Lights, Camera, Quince! Read online

  “Don’t sweat it,” Carmen said. “Really.”

  “I’m the worse best friend ever!” Alicia went on in an anguished voice.

  “No, you’re not.” Carmen’s eyes twinkled as she added, “I believe there’s one other girl out there who forgot her best friend and her mom’s birthday.”

  “I totally deserve that,” Alicia sighed. “I’m hating myself right now. After you spent my birthday with me in Spain, I had every intention of making your day just as magical.”

  Carmen smiled. “It’s not too late, chica. None of us expected Amigas Inc. to be such a big hit, and honestly, I’ve been struggling with what to do, exactly. One of the things I’ve loved about the quinceañeras that we’ve planned so far is that they really embody the spirit of each girl. They don’t feel like all the ones we used to go to where you could tell that the moms were out of control and had decided on everything. . . .”

  “Or the girls were spoiled brats.”

  “Exactly,” said Carmen. “I mean, Sarita’s astronaut theme was . . .”

  “Off the hook,” Alicia said. She loved it that she and Carmen could complete each other’s sentences. It was as if they were in her favorite Frida Kahlo painting, where two girls were connected by one heart.

  “Nilka’s ‘Top Chef’ party was too hot to handle. . . .”

  “And too cold to hold,” Alicia finished.

  “The problem is, I still don’t know what kind of quinceañera would be perfect for me,” Carmen said as she opened the front door. Immediately, their ears were assaulted by noise. Alicia put her hands to her head jokingly. It was like when she grabbed her iPod out of her bag and didn’t realize that the volume was turned way up until she put the headphones on—and the music exploded in her ears.

  Carmen’s older sister, Una, was making a smoothie in the kitchen and talking on the phone. Her brother, Tino, was watching a Mexican soccer game on the giant-screen TV in the living room. The twins, Laura and Lula, were playing Wii bowling in the dining room with three of their friends. Carmen’s stepfather, Christian, meanwhile, sat at the dining table, miraculously listening to classical music and reading Shakespeare, as if he were ensconced in the peace and quiet of the British Museum.

  “Well, hello, Carmen,” Christian said, standing up. He was from England and the blond, blue-eyed, polar opposite of Carmen’s dark-haired, chocolate-eyed mom.

  “And, Alicia,” he added, giving her air-kisses on each cheek. “You haven’t been around in ages.”

  “Actually, I come over every day. But there’s always so many people here you never notice,” Alicia said playfully. She had just the tiniest, crumb-size, speck of a crush on Carmen’s stepdad, which she could never tell Carmen about, because, well, that would just be too weird. She blamed it on the accent.

  Christian laughed. “Well done, Alicia.”

  “Where’s Lindsay?” Carmen asked, glancing toward the other younger kids. Lindsay was eight years old and Carmen’s mini-me, following her everywhere.

  “Band camp,” Christian answered. “Those tubas don’t play themselves.”

  Carmen nodded, and then she and Alicia went into the kitchen, where Una deigned to nod at them. This was a step up from the usual treatment. And frankly, more than they expected. Una was about to be a senior at Coral Gables High. A very popular senior. Throughout their freshman year, she had refused to speak to them at all in public places. She was captain of the dance team, a star member of the drama club, and secretary of state for the Regional Southeast Conference of the Model UN. Which basically meant she was a diva, but a smart diva. Deep down, Alicia really admired Una, but that was another thing she could never really tell her friend. Maybe this year Una would be nicer. Maybe.

  Ignoring her sister, Carmen tossed Alicia a plastic fork and a roll of paper towels. Then she took a container of cut mangoes from the fridge. She opened it and sprinkled black pepper on the mango slices, grabbed a fork, and said, “Let’s talk outside. I can’t even hear myself think in here.”

  Once away from the noise, Carmen made a beeline for the wooden rowboat that was docked in the canal behind her house. She climbed in, and Alicia followed. They used to sit in the boat and talk all the time when they were little, but they hadn’t done that in ages. Alicia didn’t realize how much she had missed it until now.

  For a moment they were silent as they enjoyed their snack and the quiet.

