He stuffs my backpack under the seat, and Hollander leans across to pass me her phone. I can already hear my mom babbling at me in tearstained Hindi. My hands shake as I take it. “Beta, we were so worried. Ms. Hollander was so panicked. I thought—” My mom’s voice breaks. “I thought—” I can hear her breathing hard, trying to get the words out. “Are you okay?”
I shake my head, even though she can’t see me. “I’m on the plane now.” My voice sounds far away, kind of like I left it that dark, cold room. “I’m not okay yet. But I will be.”
I say goodbye and hang up as the flight attendant walks down the aisle, closing overhead bins, instructing passengers to buckle up.
I breathe in deep as we take off, watching as the earth sinks below us and we start to float above the clouds. And that’s when I realize what’s missing. My throat is bare, and it feels like everything’s lost again.
“Oh,” Rajan says, startling, reaching for his backpack. “I grabbed this from the bin earlier. I didn’t want you to forget it.” He combs through the outside pocket and pulls out a little tangle of gold.
And I’ve never been more grateful. For who I am. For who I might get to be.
My Ganesh. The god of new beginnings.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The author of the YA doc dramedy Symptoms of a Heartbreak, Sona Charaipotra is not a doctor—much to her pediatrician parents’ chagrin. They were really hoping she’d grow up to take over their practice one day. Instead, she became a writer, working as a celebrity reporter at People and (the dearly departed) TeenPeople magazines, and contributing to publications from the New York Times to TeenVogue. These days, she uses her master’s in screenwriting from NYU and her MFA in creative writing from the New School to poke plot holes in her favorite teen TV shows, like The Bold Type—for work of course. She’s the co-founder of CAKE Literary, a boutique book packaging company with a decidedly diverse bent, and the co-author (with Dhonielle Clayton) of the YA dance drama duology, Tiny Pretty Things and Shiny Broken Pieces, soon to be a Netflix Original TV series. Forthcoming are the psychological thriller The Rumor Game (with Dhonielle Clayton) and the contemporary YA comedy How Maya Got Fierce. Find her on the web at SonaCharaipotra.com, or on Twitter @sona_c.
THE CURANDERA AND THE ALCHEMIST
Maria E. Andreu
The first snow falls on a Tuesday. Tuesday is the day I teach English as a Second Language classes, a deeply improbable thing for me to be doing for a bunch of reasons. Like, because I once needed ESL classes. Like, because ESL for people like me, and my mom, for the men in the group I teach...well, maybe it’s a bit of a tiny bandage on a heavy bleed. It makes no sense, but I want to do it anyway. Which I never would have imagined the day Ms. Scofield roped me into it.
The day of the first snow, I’m on my way to the library carrying my favorite book. The snow’s tinkly magic lights the orange-blue sky and makes the whole world hold its breath. But, like all held breath, I should have known the moment couldn’t last for long.
It is two months before the first-snow Tuesday. The intercom crackles to life. “Luisa Diaz, please come to Ms. Scofield’s room.”
Crap.
I check the time on my phone. Oh, not good. I had wandered into the library at the start of my free period. I meandered over to this dark part of the stacks in a blind corner where a bulb has gone out. I ran my finger over the spines slowly, willing them to speak to me. One did, its dark green cloth alive with promise. The Alchemist’s Confession. From a glimpse at the author’s name, I could tell it was mis-shelved. Maybe someone stashed it here so no one would find it. Or maybe they wanted only a certain kind of someone to find it, the kind of someone who gets lost in the dark nooks of libraries.
I turned to its first page.
It is the rare person who can withstand transformation, although so many think to wish it. Magic should be summoned only by the hardiest among us. I tried to explain this to her, but I loved her too dearly to do a good job of it. That’s why things happened as they did.
Questions pricked at me, and soon I was tearing through page after page.
Now that the intercom has broken the spell, my phone tells me that I not only burned through my free period, but the one after that, gym. Maybe that’s why Ms. Scofield—the school counselor—is calling me: detention for cutting class.
I pull the book up to my nose, an old habit. It smells faintly of old ink, of paper that was once too close to moisture and...something else. My mind hunts for the memory, but it escapes me.
One more minute. I’ll go to Scofield’s in a minute. The hunt for the memory the book’s smell evokes takes me down blind alleys and lands me almost eight years ago, in the faraway village where my mother grew up.
When I was ten years old, the women of Colinas went across the street from my grandmother’s house to see Don Isidro, the local curandero, one by one. They came back pale, clutching sweater fronts together with one hand near the neck and looking behind them, as if haunted. They whispered of being shown to the back room, where Don Isidro stayed when he came to visit. In a rustle of skirts and sisters they told the tale of what he’d said to them. “He’s no
