Spain or Shine (23 page)

Alita shook her head slowly. Now Elena was sure something was wrong. Alita, the girl who was always trying to tag along with whoever would tolerate her, was turning down an invitation. It wasn't like her at all.

“What's going on, Alita? You seem like you've been really down all day. Are you maybe upset because I'm leaving tomorrow?” Elena ventured. “You know, I'm going to keep in touch with you. We can e-mail and write each other postcards. And then maybe one day you can come and visit me in America.” Elena said the last sentence in as perky a voice as she could muster. Alita nodded, the faintest wisp of a smile passed briefly on her lips.

Elena started to get off the couch when she heard Alita whisper something else. “What did you say?”

“I said I liked having a sister. I know you are not my real sister, but it was fun pretending. Now it will just be me.”

“It's a little lonely, huh?”

“Yes,” Alita nodded and finally set her book down. Elena sat down next to her on the couch cushion.

“Having brothers and sisters around can be a big pain, too. You compete over everything: the bathroom, the car, your parents' attention. Brothers tease. It's impossible to do anything really great because the chances are someone else has already done it, or can do it better than you....” As she was listing off all the downsides of having siblings, she realized how unconvinced Alita looked. She couldn't sell this to Alita because she didn't believe it herself. When she first arrived in Spain, she'd envied Alita. She knew Alita would always have her own room. She'd never have to follow in the footsteps of an impossibly beautiful sister. She'd never have to fight for her parents' attention. She'd never have to wear someone else's old, stretched-out clothes. Elena realized how little that mattered now. Elena didn't need to be away from her family anymore in order to do something really meaningful and big. In fact, now that she felt capable of doing those things, she wanted her siblings around to share them with her more than anything. They weren't her competition; they were her support system.

“I think I understand why you're sad. But you have some great friends, don't you?” Elena inquired.

“Yes.” Alita slumped forward.

“Well, you don't have a big family, but your friends can be like extra family members you pick for yourself.”

Alita nodded. She seemed to understand what Elena meant. Elena told Alita about her great-aunt Elena, who didn't have a husband and kids of her own but wasn't lonely because she surrounded herself with friends. Elena realized that she'd unwittingly done the same thing. She'd come to Spain to establish her independence, to set herself apart. But in the process she had surrounded herself with great friends whom she depended on, and she suspected they depended on her, too. It was a wonderful feeling.

“Well, you do have a sister for about sixteen more hours,” Elena said, giving Alita's shoulders a squeeze. “Why don't you come with me to the store?”

Finally a smile broke out across Alita's stony face.

 

Hours after Elena had dropped Alita back off at home she was strolling along the Paseo toward the beach, and she spotted Miguel ambling toward her. The sun was at his back so that his face was hidden in shadow, but she was sure it was him. After months of scanning crowds for him she knew the real thing when she saw it. She had all of him memorized-his walk, his posture, the way he tipped his head to the side when he concentrated on something-all of him.

She'd been successful in avoiding him since the play. She didn't understand why he hadn't shown, and she was afraid she just didn't understand him, period. The fact that he hadn't shown up to the performance that meant so much to her was a sign that he was truly not interested. So she had avoided him to prove that she wasn't interested either.

Elena ducked her head and tried to dart over to the stairs before he could see her, but he was too quick.

“Elena,” he called. He picked up his pace and met her in front of the steps.

Elena spotted her friends—a line of shadowy figures filing across the sand. “I'm supposed to be meeting them,” she said, pointing to the moving silhouettes.

Miguel looked in the direction she pointed, then they both looked at each other.

“I know. Jenna told me. That's how I knew you would be here.” So, he had been looking for her. Neither of them moved. She looked back toward her friends in the distance.

“I was hoping I could talk to you,” he said.

“Okay.” Elena couldn't stop her mind from racing. What could he possibly have to say to her on her last night there?

“Come with me,” Miguel said, reaching gently for her hand and leading her toward an empty bench overlooking the ocean. His face was turned away from the sun, but his eyes still seemed to reflect strands of gold.

They sat in silence for a moment, watching the setting sun dance across the water. The fact that she was actually leaving tomorrow hadn't seemed real until that moment as she realized this would be her last sunset in San Sebastián.

Elena closed her eyes and tried to save the view just as she saw it now with the sun dropping quietly into the ocean.

“Sometimes, when I come to watch the sun go down, I can see the moment when the horizon flashes green just before darkness,” Miguel said. Was this his way of trying to patch things up before she left forever, she wondered.

“I've never seen the green flash.” Elena nodded, intrigued. “It sounds beautiful.”

“It is.” He was quiet again and looked straight ahead, but she sensed he had more to say. She waited a long time as the wind picked up off the ocean and the air grew cooler.

“I went to your play,” he said finally. “It was wonderful.”

“You came? But I never saw you. No one did.”

“I was there,” he assured her.

“But nobody saw you. Why didn't you—”

“I was there,” he barreled through, interrupting her thought. “I was called in at the last minute for work, and I got off only ten minutes before your play started, so I had to sneak in and sit in the back, but I was there. I was also backstage after the show. I brought flowers for you. They were the same kind you were already holding—the ones that Alex had given you.”