  “If I ever get stuck on an island, like on Lost, I’d be happy as long as I had peppered mango,” Alicia said, licking her lips. “Peppered mango and Gaz.”

  “Me, too,” Carmen said.

  Alicia smiled mischievously. “Oh, really?”

  Carmen giggled. “You know what I meant. Mangoes are all I need. Gaz is one hundred percent yours sweetie. Now, can we focus? What are we going to do about my quince? We need a theme—and fast.”

  “Agreed. There can be no corners cut on this one. I’ve heard Carmen Ramirez-Ruben is a very demanding customer,” Alicia said, her eyes twinkling.

  “Probably our toughest one yet,” Carmen said, playing along.

  “She’s going to hate your dress design,” Alicia said, shaking her head.

  Carmen nodded. “At least the first ten sketches.”

  “She’s going to be demanding,” Alicia insisted.

  “But not too bad,” Carmen said in defense of herself.

  “You’re right. She just knows what she wants,” Alicia agreed.

  “That’s the thing, Lici,” Carmen said, finally dropping the use of the third person. “I don’t know what I want. Not really. And I’ve got a lot riding on this quince. A lot of family expectations.” Her expression grew somber.

  “Hey,” Alicia said. “Don’t get down. We’ll work this all out. How about we take this boat for a ride? Doesn’t your mom always say that you think better out on the water?”

  Carmen nodded. “She’s got a point.”

  The two girls pushed the little rowboat into the canal, and Carmen expertly took the oars. As her friend’s long arms moved the oars through the water, Alicia waited patiently. She knew Carmen needed to be left with her thoughts for a moment. But soon, she felt she couldn’t take it anymore. She’d had a burst of inspiration.

  “Coming up with a theme for your quince is the easiest thing I’ve done all year!” she cried, breaking into her friend’s silent contemplation. “You’ve wanted to be a designer since you were old enough to say, platform heel. What do you say to a Project Runway–themed quince? It could be wunderbar.”

  Carmen giggled, even though Alicia’s imitation of Heidi Klum left a lot to be desired.

  “I know that’s what you’d expect,” Carmen said, “but it’s not exactly what I want. I certainly love fashion, but I love my family even more.”

  “Dime,” Alicia said, taking in the multicolored houses that lined the canal. “So, then, what kind of event does my best friend want?”

  “Well, you remember my Abuela Ruben? My dad’s mother?” Carmen asked. It was a rhetorical question. All of Carmen’s friends knew her Jewish Argentinean grandmother. She only came from Buenos Aires to visit once a year, but she cut quite a wide swath when she did. Abuela Ruben was the only woman in South Florida whom any of them had ever met who could make both salsa and fierce potato latkes. “She really wanted me to have a bat mitzvah,” Carmen went on.

  “But that argument was done and over way back in junior high,” Alicia pointed out. “Wasn’t it?”

  Carmen rolled her eyes. “It started on my twelfth birthday, when a nice Jewish girl like me should have been planning her bat mitzvah and hasn’t stopped. . . .”

  “Half Jewish,” Alicia corrected her.

  Carmen began to paddle the boat with increasing speed. “Abuela Ruben says there’s no such thing as half. She wants to know if I’m ready to be punished in the next life for the sins I’ve committed in this one.”

  Alicia let out a long whistle. “Your abuela really knows how to lay a guilt trip.”

 
“Are you asking me or telling me?” Carmen said playfully. “The thing is, even though my mom and my stepdad raised me in the Catholic church, I do feel Jewish. I’d love to have a quince that honors my culture and doesn’t ignore my religion.”

  Alicia knitted her eyebrows as she tried to think of the perfect solution. Coming up with on-the-spot themes was quickly becoming one of her specialties. But a Jewish Latina quinceañera was going to require a lot more research and a lot more thought than any themes she’d dreamed up before.

  “I’m going to have to let this idea cook a little,” Alicia finally said. “Can I get back to you tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” Carmen said, turning the boat around and rowing back toward home. “I didn’t expect miracles.”

  “But you deserve one,” Alicia said. Then she asked, “Do you think your abuela Ruben will even come to your quince? What about the church ceremony?”

