She's Got Game Page 3

  “Come on, you like him, too, don’t try to hide it,” Alicia said, not giving up.

  “He’s not my type,” Jamie said.

  “And what is your type?” Alicia persisted.

  “Let it go, and stop worrying about me,” Jamie said. “My Latino prince will come.”

  Alicia and Carmen were intrigued. Did that mean Jamie would only date a Latino? She’d never implied that before.

  “Dash’s mother is Venezuelan. So he’s half Latin,” Alicia pointed out.

  “Whatever.” Jamie waved her hand as if she were flicking away a fly. “He doesn’t even play a real sport. Golf? What’s wrong with football or basketball? Even tennis has more flava than golf.”

  Alicia groaned. “Here we go. It’s the flava police again.”

  “Give it up,” Carmen said. “You’re an army of one with this whole flava thing. He’s a cute guy.”

  “And clearly not a player like his friend, Troy,” Alicia pointed out.

  Carmen put on a deep voice, mimicking Troy: “One of you girls is going to leave your man for me.”

  Alicia followed suit: “Which one? Doesn’t matter. My conquests are all interchangeable. Just like my corny lines.”

  “Hey, speaking of conquests, Domingo is working at Bongos tonight,” Carmen said. “Do you guys want to come? Free virgin daiquiris all night long.”

  “We’ll be there,” Alicia said, as the boat pulled up to the dock. “Gaz and I love a freebie.”

  “Not tonight for me,” Jamie said. “I’ve got a new collection of kicks that I’m working on. But I’ll see you guys for lunch tomorrow.”

  Jamie started to walk away and then turned back around. “Oh, and, like, how do you say good-bye in Latina?”

  “Shut up,” Alicia said, laughing in spite of herself.

  “Give the pobrecita a break,” Carmen insisted.

  “I think the one thing we can agree on is that Binky Mortimer is no poor little thing,” Jamie said.

  “Pobrecita doesn’t mean ‘poor little thing’ in terms of the money you have in the bank,” Carmen said. “It has to do with the sadness in your life, and while her mansion may be bangin’, Binky lost her mother, and that sadness is real. So is her loneliness.”

  “True, dat,” Alicia agreed.

  “I guess so,” Jamie said. But as she walked away, she still was not entirely sure she believed it.

  After dinner that night, Jamie went out to her studio to work. The space was actually in the family garage. When they first moved in, Jamie’s dad, Davide, had turned it into a shop for his woodworking. But as it turned out, since he was a limo driver who worked late most nights, he didn’t actually have time to do much woodworking. As Jamie got more serious about her art, selling handmade items online and buying and selling vintage sneakers on eBay, she took over the garage space and turned it into a real artist’s space. She painted the walls gallery white, and, instead of the single hanging bulb, filled the room with secondhand track lighting.

  The studio was more than Jamie’s work space. It was her hideaway. Whenever she was feeling stressed or confused about anything, she always felt better after she took out her spray paints and markers. She’d created a line of custom totes as party favors for Carmen’s quinceañera, and the bags had been so popular that she was working on a new series, for her online shop on Etsy.com, a site where people could sell handmade jewelry, clothing, furniture, and all kinds of handcrafted items.

  The new series was called Girls on Wheels, and the bags featured images of young women from all over the world on bicycles, motorbikes, and scooters. It was her favorite collection yet, and she hoped that it would sell out on Etsy. Just in time for the holidays.

  Jamie loved the smell of paint on canvas. When she was a little girl, her mom, Zulema, had taken her to the museums in New York. Jamie would go up to all of the beautiful paintings and not only admire the images, but smell them. She wanted to smell the moon in Van Gogh’s The Starry Night and the folds of Frida Kahlo’s suit in Self-Portrait with Cropped Hair. It was a strange thing, she knew. But to her, it was like cooking. All of those layers of paints, all of those swirls of color, should smell like something—something good.

  To satisfy her desire to experience art with her five senses—well, four senses, actually, since she didn’t usually taste the art—her mother signed her up for an artist-in-residence program at El Museo del Barrio in New York City when Jamie was in the fifth grade. Every Saturday, she met with kids from all over the city and with her teacher, Trini Mayaguez. And one Saturday a month, they did studio visits and met with real artists in the apartments and studios where they worked.

