving behind chewed-­up books and tiny black poop pellets.

When a group of kids in the hallway of la Escuela San Patricia made clicking noises in their throats that sounded like a bag of angry wasps, mocking the noise I made during one of my episodes where I get really stressed and making that noise is the only thing that soothes me. All of which was ironic because this was a community school purposely made up of kids from different social classes to try to “unite” the city after all the bad stuff that happened a bunch of years ago. Instead, it pretty much united them against los ñoños. On the plus side, the cafeteria had some of the best arroz con leche in the world, so we had that going for us.

If I ignored Brayan, it would make the girls giggle, which would encourage him to do something more aggressive next time, and end with me sprinting as fast as I could from school, through the alleys and parks of San Antonio, and getting home in time to relock the front door of my building before Brayan and his two goons caught up to me. (Luckily, Mamá would be at work, like always, otherwise she’d come outside, swinging her chancla at them like a sword, and they’d be even worse the following day.)

Am I proud of that? No.

But am I fast? Kinda? Faster than them, at least.

I hoped I could give Brayan the bare-­minimum reaction and show I wasn’t a total loser while also hoping he’d lose interest. It wasn’t much of a strategy, but it was all I had.

I held up my hands, saying with my expression, What’s your deal, dude? You know how long I’ve been working on this comic book?

Which of course was when Señorita de la Paz, our math teacher, called on me.

“Señor Rodríguez? How kind of you to volunteer. Please come to the front of the class.”

Even if I had been listening, I couldn’t count to twenty unless I was wearing flip-­flops. I hoped there was enough time to stall.

“Señorita,” I said, hoping my voice hadn’t cracked this time, “I’d be happy to, but Cynthia could give a much more eloquent solution to the problem you’re so deftly using both to test our skills and to teach us something new.”

I glanced over at Cynthia Pérez, my lab partner in science class, but her massively unimpressed look told me everything I needed to know.

“It’s too bad you’re not in writing class, because your expansive vocabulary would help you there much more than it will proving value theorems.” Señorita de la Paz crossed her arms. “You were paying attention to the lesson, no?”

“Yeah, totally. I love extreme values. Like getting four arepas for the price of one.”

Her eyebrows made a V. “Do you even know what an extreme value theorem is?” She continued before I could say anything. “If you did, you’d be in calculus, not geometry.”

I still had no idea what she was talking about, but she just waited by the board. I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants. Brayan was probably smirking behind me. I imagined the cat bursting through the window, springing off Cynthia’s head, and landing on Señorita de la Paz’s desk, then swatting a pencil that bounced off Brayan’s forehead hard enough to knock him over.

I looked outside, just in case he was secretly waiting for my signal to act, trying to make my eyes say Now is the moment. He paused licking himself to stare at me again, and I could’ve sworn he raised his eyebrow whiskers, but then he decided to resume his public bath.

It was too bad the inside of my head was more entertaining than real life.

As I made my death march to the front of the classroom, someone made a fart noise with their mouth. It was obvious it wasn’t me, but everyone laughed anyway.

“Daniel Parado!” Señorita de la Paz yelled.

I turned around, surprised to hear Daniel’s name.

His face went completely pale, his hands covering his mouth.

“What on earth were you thinking?” she said.

Daniel stammered. “I . . . have no idea. Something came over me and made me do it.”

Which was believable. Daniel isn’t even un ñoño. He’s not anything. Doesn’t talk to anyone or act out, reads by himself at lunch. Other kids would make a fart noise, but never Daniel.

Señorita de la Paz wasn’t buying it. “You have three minutes to figure out how to explain it to the principal. Four if you walk slow.”

The weird thing was, as Daniel collected his books, I actually felt bad for him. Even though I was the one everyone had laughed at.

Then the door closed and the attention returned to me, and I wanted to disappear again.

I felt exposed, standing with my back to the class. I held my finge…