  “I don’t know, chica,” Carmen said as she and Alicia took off their shoes and stood knee-deep in the canal, preparing to pull the boat in, “but she’s my abuela, and I love her. I know she’s disappointed, but I’d love for my quinceañera to change her mind. Show her what my faith means, even if it is not in the traditional, Jewish sense.”

  “But will that make you happy?” Alicia asked, pushing her sunglasses up on her head so that she could look her friend in the eye.

  “I think it will,” Carmen replied, sounding far from convinced.

  Looking at her friend’s forlorn expression, it became suddenly very clear to Alicia: this had to be the most special Amigas Incorporated party yet. Grouchy abuelas or not.

  Later that night, after dinner and when they were alone, Carmen double-checked with her mom about hiring Amigas Inc. Christian had taken the rest of the family to the mall. The youngest girls wanted ice cream, Tino needed soccer cleats, and Una went along because, well, she never missed an opportunity to shop.

  At fourteen, Carmen was already several inches taller than her mother. When they stood next to each other, you could see that she had the same thin frame as her mother, plus the same heart-shaped face and café au lait–colored skin. But Carmen always looked as though she were wearing six-inch stilettos, even when she was standing in her bare feet. And at five feet two inches tall, Carmen’s mom, Sophia, who was head of the math department at C. G. High, often got mistaken for one of her students when she dashed through the hall, her long ponytail swinging behind her.

  “The fact that Amigas is planning your quince means less work for me,” Sophia said when Carmen finally brought it up. As they talked, she opened the dishwasher so Carmen could stack while she rinsed.

  Moments like this, when it was just she and her mother, were Carmen’s favorites, even if they were spent doing something as mundane as washing the dishes.

  “Listen to that!” she said to her mother.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Sophia said, turning off the water.

  “Exactly,” Carmen said, and both she and her mother laughed. Sophia started rinsing the glasses and Carmen placed them carefully on the top rack of the dishwasher.

  “You and your friends have done such a wonderful job planning the other quinceañeras I know you’ll do a great job,” Sophia went on, getting back to the topic at hand. “I also know you’ll mind the budget, which is not very big. But I have to say, I’ve been wondering why you haven’t started planning sooner. I’ve been asking you what you want to do for months now. Your birthday is less than six weeks away. You know, more than most, just how much work it is to plan a quinceañera.”

  “I know, Mamita,” Carmen said, taking the dark blue and orange clay heirloom plates from her mother and putting them into the machine gently. She paused, then added, “I’ve been really struggling, because I know no matter how great a quince we have, it’s never going to be good enough for Abuela Ruben.”

  Carmen’s mother turned off the water and wiped her wet hands on her jeans. Then she put her arms around her daughter. “Querida, it’s your day. Which means, the only person you have to please is you.”

  Carmen could feel her eyes welling up with tears. Her mom made it sound so easy. She let her head rest on her mother’s shoulders and wished, for a moment, that she was a little kid again so she could crawl into her mom’s lap and not have to make any decisions.

  “It’s just that I want Abuela Ruben to be proud of me,” Carmen said, her voice choked with tears.

  “She is—and she will be. She wouldn’t come all the way from Buenos Aires for your birthday if she didn’t know how special your quinceañera was.”

  “She would’ve liked it more if I’d had a bat mitzvah,” Carmen pointed out sadly.

  Her mother, ever the cheerleader, held up a hand. “Stop projecting, niña. You can’t have any idea what your grandmother is thinking.”

  “Oh, yeah, I do,” Carmen said. “It’s not like she hides it. Case in point: the last time she called, she said, ‘I would’ve liked it much better if you had had a bat mitzvah, like a nice Jewish girl.’”

  Carmen’s mother smiled and tried to think of a way to put a positive spin on this startlingly clear piece of information. “Well . . . I mean . . .” Then she just shook her head. “I don’t know what to say.”

  Carmen laughed. “My sentiments exactly.”

  Her mother took a seat on the high-backed kitchen chair. “Come,” she said, “sit on my lap.”

  Carmen raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, right. I’ll break you and the chair.”

  Her mom shook her head. “I’m stronger than I look. Venga, just for a minute.”