“Alex?” she turned abruptly to face him. “Those flowers weren't from Alex; they were from the Cruzes.”

“But you were hugging him and smiling.”

“We had just finished a really difficult project together. He's just my friend.”

Miguel looked down at his hands. “I did not know that. I thought you might be with him. You had been spending so much time with him. And then you kissed each other onstage. I was sitting in the audience wondering why you had asked me to come and watch you kiss another boy.”

Elena couldn't help but laugh. She forced him to look her in the eyes. “First of all, Alex has always been just a friend. Second, we were acting. It's all pretend. And I wasn't even the one who was supposed to be kissing Alex at the end of the play, Jenna was.” Elena felt herself relaxing. She was so happy and relieved that Miguel had hunted her down to tell her he had been at the play after all. “Jenna was our lead. She was supposed to play the main character, Lisa, but she got really nervous that night. Right before we went onstage, she panicked, and I had to step in for her.”

“That was brave.”

Elena looked out at the ocean and mumbled a thank-you. She didn't tell him how much more courage it took her just to ask him to the play. Starring in a play had seemed like nothing compared to the nerves she felt standing at the hotel, practically handing her heart to Miguel. “Believe me, if I had known I was going to be the one up there kissing Alex at the end, I would have at least warned you.”

“Well, I'm glad to hear that, Elena, because ... I like you,” he said to his hands. “I wanted you to know that.”

Elena couldn't believe what she was hearing. Miguel—the person she thought was too beautiful and confident ever to care for her-was sitting here saying he felt the same way about her that she had felt about him all this time. Elena looked at his profile, haloed by the light of the sunset. It was the way she had first seen him, in a profile that was practically glowing. Then she glanced back at the ocean.

The sun was just a point of yellow light on the waves; she could see it slipping slowly, slowly into the water.

She wanted to thank him for finding her on her last night and to tell him that this would be a moment she'd remember for years. But the words never left her mouth. Miguel leaned in, took her face in his hands, and kissed her just as the sun slipped into the ocean in a fleeting, brilliant flash of green.

 

Miguel and Elena found their group on the beach up near the Paseo. As they approached, they found Alex fumbling with big hunks of wood and frighteningly long matches, attempting to start a bonfire in the dark. He claimed it was a necessary skill for any respectable beach bum.

Jenna waved them over excitedly. “Hi, you guys,” she said, leaping up to give them both tight hugs.

Elena plunked down in the sand with Jenna and unloaded the proliferation of junk food she'd been lugging around in her backpack with the blankets. She knew she'd gone overboard, and she knew all the girls would complain about their caloric intake and then stuff their faces anyway.

“Elena, why did you get so much junk?” Marci whined as she reached for a package of cookies and tore it open.

“You know you love it, Marci,” Jenna teased, reaching for a bag of chips.

Alex finally got the bonfire started. Miguel moved in next to Elena, wrapping his arm around her waist and pulling her onto his lap. Chris turned on a little battery-powered radio he'd brought along and tinny flamenco music came pumping through the rusted speakers. The music was scratchy and weak, but Alex and Jenna got up and did a little impromptu flamenco routine. Elena was happy to see that Jenna had eventually given in to her obvious feelings for Alex. Although she knew they were both so noncommittal it probably wouldn't go anywhere beyond that night, she was happy to see her two best friends together for now.

Eventually Jenna persuaded Chris, Marci, and Caitlin to get up and join the dance party.

Elena stayed firmly planted, leaning back against Miguel, with his arms wrapped securely around her waist. Now that she was with him she didn't want to let go. This wasn't just another one of her daydreams. This was the real thing. This was an actual guy with insecurities and faults and dreams of his own. She turned her head and kissed him again.

The plan had been to stay up talking and goofing around until dawn when they would all watch the sunrise together from their spot on the beach. During his time in San Sebastián, Alex had been up before dawn several times in order to get a couple of good hours of surfing in before school, and he promised them that dawn breaking over la Playa de la Concha was a magical sight. But around three in the morning, some members of the group were fading. Marci and Caitlin were the first to go, followed by Chris, who ended up falling asleep with his face mashed into the sand. Jenna and Elena had to gently shove a balled-up jacket under his head so he wouldn't wake up with sand in his mouth. Then, Jenna fell asleep on Alex's chest.

Miguel and Elena lay together on Señora Cruz's blanket and looked up at the stars.

That night Elena had a week's worth of dreams. She had strange dreams about getting on a ship with Miguel, Jenna, and Alex, and yet somehow watching them float away. She dreamed of her family and Claire waiting for her back home, and how it would feel to hug them all at the airport. She had dreams about getting stuck in a plane circling over Spain and the United States, unsure where to land. She dreamed of the beach and trains and finely dressed Spanish men sitting at outdoor cafés.

Miguel woke her in time to see the light of dawn spreading pink across the sky. She sat up in the sand and looked at all her other friends still asleep on the sand. Although she wouldn't remember any of the details of her dreams that night under the Spanish sky, she knew that the whole time she had been dreaming in Spanish.