  It was at the Museo del Barrio where Jamie began to learn all the different techniques: portraiture; large-scale figure painting; and pictorial composition. But it was also that year when she learned that real paintings didn’t have to have the quiet polished marble smell of a fancy museum. Paint fresh off an artist’s brush smelled strong, bossy, bold, almost acidic, like lemonade without any sugar. Like Jamie herself.

  “Knock-knock,” Jamie’s mother called through the garage door. “Up for company?”

  “Sure,” Jamie said, not surprised to see her. Her mom would often come in after dinner to visit. At the moment, Jamie was working on a character inspired by Alicia. But she was having a tough time getting the waves in Alicia’s hair just right. It was a good time for a break anyway.

  “I made hot chocolate,” Jamie’s mother said, handing her a cup.

  Jamie was a miniature version of her mother, except that her mother’s skin was a darker shade of mocha. Her stylishly close-cropped hair accentuated her high cheekbones. Where Jamie’s style was hip-hop chic, Zulema favored clothes that had simple elegance, accessorized by her signature large silver hoop earrings.

  “Gracias, Mami.”

  Getting up from her work desk, Jamie took a seat on the old sofa that her mother had given her for the studio. The sofa had belonged to Jamie’s grandmother, and as long as Jamie could remember before that, it had sat in her great-aunt’s apartment in the Bronx, with a plastic slipcover on it. The first thing she’d done when the sofa arrived was to take the slipcover off. The mustard-colored upholstery was old and kind of ugly, but it still looked brand-new. Or, as her mother liked to say about hand-me-downs, “Nuevo para ti. New for you.”

  “So, tell me about your visit to the Mortimers. Do they really own an entire island, just for one family?” her mother asked. “You know, they devoted a whole episode to the Mortimers on Miami Mansions, Townhouses and Villas. I love those real-estate shows.”

  “Mom, it was crazy,” Jamie said. “North pools, south pools. East wings, west wings.”

  Her mother laughed. “And I bet it’s not like a Latino family, where you’ve got half a dozen kids, the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, all under one roof.”

  “Of course not. Just Binky, her brother, and their parents, and it’s bigger than a college campus!” Jamie exclaimed. “It’s like the place is designed so that every person in this tiny family has their own share of a giant kingdom. It’s kind of disgusting.”

  “So, what inspired Binky to have a quinceañera?” her mother asked. “Doesn’t seem to fit.”

  Jamie rolled her eyes.

  “What?” her mother asked.

  “It turns out that Binky’s mother was Venezuelan,” Jamie muttered.

  Her mother grinned. “Fíjate. I love it. The Binky Mortimer is a secret Latina.”

  Jamie scowled. “She doesn’t know anything about being Latina. She’s a rich blond WASP who’s dabbling in my culture.”

  “Whoa, chica,” her mother said. “Who died and made you head of the Latina police?”

  “I’m just saying…”

  “No, niña,” her mother interrupted. “Latinas come with all different backgrounds, skin tones, and hair colors. A lot of people look at me and think just because I have dark skin that I’m not Latina. You know the prejudice I’ve encountered from my own peopl
e. I will not stand for you holding Binky’s money or her complexion against her.”

  Jamie stood and picked up her paintbrush. She didn’t want to have a fight now. Not over Binky. Staring at the drawing in front of her, she thought about all the paintings she’d done of her mother’s beautiful brown face. There must have been dozens. It made her sad that sometimes ignorant people treated her mother badly because they hadn’t got the memo that the world was full of black Latinas. Maybe her mom had a point.

  Perhaps sensing her daughter’s discomfort, Zulema got up and walked over to the canvas. “I love your brush technique here,” she said gently.

  “Thanks,” Jamie said.

  Her mother looked as though she wanted to say something more, but she hesitated.

  “Give Binky a chance,” she urged finally. “Look at Alicia. Not every rich person is a carbon copy of the kids you knew when you went away to boarding school.” She squeezed her daughter’s shoulder.