  Carmen walked over and sat, tentatively, on her mother’s lap, her long legs stretched out to the side.

  As her mother combed through her daughter’s hair with her fingers, the way she had used to right before she dropped her off for school when Carmen was a little girl, Carmen felt some of the pressure ease. Maybe things would all be okay. Maybe she was just overreacting.

  “It’ll work out,” her mother said after a few minutes, echoing Carmen’s thoughts.

  “I know it will, Mamita,” she said, kissing her mother on the cheek.

  She had to hope they were both right.

  THE NEXT afternoon, the amigas—and Gaz—met up in South Beach for a planning meeting. Alicia’s dad had offered to give her and Carmen a ride on his way to a tennis game, so they were the first to arrive. At night, Bongos Café was a strictly over-twenty-one hot spot. But during the day, the café served lunch and the friends loved to hang out in the back room, where the banging beats, Andy Warhol portraits of Gloria Estefan, and virgin mojitos had a cool vibe that was a cut above the usual Cuban fare.

  Bongos also happened to be the perfect spot for celebrity sightings. This day did not disappoint. As soon as the girls walked in, they noticed Sharon Kim and the Channel 6 news crew setting up in a corner of the restaurant.

  Sharon anchored the local eleven o’clock news, but she was best known for her Sunday morning talk show, ¡Hoy en Miami!, where she always snagged interviews with the hottest stars in town. Everything about her high-wattage personality made it clear that she hoped to do much more than be the star of a local news or gossip program. At the moment, she was wearing a tomato red designer dress that Alicia was willing to bet good money was a Michael Kors, because she’d seen it in the look book her mother’s salesperson had sent from Saks. The flashes of red sole from the bottoms of her black stilettos revealed that Sharon’s shoes were Christian Louboutins. And Alicia was pretty confident that the diamond studs in her ears weren’t fake. As she looked around the room, Sharon’s grin was as wide as the I-95 freeway (post the expansion construction).

  “I wonder who she’s interviewing today,” Carmen whispered, in awe at seeing their favorite news reporter live and in person.

  “It’s Miranda Cosgrove, but she’s not here yet,” said a supercute waiter as he walked by carrying a giant platter of rice and beans. “But you didn’t hear it from me.”

  He winked at Carmen and continued pa
st her.

  Alicia and Carmen turned to each other and whispered, “Omigod—,” then bit their fists.

  The hostess, a pretty Blake Lively look-alike, finally took notice of them. “Your table is ready, girls,” she said, making both Carmen and Alicia roll their eyes.

  The minute they got settled at their table, Carmen whipped out an imaginary microphone and did her best Sharon Kim impersonation. “Miss Cruz! You look simply stunning. What are you wearing today?” This was a game she and Alicia had been playing since they were in middle school. They called it “Red Carpet Arrivals.”

  Alicia tossed her hair, and said, in a fake British accent, “Well, Carmen, today I’m wearing a black Proenza Schouler leather halter, a white miniskirt from the Gap, and a pair of hand-me-down Louboutin espadrilles from my mom.”

  “You’re simply flawless,” Carmen said, emulating the accent.

  “And what are you wearing today, Miss Ramirez-Ruben?” Alicia said, taking a turn at holding the pretend microphone.

  Before Carmen could answer, they heard someone clear his throat.

  “I hate to interrupt what is clearly an important media moment, but do you have time for me to take your order?” the waiter asked, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. It was the same cute waiter who had passed by and spoken to them earlier.

  The two girls stifled a serious case of the giggles. Just how long had he been standing there? Without a doubt he was a MWAH of the highest order (MWAH meaning, Man, What a Hottie!). His hair was buzzed short, he had bright, friendly eyes, and a long, lean build.

  Alicia quickly recovered. “We’re waiting for two more friends. But we know what they want. We’ll take an order of papas rellenas. . . .”

  “Yum,” said Carmen.

  “Fried green plantains with garlic sauce,” Alicia continued.

  “Yum,” added Carmen.

  “Two stuffed green plantain cups. One with shrimp creole, one with ropa vieja.”

  The waiter turned to Carmen and smiled. “No yum with that?”