Party Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

determination rising in her face. I had seen that look before. Amelia was hungry for the never-think-just-do life she thought we lived down by the L.A. River. When I was her age, it seemed exciting and romantic to me, too. Hanging out, listening to music played on a boom box, sloshing down forties, and not worrying about school or rules.
    I stood and started back to my place next to Ana’s mother.
    “Make sure Kata gets Ana’s bracelets and books,” her mother said.
    “How can you think about such things today?” Rosa said angrily.
    “So she doesn’t have to think about what you’re thinking about,” I said to Rosa.
    Rosa shrugged. I could tell she was afraid of me.
    “It’s okay,” I said, and sat back next to Ana’s mother.
    If I hadn’t seen my grandmother at my grandfather’s funeral, I would have thought Ana’s mother didn’t care, the way she was thinking about bracelets and books at her daughter’s funeral. Death makes people say odd things as if nothing has happened. I think it’s the only way they can get through what’s going on.
    The priest began talking, and his words carried me to memories of my grandfather. He had liked to go out to sea on a boat he had built himself. Fishing one day the boom came loose. It swept back and forth out of control and knocked him overboard. Three days later a family walking along the beach found what was left of him in a pile of kelp washed ashore.
    Grandpa was a mamo, a shaman, a curandero with big magic. The first time he saw my grandmother, he was crossing an ancient suspension bridge high above the roiling Apurímac River near Cuzco in Perú, Her face appeared in the rising mists, and he knew he had to travel north to find her. Each night as my grandfather journeyed toward the United States, he and my grandmother met in his dreams. Somehow he knew he’d find her in Los Angeles, the city of angels. My name, Katarina Phajkausay, came from them both. Phajkausay means “peace” in Quechua, the language my grandfatherspoke as a child. Katarina was my grandmother’s first name.
    After my grandfather’s funeral my grandmother made his favorite fried chicken, marinated in lime juice and diced jalapeños. Everyone wondered how she could cook. I sat in the kitchen, hidden on a stool beside the broom closet, watching my grandmother’s tears fall on the marinated chicken as she dipped it in flour and placed it in the crackling grease. Everyone said that chicken was my grandmother’s best.
    Now I imagined my grandfather with Ana in his boat, sailing across the universe.
    “Take her to heaven, Machula,” I whispered. “She don’t belong in hell.”
    The priest stopped speaking, and people began whispering rapidly behind me with the soft chatter of sparrows after a storm.
    Ana’s uncles lifted the casket and carried it outside to the hearse.
    I walked slowly behind.
    My grandmother always said that God gives us suffering to mold us into the person He wants us to become, and as I stepped from the dim candlelit church into the whirling wind and blinding white light of day, I surely felt as if I were being kneaded by some powerful hand.
    Wind littered the cemetery with eucalyptus leaves and broken branches. I waited away from the others in the oldsection, lost in a field of granite headstones and marble angels.
    My homies stood, uninvited, at Ana’s open grave. The security guard with the yellow beard had asked them to leave. When they wouldn’t, he asked Ana’s mother if she wanted him to call the sheriff. She didn’t want the sheriff at Ana’s funeral.
    It had to be confusing to Ana’s mother and sisters, sitting so rigid on folding chairs under the green plastic awning, wondering why these gangbangers had come to Ana’s funeral. I prayed no one told them the truth: that we were Ana’s other family.
    A sudden gust of wind whipped the ribbons from Maggie’s hand, and black satin strips fluttered around the mourners like dancing snakes.
    My homies pushed