  “Whatever,” Jamie muttered.

  All of a sudden, she felt an inexplicable need to clean all of her paintbrushes. She took them from the Bustelo coffee can that sat on the old wooden table next to her easel and walked over to the sink. She didn’t want to talk about it. The past. She never talked about her past. She hoped her mother would get the hint and leave her alone.

  No such luck.

  “Hija, you know we were only trying to give you the best by sending you to that school.”

  Jamie was trying hard not to lose it, but it wasn’t easy. If she had had a dollar for every time her parents had said they were trying to give her “the best” in referring to that stupid place, she wouldn’t have had to sell sneakers on eBay for extra cash. And now, her mom was bringing up all that pain all over again.

  As she continued carefully washing her paintbrushes with Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, just as she’d learned to do in her Saturday morning art classes at El Museo del Barrio, she flashed back to sixth grade. They had still been living in the Bronx then. Everything had been a mess. A ten-year-old kid had pulled a gun on a teacher when she asked him for his homework. The gun wasn’t loaded, but the incident had been front-page news all over the country. Metal detectors were installed at the school. Officers patrolled the outside of the school as well as the lunchroom.

  Jamie’s parents had freaked, even though she’d kept insisting she wasn’t scared. Still, Jamie’s social-worker-in-training mother had a zero-tolerance policy when it came to kids in bad situations. If a kid was in danger, her first priority was getting them out. And that went double for her own daughter. Without even talking to Jamie about it, Zulema had pulled some strings and gotten Jamie a scholarship at Fitzgibbons Academy, a snooty boarding school in Connecticut. And when Jamie protested, Zulema and Davide had made it clear that it wasn’t up for discussion. They were ordering her to go, and one day, she would thank them. It was what was “best for her.”

  So off to boarding school in Connecticut Jamie Sosa went, and what followed was the most emotionally challenging experience she had had in her young life.

  Six months later, Jamie’s father’s dad had died suddenly of a heart attack. Her parents decided to move to Miami to help take care of his wife, Cristina, and so that her father could run the family car-service business. Jamie had been terrified that she was going to have to stay at Fitzgibbons. But, as Zulema had explained, there wasn’t enough money to fly her back and forth between Connecticut and Miami for holiday visits. She’d have had to be up there on her own, and that was not something Zulema could live with. She wanted her daughter close.

  Jamie didn’t argue. Six months had been plenty, in her opinion. She’d been a fish out of water, the target of cruel jokes from overprivileged rich girls who had no intention of welcoming a brown-skinned scholarship student from the Bronx into the fold. They had gone out of their way to ostracize her, giving her mean nicknames, kicking her out of the cafeteria, even, at one point, destroying a painting she’d been working on—something she’d been planning to show at the Parents’ Weekend Art Show.

  And then there were the guys—confident, slick, and used to getting whatever they wanted. It seemed that many of them made the assumption that just because she was receiving financial aid and was the school’s only Latina student, she would do anything to fit in. Jamie, who had never even dated but had always been part of the popular crowd in her own school, now found herself in way over her head. She had retreated into herself, hiding away and losing the sense of independence on which she had prided herself in New York.

  She hadn’t hated every second of it. After all, it was her art teacher, Masako Utada, who’d turned her on to the hand-painted sneaker scene on eBay, fueled in large part by a huge demand in Japan. She probably never would’ve learned about that in the South Bronx.

  But that was one good thing in a sea of bad.

  She’d jumped at the chance to ditch boarding school and the daily chore of being a cultural anthropologist among the young, wealthy, and cruel.

  Moving to Miami meant more than a chance to live back at home with her parents, whom she was loath to admit she had missed while she’d been away at school. The move to Coral Gables was a chance for her to reinvent herself. She was no longer Jamie Sosa, shy and slightly awkward scholarship kid at the Big Fancy Boarding School. She was Jamie Sosa, cooler-than-you babe from the Bronx.

  But, while it had worked and Jamie loved her new life, moments like this—heart-to-heart talks with her mother and run-ins with people like Binky, who so clearly reminded her of the past—were still harder to get through than she liked to admit. She could only hope that taking on this quinceañera wasn’t going to send her running for the shadows again.

