The Time It Snowed in Puerto Rico Read Online Free Page A

I’ll take your dare.”
    I knew he would.
    After checking to make sure Mamá was still busy stirring and chopping, Omar and I jumped off the porch and sprinted toward the street. We didn’t look back or speak or stop to breathe until we rounded the bend and my pink house was nowhere to be seen. Then we stopped, gulped in the humid air, and relished the panic in our chests.
    “Think she saw us?” Omar asked.
    I shook my head. “We’d have heard her by now if she had.” Mamá could yell my name across the whole barrio if she put her mind to it, especially if she saw us running in the direction of the bar. “I think we’re safe, but we got to hurry.”
    We had to walk single file along the crooked roads of our mountain town. Though two-way, the street was just wide enough for a single car. Tangled, wet bush framed the unmarked tar. The thick vines curled around the tree trunks like plaits of wet hair. I led the way. We couldn’t talk because I had to listen for cars rounding the curves. From walking with Mamá to buy loaves of pan de agua , I had an ear for the coming whine of an engine making its fast climb up the tilted streets. When I heard it, I knew I had less than five seconds to move off the road into the bush. I stopped and gave Omar a push to his chest. “Get back. Cheby coming.”
    “What? I don’t see anything,” Omar said, but the whirring and grinding of gears came closer. I pushed him into a poinciana tree. The prickly blossoms stuck hard. “Ow! Verdita!”
    A car zoomed past. The air seemed to collect the hot dust and brush it brown over my skin. Island dirt, it stained me as much as the sun.
    “Told you,” I said, and continued. Omar’s eyes looked like they did when I unlocked the study door after hearing him pound and scream.
    We went on. A few early coquis began to sing. Co-qui, co-qui, co-qui . It was a slow song by a handful of frogs. I wondered what time it was. I’d forgotten to look at the clock before we left. Five o’clock? Six, maybe? We usually ate at seven; the rice was already on the stove. Sweat beaded on my upper lip, and I licked the salt away. If we were late for supper, I’d get the belt for sure, but I’d make sure Omar got half the spanks. I’d remind Papi that he was older and a boy.
    The jíbaros bar had a red neon sign above the door that said Schlitz. The bulb of the l had gone out at some point, so for as long as I could remember, the sign said Schitz, which I knew was a bad word on the mainland. Shits. I used it around Mamá because she didn’t know “shits” from “sheets,” but Papi was a different story. This is shits, I said once when Mamá made me wash the banana leaves for the pasteles . Papi heard and spanked me hard with hisbelt folded in half. I made sure never to say it again in front of him. I turned to Omar. “This place is the shits.”
    He didn’t laugh, so I laughed for him.
    That night there were so many cars parked outside that a few burrowed holes right into the jungle bush. Stacks of candy stood by the counter just inside the bar’s open doorway: dulces de ajonjolí, batata, coco-leche , and naranja . My mouth watered. As we entered, I dug deep in my pocket for the coins.
    “Look,” Omar whispered.
    The bar was packed full of men standing in a circle, their faces twisted in jagged smiles and squinty eyes. The loud cries of “Kill him!” and “Hit him again!” made something inside my stomach cramp. The men drank from small silver beer cans that fit snugly in their palms and looked like hand grenades I had seen in the movies. Their shouts and gazes were fixed on something in the middle of the circle. And while they screamed for blood, it was different from the angry feeling I got when the older boys at school fist-fought. It felt like that moment when the study lock clicked open after sitting with the dead.
    “Come on.” I pulled on Omar’s arm, but he didn’t move. I wanted to see what they saw, but didn’t want to go alone.