  THE NEXT afternoon, Binky arrived at Alicia’s house ready to hammer out the details of her quince. Everyone was there except Gaz, who was once again working.

  “So, as we mentioned yesterday, the most important thing we need to do is come up with a theme for your quince,” Alicia explained when they had all made themselves comfortable in the Florida room.

  “Exactly,” Carmen agreed. “As we said, the theme will dictate everything, from the decorations to your dress—which I needed to design and start making yesterday.”

  “Well, then, let’s get started, because my motto is ‘go big or go home’!” Binky said. “After y’all left, I thought a lot about it. Did you know I’m a junior member of the Daughters of the American Revolution?”

  She was met with blank looks.

  “Forgive my ignorance,” Alicia said, stifling a giggle, “but what are the Daughters of the American Revolution? Is it a voter’s drive, like MTV’s Choose or Lose?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that. It’s so cool,” Binky said.

  “I doubt it,” Jamie muttered.

  If Binky heard Jamie’s snarky aside, she didn’t let it show. Beaming, she explained, “The Daughters of the American Revolution is a volunteer organization made up of women who are descended from the first families in America.”

  “You mean the Native Americans?” Jamie asked, feigning sweetness.

  “No, I mean the first families who came over from Britain,” Binky said, struggling to remain cheerful, even though Jamie’s mockery was getting to her.

  “Right, the ones who brought over the epidemics that wiped out entire tribes; got it,” Jamie said, standing up and heading for the kitchen.

  “Let her finish!” Alicia said.

  “Finish, finish!” Jamie said as she walked out of the room. “I find Binky’s ancestors’ role in the annihilation of an entire people nothing short of fascinating.”

  When she was out of the earshot, Binky looked at Carmen and Alicia, a confused expression on her face. “Why does she hate me so much?” she asked.

  “She doesn’t hate you,” Carmen said.

  “Wealth makes her uncomfortable,” Alicia explained. “Believe me, I know from experience. But once you’re down with her, you will not find a more loyal friend than Jamie.”

  Jamie r
eentered the Florida room with a tray of empanadas and some bottles of Jarritos. “Maribelle, the Cruz family cook, sent these,” she told Binky. “Please continue. I won’t interrupt.”

  Binky took a deep breath. “As I was saying, I was thinking about going with a colonial theme. I could wear a powdered wig and a gown with satin and ruffles, and then I could descend from a full-scale replica of the Mayflower.”

  Alicia and Carmen made concerted efforts not to crack up.

  “It’s certainly a unique idea,” Carmen said.

  “But there are, um, some logistical challenges,” Alicia added diplomatically.

  Binky looked at Jamie. “Don’t tell me you don’t have an opinion?”

  Jamie shrugged. “If you don’t have anything nice to say…”

  “Come on,” Binky pleaded. “I hired you guys to plan my quinceañera because everyone says you’re the best. I want my quince to rock. So if you think the idea sucks, just tell me.”

  “Okay, I don’t love it,” Alicia said.

  “It’s a little old-fashioned,” Carmen added.

  “It sucks,” Jamie said, flat out.

  “That’s better. Thank you for your honesty.” Binky smiled. “So, if my colonial history isn’t going to cut it, what do you think I should do?”

  “Well,” Jamie said. “You live on that incredible island. You could have a Bali-themed island-paradise quince. Maybe we could turn your cabanas into gilded temples, and your dress could be inspired by an Indonesian goddess.”

  Binky clapped her hands and, for a moment, looked like a little girl in a candy shop. “I love it!”

  Alicia pantomimed tipping her hat at Jamie. “Nice one, my friend.”

  Carmen looked thoughtful. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “The whole Indonesian goddess thing seems over the top. We want to focus on Binky’s Latina heritage, not just the fact that she’s got beaucoup bucks. After all, that is what you said, right, Binky? That you want to get in touch with your roots?”

  Binky nodded. “I do. My mother’s family came from a small island off the mainland of Venezuela. I’d love somehow to give a nod to her.”